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VIP Call Recap — This Week’s Highlights
A quick tour through what members covered this week. Industrial supply squeeze
Suppliers are now warning of longer lead times on hydraulic oil and synthetic motor oils. Five-gallon hydraulic prices are up 20–30% in just the past few months, and roughly double from a year ago. The scale of consumption is what most people miss — one job site can burn 1,000 gallons of diesel per day, about $5,500 daily in fuel alone. Fuel consumption on one member’s current job has doubled since it started, reshaping bid economics.
Silver
Around $77 at the time of the call, with one well-known analyst making an unusually sharp call. The room was wry about it — “silver is the original meme coin,” the squeeze has been “coming” for a decade — but for once the price action is backing the bullishness.
Practical training for kids
A lot of us have kids or grandkids coming of age during this difficult time. Today we discussed alternative solutions to help them grow during their summer breaks. The old apprenticeship model has mostly disappeared, and that’s a real loss. Some specific paths members surfaced:
Yestermorrow (Waitsfield, Vermont) — design/build school with hands-on construction and design.
The Shelter Institute — timber-frame focused; deep but narrow.
Dog grooming, mobile grooming, and dog sitting — AI-proof, entrepreneurial, surprisingly lucrative.
Horse dentistry and farrier work — six- to seven-week courses, real demand.
Mobile blade-sharpening — quiet niche, busy operators.
Worth noting: at the Alberta oil sands, women are preferred drivers of the giant Cat 797 haul trucks (softer on the equipment), and the pay is serious money for early-20s drivers.
Private placements — how members actually think about risk and reward
The meatiest discussion of the call. The day-trader’s clean reward-to-risk ratio doesn’t translate well to placements — too many variables, timeframes, and warrant structures. But several working frameworks emerged:
Manage the downside, hope on the upside. Imagine losing half. If that’s tolerable, the position size is probably right.
The warrant is the play. With a four-month-and-a-day hold, total loss is rare. Sell shares at a loss if needed, keep the warrants, and your upside stays alive.
Recycle winners into new warrants. Trim a runner, roll the cash into a new placement, capture another warrant. Someone called this “socialism in your portfolio” — but in a sector this irrational, taking some off the table while you can is rational because of the uncertainty.
Realistic ratios: roughly 3:1 or 4:1 winners to losers, with a working target of about 3x combined share-and-warrant return. Nobody bases their plan on 10-baggers.
Doug’s three biggest wins were a fraud, a last-minute blind discovery, and a psychotic break. None predictable. That’s why you build the warrant bank across many positions.
The Kelly Criterion came up as a more formal sizing tool. Full Kelly is uncomfortably aggressive — fractional Kelly (a quarter or fifth of the output) is more realistic. The caveat: outputs are only as good as your honest read on the odds.
One more useful tip: when asking AI to analyze a placement, don’t ask “which is better” — ask “how would Doug analyze this.” The frame gives you something to push against.
Trucking and the labor unwind
April was a member’s best month ever in trucking brokerage, beating the August 2022 high. The driver: the annual DOT blitz pulled massive capacity off the road (one in five trucks pulled over last year was put out of service immediately), and demand has been quietly rebuilding as shippers move freight they’d been holding back.
A demolition contractor echoed the same dynamic from the other side: non-union competitors built on cheap, often undocumented labor are losing workforce and reaching out for JV and subcontract work because they can’t staff their projects. The cheap-labor model worked beautifully on the way up; on the way down, companies that depended on it for their margins are folding fast.
Iran, China, and reading the geopolitics
The room split on whether an Iran deal is close. The skeptical view: none of Iran’s maximalist positions have actually moved, and the Washington consensus hasn’t shifted on the Strait. A more productive framing offered by the member living in China: stop trying to read Trump (nobody knows what he actually thinks) and instead look at what leaderships in China, Russia, and Iran want. At that altitude, leaders care about staying alive, staying rich, and not losing power — which actually creates negotiating room.
On the oil “blockade” specifically: tanker transits through the Strait have quietly recovered. After being throttled to about 2% of normal, traffic is back to ~28 ships per day. Chinese vessels especially are getting through. The rhetoric says blockade; the data says oil is moving.
The view from inside China
A longer reflection from the member based there, worth pulling out:
China is a civilization-state, not a nation-state. Its legal system, tax structure (no capital gains, no property tax, no inheritance tax), and social fabric are fundamentally incompatible with the systems Western oligarchs operate inside. Taiwan reunification is drifting toward a “one country, two systems” model precisely because nobody on either side wants a war.
Authority works differently. If a foreign operative were tailing you, you’d likely get a polite text inviting you for tea, with a map of where you and your shadow had been for two weeks. Comforting or unsettling depends on your priors, but it’s not the cartoon authoritarianism Western media portrays.
Don’t forget the rest of the world. Seven and a half billion people live outside the USD room. As the U.S. Treasury flexes harder on offshore dollar usage, more counterparties are quietly exploring alternative rails.
Boats and exit optionality
One member is seriously shopping catamarans. Quick notes from the room: cats beat monohulls for livability (no constant heeling), and Malaysia allows boats to be left in marina or on private land essentially indefinitely under local law — useful for Asia-based optionality. The old joke about boats and RVs came up more than once: the happiest day is buying it; the second happiest is selling it.
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