While medieval Lords had moats and drawbridges, and wealth from being landed gentry (people who controlled estates and received income from tenants renting land on the estate) or peers of the Realm (members of the Royal Family or those with titles presented by the Royal Family) – todays tycoons prefer megahotels, casinos, private equity, or the good old-fashioned Oil business. For the sake of this article, let’s refer to crude Oil with capital O. So you know when I’m referring to the olive variant.
The Oil empire is now a long-standing television trope, but we also have self-made billionaire mavericks, eccentrics, and exotics in the crew of a combined $1.54 trillion (more than all the money held in U.S commercial banks). So is the Oil business reserved for Fallon Carrington, part of an undesirable, eco-unfriendly and corrupted and dynasty? We’ll call this the tippity-top-tier for the time being. Members of this empire are not all famous, or even well-known, but relative to the average citizen they can do what they want and their money allows them to be free. Isn’t that what our forefathers were getting at? But freedom has a price.
Welcome To The Club
“There are people who have money, and there are people who are rich”
Coco Chanel
Should you, like several of your fellow countrywomen or men, each year, suddenly find yourself in eight-figure territory you may find yourself asking “who are my ruddy faced peers and why do they all look malnourished?”
Be it Carrington Oil via mining, or Vito Corleone olive oil via farming – Investing is becoming difficult by the day, even for smart money. The entire hedge fund industry is feeling the reverberations of the changing financial landscape. Its reputation has been tarnished in the last decade, during which its hedged returns couldn’t keep up with the unhedged returns of the market indices.
On the other hand, research was able to identify in advance a select group of hedge fund holdings that outperformed by more than 124 percentage points since March 2017 [to 2021].
Supervivencia y Aflicciones
Olive oil is a luxury produce made from an un-luxury livelihood. After all, who’s racing to be a farmer rather than a banker?
If you start farming and soon find your vacant frown met with your passed-down eccentricities and an added personal CPA (certified personal accountant) congratulations! You’re no longer just a frightful bore with a nine-figure bank balance. But don’t rush to be properly acknowledged, as there’s stiff-upper everything if you peer high enough into the social stratosphere. There, you’ll reach the British aristocracy (or wherever you find yourself in the world) and discover yourself morphing into an extreme snob. My advice, farm for the joy of it, for self-sustainability or for Mother Nature. Those Oil guys are nothing like us. So just eat olives and try ride Andalusian horses for enjoyment with your mud covered farm-girl (me) and remember the days when being featured in Tatler magazine and the idea of having a couple million actually meant something… even if it is in a tightly controlled trust.
Posie Lombardi Rodriguez 