Brought to you by The Woodworth Contrarian Fund. Black Friday, an alternative measure of inflation, and Quinn calls in on Jim Cramer’s Lightning Round on his CNBC show Mad Money. Happy Holidays and Happy Friday the 13th.

Tariffs, The Election, and whether or not you can be a better investor by knowing the future. We decided to do something a little bit different this month. We have a few bite sized pieces on interesting topics that caught our eye as we look forward. We call it the Millegan Memo.

In between conversations with interested festival attendees, we conducted a poll of 58 willing participants as to their current feelings on the economy, as well as their own personal investments.  In exchange, participants received a free Woodworth-branded shot glass.  From this poll, a familiar trend emerged.

In the spirit of our upcoming sponsorship of the local Scottish Heritage Festival here in McMinnville, Oregon, we find ourselves thinking of Scotland, and the ways in which our own home half a world away has many parallels. Catch us at the McMinnville Scottish Festival October 5th & 6th.

At the recent McMinnville Scottish Festival, at which the Woodworth Contrarian Fund was the title sponsor, we asked you where you invest your money.

The proposed $60 million Gwendolyn Hotel in downtown McMinnville, which has asked permission to demolish three designated historic buildings within the Downtown National Historic District, has created a great deal of controversy.

Cathie Wood's ARKK fund, which as of writing was down nearly -50% YTD, has had a bad year. They are not the only major market player with performance issues.

Markets value certainty. Whether terrible or euphoric, more certain outcomes make planning, valuing future revenues, and controlling for future costs much easier, and by extension makes valuing companies as a whole much more straightforward (as much as it can be). The corporate temptation of whether or not to merge, takeover, or take private becomes a much harder to ignore when the answer is seemingly self-evident.

One of the many overlooked components of a well-managed portfolio is original data - data which is often sanitized, re-analyzed, or downright omitted by the time it hits the news wires. Freeport-McMoran's recent call was particularly enlightening.

The behemoth of a company that is Amazon is becoming is dangerously similar to gilded-age monopolies.

Our two cents on quarterly earnings reporting made its way into Pamplin Media Group's Forest Grove News Times.

In an early Friday morning tweet, President Trump took up advice from business leaders to look into removing required quarterly earnings reporting by public companies to the US Securities & Exchange Commission, in favor of a 6-month reporting timeline - similar to reporting done in European markets. This is misguided.