By any rational measure, capitalism is a game of survival. Millions enter the arena seeking to win the gold. Few endure. And only those who understand how to dominate earn the ultimate prize.
But one man discovered the secret that Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, and Jensen Wong all exploited to build trillion-dollar companies that personally earned them over a hundred billion each.
This one simple concept seems so obvious once you hear it that it is impossible to forget. Peter Thiel employed it to be the first investor in three companies that turned a small stake into hundreds of billions. He was the first man to fund Palantir, Facebook, and PayPal. It wasn’t a coincidence, nor was it privilege, and it certainly wasn’t luck. He learned this secret while playing a famous board game you most certainly had as a kid.
One simple quote summed it all up in his New York Times Bestselling book, Zero to One: “Competition is for losers.” Every company that won the top spot in its industry sought to build a monopoly that no one could compete with. Once you own the board, no one can play the game without paying you handsomely every time they pass Go. The dominant firms build wide moats around their businesses by developing products consumers need so badly that they won’t hesitate to pay more when prices are raised.
Unfortunately, retail investors have given up on winning because they have been taught the false prophecy that you can’t be better than average. The mainstream media has sought to spread the lie that you “can’t beat the market.” However, the truth is you can’t name a single monopoly stock that has failed to beat the market since its IPO.
Changing the Game So You Can Win
Neil Azous was an investment pro at Goldman Sachs, working on behalf of the most successful investors on Wall Street. After decades in the industry serving insiders, he got fed up with seeing retail investors being taught that they have to buy every stock in the index, no matter how poorly that company is run. Index investing simply made no sense once you realize that some are dominant businesses with huge margins, while others struggle just to break even.
He launched the Monopoly ETF (ticker MPLY) to bring this edge to investors who are fed up with the mediocre returns of index pushers. Smart early investors in MPLY have been rewarded with returns that put the S&P 500 to shame in 2025.
The problem is that most investors believe they need to own every stock in the index to build a properly diversified portfolio. This mistaken belief leads them to over-diversify and own stock in hundreds of poorly performing businesses when only a few dozen companies that generate the majority of the cash flow in the economy can possibly win.
The math is simple in that most companies, by definition, can’t win above market returns any more than the majority of athletes can win Olympic gold. So if you own all the stocks in the index, you are destined to own a portfolio of companies that are predominantly losers.
Tyranny of the Average
For decades, investors have been told to “diversify broadly,” to accept the market’s return as if it were gravity. Buy the index. Own everything. Capture the beta.
But the market is not democratic.
It is aristocratic.
A handful of companies—those with dominant market share, network effects, high switching costs, strong brands, regulatory moats, and scale advantages—drive a disproportionate share of wealth creation. If you aren’t the lead dog, the view never changes.
MPLY does not apologize for this reality. It embraces it.
Rather than diluting capital across marginal businesses, it concentrates on what might be called modern monopolies—firms that sit atop their industries like landlords collecting rent from an ecosystem that cannot easily function without them.
This is not nostalgia for the board game. It is an acknowledgment of economic truth: when one player controls Boardwalk and Park Place, the math changes.
Every computer user needs to buy Microsoft software. You have to use Visa or Mastercard payment rails to buy with a credit card. No one can get a phone without paying a toll to Google and Apple operating systems. People have no choice but to feed the profit-generating engines of the most dominant monopolies that are predestined to win. These businesses don’t compete; they suffocate competition. Over time, this dominance manifests in strong earnings, high returns on invested capital, and compounding free cash flow. And over long horizons, it isn’t hard to figure out who is going to win the game. The question is: are you going to play to win?
