America's Power Grid Has 18 Months Before It Breaks. Here's How to Own the Tollbooth on the $14 Trillion Rebuild

The Department of Energy published the proof. Wall Street buried it. A small group of investors is quietly collecting what I call “Tollbooth Royalties” — forced income from every dollar the government is required to spend.

Something is about to break.

Not the stock market. Not the economy. Not the banking system.

Something physical. Something that every hospital, military base, data center, factory, and home in America depends on every single second of every single day.

The power grid.

And when I say "about to break" — I don't mean in some theoretical, newsletter-hype kind of way.

I mean transformers are exploding in New York. Rolling blackouts are shutting down Texas. California can't keep the lights on during a heat wave.

And a 247-page Department of Energy report — published September 2024, covered by almost nobody — lays out the math in language even a bureaucrat can't hide behind:

That's the DOE's conclusion. Published. On the record. Buried on page 114.

And the price tag to fix it?

Not estimated. Not projected. Required.

That $14 trillion isn't optional spending. It's not a stimulus package that might get voted down. It's not a campaign promise that disappears after November.

It's physics.

You cannot run 5,000 AI data centers on a grid built for black-and-white television. You cannot charge 30 million electric vehicles on wiring from the Eisenhower administration. You cannot reshore factories from China without the electricity to power them.

The government knows this. The Pentagon has classified grid vulnerability as a top-tier national security threat.

Which means this money WILL be spent. The only question is: whose portfolio does it flow through?

Because right now — while CNBC argues about rate cuts and your financial advisor tells you to "stay diversified" — a small group of investors has already positioned so that every dollar of that $14 trillion flows through assets they own.

The institutions call it infrastructure allocation. The pension funds call it real-asset rotation.

I call it something simpler.

Tollbooth Royalties.

And once you see how they work, you won't be able to unsee it.

But first, let me tell you how I found this. Because if even part of my story sounds like YOUR story — then you need to pay very close attention to what comes next.

Twenty years ago, I thought I understood money.

I was in my twenties. I'd read the books. I followed the markets. I had a brokerage account, strong opinions, and absolutely no idea what I was doing.

I bought tech stocks in 1999 because everybody was buying tech stocks. I watched them crater because everybody watched them crater.

Then I did the smart thing — or what I thought was the smart thing. I hired a financial advisor. Nice office. Firm handshake. Quarterly reports with pie charts and a confident smile.

He told me to diversify. He told me to think long-term. He told me to stay the course.

I stayed the course all the way through 2008.

And when the dust settled — when my "diversified, long-term" portfolio had dropped from $340,000 to $194,000 in nine months — do you know what my advisor said?

"Markets recover."

Two words. He said it the way a mechanic says "cars break down." Like it was weather. Like the fact that I'd watched a decade of savings evaporate was just a thing that happens.

He didn't give back his fee. He didn't adjust his approach. He didn't even call — I had to call HIM.

And here's the part that kept me up at 2 AM, sitting at the kitchen table with my stomach in a knot:

Markets do recover. He knew that. He also knew that HIS fee hit my account every quarter regardless. His income was guaranteed. Mine wasn't.

And years later — when I finally fired him — I learned something even worse. The "sophisticated" products he'd put me in? Market-neutral funds, structured notes, exotic instruments that looked impressive on paper? They'd been generating fat commissions for his firm while locking me into the risk-free rate. I was earning what a savings account pays — but with a 5-year lockup and a 2% annual fee.

He wasn't incompetent. He was playing a different game. And in his game, I was the product.

That's when I started to understand something nobody in this industry will say out loud:

Now, I'm not telling you this for sympathy. I'm telling you because I know — with absolute certainty — that some version of this story is YOUR story too.

Maybe you didn't lose in 2008. Maybe it was 2020. Maybe it was the crypto crash. Maybe you haven't lost anything at all — you've just watched your money sit in a savings account, earning 4% while inflation eats 7%, and you know — you KNOW — that you should be doing something different.

But you don't. Because every time you sit down to figure it out, you get buried in noise.

Twelve newsletters telling you twelve different things. CNBC saying buy when your gut says sell. Your advisor recommending the same index funds he recommended five years ago.

So you do nothing. And doing nothing feels safe — until you do the math.

Half a million in savings at 4.5%, with real inflation at 7% on the things you actually buy — groceries, insurance, gas, prescriptions — means you're losing over a thousand dollars a month in purchasing power. Silently. While you "figure it out."

Meanwhile:

Your neighbor's kid is up 140% on uranium stocks he found on Reddit. He's 26.

Your old college roommate moved his retirement into commodities two years ago. He won't shut up about it at dinner.

And your advisor? He made more from your portfolio in fees last year than you made in returns. And he's sleeping fine.

You're not.

The retirement calculator you ran at 2 AM that made you feel sick. The conversation at Thanksgiving where someone mentioned their portfolio and you changed the subject. The growing suspicion that everyone else has this figured out and you're the only one who doesn't.

If any of that sounds familiar — if you've felt even a fraction of this weight —

I need you to hear something.

It wasn't your fault.

It was never your fault. The system you were told to trust was designed against you from the start. Your fees are their revenue. Your confusion is their competitive advantage. Your paralysis is their profit margin.

But here's the good news.

I spent twenty years being destroyed by this system — and the last three years figuring out how to beat it.

I tried everything else first. Stock picks. Options. Dividend funds. Gold. I even paid $5,000 for a "wealth management" program that turned out to be a guy with a podcast and a spreadsheet. Nothing worked.

Until I found something that doesn't depend on any of those things.

Something based on physics.

Who Am I

My name is Ethan West.

I'm not a Wall Street analyst. I never worked at Goldman Sachs. I don't have a Bloomberg terminal or a corner office or a team of MBAs.

What I have is twenty years of scars and three years of obsessive research into a thesis that changed everything.

I was a guy who got destroyed by the market — slowly, repeatedly, in the grinding way that's actually worse than a single blow. I made money and lost it. Twice. I trusted advisors who didn't earn it. I watched opportunities pass because I was too scared, too confused, or too late.

And then — late one night in September 2024 — I was scrolling through government filings I'd been meaning to read for months. Page 114 of a 247-page DOE report. A chart showing projected electricity demand versus grid capacity through 2035.

The lines weren't just diverging. They were crossing.

I sat up. I read the section again. Then I read the whole report. Then I read it a third time.

And by the time I put it down, I understood two things:

• The largest forced spending event in modern history is about to begin.
• There's a specific way to position so that YOU collect income from every dollar spent.

I started building a portfolio around it. Not a model portfolio. MY portfolio. My actual money.

And in the twelve months that followed, my portfolio did something it hadn't done in twenty years: it generated monthly income from assets that don't depend on the S&P, the Fed, or the mood of a CNBC anchor — while the thesis itself kept getting stronger every quarter.

Not because I became a genius. Because I finally had a thesis based on something that doesn't care about elections, interest rates, or what Jim Cramer says on Tuesday.

Physics. And physics always wins.

I'm sharing this with you because nobody shared it with me. For twenty years, I was the guy nobody helped. No advisor showed me this report. No newsletter pointed at the chokepoints. I had to build this playbook from scratch — and I swore that if I ever figured it out, I'd make sure nobody else had to go through what I went through.

The Secret Nobody Is Talking About

Let me ask you a question.

When you drive on a toll road, who makes money?

Not the driver. Not the car manufacturer. Not the gas station.

The toll operator. The person who owns the booth. Every car that passes — regardless of where it's going, regardless of what's happening in the economy, regardless of the stock market — drops money in the booth.

Rain or shine. Bull market or bear. Recession or boom.

The booth collects.

Now — imagine a tollbooth where the government is REQUIRED to send traffic through. Not because it wants to. Because the alternative is rolling blackouts at military bases, hospital ventilators going dark, and the financial system going offline.

Imagine a tollbooth where the traffic isn't just increasing — it's growing at the fastest rate in forty years.

Imagine a tollbooth where the government has publicly committed $14 trillion in spending — money that physically cannot reach its destination without passing through YOUR booth.

That's what I call Tollbooth Royalties.

It's not a stock pick. It's not a sector bet. It's not "buy uranium and hope."

It's a positioning strategy — a way to own the infrastructure that $14 trillion in government-mandated spending must flow through. Just like a toll operator doesn't care who's driving the car, you don't care which party is in power, which stocks are hot, or what the Fed does.

The grid must be rebuilt. The money must be spent. And the investors who own the tollbooth collect royalties on every dollar that passes through.

Why This Hasn't Been on CNBC

Wall Street makes money from complexity. From funds with 2% expense ratios. From managed accounts that charge 1% to underperform the S&P. From exotic structured products that look sophisticated while delivering savings-account returns — and generating fat commissions.

Tollbooth Royalties are simple. Too simple for Wall Street to package, mark up, and resell. Too simple for your advisor to charge 1% to manage.

And that's exactly what makes them so powerful.

Because while retail investors argue about AI stocks... while CNBC debates the Fed's next move... the institutions are quietly loading up on exactly what I'm about to show you.

BlackRock has been acquiring infrastructure assets at a pace they haven't used since 2009 — the year after the last crash, right before the last decade-long bull run.

BlackRock's infrastructure AUM: $170 billion. Up from $80 billion in 2019. More than doubled in five years.

Brookfield just raised $30 billion for infrastructure deployment. Their largest fund in history. Brookfield Infrastructure Partners has returned 287% over the last decade. More than the S&P. With lower volatility.

Sovereign wealth funds from Norway, Abu Dhabi, and Singapore are all rotating into the same sector. Norway's Government Pension Fund — the largest sovereign wealth fund on earth, managing $1.7 trillion — increased its infrastructure allocation by 40% in 2024 alone.

These are not dumb-money retail speculators. These are the most sophisticated capital allocators on the planet. And they are ALL doing the same thing at the same time.

They see what's coming. They're positioning at wholesale prices. And they are NOT telling you about it.

The Math That Even Washington Can't Argue With

Four forces are hitting the grid simultaneously — and not one of them can be turned off.

The repair bill — confirmed by the DOE, validated by the Pentagon — is $14 trillion.

That's $38 billion per day for a year. $2.6 million every minute. Every dollar flowing through a specific set of assets that can be owned — right now, at wholesale prices that haven't yet reflected what's coming.

What Tollbooth Royalties Are NOT

This is NOT stock picking. I'm not asking you to find the next Amazon or bet on a single company. The companies don't matter as much as the ASSETS — the physical infrastructure that every company, government, and household depends on.

This is NOT options, futures, or anything exotic. Everything in this strategy can be bought through a standard brokerage account — Schwab, Fidelity, Vanguard, whatever you use today. No special accounts. No margin. No complexity.

This is NOT "infrastructure investing" the way your advisor means it. When your advisor says "infrastructure," he means a mutual fund with a 2% expense ratio and 47 holdings you've never heard of. That's not what this is. Tollbooth Royalties own the chokepoints — not the whole road.

The Three Chokepoints

Every large-scale infrastructure buildout in history has had chokepoints — specific resources that MUST be used and CANNOT be substituted.

The transcontinental railroad needed steel. The interstate highway system needed concrete. The Manhattan Project needed uranium.

The grid rebuild has three chokepoints.

I can't reveal them here — but I can tell you this:

• One is a metal that the US cannot produce enough of domestically. We import 70% of our supply from countries that don't particularly like us.
• Another is an energy source the government did a complete 180 on in the last two years — going from actively shutting it down to desperately trying to restart it.
• The third is a piece of physical equipment so specialized that there are only THREE manufacturers in the world that can produce it. Lead times are currently running 3-4 years.

When you understand these three chokepoints — when you see the supply/demand math that even a high schooler could follow — the investment thesis isn't a leap of faith.

It's inevitable.

And the specific way to own these chokepoints — the portfolio structure, the exact vehicles, the allocation percentages — is what I call the Tollbooth Royalties system.

Why Your Advisor Will Never Tell You This

Wall Street made $150 billion in fees last year.

Not returns. Fees. Money pulled directly from your account, my account, everyone's account — regardless of performance.

Your advisor gets paid when you win. He gets paid when you lose. He gets paid when you sit there doing nothing. The ONLY scenario where he doesn't get paid is when you leave.

So let me ask you: has your advisor EVER told you about Tollbooth Royalties?

Has he mentioned the three chokepoints? Has he shown you the DOE report? Has he explained why BlackRock doubled its infrastructure position?

No. He hasn't. And he won't.

Not because he's evil. Because Tollbooth Royalties don't generate fees for HIM.

He can't package them into a managed account. He can't charge 1% annually to hold positions you could buy yourself in twenty minutes. He can't run it through compliance and turn it into a structured product with a 2% expense ratio and a 5-year lockup.

Meanwhile — three floors up from his office, in his firm's institutional division — the prop desk is loading up on exactly these assets. The pension fund team is rotating client money into the same thesis. The family office group is building the same tollbooth positions I'm about to show you.

Same firm. Different floor. Different rules.

JP Morgan's own infrastructure fund is up $12.4 billion in AUM in the last 18 months.

If your portfolio looks like the average retail investor's, you have a nickel in infrastructure for every dollar the institutions have. You're bringing a knife to a gunfight.

The Tax on Everything

Open your wallet. Pull out a $100 bill.

In 2019, that bill filled a grocery cart. Chicken, vegetables, bread, milk, coffee, cleaning supplies — maybe enough left over for a cheap bottle of wine.

Today, that same $100 gets you about two-thirds of a cart. No wine.

In two more years — if nothing changes — it'll be half a cart.

You didn't spend that money. It didn't get stolen. It didn't crash with the market.

It just... shrank.

That's a 41% increase in the total money supply — in two years. Every one of those new dollars diluted every old dollar in your savings account, your money market, your CDs, and your wallet.

The government calls it 3.2% inflation. Your grocery receipt calls it 30%. Your insurance premium calls it "we regret to inform you of a rate adjustment."

That's the Tax on Everything. And Tollbooth Royalties are the way out.

Because the assets underneath your tollbooth can't be printed. Can't be diluted. Can't be conjured by a committee in Washington. They're in the ground. They're real. And as the dollar shrinks, they get MORE expensive in dollar terms — which means your holdings go UP as the paper dollar goes DOWN.

The grid rebuild isn't just an income thesis. It's a purchasing power fortress.

The 18-Month Window

Right now, the three chokepoint assets are priced for a world that doesn't know what's coming.

Retail investors — your neighbor, your advisor's other clients, the guy at the barbershop — haven't connected the dots yet. They haven't read the DOE report. They haven't seen the fund flow data. They haven't heard of Tollbooth Royalties.

But in 18 months — maybe sooner — this will be front-page news.

The Wall Street Journal will run a feature. CNBC will do a segment. Your advisor will call and say, "Hey, have you thought about infrastructure?"

And by then, the assets will be priced for retail. The wholesale window will be closed. You'll be paying $50 for what you could have bought for $20.

That's not speculation. That's how every major thesis plays out.

Do you have a "Grandpa said no to McDonald's" story? A moment in your life — or your parents' life — where somebody was offered an opportunity, said "I'll think about it," and watched it become worth a fortune?

We all have one. The house they didn't buy. The stock they sold too early. The business their buddy started without them.

In 18 months, this will be that story. The one where you either say "I got in before CNBC caught on" — or the one where you say "I saw it. I read about it. And I did nothing."

The money you COULD have made is more painful than money you've lost. That's not a threat. It's just the math of how these things play out.

What the Other Side Looks Like

It's two years from now. Saturday morning. You're having coffee. You check your portfolio — not with dread, not with that familiar knot in your stomach — but with the quiet satisfaction of someone who knows exactly what they own and why they own it.

Your Tollbooth Royalties are hitting your account like clockwork. Monthly income from assets that don't depend on the S&P, the Fed, or the mood of a CNBC anchor. The grid rebuild is front-page news now — the Wall Street Journal ran a feature last month — and the assets you bought at wholesale are up significantly since you positioned.

Your brother-in-law mentions it at dinner. "Have you seen this infrastructure stuff?" You smile. You don't say much. You don't have to.

Your old financial advisor sent a note last quarter. "Hey, just checking in — have you thought about adding some infrastructure exposure?" You thought about replying. But what would you say?

"I've been in for two years. Thanks for the tip."

Click.

That's vindication. Not the loud, chest-pounding kind. The quiet kind. The kind where you look in the mirror and know — finally — that you figured it out. Not your broker. Not your advisor. Not some guy on TV.

You.

Imagine checking your portfolio and feeling... calm. Not anxious. Not confused. Just calm — because you know exactly what you own, why you own it, and that the largest infrastructure rebuild in history is sending money through your tollbooth every single day.

That picture is available to you today. For $79.

This Isn't Theory. Here's My Track Record.

I don't ask anyone to trust a thesis they can't verify. So before I show you the Playbook, let me show you what happens when you apply the Tollbooth Royalties framework to real markets — with real money.

These are positions I identified, published to my research subscribers, and held. Not paper trades. Not backtests. Real allocations in real accounts.

And two calls that prove the framework works in both directions:

And the real-assets trades that protect purchasing power when the dollar bleeds:

Past performance does not guarantee future results. All investments involve risk, including possible loss of principal. Options trading involves additional risk and is not suitable for all investors. These represent the author's actual positions and are shown for educational purposes. Individual results will vary.

What Early Readers Are Saying

Individual results may vary. Past performance does not guarantee future results. These testimonials represent individual experiences and are not indicative of all experiences.

What's Inside the Playbook

• The one asset the US military has classified as "critical to national security" — that trades on public markets for less than $50 a share (page 31)
• Why the $100 bill in your wallet buys $71 of groceries today — the Tax on Everything — and the 3 assets that get MORE valuable as the dollar shrinks (page 8)
• The "3-4 year bottleneck" — a single piece of equipment so specialized that there are only 3 manufacturers on earth. They're sitting on 4-year order backlogs. And their stock prices haven't caught up. (page 44)
• The government did a complete 180 on this energy source in 2024. After decades of shutting it down, they're now desperately trying to restart it. The last time this happened was 1973. Investors who positioned then saw 1,200% returns over the following decade. (page 37)
• Why "diversification" — the way your advisor does it — actually INCREASES your risk during the specific type of crisis that's coming (page 12)
• 4 yes-or-no questions that reveal whether your current portfolio is positioned for the grid rebuild — or sitting in the blast zone (page 58)
• How to structure infrastructure positions to generate regular cash distributions — without options, futures, or margin. The specific vehicles, the yield math, and why most advisors won't show you this approach (page 47)
• Why the next 18 months will see the largest rotation of institutional capital since 2009 — and the 3 signals that tell you it's already begun (page 22)
• A single government policy decision made in January 2025 that quietly unlocked $340 billion in grid spending — and the specific companies that benefit (page 39)
• The one question that makes financial advisors visibly uncomfortable — and what their answer reveals about whose side they're really on (page 63)
• The 5 stocks most likely to get DESTROYED by the grid transition — you probably own at least 2 of them (page 15)
• The "Saturday morning check" — what it feels like to look at your portfolio and feel calm instead of anxious, and the specific allocation that makes it possible (page 55)

The Complete System

I put everything I've spent three years building into a single document. Not a newsletter. Not a subscription. Not a course.

The Blackout Fortune Playbook.

The complete Tollbooth Royalties system — the thesis, the proof, the allocations, and the step-by-step execution plan.

Let's Talk About What This Is Actually Worth

If you hired a research analyst to build this for you — to read the DOE reports, run the fund flow analysis, identify the three chokepoints, build the allocation model, backtest the positions, and hand you a deployment plan — you'd pay $5,000 minimum. That's what institutional consultants charge for a single sector thesis.

I know because I've paid it. More than once. And half the time, the "thesis" was a PowerPoint with a disclaimer longer than the analysis.

Here's what's inside the Playbook, and what each piece would cost you separately:

A thousand dollars would be fair. You'd still come out ahead — the positions in the Playbook have averaged +43% while the S&P did 24%. On a $100,000 portfolio, that's a $19,000 difference. A thousand-dollar research fee would be the best ROI you've ever seen.

But I'm not charging a thousand dollars.

I'm not charging five hundred.

I'm not even charging two hundred — though I probably should be, and my business partner has told me so. Twice.

Why $79? Because I'm not doing this for the money.

I spent twenty years getting destroyed by an industry that profits from confusion. I swore that if I ever figured out how to beat it, I'd make sure the solution was accessible to anyone who needed it — not locked behind a $5,000 consulting fee or a 2% AUM gate.

$79 is a statement. It says: the era of paying Wall Street a fortune for bad advice is over. You deserve institutional-quality research at a price that doesn't require an institutional budget.

$79 is less than what your advisor charges you every single week in management fees on a $400K portfolio.

$79 is less than the purchasing power you lose every single month by leaving $100K in a savings account.

$79 is a dinner out. One tank of gas. And it could be the difference between watching the biggest infrastructure boom in American history from the sidelines... or owning the tollbooth.

No subscription. No auto-renewal. No "cancel before we charge you." No hidden fees. No recurring anything.

One payment. Everything. Forever.

My Promise

Go through the Playbook. Run the Portfolio Poison Detector on your current holdings. If it doesn't reveal at least one vulnerability you didn't know about — if you don't have a clear, specific, actionable plan for the grid rebuild by the time you finish — email me. I'll refund every penny.

No questions. No hoops. No "customer service will get back to you in 3-5 business days."

You email me. I refund you. You keep the Playbook.

You must be thrilled with the Tollbooth Royalties system, or it costs you nothing.

I can make this promise because the Portfolio Poison Detector has found hidden vulnerabilities in every single portfolio that's been run through it. Not most. Every one.

The only person taking risk here is me. Not you.

What You Don't Have to Do

• Quit your job. The 90-Day Battle Plan works in 20 minutes a week alongside everything you already do.
• Trust another financial advisor. You'll see exactly what I own — every ticker, every allocation. You decide.
• Pick individual stocks. The Trinity uses investment vehicles anyone can buy from any brokerage. No speculation.
• Sell everything and start over. This works alongside your existing portfolio. No blowing things up.
• Learn options, futures, or margin. If you can type a ticker symbol and click "buy," you can do this.
• Watch CNBC. In fact, I'd prefer you didn't.
• Time the market. The thesis is based on forced government spending — not guessing where the S&P goes next Tuesday.
• Have a six-figure portfolio. Minimum position sizes work with $10,000. The system scales from there.
• Fire your advisor (unless you want to — and after reading the Playbook, you might).

One playbook. 90 days. Done.

Common Questions

You Already Know

You knew before you started reading this. You knew when your advisor said "stay the course" for the third time. You knew when you ran that retirement calculator at 2 AM. You knew when your neighbor mentioned uranium at dinner and you changed the subject.

You've been carrying the weight of knowing — knowing something is wrong, knowing you should act, knowing the clock is ticking — without having a clear path forward.

Now you have one.

The grid is breaking. The government has committed $14 trillion. The institutions have positioned. And you're holding a playbook built from twenty years of pain and three years of obsessive research — that shows you exactly where to stand so that every dollar of that spend flows through YOUR tollbooth.

$79. Once. No subscription. No tricks.

You must be thrilled or it costs you nothing.

You deserve this. After everything you've been through — the losses, the bad advice, the years of sitting on the sidelines while your money quietly bled — you deserve a plan that works. A plan built on physics, not promises. A plan built by someone who's been exactly where you are and swore he'd make sure nobody else had to figure this out alone.

And one more thing you should know: the safe harbor is disappearing.

That 5% savings rate you've been earning? The Fed is cutting. It's going to 3%. Then 2%. Meanwhile the Tax on Everything — groceries, insurance, gas, prescriptions — is still running at 7% on the things you actually buy. Sitting in cash used to feel smart. In six months, it will feel like watching your savings shrink in real time. The era of free money is ending. What you do with your portfolio in the next 90 days matters more than the last 5 years.

Don't put this off. You already know where "I'll figure it out this weekend" leads.

This is the weekend. This is the something. This is your tollbooth.