Jim Mellon: Why I'm Loading Up On Energy Stocks

So there's all sorts of reasons why Golden Silver had gone up, but I did not expect it to go up as much as it did, and it was a four-year call for me. So it's worked out very well, and sometimes you don't say for the last dance, and that's my philosophy. So if I said that we have reduced our position in Golden Silver exposure by 80%, I think that would be about accurate. Those seven stocks represent about 40% of the market capitalization of the S&P, which is just a huge and very dangerous concentration risk. At a time when they're all doing essentially the same thing, I wouldn't be playing in that area, because there's plenty of. My view in life is that, you know, you don't need to be in the game that everyone else is playing. There's plenty of other things to do, and that's what I try and do. What's the next unloved sector? As Golden Silver were four years ago, but, you know, we'll actually pay you to be part of it, and get dividend yields in most oil and gas stocks of any note, that is very lowly represented in the S&P and in other indices around the world, and of course it's oil and gas, and so we've been loading up, I mean, literally loading up on oil and gas. Welcome to the Master Investor podcast with me, Wilfred Frost, where we celebrate and learn from the success of the greatest investors, business leaders, and politicians in the world, giving you our listeners the edge and a very happy new year to you. The Master Investor podcast is sponsored by BMI Investments, LSEG, and Interactive Brokers. Please do remember the views expressed in this podcast are for general information purposes only. Nothing in the podcast constitutes a financial promotion, investment advice, or a personal recommendation, more on that in the show notes. I'm delighted to welcome back to the Master Investor podcast, my good friend and podcast founder, Jim Mellon, the chairman of the Burn Bay Group, but nobody Jim, I would rather kick off the new year with more than you, welcome back to the Master Investor podcast and happy new year. Happy new year to you, Wilfred. Thank you very much for having me on and hi from the Winchery Isle of Man. Well, I know that the weather and its winchery here in London as well as what's prevented you from being here in person, but great to catch up either way as it always is. So much for us to get to, and including some of the most more specific latest developments relating to Venezuela, because I know energy is a big theme you want to touch on. But I wanted to start by talking about gold and silver, which for me were the stories of 2025. And I know there are a theme that you've been incredibly bullish on for a number of years. And I guess the first question is, did you expect quite such a big rise as we saw in gold and silver last year? I actually know, I mean, to be quite honest, when we conversed at the Master Investor Show last year, I think we kind of came to a consensus that gold over 3,000 was a likely prospect, but now it's 4,400. And that is significantly higher than I would have thought. And silver was, as you remember, I was kind of rotating a bit out of gold and into silver. Their move in silver has been absolutely extraordinary. And I didn't expect it to go this far. So actually, I've been trimming my gold and silver positions, and we still have quite a reasonable exposure, but we don't have as much as we once had. And I've got new pastures to plow at the moment. So, yeah, I'd be very happy to go through the reasons where I think gold and silver might be over-done, over-cut. Well, if you so wish. No, I'd love to. I mean, I think that Kudos for a great call, either way, over the last couple of years, because they've really taken off. Why do you think, first of all, they rocketed quite to the extent that they did? Because there's a sort of simple argument, which is G7 economies are monetizing the debt. And then there's a sort of bigger fear of, is the financial market's going to implode? That the move we saw at the end of the year would almost imply the latter, unless it's just a trading squeeze, and that's why it was such a big surge. Yeah, I mean, they're all good points. And I imagine there's an element to all of them in the recent performance. As we know, central banks, and particularly China, have been buying up gold. I think for two principal reasons. One is that they are worried about confiscatory risk, having seen what's happened to Russia and its assets stranded in Belgium. And secondly, they are, in the case of China, I think deliberately trying to deemphasize the importance of the US dollar relative to the one. And by buying gold at the expense of US treasuries are doing exactly that, which actually kind of neatly leads to one of the factors. I think why Manjuro was captured and the United States took such a strong action against Venezuela is that actually, Venezuela was selling its oil to China in Yuan. And the US doesn't like that. It wants dollars, denominated oil sales, wherever possible. So I suspect that was another factor that went into the what happened in Venezuela. And then you've got massive retail demand. I mean, it's basically gold and silver. Now, on everyone's lips, taxi drivers, to people in the coffee shop, and so forth, all talking about gold and silver. Now I'm old enough to remember when Bunker Hunt supposedly cornered the market in silver in the early 1980s and people were lining up to melt down the family silver. In those days, silver was priced at a level which is actually significantly above the current level if you adjust for inflation. So it's entirely possible that silver could go a fair bit higher, although I wouldn't want to be taking that particular bet myself. But you're going to start seeing people caching in their physical holdings of gold and silver, I think, relatively soon. And that will put pressure on the market. Also, the central bank positions are fairly opaque. We don't really know who has what. We know that there was a significant amount of arbitrage at the time of the tariffs or pre-tariffs when gold and silver was repatriated to the United States because they wanted to avoid paying tariffs or potential tariffs on gold and silver which actually ultimately didn't happen. And we also know that people are concerned about persistent inflation and loose monetary policy particularly in the United States until relatively recently. So there's all sorts of reasons why gold and silver had gone up, but I did not expect it to go up as much as it did. And it was a four-year call for me. So it's worked out very well. And sometimes you take your, you don't say for the last dance and that's my philosophy. I don't believe in leverage in markets. I don't want to be leveraged and unable to sleep. And I also don't believe that you should stay till the very last minute. Because sometimes you misjudge that and then you really get caught short, caught badly, wrong, basically. - Well, with that in mind, I'm interested that you kind of said you've reduced rather than close your positions. Was this relative to 12 months ago? How much gold and silver have you got? Is it half? Does it much lower than that? - Oh, well, my main position in gold and silver was through a company called Metal's Exploration, which is a London listed company that took over a company. I was the largest shelter in called Condor Gold. And it was a very significant position and it became even more significant. And so I've been producing that. And I still have shares in that, but not like a fraction of what I had. But I've got significant deferred compensation through that company as well in the form of milestones, which are sort of related to the gold price. And we also have gold and silver positions through other stocks as well, but not nearly as much. So if I said that we're down, we're not down, but we have reduced our position in gold and silver exposure by 80%. I think that would be about accurate. And I found a new place to play. And we've been significant in increasing our positions there. - In gold and silver, sorry, or a new theme altogether. - No, in energy. - In energy. - Yeah, so I wanna get to energy 'cause I know you wanna talk about it. But before I do, and there's lots of tangents to go off on with energy, let's pause and reflect on the market overall in AI particular 'cause I know that feeds into your bull case on energy. Do you, as we sit here today, do you think AI stocks are going to correct a bit this year? Are they going to be steady? Are they gonna collapse even? What scale of fear do you have towards their valuations? - Well, I've been wrong about, you know there, well, is it continued upward march? I suppose that they've kind of run out a bit of a steam recently, but I've been wrong about the fact that they've held up so well because I think there's a sort of an involution where it's the Chinese call it competition going on there where they're all competing to do essentially same thing and space. vast amounts of money. And we know, I know all the arguments about the fact that these companies, and we're talking about the MAX7 essentially here, are, you know, making lots of cash, and therefore they can afford all the buildouts, but actually they are building up leverage as well. And one of the companies in particular Oracle is actually very stretched, indeed, as you can tell from the CDS's, which is the insurance on its bonds that have gone through the roof, relatively recently. The stocks are way over-owned. It's difficult to know who else has left to buy them, and that's particularly because of the shepherding of investments via ETFs, which will have 50% of the US market, into the biggest stocks, as that's the way the ETF market works. And also the remarkable growth, and by the way, there are more ETFs in the US now than there are listed stocks. In case, I'd just like to think is absolutely remarkable. And also the single option options, which are, you know, one day options, which have become absolutely monstrous in the US, particularly through platforms like Robin Hood. And so, you know, again, these are companies that are probably in better shape than the big companies were at the height of the.com bubble, so they may have further to go. But frankly speaking, again, it gets back to my thing, leave the party before the last of the punches drunk on the hangover sets in. And the valuations, by whatever they actually want to look at them are extremely stretched. So another way of looking at this is that those seven stocks represent about 40% of the market capitalization of the S&P, which is just a huge and very dangerous concentration risk. At a time when they're all doing essentially the same thing, and they're all selling to each other and all creating liabilities and assets, which, you know, may or may not ever get paid off, we just don't know. But I wouldn't be playing in that area because there's plenty of, my view in life is that, you know, you don't need to be in the game everyone else is playing, there's plenty of other things to do, and that's what I try and do. This episode of The Master Investor Podcast is brought to you by LSEG, the leading global financial markets infrastructure data and analytics provider. To learn more about how LSEG connects businesses, investors and markets worldwide, visit LSEG.com. Let's touch on energy then because I guess AI is in part driving that call on energy. Yeah, I think it's it's, you know, whatever my views on the AI stocks, there's no doubt that there's going to be huge amounts of a build of data centers. And we could talk about data centers actually later on if you want because, you know, I'm not sure that they will have the same validity in 10 years time as they do today. But anyway, people building up these huge massive, great big data centers, sometimes with their own power grid attached, in other words, independent power grids for the specifically huge data centers, particularly in the United States. And there are just as we know, there isn't enough grid capacity in the US, and there isn't enough energy. So if you believe that by 2034 trillion dollars will be spent around the world, largely in the US and in China on data centers and their build out, which is bigger than the UK economy in terms of size, they're going to require an additional 20% added to the current electricity supply in the United States. China is in a much better position vis-a-vis energy costs and also energy availability. Now, there is not a single nuclear power station being built in the US. There's lots of announcements and talk about it and all that sort of stuff, but there's not one station that's being built. And China is building somewhere between 28 and 30 nuclear power stations at the moment by comparison. So uranium and nuclear are going to be part of the solution, but not for five to ten years. In the meantime, it's got to be natural gas, oil, and unfortunately coal that are going to take up the slack. And everyone has been down on energy for quite a while. And everyone talks about the oversupply, everyone talks about the fact that the world is moving to electrical and all that sort of stuff, but electrical requires power as well. So I just thought, right, I've done very well in Golden Silver. What's the next unloved sector as Golden Silver were four years ago that will actually pay you to be part of it and get dividend yields in most oil and gas stocks of any note that is very lowly represented in the S&P and in other indices around the world. And it's a super important industry despite everything. And of course, it's oil and gas. And so we've been loading up, I mean literally loading up on oil and gas in November and December. And I'm very pleased to see the action of oil and gas stocks after Venezuela because over the weekend people were saying, well, they're going to go up, are they going to go down? No one knew because it shows that maybe Venezuela can increase its oil and gas production all that will take years. But it also shows the unstable environment that we live in geopolitically around the world now, which may cause serious issues for oil and gas sometime this year. So I thought, okay, right, we're on the right track now. The stocks moved in the right way. They are under owned. And this is going to be the big area of concentration this year in a positive sense. So I suggest loading up on oil and gas. And we've got a big long list of stuff that we've been buying. So I want to get into a little bit there. What are some of the core recommendations there of what you have been buying? I mean, I totally get your point that these are cheap on a P basis, certainly compared to the Mag 7 and they haven't performed like the Mag 7, but they're not as unloved as they were coming out of the pandemic, for example. So what are the kind of core plays that you've loaded up on? Yeah. So the most oil and gas companies don't just make the big the majors don't make their money just by pumping oil out of the ground and selling it. They are making money off refining. They're making money off trading. They're making money off petrol stations. They're making money off all sorts of other stuff. And so they have a relatively stable, I mean, it does move with oil and gas prices obviously, but it doesn't move as much as you would think. As for instance, with a gold or silver mine, it would just highly get to the price of those commodities. So there's a, generally speaking, a great degree of stability in these stocks. And you know, in the UK majors, for instance, who are getting about 5% dividend yield on something like BP or Shell, which is to my mind, extremely attractive in the current environment. So we've been buying, and I've just got a little list here as I look over to the list. We've been buying BP. We've been buying AdNoc gas in the UAE. We've been buying Equinox, which is an Norwegian oil and gas company, Santos in Australia. We've been buying Jersey oil and gas, which is a speculative North Sea oil play because I do believe the UK is going to have to let them drill baby drill. It makes, you know, I can't believe that the milliband madness is going to persist for much longer. We've been buying first-trust national gas ETF, which is a US ETF, with a good balance. We've been buying some of the renewable funds, which yield very heavily, actually. And it particularly in solar, so for site solar fund, very high dividend yield, and it looks like it's going to be a winner internationally diversified. We've been buying ice shares, Europe energy, ice shares, global energy, renewals infrastructure, and Vanneck oil services. And I would add that Schumbege and Baker Hughes look like good buys as well, relatively inexpensive. And those companies will be actively involved in reformating the Venezuelan oil industry going into the future. So yeah, it's quite quite a lot. We've been buying. It's an impressive and focused list, their gym, and of course, a reminder to state the obvious gym clearly has positions in those stocks, which he's just mentioned. Nothing you hear on the master investor podcast should be considered direct financial advice. A final question then on energy gym specifically, Venezuela. I mean, what did you make of that action over the weekend? And I guess, you know, we're two, three days on. It's clear that, I mean, two things, I would think, for the investment landscape, it's clear that you can't boost production quickly. And it's also clear that removing one leader doesn't automatically drastically change the outlook of the country. So what impacts do you think this will have or is having on that investment call for oil and other areas? I mean, as I said, I think the Venezuelan, the reaction to the Venezuelan action, what a way you look at it. I personally think it's a good thing to be doing, frankly, as long as it doesn't go on to all the other countries, indicates that there's potential for great instability in the world, and therefore, you know, one of the great hedges is of course always oil and gas. And so the action of the stocks is very encouraging. leveraging indeed. As far as Venezuela is concerned, my reading of it is it will take at least five to ten years before they can get back up to what they had, which was about three million barrels a day of production, which in the context of over a hundred million barrels a day is not massive, but it's enough to change things at the margin. But we also know that it's very heavy oil. The U.S. has got lots of spare capacity for heavy oil. The U.S. is probably a peak shell and is not buying as much oil from Canada, which is heavy oil as well. So this is a nice bolster for U.S. refining capacity, but about 70% of refining is in the U.S. can handle this sort of oil. And so there's a lot in it for the U.S. and U.S. companies here as well, I think, which is why we have quite a lot of U.S. stocks and this particular list that we've been loading up on. This episode is sponsored by BNY Investments. BNY Investments is part of BNY, a global financial services company supporting investors and institutions around the world. This sponsorship does not constitute investment advice. Wanted to touch on another topic I know you're on. You mentioned it last time you joined the podcast in September and that's robotics. Since then you brought out a book on the topic specifically on robotics to flag all of the kind of by cases that the bull case for this theme. I learned a new phrase reading this book, Jim, more of X paradox, which is the idea that computers excel at high level cognitive tasks, but struggle with physical tasks that humans find simple things that we can do with our hands essentially. And one of the key arguments in your book is that paradox will go away because AI, even if you're not constructive on the stocks, AI is drastically changing what these robots can do. That's true. In fact, this is probably one of the best, if not the best use of AI that there is. But it's going to take time. I mean, I don't know if you know, but if you buy a uni tree, which is a Chinese robot and you're doing a demonstration with it to show off its so-called skills, there's probably going to be someone in China who's telling it what to do because it's just not good enough yet to be self-referential to do what is expected of it. They're just not good enough yet and that's going to take a bit of time. But in that process, there is going to be massive development and a lot of money made and probably most of that money will be made in China because China has really everything that's required for robotics. And it does manufacture at such a remarkably low price compared to the United States. So by preference, you know, if you look at the US so-called robotics companies, Tesla, Nvidia has announced that it's going to be involved in robot taxis as of today or the CES conference in Las Vegas today. You've got Amazon is already in robotics and meta wants to be in robotics as well, having given up on the metaverse. So I think that first of all, the businesses of robots in those companies is going to is swamped by their other businesses and by their huge need for capital to build out the hyper-scaling data centers. And in China, you've got hundreds, if not thousands of companies, making little bits for robots and you've got some, you know, large scale companies as well. So if you want to look at the number one area for robots at the moment, that's robot taxis. They are taking off in the US, but they're also taking off in China in an even bigger way. And the competition now is going to be in London between Weimo, which is the Google subsidiary, which may actually have a separate listing sometime this year I read. That might well be a very interesting stop to look at, actually, I have to say. And then Baidu in China, which is an old internet, the Yahoo type company in China, but happens to be probably the leader in robot taxis in China, which makes it very interesting, because, you know, there is no reason why we won't all get into robot taxis within five years. Why would we get in with a human driver when the robot taxis are basically safer? They're definitely cheaper to operate, at least at scale, they will be cheaper to operate. And they'll be much more profitable for the operators because they don't have to pay the drivers. I'm interested that you bearish, as you said at the top in the Mag 7, because I don't think that China can dominate the world at robotics. I don't know, the US for sure would let them in. And as you sort of point to Tesla's kind of the pure, most pure play robotics both for taxis and other applications, robotics play in the world probably outside of China. Well, I mean, if you look at Tesla, you know, he hasn't yet got his functioning humanoid. And I can explain that humanoid doesn't necessarily mean taking a human shape, but his human humanoid robots working properly. And in robot taxis, he's been promising the same thing for a long time. And as yet, Tesla is way behind Waymo. And Tesla may be in some ways cheaper to operate than Waymo because it doesn't use LiDAR. It uses camera sensors. But Tesla's had quite a lot of, it's been a bit accident prone. I don't know, maybe he'll pull it off, but you are paying more than a trillion dollars for the benefit of being invested in Tesla, which has got a car division that is under severe threat from the Chinese. I don't know if you saw that Tesla's deliveries were down 16% in the last quarter, internationally. And having a car business, which is going down in terms of deliveries, is adding a huge big fixed cost that would drag down any upside it got in for the near term in terms of earnings with robot taxis, if they can successfully challenge Waymo, Wayvin, the UK, Baidu, and China and so forth for some time to come. So it's all a question of price. I mean, I think all of those companies are very attractive at the right price, but the right price is probably 50% below where we are today. And will it get to be 50% below? I think so. I think so. I mean, I listened to the very interesting Dan I've podcasted the other day, and he's obviously mega bullish and all this stuff, and he may be right. But, you know, to me with the whole US market, that a Cape adjusted, Shiller to Cape adjusted PE ratio of 40 times forward, and these particular stocks are, you know, varying multiples, but in the case of Tesla vastly higher multiples, it's just not a game I want to play when there is opportunity I'll sweat. Now, the other thing is that US investors typically can't invest in these Chinese companies. And, but if you are based in the UK, you have a better chance of investing in these Chinese companies. So we'll find investments in the US, we'll find investments in Europe, we'll find investments in the UK, but we are also going to be focused very heavily on China and ways to play the Chinese situation. I know all the stories about, you know, you can lose your money in China, et cetera, et cetera, but there are ways of investing in China through Hong Kong as an example, Shanghai Connect, which make it, or Shenzhen Connect, make it safer to do so, and we're going to be very, very careful in the way that we make our investments. But that is going to be a major focus for us in the coming year. And I do concur with the investment banks, mostly out of the US that say the robotics market will be bigger than any other market in the world, including food, including transport, including apps and all that sort of stuff by the year, 2040. I think that is absolutely true. We will all need robots in our life. We'll all robots in our life. What form they take and how they work is yet to be determined, but they will work and he will all be added users of them. I can't. I'm not sure I ever want one, but I sure I will. We'll at some point. I'm getting you one for Christmas. Oh, God. For Christmas. Let's, let's, let the Christmas is a long way off at least. So, so there we go. The Master Investor podcast is sponsored by Interactive Brokers. Building wealth starts with the right broker. An interactive broker helps you reach your goals with powerful tools, global market access, low costs, and unmatched financial strength. That's why the best informed investors choose IBKR. Learn more at IBkr.com/masterinvestor. Let's touch on China more broadly and I'm interested just on, on the currency because it's been appreciating obviously it's fixed or managed so it's been allowed to appreciate by the Chinese authorities of late. Is that a healthy thing? Is there more to come? Put the bullish robotics argument aside, what's the snapshot on the Chinese economy overall? Well, it's got a serious deflation. The property market is still in a huge mess. It will be fixed until at least 2030. And even then, there's going to be thousands and thousands and millions of unsolved or unoccupied flats and ghost towns everywhere. The Chinese rate of economic growth is rather than the stated 5%, it's somewhere between two and three. I think you probably see the same stuff that I see on that. And that's leading to a lot of unemployment or under-employment, particularly in the youth. But those are the negatives for China. On the other hand, China has been exporting what you might call deflation as a result of its severely undervalued currency to the rest of the world. And now has a $1 trillion trade surplus internationally. And it's exports to the United States have been deemphasized. Only 10% of China's exports now go to the United States. So, you know, despite all the tariffs and everything, it doesn't seem to be having any dent in China's overall export performance because its currency is so severely undervalued. So, I mean, I was reading the other day that if you take an Uber in New York from JFK to a hotel in Manhattan, it will cost at least $100 if not more. In China, the similar ride is 100 yuan. So, that's the one-seventh of the price. And similarly, across the board, almost everything in China, is one-seventh of the price of the equivalent in the United States. So, the currency is massively undervalued and the Chinese government can force it upwards. And I think Trump is going to be against that because obviously, one of the key reasons why there's such a big trade deficit is because the currency is undervalued. And of course, the Chinese want to encourage the use of the Yuan in all sorts of transactions around the world to de-dollarize the world at the expense of the United States. And so, we're in an interesting situation there. But, you know, if the average person putting money on Yuan into positive is just not possible. And indeed, there isn't a Yuan sort of forward market that you can play very successful. You can buy options, but they're expensive. So, it's just one of those trades that is a one-to-watch, but it's not possible for most of us investors. Whereas the Japanese yen you can buy, and I think the yen is going to be a good proxy for the Yuan, and the yen is, by any measure, severely undivided. And I think we've got possibly 20% this year, but I've been saying that for a couple of years. So, you know, again, you kindly pointed out that Gold and Silver was a great call. And they were my major calls. But, you know, I'd be pointing out the yen is an interesting currency to hold. And here we are. It's not moved on the last year, and there's no interest on it. So, it's not been a great trade at all. Just give the ball case for that quickly, because a lot of people point to how yields are suddenly rising in a worrying way, in Japan, as if a financial crisis is about to unfold. But is that, in fact, part of the attraction to the yen going forward higher yields? Yes, I think so. I mean, you know, the lady who's coming as Prime Minister is sort of quite keen on pump-priming, which is basically, blowing air into a dead horse, because they've been doing that for so long. It just doesn't work. But they are getting inflation in Japan, and that's one of the reasons why the long end of the bond market is rising in terms of yields. And you're getting up to over 3% actually, and the longest Japanese bonds, which is, you know, way, way higher than they were just five years ago. And the Bank of Japan is quite, you know, aware of the pump-priming problem. So, it's going to be doing some quantitative tightening. In fact, it is doing some quantitative tightening to offset that. So, I'm not concerned about a full-blown, sort of, debt crisis in Japan, because actually almost all the bonds are either owned by the Bank of Japan or they're owned by the domestic market, and there's not a big foreign influencer. But what there is is a massive amount, by far the biggest amount in the world, of Japanese savings that are overseas, particularly in the United States. And they, Mr. Watanabe, the fictional, you know, hero of the Japanese savings market, is very exposed to these international investments. If there is actually a turn in the end, and who knows how it will happen or when it will happen, and I've been waiting like God over a long time for this, if it does turn, you'll see a very quick appreciation in the end. One of the reasons why Japanese tourism has been absolutely booming, and why it's been, you know, there's been everyone and their dog has been on a trip to Japan in the last couple of years, is because things are really cheap in Japan compared to, you know, the US or in Europe. And I think you can probably remember, I certainly can remember, you know, 10, 15 years ago, Japan was considered to be an ultra-expensive destination to go, and now it's the opposite, it's really cheap. So, this is a proxy. And if, you know, the yield curve flattens a bit in Japan, and you start to get interest on short-dated instruments in Japan, or even on bank deposits of some significance, one, to maybe even 3%, then the end will become even more attractive. And people like UME can just put, again, on deposit, as opposed to, you know, having to put it into pens or into euros or into dollars. As we start to wrap up, Jim, I wanted to flag, of course, to everyone that you've got your big in-person show, the Master Investor Show, it's in London on Saturday, the 25th of April, people can sign up at Masterinvestorshow.com, it's the best in-person investing event in the UK every year. It's also the biggest, isn't it, Jim? It is, and it happens to have the big attraction of one Wilfred Frost in conversation with me, which is one of the highlights of my year, if not the highlight of the year, and I'm really looking forward to it. And, you know, we will certainly have over 6,000 people there, and the major speakers is going to be incredible for this year. And if I can do it, I'm going to try and get one of those, you know, more sophisticated, not one of those sort of, you know, peptide robots or the Sydney robots that sort of goes around, does nothing, one of the more sophisticated robots along, if not two or three of them, to demonstrate just what we can all look forward to, and particularly you will at Christmas time. I was going to say I'm not taking one home with me. Particularly with your point. Particularly with your point that it means someone in China is watching, I don't think I want that in my house. Yeah, I want to buy from a different provider, and due course. But again, as you said, there's always 6,000 plus people, 25th of April in London, sign up at MasterInvestorsShow.com. We will be conversing. I'll be doing a few of the other panels. But I always just love, it's a, most of the day event on a Saturday, and it's just so much other things to speak to. And there's a great crowd of people who love like us, investing and learning from each other. So, so highly recommend that. Jim, as we do wrap up, started the year. I mean, we've touched on, I know, the big themes in detail, but as we wrap it all up, what is your overriding tips, bits of advice for people in 2026 when it comes to the markets? Well, my main thing is always to keep it simple. All right, there's no need to diversification as it is strategy, but you can be diversified without having 500 stocks in your portfolio. And so I think that, you know, deemphasize, probably a lot of people listening to this have made good money and gold. So, you know, be contrary and just take a bit off the table and look, look at energy as an opportunity as well. I think this year will also be a year when the emperor's clothes will be revealed in respect of some of the AI stories. And I would watch Oracle in particular, given the the rapid rise in the insurance protection against spawns, because it is the only one that's heavily leveraged of the of these big tech companies. And then I would also be keep your eyes open for quantum computing and the the will be quantum IPOs, I think the CIO quantum is going to be very, very big in the world. And we have in the UK a national champion in the form of continuum, which is the biggest of all the quantum computing companies. And that company, which is headed up by a very good friend of mine will be going public, I think, sometime this year for an eye-watering evaluation. And it's definitely worth watching there. And I would carry on buying UK investment trust, which sell at discounts, particularly those exposed to the domestic economy of the United Kingdom, which I think represents very good value firms of stock market. And I would, you know, just not get too focused on all the bad things that may or may not happen, but just stick to investing and carry on saving. And the the power of compounding is absolutely remarkable. And you know, the 10 years time we can all be massively rich as a result of all the good stuff that's coming along that try and buy at the appropriate price, not at the price everyone else is jumping on a bandwagon for. Well, Jim, it's always a pleasure to catch up. Thank you for sharing your wisdom. We should mention that Jim does have a position in quantumium as well. And nothing that you've heard in the podcast should be considered direct from Antelope Vice but just. Jim, as always, a pleasure to have you on. We look forward to the next time. We look forward in particular to the next time in person at the Master Investor Show in London on the 25th of April. And don't forget next week on the Master Investor Podcast, we'll be joined by David Tate of the World Gold Council. Great timing to have him on a touch on some of the points that Jim's just mentioned as well after a phenomenal year for gold. But for now, Jim, once again, thank you so much. Thank you very much, Wolf, and thanks for having me, as always. The Master Investor Podcast is sponsored by BNY Investments, LSEG, and Interactive Brokers. Nothing in the podcast constitutes a financial promotion, investment advice, or a personal recommendation. More on that in the show notes. This podcast is produced by parodying productions and Master Investor Limited in association with bird line media. If you've enjoyed the show, please do subscribe on YouTube or click follow on your podcast platform and you'll be automatically notified each time a new episode drops.