Join Bronson Hill and co-host Nate Hambrick on the Mailbox Money Show for a clear, practical breakdown of oil and gas investing with industry veteran Troy Eckard. The conversation covers the massive tax advantages (up to 80-90% deductions in year one), strong cash flow potential, current supply disruptions driven by geopolitical events, and why oil prices are likely to remain elevated for the next 12–24 months.
Troy shares his four decades of experience, explains the shift from risky vertical drilling to modern horizontal wells with high success rates, the importance of working with proven operators, and how to evaluate deals as a passive investor.
Troy Eckard is the founder of Eckard Enterprises with over 40 years in the oil and gas industry. His firm has deployed more than $1.4 billion in capital across working interests, mineral rights, and infrastructure, including ownership of the second-largest natural gas pipeline in the Gulf of Mexico.
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Full Transcript:
Bronson Hill: All right. Welcome to the mailbox money show. I am super excited today. I’m the host of this show, Bronson Hill. Really excited you decided to join us today.
We’re gonna talk today about oil and gas investing. If you haven’t invested oil and gas, which most people have not, there’s some incredible advantages. There’s tax advantages that are kind of a silver bullet, when it comes especially for high earners or people that have a lot of gains in different, all different areas. They can reduce different types of taxes and it’s kind of different from other types of investments, and there’s risks that evolve. So we’re gonna talk today about how do you understand that oil and gas space?
We’ve got an amazing guest here. We’ve got Troy Eckard, and I’ve got my amazing co-host, who just keeps upping his game better and better. And if you’re what, you listen to this, just he looks better. And he looks like younger every time I see him because of his lighting and the things he’s doing, or his touch-ups or something. So Nate Hambrick, what, tell me about oil and gas investing. What do you like about it? I know you’re an oil and gas investor.
Nate Hambrick: Yeah, well, ultimately, as cheesy as it sounds, I like the profit. Oil and gas has been very, very kind to us, and not just the profit, but also just how quickly it pays you back, and the tax — and then the tax incentives are really, really high. So the two oil wells I bought into a year and a half ago have been doing very well.
Bronson Hill: That’s great. Yeah, the cash flow and the tax — now we don’t offer any specific tax advice, to get your own professional advice. But we’ve seen people reduce, you know, millions of dollars of taxes they were going to have to pay, through things like oil and gas deals, which most deals you only can reduce, other passive gains with depreciation or things like that. Oil and gas is different, oil and gas drilling specifically, and it’s been over a hundred years in the tax code. If you ChatGPT what are the advantages for me as an oil and gas investor, reduces all types of taxable income, which is really incredible, and it’s typically about 80 to 90 percent year one, which is absolutely exceptional. So without further ado, let’s jump in.
We’ve got Troy Eckard here. He’s got four decades of oil and gas experience with Eckard enterprises. They’ve placed over 1.4 billion, with a B, in capital over 90 different portfolios. They’ve done working mineral rights, working interests, and they’re the second largest natural gas pipeline in the Gulf of Mexico, which now is the Gulf of America, right?
Troy Eckard: Yeah. Hard to keep up with the names.
Bronson Hill: Yeah, so they keep you doing more and more. So Troy, great to have you today, and once you give anything I missed on that, just, you know, what kind of, you’re involved with oil and gas.
Troy Eckard: Well, it’s been an interesting — for your 40 years of business going from, you know, the old style rigs, now you have completely driven by technology and computers, walking rigs, and now you’re not worried about dry holes. You’re just worried about manufacturing and harvesting. So the entire industry has been turned on its head the last 10 to 15 years, and it’s made it really a more palatable investment asset class for accredited investors than ever before. So it’s quite a dynamics. I wouldn’t think I’ve been doing this for 40 years, but it’s been fun and quite an evolution over those 40 years.
Bronson Hill: Yeah, that’s incredible. So I think the thing everybody wants to talk about, at least as we’re recording this, which hopefully will come out very shortly, is the war in Iran, obviously, there’s a lot happening there. The strait of Hormuz, over 20%, around 20% of the world’s oil is there. And when there’s a pinch, you know, it can push prices up everywhere, which is bad in general, unless you’re an investor, and then it can be really good. So there’s a way that I talk about, like, how do you use a crisis as an opportunity?
So as an oil investor, you know, obviously the best time to invest was before now. But if you’re gonna get it now, obviously there’s some positives there, and there’s so many things that can cause spikes like this. Can you talk a little bit about what you’re seeing as far as the war in relation to oil, and just things you’ve seen over the years, as far as, and maybe where you see, if — I think right now, we’re recording this, is a hundred and three dollars a barrel, or depends what, you know, what type of oil you’re looking at. Talk about pricing and kind of where you can see things going.
Troy Eckard: Well, I can tell you, 20 years ago, if a mosquito passed gas in the Middle East, oil went up twenty-five dollars a barrel. Today we got two global wars going on between, you know, three superpowers, between Russia, Ukraine, United States, Israel, and Iran, and oil is only up, really, twenty-five, thirty dollars a barrel.
So when you look at it from a relative risk-rewards, supply-demand, kind of a disruption, it should be 150 to 200 dollars a barrel if you did it in a comparative basis. So what it tells you is two things: is you probably have a much more broad distribution system around the globe, you have more sources providing oil than you ever had 20 years ago. And the second thing is, I think there’s a lot of distortion in the media. So I look at the movie Big Short, and I think we’ve been getting big-shorted for 24 months about this glut, an oversupply. It didn’t exist, never existed. It’s really more of a razor-thin point of demand.
Demand has gone up, supply stayed flat, and is shrinking. And so when you have a disruption for 30 days like the straits of Hormuz, it’s not really about the 20 million barrels a day missing in the strait. It’s the fact there was no one else that had any reserves to give. And the fact they’ve dumped 600 million barrels in the reserves from the Strategic Petroleum Reserves in G7 tells you how desperate they are. The fact that Trump gave Russia permission to sell in the oil in the first week tells you there is no supply. The fact that Trump is now turning on a California platform because there is no supply means we’ve all been lied to for the last 24 months. There is no supply surplus in the world.
Nate Hambrick: What do you feel like it is gonna take to break the dam loose, so to speak? Because use the Big Short as an analogy, which I love that, and I think that’s very accurate. What do you think has to happen for it, for oil prices to go up to 150, 200?
Troy Eckard: About another three weeks. So I told my geological team and my engineers about a week ago, and I bet a steak dinner, and I lost, but I said two Fridays ago, I said oil is gonna open up at over $100 a barrel on Monday. Well, then Trump came out and said, I decided, wasn’t 48 hours, I’ll give him 14 days.
I think about the logic in that. He’s willing to do anything he can to get the straits open. But because he made a 48-hour threat on the straits opening up and Iran stuck two fingers in the air, he said, okay, I’ll give you 14 days. So 14 days times 20 is, what, what are we talking about here? We’re talking about 280 million barrels. Oh, he’s willing to live without, but he’s dumped 200 million barrels out of our strategic petroleum reserves to make up the difference in shortfall. What it means is, he can’t get them to give in, he can’t get them to surrender. It’s gonna be a ground game.
So then they started pricing back in that expected oil supply shortage. We’re at $103 today. I believe if you get past the 15th of April, you’re gonna have traders looking for those back-in physical barrels to make their firm contracts for those refineries, those customers — Asia, the Caribbean, Europe — and you’re gonna find they’re gonna be scrambling to buy that last 15 to 20 million barrels. It doesn’t exist. You can see oil at 125 to 150 by May the 1st. So this is not a small clip. This is not a small disruption. This is a major cataclysmic disruption to global supply.
And if you look at the inbound and outbound out of the straits, you got ships full that can’t get out. You got ships that were outside that already delivered, trying to get back in, they’re being repositioned. But you’re missing 20 million barrels of waterborne transport. You do that times 30 days, you do the math, at 600 million barrels. You’re gonna be 1 to 3 billion barrels out of pocket by May the 31st. It’s gonna take one to two years to even begin to make up for that, not only restoring back to the original production in the reserves.
The other thing you think about is that oil and gas is a simple mechanism. It’s a domino effect. I produce, goes to local tank, goes to pipeline, goes to port, goes to ship, goes delivery. You disrupt that, it’s not only what’s on the water. I got to shut well heads. They’re shutting wells in, they’re cutting wells back. And as you know, when you shut wells back, it’s like siphoning gas from your kid. Once you stop pulling that gas out of tank, you got to do it just as hard the second time.
You got 3 million barrels coming out Iran that’s been basically essentially shut in. Got disruption. You got Qatar, which was 17% LNG. This is a cataclysmic effect on the global economy and supply, and it’s not going away for 12 to 24 months at all. It’s gonna be here for quite a while.
Bronson Hill: Let’s talk about that a bit. I think you can grab a lot of things, and of course if you’re listening, it’s easy to, you know, kind of freak out. And on one hand, like…
Troy Eckard: You should freak out. You just start buying oil and gas.
Bronson Hill: As an investor, I think it’s a great thing, right? Well, it’s gonna be — good that prices go up. For the world? It’s not a good thing because it will slow down growth and, you know, other types of things. So there’s different ways, obviously, to look at this.
Now, obviously you want to position yourself so that you can take advantage of those swings. Now, you talked a little bit about something here, too. There’s a lot of stuff happening that’s basically, in a way, trying to manipulate the price. And that’s the strategic reserves from, you know, Europe, from the US, putting money — and this is happening in gold and silver as well. We’ve seen it with the ETFs. I don’t know if you’re a precious metal investor, Troy, but for a while they’re trying to manipulate, keep the prices down. As you’ve been proven, JP Morgan was fined, I think, I don’t know, how many tens of millions of dollars, that were fined for basically manipulating the price of silver.
But in commodities, it’s, they’ll want to do it for a number of reasons, and it is kind of interesting how you can manipulate the price. Now we have OPEC, which controls, I think, was it like 20 or 30 percent of the world’s oil? It’s a minority, but it’s a certain amount. But I mean, at some point, when there’s a product like this where there’s physical demand, it’s not all futures, it’s like the product has to be there. And if it’s not there, like you said, you have major, major cataclysmic stuff.
So I mean, is there anything that, you know, if we get to where you just, the more time goes by, the more stuff can’t pass, they’re shutting wells down in Kuwait and then parts of Saudi Arabia, I mean, it takes a very long time. So we don’t go back to six or seventy dollar in any scenario of sixty, seventy dollar oil. We’re gonna be probably elevated for a very long time.
Troy Eckard: Yeah, and I think you have some real supply that’s gone. You’re gonna lose probably half the supply coming out of Iran. That’s one and a half million barrels a day. Saudi currently makes up about 9.8 percent of global production. We’re at about 100, 100-2 million barrels a day of production. We’re consuming about 104 million barrels a day. So we’re already at what I call a point of sale. We already were consuming as much as they could deliver.
But really what’s taking place is there’s been capital avoidance in the oil and gas sector for 15 years. So we’re probably one and a half to two trillion dollars behind on development. There hasn’t been a new refinery in this country in 60 years. There hasn’t been a new onshore rig probably built in the last five years, and there’s really very little in the terms of new sophisticated rigs that have been built, because no one can afford to build a rig when you can’t guarantee a contract, right?
The other side of this is we’re at about 500, little less than 500, onshore rigs. If you really had to ramp up today to replace it, we don’t have the crews. We don’t have the equipment. We don’t have the rigs, because they took the rigs and chopped them up. So you had 400 old, antiquated rigs, too expensive, too old to be drilling these new wells. They chopped them up, took off parts.
So if Trump says drill, baby, drill, we go, you got all we got, brother. There’s nothing left in us. And so we own a physical tank-coming — makes tanks for well sites. We’re like one of the largest producers of tanks in the central Oklahoma area, and we can’t even get them out the door, and they’re picking them up at the door, because there’s no tank makers. There’s no wellhead makers. There’s no catwalk makers. And so you basically, like farming, destroy the oil and gas sector.
If you want us to ramp up, you’re gonna have to pay us a lot of money. And the real thing that I think most people don’t understand is what we’re drilling today was based on last quarter of last year’s budget. They’re not gonna change their drilling until they get to the third quarter. They recognize this revenue.
So last week, you saw nine rigs laid down, oil’s at $100 a barrel, and they laid down nine rigs. What’s it saying? Until we see a runway of sustained, high, able prices, we’re not moving. We’re not budging. So that means you’re gonna have this six-month, nine-month delay in reacting to the shortage of supply, which is gonna make it cataclysmically worse. It’s not like there’s a fire and we run over the fire hose to put out the fire. We saw the fire and go, you guys got a marshmallow, because I’m not moving till I see this fire is gonna last for a while.
We’re not budging as far as drilling goes. In fact, my son works as our engineer. He’s got buddies working for two or three of the majors. They said they’re actually laying down two rigs next week, and one of them’s laying down three rigs week after next. We’re laying down rigs, not adding rigs, because our runway says we’re still getting paid $55 oil for what we sold in January and February. We’ll see this money sometime in June or July. We’re holding pat. The presidential policy is they want us to sell oil for $55 a barrel, and we’re like, we don’t work for free. We’re a private industry.
Bronson Hill: Can you explain that? Like, so you’re saying that even though the price is over $100 a barrel, they’re required to sell at $55 a barrel right now?
Troy Eckard: Well, no, I’m saying you sold oil in January that you sold. You’re getting paid in March, $54. I won’t see March’s revenue till May, and I need to see a quarter’s worth of that revenue before I go throw another 10 rigs out there. And we’ve been burned too many times as an industry. So we’re sitting back saying, look, for 24 months, between Biden and Trump’s first year, you beat us on the head and made us sell at 30% below margin. We kind of feel like we’re due six to twelve months of getting paid back what we got beat on the head for the last 24 months.
Bronson Hill: Makes sense.
Troy Eckard: Yeah, it’s kind of an interesting dynamics. But I don’t think we’re gonna respond until at least last quarter this year to any kind of price surge.
Nate Hambrick: What you described kind of reminds me of, the people who made some of, the people who made the most money in the California Gold Rush weren’t the diggers. They were the people selling the picks and all the different tools. Kind of makes me think, I mean, don’t get me wrong, we should all invest in the wells themselves. Part of me thinks, hmm, who do I know that I can invest in that’s selling the tanks? Besides just — who are you, also? Or where do you think are some of the profitable industries that are ancillary to the oil and gas well business?
Troy Eckard: Well, I’d say field services. The problem is there’s, the margins are so thin. I mean, we’re literally drilling wells right now, the wells we have drilling — we got quite a few drilling. We’re doing those wells for 25 to 30 percent below the AFE cost, whatever the budget was nine months ago. We are getting fracks done for half price. We’re drilling for maybe a million, a million and a half dollars less than what the AFE said.
So we’re getting the benefit of a hundred and three dollar oil today, and we’ve fracked about nine wells last week. We’re turning them on at $100. We drilled them for 30 to 50 percent below the AFE price that we had six months ago. So we’re getting a double bang — cheap wells that we drilled really low, because the service vendor prices are down. So I don’t know of any service company I would invest in. I think the best kind of performing stock right now is like Exxon, up to $163 a barrel, because they make money off the refined product and the production.
So they make money on either hand. It’s just a transitional time frame. I think you all said this big M&A surge, and now what you’ve done is you’ve taken competition out. So when Exxon bought up Pioneer, they now have two million acres and they don’t have to drill because it’s all held by production. There’s not this fuse burning on a time limit to develop. So you basically saturated the market with a bunch of assets that are held without any risk of not developing. So if I’m in a boardroom, I’m saying to my CEO — if I’m the CFO — say, just go ahead and sell less oil for twice the price. The math works.
Bronson Hill: Yeah, I know, and I want to actually touch base on that. If you’re an investor, you’re listening, you’re like, I mean, this is a question you should always ask: how can I take advantage of this? What can I do?
Obviously, there’s people that do this that are traders, that are kind of short-term. You know, they kind of come in and see an opportunity, to see people move funds around. But so in during COVID, there was a time when people weren’t driving. I was driving around in LA and there was nobody on the road. Actually, when I was in medical sales and I had the little card that was like, I could drive around, and it was like where you get pulled over, and it was certain places of the world, like in Italy, they actually would — they fine over a hundred thousand people being out of their homes. It was a crazy time.
But we look back, but there was a time there where oil went, you know, negative $40 a barrel. It was that you get paid to take oil because there was nowhere to put it, right? There were no more ships. There were no more opportunities. Can you talk about that era? Was there any opportunities that you guys were able to take advantage of that time, or even on the other — specific opportunities you compared to, like, what you see now? Obviously, it was a different thing. You know, obviously we’re seeing higher demand now, but this is obviously a commodity, so there’s things that pop up. But can you share any stories from back then that you saw that were just really interesting?
Troy Eckard: Yeah, you brought up a great point. So it’s two points. One: that’s when we started the current business model we had, was right before COVID. And what we recognized is every millionaire in the country was locked at home with his wife. So we’d call him and say, hey, we’re talking about energy and education, and we’d explain to him what we’re doing. They’d go, well, we’ve taken enough of your time. No, no, no, I’ve been in my house, with my wife, for three weeks. Keep talking. I want to talk about investment.
So we had a captured audience. But we also had an incredibly willing seller. Nobody was drilling. Rig count went down to 214 rigs from 700. Well prices were low, or negative for a little bit. And what you had was you had traders who said, I’ve locked into a firm contract for physical delivery. I can’t sell it to anybody. So it was a matter of how much money can I keep from losing? I’ll sell you it for $20. I’ll sell it to you at 10, hell, I’ll pay you $20 bucks to take it.
You’re about to see the opposite of that. So what’s gonna happen right now is the last 30 days was kind of that loose supply out there on ships and in tanks. Now they don’t have that, and I got a physical contract to deliver. Valero, as an example, a hundred thousand barrels. So typically they’ll buy heavy in the first nine days of every month. You’ll see commodities go up because they’re buying that ten or twenty thousand barrels of that hundred thousand — dollars — a hundred thousand barrels of firm.
You get to the middle of the month, the price kind of softens, as we saw that. You get to the end of month, like we are now, the 30th, at a hundred three dollars a barrel. Because now they got to deliver that last 20,000 barrels, and they got to go to the open market. So you could see oil up to 105 to 107 dollars by tomorrow. It’ll settle back a little bit in the first week. This is physical, financial, contractual requirement. What happens at the end of April is gonna be a little scary, because now you’re about 17 to 20 million barrels short. And now you’re gonna see people saying, I’ve got to buy early in the month, because there’s not physically enough barrels. By the last week, you could see oil at 125 to 135 dollars a barrel by the middle of April.
So this is about physical delivery, not options, and that’s where you can play the edge if you’re an options trader, that kind of stuff. But more importantly, for me, what you said is the important thing: is when no one else bought, that’s when we started what we’re doing. And we went from zero, about 120 clients, now we have about 3,300 millionaires as clients. We’ve got about 4,800 accounts. We got 1.4 billion in assets. Did the same thing the last two years, when Trump pushed the price down. We bought tremendous assets last year at 35 percent below market value. Now we’re being paid a hundred and three dollars a barrel.
We have twelve thousand wells, two million gross acres that we own, and our cash flow is about 250 million out the door. We’ll probably send out 200 million in revenue this year alone. So what happens is, most investors don’t have any confidence in energy because they know nothing about it. So they only get excited when they hear it in the news. You’re a day late and a dollar short. There’s still some good assets to buy. We think the last half of this year, we’re gonna have a hard time finding anything to buy, because our buy box is very strict.
So we only have what we own. We’re gonna pay a lot of benefits. But I bet we have a very slow back half of this year finding any asset worth buying, because the sellers are gonna be drunk on love, called a hundred and three dollar oil, and you’re not gonna be able to buy anything at a reasonable price.
Nate Hambrick: Since you brought it up, Troy, are you personally, if you don’t mind my asking, investing in oil futures?
Troy Eckard: No, I don’t. I’ve played every — I’m 61. I’ll be 62 this summer. I’ve done about every wild-ass investment you can think of, and what I really boiled down to is, do what you’re really good at. And, you know, look at Elon. He’s in three businesses, right? You look at the typical, like, Warren Buffett. He’s got 52 stocks out of 4,600 stocks. You find what you’re good at, and if you do it really well and you focus on it, you expand that skill set, which is what we’ve done.
So we own pipelines. We own mineral rights, drill wells. Have our own drilling. We take non-op as well. We’ll do about 200 million this year in drilling, about a hundred million in minerals, and then we have a pipeline that we own. You do what you’re good at, and the rest of the stuff just becomes more of an obstruction of your success. So I tell investors, do what you do: be a doctor, be a lawyer, be an engineer, be a farmer rancher. But if you want to work till June 15th every year and give your money for the first five months to the government, do it.
I’d rather drill a successful oil well, help the country become energy independent, and make 40 to 60 percent return on my money in the first 12 to 18 months. I make all my money back in four years and do it again and again and again for 41 years, which is what I’ve done. I’ve just pushed my taxes 41 years down the road by continuing to invest in domestic exploration. My wife’s new boyfriend can pay the tax bill whenever he gets my money.
Bronson Hill: That’s funny. Let’s talk for a minute. We have a couple more minutes here. Let’s talk about risks, because obviously we talk about the benefits of oil and gas. There’s amazing tax benefits, cash flow. There are risks here. There’s people in the space that are not good actors, right? There are people that take huge promotes… So let’s talk about that.
What are the risks, and how do people reduce those risks? Maybe talk about specifically what they are, because again, even if you were the good operator, I know it’s changed as well. It used to be a lot of dry holes, you know, 30 years ago. They’re dry holes all the time because you were kind of guessing. But now the technology’s improved so much, they can go in with the science and going into, electrodes and geology, and then come down. And then, of course, horizontal drilling’s helped a lot too. So talk about like risk management as a passive investor.
Troy Eckard: Well, number one, it’s always — whether in any investment asset class, whether it’s multifamily, whether self-storage, oil and gas — it’s always the who. So if you do a little Google search and you look at the who — I don’t even care what’s in the package. I don’t care what’s in the deal. I’ve learned this. I’ve had several billionaires as partners, and they’ve, everything said the same thing: it’s the who. I don’t care about what your deal is.
If you’re not comfortable with the who, nothing else matters. And so that means you got to dig a little bit. So if I’m a promoter, I’m a Ponzi scheme. I’m gonna buy the social media that pushes all my criminal activity to page number nine, which you’re never gonna get to. You got to dig, and you got to find out: is that person really been in oil and gas one year, or ten years, or thirty years? Had they been in multifamily one year, three years, or ten years? Do they have a track record? What’s their staff look like?
I mean, we’re doing right now, we’ve done about a hundred and thirty million so far this year. We got guys who raised 20 million a year. We did 20 million last week. So it’s not dollar quantity. It’s do you have truly somebody in that space or not? And it’s not being disrespectful to smaller players who raise less money. It’s maybe been raising money for four or five years, but you’ve done a good job. There’s a difference. Most these guys have no track record and have no experience, no expertise. They were selling widgets or cars two weeks ago. So the who’s important.
The second thing, after that, is you got to look at the technology. You wouldn’t — you should not touch a vertical well to save your life. You should never get in a vertical well when you have horizontal drilling. It’s not the electrodes, as you mentioned, Bronson. It’s more of what the oil companies have decided, is that we can manufacture well after well, save money by perfection. We’re gonna have a commercial well every single time. It’s, do I have this particular well that’s the Kentucky Derby winner, and this one’s third in place? I’ll take fifth in place, because I don’t lose my money. Maybe I make my money back in three years versus twelve months.
But it’s kind of crazy, when you think about eliminating the one big risk. I talked about 40 years — you could actually lose your money drilling this vertical well. I don’t have to say that anymore. Now I can say, I know I’m gonna find oil and gas. I know I’m gonna find a commercial quantity. I just don’t know if it’s gonna be a 12-month payout or a 60-month payout. But I know I’m gonna get my tax rights and make my money back, if it’s structured correctly and not over-promoted. That’s the key thing. Sophisticated investors know, I have to worry about being ripped off by a dry hole. It’s more of the who. Who over-promotes it, doesn’t know what they’re doing, or put you in a bad area where there’s really not good, successful wells being drilled, right?
Bronson Hill: Yeah, it’s amazing how things — I’m afraid I know AI is a part of that as well. These AI and the modeling to kind of know where that’s — where it is as well. It’s one of our partners is invested — that we’re working with — is invested, or has done over a thousand wells, and it’s been like just a handful of dry holes. It is very, very few. It’s less than 1%, substantially. And so it’s pretty amazing how that’s changed.
So Troy, well, I really appreciate you being with us today. I think you know, this is just great, if it really a time of conversation around, you know, just what’s going on in the world, how people can protect themselves, what they can do to get in and invest. How can people follow you and hear about your, what you’re doing on the oil side, the investing, and how can people reach and connect with you?
Troy Eckard: Yeah, it’s real simple. I mean, you go to eckerdenterprises.com. That’s our website. We created the only app of its kind, called Eckerd Insights. And if you sign up with Eckerd Insights, we don’t care about your information. If you just sign up, say, I’m not going to tell you if I have money, I might even tell you if I missed it. But you have thousands of hours of videos telling everything about how things work — oil and gas drilling, mineral rights, etc. — and you finally go, okay, I like what I see. But now I really want to think about looking at some investment opportunities. You can actually say, now I’m ready to talk to somebody.
We raise all of our capital internally, have no commissions. And we don’t use outside advice. We do it all internally. We’ll do about 500 million this year in capital. But what it allows you to do is go to the website, look and see what you like and what you don’t like. If you don’t like it, leave. We’re not going to chase you. And if you do like what you have, we’ll tie you to an in-house salaried wealth manager that says, tell me what you need, and I’ll tell you whether we can match you. Just very low pressure, the way we do things. Because generally speaking, like all of our mineral rights, we buy them. We own them before our partners come in. We put our money where our mouth is.And it’s just an easy way to do it.
The other thing is, if you’re investing with other oil and gas companies, we’ll help you with that. If it’s a good operator, maybe you have questions, we’ll help you. If it’s a bad operator, we can help you on that, too. But look, I’ve been doing this 40 years. I’m having fun. I’m 61. I hope I live to be another 40 years. It’s great to see the industry evolve, and I think we’ve only begun seeing the real true extraction values from these shale basins, because they’re just getting better and better and better at what they’re doing. So I think it’s really kind of an upside in terms of financial opportunity for investors today.
Bronson Hill: I just downloaded the app. I got it right here. So check it out. It’s Eckerd Insights. It looks awesome. I got some great articles, and honestly, it’s hard to learn about this as a passive investor, and there’s some in here about — like, there were some of those looking at — let’s see — it’s the, you know, 40 insights of how to evaluate mineral rights. 40 years of insights, or here’s the five fundamentals of buying mineral rights, right? So things like that, really valuable. So appreciate you being here, Troy. Just sit tight for a minute. We’re going to go ahead and just break this down, Nate and I.
So Nate, tell me, what was your, what were a couple of your takeaways from this interview today?
Nate Hambrick: Yeah, so two big takeaways, and there’s things that I already knew, but Troy confirms. Number one: never do vertical drilling. It’s — we already knew it, but, you know, sometimes you got to hear something seven times before you actually believe it. So Troy, thanks for being the 12th time I’ve heard that in the last few months. Appreciate you.
And then the second thing — and I kind of knew that oil prices were going to stay at a higher level — but you just, you go on Facebook, you go on TikTok, and everybody says, oh, it’s going to go back down to 70 here in a week or two, and you hear that enough times to where you start doubting yourself in the wrong direction. And so it’s really cool. I mean, you’ve got 1.4 billion dollars in assets under management. To hear that again, that it probably will be sustained growth in the oil and gas sector for a while. So how about you, Bronson? What were your takeaways?
Bronson Hill: Yeah, so I think, great, great interview. A lot of great insight to share. I think, you know, it’s been amazing to me, watching the last few years, there’s things that just take longer to catch up. No, the first one was gold and silver. I invested five, six years ago, a bunch of gold and silver. We’ve seen a three to six x increase in those, so it’s been awesome. But I’ve wondered, like, man, the price of everything has doubled since 2020, except for oil. Well, it’s like the same price. So why is that? How is that? And so sometimes too, it’s just a matter of when, more than if. And so we’re seeing it, and we’re — I don’t think we’re going to see — let’s — got the dog, you know, in here.
Troy Eckard: All right. He agrees. He agrees with you.
Bronson Hill: He agrees. Yes, yes, they agree. And so we’re gonna see, you know, continual — I think a continual increase in this, and we’re gonna see things, as an investor, I think it’s just so important how you position yourself, and getting in natural resources such as oil and gas. I think it’s that’s — really, what wealth is. It’s wealth is not dollars, wealth is not, you’re just having stuff. It’s having things that produce, and I think oil and gas is that. Obviously, productive real estate is that as well.
So anyway, really appreciate it.
Troy, thank you again. Nate, my pleasure. Thank you here as well.
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