Why I Started T&T Capital Management
A personal letter from Tim Travis
I grew up in Laguna Beach, California — sun, surf, two older brothers, and a normal kid life. We lived in a beautiful place. By most measures, we had it good.
But there was a fight that ran underneath the years I remember most. My parents fought about money. My dad was a good earner — but he wasn’t good with money. They spent beyond their means. Credit cards were used liberally. Capital that should have been working toward the future was instead chasing the present. As they later separated and ultimately divorced, I watched up close what financial stress does to a family — even one that, on paper, had every advantage.
That’s the lesson I carry with me into every conversation I have with a client today. The size of the income matters less than the discipline behind it. The discipline is everything.
A book on a Hawaii trip
When I was a senior in high school, my dad and I took a trip to Hawaii. He knew enough about investing to know who Warren Buffett was — and he’d seen Buffett mention a book in an interview: The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. He picked up a copy. I read it.
I didn’t understand all of it on that first read. But two ideas stuck with me and never left: stocks aren’t lottery tickets, they’re fractional ownership of real businesses. And the price the market quotes you each day isn’t the same thing as the value of the business — it’s just one moody neighbor’s offer. Buy below value; refuse to chase. That’s the whole game.
I went on to study finance at UC Santa Barbara, working through the dot-com bust and reading every Buffett shareholder letter I could find. From Buffett, I worked outward — to Charlie Munger, to Howard Marks, Seth Klarman, Mohnish Pabrai. The library of people who’d done it the right way over decades.
Inside the industry — and what I saw there
My first job out of college was at the Vanguard Group in Scottsdale, Arizona. It was 2004. I watched investors who had believed the index-fund gospel get their retirements cut in half by the tech bust — and then I watched many of them panic and make it worse by selling at the bottom. That experience shaped how I think about volatility, sequence-of-returns risk, and the human cost of an advisor who isn’t there when the storm hits.
After Vanguard, I worked at a small firm in Mission Viejo selling iron condors on the S&P 500 — basically a bet against major volatility in either direction. I was in my mid-twenties when I called a meeting with the owners to tell them their strategy would blow up the moment volatility spiked. They didn’t want to hear it. The financial crisis came, the strategy blew up exactly as I’d warned, and the firm laid off nearly everyone.
That was the moment something clicked. The big firms wouldn’t deviate from the model — they were too institutionalized, too focused on raising assets, too constrained by compliance to act on what the math actually showed. I realized that combining real value-investing discipline with options as a tool — not the gimmick most of Wall Street made of them, but the cost-reduction and income-generation tool Warren Buffett himself uses — could be a real competitive advantage for clients willing to think independently.
Founding T&T Capital Management
After the crisis I joined a commodities brokerage to learn the business side. By 2011 I broke off to do it my own way. T&T Capital Management was founded that year. My right-hand man is my brother Peter — the one who inspired me to read as a kid, the smartest one in the family. We’ve grown every year since (with one exception: 2020, the worst year for value investing in living memory; we underperformed and we were honest about it).
Today T&T Capital Management is an SEC-registered investment adviser managing approximately $190 million for individuals, high-net-worth families, and corporations. We hold ourselves to a fiduciary standard. Every portfolio is researched in-house. We don’t sell products. We don’t take commissions on advisory fees. We invest your money the way I invest mine — and the way I’d want someone investing my parents’ had they had the right help when it mattered.
What I want for you
I started this firm because I watched what happens when people with successful careers reach retirement and realize they’ve never done this before — and the people they used to trust are no longer the right people to ask. They need a guide. They need someone with the training, the patience, and the conviction to stay calm when markets aren’t.
If that sounds like where you are — or where someone you love is — I’d like to have a conversation. No charge, no obligation. Just a real discussion about your situation and whether what we do is the right fit for you.
— Tim
From our Education Portal: What “fiduciary” actually means — and how the structure of T&T Capital Management lines up with it.
