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Speaker 3The macro picture for the metals is, so strong, the argument is so strong. You can invest along that with these leveraged plays. And I think it really is a generational opportunity.
Speaker 4Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Thoughtful Money founder and your host, Adam Taggart. Welcome you today for a discussion about all things precious metals with one of the great precious metals, experts out there, Brian London. Brian is the publisher of the mining stock newsletter, goldnewsletter.com. He's also the proprietor of the fantastic New Orleans Investment Conference, which I will be attending in just a couple of days. It is the longest running financial investment conference, I believe, in the U.S.
Speaker 3True? In the world, as far as I know. In the world. Yes. And Gold Newsletter, I believe, is now the longest running investment newsletter in the world. Wow. Longest running and best. There you go. There you go. Checks in the mail, Adam. Thank you. I know.
Speaker 4Well, look, so you've got your conference coming up. So I just had my conference. And for folks that can't get enough of this type of macro material, especially when it comes, you know, you have speakers that talk about everything, macro markets, but there is a bent towards real assets and particularly the precious metals. So folks, you know, still want more of that. Obviously, they can go to your conference. We'll tell them how to do that in just a bit. Let's just start at the top, though, Brian. When I was at your conference a year ago, there was a sense of real growing enthusiasm. I think Silver, I think, had just crested like $50 an ounce. There was a real sense that like, hey, this price action that we've been waiting for, predicting for a long time, was really starting to get underway. And then, of course, things went bananas. In between your conference last year, which I think was early November or sometime like that, you know, basically Silver more than doubled after that in just two months. And Gold had a very similar run. Then there's been a big cooling off. And during that blow off spike in early January, I, you, many other of your speakers were telling people, look, this is this is bubblicious price action. This is, you know, there's going to be a massive pullback here. You probably. We should start hedging or locking in your gains. That is what happened. I think the big question people have right now is, OK, how much of that froth has been worked out now? And is there another up cycle coming here? Or, man, we've seen two big blow off spikes before in history, 1980, 2011, where then the price basically returned to the floor and stayed on the floor for a decade or more. Do you have a strong opinion one way or the other here?
Speaker 3Yeah, I do. And you're interested. There, Adam reminded me, what was Tolkien's subtitle for The Hobbit? Was it there and back again? There and back again. Yeah. Yeah. And here we are. So what happened? And that is the seminal question for investors in the sector right now. And, you know, I think it's it's all part and parcel of what happens when you get Western investors finally involved in the metals trade, the metals and the miners. And by that, I mean really gold and silver. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that happened a little over a year ago when Powell had his Jackson Hole speech and basically acknowledged that he was going to start cutting rates again. And then the Western investors pounced on it. And as they always do, they bring volatility. We had, you know, dizzying rallies. And then we had these stomach churning declines. And that's that's just what happens when you get the traders involved. We'd been really spoiled before then because the market. The market was till then, the first 18 months of that bull market, we really hadn't had any technical corrections or typical corrections instead of dropping or losing priced gold, just merely traded sideways and resolved any excesses over time and not price. But then the Western traders came in and, you know, be careful what you ask for. We've got tremendous rallies like we got in the fall and and going into January. But that would have burned. But that would have burned itself off anyway. And it did. It was just a bubble looking for a pin at that time. And the pin was the war in Iraq. I mean, Iran forgot what the latest war was. And and the idea that this new the new Federal Reserve underwashed was going to be hawkish and start raising rates. So that really evaporated the that rally and got us right back to where we were before. Beforehand, that I do think has been worked off the market right now, which is the Western traders as the central banks had been driving the market before then the gold market primarily, but now they've become more of a support as the price drops, they're allocating probably the same amount of money to the sector, so they're buying more gold, so they're acting more of as a support to the market than a real driver. So the theme now. The Western traders are still acting on the idea that the Fed will be raising rates and doing so in some sort of a concerted, long lasting campaign. And and I have a very strong conviction that that's just not possible with debt loads this great. And I think the math shows that. So, yeah, I think the theme is going to change. I think the rally is going to renew once it begins. It becomes apparent to Western investors and traders and even the algos that the Fed really can't raise rates in any kind of consistent or long lasting manner.
Speaker 4Okay, so you've got kind of the macro what's going on with the debt and the limitations of the central planners, as you just mentioned, and there's also the micro, which is, you know, silver. So precious metals have had a pretty rough couple of weeks, couple of months. Mm hmm. And the day we're talking here, they're close to their lows of the past. Well, they're close to the lows of the year right now. That said, silver is still above 50, at least at the time we're recording this, 50 bucks an ounce. And that is basically almost twice where it was a year and a half ago. Right. So we have to keep some perspective here that it's been kind of a rough year if you bought in at the beginning of the year. But if you if you've owned it for any length of time beyond that, you're still doing it. You're still doing pretty well. So the companies that mine these metals are way more profitable than they were just a year and a half ago. And I'm curious, kind of almost regardless what happens at the macro level, does the Western investor kind of have to start paying more attention here to the miners just because they're just putting up better and better numbers on the board?
Speaker 3Yeah, you would think so. And I have. I have thought so. I thought that each quarterly reporting period would bring some realization that they're making money hand over fist and that they couldn't ignore those kinds of earnings. But they've done a pretty good job of ignoring them still. So I really, frankly, at this point, don't know when they're going to start paying attention. But I would suspect it would happen when and if the AI bubble starts to deflate a bit. We haven't really seen that. We haven't really seen much in the way of deflation. We've seen some skepticism in the market, but nothing on the order of an abandonment of that idea yet in tech stocks. You know, we had a big drop last week and then we've come back again. So I think there's still a greed factor there and still a belief in that. And to be fair, there is some reality there. It's not like a lot of the other bubbles we've had in the past. But that's stealing all of the oxygen. And in the meantime, you have dramatic outperformance by gold and silver miners who are turning out earnings that any tech company would be envious of. So when does that happen? I think I really don't know. I can't say. But I think that there's still a very, very important area to to invest in. I think there's a lot of value there. And I think. I think there's a lot of upside there. end. It's just a matter of time.
Speaker 4Yeah. I don't know if this is a good analogy or not, but I kind of think of it like, imagine the NBA where you've got, you know, standout players like LeBron and Steph Curry, and they're getting paid massive contracts, right? As they should. They're legends in the game. But now you've got a bunch of other guys on a whole bunch of other teams who are putting up pretty comparable stats, but they're still getting paid, you know, like they're, you know, a junior B team player. And it's the question is sort of like, you know, how long can the scouts ignore these guys before, you know, owners have to say, look, these guys are putting up big enough numbers that like, I got to sign that player and, you know, basically start giving them much better contracts. Maybe it's an imperfect analogy, but that's kind of what I feel like right now is these minors are out there. Like you said, putting up in some ways, like, you know, in certain circumstances, tech like profit margins, but so far the scouts haven't knocked on their doors yet.
Speaker 3Yeah. And, and, you know, tech like profit margins more so, I think, than a lot of the tech plays, because a lot of the tech plays, the hottest ones aren't really based on, on earnings or margins, but potential. But it's a great question. And it, it isn't so much that it's an imperfect analogy, but it's a great question. And it, it isn't so much that it's an attractive area because of relative value, but also relative potential, because it's such a tiny backwater of the global investing market. And when you look at it, you know, there's, there are oceans and oceans of liquidity out there sloshing around the world, going into these big markets, but the mining and metal sector is just a little bit of a backwater. And I think that's a great question. little lagoon. So if some of that money sloshes into that little lagoon, it will have an outsized effect. The, the entire market cap of gold miners, much less silver miners is, is equal to, you know, Apple or, or, or Tesla, or even SpaceX. It's, it's, it's a fraction of what the Magnificent Seven now commands. So it would not take much if we, if just a little bit of money, a ladle worth of that global liquidity spills into the sector. It's going to absolutely explode. There's not that much in the terms of cumulative market cap. There's not that many names, especially in the silver sector, for example, which is the, the more leveraged and higher torque of the whole, of the whole sector.
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Speaker 4Yeah. And this is what I don't understand. And maybe you can help me out. I'm going to combine two questions here. One is, let's use your talk there about the AI sector. There's a bunch of companies that are building compute and such that you can be a behemoth out there and only still have a fraction of the compute market. But you could take, you know, a fraction of that market size and come in and you could own all the silver in the world. You could own a huge chunk of the gold in the world. And it just set us apart. And I think that's a great point. I think that's a great point. It surprises me that some deep-pocketed players don't realize that and say, well, I'm just going to go in and I'm just going to roll up basically the silver supply. And it wouldn't be that much relative to the unbelievable amount of capital that's getting thrown in the AI world. And AI needs these materials. You know, silver is really important to the AI build-out and the grid build-out that the AI phenomenon is going to need to run on. It just kind of surprises me that nobody's thinking that way. I mean, even just a single billionaire could step in and buy up enough supply to materially kind of send a signal that this stuff's really scarce. And of course, you know, Sobers made it to the essential minerals list for the U.S. I think in the past year it made the list. Gold obviously is a tier one asset for banks now. I don't know. To me, it just seems like the criticality of these two metals is for some reason weirdly unappreciated by the larger market.
Speaker 3It is. And you bring up a few important points that I've stressed over the recent history in my writings and presentations. One is that there are two or three big area plays in gold exploration, for example, where a hedge fund or private equity could come, lock up the tens of millions of ounces of gold in the ground for a couple of billion dollars by just coming in and buying the three or four companies that are now controlling it all and just do it in a flash. And then they would have a strategic investment that for a check that's, you know, easy for so many private equity funds to write. And that would be decades worth of a strategic investment. Another point is the criticality or the importance of a lot of these metals, not so much gold, but silver, copper, just about all of the battery and base metals and rare earth metals. What we're seeing now is that some tech companies are going upstream and trying to secure supply by investing in those companies that are exploring and developing or producing the metals. But we're also seeing government governments come in. And if you want to talk about real checks that can be written, that's where the money that can can come in can be absolutely overwhelming and completely independent of the economics of any project. You know, there are in a typical discovery development production scenario in metals, you make a discovery, you drill it off, you get permits, you get environmental permits that can take years in some instances. It takes a lot of money to drill off a project, you develop studies at various levels up to feasibility, then you have to try and finance it, then you have to build it, then you have to go through all the public comments and all the objections. And it takes for a copper mine, 15 to 20 years from discovery to actual production, it takes a little bit less for a gold discovery, probably around eight to 10 years at best, though, but when a government decides that it needs those metals, it just steamrolls over all of that process and provides the money, provides to check that these companies need to get into production, and the economics at that point don't matter when the government and the economy needs it, not just needs the metal, but needs the security of supply, the independence from our political adversaries, you know, China controls the vast majority of the rare earths market. That's a problem that can be solved with a rounding area and the rounding error in the federal budget applied to the problem in a couple of years of development. And that's what we're seeing now. So there's a lot of money, it is, you know, dumb money coming in, but it's overwhelming dumb money, and it will get projects built and it will dramatically inflate the values of the companies that are going to exploring and developing. So it's another big factor in metals and mining that I think is underappreciated, and it's going to grow in importance.
Speaker 4All right, so while you were talking, I was scanning for a chart that I did not find, but somebody who I interviewed in the past couple weeks, put up a chart, and it was of gold discoveries by, not exactly by decade, but it was like, you know, all of history up until 1950. Or something like that, 1950 to 2000, and 2000 and now, or something like that. And, you know, huge percentage of the world's known gold was discovered before 1950 or 1970, or whatever it was. And then that percentage dropped down a fair amount in the next like 30, 40 years. But in the past, I think like 20, 25 years, we've found like almost nothing. I think it's probably a function of several things. One, it's probably a function of reduced capex. So we just weren't exploring as much. much. But a big part of it too, I've got to imagine is just, you know, humans, we go after the easy stuff first. We got all the really high concentration Orbanes throughout earlier in human history because it was the easier stuff to get. And it's just getting harder and harder and more dilute to go after more deposits now. So you look at a chart like that and it sends off warning bells, right? Which is just, hey, we're just, you know, we're pulling X amount out of the ground every year, but we're finding a lot less going forward. So unless some magical new technology, you know, helps us find a huge more amount of gold than we're currently finding right now, or we go out and start lassoing asteroids and bringing gold down that way, which is, you know, still very much sci-fi. This stuff's just going to get real scarce. Right. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on that in general, from an industry perspective, but also to me, that just makes, I mean, these things happen cyclically anyways, but to me, that just screams like, hey, at some point, there's going to be a big M&A wave here, where even the big producers are going to have to start going out there and gobbling up a lot of smaller explorers and early development guys, because they just need the ounces to stay in business. And that's the let alone other companies coming from other sectors and buying up, you know, gold companies too. But do you see a coming M&A wave like this?
Speaker 3Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot to unpack from what you just said. You know, it is a combination. It's a combination of lack of exploration expenditure and development for decades. And that's across all metals. It's not just gold and silver, but the base metals, energy metals, copper, especially. There will be a supply response. Price solves a lot of what we were talking about. In gold, you can go after lower grade ore. Projects that are out there that we've known about for many years that are very large have been what we called for a long time, we called optionality plays. They were waiting for the price of gold to rise enough to make them economic. Well, just about all of those projects got economic at around $2,200 an ounce gold. And so they're not only economic now, they're robustly economic and waiting to be developed. It still takes time though. It takes time to build a mine. And so gold, I think we're going to see a supply response sooner than the other metals. Silver is 70% a byproduct of other production, other metals production. So it's harder to get a supply response. Gold, the producers can low grade their mines. They can go after that lower grade ore that's right there that was going on in their waste pile. They can run it through the mill and they should. They should be producing as much gold as they can at these prices. So there's a bit of a supply response. I think generally speaking, we've got about a golden period of four to five years before we start seeing gold production really rise in response to these prices. Copper is a different story. It takes, as I mentioned, much longer to get a large copper project into production. And there are large copper projects known out there. There are big 500 million ton copper projects that were marginally economic or sub-economic for many years. We know they're there. We have to develop. It's not a matter of which of those will get developed. To meet the demand curve coming up for copper, they all would need to be developed. So there will be still a major supply constraint. On copper. And it will be unresolvable simply by price because it will take 10, 15 years to get those new supplies online. So that's that part of it. The other part you asked about is the M&A. Yeah, I think it's going to come. I think it has to come. The gold producers are making so much money right now. They can only do so much in terms of buybacks. They can only pay out so much in terms of dividends. At some point, the analysts that are, all of a sudden, we have a lot of new analysts out there who are looking at the sector. And they're going to look at companies and start judging them on their pipeline, their reserve pipeline. In some cases, the big major producers have less reserves now than they had 10 years ago. And in some cases, their share prices are the same as they were 10 or 20 years ago. So they will have to do something to differentiate themselves and to fill that top pipeline. So far, it's been really ho-hum mergers, mergers of equals or mergers or acquisitions at a 10 or 20% premium because the developers have been able to get the money to advance their projects. And so they've already built in a lot of the value into the companies through that process. I think we are going to see the majors at some point begin to go further upstream. To more of the explorers and early stage developers to lock up some of these deposits at cheaper levels, but at takeover premiums that will be highly rewarding for the shareholders of those junior companies.
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Speaker 4And Brian, if you don't mind, in a bit, we'll talk about your newsletter and where folks can go to see all the picks that you like. But if you don't mind, I might ask you just for one, two, or three names that currently have your attention most right now. And it's not financial advice for folks to rush. Buy them, but it's just candidates for folks to go and research. But before we get there, you mentioned these companies doing buybacks and dividends. And I'm just curious because you've followed this sector for a long time. Is there kind of a giddiness to being able to talk about buybacks and dividends with these companies? Because historically, you know, they're known, the reputation they have from previous decades is being notoriously poorly run and management would not buy back shares. They'd be diluting investors at every stretch. Is there just a sense of, you know, wow, it's really pleasant to have this sector really have cleaned up its game. And now we're doing things like, you know, fiscal prudence and shareholder rewarding and that type of stuff.
Speaker 3Well, it's a mixed bag. You know, I focus on the junior mining sector. Earlier, I was a junior mining sector. I was a junior mining sector. I was a junior mining companies, you know, there's nothing more exciting is having a slug of stock in a company that makes a big discovery. And that's where, you know, a lot of our investors, a lot of our readers and subscribers have the risk, the ability to play in these riskier plays, to play in that sandbox. And they can, they understand the risk and it's, you know, it's not their mortgage money, it's, it's, it's not widows and orphans and, and they get that excitement of having these big hits and these tin baggers or more. So we do focus on that. And yes, the, the big producers have cleaned up their acts. They have become more respectable, more trustworthy for Wall Street and institutional investors. And they focused a lot on returning shareholder value with mixed success, I might say, across the board. But if you're going to, if you're going to, if you're going to invest in the further down the food chain and the explorers and early stage developers, you don't want them to be these big majors to be so prudent. You want them to revert back to human nature and start spending like drunken sailors again, because they will be paying exorbitant prices for the stocks that you own. So if you're in that sector, it is a bit of a mixed bag. I'm sure it's prudent. But I do have some confidence in human nature. And if this market continues on the broader trajectory that it's already established, I think that they will revert to human nature and we will have some drunken sailor type spending by the majors. And I hope that they're focused on some of the many names that I personally own and recommend.
Speaker 4Okay. Two sort of technology questions. I've asked this recently, but I don't believe I've asked it of you, at least not on air, which is how much potential do you see for AI? to come in and dramatically make these companies more efficient, right? AI is great on analyzing data and pattern recognition and whatnot. And that's what a lot of exploration is for sure, right? Is drilling core samples and analyzing the results and trying to guesstimate how much is there and where the right place to drill is. It seems to me that AI could really go in there and really increase the probability of finding the big deposits. Am I right? Am I wrong in your
Speaker 3opinion? Well, it shows great potential. I think you're right there. It's still unproven. There have been a number of efforts. I mean, this is nothing new that's been around for, I think, close to 10 years as far as what was referred to at one point as machine learning, and now it's AI. And companies have been using that. A number of companies have focused on that with, frankly, not a lot of success yet. The most obvious example is a company that was funded by some big tech giants. Hundreds of millions of dollars going in to teach these mining professionals how it should really be done and haven't found bunkus yet, haven't covered anything. But there are some new efforts that I've seen that I think should be done. And I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing. Show promise. Some new companies coming on the scene. And I think the efforts are getting refined. It's interesting to me, one of the companies that I follow, Kodiak Copper, that I've recommended, has a number of targets on its property. And it has been using AI to also take all of its data and develop targets. And it's developed some targets that the company has not. But it's also overlapped a few, a number of places with targets that the company's geologists have already discovered. And AI is saying, well, that's a good place to explore. So that gives me some hope that there's some potential there. Just lots of potential still unproven, I think.
Speaker 4Okay. The next one's about energy. So this is still to come, but the technology is now working. You have new fuel sources like nuclear micro-reactors, which one of the big issues in mining is energy is a big cost. And a lot of these mining deposits are out in the middle of nowhere, literally. And so getting the energy out there, supplying your energy is quite costly. Where if you could plunk a small micro-nuclear reactor, less than the size of a shipping container, at a drill site somewhere and use that to power your mining needs. And again, I'm not quite sure the difference between using electrons to drive heavy mining equipment versus hydrocarbons. But if these new energy technologies allowed for much easier access to energy at potentially a much smaller cost than they have right now, how transformative, if at all, do you think that would be to the mining industry?
Speaker 3I think it will be helpful. I don't know if I would call it transformative to the mining industry, because for the cost of even that kind of a small modular reactor, you can run a power line an awful long way, or a gas pipeline. But still, I think it will have an impact. I think for mining applications, it's probably 20 years or so away. But where the SMRs have the most impact, it's probably 20 years or so away. But where the SMRs will have the most impact, it's probably 20 years or so away. But where the SMRs will have the most impact, I think in the closer term, will be for data centers, where they can be built or put placed in a, you know, not necessarily a remote location, but a stationary location where they can provide the independent power load for data centers. And that has been a big driving factor for the uranium market right now. That's one of the new themes in uranium. And I think it's a real one. But we're only a couple of years away, maybe three, for small modular reactor installations. So that, I think, is in the nearer term.
Speaker 4All right. Yeah. And I've had a few of those companies on this channel. We've talked about, you know, the really amazing opportunities there. And just note, too, that, again, your conference, as I said, it's sort of heavy on the gold, the precious metals aspect. But you talk about a lot of hard assets there, uranium, obviously, being one. I actually remember, I've been going to your conference for a long time. You know, I remember the years where Rick Rule was telling people when uranium was just totally, I don't know, hated, but just nobody paid any attention to it. And Rick was just banging the drum saying, guys, one day, this is going to really turn around. And now, of course, he's very validated.
Speaker 3Yeah, Rick is the original uranium bug, as it were. But Rick will also tell you. In a self-deprecating manner, that the synonym for early in investing is wrong, because he was really early on uranium. But uranium has had a couple of bull markets. And, you know, he's done very well in all of them.
Speaker 4Yeah. Okay. So I threw a couple of darts there of things that could be sort of transformative to the industry and really drive the price action, especially of the miners in the future. So we talked about M&A. We talked about lack of CapEx. We talked about, you know, some of these potential technology ideas that I mentioned. Are there any other big factors that explain kind of your optimism about this sector that I haven't brought up yet?
Speaker 3Well, I think the sector, my optimism for the sector is driven from my pessimism for the financial situation in the world at large. It's not just the U.S., but every developed nation. not just the US, but every developed nation has, after 45 to 50 years of ever easier money, ever lower interest rates built up ever larger debts and those debt loads now preclude really any kind of a solution we you can't uh cut spending obviously that hasn't worked
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Speaker 4has it been tried? I mean, we're not even at the point where anybody's willing to tighten their fiscal belts.
Speaker 3Well, you know, lack of success, you can say they tried and tried without any success, and some have, you know, you have a few people in Congress, U.S. Congress, that are trying to rein back spending, but precious few, and the political system is just, you know, built to reward spending and constituencies and incumbencies, and so, yeah, it's not going to happen, and I think we have to face that. You're not going to cut spending. You cannot grow your way out of this short of discovering practical nuclear fusion or having advanced technologies gifted to us from alien races. We're not going to grow our way out of the death situation. And so the problem or the solution is going to be the same that it's been in every human society in history, and that's that the currencies have to be depreciated, aka inflation. So the currencies will be depreciated. And my optimism for the monetary metals, gold and silver, grows from that fundamental understanding. Silver in particular, I think what happened in January and February of this year was particularly interesting because silver essentially doubled in price went up to at one point 120 and industry kept buying uh industry for the first time that in my long career i saw that industry was forced to bid with investors It's not just the U.S., but every developed nation has, after 45 to 50 years of ever easier money, ever lower interest rates, built up ever larger debts. And those debt loads now preclude really any kind of a solution. You can't cut spending. demand for silver really will have an impact because there are no longer any above ground supplies. And in fact, industrial demand will take, over the next few years, will grow to take every newly mined ounce of silver out of the ground and industry will be forced to pay whatever the going rate is for that silver. -
Speaker 4And just to note here, oil market, other markets, they say the cure for high prices is high prices, right? The price gets so high that economic activity starts having to be constrained, right? 'Cause it becomes harder and harder to afford. Silver is kind of different, isn't it? In other words, it tends to be used in tracing up amounts that it's not the dominant cost factor that goes into the final product. So if silver doubles, triples, quadruples, in a lot of cases, industry's still just gonna pony up and pay for it because it's not making the end product cost prohibitive. Am I correct in that outlook? -
Speaker 3Yeah, you are. And not only that, but as I mentioned earlier, 70% of silver production is as a byproduct of other metals. So it's really the economics and the dynamics in these other metal markets that drive silver production. At some price, that will flip and silver will become the more valuable metal, but that price is way high, far higher than where it is today. So it is indispensable. It's indispensable in a lot of applications. It doesn't add a lot to the final cost of products in many of those applications. And so it's not gonna be innovated around if it could be innovated around. Copper is another example for different reasons. There's tremendous copper production, but there needs to be so much more because you can't really innovate around copper. It's not only necessary, but necessary in the delivery of energy, it's also necessary in very many of the applications in the usage of that industry. Copper windings for electric motors, copper wire for electrical transmission, copper windings for generation of electricity. So all up and down the energy distribution and usage food chain, there's copper, and you can't replace it with really anything. -
Speaker 4And that at the end of the day tends to be kind of the underlying factor for many of the hard assets that you guys talk about at your conferences. It really does come down to supply. Now, obviously gold and silver are a little bit different 'cause they've got the monetary aspect on top of that. All right, so a lot going on in this space. Obviously the big question people have is the timing of it all, the when. Brian, when does this all turn again? And when do we have better days? And honestly, I'm not gonna put you on the spot to try to answer that because that's the whole purpose of your conference. We'll get to the conference in just a second, but for folks that would like to, you know, research a couple of companies that you think are interesting in the mining space, and feel free to pick any metal. It doesn't have to be gold or silver, just whatever has your interest most right now. If you could just share, you know, just a couple of quick names on it and why you like them. And then we'll tell people how to get your newsletter. -
Speaker 3Yeah, you know, I'll give you a couple. I'll give you one that is relatively lower risk for a risky sector, and one that is a bit more of a hair and fire speculation, as it were. For the lower risk, I think Banyan Gold is one of the best deposits out there and one of the best jurisdictions. It's in the Yukon, has about 8 million ounces of gold, that I think they could use. I think they could easily get to 10 million ounces, really just by lowering their cutoff grade, which they could arguably do. And I think eventually it's gonna have much more. But they are, they have de-risked the project tremendously, very well. And I think it's, you know, one of the sure of things out there. At some point it will get bought out by a major. So that's Banyan Gold. The symbol is B-Y-N on the Venture Exchange. Another company that is, and I visited Banyan's project over the summer, and it is very well run and is really very large and growing. Another company that is much more speculative is Relevant Gold. It's similar as RGC on the Canadian Venture Exchange. I just got back from a trip to that company's projects in Wyoming. And their thesis is basically that a, the large portion of the Abitibi Gold Belt in Canada was separated and rotated and ended in the middle of Wyoming a couple of billion years ago. And if that's true, then this is the most asymmetric bet that you can have in junior mining, because operating on this thesis, which I think they've actually proven, through their work and the work of others, they've tied up most of that entire gold belt. So it is as if one company had tied up most of the Abitibi Gold Belt, where over a hundred million ounces of gold have been discovered. And I visited their projects. I don't know if they're going to make their big discovery from this drill season, a lot of results coming in from that, or next drill season, or even the next. But they have, they have strong enough backers and they have enough land and enough targets that I think they're, I really believe they're going to make not just one, but a few significant discoveries over time. -
Speaker 4Okay, fantastic. Well, thank you so much for sharing that. And folks, if you're interested in this space, those are two companies to go research. Just a reminder, if you are new to this space, I think Brian said this a couple of times, but it's a very volatile industry. I mean, the precious metals themselves are quite volatile, but the mining companies, are volatility on steroids. And of course the more you go from a major down to the minors, the volatility increases exponentially. So- - And I personally own,
Speaker 3I personally own both of those companies too. So I am not an unbiased observer. -
Speaker 4Good thing you mentioned that. Although, you know, you own a lot of companies. - I do. - And I just want to let folks know that again, if you're new to this space, I highly recommend rather than just learning from the school of hard knocks, you cozy up to an expert and look over their shoulder for, you know, enough of a period of time before you feel like you've really sort of mastered the risk and the way to analyze these companies. And a great way to do that is to, you know, there are some great people out there that publish newsletters and you can essentially just watch their trades, right? And you can jump on the ones that you want to participate in and let other ones go by, but you can, always be sort of watching their, their logic for why they're interested in the company, why they're buying it, why they're lightening up shares, whatever. And again, I think the oldest newsletter that's been doing that over the decades is Gold Newsletter, right?
Speaker 3Right Brian? - Yes, it is. And somewhat, you know, distressing, although it helps me from a business standpoint, there are fewer and fewer newsletters focusing on the sector these days, fewer independent newsletters. A number of them out there are sponsored by, mining companies, but there are only, you know, a handful or so of independent publications left out there. And I think this sector, the macro picture for the metals is so strong. The argument is so strong. And I think it really is a generational opportunity, but one that deserves spending a little money, subscribing to the best newsletters and attending the conferences. It's a lot of fun and it's very interesting. And if you find companies, which this inefficient market always seems to do, there are companies that are tremendous values, have tremendous potential that are forgotten by the market and are available for, you know, pennies on the dollar. And you can, as you say, cross-reference them with some of the best analysts out there. And if there's a company that a few of them agree on, it's likely a very good one. It's a very good bet. -
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Speaker 4Hiring now? - Yeah, that's a great point too. I say this often on the channel, because it's sort of what I do at the high level here is I really like it when you tell me, you talk to multiple different smart experts and when they have their own individual frameworks, their own individual analysis they do, but when they start coming to similar conclusions, to me, that's always an aha moment, which is, okay, people who are taking different paths are still ending up at the same destination that probably increases the probability that there's some real truth here. And you're right. And I want to give a nod to you and your expertise, Brian. You've been at this for a good long while. We're talking about a number of decades, right? I think your involvement goes back, I think, to the 80s, but correct me if I'm wrong.
Speaker 3Yeah. It sure does, as I'm reminded every time I look in the mirror, Adam.
Speaker 4Yeah, no, you are dashing and look far too youthful for that. But, you know, I cut my teeth originally, or for a good chunk of my career, in Silicon Valley. And, you know, near Menlo Park or in Menlo Park, I lived in Menlo Park, but that's where Sand Hill Road is. That's where the venture capital business started. And what you hear time and time again, when you talk to the best and most successful venture capitalists, is they say, you know what, the product, the technology, it's important, but it is far less important than the human capital. Like, that's what we bet on. We try to find the best teams and back those teams with the confidence that they will find the right way to get to the goal. And I believe mining is a similar world where, you know, there are people there that have a demonstrated track record, either on the geological side of being able to, you know, find the right deposits better than the rest of the field, or on the operational side, you know, being able to take a mining endeavor and really make it into a world-class asset. And I think more than anybody that I know, with the maybe perhaps exception of Rick Rule, but I'm not even sure, you know more of the management that's out there. So I'm kind of making a case for two things, which is that, you know, in your newsletter, you're not just looking at the operational results and things like that. You actually know the management very well for most of the companies that you're commenting on. And secondly, that's one of the great things about conferences like yours, is you can go there and not just hear from the management, but you can sit down and talk with them. You know, you can have lunch. I was telling folks the last conference I went to, I'm not sure it was yours or not, but I sat down for lunch and wasn't even looking where I sat. And all of a sudden, I just realized I'm sitting next to Rob McEwen, and I get to pick his brain for the lunch. It's an amazing opportunity as an investor to be able to have that kind of access.
Speaker 3Yeah, it really is. You know, as a promoter of conferences, and I talk to companies all the time, and I, I talk about how of our, our attendees, there are billionaires walking among our attendees that are dressed, you know, in, you know, not dumpily, but in a cardigan or something like this. And you just wouldn't know them from Adam. But there are also some billionaires in the booths talking to our attendees and have had that kind of success in the mining industry. And the smart companies, the smart management teams tend to go to events like ours and, and, and take advantage of that. So they're almost self-defining in that respect. But it is important to, when you look at an investment, look at a stock, a company in the sector, and you ask, what makes this something I want to invest in? And, and when people ask me, what do I look for? It's, it, it depends. You always come back to, it depends, it varies, what kind of a project, what grade, where it's located. But the one key, constant, consistent factor that everybody talks about, and rightly so, is management. And you want a management team that has done it before, that is, values their reputation and their track record more than making another buck on a quick hit in the mining game, as it were. You want good faith actors who not only are acting in good faith, but have expertise and experience and the ability to marshal resources to, to get something over the line. And, and so, yeah, I do focus on that a lot. And there are some instances where I will recommend a company where I don't know the management team that well, but I've looked into the, the project, but the project has to be really, really good. And there have to be no red flags for the management team for me to do that. So, yeah, it is vitally important.
Speaker 4Okay. Well, I think we've beaten around the bush enough. Let's get direct to it. So for folks that want to, A, check out your, your newsletter, where should they go?
Speaker 3Well, they should go to goldnewsletter.com, very simply, the longest running newsletter in the sector, longest running investment newsletter out there. And, you know, if you survive in a market like this for that long, you would think we were doing some things right.
Speaker 4So. Well, speaking about surviving long, not only have you done that with Gold Newsletter, but it's the longest running investment conference in the world. Folks that would like to learn more about your upcoming conference, which is coming up really fast. I mean, just within a couple of days of this video airing, where should they go? And even if they can't attend live in person, there's an opportunity for them to attend virtually, correct?
Speaker 3Yeah. Yeah. It's neworleansconference.com. I believe you have a special thoughtful money link that you'll dutifully provide to your viewers. But yeah, neworleansconference.com. And it, it is coming up in a couple of days. You can, you can attend personally still, if you are someone who can act quickly and impulsively. And that is the best value, being there in person, being able to meet people like you and mingle with our speakers who really do like to talk to our attendees. And it's a lot of fun to visit New Orleans, but you can also get, watch it live and at your leisure through recordings, video recordings of every presentation. All of our presentations, all of our corporate presentations, all of our workshops, everything is recorded and available for you to watch from the comfort of your home. And, you know, Adam, you and I have similar business models. We just get the best of the best and put them all out there. And, you know, it's the simplest, and I think the most powerful business model. You, you give people tremendous value, much, much more than they're paying for. And, you know, that, that's, that's, that's a lot of value. And, you know, that's a lot of value. And, you know, they will come. And that's been our secret. And, you know, it's, it's, I think, evident in our speaker roster that we get there in person for you to see, view, watch, and talk to.
Speaker 4All right. So two things. I'm going to ask you just to share some of the names from your speaker roster, if it's easy to do, Brian, just so folks get a sense of who's going to be there in person. Secondly, yes, your, your team has given me a nice URL. It's a little complicated. So I've, I've put a redirect in place. So folks, if you just go to thoughtfulmoney.com slash no, that's N-O, stands for New Orleans, you'll be, you'll be directed to the page that Brian was talking about.
Speaker 3Yeah. And so our speakers this year, we've got Grant Williams. We have Doug Casey for what he is saying will be his final public appearance in person. So if you want to get your Doug on, this is the only place you hope your last chance to do so. We have Danielle DiMartino, we have Brent Johnson, Dominic Frisby, Peter Bookvar, Jimmy Urio, Peter Schiff, Adrian Day, Tabby Koster, George Gammon, Robert Helms, Russ Gray, Adam Taggart, of all people, Bob Prechter, Don Durrett, list goes on and on. We have literally dozens. And, you know, the only event out there that I think has a similar roster of experts is yours. So you're a big guy. No, I mean, and it is obvious to anyone. And, and so, you know, you can go to another conference, either live or virtually, and find that on their speaker roster, maybe three or four speakers of the caliber that you and I put out there, but they're not going to have 40. And, and this is where you can really get the value. For frankly, a few hundred dollars, you can get value that will last you all year long in the recordings.
Speaker 4Yeah. And that's having been there many, many years, I can say this, you know, with authority is you're not just seeing these people on stage. You do get the opportunity. And you have to be a little, you have to hustle a little bit because there's other people that want the same opportunity, but you can, you can sit down in the hallway with a Danielle DiMartino booth, you know, or corner Brent, you know, and really dig into him about stable coins or whatever's most on your mind. Again, it's, it's not just the information coming from the stage. It's the potential for those, those one-on-one interactions as well. And it's hugely valuable. All right. So as we wrap up here, good luck. And I look forward to seeing you in a couple of days. I just, let me try to close by trying to open some more eyes here, which is, I think, you know, there's definitely some people that say, you know, a lot of people that have been kind of waiting for Godot, you know, with, with gold and silver, you know, they've been talking about this big monetary reset that's going to have to happen because of the debt and whatnot. And man, it just takes forever And, Brian, you've got white in your beard. You know, could this whole time when it all matters because of the debt and the deficit, could that happen after we're all dead? And I think the short answer is nobody knows. Don't put words in your mouth, but I think you would probably say you've got some good confidence that the implications are going to force themselves onto reality still in our lifetime here in a meaningful way. But also, you've been in this business for decades, and I know you personally. You've done quite well, and you can do quite well in this business with just sort of the standard operating procedure of what's going on with the precious metals and all the other issues we mentioned about the lack of supply, the underinvestment in CapEx and all that type of stuff. And yet, you have this massive potential optionality of the world really having to care. About what's going on with the debt and the deficits. So I guess what I'm trying to get across here is you don't need a sovereign debt crisis to make a fair amount of money in the precious metals space. You can make a really nice return in the precious metals space under kind of standard operating procedure, but you also have this embedded optionality where things could go incredibly in your favor. Now, the world might not be a fun world to live in if we're having a sovereign debt crisis all at once. But you're going to be relatively way. You're going to be better off than other people as a result.
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Speaker 3Yeah, and that brings up two points. I tell people, especially people who are new to the sector, that there's two reasons in gold and silver. One is as insurance and one is as investment. Insurance. Is against that, you know, that tail risk of everything going to hell in a handbasket. You need physical metals, need to own some physical metals and have them readily accessible. And there's a whole lot we could talk about in that respect. The other thing is that if you're confident in the trend of higher metals prices for the macro reasons we discussed primarily at this point, debt and deficits, you can invest along that trend with the leveraged investments, primarily mining stocks. Mm-hmm. And do quite well. And for that trend, I think that's the one thing we know and we can be confident in. After all those decades of ever easier money, we're in the end game. And like you, I have skepticism as to the timing of it and who can predict the timing. I don't think anyone is smart enough to tell us the precise path ahead and when it will end and how it will end. But the one thing we can be very confident in. And that's the trend. We can see that. And that trend tells us you want to be in these sectors. And you'll do very well if you are both protecting yourself and hopefully building wealth as well.
Speaker 4All right. Well, the key part here is getting smarter and then taking the right action. And your newsletter and your conference are great for both of those. You know, certainly getting smarter. And then your newsletter gives people really actionable targets to consider putting their money in. As we wrap up here, Brian, I just want to say thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Thank you. And I just want to note, you've actually talked to some of the advisors that I have on this channel. I just very quickly want to make a plug for them in the sense of, especially if you are not experienced investing in this space, there are some key questions that you want to ask early on. How much exposure do I want to have to the sector? What makes sense given my overall financial situation? If I'm starting to go, you know, up the risk ladder by getting into more minor, you know, major minor, the mining, sorry, the junior miners, how much risk makes sense, you know, for me to take on in this space? Do I want to have any hedges in any way, shape, or form on any of these positions? And so those are all questions I think you want to ask of a good financial advisor, one that really understands the space. And it's, to be honest, it's pretty hard to find a financial advisor who is willing to engage with you in the precious space. One, because they don't like the metals themselves, because they don't make any money if you own physical bullion. And secondly, you know, as Brian was saying, like, this has been an under, a poorly understood sector, and there's just a lot of people out there that just don't follow it. So, but if you've got a good financial advisor who does have the expertise, the familiarity with the sector and the expertise investing with it, great, listen to their advice. If you don't, consider talking to one of the ones that Thoughtful Money endorses, these are the firms you see with me often on this channel. To do that, just fill out the very short form at thoughtfulmoney.com and talk to them about this. They'll give you their best advice for your specific situation. These conversations are free. There's no commitments involved. It's just a service they're doing to help regular people like you. So, Brian, you know, I know you're like me, which is sort of like getting the information is really key. But in and of itself, it doesn't have value until you actually apply it, correct?
Speaker 3Yeah, absolutely. And it is important. It's important to note that what I say and talk about in the companies I recommend, and, you know, it's not individualized investment advice. It's not personalized investment advice. I cannot do that. I'm not a registered investment advisor, and I don't do that. So, it is vitally important that you talk to someone who can give you that advice that's tailor-made to your particular situation and your risk profile, because everything I've talked about today is on the risk year end of the spectrum. I think it's a generational opportunity in this sector. But even within this sector, there's a wide spectrum of risk tolerance or risk exposure, and you need to be aware of that.
Speaker 4All right, well, look, in wrapping up, folks, please join me in thanking Brian for giving us so much of his time, his expertise, and even sharing a couple of specific companies there with us. Please thank him by hitting the like button and then clicking on the subscribe button below. So, what was that little bell on? The little bell icon right next to it. Brian, like I said, best of luck with the upcoming conference, and I look forward to seeing you in a couple of days. Me too, Adam. See you soon. All right, and everybody else, thanks so much for watching.
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