Where the real growth went (you can't buy it)

Today’s Big Picture

Amazon went public in 1997 when it was just three years old. 

In 2024, the typical company waited 13.5 years before it let you buy a share.

That single number explains a lot about modern investing. The U.S. had about 8,090 listed companies at the 1996 peak. Today it has roughly 3,900.

Of American firms with more than $100 million in revenue, 87% are private.

The growth that used to happen in public now happens in private, and most people never get a look. 

Family offices keep about 42% of their money in alternatives. The average household keeps close to zero, because the door has been locked by rule.

The lock is loosening. A 2025 executive order and a March Labor Department rule started opening 401(k)s to private assets, slowly, through funds, with fees and lock-ups attached.

Today’s guest built a private-markets club aimed at that gap. 

It opened in June, met in person for the first time yesterday, and its own members hold 3% of their money in venture. He explains below.

First, three stories: a bond auction that embarrassed the doom headlines, oil at $97 into tomorrow’s inflation report, and a crypto vote losing support.

Signal vs. Noise

The Highest Yield Since 2023 Drew the Strongest Bid Since 2016

• The noise: “Foreign buyers are abandoning Treasuries.”
• The signal: yesterday's $39 billion auction of 10-year notes cleared at 4.834%, a level the 10-year hasn't traded at since October 2023, and buyers lined up for it. Demand ran 2.71 times the amount offered, the strongest since 2016, with foreign and institutional bidders taking 79% and dealers stuck with just 4%.

Translation: at nearly 5%, the world still wants to lend to America. It just wants to be paid for it.

The other half of Sunday's story played out alongside it. The Treasury announced it would buy back up to $6 billion of its own long bonds, triple the old cap, and the market barely blinked.

Stanley Druckenmiller warned in print against a Treasury "defending a price." The 30-year auction at 1 p.m. today is the next test.

Oil at $97, a Hike Near 70%, and the Number That Decides It Tomorrow

• The noise: Apple’s first foldable, the iPhone Duo at more than $2,000, got the afternoon’s headlines.
• The signal: the bond market got the money. WTI crude jumped about 4% to near $97 as tanker traffic through Hormuz fell to a handful a day and Houthi strikes hit Saudi refineries. The Dow fell 0.8%, small caps 1.3%, and the odds of a Fed hike next Wednesday moved toward 70%.

Three prints land before then. Producer prices this morning, and the European Central Bank’s decision today, where all 65 economists polled expect a hike to 2.50%.

Then tomorrow at 8:30 a.m., the August inflation report. Consensus is a hot 0.4% for the month on both headline and core, after July’s 3.4% and 2.5%.

A cool CPI is the one thing that could stay the Fed’s hand. Oracle and Adobe report tonight, but the Fed won’t be reading those.

Golden Cross, $3.8 Billion In, and a Vote Losing Support

• The noise: “The golden cross fired. Rally incoming.”
• The signal: Bitcoin sits near $79,000, below the $80k psychological level. The funds have absorbed about $3.8 billion in three weeks, the best stretch of the year, and are still slightly negative for 2026 overall.

The catalyst that matters is Tuesday’s Senate vote on the crypto market-structure bill. It needs 60 votes, and Galaxy Research has cut the odds of passage this year to about 30%.

Starship’s next flight is targeted for the same day. A hike decision follows the next afternoon.

Same read for a third day: price waiting, money arriving, policy deciding.

Elon's next move has a date on it: SEPTEMBER 25

In his brand-new Masterclass, James Altucher walks through the filing, the plan, and the specific tickers he's watching and why a new deadline is quickly approaching for Elon Musk’s next big move.

The date matters: it's when Altucher expects the news cycle to catch up to what's already sitting on file at the FCC. 

Watch it while the story is still under the radar.

Watch the Free Masterclass →

Featured Contributor

Today’s guest is Maxwell Nee, Chairman and Founder of Family Office Insider, a board director and investor, and a co-lead of Inflection Club. Inflection Club is a private investment club for its members. Nothing in this section is an offer, a solicitation, or a recommendation, and private investments can lose their entire value.

Nobody Has Ever Seen the Whole Thing

The largest financial decision you will ever make, you will probably make alone.

There was never anyone to bring it to. 

• Your adviser sees what’s under management. 
• Your accountant sees the tax and never the strategy. 
• Your family sees the balance and none of the reasoning, because you spent years making sure they never had to worry about it.

For most people who built something, nobody has ever seen the whole thing. Every big call gets made in your own head, checked against yourself, and then you live with it.

I have sat across from hundreds of people in that position. 

Founders, practice owners, people with real money and no room to think in. They don’t describe it as loneliness. They describe it as normal.

Five months ago, we decided it didn’t have to be.

We could have built a fund. We built a table.

Tan and Salim, founders of Decentralized Masters, kept hearing the same sentence from their members: I don’t know where to take this decision. 

They weren’t asking for deal flow. They were asking for a room.

So the room is the product. 

Our Roundtables seat 12 investors, and twelve is fixed, with nothing to do with exclusivity. It’s the largest number at which everyone still speaks. Add two more and someone goes quiet, and it’s usually the person who most needs to talk.

We filter for the table, not for money. 

161 people have applied since April. 66 are in. 

Each one went through a profile, a conversation, and a personality assessment, because qualifying is only half the question. The other half is whether you’ll say what you’re worried about in front of eleven strangers.

Yesterday, they stopped being strangers

For five months, I have known what these people’s kitchens look like at 8:00 AM, because that’s where the video calls happen. Yesterday, in a ballroom in Austin, I learned how tall they are.

Forty-four members were in the room. One had crossed an ocean. Several had travelled for two days to sit at a table with people they had only ever seen in a square on a screen. That took some faith.

Look at who they are. 

72% own the business they run. 11 in healthcare, nine in financial services, eight in real estate. A physicist. Six pilots. One former professional baseball player, which came up on a call months ago and which I have been waiting to say out loud.

Only 6% are full-time investors, and that’s deliberate. 

Our committee does the diligence on every deal. What we can’t buy is what they bring: when a healthcare deal comes through, eleven people at the tables have run one and know the real timeline. It’s never the one in the deck.

The four, and the 198

Since June, 202 companies have pitched us. We have put four in front of members.

All 202 looked good on the first page. They always do. Founders spend three months on the deck and a decade on the story.

So the four are the visible part of the work. The 198 we said no to are the rest of it, and we show members every pass and the reason. A club that only shows you its winners is marketing with a membership fee.

The number that stopped me

We asked members where the largest single piece of their money sits. Forty-two percent said real estate. Forty-two percent said public stocks.

Venture and private equity, the thing every one of them joined this club to do, came in at 3%.

I won’t tell anyone what that number should be. That’s their call, made with their advisers. But think about it: people who built businesses, who applied to a private-markets club on purpose, still keep 97 cents of every dollar somewhere else.

The door to private markets was locked for so long that even the people holding keys forgot how to use them. That is why the club exists.

Where it’s pointed

A thousand members by 2030, which is 83 Roundtables. The Roundtable never gets bigger. What scales is the number of tables. What never scales is the table.

Four regions, the U.S., Singapore, London, and Dubai, each opening when enough members live in a time zone to meet in daylight. Six of our members join today from Australia, Switzerland, and the U.K. at hours nobody should have to join anything. The map is the apology.

And I’ll say here what I said on stage. Nothing in that plan is a promise of performance. In this asset class, capital is at risk and you can lose all of it, in a single position, in a company that looked good to everyone in the room, including us.

The sentence that is the product

A few weeks ago we asked members for feedback and expected to hear about deals. One wrote back: “I do not have to make financial decisions in isolation anymore.”

Read the last two words again. Everything else we built is logistics. That sentence is the product, and it’s the same one I opened with, from the other side.

This is the first time you’re hearing from us in Future Finance. It won’t be the last. Next time, I’ll walk you through the filter itself, all twelve criteria, nothing held back.

- Maxwell Nee

Chairman & Founder, Family Office Insider | Inflection Club

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Final Thought

For a century, the public stock market was the great equalizer. A company's annual report told the janitor and the fund manager the same story on the same day.

That's what left the room when the companies did. As the best businesses moved private, so did the information about them, and what replaced the filing is the table: people who have run the thing, telling each other what the deck won't. Maxwell's line stuck with me for that reason. What scales is the number of tables. What never scales is the table.

The new rules opening 401(k)s can hand you a slice of private returns. They can't hand you a seat. That's the difference worth understanding before the habits change.

Tomorrow at 8:30 a.m., the inflation number that decides the Fed's hand. See you then.

- Rami Al-Sabeq

Editor in Chief | Future Finance

The Institutions Are In. The Edge Is In What They Buy Next.

By the time a pension fund files a disclosure, the easy money has already been made.

The real edge is spotting where serious capital is heading before the paperwork catches up to it.

That’s the whole job of Gems Uncovered, our research on early, asymmetric plays before they reach the mainstream.

Follow the smart money early, not after it’s on the front page.

See how it works right here…

Disclaimer: This content is not financial advice, it is for informational purposes only. All investments involve inherent risk. Any financial decisions you make are solely your responsibility.