Three stories ran in Saturday’s paper. A soccer club in a small Norwegian town. A line of people waiting for a job cleaning the New York subway. A fly-fishing school in the Catskills. They have nothing to do with each other.
They kept sounding like the same story anyway. In each one, the reward went to the people who stayed. And in each one, nobody could tell at the start who the reward would arrive for.
The Club That Wasn’t Trying To Build A Star
Erling Haaland is the most intimidating soccer player in the world. He learned the game at Bryne FK, a free club open to everyone in his parents’ hometown of 14,000 people. The teams there cared more about having fun than winning, and barely kept score. The volunteer coaches preached one line: as many as possible, for as long as possible, and as good as possible. Good comes last.
His years in that youth club happened to overlap with a study of kids the same age from the same community. Of the 40 boys on that club team, 35 kept playing from childhood through adulthood. Six turned pro. Five were picked for youth national teams. The club was not built to produce Haaland. It was built so almost nobody quit, and Haaland fell out of it.
The Line To Clean The Subway
One of the most coveted jobs in New York City is cleaning the subway. It is the lowest-paid job at New York City Transit. The work means human waste, vomit, and hauling heavy trash up and down stairs. The wait to get one can be up to four years. When the MTA called for applicants in 2022, more than 75,000 people applied over about eight weeks. It reopened applications in February 2025 and got nearly 49,500 more.
Nobody is standing in that line for $20.89 an hour. They are standing in it for what comes with the hour. Union workers make minimal contributions toward their medical, dental and vision coverage, and they get a pension plan based on their years of work and salary. A 33-year-old cleaner named Susiauh Bourdier said the whole thing in one sentence. You’re building for the future.
If you are a CalSTRS or CalPERS household, read that sentence again. The thing tens of thousands of strangers will sit on a list for years to reach is the thing you already have. And it is the thing you are most likely to value at zero when you compare your salary to a private-sector number. Your plan document will tell you what the pension is worth, and it will tell you what health benefit, if any, follows you into retirement. Do not assume there is one. Bring the document to a review and let’s put a dollar figure on it.
Sebastian Modak paid $795 for the two-day Trout School run by the Wulff School of Fly Fishing in the Catskills. The school was founded in 1979 by Joan Salvato Wulff, a champion caster who is now 99, and her husband Lee.
His wrist kept ruining his cast, so at the school they strapped it into a leather wrist lock. By the second day, in his own words, his casts had progressed from consistently awful to pretty decent about 40% of the time.
The morning after he graduated, he paid another $450 for a half-day with a Wulff School instructor and guide, Mark Wilde. It took two hours, many fly changes and two stops along the Beaverkill before he caught his first trout.
Forty percent after two days is not a disappointing scorecard. It is the correct one. Nearby in Livingston Manor, the fly shop Dette Flies is 98 years old and still run by the family that started it.
The Same Lesson, With Money
Morningstar analyst Jeffrey Ptak estimates that investors in the original cohort of bitcoin ETFs lost an average of 5.8% a year, in funds that made money. Morningstar puts the gap between what those funds returned and what their investors returned at 14.30 points. Jason Zweig reported the finding in Saturday’s Intelligent Investor column. The investors got there by buying after the price ran and selling after it fell. Zweig’s point is that this is not a crypto problem. He has been writing about the behavior gap since long before bitcoin existed, and notes that financial advisers and big institutions underperform their own investments too.
A separate finding, published last week by Clearwater Analytics and reported Monday: portfolios of $30 million or more drifted from an average 44.9% in stocks three years ago to 47.4% as of June 30. Clearwater’s head of research says there really hasn’t been much rebalancing at all. That is the whole finding. The paper reports the drift and does not report what it earned anybody, so neither will I.
Monday was a reminder that staying in is not the same as being spared. Stocks fell, bond prices fell and gold fell together. Gold dropped $107.10 to $3,997.00. Nothing clever protected anybody that day.
And here is the honest ending. Norway lost. England beat them on Saturday and plays Argentina tomorrow in Atlanta. Haaland is going home. So the lesson is not that showing up for twenty years wins the trophy, because it plainly doesn’t, and I am not going to pretend otherwise to a room full of adults. The lesson is that showing up for twenty years is the only thing that gets you onto the field at all. Every other argument in this business — which fund, which sector, which week — is an argument about what happens once you’re already there. If you are not sure what your own staying power looks like on paper, bring your statement to a review and we will count it.
Two jobs. First, for every CalSTRS and CalPERS household in the book, put a dollar figure on the pension in the plan document — a line item, not a footnote — and note separately whatever retiree health benefit the district actually provides, if any. Do not assume one exists; the MTA benefit in Saturday’s story covers active union workers, and that is not the same thing. The evidence the pension is worth something is that tens of thousands of strangers will sit on a list for years to reach it. Second, in the models book, carry Morningstar’s finding and not our own gloss on it: investors in the original bitcoin ETFs trailed their own funds by 14.30 points a year by buying high and selling low. That is a behavior gap, and it is the one thing a review can actually close. We are making no claim about how the $30 million non-rebalancers did, because the paper doesn’t say.