Never Enough
The true cost of more
Capt. Jim tells me people are really on the go. To be clear, he volunteered the info, I didn’t ask.
Dressed in a full pilot costume, shirt, tie, ID badge, shoulder epaulets, that bus driver hat they all wear, the 65-year-old had just landed a midsize business jet at a New York FBO.
That’s a “fixed-base” for non-commercial passenger aircraft. There’s a waiting area with snacks and leather chairs but not much else. Also, close to no security, since people rarely hijack a plane they already own.
Today’s owner sent Capt. Jim to pick up his kids from summer camp. He then had to send the either always verbose or just acutely caffeinated Captain home in Delta First seat 4C, next to me in 4D.
These guys have a hard time not flying. You’d think at least take the tie off. But they can’t… They stop by the cockpit on the way in, help people with bags, nitpick my disregard for the safety briefing, and seem to face a potential panic attack if they can’t see out the window during takeoff and landing.
The cost of Capt. Jim plus a midsize 7-8-seater like a Citation or Hawker runs around $7k/hr…roughly. Step up to the larger Gulfstream G4 or G5 category and you can double that in a hurry. Those are big enough to carry almost an entire soccer team.
If you’ve flown this way you know they usually cater the plane with what looks like the same spread you get during afternoon tea at The Ritz London. Which incidentally is not a Ritz-Carlton, and thankfully free of loyalty point junkies.
How People Think
$7k/hr might sound like a lot… but it’s a matter of perspective.
Capt. Jim will work for anyone in the midsize jet world. Today’s client was a billionaire.
Let’s say he sends the plane somewhere 3 days a week, for about 5hrs each time round-trip. That’s 15hrs a week or ~$105,000/wk plus the cost of ferrying the Capt. to and from work. Safely ~$5.5 mil/yr.
Even at that rate… today’s owner couldn’t possibly run out of money. Treasury bill interest alone on a billion is ~3.7% or ~$37mil/yr. Meaning you could fly a fleet of six planes simultaneously at that pace and still not spend the interest on merely one billion.
Capt. Jim doesn’t fully process this. He, like most people, sees his employer as “them,” and himself as “us.” He appears unable to let go of all the concepts and beliefs he’s picked up from his fellow man.
This matters, because chances are, that big boss runs on his own bad thinking. He too doesn’t have enough. He may worry what the other billionaires think of him, especially the ones with several billion and up. What he’s involved in, where he vacations, how people look at him. All this is merely an elevated level of common bad thinking. Just as dangerous and futile as the Capt. worrying he can’t relax until he has a little more.
Lose Touch with The Flow of Things
I happen to enjoy commercial flying, with appropriate airline status of course. The back of the plane adds more physical wear and tear than I can handle.
What I like about flying is the process. There’s a flow of things, a pace to travel. If you can sense that, you’ll tap into a deep state of observation.
Sure, private aviation is nice. The black car drives you right to the plane, they have crustless finger sandwiches for you, plus the takeoff is near-vertical. But you lose a valuable sense of what people are up to. That helps you predict what the herd might do next.
It’s far deeper than the surface level nuisances. The arbitrary rules, long queues, bad food, or the unusual shape of TSA workers. Almost as if they discriminate against lean people during the hiring process.
Don’t for a second think this is about humility either… that’s another trap. There’s nothing wrong with flying in a better seat. Also, nothing wrong with being the only passenger on a plane.
It’s disconnecting from the human experience that causes huge issues.
For every person who’s sure they don’t have enough, there’s a lesser person who’d gladly trade places with them. That lesser creature swears they’d be totally content with the swap. In fact, they’d give everyone on their whole bowling team a Starbucks gift card or a scratch-off lottery ticket when they told them the good news, just to share the love.
That’s a nice idea, but it’s not how things work. After a certain threshold, money doesn’t matter. The motivations change.
Your boat gets parked at the fuel dock because the slips are for larger vessels. Someone says, “I had a plane like yours when I was in college.” Or worst of all, you rent a house in Marbella and figure out it’s on the wrong street. Almost like a schoolyard friendship which fails to advance because one set of parents lives on the wrong side of the tracks…
This stuff happens… and it gets worse. “What’r you up to these days?” needs the right answer at the cocktail event. Invest in something too new or too old and you’re shunned. It goes on and on, until you realize it doesn’t matter.
And if you can do that now, you’ll do yourself a huge favor. Things get more obvious… life feels easier, and investing is less about comparison. That unleashes newfound clarity.
They Steer Companies
Most highly-successful investors end up fascinated with human psychology. People run companies, people buy stocks, and people cluster around trends.
It’s why seeing the never enough state of mind in your peers helps predict what they’ll do next. Seeing it in yourself helps you enjoy life. Seeing it in the billionaire class helps understand why two stocks in the same industry can move in different directions.
You’ll notice right away people shun this deeper look into things. They’ll say it’s too headsy for them, or too complicated for a simple person who just needs direct instruction on which stock symbol will go up so they can get ahead. That person never succeeds. They’d be far better off spending the money than gambling with it.
The people who do look see the evidence in plain sight. Of course, you can’t call out these high-level control freaks easily, the ones running companies. They’ll sue you, likely using company funds. Meaning if you’re a shareholder, you’re funding a lawsuit against yourself. What makes it worse is, your assumptions are often right.
Take the gold rally earlier this year. The late January high of ~$5,417/oz was ~136% higher than just one year before.
If you went back to any gold conference last decade, any of them, and asked the CEO of any major mining company what ~$5,500/oz gold would do to their stock… every single one of them would say something like, “You’ll have to peel it off the ceiling.”
In reality, some stocks did drastically better than others. Take the three marque majors for instance, Barrick Mining Corp (B), Newmont Corp (NEM), and Agnico Eagle Mines Ltd (AEM).
This chart shows the widely-respected major Barrick in orange trailing its two peers by a mile. And that’s in the midst of a generational move in the gold price.
Reporters only now point out AEM did almost ~4-times as well at the peak. The mainstream news comes long after it’s useful. People seem to miss that.
Barrick always had an odd structure under its deceased founder and long-time operator Peter Munk. That’s a personal opinion developed over ~20 years of experience...
More recently it always felt like buying the stock turned you into a sharecropper instead of a shareholder. That’s no offense to the projects or even the mid-level employees.
There was just this feeling. Kind of like the one you get when driving a corporate vehicle with a governor capping top speed at 55 mph, even when you cross state lines into a posted 70 mph zone.
Sure enough… there’s a heavily compensated expert at the helm. He’s a master with corporate finance, which when used aggressively can at times feel necromantic to shareholders.
The 12-year Chairman of Barrick rakes in a ~7-figure stipend, many options, various perks. Then sits on seven other boards including Ford Motor and Paramount, runs his own advisory firm, and according to a less-than-flashy Bloomberg article, wrestled full control of Barrick from its most recent CEO, who had major industry respect.
There’s never enough. At no time did anyone stop to see this guy has a reported ~$113 million worth of Barrick stock, no obvious focus on the gold business, and at 72-years-old, seems determined to compete for more in every category.
Time settles all scores… and after years of sharecropping, Barrick shareholders seem irritated with his latest plan to separate the company into two parts, conveniently doubling his influence.
Think Bigger
The world’s a lot bigger than the gold industry.
Don’t tell the gold bugs but there are swings in tech shares these days that nearly eclipse the entire market cap of the gold sector.
Big swings mean big opportunity regardless of which side you’re on. Especially when the swing is related purely to excessive speculation being reined in overnight.
What you find is the same off-thinking runs this sector too, just with bigger numbers.
In a way, data is the new gold, tech the new frontier, and hardware the modern railroad. Yet people still make the decisions. Understanding how people think, what motivates them, how they run corporations, helps avoid stocks like Barrick, and helps explain why things happen in tech land.
Take Leopold Aschenbrenner for instance. He’s ~24 years old. Way back in 2021, he was still at Columbia University in NYC.
The AI-expert published a ~164-page whitepaper on the future of this trend after being fired from OpenAI. It attracted attention, and the chance to raise substantial funds he could invest.
Situational Awareness, LP became the fastest growing fund in several categories. Returns topped ~1,000%, then crashed last month. Almost like a bank run, the fund had to sell off much of its stock portfolio at a fire sale discount.
However, think back to the comparisons that plague Capt. Jim and the rest of his subdivision. They see a billionaire 24yr old who leverages his ~$10 billion fund as much as 4x, meaning he’s got $40 billion of stock with $10 billion backing it… Not one of those people sits in their screened-in lanai thinking they’d push the bets further.
Mr. Aschenbrenner negotiated the fire sale from a large Tuscan-style villa in the hills above Carmel, CA. Roughly ~72 hours before his own nuptials, which included a time for guests to quiz him on his most current AI predictions, the ~24-year-old got to know the top lieutenants of firms run by Ken Griffin and Izzy Englander via phone deep into the night.
Forget about the numbers. Forget about the size of the boat, plane, house, or account. If you go with the flow of life, you start to notice. If you stop comparing everything to us and them, you start seeing resonance. If you learn for the sake of learning, you stack up cumulative knowledge. Finally… things happen in a way that makes complete sense. Instead of being surprised, worried, anxious, you’ll enjoy the ride a little more.
How Stocks Move Now
In early November 2025, about 9 months ago, we bought shares of a company making key connection components for the AI boom. It ran up ~217% by June.
Since then, it’s had huge gap days up and down. In late July, mostly down. Now it seems like it’s back on regular footing.
While we can’t know for sure, it looks like the 24-year-old bridegroom had some of those immensely leveraged bets in this company, the same one we own. We’ll discuss it in greater detail later in the portfolio review, but the huge, unexpected drawdown coincided exactly with his fund’s fire sale of equity securities.
We’re still up ~164% in nine months… that’s against an era where people told us ~8% per year compounding was a magic carpet ride.
There truly is never enough… until you decide to stop competing and start living.
The TTL Map
Speaking of living, TTL has two types of readers.
The first comes and goes quickly. Like Stephen F. who sent a fiery complaint that he wasn’t personally informed of our decision to add to a position on a pullback this spring. As if we’re supposed to send him a text and disrupt his trip through the buffet line at the Sky Club. He’s likely licking lemon bar icing off his index finger anyway and wouldn’t be able to quickly load up the Schwab app.
That’s not our reader… he’ll sign up for stacks of newsletters, favoring the ones with big promises, bad results, and forgettable editorial.
What we’re doing here is learning for the sake of it. In a world of computer-generated editorial, hyper-stimulated ad blitzes, and endless distractions, try reading something written by a human.
The entire genesis of the newsletter industry was interesting person tells interesting story. If you read enough interesting stuff, you’ll become more interesting. Forget about the fact we’ve got enough portfolio wins that you could just catch one of them and fund the learning for two lifetimes.
Plus, we lock in your subscription price the day you sign up. Meaning as long as you stay actively subscribed, we eat the inflation, of which there’s a lot…
Speaking of, we’re working on a new subscriber feature called, The TTL Map. It’s almost ready for real time. The Founders got a preview recently. In fact, they sort of beta-tested it to help speed the process.
This map is for real seekers. You’ll be able to see places we visited in past TTL issues, see notes, then click out of the TTL map directly to your personal Google Maps where you can save the pin yourself.
This isn’t a travel review service per se. Things change rapidly, and even the finest hotel experience in the world eventually gets ruined by private equity. Same goes for the best croissant in NYC or Paris. Things change… we’ll do our best to update the map when age overtakes beauty.
The idea here is you’ll get a jump on planning your next adventure. You might see one thing worth doing, which leads to something else you’ve been wanting to do, and keep putting off.
TTL keeps growing and it’ll take the price higher with it. If you’re on the fence, lock in while you can. People who came on board in the early days are in an almost free-ride situation at this point.
Plus, if you know someone else who’d love it, forward the letter. They’ll read for free to the paywall. In time, we’ll earn their attention, and they’ll cross it. This is a distance race. It’s a process, not an event.
Assuming no aviation accidents, rogue cosmic debris, or random attack on the New York subway, this should go on for several more decades.
Hard Court Season in Full Swing
One benefit of new ideas, new places, and new experiences is you notice new things. Some of them turn into actionable ideas… even if they feel like leisure at the time. Traveling to see professional tennis is one of those things for me.
An interesting feature of the game is the millimeter-precision of its rules. This means the laser-like details of the court, lines, net, equipment… both players face the same conditions. Better play is the only way to win.
Contrast that with modern life where politicians make draconian laws, then give exceptions to noisy donors. Or school officials who act stern until they run into the child of a big donor. At times it feels like the grey area is where success happens. But not in tennis.
The tour is now in its outdoor hard-court swing. That starts after Wimbledon, the grass grand slam, and runs through DC, Montreal, Cincinnati, Winston Salem, and NYC for the final 2000-point hard-court grand slam event around Labor Day.
A company called Laykold is the leading producer of the outdoor hard-court surface. It might look like simple blue and green paint with white lines…but it’s much more. Each tournament venue strips and replaces this acrylic surface annually to ensure precision. Further, the choice of ingredients in the acrylic solution makes Montreal bounce differently than Cincinnati.
Both Montreal and Cincinnati, which kicks off this weekend, are Masters 1000 events. These are nine 1000-point tournaments on the tour. I’ve seen seven of them, and plan to see the other two, Madrid and Shanghai, when possible.
Points are critical in professional tennis because you’ll seed poorly if you don’t have them. Worst case, you’ll have to qualify, which means playing an entire tournament just to get into the actual tournament. You’re completely gassed when the main event starts.
Tennis tournaments are single elimination events. Prize money and points build at each round. Similar to the better-known NCAA basketball tournament, higher seeds face easier first rounds, sometimes even receiving a bye. As the tournament progresses, competition heats up.
Traveling for professional tennis is a great way to see new things. Like this superb local coffee roaster in Montreal, which we’ll include on the TTL Map for subscribers. If you get to Montreal, check it out.
The coffee shop is tucked into a winter sports store, snowboards and ski suits, etc. There’s a little bench to sit on with other coffee nerds and talk. Plus, the barista, pictured here, is like talking to a coffee sommelier.
Seeing the evening session of a professional tennis event leaves most of the day open for coffee, croissant, and sauna. In each category, you can and should find the best. Again, see The Map for links if heading to Montreal anytime soon.
Up ~27% off The April Low
This whole exercise is much more than a life of leisure.
The Trust owns shares of a company producing what I feel is the finest tennis racquet available in the world. It’s a strong claim… but when you need 305 grams to be exactly that, and it’s a weapon you’ll carry into a three-hour battle, compromising means choosing second place. There’s no reason to do that.
Plus, shares of the only almost pure play tennis racquet producer trading, are up ~27% off the April lows.
In several issues this summer, we showed a multi-year chart… every year about this time the company spits out earnings, announces its semi-annual dividend, and for some unknown reason, sees a lumpy inflow of cash from international investment funds. That last part is yet to come this year…
Just notice the move up yesterday. That’s 7.22% in a day. Actually, in a night, since it trades while many of you sleep, or watch YouTube videos, whatever it is you do between sun down and sun up.
Plus, if this pattern works out like prior years, we’re just getting started. In the chart below, notice the huge trading volume backing the 7.22% one day move…