Our Team

Jeff began his professional career in 1982, at Foster Marshall-American Express (now Smith Barney) in Portland, Oregon. Jeff connected with “value investing” but found the retail brokerage business a challenging environment in which to encourage investors to buy businesses Wall Street despised. So in the late 1980s Jeff helped Smith Barney create the Portfolio Management Advisory Board. Along with Jamie Dimon—now CEO of JP Morgan Chase—Jeff and other executives formed policies aimed at better-serving client interests. “We wanted high levels of disclosure, reasonable fees, and no broker compensation for trading the portfolio,” says Jeff. Jeff also served as a member of the Chairman’s Council from 1990 to 1996 and as Senior Vice President of Investments and Senior Portfolio Management Director.  In a national competition pitting some of the nation’s top performers against each other, Money magazine named Jeff an “All-Star Broker”, two years in a row*  (1997/1998.)

In 1998, Jeff realized his professional dream. He left Smith Barney to start his own investment advisory, Auxier Asset Management, and, in 1999, the Auxier Focus Fund. From the start, Jeff wanted a fund where the manager is held highly accountable, so he committed to remaining one of the Auxier Focus Fund’s largest shareholders. How many managers invest their entire personal retirement into their own Fund? In Jeff’s case, that’s over 166,000 shares, right on the line with his investors. Jeff instituted company policy that he will not sell a single share while still managing. In addition, his family’s assets are included in the money management portion of Auxier Asset Management. Jeff volunteers GIPS® compliant numbers showing performance back to 1989. And members of the Auxier Asset Mgt. Team also has large percentages of their own personal net worth invested in the Auxier Focus Fund. The small, long-time staff enjoys a “nearly never” meetings policy, instead focusing on aggressive, fundamental research. “Everyone here is focused on performance,” says Jeff. “We’ve all got our own money on the line.”

You don’t survive 40 years in portfolio management and research analysis without a passionate love for research. “We are 90% research, 10% trading. Most investors work the opposite,” says Jeff, who happily devours numbers, spending 8-10 hours each day scrutinizing 20-40 companies per week. He pours over annual reports, trade journals, and investment publications, tracking quarterly conference calls, and reports evaluating competitive threats to each franchise. Stocks are aggressively monitored. Says Jeff, “This daily grind-it-out research helped us sail right around the Enron hurricane. Early on we saw that management claims didn’t square with the numbers. We discovered a balance sheet debt that was completely hidden from most investors. We sold and made money off Enron.” Jeff doesn’t focus on economic trends—as he puts it the “unknowable”—rather crunching through numbers to unearth outstanding companies that have been knocked down with a temporary problem. You can’t predict the future, but you can analyze and discover exemplary companies.

Jeff and his family deliberately live far from the wilds of Wall Street, on a 108-acre farm just outside of Portland, Oregon, and just west of the end of the Oregon Trail. Nursery stock, timber, and hazelnuts grow abundantly on the fertile hillsides in a valley where 90 percent of the nation’s hazelnut crop is harvested. In the fall of 2006, Jeff harvested a record 90 tons of hazelnuts from his farm. When he’s not researching, you may find Jeff clearing land on his 43-thousand pound Caterpillar D6-C bulldozer or scanning his favorite non-financial website, Bulldozer.com. Jeff also conducts research from his 2,000-acre ranch in the high desert of Central Oregon where antelope, cougar, wild boar, rattlesnakes, and coyotes share the wide-open space. Jeff sees similarities between investing on Wall Street and his life on the farm and ranch. “All take extremely hard work and involve consideration of price, value, margin of safety, and wise allocation of capital. This lifestyle keeps you humble and focused on the rewards of hard work,” says Jeff. “I’m far from the greed and emotion of Wall Street and able to conduct the kind of independent thinking that keeps us ahead of the pack, not chasing it. I love my job and consider it a stewardship of other people’s hard-earned money. I want to do this for the rest of my life.”

Auxier Asset Management LLC is a registered investment advisor with the SEC.  Auxier Asset Management claims compliance with the Global Investment Standards (GIPS®).  To obtain a compliant presentation and/or the firm’s list of composite descriptions, please contact us at (800)835-9556 or info@auxierasset.com.

* Money’s All Star Brokers were selected based on the following:  Survey was created and conducted by Junius Ellis, writer for Money.   He asked industry professionals to nominate brokers at firms other than their own.  Candidates had to be willing to take new accounts of $150,000 or less, to have records clear of disciplinary or other disclosure events (FINRA), to display attributes (subjective and determined by the writer for the publication) such as accountability and independent thinking.    Additionally, those listed as All Stars customarily base their recommendations on their own independent research, personally own the stocks on their buy lists, avoid selling most brokerage products (“whose gold-plated fees can weigh down client’s returns”) and give commission discounts to regular customers.   From there, Mr. Ellis made his final selection of Money’s All Star Brokers based solely on the returns of the stock selections submitted by the brokers.  Stocks of all categories were considered.  Brokers participating did not pay a fee to participate.  The All-Star Broker rating is not indicative of future performance.