The “29% Account” Is Texas Pacific Land
The Oxford Income Letter’s “29% Account” promotion describes an “account” that averaged 29 percent a year for decades, that BlackRock parks billions in, and that anyone can open in five minutes. The reveal is Texas Pacific Land, ticker TPL, a company with roots in the 1880s railroad land-grant era.
The backstory is genuinely interesting. The federal government granted railroads land for every mile of track they laid, and when many of those railroads failed, the leftover land and mineral rights were organized into trusts. Texas Pacific Land was one of those, a passive liquidating trust for more than 130 years until it converted to a corporation in 2021. Today it holds roughly 870,000 acres in the Permian Basin and collects royalties from thousands of oil and gas wells without operating any of them.
The Business Is Excellent
The model is the appeal. TPL gets a top-line share of revenue from its wells without paying the operating costs, labor, or geological risk. It is tax-efficient and near-zero-cost. On top of the oil and gas royalties, the same land sits on substantial water rights and cheap energy, which is exactly what AI data centers need, and Lichtenfeld notes $265 million in water-rights revenue in 2024 alone. Data-center developers are actively looking at the Permian for power and water, so that forward angle is real.
At around $363 a share, with a 52-week range of roughly $269 to $547, TPL is a high-quality asset. The dividend yield, though, is only about 0.6 percent.
The Catch Is the Word “Income”
The 29 percent figure is real as a long-term average return for TPL shareholders, but it is almost entirely share-price appreciation, not yield. The famous $1,000-in-2000-becomes-$556,000 number is a capital-gains story, and it depends heavily on the fracking revolution that turned the Permian from “played out” into the most productive basin on earth. From 1980 to 2000, the asset returned only about 2 percent a year.
That matters because this is sold by an income newsletter. If you want to live off the “29 percent,” you would have to sell shares, which is the opposite of what an income investor expects. We unpack the full promotion in our Oxford Income Letter review, and contrast the true royalty structure with the trust Lichtenfeld recommended before in our PBT stock explainer.
The right way to think about TPL is as a high-quality energy and water royalty you buy when oil sentiment is weak and hold for decades, not as a savings-account replacement. See our Oxford Club publisher profile for more on the publisher behind it.
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