History

A Note on the Golden Sextant
by Robert K. Landis
We were early. And we were right.

AuroStar traces its lineage to a lunch just off Harvard Yard in June, 1999, when I first met Reginald H. Howe.

Reg was the proprietor of a dissident website called The Golden Sextant. The name came from the title of an award-winning essay Reg had written back in 1991 for a competition held by Bank Lips, Zurich]. The “sextant” in the essay’s title was the symbol of Belmont Hill, the Boston boys’ school founded in 1923 by Reg’s grandfather. The “golden” was a nod to Roy Jastram’s famous study on gold, The Golden Constant.

Reg had recently posted an erudite commentary that had caught my attention. I reached out and asked to meet him. It turned out Reg was a gold bug, a charter member of what was then a tiny, albeit noisy, sect that held that gold is permanent, natural money, and that unbacked paper currency is a just a form of fraud. I, by contrast, had the predictable monetary awareness and convictions of a typical product of elite American institutions. My interest in the storied commodity was vague and casual.

Following my lunch with Reg, however, my re-education proceeded apace. Reg was a patient tutor, and I was a determined student. Within a year or two, my conversion was complete.

And so began a professional association and a close friendship that continues to this day.

For about 12 years within that arc, Reg & I posted commentaries on his website, a curated selection from which may be found below. Both Reg and I were active in GATA.

Separately, Reg kept busy by filing lawsuits against the Bank for International Settlements, the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, and a number of other establishment monetary icons. I got involved in several endeavors in gold mining and exploration, at the invitation of gold bugs I had met through Reg, notably the Pollitts of Toronto. One such endeavor, Amarillo Gold Corp., was based in Brazil.

My son Sam, like Reg a graduate of Belmont Hill, interned as a field geologist at Amarillo after graduating college in 2011. His first boss there was one Augusto Rayol.

Fast forward to 2026:

Sam is CEO of AuroStar, Augusto is Director of Exploration, and Reg & I are substantial investors.