I learned all about it last week during an extended layover at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport (AUS). Out of eight Delta flights in seven days, six were delayed. That’s still better than Spirit Air customers did last week.

The unexpected and uncontrollable delays gave me time to catch up on a large reading backlog. In this case, the most recent issue of Florida Trend. If you’re unfamiliar, the periodical covers just about every business current event in the state.

Plus, conspicuously reading Florida Trend in places like New York, Los Angeles, or Austin in this case, stirs up the locals. They seem to hate Florida, which I find amusing.

Florida is after all the third most populous state. As a property owner, I should keep up with things. Today, it’s the alligator industry.

Farmed alligators are worth ~$262/each. About ~70% of that is the hide, evidently.

There’s only about ~6lbs of edible meat at ~$12.50/lb…tail and hands only.

Buyers, mostly the fashion industry, only want “clean” hides. Meaning, free of scrapes and battle wounds. These are after all, ferocious reptiles.

The ~20 gator farms spread across Florida harvest ~26,000 of these beasts each year. The problem is, farmed gators don’t reproduce.

Lost Their Edge

They apparently lose their libido on the farm. That’s according to the journalist charged with looking into this for the magazine.

It seems weird. Gators are fierce animals. They’re aggressive, resilient, and sort of an apex predator in the Florida Everglades…which is the big leagues of predation.

Somehow, they just lose their edge. It might be the reliable sound of the farmer heading to the fence with hundreds of pounds of raw chicken, every morning, like clockwork. Of course, until the one day they get muzzled and loaded into the truck before being turned into a wallet some Parisian banker gives his girlfriend… surely the creatures don’t have that much foresight.

This lack of desire creates a business continuity problem for the farmer. In fact, alligator farmers have to buy wild eggs to keep the operation going.

Last year, they bought ~175,000 of these wild eggs. About ~a third of those came from public land, fetching ~$5/ea. The rest from private land at a market rate of ~$2/ea.

So, the next time a surly barista wants a $2 gratuity for handing you a mediocre drip coffee, compare that to what Florida swamp people do for $2.

Dangerously Comfy

There’s something seductive about comfort. As an idea.

In my 20s, I had several friends who got no-show jobs with family businesses. I envied this… it seemed ideal. Now they look sickly. They’re also boring. As if they’ve lost their edge. Maybe that’s how the wild gators feel about their farmed cousins.

And while there’s no sense in intentionally making things uncomfortable, there is a middle ground. It’s giving up the idea that there’s some level of comfort where you’d be better off.

It’s mostly a mindset. We buy into fear, and behave accordingly.

The problem is, everyone validates this. We sort of give each other permission to live in this fear-induced obsession with unattainable comfort. Nobody warns you about the downside of this unexamined belief.

It’s an ideology. There are two pieces to it. People fear change, and want things to improve. It’s a Double Bind.

Loving Change

Don’t worry, TTL hasn’t gone philosophically soft. Quite the opposite. We’re killing it with two of our newer positions, which seemed risky at first.

Plus, we’re about to ease out of two gold miners, with long-term gains from being in before the 2026 surge. More on that later…

The thing about change is, it’s the touchstone of positive improvement. If nothing changed, we’d be feudal serfs waiting to die for our overlords. And we’re a long way from that…

Awareness of how this works is ~90% of the battle. Merely reading this essay puts you at the right side of the bell curve. It’s what a good newsletter should do…

There are two types of newsletter readers. The one who only skims looking for some sort of cheat code for life… some hack to get ahead and override years of poor execution. That reader falls away quickly, blaming the editor for his or her problems, only to move on and do it again with the next situation.

The second is far more successful. They see the newsletter as a link to a person with unusual wiring. A person who’ll do things they themselves might find intriguing, but unwilling to do.

That person benefits from constant, long-term exposure to new ways of seeing things… In alligator terms, they keep their libido without introducing the perils of the Everglades.

Think of it like watching someone else test a parachute… The newsletter writer goes where you wisely don’t. In this case, to the Food Court at The Venetian Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, NV.

Las Vegas is my second least favorite city. I can’t remember the first, but it’s probably somewhere in Massachusetts.

I dislike Las Vegas so much I organize my activities to minimize time in the city. On this trip, ~27 hours got the job done. The Food Court meeting was about ~45 minutes of that ~27 hours.

I bought a box of Bitcoin Trading Cards from a guy named A.G. The Alchemist for ~$1,200. He’s a Bitcoin collectible enthusiast. He’s also a sort of expert on these matters.

You might be tempted here to discard this as not investment-related… there is after all a gentleman with a neon yellow tank top in the background with a discarded Amazon box filled with his trading card collection…

That guy, who hauled his encased, cherished cards to this godforsaken slop hall hoping to trade with A.G. The Alchemist…is in for a rude awakening.

Selling to The Alchemist is trickier than trying to sell overpriced options to Stanley Druckenmiller. Forget about it.

The thing is, I went to Las Vegas for the 2026 Bitcoin Conference… and it told me everything I need to know about the Bitcoin market.

Sentiment Testing

Before we get to A.G., and his story of being “puddled” by a malicious party goer which capped off his personal party era… there’s a value to physically being in a place concentrated with experts. You can sense things…

These two pictures are of the exact same place in The Venetian Hotel Conference Center, which is larger than an international airport.

The first is from 2025, last year’s this time at the same event, at the exact same time. As you can see, the place was packed.

Plus, (you can revisit the issue here) the scene was wild. DJs, models, the Winklevoss Twins, an F1 car, proselytizers handing out salvation pamphlets, people with more money than sense, the First Kids of the U.S.A., it was a zoo.

This year… significantly less of all that.

It’s not like there was nobody there… it’s still a big conference. But the tone and feel was way different.

For instance, notice the old curtain trick long used by conference promoters to hide the fact they didn’t fill up the exhibit hall.

It just wasn’t the same… and it’s why I gave A.G. The Alchemist $1,200 for a box of Bitcoin trading cards.

The Value of Unusual Data

To be clear, I have exactly zero interest in trading cards, Bitcoin or otherwise.

What you should know, if you’re new here, is that I sort of walk through decades of life as an intellectual outcast. I accept it at this point… I realize what I do makes extremely ideological people uncomfortable. They have to lash out to validate their conviction. It’s why newsletter writing became my only viable career path in the late 2000s.

A.G. The Alchemist told me these particular Bitcoin trading cards were on their fourth iteration (fourth unique series). Like Bitcoin, there are a limited number of cards. He pretty much knows how many of each there are, or the implied rarity. This is like talking to some guy who knows every beet-producing farm in the Midwest by heart and what the weather will be next week over the them… He is the market.

And by the way, when he got “puddled” by his party friend, that was an estimated 75 hits of acid which he said “stopped time” and gave him answers to some of life’s bigger questions. I mean, that’s a wild ride.

So, instead of buying a pack of cards for $50, or no cards at all, I bought a whole box of unopened packs for $1,200.

The Alchemist agreed to meet me in person when Bitcoin crosses $100,000. He’ll do a “box slam” with me which is collector lingo for cutting open all the packs, identifying the rarity of each card, and advising on which to send off for grading.

From decades of rare gold coin collecting… I know what this means, and won’t be surprised if I turn a significant profit sufficient to pay for the whole exercise…and then some.

Watch For the Triple

I wrote a book about gold at a time when gold was not very popular. Priced below ~$1,500/oz during composition.

Gold went to ~$5,600 this year and unsolicited haters from the gold community lashed out when I didn’t agree it would keep going. In fact, it seemed like it maybe overshot a little.

Sure, I like gold, and I’m thrilled to own some, but it’s not a religion. People want a preacher… for their own reasons.

The hallmark of profitable investing is avoiding membership to an idea. You hear about conviction all the time… you’ve got to bleed for your ideas. But people die in that mindset. If you die, you’re out of the game. It works the same way with money.

The trick is to hold conviction loosely. Avoid the tempting belief that this or that idea will change your life. Your life doesn’t need changing… only your thinking does.

Similar to the gold people, the Bitcoin people don’t like me either. I don’t care much about the Bitcoin economy, orange freedom, or any of that stuff. The lingo sort of annoys me. Almost as much as hearing gold people talk all giddy about societal collapse… it’s too much.

For reference, here’s the current value of Bitcoin versus gold, and a few other things:

• U.S. listed stocks $75.5 trillion

• U.S. Treasury Debt $39 trillion

• Gold $32.6 trillion

• Space X IPO $2 trillion (est.)

• Bitcoin $1.63 trillion

Here’s what’s wild… Bitcoin has a finite supply. A huge portion of that is lost. You can’t recover the stuff… meaning, the market of available supply can’t grow.

Even the gold supply grows. Some people fear advanced satellite technology might someday unlock new gold deposits… it’s a real concern.

Stocks have limitless supply growth. You just print as many shares as people will buy. Treasuries have some limits… the whole maintain belief in the system thing keeps a governor on it.

Bitcoin out of all those is the only one that literally can’t grow. Plus, we’re charging full speed into total digital control. Every keystroke monitored, every eye movement tracked by spy tech cameras on the phones people can’t dislodge from their corn syrup-covered fingers… The masses love it.

There might come a day when they discover enthusiasm for permanence on a blockchain. For the unique exchange of ownership without a counterparty. They might want to own a slice of that more than the limitless share certificates or other assets with prices out of proportion to value.

Bitcoin at ~$250,000 gives it a value of ~$5 trillion…which does not seem crazy.

The Trust bought some in late 2023 and kept it up since… As with gold, it seems like a sensible footer in the foundation. Time will tell…

While the ideologues attack anything new or different, like luddites setting fire to books, the more you get away from them, the crazier they look.

You’re only as good as your next decision. You can’t make that until you survey the available options. If you stay comfortable, avoiding any variables, you limit your field of view.

Meanwhile, we need to live… while we can. And the best way I know to do that is to hit the road and learn something.

Get Busy Living

The Waldorf Astoria is part of the Las Vegas CityCenter complex. Google says it cost ~$8.5 billion to construct in 2009. Around ~$13.5 billion in modern dollars. And they didn’t put an espresso machine in the place.

I told Santiago he should be ashamed to serve that overpriced sludge. Also, Nespresso is not espresso. It’s highly-processed before being packed in an aluminum canister somewhere very far from here, then pierced with the push of a button and extracted with steam.

The Waldorf charges $8 for a drip coffee and it’s worse than the Bunn-O-Matic glass pot sitting in the tire shop waiting area. There’s also an obligatory ~9% tax, ~20% gratuity, added to the $8. Plus, the daily “Resort Fee.” That city is what I imagine prison feeling like. It’s soulless…vapid.

It’s why I took care of business as fast as possible and got myself on another delayed Delta flight to JFK departing just after midnight. I’m more comfortable in a city with a pulse.

Moments after springing out of seat 10F into JFK 4, deep into reviewing set two of the 6^th night of Phish at the Las Vegas Sphere, I heard my name. It sort of pulled me out of a self-induced hypnotic focus.

The reward was the best hug I’ve had in years. Coming from a top-tier cornea replacement surgeon, I mean like who The White House would hire to do it… when it really mattered.

This doctor is also a genius, and a woman of insatiable intellectual curiosity. If you don’t already know… organically curious people end up being the most interesting to know... These moments, hugs or human connection like this, these are the ones you don’t want to miss…

But people do miss them… they get themselves so rigid, they can’t see anything but their increasingly hardcore beliefs. They feel a false comfort from this.

You can stop doing it anytime you’re ready. Let’s practice.

Avoid Stereotypes

Phish played 9 shows at The Sphere Las Vegas, which by the way is public, as Sphere Entertainment Co (SPHR). Have a look at that stock chart…

9 shows means 18 sets at roughly ~80 minutes each and 9 ~20-minute encores. That’s ~27hrs of stage time with not one song repeated. To me, that’s fascinating.

Yet I did not attend any of the shows. I have contempt prior to investigation for Phish at The Sphere.

For starters, I am not into altered states of consciousness. I have experimented with this in the past, willingly, unlike A.G. who was unwillingly puddled. Yet for me, I’m quite happy walking at my own pace.

My friend, expert hitting partner, and all-around gem of a guy Mr. Pieralisi from the racquet club says I have a “twinkle in the eye” most of the time which people commonly mistake for a hallucinogenic tell.

I’m fine with it… and once after giving a speech at a $1,200/ticket financial conference, an attendee told me he loved the speech, and asked if I was on mushrooms. What?

No, I’m not on mushrooms, and be careful with assumptions. I’d presented a gold kilo bar to the audience like show and tell. In the following ~18 months gold nearly tripled… pay attention.

I don’t expect any more than 1% of you to ever even listen to a Phish song, ever click the website link to the Bitcoin trading cards, attend even one of the nine ATP Masters 1000 tournaments, or hand-grind your own coffee in a purportedly 5-Star hotel while the staff looks on in confused horror.

But I do expect you to absorb the exposure to someone who lives an odd life steered almost exclusively by curiosity. It’s learning for the sake of it, for the fun of it.

When you label it, when you judge it, you miss the benefits. It might make you feel some false safety, like you’ve got this or that figured out and you’re just sure of it… but new information is not a threat to you. It’s an advantage.

Change is constant. Change is your ticket to a better life. Get on that plane, even if the pressurization equipment fails and they make you wait three hours for “replacement equipment.” Take that trip… you’ll know more when you get back.

The Bull Is Loose

I also don’t expect you to follow TTL into every trade. Merely seeing the logic behind the decisions might be more beneficial to your financial journey than any one action. After all, you are in charge of your journey.

The wisest TTL subscribers read only for the Postscript, after the signature… and we’ve got another good one today. But before we get to that, it’s profit time.

In late February, we introduced a controversial new pick. Two actually…

The first was a Bitcoin miner, overrun by a value investing activist shareholder. That new holder forced the ideological “miners” to pivot from the coin-minting business. Sure, keep the ~19,000-coin hoard, can’t hurt. But lease out the mining facility to data companies or hyperscalers.

For reference… we discussed the company’s long-term power supply agreements, paired with finished facilities, and modest to low debt profile. Well… it’s happening. See the chart below.

And remember, we ideally want to own things that move over a ~4-8 quarter period. Something that shoots up in a week is no use to us. Maybe you have a corporate structure as a professional trader, where short term gains are capitalized… some people have that. We don’t. And the short-term rate is ~40% when you calculate all the surcharges Obama successfully tacked on to the already rapacious ~36%. Whatever your effective rate is… the long-term capital gain rate is likely a lot lower.

Also, I’m so sick of people forcing you to say, “I’m not an accountant” etc. whenever they talk about tax. No kidding? You mean, TTL isn’t an accounting advisory service? It’s also not an auto mechanic, or dentist, or anything.

But check out this stock chart, seriously, and the Trust got lucky because in dealing with the 2025 tax bill we had to limit the size of new positions, and this baby lingered down to almost ~12/sh in late March.

It hit ~$23/sh this morning….and we got the full position in the teens.

Read more

Don’t let the first glance fool you. It’s not like something you’d see in the Dunkin’ case. This immaculate creation weighs next to nothing. Every detail of its construction matters.

The dough is delicate pâte à choux. Cooked on stovetop. It puffs as steam builds and ends up nearly hollow. It’s the same dough used to make éclairs, if you’ve had one of those you know how light they are.

The filling is praline crème mousseline, a far cry from cake icing. It takes flavor from roasted hazelnuts and almonds. The rich nuts produce a flavor sugar can’t imitate.

I paid €16 to try one last week at a ritzy hotel on the French Riviera after concierge Lucas delivered a verbose story of its history.

The Product of Promotion

As he summoned the wheeled pastry cart to head our direction, Lucas explained Brest, France is the closest major city to New York. It’s that far western arm of France that juts out into the Atlantic.

In 1910, a journalist named Pierre Giffard had a Paris-Brest-Paris bicycle race. Riders paid an entry fee to pedal ~375 miles to Brest then turn around and go all the way back.

Struggling to generate entry sales, Giffard asked talented pastry chef Louis Durand, or “pâtissier,” to create something notable for the event. It might help promote the struggling race.

Durand came up with the circular treat in his shop. Shaped like a bike tire, he named his creation the Paris-Brest after the race route.

You’ll find these in any respectable French pastry display case. The one I had was world-class. You can also visit Maison Durand in the outskirts of Paris to try the original.

Less Surprised

Most things you run across in this life have a promoter behind them. It’s a treat when someone like Lucas breaks down the whole scheme.

After a while, you start to notice the players, the incentives, and the process of things. You notice people tend to go along with life. They have emotions about things as they happen, they make choices, and often end up deflated or fatigued.

There seems to be a lack of curiosity in the average American money-seeker. They hunt desperately for a miracle ticker symbol. Some life-changing catalyst which usually leads to trouble.

The most successful investors tend to see it differently. Life doesn’t need changing. That’s a tough one… in a society fueled by comparison and envy. The foundation belief is something needs changing. It’s where all the trouble starts.

The winners somehow know not every story needs action. Lucas recounted the entire history of the Paris-Brest, delivered it on a wheeled cart, and the whole experience was great. It came and went, and I’ll remember the details fondly.

People don’t seem interested in learning for the sake of it. Knowledge is cumulative. Spend all day scrolling Twitter (X) and you’ll develop a firm understanding of what makes a good tweet. What you do with that, I’m not sure.

Spend all day learning about stocks, promoters, capital structure, narrative development, economics, incentives, and you become an expert in how things work.

Don’t stop there… layer on a fascination with human decision-making. What makes people tick. Separate what they say from what they do. Then sit back and observe…

The more you learn, the easier it gets.

Shouldn’t Be Public

Not everything calls for action.

Take recent headlines on sneaker company Allbirds Inc (BIRD). Shares rallied ~800% last week after announcing a shift from wool shoes to AI equipment leasing.

That’s an incredible chart.

The stock traded something like ~50-times its total share count… in a day. It means computers grabbed shares as they shot higher on retail demand.

The company announced plans to sell its failed sneaker business for ~$50 million. The buyer can take the brand downstream, filling bins at TJMax or other discount retailers.

Keep in mind, BIRD made shoes for Silicon Valley types late last decade. The wool sneakers were “office cool” in the worst possible way. The perfect complement to a half-zip techy vest and athleisure pants. It’s the fashion equivalent of self-mutilation.

In the cash-flooded post-flu-panic 2021 frenzy, people loved it. Sneakers to the moon. BIRD’s backers did what any sensible owner does… they sold.

BIRD went public in 2021 hitting an adjusted price of almost ~$600/sh before selling the shoe portion of the business recently with its shares around ~$2.50.

A novice reads last week’s story and runs after some BIRD shares, which promise to be an AI play now.

Meanwhile, experience says read the story, enjoy it, remember walking by the store in SoHo thinking, “this’ll never last.”

As for the company’s pivot, the new name is “Newbirds.” It raised ~$50 million to set up computing capacity it plans to lease out. We have a better play in the Trustee Portfolio with significant scale, contracted power supplies, and an activist cracking the whip… and after a tough March, it’s up ~40% so far this month.

Learning For the Sake of It

I didn’t go to the French Riviera to eat pastries. Although I can spot a properly baked croissant from across a busy road, and do get easily distracted. Trips never go as planned, for me at least.

The starting reason for this trip was the ATP Monte-Carlo Masters 1000 tournament. It’s the 7^th of 9 1000-point ATP tennis events I’d like to see.

The ATP (Association of Tennis Professionals) is the men’s tennis points chase. The women have the WTA.

Points are critical on the tour. They determine where players seed in the next event. Seed #1 for instance, and you might play the lowest-ranked player in the tournament. That could mean your first match is against seed #64 or #96 depending on the size of the event. It should be quick.

Compare that to seeding in the middle, say #16. Your first match is against #18. It’s tight, and might take hours to win. You play again the next day, leaving little time for recovery. Points matter; players know it.

Plus, the points fall off after a year. If you win the 1000-point event, next year you have to defend the points. At least coming in second to keep ~650 of them, or making the quarterfinals and keeping less than half of them.

I’m determined to see all 9 of the 1000-point events, it’s the ATP Masters series. There’s no real reason behind it, other than the tennis majors, U.S. Open, French, Aussie, and Wimbledon, seem filled with spectators who don’t always know much about tennis.

And that’s annoying. It’s just one more example of too much money chasing simple, human experiences.

Did It Change, Or Did I Change

Of all the Masters events, at least the seven I’ve attended, this one might be the best.

It’s held at the Monte-Carlo Country Club on the eastern fringe of Monaco just across the French border. Monaco is smaller than Central Park.

This place is right out of the ‘80s, in the best possible way. It’s a class event. With the Prince of Monaco in a baseline box suite. He’s up and down all match, making hand gestures when his local player Valentin Vacherot misses a drop shot or a tight line call.

The court is also super ‘80s. While regulation size, the iconic red clay stadium offers significantly less space between the baseline and the fans. They built the facility in an era of serve-and-volley play. Players now hit big baseline shots, preferring to start the point way back. However, players seem to love playing in this retro setting.

I loved it too, and along with the 1000-point events in Rome and Indian Wells, CA, I’ll hit this one twice.

Rolex is the title sponsor of the Monte-Carlo Masters event. The brand logo is everywhere. Lots of well-heeled attendees wear the watch, including me. It made me think even harder about my lost love for the brand.

Europe seems to still be a place where Rolex symbolizes something timeless. The U.S. lost that… at least from my view. As a kid, I noticed men I respected sort of earn their way into Rolex ownership. That’s no longer the case. These days, valet parking attendants wear Rolexes, some real, some fake. The brand lost something special. But maybe it’s just me…

My father wore a simple, classic watch with what I think was a fake alligator-skin band. I don’t know what it cost, but my suspicion is he paid today’s equivalent of ~$1,000 for it after college, and wore it until the face fell off. It was nice, but not iconic. He was sort of a re-sole the shoes forever kind of guy, and it fit.

There’s something to be said for wearing things that fit your personality. When you wear something for effect, it loses style completely. It’s why I can’t stand logoed clothing… for the most part.

But Rolex always felt different, established, iconic. Something like a Submariner of James Bond lore. That stuck with me. (If you’re new to watches, this is an classic stainless steel sport watch with a black face)

When I reached independence with work, I saved up and bought a used Submariner (with date) from a gold dealer. I told him I’d always wanted one, and he called me with a good one from an estate he liquidated. $4,950 no tax (gold coin trade) felt like a lot of money to me… and it fit my feeling of effort exerted to get there.

Years later, Rolex changed the Submariner, making it stronger in mechanical and aesthetic ways. On a ski trip in St Moritz, Switzerland, I noticed the Swiss franc hammered one morning. I stopped into an authorized dealer and bought a new Submariner for $7,100 (tax free) which felt like a steal since the watch had an MSRP of ~$8,800 plus tax in the U.S. I put the older Sub on a winder.

Then a few years later I got bored with the Sub and bought a GMT Master II (black face, black bezel) while in Bermuda. This watch is a quick time change originally designed for Pan Am pilots. It keeps GMT time and two other time zones. I traveled a lot, knew the watch, and after trying it on, bought it.

Then about ~5 years after that, I felt bored with the GMT and bought a Yacht-Master II with an Oysterflex bracelet. This is branded nomenclature for “rubber band” according to modern Rolex corporate marketing materials.

It’s evolved further…the company that is. Into one reluctant to sell even someone like me another watch. Not that I want one, as I feel like I’ve outgrown the brand.

I can’t tell if it’s the brand that changed, or me. And I’m not sure I care.

Life Has Chapters

The crowd at the Monte-Carlo CC is a treat. Polite, genteel, established.

Europe is a funny place when it comes to classes. In the U.S., we have true class mobility. Notice how everyone you meet in the upper U.S. class seems to tell you they came from nothing. I’m so tired of this.

It’s almost implausible that everyone with 9-figure net worth came from nothing. Further ridiculous is how people use this as a way to self-humble.

It’s why I want to be on record with the fact that the Tucker clan came from a lot more than nothing. We had respectable housing, two station wagons, a small, stable business, and we lived like civilized members of the upper-middle-class. We got intense lectures about what was possible both above our level, and below it.

That left me with the feeling anything was possible. It also makes me see the self-humble crowd as unaware hoarders.

For instance, I spent part of the day with a C-level exec at the tournament. Great guy… big tennis fan. He’s running the treasury of one of our portfolio companies…though I promised not to say which.

This guy established himself as a, “we had very little growing up” person. I checked the Bloomberg and as of writing this, he’s got a reported ~$222 million of company stock and total 2025 compensation of ~$27.8 million. I think it’s time to drop the came from nothing intro…

The thing is, our lives have chapters, and that’s a good thing. But people don’t turn the page at the end of the chapter. They either forget, or they can’t let go of it.

We somehow need a story, a narrative. We’re totally uncomfortable with a new chapter, anything could happen. Maybe it’s what the “grew up poor” crowd didn’t get at the dinner table… they were too busy clubbing siblings for what little sustenance the oversized family had on hand.

Either way, I think the Rolex chapter is over, for me, and something new might be better for the next one.

An Insane Indication

Maybe a smaller brand for this chapter…

There’s a thing called “quiet luxury.” Perplexity AI used the term to describe me. It’s the first I’d heard of it.

Quiet luxury means you like places, items, people who have rock solid craftsmanship, and are so authentic, they go almost unnoticed.

I think the bot is on to something. TTL has no advertising, no flash, and no ringed fence keeping you in. Leave whenever, come back anytime. No games.

As for personal life, your editor has two small residences, which visitors call, “vibey.” This means you feel different in the space. They’re small, with curated furniture and accessories, almost no clutter, no item without a purpose.

The same goes for two vehicles, one that’s a “lasts forever” Toyota Land Cruiser family tank. The other an antique Land Rover Defender 90. There have been Audi S7 type vehicles, and an F150, and others in the fleet… but there’s never a flashy statement type of ride.

And there’s no debt on anything. It’s a constant point of contention with the money advisors who circle endlessly hoping for fees. They can’t understand an unleveraged lifestyle… and I can’t understand the point of leveraging to get more.

More of what? More money you can’t spend, more square footage you can’t enjoy, more watches you don’t want sitting in a safe… Which simmers as I think about what to do with this Rolex chapter, which is definitely over.

Rolex makes over ~1 million watches per year… way too many. The brand does still have value… and likely always will. It probably makes sense to keep the old watches. If nothing less, as a reminder of the prior chapters. I remember everything that happened while wearing them… I stayed true to my internal compass, and higher paths emerged.

As for the next chapter, maybe something in the quiet luxury category. I’m thinking a Patek Phillippe Aquanaut. Specifically, the 5968G-010. These are reference numbers, to signify specific iterations.

Patek makes a lot less watches… an estimated ~50,000 per year… maybe one-twentieth the production of Rolex.

Before the flu panic, you could visit an authorized dealer, try on the Patek, and they’d order one for you. I looked into this, and they wanted a 10% deposit which you’d have to use eventually for some purchase. That’s a small, reasonable bar.

Then people went sort of watch crazy after the flu panic. Maybe it was something in the shots… Either way, you can’t buy a Patek anymore.

I tried to visit a Patek store in London and was denied entry. Some guy on a bike skidded to a stop, asked me if I was E.B. Tucker, and showered me with YouTube fan praise. This all happened in front of the store guard who denied entry. Who’s in there?

So Patek decided to limit sales to “relationship customers.” This means people who buy several watches they don’t want in order to eventually get one they do want.

To me, this is totally idiotic… and something I’d never do. Every Rolex I bought I thoroughly enjoyed. I wore them all like a kamikaze pilot. Tennis, sauna, shower, pool, ocean, with little care for scratches or theft.

I’ve never had trouble with personal theft. People in the theft business tell me I “look like I know what I’m doing” all the time, which is a major deterrent.

That said, the only Patek that interests me, the Aquanaut Chronograph in white gold, exists only with owners who bought it because they didn’t want it… and after holding it in their safe for several years, they offer it through a second-hand dealer. That sort of covers the transaction. If they sell too soon, or advertise too publicly, Patek labels them a flipper… Through this disguised sale method, the price sits about ~50% higher than MSRP.

While this makes absolutely no sense, I’ll probably buy one, we’ll see.

Either way, life has chapters. They’re meant to be read at a steady pace, enjoyed, and let go of when they’re over.

Why I Won’t Be at The Sphere

Too many texts and emails to count…

Phish is right in the middle of a nine-night run at The Sphere Las Vegas. The nine shows are Thu/Fri/Sat for three April weekends in a row.

The steady stream of inbound messages on this mostly came from people who’d never seen a show. Phish does shows, not concerts. A concert is a regurgitated work product, like a multiple-choice test made up of questions from the material covered in class.

A show is wholly different. Instead of a predictable test, imagine the teacher gives you one paragraph to start an essay about what you learned over the semester. Where you take it and how you take it there determines your grade. Most people fail that assignment.

The Sphere is visual stimulation at the extreme. While Phish already has cutting edge lighting at shows, choreographed by legendary lighting engineer Chris Kuroda, The Sphere is more images than lighting.

The setting is so different, I had to square the band in green below for reference.

This is for sure a fun way to see a show. They put tremendous effort into the visual effects. But it’s nothing like the typical show experience.

I had to explain to each inbound why I’d pass on the Sphere shows. Even though I’ll be in Vegas next week for one day of Bitcoin 2026, I won’t stay for Phish.

Going back to October 29, 1994 in the now demolished Spartanburg Memorial Auditorium in Spartanburg, SC, I have a way I like to see shows. I’m take it or leave it on the football field-sized screen behind the band. This is how I prefer it. It’s the view from my post at The Mann in Philadelphia, PA, July 15, 2025.

From the tone of comments on prior TTL issues, the band has an odd reputation compared to my experience seeing them live periodically over ~32 years. Homewreckers, druggie hippies, and generally maligned artists… the more bizarre the slurs get, the more I want to see them…while I can.

The music is improvisational rock. It’s built off the concept of listening exercises. It’s the “yes, and” approach of stage communication.

There’s a call and response style of play. This means you’ll notice in the video above, the bass player watches to see where the guitar player takes his playing. The drummer often holds a beat with three of his limbs while adding an interval with the fourth. It’s a rare skill.

This video is the middle of a song that could morph through 10, 20 minutes, or more, changing as it goes. The song builds and evolves. You’ve heard it before, but the authenticity of real-time improv makes it totally unique.

The music at The Sphere is still great, but I’ll pass on the experience. Instead, see you in Madison, WI for the first nights of the Summer Tour, Fenway for the closer, and maybe one night of the MSG run in the middle.

Miles Ahead of Allbirds

1,858 Phish shows are available for free playback. The band allows taping, reproduction, and sharing of its unique content. Here’s a link to one of my favorites, over nine hours of live music 12/31/99 at the Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation in Big Cypress, FL.

When you get lost in hobbies, travel, learning for the sake of learning, your mind sees more. When you shrink your world, your experiences, down to the most highly controlled and contrived level, your senses atrophy.

It’s why the Allbirds news read so funny last week…to me at least. An ~800% daily move up in a stock down more than 99% from its 2021 high…

Plus, while computers trampled headline reading novice investors, the real story passed by. Newbirds, the company’s proposed new name after selling off the sneaker division, aims to provide computing capacity to the AI sector, generally speaking.

This means the company’s proposed ~$50 million financing deploys capex. It’ll then lease out computing capacity to customers in need.

It might work. Think of it as WeWork for computing capacity. Remember the business of renting space then sub-renting it worked well in a bull market. When it turned, stock buyers got hammered.

Newbirds is a long way from this kind of scale… but we can do better. And we did do better earlier this year in recommending a Bitcoin miner forced to convert its facility and massive access to power into AI capacity… with the expectation of massive EBITDA right around the corner.

We’ve had a tremendous April up ~39% so far… This might be early innings too. I’ve added to the position almost every day this month, and it still feels cheap. [Click here if you’re seeing a paywall]

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In 2011, GATA, the Gold Antitrust Action Committee announced a conference at The Savoy. Registration was $800, then there was the room. Having followed GATA, I wanted to go. But it felt expensive…

And not because I grew up poor or anything. I’m not one of those people who starts every money conversation with a disclaimer that they “came from nothing.” I’m getting tired of those disclaimers. I’m also wondering how it is that everyone was so poor and ended up so well off.

Instead, several years earlier, I’d made a conscious decision to pour myself into writing. It meant having a few less creature comforts, but a lot more freedom.

The GATA guys didn’t offer any media passes, telling me they could barely afford to get to their own event, being a non-profit and everything.

Ideology Doesn’t Pay Well

GATA hit my radar in early 2008. It’s a non-profit organized to expose the irregular dealings that characterize the gold market.

Its big splash was a January 2008 advertisement in the WSJ. The group spent ~$264k, the bulk of its donated cash, to run a message it hoped would be a crucial turning point for the cause. While it did get some additional press, the whole thing sort of came and went.

The non-profiteers preached, pounded, and raged at the ills of the gold market, and the price rose to ~$1,000/oz for the first time shortly after. It slumped during the 2008 fallout, then rose again for ~30 months leading up to the GATA 2011 conference.

The August event fell within days of rating agency S&P downgrading the U.S. Treasury as a borrower. Everyone there felt like any move up in gold was merely an appetizer. This was only the beginning.

The speakers addressed an audience of true believers. The light budget meant limited food at cocktail hour, and a cash bar. Attendees didn’t care. It was all about the ideology.

They expected an era of truth for gold. Exposure of the widespread, accepted financialization that held gold down. The spoofing where faux bids clogged trading systems, causing real buyers and sellers to do things they otherwise wouldn’t. Then only to reverse course on confusing market prints.

About a week after the event, gold hit an all-time high of ~$1,900. It wouldn’t hit that level again for a solid nine years.

Being Early Can Bankrupt You

Nine years is a long time. It’s ~468 weekends. People do a lot of things during that long of a period. Money does too.

The nine years gold spent falling from ~$1,900 to ~$1,050 nearly flushed even the most convicted out of the trade. Sometimes at the worst possible price. The middle of that period, ~2015, was so dire it felt like the industry might cease to exist.

Meanwhile, stories of gold market spoofing came and went, nobody seemed to care outside of hard-core gold bugs. Other markets rose much higher. Clueless people who bought the broader index even did great.

Yet the gold purists hammered harder. They kept at it, on message, fully ideological, unwilling to accept anything other than complete honesty for a market they felt deserved the truth. They doubled down during pain, ignoring the state of things around them.

In 2020, with gold at a flu-panic price of ~$1,500, I wrote what some people say is the best-selling and only palatable book on gold. When it came out, I heard from the Chairman of GATA.

He scolded me for not focusing on malfeasance in the gold market, price abuse, and his causes. I asked if he’d considered giving up the “good fight” and making some money. Absolutely not. I asked what he’d do if the truth he alleged finally came out. He said they’d have a keg party and celebrate the defeat of the big, evil banks.

A keg party… like the aluminum barrel containing 165 beers of 12oz serving size. The ones you have to attach a plastic pump to, before serving yourself a lukewarm, foamy refreshment.

Expensive Beliefs

There’s nothing more dangerous than total conviction.

When it comes to hard-core ideology, it can kill you. When it comes to money issues, it can bankrupt you.

While nobody likes gold more than me, there’s something about it that distorts some people. They get sort of overtaken by this obsession with gold compared to everything else. They call it “real,” implying almost everything else is a fake.

That might be true, but also might not matter. Gold tends to run up in advance of turmoil, money bloat, or big change. Owning some over the last quarter-century proved a good way to maintain hard-fought wealth. But a little goes a long way.

Depending on your situation, owning a small percentage of gold, even less than ~5% of assets, proved wise. Buying ~50% at the wrong time risked frustration boarding on madness. The real danger here is reaching the point of maximum pain, then tapping out, at just the wrong time.

Too much belief in anything risks this. It’s like overeating… you lose your senses.

Competitive eaters train to block out something called Flavor Fatigue. It’s where the body sends a signal at around the ~10^th slice of pizza that you’ve had more than enough. You feel sick. Competitive eaters block this out to double intake.

Hard-core ideologists do this with money. Gold bugs do it by obsessing over what’s “real.” It’s dangerous, expensive, and if people around you do it, it’s annoying.

Pleasure and Pain

The problem starts with how our mind works.

Kids and animals tend to bounce from one thing to the next. They eat when hungry, sleep when tired, and forget about what happened five minutes ago.

Around the age of ~8, humans start to develop some degree of agency. Experts tell me it’s a “theta wave” state up to that time. Think of this switch on as the dawn of the ego.

We start to perceive pleasure and pain. Situations that are uncomfortable, we try to avoid. The comfy ones, we try to insulate and protect, making them permanent. Both of these at an extreme cause big problems.

The Ways We Resist Change

We all know change is inevitable. The most successful of us know change brings opportunity.

Instead of whining about, or fighting it, successful people flow along with it. It’s how fortunes are made.

But many people resist change like a frightened dog when it sees the vet clinic. They’ll do about anything to protect perceived safety one way or another.

These are three key ways the unexamined human does it. Three of the most financially dangerous ways.

1. Confirmation Bias

2. Belief Perseverance

3. Cognitive Myopia aka “Tunnel Vision”

Confirmation Bias is an easy one. To the person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When we believe something with full conviction, we ignore all other facts.

There’s some kind of false belief that we fail if we loosen up on our conviction. Meaning, the stock bull only likes positive articles. The stock bear hunts around for negative news.

Belief Perseverance is the psychological equivalent of the “clean plate club.” Parents used to force kids to finish all food on their plate. This was seen as some kind of fear-based starvation avoidance mechanism. Few encouraged them to listen to their stomach, aim for moderation. Many became over-eaters.

Cognitive Myopia is tunnel vision. This one leads people to shrink their view smaller and smaller. They’ll end friendships over challenged beliefs. They’ll reduce their circle to only people who see things the way they do. It’s living in a sliver of the world, seeing the other 99.9% as a dangerous “them.”

Where This Gets Expensive

There’s a fine line between conviction and dogma.

To some degree, conviction makes the world work. Without it, we’d be a bunch of beta creatures following each other in circles. Intense pursuit of ideas causes change.

At the extreme, hyper-focus leads to psychological hangups. That’s when passion turns to dogma. It’s when someone asks you, “Have you ever considered you might be wrong?” and you answer, “Absolutely not!”

The first step to freedom here is taking things a lot less seriously. All we’re talking about is money. They print the stuff every day, there’s tons of it.

Gripping, hoarding, and fearing the loss of money rarely leads to finding any of it. Try something new.

Don’t call that “too woo.” It’s anything but.

Everyone sort of knew gold was too cheap in the 2000s. I clanked two coins together and thought, “Wow, that’s a cool sound.” Then I bought some. The price then was in the ~$400s.

When it went to ~$500, I didn’t freak out and hoard it like a deranged packrat. Each time I made some money, I bought a coin or two, and kept that up for a long time. Then eventually wrote a book on the subject.

While I still think it’s great, it’s not the only thing. And turning it into a religion is dangerously expensive.

Let Go & Flow

When your opinions overpower your senses, you can’t see out the windshield.

It means your view of things drives your decisions. You dress for the weather you want instead of the reality outside.

Right now, there’s an overall bullish feeling around gold. I’m in a group chat with resource industry executives, and their bullish tone is palpable.

Gold had a moment. So far, it looks like it did what it always does, predict trouble before it happens.

Gold ran up ~6 months before the 2008 crisis, before the flu panic, before the eastern wars kicked off in 2022, and before the Q1 plunge into global conflict. Holding too much of it in anticipation of the next big event might get expensive.

This is a good move in gold. If we use the accepted number of total above-ground gold in the world, ~7.07 billion ounces or ~219,891 tonnes, it means the current ~$4,800 price values total world gold at ~$34 trillion.

Again, we’ll compare that to the value of other big asset categories.

• Above Ground Gold Hoard ~$34 trillion

• U.S. Public Equity Listed ~$70 trillion

• World Public Equity Listed ~$148 trillion

• U.S. Treasury Debt Outstanding ~$39 trillion

• Fed Balance Sheet ~$6.7 trillion

• Bitcoin ~$1.43 trillion

Almost nobody seems to get this comparison. Gold is a useful asset, with no counterparty risk. That’s an important feature. But it’s not the only thing that matters.

Stocks represent the creative capacity of free-thinking people. It’s the future earning power of big ideas, innovation, and mechanisms that advance civilization.

Further, stocks are a western concept. Many countries copy our equity ownership idea; few have the societal webbing needed to make it work.

That’s why U.S. equity has a higher value than other parts of the world. People miss this, but the metric of ~25% of world GDP and ~50% of world equity value is not as crazy as it looks.

Then there’s debt, which most people reading this rant about. The U.S. federal debt to total world gold ratio is almost even.

Go ahead and disagree with the comparison in the comment section below. U.S. Treasury debt has a powerful repayment record. When a large sovereign wealth fund looks at things to own, that’s a big one. It’s also very liquid.

Then there’s the handwringing over the Fed Balance Sheet which swelled from ~$0.8 trillion in 2008 to ~$9 trillion after the flu panic. Now it’s ~$6.7 trillion. About one-sixth the value of world gold.

We’ll leave the Bitcoin comparison alone since the TTL comment section makes it clear most of you think it’s worthless. Gold enthusiasts are unwilling to consider owning any Bitcoin. Not even a tiny position.

If you’re tired of ideological frustration, try buying a token amount of Bitcoin just to gloat when it goes down. Worst case scenario then is, it might go up. If it does, you’re welcome.

Learn The Code

People fight trends.

We shifted into a situation where stocks always went up after ~2009. I personally know people who destroyed their careers shorting stocks in the first few years after the big financial crisis. The popular belief was, another crash sat just around the corner. It never showed up.

Now people think the value of stocks overall is too high, like the late ~90s, in a bubble, and set to fall. Yet they sit idle owning stocks, or gambling on upstart shares, most of which are in a major downtrend.

Like it or not, we’re in a world where stocks matter a lot. There’s a tie to people’s overall psychological mood. That seems to be managed.

You’ll notice in the chart below, when the index swoons, riskier stocks dive. From the January high, we had a roughly ~10% pullback in stocks broadly.

This is after rising ~18% last year including dividends.

The average person has little idea what’s going on here. A falling index, oil surging ~50% then falling ~15% overnight on “truce” news, then surging again, then falling again…

These gyrations destroy the best traders. Only computers trained to capture micro moves tend to make money in this environment. And it’s not changing anytime soon…

If you work with an at-home computer algorithmic trading system, tell us more in the comments below. Most of you likely don’t. The Trust doesn’t either.

The Trust aims to beat the indexes by a margin, year in, year out, over a long period. Not to beat the market on a daily or hourly basis…which is not only difficult, it’s also, all-consuming. It gets in the way of leisure activities.

We’ll have some surges, and some slumps, we’ve had both. But we won’t lose sight of the fact that trading those surges and slumps is a low-probability activity over a long period. Sometimes it works, the time it doesn’t leaves a big mark.

Before we get into the portfolio, which is up dramatically across the board today on “truce” headlines, we need to remind you of something important.

Beware of Fakes

TTL subscriber John wrote in with this comment:

“HI E.B., some time ago I got a message from you (or someone purporting to be you) asking about whether I wanted to trade with you (some sort of program that mirrors trades you make) and was given a Telegram contact. […] someone may be using your Substack photo and perhaps contacting your followers pretending to be you. Please advise.”

John, unfortunately, this is a scam. And it’s not the first we’ve heard of it.

Duplication technology is so elaborate now, they’ll have a back-and-forth conversation with you and a computer-generated E.B. convincing you it’s real.

That said, an easy way to handle this is, the TTL publication schedule, you’ll see the real TTL every other Thursday at 09:00 New York time.

This issue has a paywall below. If you cross the paywall, that’s it, you’re in. There’s no Telegram account, no sketchy fund request, and no games.

Now, let’s get into the portfolio, which is all green today.

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The odds say you’re walking in with $100, and out with $70. You know that, but many people don’t.

It’s that broad segment of the population who does their weekly shopping at the gas station. The ones who stand in line with a blank, open-mouth stare. Kind of a far-away gaze. Where you think they’re about to say something but after a while realize they look that way all the time.

This cohort can’t forecast weekly household demand for milk, diapers, and bread. Mesmerized by beer advertisements, and light on cause-and-effect thinking, they’re hopeless prey to the idea of instant riches at the gas station counter.

Warnings on the back of the scratcher don’t help either. This one says explicitly the payout ratio is less than 1:4 meaning if you buy four, one should pay something.

We found the one winner in our batch paying only $5. Better than Vancouver mining stocks, but bad by any other standard.

Before you write it off as $20 you won’t miss, consider the scale of state lotteries. ~$7.1 billion spent in Florida last year, ~$5.2 billion returned if the odds all match general estimates. And ~$60 billion spent nationally meaning around ~$42 billion returned to winners. The house rake is huge.

Before You Judge…

That open-mouthed, blank stare in line at the gas station isn’t as far removed as you’d like to think.

We’ve degraded what constitutes investing to something close to hoping for instant fortune at the BP station.

For instance, take the latest craze of betting on the price of Bitcoin… 5 minutes from now. This means simply, will the price be higher or lower… 5 minutes from now. Bloomberg says ~$60 million worth of these directional bets hit the market every day.

This is not people buying Bitcoin. It’s merely betting on the price being higher or lower 5 minutes from now. Like a coin flip.

Then flipping the coin over and over and over again, all day. It makes day-trading look old fashioned. You can make exactly 288 of these 5-minute directional bets per day. Assuming you don’t sleep or take breaks.

5-minute betting is down from 10-minute direction bets on Bitcoin in the past few months. Last year it was 15-minute bets. Maybe we’ll keep going until it’s 5-seconds worth of suspense.

Polymarket is the leader in prediction betting. Oxinsider.com tracked and posted data from one account with 434 prediction bets.

In all, this “investor” placed ~$2.055 million worth of bets. The win rate of 3333.3% seems high but we’ll let the cited data speak for itself.

As for the outcome, the “trader” still lost money. $53,811 according to the article.

Action > Profits

We say we want profits. We want our money to work for us, so we can multiply it. Pretty much everyone says this. What we really want is action, excitement.

We need it. Almost as if we can’t sit still. We might learn some fact about ourselves if we do. And we can’t handle it. So, we’ll stay distracted.

Maybe we’ve always been this way. In the 20^th century, which just about everyone seems to now call the good ole days, people smoked. We always knew smoking was a sort of distraction or fixation more than anything else.

Employers figured out the smoke break was a key feature of the work day. Stay on task, looking forward to 15 minutes of gossip huddled outside with coworkers.

What we want, or maybe need, is a distraction from the daily tasks of life. And nothing captivates our attention like instant riches.

Most people betting on the direction of Bitcoin 5 minutes from now, 10 minutes from now, 60 minutes from now, lost money.

Polymarket studied 4,838 wallets to find only 1,606 of them generated profits. That’s only ~33% of gamblers.

It’s not only the odds. It’s the frequency of betting.

These contracts vary in price. An example would be paying $0.95 to receive a $1 back if Bitcoin is higher or lower in 300 seconds. That bet pays off ~86% of the time.

The issue is, the one time it does not pay, you lose the full $0.95.

Missing The Moves

The problem with betting on the price of things 300 seconds from now is you lose perspective.

It’s like people who travel to Las Vegas, plop down at a slot machine, and sit for 12 hours without moving. They sort of lose their senses. They could be anywhere and wouldn’t know the difference.

It’s the same problem with gamblers betting on the price of things being higher or lower minutes from now. You miss the entire move by focusing on micro ticks.

The price of Bitcoin has real potential to reach ~$250,000. Go ahead and argue against it in the comments below… We’re eager to see your rationale.

The entire supply of all Bitcoin ever to exist is merely ~$1.43 trillion. That pales in comparison to the value of all U.S. listed stocks, which is ~$68 trillion.

The same people who tend to argue Bitcoin is a fraud, scam, or hoax also seem to agree on loss of digital freedoms. As if we ever had any…

Just try living without digital access. You can’t do much. That’s a lifestyle people say they want, but few seem willing to take on.

There might be something appealing about Bitcoin as the digital walls close in. It may shine as the one true uncontrollable digital asset. Either way, $1.43 trillion is a small number these days.

It’s not even a year of federal budget deficits, which the typical Bitcoin bear also worries about.

Then there’s gold bugs. Nobody dislikes Bitcoin more than gold bugs. That’s coming from the guy who wrote the book on gold.

With gold at all-time highs, gold bugs lashed out at anyone who said it’s sort of, high enough. After all, $5,600/oz was ~$39 trillion of total gold value.

Then there’s the call for ~$10,000/oz, and higher numbers. Big calls get big clicks in a bull market. $10,000 gold is ~$69 trillion worth if you add it all up. That’s more than all listed U.S. stocks.

Gold worth more than stocks is a huge problem. Stocks value the creative capacity of all the people striving, stretching, and often angling for innovation. You don’t want to see vaulted gold valued higher, it’d mean there’s not much for us to do other than protect our gold. And we might have trouble finding ammo at some point.

Ideological Danger

Gold runs before things happen. It’s the ultimate indicator.

It ran before the flu panic of 2020, before the ongoing wars in the east, and before the August 2011 downgrade of U.S. Treasury debt. After these runs, it tends to chill out, or slump.

That doesn’t mean the value goes away. It’s nice to own some. But there’s little point in closing off the possibility of any other opportunity between the peaks.

What you see is, profits are secondary for some people. They’ll say they want to make money, but closer analysis shows they’re on an ideological mission.

They need something to believe in. They feel a part of something when they buy into a belief.

After they buy in, they need you to believe too. They’ll tell you in passionate detail about this new way they see things. Could be gold, could be XRP Ripple tokens, could be anything. Doesn’t matter. If you seem unmoved, they press harder.

They respond better if you seem convinced after a heavy sales pitch, even better if you buy in and follow them. This is a sort of ideological pyramid scheme. Try to avoid it. It’s where expensive mistakes happen.

The more this goes on, the stronger the conviction. People eventually ignore all external signals. Anything that might challenge their belief. They’ll fight it right down to zero if necessary.

Maybe we’re afraid to be wrong, some kind of pride or ego thing. Animals don’t do this. Kids don’t either. If something stops working, they move on. Only adult humans do it. And it gets expensive.

If you get away from this for a minute, you’ll see it for what it is. You might have fewer friends, but you’ll have wider vision.

You’ll notice, nobody really wants objective advice. Let them figure it out on their own. They’ll fatigue or run out of money at some point, and maybe wake up.

We’re all on a journey, and feedback along the way only resonates when we’re ready to take it.

Don’t Miss the Triple

The gamblers betting $60 million a day on 5-minute moves in the Bitcoin price probably won’t be around for a move to ~$250,000.

The guy who spent ~$2 million on 434 bets lost ~$53,800 doing it. Hopefully he had fun.

Instead of hoping for a life-changing boost, some kind of “instant riches” advertised on front the scratcher, try to notice change, and get involved with it.

It’s almost as if people want things to get better, but not change. It’s what drives the money hoarders who pile up assets ignoring everything else in the process.

I’ve personally been involved with people who destroy relationships in the name of excessive financial hoarding. They pile up more than they can spend…and money doesn’t store well.

Just watch over time. Getty’s kids ended up in all kinds of odd situations, people who inherit a fortune don’t always know how to use it.

When it comes to you and your money, find a lifestyle you want, and buy it. That means, do something you enjoy to earn money, then spend the money doing things you enjoy. It helps keep you objective. And, avoids hoarding.

Hoarding is for people mired in fear. It’s not wrong per se, but causes severe myopia. You get so focused on your pile you’ll forget to notice the truck about to broadside you.

And when it comes to changes in what’s hot and about to get hotter… see the rampant, compulsive gambling as a clue.

The 434 wagers cost the maker ~$53,800 in losses. They made the company needed to fund those bets more valuable.

That’s not the prediction company… it’s the stablecoin tokens needed to play on the prediction company’s platform.

We bought stock in that company in late February. It ran up ~60% in less than a month. It pulled back to now up a mere ~22%. If that doesn’t get your attention, nothing will.

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Dear Founders,

About a month ago, I said no thank you to a lucrative opportunity.

A French startup called Slice said some ~300 people wanted me on its platform. By “wanted” they meant, requested, and agreed to pay a monthly fee for access to my thoughts on markets.

That’s just the direct requests. Slice felt they’d multiply that on announcing my addition to the platform.

It’s a cool idea, Slice. But the issue for me was, I already have a place to share my thoughts, here.

Free readers get to see a generous chunk of each issue, right up to the paywall. Subscribers get the full issue, and Founders, the elite commandos of TTL, take additional Quarterly Notes.

There will be times when we discuss something we look back on as life-changing. Other times when something surges and fades, like the warrants we got into last September roughly two weeks before the promoter-and-chief sent them skyward.

It’s all part of the journey, and we’ll take one more step of it today before the end of Q1.

Up In the Sky

There’s a lot going on overhead.

As you read about ongoing conflicts, the various tactics used, notice how much of modern warfare relies on space. We’re moving into a scene where life sort of happens under a web of satellite activity.

What’s wild is, there will be more not less traffic above. So much, we’ll one day see 2026 as a two-lane country road before Eisenhower built the Interstate System.

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So much, he diverts a portion of his unusually large income each year to aligned causes. At 97 years old, this is more than a pattern. It’s a way of life.

What drives Jimmy’s publicly proclaimed charitable decisions doesn’t always carry over to his personal decisions. He loves deals even more than spreading the good around, evidently. His office told a Bloomberg reporter they do a deal “about every three weeks” which seems like a lot.

All that “dealmaking” created a sprawling empire with dozens of companies, and 59,000 employees. It owns everything from fishing fleets to billboards to car lots.

The big boss loves car sales. He’s known for showing up on site to haggle with customers.

It might be the thrill of action. The chance that he’ll come away with more than the other party in a transaction.

In the late 1970s Jimmy risked $25,000 (CAD) on silver futures. He ran the bet all the way to ~$78 million before watching it fall back to practically nothing.

It’s almost beyond comprehension to push a leveraged bet that far. Silver did make an epic run during the same period. However, pressing a bet like that turns winning into an intergalactic experience.

The issue with super-leveraged runs like that is the danger of losing your senses entirely. It gets hard to know which way is up. The action can be intoxicating, almost like enjoying vertigo.

It goes on until you can’t tell the difference between down and up. Like that syndrome where skydivers misjudge the approaching ground. Jimmy sort of did this with his big, exciting silver bet…forgetting to peel off a few million on the way up. The desire for more defied logic.

In that case, the silver trade, he got lucky. His personal assistant, who by the way holds the record for longest-serving female personal assistant according to the Guinness Book of World Records, which Jimmy owns, saw this epic disorientation unfolding in real time. She syphoned money out of Jimmy’s reach…for his own safety.

When the dust settled, and Jimmy came back to earth, she informed him of $6.6mil (CAD) tucked aside. That made the trade a still epic 26,300% winner.

Losing Perspective

Maureen Chant is Jimmy’s personal assistant. She’s an estimated ~85 years old now…still working evidently. Twelve years younger than the boss, she joined the office in September 1963.

How you hire says a lot about you. It also tends to create an annuity for any organization. Most people go cheap on employees and wonder later why they can’t get anything done.

It ties in with overall distorted thinking. It’s the glaring gap between what people say and what they do.

Don’t bother pointing this out. They really believe what they say, and won’t respond well if you ask why it’s so different from what they do.

Jimmy Pattison has a net worth of ~$7.1 billion. His empire generates annual sales of ~$14 billion. He has a foundation with $283 million of assets that gave away $20 million to mostly religious causes in 2024. All those numbers are Canadian dollars FWIW.

We’ll assume Jimmy enjoys himself with the $7.1bil. What people do with their money is their business. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Money is meant to be fuel for the life you want. It should be burned up in the process. It doesn’t hoard well. Just ask the descendants of crime bosses who try to live off illicit cash. You can’t get rid of the stuff at the same pace the government creates it.

Then there’s the new school of inheritance thinking. Almost everyone in the mass affluent class has noble ideas of how they’ll insulate progeny from struggle; then introduce nominal guardrails like drug tests or scholastic metrics with rewards.

It doesn’t work. Nothing replaces real life. The perfect harmony between opportunity, desire, and execution. Life unscripted sorts out the winners and losers better than even the most meticulous planning.

When it comes to progeny, a little stomach rumble might lead to greatness. Don’t cheat them out of it.

And when it comes to charity, be careful. Too much money can ruin a good idea. Helping someone often costs very little. If you do feel inclined to spread a little cash around, maybe don’t run to the Bloomberg reporter to let them know.

Afraid to Live

Spend it while you can. And not for the reason you think…

Planning and doing things you enjoy massively shifts your perspective. Keep a list of things you want to see or experience. Scratch them off one by one, add new ones, and watch how much more interesting your life becomes.

If you can’t think of anything to do, give some money away. Seriously… and don’t talk about it. There’s nothing worse than the swollen steak-eaters in penguin suits crowding those 8-top circular tables at charity events.

Try some real life giving. Get a stack of $20s from the bank and tip anyone who does a task you’d never do. Furniture delivery people almost never get tips. They carry a sleeper sofa up three flights of stairs without leaving a scratch and people shoo them away with only a thank you.

Forget about the entitled baristas with their hands out. Give the janitor, hotel housekeepers, car wash attendants, and the entire landscape crew $20 each and tell them the place looks amazing. Watch how happy they are. Far happier than the nonprofit behemoth that invites you to an awful dinner with a silent auction.

If $20’s too much for you due to reckless gambling in the stock market, do it with $5s. But not $1s, that just feels condescending, almost as bad as giving them loose change. Or skip the giving, and spend the money on yourself.

What you’ll see is it helps you get rid of the dangerous, sometimes financially fatal more disease. People don’t want to spend or give money because they fear they won’t have enough. They hoard, and speculate. It’s a dangerous combo that often leads to big losses.

It’s because the More Disease causes myopia. That’s when you focus so intently on something, greed in this case, you can’t see anything else. Like Jimmy P. when he looked at the $78 million profit on the silver trade and thought $79 or $80 would surely be better.

The real issue here is our relationship with money. If dysfunctional, we can’t see up from down. An incredible opportunity thumps us in the head and we can’t see it. We say it’s what we want, but we walk right past it if our mind isn’t right.

Lost Our Natural Senses

We’re a long way from belly rumbles in the West.

Life is just too good, and we can’t think straight.

Even at professional tennis events, people seem consumed with the idea of betting on odd outcomes. From war odds, to future elections, the compulsion with trivial betting is a sign of bigger problems.

Last year at the Toronto ATP Masters 1000 a group of young men kept bothering me asking if they should take an “early payout” on their match bet. I’m not sure they watched one full point of the match… Ben Shelton, who serves like a bunker buster munition. They knew nothing about him.

We need stimulation, distraction, so much we miss the moment. As the inside tongue of my Mercer Brand shoes read, “The only thing you can’t recycle is time.”

There’s nothing wrong with desire, with wanting more. The issue is we jump all over the place, unable to sit still. We need action so badly we can’t remember the plan. Assuming most people even have one, which is a stretch.

During 20th century capitalism, there were barriers to capital markets. You needed a broker, who charged hefty fees. People bought stock and waited five days for settlement. There was friction to the investing process.

Today, people trade stocks on airplanes, in cars, during movies, at tennis events, and call themselves investors. They monitor noisy apps like X and Reddit for the next bit of chatter that might change the emotional course of their day.

Everyone is a day trader. I’ve seen vanity plates “DAE-TRDR” which means somebody already had “DAY.”

There’s nothing wrong with this per se. It’s what makes a market. But the collective disorientation means we respond to headlines, and miss trends.

The New Fed

Even I didn’t see it at first… now it’s clear.

The Federal Reserve as we know it is cooked. It’s a matter of time. The media drama, presidential visits to the construction site at its headquarters, investigation of bureaucratic-types sitting on its board, all might be clues of a controlled demolition already in progress.

The whole ~17-year obsession with how it’ll fix borrowing costs seems silly too. Going back to the 2008 0% rate-fix, we’ve seen the institution take on serious corrosion.

Banks as we know them are finished. Just visit one. The staff looks about as capable as a team of clerical workers at the VA. And we all know there’s a form or checklist for moving more than $50. Also, a separate form when someone duplicates one of your checks using Photoshop and empties your account.

The whole thing is obsolete. And it’s ripe for someone like that chirping senator lady who’s always hovering over already dead institutions and ideas, trying to convince us she’s on the case.

They’ll say Ron Paul was right, turns out the whole institution was a big ruse. But it’ll be too late. And the fix is always worse than the problem when these people get involved.

FedCoin Is the Enclosure

Banks move less money than ever.

For starters, if you need a loan, there’s a good chance you source it online or with one of those wholesale type firms. That’s for something conventional, like a house.

The bank doesn’t work like the spigot it once was. Giving the old Fed a way to turn up or down the flow of money with its policy. It’s why the New Fed needs new owners.

We all know the old Fed had owners. The primary dealer banks owned the Fed. They agreed to backstop Treasury auctions. They sort of promised Washington they’d babysit the money supply for the privilege of having the exclusive right to issue our money.

The New Fed needs owners with a spigot on the new system. Stablecoin issuers are the new primary dealers…

A stablecoin is a digital token linked to the value of the U.S. dollar… meaning, 1 digital stablecoin token = $1. There is no speculation potential with stablecoins.

Also, stablecoins likely involved with the New Fed have nothing to do with the ~15,000 junk coins discussed on Reddit crypto forums and stock chatter sites. Those have no purpose, and it seems like nobody informed the holders the bull market ended.

Take Tether for instance. It’s taken in ~$184 billion U.S. dollars. As in, people like you wired, transferred, ACH’d or somehow sent Tether ~$184 billion. Tether in return issued ~184 billion tokens worth $1.

Meanwhile, Tether takes the ~$184 billion and runs the world’s most interesting investment fund. It seems like almost none of the ~184 billion token holders want their dollars back. All Tether has to do is generate a small return and it’s printing money.

To be clear, it’s printing the old kind of money. Meaning, it might buy stocks, gold, Treasuries, etc. Its owners seem happy to collect the old version of money for their efforts.

While some of you think this surely can’t be real, it is. There’s another one called USD Coin with ~$79 billion on deposit, and they go down in size from there.

Why Nobody Asks for Dollars Back

In 2016 I wrote about FedCoin. It might be the first time the word was ever used.

Then in 2020, I wrote an entire chapter in Why Gold? Why Now? laying out a case for a digital currency as inevitable.

At the time, I found Bitcoin (XBT) very interesting, but did not own any. It was in the ~$30,000s when I finally bought some.

What fascinated me with Bitcoin was the automatic transaction potential. Meaning, the exchange between buyer and seller could take place 24-7-365 without anyone supervising. It seemed clear one day everything from stock settlement, which used to take 5 days, to property tax liens and transfers, could happen on this type of system.

While at the time I felt this meant exchange operators like ~$109 billion market cap CME Group Inc (CME) would crater in value, I totally missed the advent of stablecoins.

People around me bought Tether, USDC, and even one called Luna that crashed, wiping out many holders. The whole thing with stablecoins didn’t make sense, even while Bitcoin as a sort of philosophical plumbing for a new system did.

Today, as we move towards the first ~$1 trillion of stablecoins sloshing around, it’s clear there’s a race to grab market share.

It’s easy to imagine companies like Apple Inc (AAPL) offering consumers discounted payment terms, rebates, special features, to keep money on deposit via a branded stablecoin. Maybe, AppleCoin, always valued at $1, with frictionless, low-cost movement around the Apple ecosystem.

The whole concept of Apple Pay never made sense to me… a credit card on the phone is still a credit card.

Credit cards come with gigantic transaction fees. Stablecoins will reduce these fees to a fraction of current levels. Maybe Apple creates an incentive to lure consumers to a stablecoin and away from what’ll seem like expensive, antiquated cards when making payments in the future.

We sort of know this. The fraud risk is lower, the friction is lower, the cost surely will be lower…when we transact with stablecoins.

Companies like payment processor Stripe, who happily rakes almost ~4% of every TTL transaction for processing card payments, even has its own stablecoin payment system in development. There’s a veritable race to start these firms.

And while the New Fed itself may issue and control a payment system called FedCoin, it could treat these bigger stablecoin issuers like the modern-day primary dealers of the Old Fed… which themselves surely have plans to issue stablecoins.

Last issue of TTL, we bought the only stablecoin issuer I know of with a valid stock listing… and it’s up 36%.

More importantly… it might just be getting started. If so, it’ll be our piece of the New Fed.

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It’s the name given to a corporate army under the command Loren “L.M.” Berry, the king of Yellow Pages advertising sales.

Barry’s sales team dressed better than their customers, drove nicer cars, and earned more money. Around ~$200,000/yr at the time which is about $1 million today.

Loren Berry created a culture by example. His early life shaped him. Born in 1888 in Wabash, Indiana, his father died when he was just four years old. His widowed mother sold horseradish to survive. Horseradish…

She trained Loren to take over horseradish sales at age eight so she could be a nurse, and a midwife. Her son went on to sell advertisements on printed local directory fliers. This was the Google search of the early 1900s and 10s.

He never stopped selling. He pitched people in carriages, hotel lobbies, weddings, funerals, churches. He made it a disciplined lifestyle and demanded the same from his army of salesmen.

It worked. Berry’s intense focus and determination culminated in ~1 million advertising customers across ~800 local telephone directories with ~$300 million in revenue before selling out to Bell South in the 1980s, after his death.

No More Yellow Pages

Nobody under the age of 40 knows what the Yellow Pages is. The brand still exists online, but it’s practically irrelevant.

Plus, the whole culture Berry demanded isn’t relevant anymore. Cadillacs are plastic clunkers, nobody wears suits, and the whole work hard mantra might be a thing of the past.

Influencers are the new “ad men.” They can sleep late, and make videos about how tired they are. Millions of people watch them. They turn that eyeball time into cash.

Things change… and successful people change with them.

The problem is, most people panic at the idea of change. They worry they’ll lose something they have. They forget how much opportunity change brings with it.

Especially when entrenched success resists change. This means the most successful people who dominated yesterday tend to grip what they have so intensely they can’t see new, larger opportunities.

The wise Berry Man of the 1970s and 1980s switched to software sales in the 1990s, medical device sales in the 2000s, and something else today, maybe influencing.

Most of the time, change doesn’t have to be dramatic. Things start to shift. Instead of gripping on in fear, try to notice the shift. Accept it, and go with it.

Spotting The Next Big Thing

Earlier this week a viral article ripped through the market psyche. It caused a radical sell-off in many tech stocks, unfortunately in one we own.

If you read the article, you know it’s dystopian fiction set in 2028. There’s talk of former tech executives scrambling for work on hyper-optimized food delivery apps, doing handy work, and overall resigned to subsistence living.

It goes on to expose agentic AI as an optimization tool that never sleeps. It optimizes us out of existence. Which flattens government income tax revenue, and the value of almost every tasks.

While the author says the broad stock collapse after publishing was a big surprise to him, we’re skeptical.

After all, we did roughly the same thing in TTL back in June 2023. It caused no sell-off, did not go viral, and most of you had nothing to say about it.

That’s OK… we know things that are urgent get the more attention. Something new will hijack attention tomorrow.

Agentic AI will likely not cause a dystopian era where former tech executives mow lawns to survive. Partly because they don’t know how to operate gas-powered lawn equipment. Also because in that scenario there wouldn’t be many people with sprawling, manicured yards which come with great expense for the owner.

The swift sell-off this week flushed anyone who over-borrowed to buy shares in affected firms. Just a few days earlier, in the Feb 12 TTL issue, we printed this after the portfolio table. It’s part of a larger statement you might want to revisit.

This is what the successful viral hit piece did to some larger stocks earlier this week. We don’t own these three, but it’s a fair representation of what happened to a big chunk of the market… in a matter of minutes.

~25% Smaller in ~90 Minutes

It’s tough to lean on predictions like the ones made in that Citrini hit piece. For starters, there’s no portfolio of ideas displayed. It’s merely a macroeconomic thought piece.

The comment section at the end of the article is highly valuable. There are many tech executives relaying specific insight about big, glossy statements in the piece.

Not everything goes pancake in an era of big changes. Some companies evolve into players for the next era. Amazon started as a book retailer. It used change as an opportunity to grow.

IBM did the opposite. It went from corporate titan to bureaucratic morass. Its executives ignored external change, focusing instead on protecting their place inside the corporation. In real terms, IBM shrank at the dawn of the personal computing age.

Static predictions are rarely accurate. They miss how things evolve as people steer companies through change. That’s what makes change a dynamic opportunity.

As for our top-tier cybersecurity stocks in the Trustee Portfolio, it’s hard to see a future without them.

Life is moving fully digital. Try living analog for a month if you’re slow to believe and accept this. You can’t access anything without a digitized portal.

Last week’s news was an agentic AI tool called Claude would provide low-cost, easy cybersecurity, commoditizing the service.

What many missed was a simultaneous report from Amazon on hackers using Claude to radically enhance their effectiveness.

Claude will help protect you, and help the hackers target you. Evidently…

The pace of news flow fails to see the full picture today. Our system relies on ownership. We own things, we want them to go up in value. Companies own things, boards of directors supervise ownership on behalf of shareholders. We doubt they’ll easily turn that over to Claude or any other low-cost agent.

A Marathon, Not a Sprint

The Trustee Portfolio has sixteen stocks split between two sections. One is more core. The other more transient.

From the pulse of the recent feedback, nobody seems to own the core stocks.

The large concrete company we suggested in the February 12 issue might soon decide to start paying a dividend… did that last week sending the stock up ~20% YTD.

Or, the large American tractor company which shockingly, sold more tractors, boosting its outlook, and notching a ~35% YTD gain.

Or, the world’s finest maker of tennis racquets, a family-controlled business up ~12% YTD and ~59% since our recommendation ten months ago.

Ten months… not even a year. Which as a reminder, is a key distinction for individual stock investors. The general obsession with instantaneous wealth misses the facts of taxation.

The goal here is to beat the index, by a nice margin, year after year, for decades. There will be lumps… but this is a marathon, not a sprint.

And the chosen cadence is a firm base (the core) to make taking risk more palatable.

We’re adding two new stocks today. One might be a key figure in the “Future Fed” which could administer a FedCoin to cinch up this whole digital era once and for all. The other is a muscle play on the same movement.

There’s a common request for specific instruction with how to use the portfolio. We don’t do it, because we can’t. The “give me the ticker and tell me what to do” impulse might be tempting, but it’s dangerous.

Try to read the issue and understand why we like something. Then decide where it fits in your holdings.

Successful investors make a habit of constantly learning. Compulsively learning… even when the thing learned doesn’t go into practice right away.

What novices miss is, the more you expand your knowledge base, the easier it is to spot opportunity.

Like the obvious intermission between acts of our monetary system.

Prepping For FedCoin

Chapter 17 of Why Gold? Why Now? laid out a case for FedCoin as an inescapable currency system that seemed inevitable. What we see now is the entire Fed might vanish in the process.

It’s easy to imagine the shrills like that lady senator who’s always barking at money people, calling for a full Fed inquiry. They’d love to “end the Fed” after it’s already over.

Sort of like all these files from the 1990s clogging up the WSJ homepage the past few months. If you know about stuff, then you already knew about all of this. Like, a long time ago. But most people have no clue. They wait to be told what to think.

The thing with the Fed is it’s an old tool. It mattered when lending and banking was a spigot for the capitalist system. That’s less and less the case.

A new Fed 2.0 might be made up of stablecoin issuers. These companies have a somewhat divine business model. People give them official U.S. currency; they exchange that for digital tokens. So far, the customers rarely ask for the money back.

Meanwhile, the stablecoin issuer uses the money to purchase any number of hopefully appreciating assets. The largest of these issuers has ~$184 billion of customer funds to invest. It’s sort of like a modern-day life insurance float situation, where they had almost free use of funds until people died. This is a bit better as even customer death might not lead to a call for repayment.

Shareholders of these money alchemists might later look like the modern equivalent of early 20^th century bank investors. That’s back when the bank had real power. Stroll over to a retail branch of a name brand bank today and assess the current situation for yourself. It’s on par with paying a utility bill downtown at the county building.

Several of these potential pillars of the new system are private. Buying them is tough. Not impossible, just complicated. The second largest is public, and looks like it found its post-IPO footing.

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Farmers carefully nourish special “Japanese Black” cows for ~600 days to produce the exquisite product.

Government monitors watch over the process from birth to slaughter ensuring only the finest product takes the coveted rating.

The result is a beef so special it sells for ~10x the cost of a comparable size and cut at an American grocery store.

Normal steaks, the pedestrian variety you’ll see at Longhorn or Texas Roadhouse, are solid red (muscle) with a little fat around the edges. Or gristle, in the cheapest variety.

Not the case with Wagyu… it’s almost infused with fat. The muscle looks more like a shaken snow globe. The cow did pretty much nothing its entire life. The muscle is the fat.

Notice the three little slivers of meat in the picture below. That’s the recommended serving size for a reasonable person. It’s about ~2-3 ounces of meat.

Most Japanese people know instinctually this is a sort of maximum serving for indulgent items. It’s a way to finish the meal. It’s a treat… “finest in the land.”

Just one piece on your tongue is enough to fry tastebuds for the rest of the evening.

The Japanese suggested serving seems reasonable. But reasonable is a debated term.

Reasonable for people who don’t want gout. For people in a society that produces lots of centenarians. And one that values a balanced approach to living.

But that’s not how we do it in America.

The American Way

If it’s good, you need a freezer full of it. That’s the American way.

Forget about one bite. The specialness of the meal has little to do with the details. It has nothing to do with biology. That was merely a class in high school.

We’re all about Instagram attention, excess, extremes, and ultimately, distraction. It might be through indulgent food, flashing screens, or the chance to win free money. Either way, as a society, we do bizarre things to distract from the truth of the moment. It’s as if we can’t handle it.

When it comes to premium meat, a cow is merely something we’ve seen a picture of. Meat comes from a kitchen or a plastic container. We pair it with indulgent side items that cause acute gastric stress. That’s how we do it.

Take Spokane, Washington native Katina DeJarnett for instance. She’s a competitive eater behind the YouTube channel Katina Eats Kilos.

Katina knows how popular Wagyu beef is. She decided to film herself eating ~6lbs of the special meat in this video.

Her serving is roughly ~40-times what the Japanese curators behind fine Wagyu recommend.

As she attacks the giant tomahawk ribeye mid-way through the video, she comments on how it’s “a little fatty” for her taste… Understandable as a frontier family of 10 might feel over-indulged trying to finish it… let alone one person in under 48 minutes.

That’s right… in 48 minutes she finished six pounds of Wagyu beef, and two cast iron pans of bacon-topped, cheesy macaroni, and creamed spinach… which no sensible person considers a vegetable anyway.

The Danger of Excess

Let’s get something straight here… TTL is no ascetic publication.

We ate those three slivers of Wagyu unapologetically in Tokyo. It capped off a memorable meal. Long-time readers may remember it.

We also don’t fault excess. Hats off to Katina, she has another video showing off her new hillside crib in Nashville, TN. Competitive eating on YouTube pays big, evidently.

The issue with excess is not about the item consumed. Food, money, time, people’s emotions…eyeballs, clicks & likes, anything…it’s all the same. The problem is, when the focus is all about more, you lose your senses.

Competitive eaters miss the point of fine foods. You enjoy them, savor them, share them with old friends or new friends. You slow down and let your senses take in the experience. It’s what marks a life well lived. When it’s done, you fold the napkin, pay the bill, and thank the owner. That’s it.

When the focus becomes more, a thousand dinners, 6lbs of Wagyu, enough for 40 people, you can’t tell the difference between good and bad, enough, and too much. Everything gets blurry.

And while Americans love competitive eating, they also love competitive earning.

Many people do jobs they don’t enjoy for money they don’t know how to spend. They’ll say they do… everyone swears they’ll do it better, if they just get the chance. But they won’t.

By the time they figure this out, it’s too late. The quest for more ruins the meal, the date, the trip, the moment…

The Money Obsession

Just a little more money should do the trick… but it won’t.

You see, nobody puts a number on the lust of just a little more money. Nobody.

Just ask people. They’ll move the goalposts again and again. Three million might seem like an un-spendable amount to a twenty-five-year-old with a starter job. Come back in ten years and they’ll swear ~$5 million will do it. Another ten years and ~$10 is the minimum. Soon they’ll think who can live without a summer cottage, these kids aren’t going to educate themselves, and how can anyone retire on less than ~$20 million.

But don’t get stuck on the numbers…. They’re irrelevant. You’ll find the upper portions of the wealth scale do the same thing.

For instance, take a look at these two billionaires, Marc Lipschultz and Doug Ostrover. Bloomberg puts them at ~$2 billion each.

Most of you probably think that’s enough money to get around for the next few years without much trouble… You’re wrong. You don’t understand the power of perspective.

Humans operate with the perspective of a sonar on a ship. We see the world from our point of view. Everything else is outside of us. The cow comes from the butcher, the steak comes out of the box, or maybe overnight from Tokyo via FedEx. We don’t think about it from the cow’s perspective, or the farmer’s.

And the Ostrover/Lipschultz duo has about the same behavioral tendency of Katina the competitive eater.

These two cobbled together a collection of General Partner (GP) interests in various leveraged private funds you’ve heard of from Vista Equity to Silver Lake…the list is long.

Blue Owl Capital (OWL) is the listed entity they took public in the SPAC frenzy of 2020. However, they didn’t sell out and retire as the average thousandaire desperate for life-changing gains might assume.

Instead, they borrowed heavily against their hoard of OWL stock. For what, we don’t completely know.

We do know they bought a majority stake in the NHL Tampa Bay Lightning in late 2024. They surely have ample personal housing in various climates. And there’s no way they’ve seen the inside of a commercial aircraft in a decade…

But they didn’t sell stock to fund this lifestyle… they borrowed against it… and it went down.

They did what everyone else does…what the Morgan Stanley rep begs your editor to do, what every high-end executive does, what everyone except like 12 people in the whole upper crust does… they borrowed against their stock.

And we’re in a period where deal activity pulled the parking brake. Where credit stopped rolling over on endless buyouts. Where the private equity funds that bought 300 car washes across 8 states figured out you actually do have to wash the cars…

That’s part of why the OWL stock looks a little flat. That’s why the borrowing, while we can’t know exactly what the use of funds was, the borrowing is a problem for the duo.

It’s Never Enough

The OWL duo will likely be fine. Odds are an incoming Fed orchestrator like Kevin Warsh lowers short-term rates, shifts the Fed balance sheet to T-bills from longer-term holdings, and engineers an upward-sloping yield curve… the duo surely finds relief as its GP interests come back to life.

There’s a deep history of this odd behavior in the private equity and leveraged finance scene. The stake in Vista Equity created big value for OWL. Vista executive Robert Smith settled a huge tax evasion case with the IRS in 2020 paying an estimated ~$140 million to avoid prosecution.

We’re no fan of taxing authorities here at TTL… but we do value clear thinking. Tax evasion often leads to ideological obsession with the quest, blinding the evader’s ability to make rational investment decisions.

Smith agreed to cooperate against his early backer billionaire software mogul Robert Brockman. Brockman was a spendthrift who stayed in cheap motels eating TV dinners. When the IRS came with full force, he claimed dementia, passing away at the not so old age of 81 before his estate settled with the agency paying the largest ever penalty of $750 million to end the case.

He might have lived longer if he paid the tax bill, and used the remaining ~$3 billion to stay in nicer hotels, with better food. The evasion effort seems like it has a hidden cost.

It’s a lot like the OWL guys, who borrowed against falling stock to buy whatever hockey team or roller derby arena they wanted. It caused avoidable stress… if selling stock and spending freely, they might make different decisions.

Foggy Glasses

We say it all in the spirit of cushy spending. A life of comfortable freedom gets a high ranking at TTL HQ. Let’s call it, swiping the Amex with impunity.

Doing what you choose, when you choose, with whom you choose, is the ultimate freedom.

The issue for people like the OWL duo is, when you borrow against an asset, you lose some clarity on that asset. You can’t as easily see if you still want to own it. You lose the power of choice.

What you want is a relationship with your stock where either of you can leave at any time. It keeps things competitive… keeps everyone paying attention.

While that might sound scary, it’s the truth. There is no certainty. There is no permanence. Not with countries. Not with companies. And certainly not with money.

Plus, you don’t need permanence. If you bought a newspaper stock in 1910 aiming to hold it “forever” and stopped paying attention, you missed the internet.

The more you go with change, the more you live a full, rich, interesting life, the more you realize change is more valuable than permanence. The opportunity is in the change.

When it comes to borrowing against stock, sure, you might miss a rally. It’s true. And in the case of personal decisions, it’s easy to look backwards and say this or that could’ve been optimized differently. But that’s dangerous thinking.

True power is in letting go, using money to live, deciding what you want, when you want it, what you’ll chase, and what you’ll do when you catch it… that’s the game. And it’s the best game.

Contorting an otherwise incredible life journey with complex arrangements feels smart in the beginning, but sometimes ends in painful regret.

Clear-Headed Decisions

While most people want the next secret stock pick, what they really need is a reminder about the three-slice Wagyu rule.

The S&P 500 Index (SPX) rose about ~10% per year over the entire 20^th century. It rose 16.4% last year or about ~18% with dividends.

Between 2003-2025 the index only had 3 down years… take out 2008 and the two other down years look like blips.

Point is, we’re in a sustained bull market. It feels like we don’t have bear markets anymore…. Just occasional panic attacks.

The old definition of recession was two consecutive quarters of contracting GDP. Now we see two days of market declines and we go full hysteria.

That’s a two-day panic… before a reversal strong enough to give you whiplash.

Last year, 2025, we had a huge market rally into inauguration day. Then we had an equally huge market panic over DeepSeek, which released a powerful, low-cost AI tool.

You’re forgiven if you completely forgot about DeepSeek. The news cycle runs about ~72 hours taking most people with it. As a reminder, NVIDIA Corp (NVDA) lost about ~40% of its market cap in that panic…

Then there was the tariff panic. Around April 2025. It’s when we just knew the world wouldn’t do what it should and everything went full liquidation. The SPX fell from ~6,100 to under ~5,000… a large decline of ~19% top to bottom in ~5 weeks.

Five weeks… five. Not five years, quarters, or even months. Five weeks. If you sold stock then, you got cooked.

Then last week, software stocks faced overnight obsolescence, taking the entire market down for “two days.”

This is not capitalism, as it relates to free markets. This is a centrally-controlled capitalism, with managed markets. We should trade what we see, not what we were taught last century.

Let’s get specific about this in the portfolio… because we’re doing great.

For starters, not one comment in the comment section mentions quiet gainers in the portfolio… it’s almost like people want 6lbs of tomahawk Wagyu, or nothing.

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Dear Founders,

Two people can look at the same facts and come to a different conclusion. It’s a fascinating aspect of human psychology. It’s also job security for marriage therapists.

It’s 04:00 at TTL HQ right now. One of the Tucker kids is horizontal on the Iranian Bijar. Aladin the rug dealer swore it was ~1860 vintage but had no verifiable supporting documentation.

Bijar rugs are famously durable thanks to the high-altitude wool and a unique “wet double welt” weaving technique. Either way, it’s nice to grow up on fine antique carpets.

We’ve been in here since 03:30 watching every shot of the Australian Open final. As you know, neither of the Tucker residences contains a television.

There’s a tension in the office… with support split firmly down the age line. The 38-year-old genius against the 22-year-old brute. As you surely know by now, youth won.

The TTL supercomputer has four screens. The bottom right always has spot gold (XAU) on the left, and Bitcoin (XBT) on the right. That’s even the case when the live broadcast beaming from Melbourne is on the top monitor at this unusual hour.

While the next generation stares up at the action, the bottom right screen has my attention. It’s the barbaric drop in gold last Friday. Which, as you know, was not entirely surprising.

The problem with writing a large and very public newsletter is you say the same thing again and again and wonder if anyone reads it.

Almost like writing essays in middle school when we’d scribble, “please put a check mark in the margin if you’re still reading this” and we’d see a red X there with a “C-“ on the header.

The ~$500/oz drop in gold Friday came right on time. Anyone playing around in the gold market last week got what was coming to them.

Foundational Means Cured

Gold is not a make money type of asset. It’s foundational.

That means, wise buyers add some here and there over time. You make it part of your personal bedrock. The purpose of bedrock is to keep the building upright as it rises.

People today just don’t think this way. We had an entire essay last TTL about it…and people still ignore it. They want double, triple-levered trading products. Those work great…in the middle of the action. The disclaimer people don’t read says they work in both directions.

What makes this worse is the trove of emails, messages, and social feeds out of the gold community. It feels alien to read this stuff.

Gold ran up ~25% from the end of 2025 through last Wednesday. That’s 28 calendar days and ~20 trading days. Gold trades from Sunday night through Friday late afternoon… almost round-the-clock.

The thing is, physical gold demand has little to do with the price. Meaning, if demand picks up in most everyday products, the price rises. In the case of gold, there’s an external factor dominating the price.

The price we all see is purely a function of futures trading. We’ve gone over this endlessly in past issues. We’re not rehashing it today… but you should know the active gold contract (April) traded ~57 million ounces on Thursday.

For context, 57 million ounces is about half of annual gold production across the entire world. So, ~183 days of digging, hauling, crushing, sifting dirt worldwide in search of gold… and it changes hands in one trading session. Sure.

Silver is worse. ~1.5 billion ounces traded on Friday last week… or about ~15 months of worldwide production.

Mute The Noise

I’ve had enough of the ideological segment of the gold community…

For instance, ~$5,000/oz gold has a value of ~$35 trillion. That’s using the World Gold Council estimate of worldwide above-ground gold. Let’s assume it’s the right number.

$35 trillion is a lot. Too much, honestly.

We talked about this last week, in the essay people likely read but didn’t digest. Gold doesn’t do anything. It’s money, sure. It’s wealth, sure. It’s untethered to the modern daisy chain of finance, yes. But it’s functionally useless.

That’s coming from the guy who wrote the book on gold… it’s useless.

And if you had a ~5% holding of physical gold when the book came out, that’s now ~20% or more… which is a lot.

Think about the loudest people in the gold community…which is not us. They call for $7,500 or $10,000/oz.

At $10,000/oz gold has a value higher than all listed U.S. stocks. Which is crazy.

Crazy because equity values our ingenuity, drive, passion, rights to our created property, everything that makes us what we are, according to popular beliefs. [Upgrade to Founder Level to keep reading]

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These are the advisors whose advice stops at, “You gotta be in the stock market.” They also ask you how old you are, and based on when you’ll likely die, they apply an investing formula. It’s the financial equivalent of a county-administered daycare program.

The 330,000 headcount comes from a 2021 BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) estimate. It went on to predict retiring Americans need more not less of this good advice with another 30,500/yr joining the ranks of advisors through 2030.

It’s a veritable army of U.S. stock market evangelists. And if any one of them sat next to Mr. Cheah on a Southwest Airlines flight and faced the dreaded “so, what do you do” question, he’d be in for a stern lecture.

Not that Mr. Cheah would be in the middle seat on a Southwest flight, ever. Or any commercial airline for that matter. He’s a billionaire who likely avoids crowds and inquiring middle-aged managerial types at all costs.

“Lifetime Savings”

Back in 2008, Mr. Cheah started buying gold. First a little, then more.

He originally came from Malaysia, where he was a financial journalist. He segued into active investing and is a wealthy 71-year-old today.

The gold buying wasn’t a popular thing to do. He told Bloomberg:

“I was a very patient investor – I bought precious metals, didn’t trade them, and considered them part of my lifetime savings”

That type of behavior triggers the American wealth advisors. Gold is dead money. It pays no dividend, creates nothing, and requires storage headaches. To that, Mr. Cheah says:

“If you have physical gold in the warehouse, or in your bank safe, nobody owes you anything.”

True… it’s the only major assets in the world with no counterparty risk. That means someone doesn’t need to perform for it to work.

In fact, Mr. Cheah goes on to effectively say human nature does the work for you. Politicians, bureaucrats, control freaks of all flavors will always support the gold price. They’ll attack, malign, manipulate, inflate, and all that predictable behavior supports the one thing Mr. Cheah sees as the antidote.

His Radical Strategy

It makes so much sense in retrospect.

Mr. Cheah ran his business, owned stocks, a few bonds, and kept buying a little gold the whole time. He recommends this asset allocation to serious wealth-builders.

The man has an estimated net worth of ~$1.4 billion now. He’s not really a gold fanatic, he’s a realist.

There’s something about gold that’s comforting…for a middle-class person. To be clear, middle class means non-elite, noble, or otherwise influential.

Forget about the media definition, if you make less than ~$1mil, you’re middle class. In the power hierarchy, not the tax-bracket sense. And you’ll slowly realize preserving your own personal sovereignty is your key responsibility in this life.

There have always been classes, there always will be. Americans are so scrambled with digital messaging they have no clue how social order works. That’s good for the few who fight for a hand on the controls. You want a bamboozled populace. They’re easier to herd.

For the small minority who wake up, gold acts like a beacon of truth. I bought my first ounce of gold in ~2004. It’s difficult to remember exactly when. They say you never forget your first, but there have been so many it’s all scrambled now.

While we love stories of risky, radical trades, twenty years of steady gold accumulation was pretty boring.

I remember going to a collectables store. This is the place where people take safe deposit drawers after grandpa dies. Savvy, crusty, quiet men behind the counter examine things and low-ball the heirs. It’s like a pawn shop without the power tools and yard equipment.

My guess is, you’ve never been to a pawn shop… I have. I started going to them in the fourth grade when my friend Shelton G. wanted to buy a stereo for his room. We rode our bikes up there. He showed me the unit and explained his dad, a tobacco executive, would return on Saturday to negotiate with the chain-smoking guy behind the counter.

I liked the whole scene. I’ve always liked it. When I bought my first two 1908 Saint-Gaudens gold coins from the guys running the collectables store, I knew pretty much what I was getting into. While I’m sure I overpaid a little, it was fun, nostalgic in a way.

And it kept going. I got into it. Holding gold coins in your hands is fun for some unknown reason. They’re heavy, dense. They have fun designs. I got a jeweler’s loop to inspect them. Mostly to show the crusty counter workers I had some faux knowledge which deters high-ball offers.

Steady Wins the Race

One coin at a time in the early days… this kept up.

For a stretch I worked for a gigantic marketing firm masquerading as a financial publisher. This means a handful of people producing financial research, an army of people selling it.

Every month I had a little cadence. I’d make a double mortgage payment, and buy a gold coin. I did other things like buy stock, pay bills, buy a watch, overpay life insurance, and do the occasional private placement. But the double mortgage payment and the coin were bedrock.

Keep in mind, both of those monthly moves are, on paper, idiotic. Gold does absolutely nothing… it’s dead money. Paying the back end of a mortgage is even dumber.

However, this stuff adds up. I ended up with tubes of coins. I paid off the mortgage… and the gold price handily beat the S&P 500 Index from 2000-2026.

It’s true… from 2000 to today gold is up ~1,733% and the S&P 500 Index (SPX) is only up ~375%.

Sure, if you bought the SPX at its low on March 9, 2009, you’re up ~10x. But I remember that day… even gold seemed like it might fall in half again. But it didn’t…

Steady and even-keeled wins the race. Investing according to a pie chart allocation like Mr. Cheah suggests also wins. That means splitting assets between stocks, bonds, and foundational investments like gold and Bitcoin. But most people won’t do it…they hang out at the extremes looking for miracles.

Noisy Distractions

We can’t know what Mr. Cheah is up to right now… with this inevitable, yet parabolic gold rally.

He doesn’t write a biweekly newsletter. But I do, so TTL subscribers can see what I’m doing. And I’m doing roughly the same thing I always do. My guess is Mr. Cheah is doing about the same too.

I’ll make little tweaks. Sometimes, I want to test the plumbing. In trading, how the market handles a small sell order tells you a lot about the plumbing… if there’s a leak, and where it is.

Yesterday I took two 100-ounce silver bars up to a local coin shop. The counter guy looked stunned, like, “You’re the E.B. Tucker from YouTube?” I might be… Either way, “See if you can sell these two bars.”

I’m curious if silver bars find a bid right now. I’m not bearish on silver, but it’s hard to store, and I’d love to sell a little of it here at ~$113/oz. Mostly, to test the plumbing. How the market takes this small sale helps me decide how much physical I want to hold onto.

The shop owner came out and told me he has, “100 sellers for every buyer.” Which might be hyperbole but it did seem like everyone from regretful 2011 buyers to junkies with silverware were in there clogging the counter.

I have an odd affinity for junkies. It started in 1997 when I worked for an electrical construction firm doing third-floor rough-in. That’s where you run all the metal conduit pipes before the concrete trucks show up to pour the walls and floor.

I had a 1994 Ford Ranger, manual shift. The supervisor Roosevelt asked me to pick up Maryland Mike on the way to the shop where we met at 6:00 AM to pile into the company work trucks.

Mike was a journeyman electrician, clever guy. He had fun stories, some involved minor jail stints and other colorful details. Monday through Thursday he’d be waiting for me at 05:30. Friday mornings I’d have to drive a few blocks around his apartment looking for him.

Evidently, the direct deposit payroll, a new thing back then, hit Friday morning at 00:00. Mike figured this out and went to an ATM pulling all the payroll out at once. He’d then go smoke crack for as long as possible, sometimes coming up for air in time for work… at least, that was always his firm intention at the start of festivities.

This all eventually led me to explore community college as a means to exiting the commercial construction field. That took less than 6 months. But you never forget what you learn about human nature in these settings.

Standing at the counter yesterday with 200 ounces of silver I’d love to let go of for ~$113/oz I can spot the junkies and know exactly what they’re up to. People are selling, not buying.

A Private Digital Central Bank

Tether is buying… evidently.

If you don’t know, Tether is a company that sells digital tokens valued at $1 in exchange for actual $1s, like the green paper kind.

The company takes $100,000 of your dollars and gives you 100,000 digital dollars which you can apparently use to more quickly swap other digital money without bothering with the green dollars again.

While this digital swapping goes on, the company, Tether, uses your $100,000 to buy corporate bonds, gold, and recently, gold stocks.

It really makes you wonder if there’s any point to Tether… meaning, you could just buy the gold yourself. I get the whole digitized “crypto rails” thing. But it’s still weird to watch a private company morph into a quasi-central bank.

Either way, gold at $5,280 has a value of ~$36.7 trillion or about half the value of the entire U.S. stock market. That’s probably about enough for gold…

Mr. Cheah’s Pie Chart

At TTL, we run the Trustee Portfolio. There are two parts, Core, and Cyclical.

At the top of the Core section, we have foundational assets. Gold is one of them, but there are two others.

The point of foundational assets is to stabilize the portfolio. Like Mr. Cheah, there’s a large slice beyond that dedicated to stocks… and there likely always will be.

Stocks represent the value of human ingenuity, drive, determination, property rights, and ultimately, the profits generated as a result. It’s a western thing… really, an American thing.

Some people get bulled up on international stocks arguing they’re, “so cheap.” We don’t…

Years ago, I wrote a newsletter focused on international equities. I visited a different country every month, which was fun for a while until I developed time zone vertigo, dreaming in German only to take the elevator down and discover I was in South Korea.

What you figure out on this boondoggle assignment is, foreign stocks are cheap for a reason. From shareholder rights to dividend policies, corporate finances match the culture. U.S. stocks tend to deserve the higher earnings multiple.

And we’ll own U.S. stocks, in TTL. We’ll own them because they represent the creative power of American ingenuity. It’s not an ideological thing; it’s a practical reality.

Meanwhile, gold at ~$37 trillion is fully valued…. If you argue against that in the comments, be sure to tell us what kind of drama you expect ahead that justifies a higher gold valuation.

U.S. stocks have a value today of ~$73 trillion. It means gold is worth half the entire U.S. market.

For all of you calling for a radical market decline… consider a scenario where gold has a value closer to equal stocks. You’re betting then on American ingenuity being worth the same or less than a static rock.

Again, no disrespect to gold… it’s TTL bedrock, don’t forget that. But the price rise has short-term limits.

Some of you will hit us with the argument that our ~$37 trillion gold value is worldwide versus U.S. listed equity. Fine… but the entire rest of the planet, the other ~95% of the humans inhabiting the rock, only managed to create another ~$65 trillion worth of stock value.

Point here is… gold looks fairly valued unless something insane happens. If you’re betting on insanity, we’d expect your actions to match.

Silver’s Plumbing

Then comes silver, which needs a plumbing test. Here’s the problem; at ~$113/oz spot, the physical market is already breaking…

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Dear Founders,

There’s a foot of snow on the ground in my NYC neighborhood. Parts of Florida will see overnight lows in the mid-20s this week. You can’t play tennis in a parka. And you don’t have to.

Meanwhile, it’s mid-summer in Argentina right now. Plus, there’s decent Wi-Fi, when the power’s on. Peppers and I migrated down there for about half of January.

If you don’t know her, Peppers is the inanimate stuffed duck one of the Tucker kids gave me a few years ago. She’s been to four continents, and counting.

The thing about Argentina is, it’s Europe without the vainglory. That’s only my opinion, but that’s the only opinion that matters. Travel preferences are totally subjective.

My long-term plan is to shift along a vertical migratory pattern. Buenos Aires the first six weeks of the year. Florida the next 12 weeks, NYC through Halloween, and back to Florida. Sprinkle in a few quick hops to Europe on an as-needed basis and you’ve got what I feel is an ideal living arrangement.

While dodging the American cold wave in Buenos Aires this year, I had to give my opinion as a panelist on a new kind of private placement shark tank.

I’m sharing this because it’s one of the few places you can watch the private placement process as it actually happens. Pitch, pressure test, market reaction, all of it. The pitches are free to watch. See the link at the end to watch a few of them.

A Unique Format

It works like this.

The company-sponsored pitch gives an executive ~45 minutes to run through that boring slide deck nobody pays much attention to. There’s typically an ongoing fundraising, or an imminent one.

Next, the panelists, or sharks, pepper the executives with questions. These are resource companies, and most of the sharks are geologists, or have some mining background.

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Like customers in line at a convenience store mesmerized by the Powerball payout. They can’t help themselves. A $2 chance at $2 billion buys distraction.

It’s even hard to work the math on a 33,016,800% gain. $100 turns into $33 million. $1,000 turns into $330 million. $10,000 turns into $3.3 billion. And so on…

People love daydreaming about this. It’s some kind of relief from the present. They’ll buy an obscure meme token, unknown penny stock, or even a $2 Powerball ticket to go with their 20oz Pepsi.

They rarely know what happens if the ticket hits. What life’s like after the gain. The financial equivalent of being shot from a cannon. A money cannon in this case. Which sends you far, fast. But burns off your eyebrows in the process.

Gain Lusting

The modern obsession with dramatic gains is crazy.

For starters, most people present themselves as “investors.” They know a few general terms like Buffett, Ponzi or crash, and use them broadly in conversation hoping to appear credible.

Generally, what they say and what they do don’t match. For all the talk of thrift and discipline, many seem to want stunning, overnight success that’ll impress friends at a backyard party.

That has little to do with investing. And it tends to skew focus to one detail of a much bigger story. When investing becomes a rearview mirror exercise focused only on gains, all the other details get lost.

Bloomberg ran a story on Max Keiser last week. He had a highly-entertaining financial show back in 2010 hosted by his wife Stacy Herbert.

The article said Keiser was one of the first to explain the merits of Bitcoin on television. The date, December 22, 2010. Its price then, $0.26.

It’s impossible to know if Keiser held all the coins, or how many he had at the time. It’s also irrelevant.

There’s always a pitch for the next potentially life-altering idea. It’s worth listening to them. In many cases, it’s worth taking a tiny flier on them. But not with the hope of changing your life.

The change that comes with a double, triple, or quadruple is highly enjoyable. Those 100%, 200%, 300% gains can materially improve daily life. Regardless of the starting size, multiples matter.

A long life of steadily beating the average market return is far better than climbing into a money cannon hoping it fires in the right direction.

This isn’t about being conservative or boring. It’s about being able to spot a triple when it’s right in front of you.

All The Details

Most people reading last week’s story on Keiser’s life-altering sonic boom gain lack full context.

Bitcoin spent 2010 trading between ~$0.05-$0.30. You’re reading that correctly…

The second red arrow in the 2010 price chart below marks Keiser’s televised discussion of Bitcoin… mid-December 2010 at roughly ~0.25/coin.

The first red arrow marks Laszlo Hanyecz’s successful use of 10,000 Bitcoin to purchase two large pizzas from a Jacksonville, Florida Papa John’s. He needed a third party to accept the coins and facilitate the trade with a conventional credit card. But nonetheless, the first commercial Bitcoin transaction. Hanyecz’s price then, about $0.004/coin or a ~90% discount to the spot price of $0.05/coin at the time.

Keiser pitched the idea about ~7 months later when the price was ~5x Hanyecz’s pizza feast.

His gain implies he rode it up to almost ~$30/coin or about a 100-bagger by early June 2011 only to see it fall ~90% to around ~$3/coin by November.

Are we having fun yet?

2012 saw the coin up to ~$13 or about 4x before 2013 saw it go ~100x again to roughly ~$1,150 then fall again ~80% to around ~$200 the next year.

The point here is, Keiser held through all of this… which is beyond having your arm hair singed off by heat from the cannon barrel. It’s pure madness.

In fact, after enduring all of that, the price ended 2016 around ~$950/coin….and is 100x higher today.

When a headline lures your attention with a 33,016,800% gain… be sure you compute the fortitude needed to endure the ups, and the downs.

Blurred Vision

Headlines and news alerts are high volume. That doesn’t always mean there’s anything behind the noise.

Few people held Bitcoin from the pennies to six-figures. If they did, they earned the windfall.

The danger with selective focus on gains is you miss the opportunity in front of you. Gain hunting warps your vision. Nothing measures up to the gigantic results you imagine. The same psychological error plagued the gold market only with more human-sized returns.

It’s like refusing to buy gold for ~$800/oz in 2009 because it was ~$300/oz earlier in the decade. Or, it was $21.65 a century before. This goes on forever… it was $0 at the dawn of civilization.

Gold sat stagnant for several years while the case for gold firmed up beyond obvious. I wrote a book on the subject in 2020. Gold roughly tripled in the half-decade that followed. A triple isn’t enough these days.

Meanwhile, gold has a value today of $35 trillion if you use $5,000/oz to compute it. That’s all the gold in the world. I’m less excited about gold at that valuation… it already revalued itself. The time to get involved is before the revaluation.

Gold at $5,000, or about 8% higher from here, is a stunning 18-times as valuable as Bitcoin. That seems like too much of a gap.

The same “triple isn’t enough” psychology shows up in how people talk about Bitcoin now. Sentiment is split three ways.

There are the maximalist people who seem ideologically bent on the idea. It’s sometimes difficult to talk to them.

Then there’s the crowd who thinks it’s a hoax or scam… I hear this a lot. There’ll be some loss event, some grand trap. It’s possible, but not the only possibility.

The $1.9 trillion value of Bitcoin has a finite supply. There’s a crop of investors with ~$73 trillion worth of U.S. stocks. That’s more than 38-times the value of Bitcoin.

There’s $39 trillion worth of U.S. Treasury debt…growing by the day. The list goes on and on.

It makes a strong case for Bitcoin growing into a market cap of ~$5-6 trillion…as a start.

Yet people don’t consider it. They want the million percent gain… the shot out of the money cannon. When the triple buys a lot of freedom without the whiplash.

They’ll Miss This Triple Too

The tough part is, it’s not 2010 anymore. Bitcoin is not the obscure token used in a pizza buying stunt. Things change. To be successful, you need to change with them.

A lot of people got caught offsides in the 2011 gold surge and fall. They raced to sell as soon as it recovered the old highs. They stopped thinking there.

It’s our thinking about gains and prices that needs adjusting. While gold at ~$35 trillion is less exciting today, Bitcoin under ~$2 trillion is more relevant than ever.

There’s an odd cluelessness about our swift march toward digital life. Every keystroke is tracked. Tell your spouse your back hurts and you’ll shortly see an ad for local chiropractic relief.

There’s no turning back. And the once-obscure pizza stunt coin is the original digital asset. It’s completely different from the ~15,000 (or more) startup tokens sloshing around the digital world.

Bitcoin is the blue chip of digital money. That might capture attention as the inevitable unfolds.

People who spotted the inevitable with gold bought a little along the way…and did great. The same approach makes sense with Bitcoin. And if a triple ends up being insufficient, leave it up to the other 95% of the portfolio to chase the money cannon.

Silver, A New Stock, And an Important Subscriber Question

Let’s get into the details now. If you’re not a subscriber, click here to fix that. We’ll get into:

• Where silver goes next

• An important question from subscriber Bob R. about buy-price guidance

• A new stock growing revenue at staggering pace and almost ~100% customer retention

First, silver.

In an interview last year, with a gigantic stack of silver next to me, I made a prediction. So far, it’s playing out exactly as expected.

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Dear Founders,

We pick up a lot of habits and mannerisms from our parents. It’s unavoidable. The world is big and confusing. How they interact with it shows us what’s normal.

People worry about this in western society… but there’s nothing to worry about. Kids aren’t clones. They often repel the specifics yet mimic the underlying behaviors.

For instance, my father was a basketball nut. A sport I couldn’t care less about. Yet his depth and understanding of the game has a lot in common with my adult work habits. One of them led to a new stock idea we’ll talk about below, and maybe more in a future, regular issue of TTL.

As for the habits that led to this idea, some date back to the pre-ESPN days when we watched basketball games on a wood-paneled television. The one with a clicker knob someone had to stand up and go turn manually.

We lived in rural eastern North Carolina, between some of the best collegiate basketball teams in the country. My dad understood the game well beyond the fan level.

He’d tell you this team was weak in the paint, couldn’t guard the baseline three, etc… but it went much further. He’d know about some high school junior in Tumbleweed, Oklahoma who could almost levitate during his jump shot. As if he had a pro-level scouting ability.

The Poop Sheet

What most people miss about success is how simple it is to achieve. It’s all about your habits. How you spend your time.

The more you study a subject, the easier it is to spot opportunity. It’s immersion, letting curiosity lead, getting lost in the details.

Every weeknight around ~7:00 PM a Chrysler New Yorker rolled up the driveway. We’d eagerly greet the big man himself. He seemed most interested in the mail, before disappeared to the grownup side of the house.

The mail contained a weekly periodical called, The Poop Sheet. This was literally a publication about collegiate basketball produced and marketed as toilet reading. It’s long out of print, extinguished by the digital age.

I tried to read this journal a few times… it was way too technical. It had details about players, statistics, team composition, things only a high-level coach would understand.

When my father emerged, sat down at dinner, and said, “The Wolfpack’s in trouble this season” he really understood why.

It’s about how we spend our time. More accurately, how we waste our time.

Time is meant to be wasted. It’s the things we get lost in. An avocation tells us more about a person than a vocation.

It’s the 10,000 hours of practice that’s hard to fake. It’s curiosity-driven. It’s what cultivates deep understanding. When the avocation becomes the vocation, success often follows.

While I struggle to watch more than 20 seconds of a non-tennis professional sporting event, some of the habits seen in childhood carried over.

Feed The Machine

There are about ~6,000 publicly-traded stocks in the U.S. listed on major exchanges.

While I didn’t get far with my effort to read the The Poop Sheet, I did like the back pages of the Wall Street Journal in the ‘80s. Stocks traded as fractions. It was IBM at 32 1/8 on one day and 33 1/4 the next. Newly acquainted with fraction math, this daily price quote intrigued me.

We had a computer lab at school, with about two machines in it. I’d seen the IBM logo. Associations helped stoke my interest.

That grew to other names. My grandfather loved bank stocks. He’d tell me one to go find in the paper, maybe to shoo me off.

Curiosity finds its own path. We had a PBS public access channel, I watched Louis Rukeyser’s Wall Street Week and felt like whatever this guy and his guests were into, I wanted part of it. There was a dignified calmness to the wealth, something spoke to me. Must have been how my dad felt when he saw Julius Erving play in his 1971 debut with the ABA Virginia Squires.

Either way, our passion makes us curious. When we’re curious, we learn. While adults try to keep us on task, most of the big successes in life come from letting focus naturally find its way.

New Year New Watchlist

It’s rare to find a stock idea by intentionally searching.

More likely, one thing leads to another and you stumble on it, like a happy accident. It’s the goofing off, time wasting activities that lead to open-minded discovery.

That’s only if you have good habits. Fundamentals might be a better term. It’s the reading for the sake of it, learning just because, or wanting to know details of something you think sounds cool but might never do. Busy, on-task, highly-structured people avoid this. Curious people indulge…

One of the ways I get lost and kill time at the TTL desk is looking over the top say ~30 holdings of many different small-cap mutual funds. These funds run computer models screening the market for upticks in smaller stocks. They position, and add shares as funds flow in, or the stock price moves. Running through the top holdings sometimes uncovers companies I’ve never heard of.

Take the Royce Smaller-Company Growth Fund (RVPHX) or iShares Russell 2000 Value (IWN) for instance. As of Tuesday, here’s the top holdings of these two funds.

Fund holdings change frequently, so this is not pinned down in any way. It’s merely a good starting point. I went through both lists running first a one-year chart, and a description of the business.

I discarded the bank stocks right away. It’s not the ‘80s anymore…the banking business is a slug. Blockchained banking as an evolutionary bridge is a different story… but for this exercise, I’m not touching that.

Below, we’ll narrow the list of 43 down to 7 worth watching…and one that might graduate to the Trustee Portfolio.

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On the right side of the page, there’s a picture of you, one you’re happy with of course. Below that there’s personal information, where you were born, and where you died, some time in 2026.

It means 2026 marks the end of your earthly experience, as a human at least. We’re not getting into anything beyond that. The big question is, would you be happy with how the Wikipedia page reads?

Right away people resist this question. How they resist it says a lot about them. The question has little to do with dying. It’s all about how you live.

There’s the typical default to traditional afterlife beliefs, often folksy. This gives people permission to stop thinking about how they live today. It’s a mistake to cling to this. You’re cheating yourself out of better living now.

Then there’s the widely-accepted bucket list. This one is as bad as sending Santa Claus a wish-list. If you have a bucket list, tear it up. It’s nothing more than a distraction. Go do all that stuff right away and you’ll see why it’s little more than a pacifier.

The overlooked feature of the end date on the Wikipedia page is, it’s the moment when everyone is the same. All the games stop, all the ranking, the comparing, the status, the bad thinking, hiding from reality, passing time by distracting yourself… it’s all over.

Thinking about that for just a minute can radically change how you live today.

The Power of Narratives

With most people, there’s a huge gap between what they say and what they do.

If you want to have a lot of friends, don’t point out the vast difference between these two things. Let people tell you stuff, and act impressed by their explanation.

Let them tell you about their dieting plans while they order fries for the table and devour them without help. Don’t give them a hard time about it.

If you tried to explain the real secret to weight loss, consuming fewer calories than you expend daily, they’d feel shame. Nobody likes that.

Let them talk about how they don’t have enough money, or they hope something good happens, or there’s a Powerball winner somewhere that must feel so good. All of this is distraction thinking. It has zero correlation with success. The talker doesn’t want success guidance, they want empathy.

You’ll slowly notice people need beliefs. They gravitate towards platitudes, group thinking, and simple explanations for dynamic situations. Let them do it… It’s how they’re wired.

We’re in a sort of hypnotic state of striving. The foundation is scarcity; the walls are a rating system we all agree on. The roof is some accepted outcome we all hope for but no one can name. This is how the majority marches through life.

It’s the unexamined beliefs that get you in trouble. Until the Wikipedia page ends… then it’s all over, in an instant. That’s the moment when not one of these narratives works anymore. You’re face to face with reality. The music stops… everyone gets to see your real dance partner.

Thinking about it for even one minute today might change everything about how you live tomorrow. It’s your chance at clarity.

The Extremes

There’s a thought exercise for fixing bad thinking. Try to name the beliefs that drive you, and carry them out to the extreme... as a thought exercise.

Think of it like two people with a drinking problem. Both crave relief from the perceived stresses of life. The first rations drinks like one of those self-feeding machines you buy for a dog who’d otherwise eat until their stomach exploded. The second person goes full tilt aiming to annihilate the emotional stress on a bender.

We think the first person, the rationed user, is better. We reward that person, we give them a pass to seek palliative relief, almost daily. Meanwhile, we shame the second person. Yet going off the rails often leads to real behavioral change. We all know rock bottom is an uncomfortable place.

It’s the extremes that highlight bad thinking. Once you see it, the odds of change increase.

That’s especially true when it comes to money. Western society has generally bad money thinking. It’s societal psychosis. Everyone buys in. From panhandlers to billionaires, nobody has enough. The mere definition of enough money is a moving target as elusive as a desert oasis.

Just try pointing this out in conversation. You’ll notice right away people defend, then attack. Try pointing out the scarcity mindset driving people to do things they’d otherwise avoid. Then highlight the fact starvation in America is optional. Cite the piles of uneaten meals dispensed at Washington Square Park every day… you can literally subsist on handouts from people who received handouts.

Even suggesting this causes people to lash out with a stream of defensiveness. They label you insensitive, a gaslighter, and likely end your friendship. Let them go. It’s for the best.

There’s Never Enough

Billionaire Robert Brockman died in 2022 at the age of 81. He claimed mental incapacity in his final years as the IRS prosecuted him for the largest personal tax fraud conviction on record.

Brockman built and ran a huge automotive software company. He made a pile of cash. He was then an early investor in Vista Equity Partners, a massively successful firm run by fellow billionaire Robert Smith…who also had significant IRS troubles.

Even with more personal annual income than an entire subdivision of working families, Brockman became obsessed with frugality… and tax evasion.

The Wall Street Journal reports he stayed in budget hotels, eating frozen TV dinners. If you’ve never had frozen TV dinner, round up $3.74 and buy one at the grocery store sometime, it’s hard to imagine choosing it over homeless handouts.

What nobody points out is, behaving this way with billions of untaxed dollars stashed offshore is clinically psychotic.

High-end obituaries are a great place to examine undiagnosed money psychosis. Take Garry Winnick for instance. He was a financial engineering expert alongside Michael Milken in the late 1980s junk bond mania.

Winnick died heavily indebted, leaving his wife clueless as to why she’d have to find a new place to live. She thought they had a net worth of ~$6.2 billion but he slowly managed his way into foreclosure.

The couple lived at a 40,000 square foot, 8.5-acre sprawling estate in Los Angeles. It had more landscapers than a Disney theme park. Covered in gold leaf and gaudy statues, the widow never imagined they had a cash flow problem. Gary spent his last days drawing down lines of credit against anything lenders would accept as collateral.

There’s nothing wrong with success. Prime filet of beef digests easier than a $3.74 frozen Hungry Man Salisbury Steak TV dinner…

The problem isn’t the money… it’s our thinking. We’re so compulsive, as a society, we don’t know the difference between too much and not enough.

Right Thinking

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions… If there’s something I want to do, I’ll do it now, or make a plan to do it as quickly as possible.

It’s a different way of thinking… and it changes more than merely how you start the year.

The resolution gives people permission to fail. Making a promise to fix a bad habit later feels good. Almost everyone does this. It keeps them in the comfort of the herd.

When you change quickly, and decisively, you stop running on fear and hope. When it comes to money, you stop making investments hoping to change your life. Instead, you make ones that match the likely outcome of what you see happening in real time.

You’re then free to try something. If it doesn’t work, change. Without the need for a herd narrative pacifier, it’s easier to spot opportunity.

Take silver for instance. The price broke ~$80/oz last week, up more than ~150% for the year…few people will profit from this move. Worse yet, not one of the hundreds of news stories I saw discussed the guts of the move accurately.

For starters, silver attracts ideological investors. There’s something about it… if you’re clear-minded, you’ll spot it right away.

One segment talks incessantly about silver as coinage. This is an insane reason to own something. Coined money is now made from the cheapest base metals available. We will likely have low-denomination coined money for a while, and there is slim chance it’ll be made from silver.

Further, nobody cares if you trust the money or not. You’ll use what they tell you to use, and you’ll either like it, or starve. Soon, that’ll be FedCoin. Go ahead and disagree in the comments below.

Plus, the digital age is a great era for bureaucrats and societal control mongers. The populace is so disoriented from watching TikTok videos of people applying makeup or making their cat jump over things, they have virtually no idea what’s going on.

Then there’s the “supply crisis” silver investor. This segment has limited understanding about how prices work.

There’s been a material deficit in silver supplies for many years.

The simple numbers are annual supply of around ~1 billion troy ounces. Of that, about ~80% is mined and the rest comes from recycling or harvesting scrap supplies.

Silver is a key conductor metal used in everything from solar panels to electric vehicles. Annual demand is upwards of ~1.2 billion troy ounces now.

Try to avoid going down the rabbit hole when reading about this obvious ~200 million troy ounce annual deficit. Financial engineering renders the physical deficit irrelevant.

Pointing this out incites rage within the silver community. That’s OK. It’s not personal… They need to defend their ideology… Even at the expense of profit.

Take for example the recent rise to ~$83/oz and the swift correction to ~$70/oz.

To be crystal clear, I do believe silver will eventually top ~$100/oz. But I also believe most silver enthusiasts will fail to profit from it.

The reason is, they tend to misunderstand the power and effectiveness of financial engineering. It’s a powerful force in our centrally planned economic system.

Set The Price to Whatever

When the silver price rose ~10% in one day last week, I knew there’d be trouble.

You see, physical silver demand from investors has almost nothing to do with the price. Meaning, people going out and buying silver is not material when it comes to price discovery.

Sure, enough buying does eventually become a problem. And it almost did become a real problem in February ~2021 when silver bugs came out in force trying to corner the market. Almost like a flash mob version of the Hunt brothers’ escapades in the early 1980 surge to ~$50/oz.

The Hunt brothers also failed to understand the radical power of financial engineering.

The mechanism here is leveraged futures contracts.

Futures are a speculative bet on future delivery of any commodity. They started out as a sensible way for Farmer Brown to pre-sell next fall’s corn harvest as a means of funding the immediate expense of planting and growing the crop.

Investors who thought maybe a dry summer would reduce corn yields gave Farmer Brown the money to plant. If the national crop came in heavy, they’d lose. If it came in light, sending prices higher, they’d win.

You can easily see how this turned into a popular betting scheme. It’s almost an old-time version of the modern obsession with betting on the outcome of everything from the number of touchdowns in a game to who becomes the next governor of New Hampshire.

Broad interest in this way of speculating brought new sources of investment capital to commodity producers. Exchange operators further innovated allowing investors to make the same size bet with smaller amounts of money.

This means instead of funding Farmer Brown’s entire crop, merely come up with ~10% of that amount and they’d loan you the rest.

Play that out… Farmer Brown needs $100,000 to grow the corn crop. You put up $10,000 to control the $100,000 bet. Crop values go up, you see $10,000 turn into $20,000 in a hurry. They go down even ~5%, you’re down ~50%.

Trading Gone Wild

Earlier this month, a 5,000-ounce silver futures contract cost only ~$4.40/oz. Now it’s ~$6.50/oz.

That’s not the price per ounce. It’s the cash needed to control an ounce in the market. Meaning, deposit that amount and profits from the movement of a ~$70 ounce are yours to keep. So are the losses…

It’s how most traders bet on movements in the silver market. Or any commodity market for that matter.

If they buy the ounce of silver outright for ~$70 it ties up too much money. After all, a mere ~150% gain in a year is not enough these days.

With only ~$4.40/oz tied up, the move from ~$30/oz to $70/oz is much more dramatic. If you’re not with us here, with a mere $4.40 you captured $40 on that silver move… pretty sweet.

But most traders go full-bore. They can’t help it. It’s in their blood to press a winning trade.

If you’ve traded leveraged futures, you know they’re the pure, uncut cocaine of trading products. Nothing moves more like futures on a day like last Friday in the silver market.

But as any seasoned cocaine user knows, the comedown effects can be brutal.

As the price shot to ~$80/oz, the exchange raised that $4.40/oz margin requirement to $5.00/oz then again to $6.50/oz.

That means anyone with a 5,000-ounce futures contract had to pony up another $3,000 on the first hike and another $10,500 including the second hike.

Sounds like no big deal, but say you added contracts to the trade at $80 or higher…betting it would keep going. The surprise hike in margin rates sent prices plummeting to ~$70 meaning you watched that hero trade go against you so fast you’d barely have time to reach for the mouse before you’re getting a call from the broker to wire more cash.

Things get messy fast… and it almost always happens this way. Often on a Sunday night or a time when most people are not paying attention, liquidity is thin, and heads roll in a hurry.

A Year in One Day

The Hunt brothers didn’t fully appreciate how well this works. Modern traders and silver ideologues often don’t either.

On Monday, silver futures (March 2026 contract) traded ~1.26 billion troy ounces. It means well over a full year of silver demand turned over in the paper futures market.

Paper here means the contracts are merely a cash-settled bet on price direction. They have almost nothing to do with physical metal.

However, as the price falls, coin stores and dealers catering to physical investors adjust accordingly. That’s because they often use this futures market as a hedging mechanism.

The point here is, this system works. It works a lot better than the silver hoarders care to admit.

If you want to make money, you’ll need to pay attention to it.

If you don’t care about making money, and merely need an ideology to believe in, keep fighting it…

Let’s Make Some Money

Prime beef filet is better than Hungry Man Salisbury Steak frozen TV dinners… so let’s spend 2026 eating on white tablecloth and not using the microwave in a budget motel.

We know how this modern financial system works… we know it someday ends in a horrible Wikipedia entry. But that day is not today… and it might be a while before that happens.

Plus, a bet on implosion is a bet against life as you know it. Be careful what you wish for…

As for silver, let’s see if the current washout ends violently, setting the stage for a spring 2026 assault on ~$100/oz.

If it does, it might be a good time to sell a few bars just to make sure the market works… could be a fun experiment in TTL.

Meanwhile, 2025 was the worst year in many for stock pickers. Meaning, people who sat still and did nothing in the S&P 500 Index (SPX) clocked a ~16.8% gain not including dividends. Closer to ~18% if you do.

The Trustee Portfolio did OK considering the rest of the pack…

The goal is not life-changing performance… that usually happens accidentally. I’ve had more than one 100x gain in my career…each time it was a bet I felt so wary of I never expected it would even double.

It’s why TTL is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s why good investing is about good habits, and rational thinking. It’s why the best investors often spend a ton of time reading, studying, thinking, and learning just for the sake of it… it’s the lifelong passion that pays the biggest bounty.

That said, we did have a few happy accidents last year… and surely will have more.

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Being asked to play in this prestigious tournament is almost a full year commitment. There’s no big money purse like the better-known singles events. In fact, most of the matches are barely televised. You’d need a triple-digit satellite TV sports channel to watch it. Yet the top players in the world line up to play.

The tournament runs January to November. The early rounds are so poorly attended you could stretch out horizontally on an entire row of seats. Shocking, considering this is the world’s premier annual men’s international tennis competition.

A Big Idea and A Big Trophy

It all started in 1899 with a big idea. Harvard undergrad Dwight F. Davis thought he and some fellow American players should challenge the UK to a tennis duel. More of a patriotic competition than a money thing.

Davis personally paid for a gigantic silver trophy to show how serious he was about the ordeal.

They called the match a “challenge.” That made declining to play somehow dishonorable for the British team. The first challenge took place the following year, in 1900. Davis’s trophy was so big an offensive lineman could hide in it.

Initially called the International Lawn Tennis Challenge, Davis’s U.S. team hosted the first challenge at Longwood Cricket Club in Boston. With a home field advantage, they won. He kept his trophy that year, and international bragging rights. Today we call the tournament, The Davis Cup.

“Rubbers” and “Ties”

125 years later, The Davis Cup is still the most important international men’s tennis event you’ve never heard of. This year, 141 countries entered the challenge.

The way it works is each country has a domestic tennis federation. That’s a bureaucratic organization charged with fostering, developing, and promoting local tennis talent to compete on the world stage. It’s almost like a National Olympic Committee where lesser countries figure getting a player to the final rounds might be the only time a foreigner ever see its flag.

Starting in January, each nation picks a 5-person team, and a captain, which is pretty much a coach. They have other support squads, trainers, physios, resources you need to compete at a professional level these days.

Like any tennis tournament, there’s qualifying, first round, second round, quarters, semis, and finals. The captain decides who plays in the “rubbers” during each stage.

Rubbers are the individual matches. It’s a best of three format for the challenging countries. Meaning, they need to win two rubbers to win the “tie.”

Tie is the term for the country versus country competition in any given part of the tournament bracket.

If the country wins both singles rubbers, it wins the “tie.” If each country wins one singles rubber, they play a doubles rubber to decide who wins the tie. The winner of the tie advances to the next round.

• Rubber 1: Singles

• Rubber 2: Singles

• Rubber 3: Doubles (only if singles split 1-1)

Meanwhile, the players on the national team go back to a grueling men’s tennis calendar. It means throughout 2025, U.S. star players Ben Shelton, Francis Tiafoe, Taylor Fritz, Tommy Paul, and Riley Opelka rushed from ATP singles events to Davis Cup challenges.

Bob Bryan captained the U.S. Davis Cup squad this season. As a more recent tennis enthusiast, I’d never heard of him, until last Sunday. He played doubles with Kevin Anderson (former ATP #5 ranked) on the court next to the Tucker kids and me at The Breakers in Palm Beach.

Anderson was far more interested in one of the Tucker kids than the socialites who paid $50,000 to play doubles against them. We only paid ~$120 for the court next to him… a much better deal.

Italy Wins… In Italy

I thought the best way to learn about the Davis Cup would be attending the finals, in Bologna Italy.

Unfortunately, the U.S. got knocked out in the semis in September. That left eight countries in the November finals. Italy was one of them. There’s nothing like watching Italians cheer for their home team. Rowdy is an understatement.

Plus, the Davis Cup has unique rules for spectators. You can make excessive noise, I mean, bullhorns, snare drums, kazoos, anything, but when the serve clock hits zero, you must be dead silent, or the country you’re cheering for gets a penalty.

Notice the crowd cheering for Italian Matteo Berrettini between points, then going dead silent before the next serve. There were several people using actual bullhorns between points.

This went on all weekend… until Italy defeated Spain in the final round on Sunday evening. The crowd went wild. Nearly raising the roof of the unlikely venue.

Plus, Flavio Cabolli, the Italian who most people agree carried Italy to the cup this year, has a habit of ripping his shirt in half when he wins, a crowd-pleasing gesture unique to Italian tennis. Here he is securing the final point in a ~3-hour gauntlet against Munar of Spain.

Bologna is an odd place to host the finals of a worldwide tennis tournament. If you haven’t been, it’s an antique of a city, winding brick streets. It’s an older, slower place. The primary reason to visit is the food.

Bologna is the home of mortadella, which the U.S. ruined by creating Oscar Meyer bologna and saying it’s pretty much the same thing.

The city also has unique dishes like tortellini in brodo, it’s hand-made tortellini in translucent bone broth. You can eat your way through Bologna for days without having the same dish twice. It’s really a must visit for food snobs.

But none of that matches with world-class tennis. The event venue was an exhibition center you’d expect to host a regional, high school gymnastics competition. Absolutely insufficient for the crowd, travelers, or really anyone.

The thirty minute walk from the city center gives plenty of time to wonder how this place secured the Davis Cup finals. It’ll be there again in 2026, and 2027.

Adjust the Team Mid-Tournament

Due to the long format, team captains often make changes mid-year. U.S. captain Bob Bryan swapped two star players for lesser-knowns late in the year. Right before the loss in the semifinals, he chose two players known for doubles prowess.

Things happen, and it’s crazy to think the strategy that works in January still works in September. The other teams change, players get hurt, some get the yips. In tennis, the yips is a phenomenon even more inexplicable than the Davis Cup.

Wikipedia defines the yips as:

“…a sudden and unexplained loss of ability to execute certain skills in experienced performers such as athletes. Symptoms of the yips are losing fine motor skills and psychological issues that impact the muscle memory and decision-making, leaving them unable to perform basic skills.

The exact cause of the yips is still not fully understood.”

It means from a bad shoulder on Ben Shelton to another player getting the yips, things happen. And how you change strategy when they do determines the outcome.

Like it or not, you’re the captain of your own team. You can seek out a guru but a good guru knows they don’t have any secrets, you’re the one who knows what to do.

You can overpay for the promise of a secret cheat code; people do that all the time. Eventually you’ll figure out the truth…if you plan to have anything worth having, you’ll need to do some occasional thinking to keep it.

It means the strategy that worked at the beginning usually does not work as well midstream.

It’s a Distance Race

This happens on a personal level. Especially now, as we live in a society totally obsessed with money. You really need to keep playing to win.

The idea of piling up resources doesn’t work. That’s a leftover belief from 20^th century capitalism… that stored capital insulates you from change.

These days, the money flows. Movement has more value than capital. It’s the ability to play and win in the long format tournament, year after year.

The people who resist this, tend to look for old fixes to new conditions. They want a sort of financial cheat code for modern life. Marketing experts know this. They dangle the promise of a secret trading system, a financial life hack, for ~$5,000 or more. It predictably doesn’t work. Nobody who buys these reads the disclaimers first.

Being captain of your team isn’t as hard as you think. It’s really about swapping out players when you see the field change before the next challenge. Don’t leave last month’s player in next month’s challenge.

It’s hard to do that if you watch every shot like it’s of real consequence. Each game has lots of shots, each match has lots of games, and every rubber is different. That’s not something to fear, it’s an opportunity.

As you do this, just watch how things change, for the better. You’ll stop thinking about the past, and start being excited about the future. You’ll notice most people do the opposite…which leads to resentment of people who change quickly.

There’s a lot of that type of regressive thinking in the ranks of the gold community. Which is odd…for something that’s done so well.

The total value of gold at ~$4,350/oz is ~$30 trillion…which is a lot. Yet the diehard gold bugs seem seething mad when you suggest maybe it’s a good price, for now.

We live in a hyper-financialized system. The value of things must go up once you start down that road. The rulers of this current regime know maintaining order means controlling the pace those prices rise.

Meanwhile, gold people see red when you don’t agree on greater price predictions. Forget about the fact a ~5% portfolio allocation to gold a few years ago is now ~15%, or more. Which is more than plenty.

Gold is an unproductive asset. It has huge value on a personal wealth level. However, too much of it is dead money. It sort of puts your balance sheet into a medically induced coma.

Plus, the most disturbed gold enthusiasts seem only happy with ~$10,000/oz predictions. Kind of like the crazed silver people in 2011 who insisted on $100/oz. They’ll probably get it…in 2026, after a 15 year wait.

They passed up a lot of other bull markets by ignoring reality. There were so many ways to make money while waiting on that silver run you almost had to try not to find them.

Plus, a $10,000 gold price means ~$70 trillion in market value for physical gold... It’s a lot. Especially considering the entire U.S. equity market cap, meaning, all stocks trading on U.S. exchanges is only ~$71.4 trillion.

Further, people argue about the value of all stocks not just U.S. stocks. But stocks are a U.S. idea. The entire rest of the world only adds about ~$50 trillion more in equity value.

I was editor of an international stock research publication for a while last decade. Believe me, there’s a very good reason some countries trade at low earnings multiples. All you have to do is buy a few of them and you’ll discover why.

An All-Year Event

The thing is, a hyper-financialized system does have certain benefits. Politicians realized a while ago, people behave better when they feel rich.

Once you see that perspective, it’s hard to argue for a massive market decline. There’s a big incentive to “fix” any sign of decline quickly. If they let it balance itself, we’d have nothing left to lose… which is a dangerous condition.

It’s why the gold bug calling for cratering equity values and a higher gold price seem confused. Don’t bother asking them who’d buy the gold at double or triple the value of all U.S. stocks… More likely, people would just kill them and take it at that point.

With the notion of perma-expansion fully embraced, it’s easier to see the likely path ahead. It shifts the focus to the value of asset classes in general.

Comparing them by size becomes easier. It’s a sort of World Cup of Money at that point. You start to notice what team everyone’s on.

There’s one huge contrast when it comes to gold and the bug-eyed gold bugs. It’s the total value compared to Bitcoin. Again, not the price of gold and Bitcoin, the total value of each.

~$4,350/oz gold is worth ~$30 trillion in total. That’s all the known gold. That compares to ~$1.72 trillion worth of Bitcoin at ~$86,500 per coin, or token, or whatever.

It means all the gold in the world is worth about ~17.5-times all the Bitcoin. Which seems high enough.

The two don’t have as much in common as you’d think… the primary thing is an “anti-fiat” bias in the owners. That’s where most of the similarities stop.

Gold supply can grow with digital advancements in discovery technology. I’m totally convinced there will be a day when geologists survey earth by satellite. No more walking around with a prospecting pick.

That compares to Bitcoin which has a maximum supply of ~21 million. Computers race to solve its increasingly complex reward equation… and at some stage, quantum computers will likely solve it in three seconds. But we know the maximum supply. Where with gold, there could be some Antarctic hoard discovered skewing the whole value proposition…

The gold bugs decry any suggestion to buy anything else… yet most bought speculative stocks loosely related to the gold idea, or other poor performance assets when just plain bars and coins did great.

Bitcoin evangelists did something similar. Most of the Lamborghini rental customers, diamond eye-types, went way too large on speculative junk tokens. Once they get washed out…that 17.5X spread between Bitcoin and gold might get a little tighter…

Both groups are too loud for their own good. A ~5% allocation to gold when it hugged the low ~$1,000s turned into more than ~15%. There’s a chance Bitcoin does the same…once the teenagers get washed out of the trade.

Housing as Psy Ops

It’s wise to watch the value of things most people own…

Take housing for example. In the 2000s, we sold everyone on the benefits of homeownership. Forget about the fact home prices barely inched higher with CPI during 20th century capitalism, mostly reflecting the real cost of re-building the home. We turned it into an investment everyone could and should make.

People felt wealthy when they saw neighbors sell homes for ~10% more, and another ~10% the next year.

Better yet, they started borrowing against the value of those rising prices to do everything from eat out to buy another house, or four.

Fast forward to a housing market worth ~$55 trillion today. While the rise of roughly 5-fold this century looks good, the last year or two zoomed in looks awful.

Remember, this ruse only works if the numbers keep climbing…

It costs about ~11% of home value to sell the family box. Try it for yourself if you don’t believe me.

The baristas who rattled tip cans in your face demanding a living wage, and help rounding up a 3% down payment… they wanted access to the homeownership dream. They now know the bungalow doesn’t maintain itself.

Plus, the costs rise incessantly… prices need to keep up or people start to quit on the dream.

Just imagine what the average early ~30s person who bought a home during the flu panic does when it sells for the same price they paid… and they owe money at closing, after making 36 payments…

The sedation effect of rising asset prices flips to rage in a hurry. For a group of so-called capitalists, we sure are fickle speculators…

However, there’s a logical way out of this. Even a college freshman in the first week of any finance class knows there are two ways to raise the value of leveraged assets…

1. Lower borrowing costs

2. Extend loan maturities

If you studied humanities, you surely still know the first of these means lower monthly payments. As for the second one, imagine the difference between a new car with a 3-year loan and the same new car with a ~10-year loan…

The 40-Year Mortgage… The 50-Year Mortgage… Century Mortgages

If you’re already on the team, you know where this goes: extend maturities and keep the game alive.

If you’re not, now’s a great time to join. You lock in your rate the day you subscribe. Future price hikes don’t apply to you. See membership options here (link).

On the other side of the paywall, we’ll address a timely question from Harry C. about a stock we’re up ~28% on since July. And why longer mortgage terms might be fuel on that fire.

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For starters, he was obsessed with design. Like most people plagued with this obsession, scale and profit take a back seat.

Growing up in the hills about a half-hour northeast of Florence, Italy, Piero built models, drew, and thought up new ways to make existing landscapes look the way he saw them. It landed him a special commission to move to Tehran in the early 1950s, as a guest designer. Still in his late teens, he had a chance to create on the world stage.

This was a big break for the young Italian. Yet just before he took off, his brother, a more practical craftsman, passed away in a tragic accident. Piero never left for Persia, and stayed in the hills overlooking Florence.

In the wake of tragedy, the Bambi family business carried on. Piero’s father Giuseppe and his uncle Bruno ran the company. It was essentially a custom machine shop, with a classic Italian flare.

Italians know detail. Especially in the north. Pick up any product crafted there from stone, wood, steel, leather, and it’s almost sure to leave an impression on you. It’s a pleasure to own a fine Italian anything. And the Bambi brothers landed right in this tradition of fine craftsmanship.

When Piero took over, he had the design part of the job dialed in naturally. As for the prospect of earning big, not so much.

An Obsession with Detail

Coffee is part of the Italian culture. And most of it is low-quality. More on that later.

But this low-quality coffee tends to work fine as espresso. Italians love espresso, likely because they don’t have beans worth extracting in any other way.

Espresso neutralizes the finer details of premium coffee. It’s all about a very fine, almost powder grind, as compared to a more course grind for slower, delicate extraction. The finely ground grinds then fit into a portafilter. This is a metal basket with a handle attached. Tamp down the grinds, then attach the portafilter to the espresso machine quarter-turning it firmly into place.

That portafilter needs to hook into the machine with the certainty of a radiator cap. The espresso machine produces intensely hot steam, around 200 degrees Fahrenheit. And under intense pressure…about 130 psi.

For context, your car tires are just under ~40 psi. You cringe when filling them to the suggested limit. Espresso extraction requires pressure equal to ~3-times the max limit of car tire pressure.

Like all Italians, Piero grew up in this espresso culture. You can service a world-class caffeine addiction bopping around Italy. Walk in, drop €1.35 on the counter, and wait about ~45 seconds for your fix. Do it again an hour later and nobody says more than, “Grazie mille, ciao!”

This Italian coffee culture has two big problems. One is the beans. Espresso extraction puts lipstick on the overall poor quality of Italian beans…even today; when super-premium product is widely accessible. They still don’t know what they’re missing. Bad coffee in 2025 is optional suffering.

The other problem, the one Piero spent the rest of his life trying to fix, was how this high-pressure steam equipment, intense torque, and force, all fit into a countertop metal box worth looking at.

He Changed the Coffee Counter Forever

Piero died in 2020, evidently of some pedestrian variety of old-age cancer.

He departed earth mere weeks before his iconic La Marzocco espresso machine became the must have device in homes of bougie coffee snobs desperate to exploit new hobbies during the flu panic.

Today, high-end home machines make up ~52% of company sales. Premium coffee shops make up the rest. In fact, it’s almost a good indicator of overall shop quality when you see a La Marzocco machine in use.

Piero Bambi ran the Bambi Brothers enterprise under the name La Marzocco. Marzocco being the name of a heraldic lion seen in statue form around Florence Italy.

Donatello carved one of these in the 15^th century and the Florentine Republic took it on as sort of a mascot prior to that.

This arguably foolish obsession with micro-detail, welding a lion on the corners of the espresso machine for symbolic resonance, taking component design to an absolute extreme… kept La Marzocco small.

Eventually, Piero’s Ferrari-like machines did make their way around the world… slowly. It took decades for business to grow one sale at a time. One perfect espresso at a time, people noticed.

In the late 1980s, a coffee extremist name Kent Bakke from Seattle, WA hired a translator and set out for rural Italy to find and play with the world’s best espresso machines. Bakke is to coffee what Jay Leno is to classic cars, with his own private museum built to house his collection. You can visit it, if you send an email asking politely.

Bakke ran the machine all day with Piero. “Geeking out” is what Gen Z people call this type of visit. He eventually bonded with Piero, convincing the detail-obsessed Italian to license the brand to him for U.S. distribution.

It took Bakke eight months to sell the first machine. Nobody in the U.S. cared much about world-class espresso extraction in the late ~80s. The enthusiast-slash-expert Bakke kept up the sales effort… until he landed an order for several machines at a local start-up coffee chain called Starbucks.

How Commercial Success Destroys Design

Over the next ~10 years or so, Piero Bambi, Kent Bakke, and La Marzocco grew in ways previously unimaginable. Piero never wavered on quality, detail, and dedication to the world’s finest espresso extraction, from the best-looking machine possible. However, in the U.S., we don’t care much about either of those things.

Starbucks became a dominant brand during that period. Much of its growth came from getting away from good coffee. As it slowly devolved to selling what looks like high-calorie milkshakes with a splash of coffee in them, the profile of its staff also changed.

Real coffee people left the company, they didn’t find if much fun making milkshakes for people who think coffee tastes bad, but still want a buzz.

Starbuck corporate told La Marzocco they needed a push-button machine someone with McDonalds level passion for coffee could operate. Piero hit the ceiling.

Just imagine having the world’s lone coffee behemoth sitting in your office, arriving by private jet, responsible for almost all your annual sales… they tell you they want a push-button machine, which you surely could build. And you say, “no.”

Piero Bambi said no to Howard Shultz, to Starbucks, to the entire concept of financial success. He refused to compromise his design standard. He effectively said he’d rather be out of business than degrade his business in that way.

To the Curb

When Starbucks took its business elsewhere, every espresso machine maker in the world said yes to whatever push-button the company wanted, at the lowest price possible.

The chain ripped La Marzocco machines out of its stores, and discarded them. Like, in the trash. La Marzocco sales fell to almost nothing.

Meanwhile, the barista exit picked up steam. These were the ones who actually loved coffee. They couldn’t take it anymore. Between the blob-like customers and corporate overloads with their Human Resources handbooks, anyone with an edge left.

Many of them opened tiny shops, focused on slow-pouring quality coffee. I’m in one of them this morning. You can spot the difference the second you walk in. They don’t want to make milkshakes for zombies. They want to hand-craft you a perfect coffee. And they want to do it on the machine Piero designed.

This herd of premium coffee pioneers often found La Marzocco machines for free, or next to nothing. We’re talking eBay back then, or “come and take it” advertisements. They bolted them to the counter of these new shops, and put them to work.

The Italian parent company stabilized, and in 2015 released its first home machine. That caught on, picked up steam, and exploded in 2020, just after Piero passed.

If Piero sold out to automation, if he caved to fear and sacrificed design, he might have died a wealthier man. Instead, he died as the man that changed the counter of every respectable coffee shop in the free world. To me, that’s a lot better way to go out.

Go See for Yourself

You can visit the La Marzocco factory.

Technically, it’s the former factor, where Piero worked. You even get to see his drafting table, with a view of the majestic Italian countryside out the side window.

The second floor of the building is a sort of modern coffee dream setting. They roast rare beans, have a full coffee bar with gigantic custom espresso machines, and will even serve you lunch from a high-end commercial kitchen tucked into a back room.

It’s real treat. A coffee nerd named Ben told me about it earlier this year, and I tacked it onto a planned trip to Bologna. Which is only a ~50-minute train ride from Florence.

I like to do this type of thing. I find it interesting, educational, and exciting. But people generally don’t agree.

Sure, they think it’s cool to hear about, but they don’t go. They say they can’t go; they don’t have the time. In fact, they don’t do much outside of their routine.

It’s because in America, we really don’t value passion. And we have all kinds of serious reasons for the stance.

Don’t bother pointing out most people spend ~3 hours per day scrolling media feeds on their phone. That means ~21 hours per week, donated to external influence. They barely notice it, yet immediately say they have no time for curious pursuits.

We like to talk about passionate people. We say this or that person was passionate, and created something amazing. We watched a video about it… But we’re more interested in the monetary success they achieved than the details they mastered.

Piero Bambi is a perfect example of mastering details without financial reward. Sure, he made plenty of money during his career. Yet his real notoriety and success came after he died. That’s when people looked around at a world of push-button coffee machines baffled by the loss of experience. They wanted something real, and La Marzocco had it.

Shunned into Submission

The lesson is… when you choose passion, you win. Yet in America, we don’t value the choice. In fact, we ridicule it.

We do jobs we don’t enjoy for money we’re afraid to spend. We live in soulless drywall boxes with LED lights, drive plastic cars bought when the monthly payment suits our stretched budget, and most of us recoil in horror at a $5 price tag for a world-class cup of coffee… that’s $5 that could change your whole day.

From early life we’re taught this leveraged, utilitarian way of making money decisions. Someday we’ll do the things we really want to do… but that day never comes. We’re loyal to this American way of thinking, questioning it means being banished from the herd for good.

But the herd doesn’t know where it’s heading… it can’t see the destination is unpleasant. All you have to do is step out of it for a minute and the whole thing looks different.

Last month I told you about a check I wrote and mailed that was stolen. Someone Photoshopped it and deposited it several times. The fraud department at the bank dealt with it, but it was so unpleasant I moved the account.

At the new bank, Alberto the service rep froze like a highway deer when I gave him a check for $25,000 to deposit into the newly opened account. Too large… needed a “manager override” to proceed. That triggered a full-on sales pitch from the in-branch “investment professional.”

This toolish guy in his early 30s shows up in a Men’s Warehouse costume and right away complements my watch, telling me he’s been on a Rolex waiting list for a lesser model for two years, and plans to buy whatever they offer him, and flip it. It was so nauseating, I ordered a Casio later that night, and put the other watch away for a while.

The young guy proceeds to hard sell me on the idea of giving him custody of some assets. He had a list of questions surely prepared by corporate. And he did not like any of my answers.

What are my financial goals? “To do exactly what I’m doing today until I die, which will be just shy of my 100^th birthday.”

Do you want to reduce your taxes? “No.”

Why not move some stock over here, leverage it, and mortgage both your houses, and let us manage the money which will generate more return than the new payment. “Can I just have the new checking account and get out of here?”

Frustrated, he says, “You look like you’re from the west coast?” That one did not seem like it came from the corporate training manual… must be the long hair.

The point is, we’re taught to avoid living. Stay in the market, hoard, scrounge, sacrifice… for some future day. That day might not come. If it does, you might have arthritis, and the La Marzocco museum doesn’t have a chairlift.

Shift Your Perspective

Nobody knows the name of any Starbucks executive who shunned Piero Bambi in favor of machines that helped low-pulse replacement baristas make beverages no human should drink.

Staying in the scarcity game, the chase, being committed to the goal you refuse to examine is no way to live. Like a 6-year-old who has no idea what they’ll do with all that Halloween candy. Plus, what you’ll see later is, when you focus on hoarding, you end up with huge blind spots.

It’s the advantage of picking your beak up from the chalk line. You see where the line’s heading… and decide if you want to go there or not. Maybe somewhere else entirely.

The paradox is, when you shift from compulsive hoarding to intentional living, you often, in time, make more money. If this feels too radical, simply consider the opposite.

When you choose a job based solely on money, you usually don’t enjoy it. You say you’ll enjoy the money later, but you’re too busy numbing your disgust for the task to do anything fun. Everyone around you knows it, and tolerates it since that’s how we collectively approach work.

When you flip that decision to doing something you enjoy, with money as a secondary detail you’ll sort out later, something magical happens. You’re pleasant to deal with. People seem drawn to you.

Think of this like the lady who quits corporate to work in a plant store. She thrives, she opens her own store, next thing you know, she’s so busy she needs help organizing the business. It’s accidental success stemming from doing something she enjoyed.

And when it comes to investing, something very similar happens. You flip from, “I need something to multiply my meager savings” to noticing which way the wind’s blowing.

When you need something from the market, you never find it. When you have everything you need, everything you notice seems to go up.

It’s a mindset… and most people refuse to try it. They’re the same people who said Piero Bambi was a fool.

Obvious…Once you See It

Take this chart for instance… We bought the stock earlier this year.

Without thinking it’ll change your life, which doesn’t need changing, take a guess which way this thing moves next… it should be obvious.

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Dear Founders,

Truth is, I wasn’t crazy about Dubai… It was just one stop on a much larger trip that spanned the entire second half of November.

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It’s not quite a working airport. There are several runways. Wide, properly striped, and long enough to land that clunky space shuttle we used in the 1980s.

There’s also a cavernous passenger terminal. It’s mostly empty. The lights are on, there are seats with power outlets, and un-branded check-in counters waiting for the big day.

The whole thing looks like one of those videos from a ghost city in interior China. Where they built rows of empty high rises for residents that sometimes never showed up.

Dubai’s other airport, Al Maktoum International (DWC) looks like that kind of place.

Big Plans

This is a place where big plans dictate development.

There’s a defined nobility here in this section of desert. A collection of families run things. You’re either in or you’re out. It might be the land of good times and low taxes, but meritocracy is a Western concept.

The technical name is the United Arab Emirates. There are seven total. Abu Dhabi is the one with all the power, Dubai is the one you’ve heard of, and the other five you couldn’t name if there was a sword to your neck.

Power, for our purposes, means commanding economic development. Setting the tone, so to speak.

Remember, there’s some history to this way of doing things. Dubai was a minor city not too long ago. Maybe not quite camel dung in the streets, but it certainly wasn’t a place where the world’s tallest building sits atop the world’s largest shopping mall. By the way, that mall has not one but two full-scale Prada stores that feel as big as a subdivision house.

There’s a different level of cash sloshing around the place. You can get anything you want, when you want it, and they’ve most recently managed to turn Dubai into a modern Switzerland for the world’s displaced wealthy.

That’s the issue with amassing gobs of money, you have to hold onto it, which becomes a full-time job. You almost feel bad for the world’s on-the-run, ultra-high-net-worth crowd. At least they have endless designer boutiques at the Dubai Mall to soak up some of the loot.

A Track Record of “Command Economics”

Dubai was once a big idea. Now, its mega airport DXB feels smothered by development. Hence the new super-mega airport in the middle of barren desert an hour south.

As Dubai inched upward, leaders commanded the world’s most luxurious hotel, also in the middle of nowhere at the time. The Burj al Arab is the world’s only seven-star lodging option. It’s so nice, the rating agencies had to invent a new category for it.

When they broke ground surrounded by undeveloped sand dunes, people thought they were crazy. Now all that sand between the Burj hotel and Dubai to the north is fully developed…with premium real estate.

It didn’t stop there… with the super-luxury hotel going vertical, they went offshore commanding construction of man-made islands. First was Palm Jumeirah, which seemed crazy, but now seems unattainably luxurious. It’s packed with mansions, yachts, and exclusive clubs.

Admittedly, the grand plan to dredge a constellation of 300 islands in the shape of the earth, visible from outer space, proved a little too ambitious even for this bunch. The iconic World Island remains largely a spectacle.

But the new airport probably will work. This is what current plans call for… a colossal city which at this time is merely highway infrastructure and basic utilities surrounded by sand.

Below is a 3-D rendering of the grand plan… which keeps growing…alongside the total cost, and timeline to completion.

Keep in mind, there’s a big boss man behind this. He has wealth that’s tough to calculate. It’s sovereign.

He has a passion for falconry, a lot of planes, cars, and stuff. But most valuable, is the power to shape reality into one that suits him.

The Dubai Airshow

An empty airport in the desert does turn out to be a good spot for a major, international airshow.

If you’ve never been to an airshow, put it on your bucket list. There are several types. Some feature amateur pilots performing ill-advised maneuvers in vintage planes. This is what happens at the giant AirVenture event in Oshkosh, Wisconsin every summer. It’s run by the Experimental Aircraft Association.

The Dubai Airshow is more of a red-carpet thing. This is where Lockheed and Raytheon trot out their latest and greatest killing machines. The U.S. State Department and DoD send a full squad of low-level diplomats to make sure the hosts know how important they are.

Then there’s the commercial side of things. Boeing, Airbus, Gulfstream, Bombardier, they all want the locals to know what’s available in way of modern luxury.

This is our latest and greatest American personal-use aircraft, the Gulfstream G800. It can fly from New York to Hong Kong at top speed over ~700 mph, at a max altitude of ~51,000 feet, without making a fuel stop.

Every major company gets some skytime to show its stuff here. There are Boeing 777-X wide-body cargo planes doing figure eight loops above the runway. The announcer on the loudspeaker makes clear you can count on this craft when things get hairy.

The whole day goes like this. It’s big, it’s luxurious, it’s fun, and it’s loud.

Except for a few moments midway through the day when everything went silent. You could almost hear a pin drop on the red carpet. Nobody knew what was happening. Except for a few dozen people gathered on the second-floor balcony of Chalet #A14.

They marveled at their runway model. It took off vertically like a helicopter, yet as quiet as a cat burglar. Battery-powered craft don’t generate noise as a byproduct of thrust.

Once airborne, it flipped its nine propellors forward and pranced around for the unaware crowd.

The tiptoeing electric aircraft is an eVTOL. It’s no accident the Airshow wanted the plane in attendance. Dubai plans to build several sky ports offering shuttle service between DXB airport and key destinations, like the seven-star Burj Dubai Hotel.

The company hopes to integrate this four-passenger, one-pilot, battery-powered transport option into easy-to-use apps like Uber. The big idea is a mobility option that avoids traffic congestion, crowds, and gasoline.

Notice this demonstration below, which proposes hailing the nine-blade silent aircraft when you don’t feel like driving from the man-made Palm Jumeirah to DXB airport.

The whole idea makes sense. It’s gridlock trying to get across a congested city built on command. There’s also plenty of demand for anything luxurious that saves time, or turns heads. Time will tell if the big plan to pepper Dubai with sky ports takes off.

Same Plan, Less Power

The big boss man in U.E.A. isn’t the only one working on this. About ~10,000 miles to the west, and a world away, there’s another man pushing the same idea.

While he doesn’t publicly tout falconry as an hobby, Nick Short thinks we could and should have veritable highways in the sky crisscrossing the U.S. Think of it like the Eisenhower Interstate System, in the air.

Mr. Short is head of the North Carolina Department of Transportation’s Aviation Division. Most likely a job with substantially less agency than running a wealthy sovereign kingdom.

Short thinks the best way to get this started is a pilot program linking his state with others. Georgia is his suggested test case.

He’s probably right. Also, probably still a bit early.

We’ve got an FAA that uses floppy disks and goes on strike occasionally. We all know there’s a data center somewhere in central Kansas powered by a micro reactor that can replace the entire FAA staff… but not quite yet.

Then there’s the U.S. business system, remarkably bureaucratic for a so-called free market. We’ve got trucker unions, people manually turning a sign from “stop” to “slow” during highway construction, and state representatives duck hunting with the owners of asphalt companies who will resist highways in the sky like the plague.

Nick Short surely knows this, and also knows technological efficiency is inevitable.

No Money, No Problem

The complicated part is, the U.S. has no money.

That might sound radical on the surface. But spending time in the places where we spent all the money might change your view. Take the U.A.E. for instance. It’s swimming in cash.

People who haven’t been or haven’t socialized in the right places while there can’t see the full scope. It’s far beyond the two Prada stores. You need to see families with seventeen compounds and a fleet of 60 vehicles. That’s just the driving kind. Add in the planes, boats, and sand buggies and it might be 100.

We sent the money first for energy, then for strategic regional reasons, and probably a little more for nefarious reasons from time to time. Either way, we sent a lot of cash… pretty much all of it. And so far, it doesn’t matter.

We don’t need money because what we have in the U.S. is, a stock market. People love to talk about the Fed, the debt, the concept of a dollar printing press… it’s the U.S. stock market that’s the current pillar of power.

For instance, the nepotistic big bosses of the U.A.E. that preceded the current boss made a lot of smart moves with the money we sent him. He created various, well-known sovereign wealth funds, among other things.

These funds built Dubai, generated economic growth, and in the process, investment returns. The current boss has to continue investing that money, and often chooses the U.S. stock market as a key home for it.

It means the real power needed to drive U.S. innovation has more to do with the ability to issue new stock in exchange for cash. To sell the promise of big things in the future, for dollars today.

We need that money, if we want to build the highways in the sky Nick Short and the other 49 people who do his job around the U.S. now envision.

Stock Market as a Checkbook

So far, it doesn’t matter much that we have no money. We simply sell stock to fund development as needed. This works great, as long as people buy the stock. So far…so good.

Tesla is a great example of this. For years, decades now, stock bears highlighted the company made no money, bled cash, and any day now would go bust. Nope. Tesla kept selling stock to do the impossible until it did the impossible.

Same goes for Netflix. Herds of stock bears died on the hill just certain the company would never make it. The financial analysis they trusted destroyed them. We’re truly in an era where fundamentals don’t matter.

People have a hard time with this. There are herds of CFAs baffled by rising stock prices on little to no fundamental basis. What matters in the U.S. is the value of hope. They don’t teach that in the CFA material because there’s no quantifiable formula for it.

It’s the huge idea that sells. It’s blue sky as far as you can see. That’s what people pay for. And when they pay, we use the money to create things we need.

There’s no limit to the amount of stock you can create and sell to blue-sky buyers, as long as there’s demand.

The leading companies developing eVTOL planes might burn ~$1 billion each next year…with no product.

People allege the U.S. dollar is just paper. At least there’s a taxing authority behind it. In the case of funding radical innovation, we sell paper tied to only hope. It’s after the dust settles, and quarterly revenue hits, that the CFAs figure out how to value the mature companies.

And what that means is, we need the overall stock market to hold up to fund the whole thing.

We Can’t Bounce Checks

If you kept a journal on your desk, and noted every bear market pundit featured on financial news, you’d run out of paper.

Market fear, and crash prediction, sells a lot of advertising. Whenever you watch financial media, don’t forget the real purpose…to keep you watching long enough to sell premium advertising space.

You probably don’t notice, but TTL doesn’t sell you anything. You don’t see any tacky banner ads, or sleazy email solicitations. Maybe someday you’ll subscribe, maybe not. If you do, the numbers say you’ll never cancel. Maybe it’s because we’re not cheapening the relationship by turning it into an infomercial.

Either way, we’re also not in the camp of people predicting financial collapse. It can’t collapse.

Well, it can, but if it does, we’re screwed. And that would be a societal bummer of epic proportions. Something nobody upstairs wants. We would lose our checkbook for funding innovation. We’d have to round up real money, which would not be easy since we already looted the place.

Take a look at the value of the U.S. stock market. This is the sum total of all listed public equity. In late October, it crossed ~$72 trillion for the first time. It’s down about ~5% in the ensuing three weeks.

Before you scoff at this notion, that the market can’t go down, think about the typical U.S. billionaire. There are about ~3,000 in the world according to the lists. Around ~30% of those are in the U.S.

Unlike foreign billionaires who often own key infrastructure, or control small countries, U.S. billionaires tend to own equity…typically, leveraged.

It means without being able to sell stock frequently to fund new ideas, they’d have a much smaller wealth profile.

Worse yet, most ultra-high net worths don’t sell stock, they borrow against it. Morgan Stanley reps pitch this scheme to your editor frequently… free up cash, borrow against your assets.

The problem is, if you leverage the assets, you capture the future upside, but take on serious risk in the process. Plus, it adds unnecessary stress to an otherwise enjoyable life. Still, it’s what most everyone does...in the U.S.

And it’s more reason why the ~5-fold rally in U.S. stock valuations since ~2010 might be a matter of national importance. Without the ability to sell stock to clamoring buyers worldwide, to draw back in some of the spent wealth we swapped to maintain our lifestyle, we don’t have much.

Assuming we can however, we’ll probably have highways in the sky sooner than people think.

We don’t need oil money, a sovereign wealth fund, or the savings of past generations. All we need is people to buy ~$1 billion worth of stock next year in a company with no salable product and tons of blue sky.

So far, the two stocks we own trying to do it show little sign of trouble. (click here to keep reading)

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The modern office buildings, impressive urban planning, and brisk efficiency don’t get the likes and clicks needed to pay for the trip.

It’s not too far from the more photographed parts of Paris. About a four mile straight shot up a wide avenue from the Arc de Triomphe. In fact, this newer part of the city has its own arch. It’s much more modern. And just behind it, sits a brand-new, state-of-the-art arena.

It’s called the La Defense Arena. Last week it hosted the ninth and final ATP Masters 1000 event of the 2025 men’s tennis season.

Almost nobody in the surrounding neighborhoods seemed to know or care about the tournament. Some walked right past the world’s top-ranked players on the street without noticing.

1000 Points on The Line

Men compete on the ATP Tour. It’s the Association of Tennis Professionals. Women have a separate tour, the WTA.

The ATP uses a points system to rank players. The winner, finalist, and on down the line earn points based on how far they make it in the tournament. Earned points boost their tour ranking, which changes by the week, since there is a tournament almost every week.

Also, higher ranked players seed better in the next tournament. The top seeds often have a first-round bye, meaning they enter the second round rested.

Physical rest matters since most players stay on tour all year long. For many, it’s a 50-week season. That compares to professional football with a 17-week regular season, or baseball players with as much as a four months off.

6’11” versus 5’11”

After a few days of qualifying, the Paris Masters kicked off last Monday. Tuesday morning, Frenchman Corentin Moutet, who claims to be 5’11” but looks 5’5” took on 6’11” American Reilly Opelka in the first round of the event.

With his mammoth frame, Opelka has one primary weapon, his serve, which frequently clocks ~140mph. In tennis, serving well means winning half the games…leaving only the receiving games to chance.

Short but fast, Moutet had to stand almost an entire court length behind the baseline to account for the speed and intensity. For him, it’s a defensive start to every point. He lost the first set 3-6.

The Masters 1000 matches are a shorter, best of three sets. Grand Slam tournaments, like the French Open held on the other side of Paris in early June, are best of five sets. That means here, losing the first set is dangerous.

Moutet defended serves, attacked shots once in regular play, stayed focused, and won the second set 7-5 in a tie break.

Tied up 1-1, Opelka lost control of his serve in the third set. Moutet never left any point to chance. He won set three 6-1 knocking Opelka out of the tournament.

In the next round, Alexander Bublik of Kazakhstan beat Moutet 3-6, 4-6. Bublik ran Moutet so hard, he lost one of his shoes in the second set.

A Game of Millimeters

After beating the 4^th and 6^th ranked players, 13th seed Bublik then lost to Felix Auger-Aliassime of Canada who finished 2^nd overall.

At this level, the difference between the 500^th ranked player and a top-ten player is almost immeasurable. Everyone has fundamentals, everyone has a dangerous weapon in some part of their game, and everyone else on tour knows what that is.

What separates the trophy-holder from the player who loses in the first or second round is instinctual flow. It’s art, and it takes over where science has no more power.

Meaning, all the preparation and training leave the mind when a ball comes flying over the net at 140mph, game after game, for several hours.

These athletes are in peak physical condition. They might not look like strongmen, but the conditioning behind this performance is extraordinary. Most spend hours with targeted recovery trainers after each match.

All that to prepare for the next match, which they can trust to happen on a court that’s always 78’ long by 27’ wide. It always has a net that’s exactly 42” high at the posts, and 36” high at the center.

They know their serve needs to cross the same size net without touching it, and land inside a 21’ by 12.5’ service box on the opposite side of the court.

Opelka, or any other top player, would never be able to train and compete at this level if tour officials changed the height of the net arbitrarily. He’d never be able to play and win if the rules changed due to circumstances.

Tennis is chess on the run. In chess, the pieces have movement rules. Squares have a fixed color. If those change on the fly, it’s no longer a game a human player can master.

And if the lines changed on the tennis court, hard work and human ability would be useless on tour.

Trusting The System

Humans need to trust the lines of any system. If we don’t, we quit playing.

It’s not that people don’t still want to win. It’s the effort that changes. With blurry lines, we switch from competing to cheating. We start managing outcomes instead of effort.

There are millions of muscle movements going on in the body of 6’11” Reilly Opelka when he serves that cannon… The human body in motion is a gigantic orchestra.

That orchestra operates as conditioned; we call it muscle memory. Unless the mind causes hesitation.

There’s no way to think about every single movement. Any tennis player will tell you the body follows the mind. Picture the shot you want, and let instinct take over.

There’s a cosmic magic to hitting a tennis ball. People are not machines. Science might study the mechanics, but art takes over when executing a shot.

The key to the whole thing is the rigidity and trust of activity. We know the rules, regulations, court size. There are no exceptions, excuses, or oligarchs with special access.

Opelka lost in Paris, packed up, and headed to Athens for this week’s tournament. The Vanda Pharmaceuticals Hellenic Championships.

It’s 50 weeks a year of this. His $1.2 million of winnings in 2025 is the bare minimum needed to keep the show on the road. Currently ranked 50^th in the world, there are thousands of up-and-coming players eager to challenge him.

He’s fully bought into the tennis system. If he lost trust in it, he’d surely quit sacrificing his mind and body to the process.

It’s Time to Question Beliefs

We’re totally bought into our money system. The idea we need money, and must sacrifice something to get it.

It’s a capitalistic idea. It’s what we were taught. We need money, and we always need more of it. We promise we’ll chill out and do things we enjoy one day… but we don’t know when.

This thinking drives us to do all kinds of unconscious things. We do jobs we don’t enjoy, defer pleasure, and grow to resent people we think have more than us.

You can’t know what people have, with any certainty. Plus, it’s always changing. You can think that couple in the picture has it made, but you never really know. And it’s none of our business anyway.

If the average American stopped for a minute to consider what they want to do over what they say they “must do,” they might suffer a mental breakdown. The compulsion we have around money is a closet door nobody wants to open.

The few who do see we’re in a new system. It’s not the one we learned about in the 20^th century… that’s over. This is a new period, where hard work and thrift don’t yield the same benefits.

Carrying on without looking up means wasting time focused on old ideas.

Managed Markets

It wasn’t always this way…

There was a free market system at one time. That’s where buyers and sellers set prices. We called it capitalism, because we like one-word explanations for complex systems.

The reason we took on the work hard, delay gratification mentality is free markets rewarded it. Prices run too high, wise people sell. When business slows, the most irresponsible players go bust. Thrifty people gobble up their stuff for pennies on the dollar.

But that doesn’t happen anymore… and it’s been a while.

The departure from free markets happened slowly. Like someone who got just a little dab of botulinum toxin to adjust one little wrinkle they obsessed over. Two decades later they look like a swollen raisin attached to the fresh bunch of grapes.

We didn’t like the self-correcting function of free markets. More realistically, our governing representatives didn’t like it. They knew hungry mobs started most historic rebellions. While a satiated population remained calm even while being fleeced.

What once took cheap food and entertainment to produce now takes digital money…or even the mere perception of it.

Three decades into the managed market system we can’t handle even a one-month bear market. People freak out. Politicians know we’d question the whole system if we looked too closely. They can’t have that.

It’s why we transitioned to a centrally-managed market. It’s why stocks rise constantly. And since everyone knows that can’t go on forever, we have the occasional minor panic. Like kids getting an unwanted but much-needed haircut.

This chart shows the value of all listed U.S. stocks going back to 2020. Notice the occasional panic events but the overall rise from ~$24 trillion around the flu panic to last month when it hit a record ~$73 trillion.

There’s a side effect to all of this. When you tinker with complex systems, you trigger unexpected flareups.

Fundamentals Don’t Matter

In the old days, people studied company financials to get comfortable with a stock ownership. Now, it’s less important.

The way it works in 2025 is computers spot movement, either up or down. Programmers and traders pile in, stretching the movement even more. That causes impatient retail stock buyers to notice Reddit posts, or X commentary, and rush in. This feeds on itself.

Take Sprouts Farmers Market Inc (SFM) for example. We bought the stock in July 2023 for $37.15. It’s a great store. We recently sold it for a ~200% gain because it broke out of an uptrend. Not much changed with the store.

While we booked a nice profit in SFM, the peak gain was ~383% in early June this year. That’s 383% in less than two years…in a grocery stock.

The main factor behind this run is a side effect of market intervention. Once a company makes strides in its business, surprises the market, and shows growth, small funds take note and invest. This feeds on itself. Momentum takes over. Computers track the indexes that add more. It’s a self-propelled loop.

This goes on for a while, we held SFM far past what felt reasonable. Each opportunity to sell seemed crazy just a few weeks later as it hit new highs.

Then, the run stops. One bit of tough news and it gaps down. Computers take note, sell, and funds re-balance. The same propulsion works on the downside.

SFM is a fabulous store, maybe the best mainstream organic grocer. It might someday be a logical takeover target for a big player like Walmart Inc (WMT) that can’t figure out organics… But we’re stock buyers. For us, the run goes far enough at some point. Almost as if everyone forgot it was a grocery store.

This feedback loop happens in the broader market too, but with more management. Look back to the chart of the U.S. stock market value above… notice the constant uptrend with the occasional shakeout. Sellers learn to hold on, or miss out on the triple.

People forget what the Fed chairman told us back in November 2010 as justification for his radical money stimulus operation… turns out, he told the truth.

It might go down as the greatest monetary hijacking in history. The moment when free markets died.

The Effect on People

Here we are… with a population of investing junkies.

Absolutely everyone is a stock buyer… and nobody has enough money to do whatever it is they could be doing but aren’t.

You can’t get a Rolex without waiting on a list for two years. There’s a 100-person line outside of every mediocre airline lounge at LaGuardia. And the general sentiment is if we get just a little bit more money, we’ll finally be able to chill. But we won’t.

The investing public has a time horizon of about 3 days when buying stocks. They need action, and fast. The entire concept of holding for the long term is on its head. Yet there’s plenty of opportunity.

We’ve had a ~52% run in physical gold this year. That’s not a typo.

People largely didn’t care about gold when it sold for under $2,000. Now they think it’ll go to $10,000. Or at least they’ll take the digital clickbait to hear why. That run might take a little bit longer.

$4,000 seems like a pretty good price for gold. Consider the following market capitalization for several broad-based assets. You know, things we all generally accept as being fundamental.

• U.S. Public Stocks ~$72 trillion

• U.S. Residential Real Estate ~$55 trillion

• U.S. Public Treasury Debt ~$38 trillion

• Gold ~$28 trillion

• Bitcoin ~$2 trillion

It seems a little fully valued against these other assets. Consider a $10,000 gold price would value the world’s raw metal supply hidden under beds and in sock drawers worldwide, at ~$70 trillion.

That’s almost the entire U.S. stock market value, double the public Treasury debt, ~50% more than all the homes in the U.S., and 35-times Bitcoin.

Then people say there’ll be some calamity or massive debasement scenario. Maybe… but the financialization of markets is so intensely controlled, so centrally monitored, it’ll keep going until the whole thing goes bloop. That might not be as soon as you think.

And if it is, look for cover. The $10,000 gold tomorrow crowd often wants a ticker symbol to profit from societal ruin. As if there are buyers waiting in the rubble to bid things up… it’s crazy.

The New Game

If the whole idea of managed markets doesn’t sit well with you, have a look at the Adam Curtis documentary HyperNormalization. He also did Century of the Self. There’s a subtle mention in the film about removing the Arab hand from the oil spigot… so to speak.

The notion is, with the financialization of energy markets, managing prices became possible… in theory.

It’s easy to imagine… The vulnerability of the West vanished to some extent when a threatened oil embargo could be squashed with giant leveraged sales of oil futures.

Either way, if it works in energy markets, surely it works in stock indices. And if we manage a major index higher, everyone feels wealthy.

Plus, if we shake the tree occasionally, give it a little unexpected haircut, we’ll keep people skittish about lofty prices. The whole thing works out to be a Frankenstein market.

Now let’s get our piece of it. (FREE READERS - CLICK HERE FOR AN INCENTIVE TO KEEP READING)

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Previously only seen in elderly panhandlers, peasants, and extreme osteopathic anomalies, DHS now plagues some people in their 20s.

Like this young man, who became so entranced with his smartphone, his body changed shape to accommodate the behavior.

Before you chalk this up to a one-off, take a look around. Notice the percentage of phone-in-hand people. You might be the only one not looking at a phone.

Moms keep a finger holster on the back of their phones. This is a modern-day ready position, keeping close tabs on whatever it is they keep tabs on.

Kids have smartwatches as early as first grade, tethered to mom or dad’s phone, and soon their own. The Tucker Kids know better than to ask for a smartwatch. They wear retro, 90’s-era Casio watches at the moment, and seem happy about it.

Teenagers in Asia love strapping a leather shoulder band to a special phone case allowing them to carry the device like a purse.

If someone tells you they missed your call, text, or email, it’s a lie. The smartphone permeates western life from the boardroom to the bathroom.

Slowly Then Suddenly

The body follows the mind. We generally know this is true.

Years of toxic thinking leads to disease. Holding on to resentment blocks us from our next success. In every case, it’s the little decisions and habits we ignore that set the stage for bigger outcomes.

Americans on the whole are not responsible for anything that happens to them. All you have to do is listen to how they talk about their circumstances. If something good happened, they did it. Everything else happened to them. It’s a mindset high-achievers avoid like the plague.

The human tendency is to act mostly on impulse, then explain away the consequences. We find comfort in behaviors others accept as OK, regardless of the objective truth. Like smoking in the 20^th century, behaviors define an era. Only later do people look back to wonder how everyone went along with the obviously harmful trend.

The problem now is, we can’t live without the phone. What started as a way to answer emails and messages on a utilitarian device turned into an all-consuming obsession.

Watch over the shoulder of a phone-obsessed stranger…they won’t even notice. They fidget from checking the living room pet camera to see if Bootsy the cat woke up, to purging an inbox full of marketing emails, over to Instagram to see what everyone else is up to, then to a propagandized news app, back to Bootsy the cat, then to a message they’ll ignore from a real-life human who made an effort to get to know them. After all, if you don’t meet someone online, it’s hard to know if they’re real.

Active daters say a real-life person who says hello and complements them could be a murderer… meeting that same person online feels safer.

The distrust of meeting people in-person is a snapshot of where we are. Humans have an innate ability to sense sketchy people, dangerous situations, and general trouble. It’s a survival mechanism… and we’ve abandoned it.

We’re twenty years into compulsive phone use. We ignored all the warnings, wrote off all the detractors, and chose more of what’s destroying us.

We trust the device… we love it. And if the screen went black, we’d give up our last shred of dignity to make it light up again.

Set Up for Submission

The phone is not the problem… it’s the dulling of our senses from years of compulsive use.

We’ve lost much of what it means to be human. From the ability to sense danger to sitting still for thirty seconds without leg shaking, cuticle picking, or compulsive vaping. And it’s all a big setup.

The mass public of phone addicts can’t see themselves lined up, marching willingly towards digital serfdom.

One way this could play out, a very dark way, would be a mass cyberattack knocking all phones out of service.

For instance, imagine a simultaneous phone outage on a broad scale. Everyone in the coffee shop looks up from the phone to discover they’re in a coffee shop. Without phone access, they can’t post a social media message about the phone outage. Panic ensues…

The phone is on, but doesn’t work properly. Brokerage accounts display all zeros… or red negatives with spotty blurbs of personal data. Maybe there’s Cyrillic font scrambled across the screen, a clue as to the preordained bogeyman… Or, maybe the screen goes black entirely.

Intermittent messages appear from emergency services; fear grips the populace. Vehicles produced after the year 2016 don’t function. 3,000 Nigerians on electric food delivery bicycles in NYC eat the last remaining order in the bag figuring the intended recipient will never know the difference.

Troops in diesel-powered National Guard transport trucks hand out printed notices of what happened, allegedly. They read, “The fix won’t be easy… and might require sacrifice.” Hang tough while leaders work tirelessly to protect the digital freedoms you’ll shortly be asked to surrender in a series of draconian trade-offs.

The drumbeat narrative turns to safety, national pride, the importance of digital influencers as the modern American entrepreneur. To protect against this terrible situation repeating, we’ll need to give up a few liberties… like all of them. Including consenting to constant monitoring. That camera on the front of the phone and laptop already reads your facial expression when you react to information.

Don’t bother telling the average phone addict about this potential future reality… From the paranoid helicopter mom glued to a digital newsfeed…to the anxious GenZer who just can’t seem to meet any real-life friends… People tend to defend bad habits to the bitter end.

Conditioned To Comply

Digital tethering is essential for a productive modern life.

Without it, you can’t easily pay bills, view account balances, or order services of any kind. You can’t book a flight, board a flight, or check out at Whole Foods, without a complex digital bridge connecting your phone to a vast, unseen commerce system.

Behind the screens, everything from auto insurance quotes to distribution of this newsletter relies on steady access to the network. Think of it like a digital tether…and Monday this week, it all stopped.

Amazon.com Inc (AMZN) has a cloaked division called Web Services. It’s a catch-all for data transport and management. The company rents this capacity to just about every business you can imagine. While you think of it as a retail website, it’s more accurately a digital services company.

A closer look shows the U.S. has an artery system of wires crisscrossing it. The Northeast has the most, or at least the most sensitive. AMZN is a key operator in that region. One of its primary veins around Washington DC went offline Monday.

As you surely noticed, websites displayed, but didn’t function. Sites like Delta, Amtrak, and the French Tennis Federation frustrated logistical planning efforts at TTL HQ.

For the phone junkies, spinning hourglasses clogged the screen. They looked to the phone to understand why the phone wasn’t working…

That’s just the infrastructure component. The pipes we’ve never seen but can’t live without. Stuffed full of optical wiring. However, the data moving through those pipes is valuable, to us, yet about a safe as a thick wallet left on the floor of Penn Station.

Even The Protectors Aren’t Safe

Passwords make people feel safe. That’s about all their good for. Like trusting home security to a faded Beware of Dog sign in the yard, they rarely prevent material breaches.

We already accept these large-scale breaches as common occurrences. There’s a general conditioning that digital life is unsafe. But we stay loyal to the idea of safety. We expect cybersecurity firms to protect us.

F5 Inc (FFIV) is a cybersecurity firm. It has a ~$17 billion market cap, and booked ~$3 billion of revenue last year, not exactly a lightweight.

The company counts ~85% of the Fortune 500 as paying cybersecurity clients…also many sovereign governments. The idea is, FFIV protects sensitive data.

Last week, FFIV itself admitted hackers rooted into the most sacred parts of the company’s systems...hanging out there for roughly two years, unnoticed.

It reads like a situation where not spending ~$3 billion on security services would have been safer for clients… as F5 admits “some” sensitive customer data might be compromised.

This incident is just one more example of hacks, theft, fraud, and outright human moronity on the rise.

Moronity is a real word, noun in fact, Merriam-Webster says so, even if it’s lesser to the Oxford English Dictionary. In the case of FFIV admitting employees “failed to follow” its own protocols, the word fits.

You might think it means trouble for FFIV stock. maybe so. But don’t be too confident…

Cybersecurity market leader Crowdstrike Holdings Inc (CRWD) nearly grounded all western commercial aircraft in 2024 when it botched an overnight software update… the stock fell, then went on to roughly double. It faced untold billions in liability claims… but kept growing.

Companies and boards of directors keep hiring these firms. They spend when prompted… even if the results aren’t good. Even if the firm hired to protect it is the source of the breach.

Cybersecurity protection is a modern corporate tax. We own three of the leading companies in the Trustee Portfolio. Let’s go over them now along with seven more on our watchlist.

But before we do, a few words about the ~$250/oz drop in the gold price on Tuesday.

Numbers Get Bigger

You’d think writing a best-selling book on gold at a readability level right around chocolate pudding would be helpful to a broad audience… but that’s in question.

For starters, gold doesn’t really go up in value. It can preserve value, protect it, and during the occasional big rally maybe goes up more on scarcity concerns. The reason behind all this is it doesn’t create anything, it just sits there.

That’s bad news for the speculative masses these days. They can’t handle things that rise in value by say, ~15% per year. They need 15% in a day, maybe a week. The steady two-decade gainer does nothing for them.

An alternative way to own gold is by percentage of assets. Say, ~5% of assets. Regardless of pile size, $1,000 or $100,000 or $100,000,000, 5% would be an easy to calculate number. Owning some small allocation to gold, for instance, wouldn’t really cause a lot of headaches other than quarterly rebalancing with an Excel sheet.

People tell me that’s too complex for them, the Excel sheet, and the percentage approach. They need fast action, today. Forget about the fact an 8^th grader can draw a pie chart with Crayons, hard-working adults can’t do it. They won’t do it. They’ll invent all sorts of deviant ways to gamble around gold, then later say the book about gold was no good. Then they’ll give up and move on to the next good idea they’ll use to hurt themselves.

That’s optional suffering. Gold did about what we expected, for years. Sometimes it under-paced, this year it over-paced. Then on Tuesday, it gave up about a month of gains in one session.

What you might not know is, very few physical ounces of gold changed hands to make this big move.

Unlike the five minutes of supply-demand knowledge you got from sitting through years of middle school civics classes on how great capitalism is, the gold price largely moves by an outside factor.

Move The Price Like Making Weather

It’s all tied to cash-settled futures contracts.

On Tuesday, 525,500 of them changed hands. Each represents 100 ounces of gold, or a total of ~53 million ounces. For context, that’s almost half a year of gold production.

Futures started out as a way for commodity producers to finance capital expenditures by selling next season’s production early. We’re a long way from that.

Cash-settle futures dominate gold trading. The volume of contracts tied to physical gold pales in comparison.

Cash-settled means the contract holder lays claim to the difference between the per-ounce market price and the contract price at expiration.

December is the current expiration month…for cash-settled futures contracts. November contracts, some used for physical delivery, for instance had ~99% lower volume on Tuesday. The cash-settled market is where the action is.

Here’s how they work… and how they hold the power to move the entire gold market.

The New York contract represents 100 ounces of gold. On Tuesday, that contract had a value of ~$412,000.

Buying one of those contracts means betting on a higher gold price. All you need is ~$20,000 cash to see one of those ~$412,000 contracts show up in your account. This is margin, or cash deposited in the account allowing you to hold the 100-ounce gold contract.

If gold rose ~$100/oz, like it did Monday, your contract value rises from ~$412,000 to ~$422,000. However, your trade shows a ~50% profit because you only deposited ~$20,000 for the contract and the value of the contract rose by ~$10,000.

It’s pure financial alchemy… and it works in both directions.

If gold falls ~$100, the value dips to ~$10,000. The futures broker might call you and ask for a wire to shore up the account. Another $100 down and you’re busted. The broker typically liquidates the contract sending you a bill for any loss in excess of your $20,000 deposit. Ouch…

Days like Tuesday show the power of moving the price around with futures. It’s an odd argument to say half-a-year’s worth of gold turns over for technical reasons… hedging, or any other plausible idea.

Maybe… but reality likely means heavy selling wiped out leveraged gamblers holding long futures bets. That beget more selling, and few physical ounces of gold changed hands in the process… only paper contracts.

Let your imagination run for a minute… you’re a trader looking at this hyperbolic gold price. For $200/oz of cash margin you can sell millions of ounces without ever touching an ounce…. All you need is enough financial heft to keep the selling up long enough to overpower buying, the price tumbles. The more it falls, the more your leveraged bet soars in value. Then, at some point, the forced selling dries up… and you cover. Never touching a physical ounce. That’s how free markets work…here in the U.S.A. at least.

We have three positions exposed to gold in the portfolio. They’re all holding solid gains, even after the mid-week tumble. Let’s get into them now.

If you forgot to subscribe, join us here as a regular subscriber.

We also have a Founder Level with quarterly notes from the TTL desk. The Q3 Notes covered three trading warrants from an expert on the subject…one of them quickly shot up when critical metals dominated headlines. Topics in Founder Notes are not recommendations… just a closer look at things on the TTL desk once a quarter. If you’re into that kind of thing, check it out.

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