About Arete

What’s in a name?

Arete, in a name, captures our values, our mission, and our continuing commitment to customer satisfaction. Every aspect of Arete Asset Management, LLC has been designed to perform the function of investment management as well as possible. We have created an independent company in order to ensure that our interests are well-aligned with our clients and to avoid conflicts of interest. We seek only the types of clients for which our product offering is appropriate. We have developed, refined, and continue to refine our investment process to focus resources on investments with the greatest opportunity, while carefully managing risk. We also operate from a management philosophy built on the foundation of mutual respect and human dignity, in order to facilitate and nurture each individual living up to his or her own potential.

Definition: Arete (Pronounced ar-uh-tay)[i]

1. Goodness or excellence of any kind. Fulfillment of purpose or function, the act of living up to one’s potential.[ii]

2. Effectiveness, knowledge.

In Homeric poems, arete is frequently associated with bravery, but more often, with effectiveness. The man or woman of arete is a person of the highest effectiveness; they use all their faculties: strength, bravery, wit... to achieve results.

Arete is explicitly linked with human knowledge. It became the foundation of both Socratic and Platonic philosophy: the highest human potential is knowledge and all other human abilities are derived from this central capacity.[iii]

3. Greek, “the goodness of a thing,” “that at which a thing excels.”

In Greek literature, when applied to persons it signified qualities such as valor, prowess, courage, strength. In a moral sense it meant virtuousness, meritoriousness, goodness of service. It is often translated as virtue...

The philosophic meaning of arete has to do with the “functioning excellence” of a thing. When something performs the function it is designed to perform and it does this excellently then it has arete; it is “virtuous” in that respect. Example: The arete of a pruning scissors is to cut branches. It was intended for this purpose. It does this better than anything else. In so far as it performs its function well it has arete.

To determine human arete, the Greeks asked “What is unique to the human?” The arete of humans will be found in that which they can do uniquely: reason. The use of the rational faculty is that which distinguishes a human from all other beings. A human’s arete consists of the development and use of his reason to the utmost level of functioning excellence.[iv]

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http://www.thinkarete.com/.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arete. This is also remarkably similar to the concept of “genius” described in High Performing Investment Teams, by Jim Ware.
http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/GLOSSARY/ARETE.HTM.
Peter A. Angeles, Dictionary of Philosophy, Barnes & Noble Books A Division of Harper & Row, Publishers, 1981.