In the investing world, fortunes are rarely made by accident. The biggest winners of the past two decades — Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia — didn’t just sell great products. They all mastered a single, powerful principle: monopolize a market segment before anyone else does.
It’s a principle that would make the creators of the classic board game Monopoly proud. In that game, the winner isn’t the player who spreads themselves thin across the board — it’s the one who controls a key stretch of real estate, stacks houses, and compounds rents. The same dynamic has played out in real markets, where the companies that dominate a niche tend to generate the highest margins, widest moats, and most consistent compounding returns.
And now one ETF — the Monopoly ETF (ticker: MPLY) — has turned that timeless truth into an investable strategy that has been crushing the S&P 500 since its launch.
The Secret Behind Market Dominance
The premise behind MPLY is simple yet powerful: the companies that have delivered the greatest long-term wealth for investors all share one trait — they’ve built a form of monopoly.
Not a literal monopoly in the antitrust sense, but what portfolio manager Neil Azous, calls an “economic monopoly” — a business so dominant, so indispensable, and so deeply entrenched that competitors can’t easily dislodge it.
“Every market legend — from Apple’s iPhone ecosystem to Google’s search engine and Amazon’s logistics network — figured out how to corner a space,” Azous says. “They built pricing power, loyalty, and data advantages that compound over time. We built MPLY to identify and own those same traits across industries.”
The ETF’s research team analyzed over eight decades of market data, dissecting the performance of hundreds of stocks that turned early investors into millionaires. What they found wasn’t just innovation or luck — it was control. Companies that controlled distribution, data, or user ecosystems consistently outperformed those that competed on price or marketing.
From Board Game to Balance Sheet
To understand MPLY’s philosophy, it helps to return to Monopoly the game itself.
In the early stages of Monopoly, every player scrambles to buy as many properties as possible. It feels exciting — diversified, even. But veteran players know that spreading too thin is a losing strategy. The real power comes from owning a full color set — say, Boardwalk and Park Place — and building houses as fast as possible. That’s when the cash flow snowballs.
MPLY applies a similar concept to markets. Instead of owning a little bit of everything, the fund seeks out companies that already control a critical slice of the economic “board” — industries where they’ve built high-margin dominance through scale, brand power, or network effects.
Consider Apple (AAPL). Its monopoly isn’t just the iPhone — it’s the closed ecosystem of devices, services, and App Store economics that trap users inside. Once you’re in, switching feels like walking away from Boardwalk with hotels.
Or Nvidia (NVDA), which built a virtual monopoly over high-performance GPUs — the “utilities” of the AI age. Nvidia doesn’t merely compete; it defines the market, much as owning the railroads in Monopoly ensures that every player pays you just to move forward.
As Azous puts it, “Monopolistic advantage isn’t about size; it’s about inevitability. You want to own the companies everyone else has to pay just to exist.”
The Power of Compounding Control
When researchers compared companies with high market concentration against broader benchmarks, the data was striking. Over the last twenty years, stocks with quasi-monopolistic dominance — firms that held over 50% market share in their core segment — generated an average annualized return nearly twice that of the S&P 500.
Those firms also had fatter gross margins, more pricing power, and lower customer churn. The consistency of earnings meant they could reinvest, buy back stock, and keep fortifying their position — like upgrading houses to hotels.
In investing, control compounds faster than capital.
That’s the foundation MPLY seeks to capture. The ETF’s portfolio tilts heavily toward companies with wide moats, high free-cash-flow margins, and structural barriers to entry. It’s not chasing hype; it’s buying control dynamics — the very DNA of market leadership.
How the Strategy Works
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The Monopoly ETF (MPLY) uses a proprietary “Dominance Scoring System” developed by the Strategy Shares research team. The model evaluates companies across five key pillars:
Market Control — share of market or ecosystem dependency.
Network Effects — how each new user strengthens the moat.
Pricing Power — ability to raise prices without losing demand.
Switching Costs — customer difficulty in leaving.
Reinvestment Edge — capital efficiency reinforcing dominance.
Each company receives a composite “Monopoly Score.” Those scoring highest — typically firms like Microsoft, Visa, Meta, Broadcom, and Amazon — form the ETF’s core holdings.
It’s a forward-looking approach. Instead of reacting to momentum or quarterly earnings surprises, MPLY targets the structural advantage that keeps cash flow compounding through multiple market cycles.
A Modern Lesson From an Old Game
If the 20th century rewarded industrial scale, the 21st century rewards platform control.
In Monopoly, it’s not the number of properties you own that wins the game — it’s how effectively you extract value from others crossing your space. Likewise, the modern economy is dominated by companies that have made themselves unavoidable.
Think of Google: every search funnels data back into its algorithm, making the next search better — a feedback loop no competitor can replicate. Or Visa: every card swipe strengthens its network effects, making it harder for new entrants to compete.
Even in newer sectors, like artificial intelligence, this dynamic holds. Nvidia’s dominance in AI chips and software frameworks resembles a player who not only owns the railroads but also controls the dice.
MPLY’s thesis is that this dynamic — the inevitability of paying rent to the dominant player — explains why certain companies generate so much long-term wealth. Investors who recognized those patterns early, whether in Amazon’s e-commerce logistics or Microsoft’s cloud dominance, didn’t just pick good stocks; they effectively bought Boardwalk before the hotels went up.
Why Investors Are Paying Attention
As markets grow more competitive and information-driven, traditional valuation metrics like P/E ratios and dividend yields often fail to capture strategic control.
“Wall Street still thinks in linear terms — revenue, margins, growth,” Azous says. “But the new economy compounds through monopolistic feedback loops. Once a company hits critical mass, it’s game over for everyone else.”
That thesis has resonated with both institutional and retail investors seeking a smarter, more structural way to capture long-term alpha. Since launch, MPLY has drawn attention from financial advisors who view it as a complement to core equity exposure — a strategic bet on the winners of tomorrow’s economy.
The fund’s holdings are surprisingly diversified across sectors, including technology, consumer platforms, infrastructure, and even healthcare — yet unified by the same principle of dominance. Whether it’s Google in digital search or Eli Lilly in obesity drugs, the unifying DNA is control of the profit pool.
The Next Generation of “Monopoly Stocks”
MPLY’s team isn’t just looking backward. Their research continually scans for emerging monopolistic traits in mid-cap and frontier sectors — the next wave of “Boardwalks in the making.”
“History tells us monopolies evolve,” says Azous. “Twenty years ago, nobody thought digital payments or cloud software would become trillion-dollar moats. Our goal is to identify those dynamics early — the companies quietly cornering a market before the crowd notices.”
Names in areas like AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, and digital health are already on MPLY’s radar. Each reflects a new version of the same old story: innovation creates advantage, advantage compounds into dominance, and dominance turns into wealth creation.
For investors tired of guessing which fad stock will pop next, MPLY offers something rarer: a systematic way to own the companies that have already won the game.
As Azous puts it, “You can chase every roll of the dice, or you can just own the board.”