Straight Line Logic

Robert Gore was born in 1958 in Livermore, California. He grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where both his parents worked for the Los Alamos National Laboratory. His undergraduate education was at UCLA. He graduated in 1980 summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a double major in economics and political science. He completed the JD/MBA program at UC Berkeley in 1984. He held part-time jobs throughout undergraduate and graduate school. He passed the bar exam and is an inactive member of the California Bar Association.

Mr. Gore’s career in finance began in 1984 with a bank in San Francisco, trading municipal bonds. In 1985, he went to a Wall Street firm’s west coast municipal bond office in Los Angeles as a bond trader. He developed its block and institutional sales capabilities and after four years was promoted to manager of the region.

In 1990, Mr. Gore went to a private partnership, headquartered in Los Angeles, which served a high net worth clientele throughout Southern California, as head of the firm’s fixed income division. In 1991, he became one of the youngest partners in the firm’s history. The fixed income division was consistently among the firm’s most profitable and in 2003, he was named to the executive committee. He wrote a market commentary that was distributed to the firm’s clients. Already known for his prescient calls, in 2006 he began warning of a looming housing debacle and financial crisis. His family sold their house and he set up a proprietary trading desk to capitalize on the situation. His prediction was initially not popular with his firm’s financial advisors, but it ended up saving their clients a great deal of money and he has garnered a substantial following. His current prediction: the worst is yet to come.

Mr. Gore is a past president of the Los Angeles Municipal Bond Club. He has made appearances on television and radio shows as an expert in fixed income securities and California municipal bonds. He has been quoted in the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register and had a letter published in the Financial Times.

In July of 2012, Mr. Gore retired from financial services to devote full-time to his writing. His first novel, The Gordian Knot, a legal thriller and courtroom drama, was published by the Writers Club Press, an imprint of iUniverse.com, in 2000 (Amazon link). His second novel, The Golden Pinnacle, is now available on Amazon. More information about and excerpts from The Golden Pinnacle are available on the Novels tab, and at thegoldenpinnacle.com. His articles on straightlinelogic.com have been reprinted in The Sangre de Cristo Sentinel, a Colorado newspaper. He is a featured writer on The Savvy Street, an online magazine, and has been on websites Zero Hedge, David Stockman’s Contra Corner, Lew Rockwell, The Automatic Earth, The Burning Platform, and Western Rifle Shooters Association.

Besides writing, Mr. Gore is involved as a principal and investor in a technology startup and plays golf, skis, swims, and cycles. Although he engages in political commentary, he enthusiastically shuns politics.