Everybody remembers the DeLorean. Nobody remembers the number. Doc Brown needed 1.21 gigawatts to push a car through time, and in 1985 that was the punchline — power so absurd it could only come from a lightning bolt. Today it is roughly one data center campus.
The DeLorean has been replaced by the robotaxi. Last month a humanoid robot ran 100 meters in 9.39 seconds in front of a stadium crowd, faster than Usain Bolt has ever run it. In June an uncrewed boat pulled two downed Army aviators out of the water near the Strait of Hormuz. And none of that is the half of it. The same intelligence is now in the call you place to your bank, the scan your doctor reads, the route the truck takes to your grocery store. We are using it for nearly everything now, from photographing your kid’s half-assembled bike to find the part you are missing, to a scientist redesigning a strand of DNA. And yes, the way this money manager works — and, dare I say it, writes.
Much of what you are witnessing now manifested just twenty-four months ago. The underlying technology had been in development for years, of course. But the investment picture and the cultural zeitgeist began their transformation about two years ago. All this begs a very important question: when the technology tornado spits you out, where will you be heading?
To answer that, go back to when the clouds started forming on the horizon. Not way back — just far enough to see how quickly and dramatically things change. To understand the value printed on your account statement, let’s go back two years.
Two years ago, artificial intelligence was a single-stock story: NVDA’s earnings call. OpenAI was interesting but hallucinating as though it had spent the week at Burning Man, and Anthropic was a word you heard only in college social science departments.
Two years. That was all it took. In two years the face of business changed completely, across every sector: how a company hires, how it spends, how it grows, how it earns. The ramifications are not fully knowable. But as at every prior industrial inflection, there will be winners, and there will be losers.
Every dollar you own today is a bet on a world that has not been described yet. Not by me, not by the strategists on television, not by anyone selling you a forecast. That is not pessimism. It is humility, and it is what I get paid for.
If you are receiving this missive, you invest in the equity markets in some way, through a money manager or on your own. At this moment, where you go, where you turn, the choices you make will have a profound impact on your returns. Make a mistake and it compounds. What is vicious about this market is not its temper, it is its speed: a business can be structurally obsolete in twenty-four months. Back the wrong ones and you may not get a second chance. If your horizon is thirty years, ignoring all of this and buying the whole market is a perfectly good answer. Participation does not require perfection. If it did, I would be out of a job. It does take common sense, awareness, low fees, and a transparent, efficient portfolio that rides ahead of the twenty- and thirty-year tsunamis rather than being swamped by them.
What now?
I am leaning into Doc Brown’s 1.21 gigawatts. That power is real now, and I would rather aim it at my own work than stand back and worry about it. Let me be plain: I am not against the machine. It is a tool on my desk, no different in kind from the tools Caterpillar and Illinois Tool Works have been selling for a century. What earns a place in a portfolio is never the tool or the excitement about it. It is sustainable, durable earnings. What I will not do is buy a theme indiscriminately because it is the theme. Curation and herd behavior sit on opposite poles. Historically, the herd tends to end up at the bottom of a cliff.
Harnessing the lightning bolt
The Constitution is a new KWM proprietary managed portfolio. It is built neither to avoid what is popular nor to chase it. Plastic cherries look wonderful in the bowl. Nobody should eat them. Every business faces the same test, fashionable or forgotten: durable growth, a strong balance sheet, a rational price against what it earns, management honest and able with capital, and a moat nearly impenetrable and widening rather than eroding. Pass, and the sector does not matter. Fail, and no story gets you in.
Thirty businesses at most, each argued against a written doctrine drawn from forty-nine years of Berkshire Hathaway letters, plus one principle I added myself: earnings expected to hold up across recession, inflation and stagflation. Pricing power, and products people buy in any weather. A hull made of brass should endure any environment. Nothing enters and nothing leaves without my saying so. Going back to the future, there are things I cannot predict, and in two years there will undoubtedly be stocks in this book that have underperformed. I will stay vigilant and clear-eyed, and control the controllable. The undisputed and undefeated fact of the equity market is that you must be invested to earn a return from it. The good news is that you get to choose how. The fact sheet is at keelwealth.com/constitution.
What makes this firm unique
I do not require all of your assets to open an account. Most managers want the whole relationship or nothing. If a piece of your portfolio has been underperforming, we can move that alone, provided it meets our minimum. Whoever holds the rest keeps it. You get a second manager in the bullpen, with a record you watch in your own account rather than in a brochure.
Two years from now someone will write this missive about September 2026, and the interesting part will be what none of us are discussing today. The portfolio you hold now is the one that will live through it.
If we haven’t talked recently about your time horizon, your withdrawal plans, or what a misjudged two years would mean for your household, let’s have that conversation this fall. Call me.
If this missive brings someone to mind — someone closer to needing their money than two years ago — I welcome the introduction. Referrals are how this practice grows.
This missive reflects my views as of the date of publication and is provided for informational purposes only. It is not a recommendation to buy or sell any security, nor is it investment advice tailored to any individual. Market data cited is drawn from public sources believed to be reliable. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal.
Regarding the Constitution Portfolio: no performance record is presented and none should be inferred. A portfolio of roughly thirty positions is concentrated and will behave differently from a broad market index, including in periods of loss. Research is assisted by language-model software working under a written doctrine; every recommendation is reviewed and signed off, or refused, by Scott Zodin personally, and no model places trades. The doctrine is Keel Wealth Management’s own interpretation of Warren Buffett’s published Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letters. Keel Wealth Management, LLC is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Berkshire Hathaway Inc. or Warren E. Buffett; neither has reviewed or approved this strategy or has any involvement in it, and any errors of interpretation are ours alone.
Back to the Future
Everybody remembers the DeLorean. Nobody remembers the number. Doc Brown needed 1.21 gigawatts to push a car through time, and in 1985 that was the punchline — power so absurd it could only come from a lightning bolt. Today it is roughly one data center campus.
The DeLorean has been replaced by the robotaxi. Last month a humanoid robot ran 100 meters in 9.39 seconds in front of a stadium crowd, faster than Usain Bolt has ever run it. In June an uncrewed boat pulled two downed Army aviators out of the water near the Strait of Hormuz. And none of that is the half of it. The same intelligence is now in the call you place to your bank, the scan your doctor reads, the route the truck takes to your grocery store. We are using it for nearly everything now, from photographing your kid’s half-assembled bike to find the part you are missing, to a scientist redesigning a strand of DNA. And yes, the way this money manager works — and, dare I say it, writes.
Much of what you are witnessing now manifested just twenty-four months ago. The underlying technology had been in development for years, of course. But the investment picture and the cultural zeitgeist began their transformation about two years ago. All this begs a very important question: when the technology tornado spits you out, where will you be heading?
To answer that, go back to when the clouds started forming on the horizon. Not way back — just far enough to see how quickly and dramatically things change. To understand the value printed on your account statement, let’s go back two years.
Two years ago, artificial intelligence was a single-stock story: NVDA’s earnings call. OpenAI was interesting but hallucinating as though it had spent the week at Burning Man, and Anthropic was a word you heard only in college social science departments.
Two years. That was all it took. In two years the face of business changed completely, across every sector: how a company hires, how it spends, how it grows, how it earns. The ramifications are not fully knowable. But as at every prior industrial inflection, there will be winners, and there will be losers.
Every dollar you own today is a bet on a world that has not been described yet. Not by me, not by the strategists on television, not by anyone selling you a forecast. That is not pessimism. It is humility, and it is what I get paid for.
If you are receiving this missive, you invest in the equity markets in some way, through a money manager or on your own. At this moment, where you go, where you turn, the choices you make will have a profound impact on your returns. Make a mistake and it compounds. What is vicious about this market is not its temper, it is its speed: a business can be structurally obsolete in twenty-four months. Back the wrong ones and you may not get a second chance. If your horizon is thirty years, ignoring all of this and buying the whole market is a perfectly good answer. Participation does not require perfection. If it did, I would be out of a job. It does take common sense, awareness, low fees, and a transparent, efficient portfolio that rides ahead of the twenty- and thirty-year tsunamis rather than being swamped by them.
What now?
I am leaning into Doc Brown’s 1.21 gigawatts. That power is real now, and I would rather aim it at my own work than stand back and worry about it. Let me be plain: I am not against the machine. It is a tool on my desk, no different in kind from the tools Caterpillar and Illinois Tool Works have been selling for a century. What earns a place in a portfolio is never the tool or the excitement about it. It is sustainable, durable earnings. What I will not do is buy a theme indiscriminately because it is the theme. Curation and herd behavior sit on opposite poles. Historically, the herd tends to end up at the bottom of a cliff.
Harnessing the lightning bolt
The Constitution is a new KWM proprietary managed portfolio. It is built neither to avoid what is popular nor to chase it. Plastic cherries look wonderful in the bowl. Nobody should eat them. Every business faces the same test, fashionable or forgotten: durable growth, a strong balance sheet, a rational price against what it earns, management honest and able with capital, and a moat nearly impenetrable and widening rather than eroding. Pass, and the sector does not matter. Fail, and no story gets you in.
Thirty businesses at most, each argued against a written doctrine drawn from forty-nine years of Berkshire Hathaway letters, plus one principle I added myself: earnings expected to hold up across recession, inflation and stagflation. Pricing power, and products people buy in any weather. A hull made of brass should endure any environment. Nothing enters and nothing leaves without my saying so. Going back to the future, there are things I cannot predict, and in two years there will undoubtedly be stocks in this book that have underperformed. I will stay vigilant and clear-eyed, and control the controllable. The undisputed and undefeated fact of the equity market is that you must be invested to earn a return from it. The good news is that you get to choose how. The fact sheet is at keelwealth.com/constitution.
What makes this firm unique
I do not require all of your assets to open an account. Most managers want the whole relationship or nothing. If a piece of your portfolio has been underperforming, we can move that alone, provided it meets our minimum. Whoever holds the rest keeps it. You get a second manager in the bullpen, with a record you watch in your own account rather than in a brochure.
Two years from now someone will write this missive about September 2026, and the interesting part will be what none of us are discussing today. The portfolio you hold now is the one that will live through it.
If we haven’t talked recently about your time horizon, your withdrawal plans, or what a misjudged two years would mean for your household, let’s have that conversation this fall. Call me.
If this missive brings someone to mind — someone closer to needing their money than two years ago — I welcome the introduction. Referrals are how this practice grows.
This missive reflects my views as of the date of publication and is provided for informational purposes only. It is not a recommendation to buy or sell any security, nor is it investment advice tailored to any individual. Market data cited is drawn from public sources believed to be reliable. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal.
Regarding the Constitution Portfolio: no performance record is presented and none should be inferred. A portfolio of roughly thirty positions is concentrated and will behave differently from a broad market index, including in periods of loss. Research is assisted by language-model software working under a written doctrine; every recommendation is reviewed and signed off, or refused, by Scott Zodin personally, and no model places trades. The doctrine is Keel Wealth Management’s own interpretation of Warren Buffett’s published Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letters. Keel Wealth Management, LLC is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Berkshire Hathaway Inc. or Warren E. Buffett; neither has reviewed or approved this strategy or has any involvement in it, and any errors of interpretation are ours alone.
What do you think?
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