What a Plane Ride Over North Dakota Taught Me About Wall Street

Editor's note: There's only so much you can learn about a company from a spreadsheet. As our colleague Gabe Marshank writes, sometimes you have to hop on a plane and check it out for yourself. In this piece, which we last published in DailyWealth in October 2025, Gabe recalls how he once did just that... and used the insights he gained to make his firm a fortune.

In the investment world, it's easy to fall for a good story.

The glossy investor decks... the well-rehearsed management calls... the perfectly timed CNBC appearances. They create an illusion of clarity and control.

I saw that firsthand in 2014. I was working for David Einhorn as an analyst at Greenlight Capital, trying to crack the code of U.S. shale-oil companies.

They looked great on paper. But the spending assumptions were aggressive... and the production estimates were even more so. They were supposed to be fantastic businesses. But they couldn't seem to generate cash and grow simultaneously.

For a good business model, doing both of those things should be as easy as walking and chewing gum. In short, something wasn't adding up... But every sell-side report I read echoed the same bullish narrative.

So I got on a plane and flew to Bismarck, North Dakota...

Not for a slick investment bank conference, but for a humdrum industry gathering in a regional hotel's ballroom.

The reason why is key to how we as investors manage to see through the hype. Because real investing – the kind that helps you generate market-beating returns – often doesn't begin with a PowerPoint...

My colleague, Josh, and I headed to a nearby bar to see who we could meet. We got to chatting with a local named Tony, who became our pal for the night.

He worked a day job in the oilfields. But his real love was flying his restored, single-engine, 1960s-era Mooney airplane, which looked like this...

The next morning, true to his word, he showed up at a rural airstrip ready to fly us over the giant Bakken Formation of the Williston Basin.

As I squinted through the cockpit glass at pumpjacks and pipelines, the inconsistencies were impossible to ignore.

The geography was brutal... the infrastructure was patchy... and with the seasonal challenges of operating in sub-zero winters, the operators were flat-out spending too much on growth.

None of that fit into the narrative Wall Street was peddling in its spreadsheets.

Tony laughed. "Those analysts are trying to drill wells in Excel," he told us. "It's a lot easier in a spreadsheet than it is in the real world."

That trip sealed it for me: These shale players weren't the next great American growth story...

Analysts were only accounting for the cost of drilling a well, not the infrastructure required to get the supplies to (and energy from) the wells. Capital expenditures were blowing past expectations. The whole business was spiraling into a financial black hole.

We shorted the stocks and made our firm a fortune as the story unraveled.

Eventually, just about every CEO in the industry was replaced. And all the new ones came in singing the tune of "capital discipline." In other words, they admitted they were spending too much... But we'd already figured that out.

That's the power of "numbers over narrative."

Wall Street Doesn't Always Tell the Truth 

By design, Wall Street sells narratives. But narratives are smooth. Reality isn't. To uncover great investments, you have to find where those two diverge.

Sometimes, the narrative is sheer panic...

In August 2003, much of the Northeastern and Midwestern regions of the U.S. – along with parts of central Canada – suffered a widespread power outage just after the stock markets closed.

Panic spread and futures plummeted. People thought it could be a terrorist attack. But my utilities analyst pulled up grid-level data and said it was simply a cascading failure.

We told Steve Cohen, who bought index futures while the rest of Wall Street froze.

The market snapped back once everyone else caught on to what we already knew. We booked millions in profits. Again, it was a case of numbers over narrative.

A management team might promise discipline. A news anchor might call something a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity." But reality has a way of humbling the headlines.

The numbers don't care about your story... And eventually, the market follows the numbers.

So next time you hear a "perfect pitch," ask a harder question... look for the footnotes... check the balance sheet... and consider what could go wrong.

Or better yet, take a flight over the oilfields yourself. Remember, real investing starts where the PowerPoint ends.

Regards,

Gabe Marshank

Editor's note: Gabe already has two $100 million trades under his belt... And right now, he says conditions are lining up for a rare "fat pitch" trade. It all has to do with a massive wealth transfer that's about to send money flowing straight into a small group of little-known companies. For folks who know where to move their money, it could be the chance to make some extraordinary gains – but you have to act before June 1.