#321 What’s Happening in Oil and Gas Right Now (And Why Physicians Need to Pay Attention) ft. Troy Eckard of Eckard Enterprises

Why This Oil Market Is Unlike Anything Troy Has Seen in 41 Years

Why Troy Is Worried About the Retail Investor Right Now

Troy takes a sharp turn into the broader financial picture, and he doesn’t soften it. He says the mainstream financial media, Fox News, Bloomberg, all of them, are telling retail investors to stay calm, hold their stocks, keep buying.

His read on why is different: the big money has already moved to the sidelines. When everyday investors are buying stocks today, they’re buying from people who got in five years ago and are now selling at five times the price. He draws a direct line from 1987 to 2008 to today, calling it the same story told a different way.

He’s particularly concerned about older investors, those 50 and above, who still carry the memory of 2008 and have a gut feeling this moment rhymes with it.

Troy says he almost got wiped out in a previous cycle and isn’t willing to ignore what this situation smells like. Some investors are still going full speed into stocks and Bitcoin. Others are pulling back and asking harder questions. Troy is firmly in the second camp.

The point he keeps coming back to is that smart money doesn’t wait for the news to confirm what it already knows. By the time the average physician hears the full story on TV, the repositioning has already happened.

Troy isn’t telling people to panic, he’s telling them to pay attention in a way they probably haven’t had to in 40 years, because the global economic order is about to shift in the next 12 months, and currency, trade, and inflation are all going to feel it.

Oil and Gas Is Real Estate, Just Underground

Peter shares how he first got interested in oil and gas: he needed uncorrelated assets, things that wouldn’t all move in the same direction at the same time.

Troy’s explanation of why oil and gas qualifies took a frame Peter hadn’t considered before, that it is, in a sense, real estate.

Troy walks through how the US divides property rights into three layers: air rights above, surface rights everyone knows, and mineral rights below. Each layer can be independently sold or leased, which means one piece of ground can generate six separate transactions.

The IRS treats mineral rights and working interests exactly as it treats real estate. That brings with it depreciation, depletion allowances, and write-offs. The biggest one Troy flags is the 100% first-year write-off available when you drill a domestic well under current law.

Invest in a working interest well this year and the entire amount can be written off against your W-2 income. For a physician at the 37% federal bracket, that math gets interesting very fast.

Troy is honest about the part that makes this harder than traditional real estate. He can’t take you to a field and point at your asset. It’s 2 miles underground through an 8-inch hole. That requires a different kind of trust in your operator than walking through an apartment building does.

Even after 41 years of educating investors, Troy says most high-net-worth individuals, he puts it at 98% or higher, still have no real understanding of how this asset class works. That gap is what his whole career has been spent trying to close.

The Two Ways to Get In, and the Risk Each One Carries

Troy maps the two main entry points using real estate as the comparison, because most physicians already understand that framework.

Mineral rights are the equivalent of raw land. You own the ground where the oil sits, and you’re entitled to a royalty off whatever gets produced. Eckard only acquires minerals that already have an active oil company drilling on them, which removes a significant layer of guesswork.

Troy describes the economics simply: mineral owners receive around 20% of all production revenue, with no drilling costs, no liability, and no ongoing bills. The oil company takes all the risk, does all the work, and pays you first.

The second entry point is working interest, which functions more like being a developer on a project. You’re putting capital directly into the drilling of a well. The trade-off is higher risk but also the 100% first-year tax write-off.

Troy gives a clean example: invest $1 million into a five-well program, and a physician at the 37% bracket effectively gets $370,000 back through tax savings immediately, before a drop of oil is ever produced. The actual risks on the back end are commodity price movement and the time it takes to get a well producing.

Troy follows this with a serious warning about the operator landscape. He says most people working in this space, by his estimate, can’t find their way through the basics, let alone deliver returns. The way bad actors make money is by stacking fees high enough that even a successful well never produces a payout for the investor.

He recommends asking the same due diligence questions you’d ask a real estate syndicator: what did you pay for the asset, what are your fees, is there a backend, do you have management fees built in?

The challenge is that oil and gas has no central database to run comps against, which is exactly why education and operator transparency matter more here than in almost any other asset class.

The Tax Case Most Physicians Have Never Heard

Why Troy Is Against Over-Diversification

Troy makes a point here that he admits goes against most conventional financial advice: he’s skeptical of over-diversification.

He’s watched clients spread money across 13 different investments the way Ray Dalio recommends, and what he’s seen is that most of them lose on seven of those thirteen. The problem is math. When your winner only holds one-thirteenth of your capital, even a big win doesn’t move the needle enough to offset the losses across the other twelve positions.

His most successful clients, the ones who actually built serious wealth, were not diversified in the traditional sense. They were very good at two or three things and went deep in those. Troy has clients who refuse to touch the stock market entirely because they can’t compete with AI-driven trading systems.

He makes the point bluntly: by the time a physician gets out of a morning surgery and checks their portfolio, an AI could have already bought, sold, shorted, and exited a position before they could hit a button. Oil and gas mineral rights, by contrast, don’t trade that way. Every morning, those 12,000 wells he manages made money overnight, and that won’t change by the time you get out of the OR.

The practical takeaway Troy offers is this: the smarter move at a certain point in life is learning to say no. He did it seven years ago. He stopped chasing every opportunity that sounded interesting and stayed in his lane. If someone pitches him something that doesn’t closely resemble what he’s built his career on, his answer is no by default.

He’s not trying to prove anything with new deals or startup investments. He knows which horses he’s betting on and doesn’t need to see the rest of the race.

How the Current Oil Boom Is Playing Out for Existing Investors

Troy addresses something that surprises a lot of people: even with oil near $93 a barrel and heading potentially higher, the number of active drilling rigs has actually gone down since the war started.

He explains why. For four years under the previous administration, banks were effectively told not to lend to energy companies. Most of them pulled out of energy lending entirely. The industry adapted by becoming self-funded, spending only what cash flow from existing wells could support. That discipline didn’t evaporate when oil prices spiked.

The result is that drilling costs haven’t gone up the way you’d expect, and asset acquisition prices haven’t moved much either. For Eckard’s investors, this means they’re getting paid at war-driven commodity prices while drilling at pre-war cost structures.

Troy puts a number on it: the revenue generated for partners in the first 90 days of the war is roughly equivalent to nine months of normal revenue.

If this price environment holds through the year, he says they’ll distribute close to 80% of what they sent out over the entire previous five years, in a single year.

Troy also pushes back on the idea that the window has already closed. He says the firm still prices wells using NYMEX benchmark pricing around $72 a barrel, so anything above that is pure upside on top of an already-working model.

He’s not projecting $150 oil to make the math work. The baseline already works. The current price environment is what he calls gravy on top, and for investors who have been in the portfolio, this is exactly the kind of moment the structure was built for.

How to Participate and Where to Learn More

Peter wraps up by asking how physicians can actually get access to these opportunities, specifically whether they can own oil and gas assets directly on their own or whether working with an operator like Eckard is the more realistic path.

Troy explains why direct ownership at a meaningful level is essentially out of reach for most individual investors today. The middle of the oil and gas market has disappeared over the last decade. It’s either mega-deals in the $100 million to $1 billion range, or small operators running $1 to $5 million raises.

The average well costs $8.5 to $10 million to drill, and leasing prime acreage runs $100,000 an acre. A physician writing a $500,000 check can’t buy into the top assets alone.

The solution Eckard built is aggregation. Pool 30 or 40 physicians and engineers together, and suddenly that group can acquire the same caliber of mineral assets that Exxon holds, at the same price, with the same returns. Troy says they’ve run this model for seven years, have around $1.55 billion in assets, and are on track to do roughly $500 million in new transactions this year alone.

He notes the demand for their drilling opportunities is already heavy enough that he expects to have a current $200 million transaction fully funded within 60 days. By October, he says, there likely won’t be anything left for the year.

For physicians who want to understand the space before committing anything, Troy points to two resources. EckardEnterprises.com has the Eckard Insight app, which houses thousands of hours of educational video content.

He also recently launched OilClarity.com, a standalone educational site he built with no sales agenda attached. Visitors can enter their income and state, model different tax scenarios, and find referrals to CPAs and securities professionals.

Troy frames it plainly: after 40 years in this business, he felt he owed the investment community a place to understand how oil and gas actually works, whether or not they ever invest a dollar with him.