Horse trading always fascinated me. Lots of wheelin’ and dealin’. Lots of commodities passing hands. The energy in the air. The back-and-forth.The opportunity. The gumption. Horse trading always fascinated me. Lots of wheelin’ and dealin’. Lots of commodities passing hands. The energy in the air. The back-and-forth.The opportunity. The gumption. The importance of knowing what you’re doing or-–more importantly–in trusting someone who does. (If you don’t know what you’re doing and you get into horse trading, well, get ready for some life lessons.) It all seems so Texas. And the people. The life in it all.

While we are an investing company, being a Family/Life company as well means that it matters who our investors are. There are few things we enjoy more than sitting down with them for a good chat about what matters most in our lives. We recently had the pleasure of sitting down with one of our long-running investors and good friends.

At Maevlo, we love the range of experience and expertise that our investor partners bring from so many different arenas. Some of you are oil and gas experts, while for others, we're your sole contact point with the arena.

By Jacob Wilson

It's easy to pigeonhole people.  You see an asset, an investment, a shiny toy, and you can pretty quickly guess the social strata they're in.  The assets we hold and the way we invest, of course, flow from who we are, right?  One of the things I enjoy most about what we do at Maevlo is seeing how exactly opposite the case is in our line of business. Owning minerals tells very little about who you are and what the rest of your life is like. We talk to a lot of mineral owners and sellers, every day, and what keeps life so interesting for us is just how different they all are. 

The thing about minerals is you don't pick them up at the dealer, they're not all along spectacular coastlines, they don't have shiny paint and loud engines.  They're sitting underground wherever they happen to be. Under corn fields, suburban neighborhoods, and remote forested hillsides. Ever since the fracking (often called 'shale') revolution, they aren't sitting underneath a well bore in your backyard. The place where they drilled is likely miles from your house or property.   Since your mineral rights go from your property line straight down to the center of the Earth, that means that all the oil and gas they collect from beneath your property is yours. But what mineral owners have in common, ends about there.  How the title to your acreage of mineral rights ended up buried in your filing cabinet is as unique a story as your life and family story is.  That's what we love most about talking to mineral owners: every acre has a story.

For this blog, we thought it'd be helpful to talk nuts and bolts. Let's talk shop. You decided to take the plunge into the mineral royalty space with a Maevlo fund. You got comfortable with the team here, our integrity, skill, and roguish good looks perhaps (read a little sarcasm at the end).

When it comes to investing, the biggest risk you'll ever face is the people, the "who," if you will. If you're not investing with good people, you're likely to get burned. Because, no matter how "good" the deal is, it's the character that counts most when important decisions are made. But, if you really know someone, trust their integrity, and even better, if you have a history with their family, and things don't work out perfectly now and then, you'll stick with them. And when they get it right (which good folks tend to do), it's all the more fun to win together.

There have been a lot of big strides in the life of Maevlo lately, not least among these being the rollout of our investor portal, Juniper Square. If you're a seasoned real estate equity investor you've probably come across this service before, but for many of our partners it's a new thing and, for us, it feels like a significant step. It's good to mark big moments in life, so let's take a moment to talk about this step with Juniper Square!

My favorite questions to ask when someone is selling an investment idea are, “Why this opportunity?” “Why now?” and “Why is it available to me?” Through our recent musings on the period of “structural deficit” we are entering, you’ve gotten a sense of how we answer “Why this, why now?” Now for a bit of reflection on why we think we are the right kind of investors for this market in this day and age.

There are always many currents in world markets and anyone who says they can predict the future with precision is a liar or a fool. But it is possible to describe the larger swells and trends and attempt to wisely align your decision-making with them. One of the bigger swells that we see right now in the oil and gas industry is actually quite a big one and is worth naming. We believe we’re in the early innings of potentially a decade-long horizon wherein we’ll experience Structural Deficits. In short, the abundant energy we’ve all been privy to over the last several decades will begin to decline and that will intersect with the continued appetite around the world for energy consumption.

I always find it interesting how when someone tells you what they do for a living, you’ll usually have some sort of idea what that means, but if you take the time to dig deeper, you always find that the real story is so much more rich and interesting. Most of my friends know I am in “oil and gas” or that I’m a “landman.” But what do those words really mean?

Family. Life. Investing. When we launched the MAEVLO adventure, these were the pillars we set up as guideposts. Some slogans are there to make customers