It’s summertime. If you have an appetite for no more than a few sentences plus a chart, here it is.
In a world where “what’s different” has outsized importance relative to “what’s the same,” this is different.
Source: Yahoo Finance (price return). Crude oil (CL=F) as of July 16, 2026, indexed to 100 at Dec 31, 2025. Cone calibrated from 2023–2025 daily log returns; geometric Brownian motion, illustrative only. Past performance does not guarantee future results.
Compared to the last three years (during which crude oil prices generally declined), 2026 is different so far—very different indeed.
As of earlier this week, crude oil was 37.5% higher than at the start of the year.
The play-by-play is fairly obvious.
Pre-February 28, oil was tracking higher, ostensibly on the expectation of war with Iran (as suggested by the military buildup in the region).
Then we had the hot war, during which oil roughly doubled.
Then the détente (and the “cease-fire” MOU). That helped pull energy prices lower into the end of June, contributing to the reported decline in headline inflation for the month.
Since the start of July, the risk of renewed conflict has risen again, and oil has moved higher in response.
Families and businesses have spent the last few years getting used to lower energy prices. If that changes, budgets change too. What that means for the economy and markets remains to be seen.
Perhaps this gets “resolved.” That would be nice, from a geopolitical and human standpoint.
Perhaps the economy (and thus markets) has moved on from the oil-centric energy system that dominated the 20th century. That would be nice, from a risk and environmental standpoint.
And perhaps this domino makes other dominos fall (eventually). Households could reduce spending to absorb the “higher cost of everything,” starting with gas at the pump. Companies could rethink their spending plans in response to more cautious consumers, or the higher cost of delivering goods and services to them.
As I often say, if you know what happens next, that makes one of us. Much of this uncertainty is simply not under our control. The work is to make decisions that do not require a single version of the future to come true.
We’ll likely want to revisit this graph in a little while, after the next card is flipped over from the deck.
On July 26, 2018, my dad wrote me a simple email:
“I love you so much, and I have so many things to tell you.”
He and I had talked every day—sometimes for a handful of minutes over the phone, sometimes for hours in person—since he’d been admitted to the hospital with a cancer diagnosis five months prior.
We would speak a couple more times.
And our last email exchange would be dated July 29.
My father died on August 1, 2018.
To this day, I have so many more things I wish I could tell him.
If you haven’t received an email from me over the last month, now you know why.
My wife, my daughters, and I have been traveling together.
A decent number of weeks, as a matter of fact.
I didn’t want to write to you.
I wanted to talk to them.
Now, we’re back.
Let’s pick things up slowly.
We have a couple of recent podcast conversations to talk about.
Money decisions are people decisions.
I used to work closely with Kaley Klemp.
She helped us think about how people actually work together: how they talk, how they disagree, how they make decisions, and how they behave under stress.
Kaley joined TREUSSARD TALKS back in early June.
It was a “different kind of conversation.”
Less market talk (a lot less…).
More about how people communicate.
How they treat one another.
How they feel.
We talked about being “above the line” or “below the line” — open and curious, or closed and defensive.
We talked about the difference between asking, “What can I learn here?” and asking, “Whose fault is this?”
We talked about the “need to be right” and how dangerous it can be in fields where nobody gets to be right all the time.
That matters because investing is not just about numbers. It is about fear, patience, ego, regret, and the conversations families sometimes avoid until they have to have them.
That’s also why I’m teaching Behavioral Finance at UC Irvine this summer. The numbers matter. But what people do with the numbers often matters more.
Conscious Leadership, Curiosity, and Culture by Design — with Kaley Klemp | Treussard Talks (E26) is on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.
All of it is on treussard.com, including a deeper summary and the full transcript.
The economics of private equity investing—and what makes private firms different
And then there is my conversation with Ludovic Phalippou (Oxford Saïd Business School) on private equity.
This one gets into how investment firms actually make money — and why investors should understand that before they sign up.
Because you consume your own future returns.
Not someone else’s historical track record.
And as we know, past performance is not an indication of future results, especially when the world changes as much as it has over the last few years.
As he puts it, Ludovic has spent twenty-five years studying one subject every day, from every angle: private equity for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
He has read countless fund documents — the legal agreements that spell out who gets paid, how much, and when. He has done the math on fees: what managers collect, what investors keep, and where the gap comes from. He’s testified before the House of Lords and built models that many institutions use to estimate what private investments might earn.
What’s interesting about Ludovic is that he’s often seen as “the enemy of private equity.”
That’s what happens, I suppose, when you spend years (decades, really) pointing out the economics of fund fees earned by fund managers instead of end investors.
But I was actually surprised by the number of times Ludovic said, “and I like this a lot about private equity.”
For example:
He is convinced that private firms are, by and large, run differently from public companies.
A sharper focus on business performance (read: profits), and
Less office politics, career-risk management strategies by senior executives, and all the strange internal games that can shape behavior inside large organizations.
On this last point, I will refer you back to my conversation with Kaley. See, it’s all connected indeed.
He also argues that when the focus is on eventual business success, people tend to be more willing to experiment, learn by doing, and take chances. He has some fun examples on this front.
So yes, Ludovic is critical of private equity—on certain aspects, very much so.
But he is not cartoonish about it. And that is what made the conversation useful, with lessons that apply well beyond the topic at hand.
The Economics of Private Equity with Ludovic Phalippou | Treussard Talks (E27) is on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.
The full transcript and a deeper summary are on treussard.com.
You do not have to be on a team.
You do not have to be a private equity evangelist or a private equity hater—even if having opinions about the industry is how you make a living.
You can study things as they are.
You can notice what works.
You can trace who gets paid what.
You can be open-minded about where the risks are.
You can point out where the story people tell about an asset class differs from the arithmetic underneath it.
You can live in the world as it is:
messy,
full of contradictions,
and hard to put in a simple box.
That, to me, is a much better place to operate from.
About markets.
About people.
And, probably, about most of the things that matter in the end.
Disclaimer: All content here, including but not limited to charts and other media, is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Treussard Capital Management LLC is a registered investment adviser. All investments involve risk and loss of principal is possible.
Full disclaimers: https://www.treussard.com/disclosures-and-disclaimers.
