I Left the Newsletter I Helped Build. Here's Why.

I'm writing this from a parking lot in Germany, with three kids asleep in the back seat and something I need to tell you.

We just pulled over for a break somewhere in eastern Germany — I honestly couldn’t tell you where, my wife is the one who organizes these trips from A to Z. She’s rummaging through the car, trying to find the bag she swore she packed on top. The kids are asleep in the back seat. I’ve got maybe an hour before someone needs something, so I figured I’d sit down and write this.

Somewhere in Germany. My wife looking for the thing that’s definitely in there somewhere.

We’re driving from Lithuania to Spain. Five countries, roughly 3,300 kilometers (about 2,050 miles), four days on the road. It’s the kind of trip that sounds romantic until you’re eight hours in and the back seat has descended into open warfare. But we do it every summer — whenever we’re not in Paraguay, we spend part of it in Spain so the kids can practice their Spanish with people other than their father. This time, though, the trip feels different. It feels like a new beginning… and in more ways than one.

I’ll get to that.

The Road Here

First, a few things I noticed on the way here, because they’re hard to ignore.

Crossing into Poland, we ran into something that wasn’t there last summer: a checkpoint. An actual border control point, with officers and a queue of cars. We hit another one entering Germany. If you look at the photo below, you’ll notice they look almost makeshift. Because they are. These didn’t exist just months ago.

Border checkpoint. Schengen, apparently, has some caveats now.

For anyone unfamiliar, most EU countries are part of what’s called the Schengen Area — no passports, no border checks, drive from Lisbon to Tallinn without stopping. That was the deal, anyway. Country after country has been quietly reintroducing controls, mostly because of out-of-control immigration and the problems that come with it. Nobody’s calling it what it is. But when you’re sitting in a queue at a border that didn’t exist last year, you notice.

But it wasn’t just the borders that made this trip feel different. It was how much more expensive everything was. Accommodation, eating out, noticeably pricier than last year. Inflation still working its way through, apparently. And then there's the fuel.

Fuel prices at a gas station in Germany. That’s euros per liter.

If you're American and wondering why Europeans seem perpetually grumpy, here's a big part of your answer on a blue sign. Regular gasoline at €2.37 per liter. That’s nearly US$10 per gallon. Diesel isn’t much relief, and in some countries, it’s now more expensive than gasoline, after years of the EU promoting it and then deciding it was the enemy. You pull into a gas station in Germany and watch €140 — roughly US$155 — disappear into a Volkswagen. Then you do it again in France. And again in Spain. Multiply that by an entire continent, layer on everything else those fuel costs feed into — food, shipping, heating — and you start to understand why the European middle class feels like it’s being slowly squeezed out of existence. Because it is.

Pit stop somewhere along the way. At least someone’s relaxed.

The Question Everyone's Asking

I said this trip feels like a new beginning. Here’s what I mean.

Over the past month, I’ve been getting messages from readers asking me, in various ways, the same question. Here’s one that arrived a few days ago:

Lau, are you still with Doug Casey’s newsletter? I noticed your Substack seems to be its own thing now. What happened?

As I know well from experience, for every one person who writes in to ask, there are probably ten thinking the same thing. So I figured, rather than writing the same answer forty different ways, I’d sit down and write it once.

The short answer is yes. I’ve left the newsletter I spent over two years building, and I’m striking out on my own.

Here’s why.

For two and a half years, I wrote every recommendation, every alert, every company update, and most of the free essays for a well-known investment newsletter. I built the portfolio. I vetted every company. I made the calls on what to buy, when to take profits, and when to cut a position that wasn’t working. I did the research, I got on the calls with management teams, I ran the numbers. The track record, for better or worse, is mine.

I’m proud of that work. I still am.

But over time, tensions started to build around what was being recommended, and how. I’d raise concerns. Sometimes they were heard. Other times they weren’t. And increasingly, I felt I was expected to go along with decisions I wasn’t comfortable with. It was starting to keep me up at night. Not the work — the feeling that I couldn’t always do right by the people who trusted me.

The moment that made up my mind came when I was asked to recommend a company to our subscribers. This wasn't a company I had found or vetted. When I sat down and did my own research instead, I discovered a serious legal problem: the company was the subject of a lawsuit that went directly to the heart of its investment pitch. The kind of thing that, if we'd recommended it, could have hurt subscribers and cost us all credibility.

It didn’t go out, because I caught it. But the fact that it got that far made the decision for me. My May issue was my last.

I could have stayed. Financially, it would have made sense to. There’s a comfort in having a paycheck arrive every month, in not having to build something from zero, in letting someone else worry about the business side while you focus on the research. I understand why people stay in arrangements like that for years, even decades.

But I’ve learned that the cost of staying somewhere you don’t fully believe in is always higher than the cost of leaving. It just takes longer to show up on the balance sheet.

Now, I have nothing but respect for Doug Casey. I’ve worked with him and for him, in various capacities, for the better part of fifteen years. He’s one of the sharpest, most original thinkers I’ve had the privilege of learning from, and I owe him an enormous amount. The decision to leave had nothing to do with Doug, and everything to do with my need for full editorial independence. I need to be the person who decides what gets recommended to the people who trust me with their capital.

The Road Ahead

So here I am. Parking lot in Germany. A lot of road still ahead of me, in more ways than one. My wife has found the bag (it was, in fact, on top). The kids are stirring.

I’m not ready to share the full picture yet. That’s coming soon. But I’ll tell you this much: what I’m building is different from what I was doing. It starts from a premise I’ve been circling for a while now, one that years of writing about crises made impossible to ignore.

There’s a word from the military that keeps coming back to me. It describes a state of affairs where nothing works the way it’s supposed to, but everyone pretends it does, and life goes on anyway. I think it’s the most honest description of the world we’re living in. And I think it changes how you should invest, how you should protect your wealth, and how you should think about what’s coming.

More on that soon.

For now, Spain is two days and 2,300 kilometers (~1,400 miles) away, the trunk is full of bags in the wrong order, and three kids are about to realize they’re hungry. Some things, at least, are predictable.

Have a great rest of the weekend,

Lau Vegys