Rick Rule: Fed Pivot Means Worse Inflation? M&A Coming For Gold Mining, Royalties & Commodities

Jason Burack of Wall St for Main St interviewed returning guest, long time natural resource investor, credit analyst and mine financier, Rick Rule of Rule Investment Media https://ruleinvestmentmedia.com/

Rick was also a former VP at Sprott Inc for many years.

During this hour plus long interview and conversation about the state of natural resource companies and mining companies in gold, copper, uranium and platinum group (PGM) metals, Rick talks gold demand and gold mining companies having a major divorce or disconnect in terms of their valuations from the gold price.

Many mid-tier gold miners with good profit margins find their valuations at a 30% to 50% discount to net asset value (NAV) relative to projected future cash flows from current metals prices.

Rick also talks about the upside in Franco Nevada, Equinox Gold as Greenstone comes online and switches to cash flow positive, the Hod Maden mine in Turkey currently under construction and the long term uranium bull market.

Rick expects a lot of mergers and acquisitions among mid-tier gold miners like Lundin Gold.

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Hi everyone this is Jason B of Wall Street for M Street welcome back to another Wall Street for M Street podcast interview today’s special guest is a returning guest he’s actually one of my favorite guests I love having deep conversations about natural resource stocks Commodities with him he is truly

A world-class expert he has Decades of experience and success financing hundreds of Mines he’s a former vice president in ASAT he’s worked in the natural resource industry for many years financing mins and as a credit analyst Rick R thank you for joining me again always a pleasure Jason thank you for

Having me back so Rick we’re recording this interview on Wednesday February 7th 2024 the paper gold price is still above $2,000 an ounce but you wouldn’t know that with the gold mining stocks uh I was listening to a presentation from your friend and uh Ross batty who I’ve

Also interviewed in the past and Ross has a lot of success just like you many decades of success in natural resources and he was talking about the disconnect or Divergence between the paper gold price in US Dollars and Gold stock valuations like with the cash flows that these companies can produce have you

Ever seen this type of Disconnect or Divergence between the gold price and Gold stock valuations in your career before uh twice um both by the way uh as preceding a major rally uh what’s unique this time is that the Divergence uh really extends all the way

Up through the value chain to the majors I’ve seen the Juniors frankly more oversold but I have never seen the Divergence uh reach as high up the feeding chain as it happens now now Ross because his background is from an issuer’s point of view he thinks that the cost of capital

To the gold mining industry Is tragically High because I’m a Tre a checkwriter my point of view is different which is to say opportunity is for me the cheapest it’s ever been so what he sees is a bad thing I see as a good thing uh because

The price of opportunity has come down uh I think uh uh an interesting and related topic uh Jason is to speculate perhaps on why this is the case and I have perhaps three why the first why would be that it’s really been 40 years since anybody had to truly concern themselves about inflation

Really since 1982 the consequence of that is despite the fact that the Hallmarks of inflation are in front of us concern about inflation has been dampened by 40 Years of benign economic climate and people who are concerned about inflation believe that they can adopt the Warren Buffett approach which is to say buy

World dominating companies that have pricing power and those those companies uh can fight inflation internally on their own balance sheet rather than by holding gold and there’s a certain attraction to that theory if you are as a smart as Warren Buffett sadly uh I’m not the two other reasons for the

Disparity I think are also of Interest the first involves the junior miners uh which are uh really really really oversold but I would suggest to you Jason deserve to be oversold uh it is my belief that of the 2500 public companies worldwide that purport to be mining companies probably not more than

10% are viable the rest are destined to descend to their ultimate Net Present Value which is to say zero this disguises the fact that 10% of the issuers are of such quality that they add legitimacy and occasionally luster to a section to a sector of the economy

Pardon me uh which has no other redeeming features if you are going to participate in the Juniors if you’re going to be Seeking Alpha relative to the gold market generally you have to be a stock picker if you buy the sector you go broke if you buy companies you can do

Well which finally brings us to the seniors and I would suspect too that the lack of institutional following for the seniors uh in many cases goes all the way back to the decade 2000 to 2010 Jason some of your older listeners will remember that during that period the gold price Advanced from

$256 I think it was uh to $1,850 uh set more than a Sevenfold increase in the gold price yet the free cash FL flow per share uh of companies on the Philadelphia gold and silver stock index actually fell it took real skill for for an industry to turn a Sevenfold increase in

The selling price of their commodity into reduced free cash flow what all that means is that the industry has in some senses earned the low reputation that it enjoys today uh from my point of view that’s lovely because the lack of attention that the uh institutional investors

Played in that decade is a thing of the past which is to say the mining companies are held to much tighter leash and the managers without exception that presided over that deterioration in shareholder value have been thanked and excused uh and there are new managers uh

Who have cut their chops in times that were substantially less generous and I expect that the performance uh the fiscal performance of the gold mining industry in the next 10 years will be markedly different than it was in the past uh and I believe too that despite the fact that people are unconcerned

Concerned about inflation that real true core inflation is much higher than other people think it is and that the period we’re in now resembles more closely than any other the period 1969 7071 and 72 four years where the Spectre of inflation was in front of us but because

Nobody had been bit by it for 20 years nobody cared it wasn’t really until the middle part of the decade of the 1970s that the reality of uh true inflation caused the inflation narrative to bite the investing public which is precisely what I think is going to happen sorry

Jason for that very long answer but you asked me a fairly nuanced question yeah we’re at a unique spot here I mean the earnings and the quarterly earnings coming up for a lot of these gold miners especially the lower cost ones say like your lending Golds your ago Eagles they’re going to

Be very very good Rick you don’t expect any surprises where the costs are going to spike I mean the profit margins their free cash flow should be very good right uh I do expect some negative surprises frankly because we’re seeing inflation in the value chain uh we have been in a

Period of ,900 to $22,000 gold for six or seven months uh and while the gold price has stayed static uh the input costs have not stayed static uh particularly the cost of skilled labor uh has been rising at between uh 15 and 20% compounded for some period of time

But other inputs too steel cement uh in certain jurisdictions Labor uh and unfortunately the input if that’s the right phrase for it that’s climbing the fastest worldwide is social rents uh the increasing uh offsite Capital requirements on mining companies the taxes and the royalties so I actually

Suspect Jason that there will be some negative earning surprises well I mean you had the mind shut down with Franco Nevada and I was going to ask about that later so let’s let’s save that for a little bit later I want to add to some of your points here

Also let me add that I think globally there is currency de basement problem relative to the us it’s a lot larger and the demand for for gold it’s not for gold stocks so there’s a big disconnect there’s enormous demand for physical gold and gold tonnage from non G7

Central banks private sector demand in China India turkey a lot of Emerging Market countries where the currency debasement on a relative basis is much faster than in the US we see this in mainland China Rick where I believe even a couple months later later now in Shanghai I think the premiums are still

Up 10% above spot prices I hearing I spoke to a source that was buying gold in Shanghai at a bullion dealer in the last week or so he said that the premiums are still over $2,200 an ounce but they’re not buying gold gold mining companies they’re just buying physical

Gold the point that you make is very accurate uh there is strong physical demand for gold uh outside the United States uh LED until very recently by central banks that came to understand that they needed a medium of exchange that wasn’t the US dollar a medium of exchange that couldn’t be politicized uh

Extr territorially it is also true that while the gold price has been static in US dollar terms the US dollar has done well uh against other currencies and the consequence of that is that gold has been performing extremely well uh in non US dollar jurisdictions it is true too

Uh apparently that retail demand for gold continues strong in China uh not least of which because of a Thousand-Year old cultural predisposition to Gold uh I think however that gold needs to do well against the US dollar for gold truly to do well well-healed investors on a global

Basis have access to US dollar denominated uh savings and investment products be at the S&P 500 index funds or be at us treasuries and they have been skilled for 40 SK schooled pardon me for 40 years to buy the dips in US dollar denominated instruments uh it is also true that the

US by itself uh comprises between 22 and 23% of the global market for savings and investment products and the market share of gold in the United States uh is less than 1/ half of 1% which is to say less than one half of 1% of the assets uh of all savings and investment

Products in the United States are gold related the four decade mean Jason mean market share of precious metals and precious metals related Investments is 2% I happen to believe in the US market that the market share of precious metals and precious metals related assets will

Revert to mean if I’m right I may be I may not if I’m right demand for precious metals and precious metals related assets will quadruple from half a percent to 2% in one Market that uh controls 22 to 23% of the global uh savings and retirement assets

And by the way uh one of the characteristics of the US market is that much more of the market share uh of savings and investment assets are private rather than in government control so it is as you say uh one market among many but it is the most important Market by every metric

Well right now you have lot of flight Capital that’s leaving Chinese stocks and Chinese real estates it’s gone into mag 7 it’s gone into S&P 500 flight Capital out of China it’s gone into physical gold like we said earlier also a lot of young adults here in Western

Countries a lot of them they don’t seem to be interested in being Diversified they want to seem to just try to buy Bitcoin every month with dollar cost averaging and get rich and then on top of that you have the Federal Reserve Bank keeping short-term interest rates

Higher at around 4.5% at least for now there’s no R Cuts yet although maybe in a couple months when more of the regional Banks go Bust or they start doing some type of bailout with a new Fanny May or Freddy Mack or something like that that’ll change but if you’re a

Sec accredited investor and you have $5 million or more in a bank account you can earn 4.5% now there’s no incentive to go and take a lot of extra risk maybe with some of these gold stocks that are not consistently profitable uh you’ve said a lot of

Things so that’s I just highlighted a lot of the macro stuff I mean there’s a there’s a lot of stuff going on in China right now let’s let’s unpack a few of those things uh what you say with regards to the alleged competitiveness of other savings products including

Demand deposits is very true I myself have large US dollar savings not because I consider 4.5% attractive but rather because I think that there’s a possibility perhaps a probability of some form of liquidity Crisis coming up and if I have the cash I have the tools and perhaps the courage to take

Advantage of that circumstance rather than being taken advantage of by it a lot of sophisticated investors that I know and a lot of family offices are maintaining large cash balances because they think that we might be headed into some event uh not unlike the 2008 event I’m

Not saying it’s going to happen but I’m not saying it isn’t going to happen and I’d like to be prepared for it um what interests me is this the um the widespread belief among audiences including probably Yours Jason uh that the rate of inflation is correctly measured by the

CPI I don’t believe that to be the case uh the CPI the so-called Consumer Price Index in the first instance it’s a quote hedonistically adjusted index which is to say that the uh index arrangers arbitrarily assign value to certain products like computers and apartments that have nothing to do with

The market but in particular the CPI doesn’t include tax that tax is the largest component of the cost of living for most American and Canadian families when I attempted uh I albe it uh inefficiently to construct an inflation index in the basket of goods and services that I consume and I’m loed to

Describe tax as a service but we’ll leave that aside when I looked at the components of my cost of living what I discovered is that the basket of goods and services which I consumed was escalating in price at about 7% compounded uh the consequence of that I think is that although the broad

Paradigm is that inflation is at 2.6 or 2.7 uh true inflation the deterioration of the purchasing power of American Savings and wages is decreasing at 7% you need to understand then that if you feel complacent with your money on deposit at 4.5 uh what’s actually happening to you

Is that you’re losing two and a half% of your purchasing power a year I’m willing to do that with some of my cash because I consider the foregone interest or the negative real interest to be an option premium uh to enable me to have the cash to take advantage of a liquidity decline

But I would argue precisely Jason that this negative real carry uh the difference between nominal and real interest rates uh is a circumstance that reminds me of nothing so much as the early part of the decade of the 1970s when all of the Hallmarks of inflation were present but where

Investors and Savers have been preconditioned by the 50s and 60s very benign climates not to fear inflation it wasn’t really until kill the FED pivot in late 1975 that the broad perception of gold is an inflation hedge and inflation itself as a real risk became widespread and I think that’ll that’s likely to

Happen in the US in the next five years sooner uh if we have a real fed fed pivot so we have a lot of these mid-tier gold miners that are producing and one asset Gold Miner so these are like Junior producers that maybe have a growth project that they can invest in

They don’t have to go out and do an acquisition they’re selling at 30% to 50% discount to net asset value so that’s Net Present Value future discounted cash flows for our listeners who not familiar do you expect some of these larger senior producers like a barold are they going to run the numbers

And see that like we can go byy a producing midair go Miner with a good project for a 30% discount or maybe even 50% discount in net asset value do you expect then a lot of mergers and Acquisitions to pick up in the next 12

18 24 months I do but I don’t expect baric to be the acquirer uh I expect baric to be the acquirer of very large uh probably politically challenged deposits but deposits at any rate with in excess of 5 million ounces of Inu recoverable reserves and resources I think we’ll see mid-tier lateral mergers

I think we’ll see multi-asset producers which are viewed in the market as safer uh and thus having lower cost of capital acquire the single asset producers but I think we’ll likely see an orgy of m&a if the capital markets don’t improve if the capital markets improve uh understand that the managers of

Companies that would otherwise be acquired are loathed to sell because that earns that ends their salary stream the industry doesn’t seem as a whole very counter cyclical I mean a lot of the CEOs don’t like doing Acquisitions towards the bottom and when valuations are cheap I think they’re

Kind of more of a herd mentality and they like doing Acquisitions when metals prices are ripping share valuations are higher that’s correct that’s absolutely correct I mean understand uh that an industry which uh was rewarded from a Sevenfold increase in the commodity price with a decline in

Free cash flow is not necessarily an industry that attracts the the best and the brightest yeah I mean I’m looking at SSR Mining and they don’t have a balance sheet problem they have a couple producing Minds maybe the market doesn’t like the geopolitical the perceived geopolitical risk in Turkey but they

Have good earnings free cash flow relatively low cost they just bought a St in hot mod and they have cash flow from another m in turkey and yet they’re selling near 50% discount to net asset value and they’re mid-tier producers so it’s kind of surprising to see valuations like that I think the

Challenge there is that the uh discount rate that they chose to use is 5% which I think is too low I think the other challenge that silver standard has is that the mines that comprise the net asset value are viewed by the mining industry as being mines that are very

Long of tooth uh mines that have produced for 25 or 30 years so the potential the potential for downside surprise and the lack of potential for upside revaluation in these Minds is probably reasonably low the upside in SSR from my point of view is all around

Hod moden which I think is a superb deposit and it’s a deposit that has suffered I think from a lack of regional exploration uh I believe and there’s some dispute about this I believe that had Maden is a a volcanogenic massive sulfide deposit and without going into boring detail

About what that means uh it is common in VMS deposits for them to occur in clusters and I don’t think that SSR or their partner their Turkish partner chuk uh has done very much Regional uh work their belief is that they put the thing in production uh they uh pay back the

Construction expense including the mill with free cash flow from the original deposit and then they uh drill out the surrounding grounds from free cash flow which I understand but I suspect that the real upside surprise at SSR if it occurs will be around hoden not the other

Assets and that’s how the industry does it with once a mine gets to cash flow positive we’re going to see that I think with greenstone too up in Canada greenstone the construction just finished but with with hoben I mean there’s uh the grades for the copper I

Think they’re some of the best in the world and the deposit the mineralization comes up right to the surface so there’s the potential there for near surface mining and once the deposits in production I think there’s going to uh they’re going to reinvest a lot of the exploration drwing the copper grades

Though and we’re going to need a lot more copper longterm with the mental of electricity artificial intelligence might use uh the copper grades are some of the best in the world very high quality deposit uh I think that the anticipation around the deposit will increase uh once the certainty of on

Time on budget uh occurs uh and for sophisticated investors it’s going to be more than on time on budget you’re going to need ontime on budget name plate capacity the other stock that you mentioned the Hard Rock deposit the Equinox deposit I think is a fascinating circumstance uh because

The last four mins that have been opened in Northern Ontario have been way behind schedule and as much as double budget or in the case of cot almost triple budget the investment Community anticipated that hard rock would be a failure too and the pathway to production at hard

Brock has presided over a 50% decline in the share price of Equinox if Equinox delivers on time on budget completion which they’re almost certain to do uh and if they attain name plate capacity which I believe they’ll be able to do I’ve known this this team for a

Long time I suspect with no increase in the gold price uh Equinox doubles uh because the objections to owning the stock disappear uh that’s a fairly unchallenged thesis yeah I don’t think anything’s priced into the Equinox Gold stock yet or the Gold Stream that sandstrom gold has I was looking actually at the

Greenstone deposit I mean they have a lot of really good growth plans but they’re waiting for the mine to become cash flow positive in the next six months looks like they have an underground mine they have another potential deposit that can be trucked there uh there’s a lot of good

Exploration drilling targets I mean this mine could potentially be a long district for many many years way longer than the 14 years of reserves and the truth is they don’t need to do any of that in order to double the share price all they need to do is obain name plate capacity

Well I’m talking long-term potential for greenstone do you think it could get up there with maybe Canadian malartic or Detour Lake no no I don’t uh I think there’s more there than is in the reserve or resource statement but I see hard rock as a high quality tier 2

Deposit uh I see malartic uh and Detour as tier one deposits even though uh the costs for greenstone are going to be below 900 now so at least that was the projected cost yeah no I uh I I don’t have any trouble with mindsight costs in the near- term

Being under a thousand uh what I have trouble with is seeing uh greenstone uh become a 10 million ounce deposit those are pretty rare right there’s not many of those to find anymore I mean malartic and Detour are both deposits that have in excessive 10 million ounces in Rec in uh recoverable

Reserves and resources those are scarce beasts and agnika owns both now that’s correct that is correct yeah again not even Newmont Mining and Beric gold have anything that close the uh you know agnico relative to its peers is probably premium priced the reason that it’s premium prices it has

Premium assets and they’ve been superb uh Capital allocators asset allocators I I’ve known them for a very long time I think I’ve I think I’ve seen them make uh maybe pardon me I got a kill this call I see that I think I’ve seen them make maybe two mistakes in 20 starts so

They deserve a premium price so you don’t think any of the companies like emx royalty or SSR they’re not being discounted extra because of Expo exposure to like royalties or mines in Turkey then you think that’s just maybe a lack of uh long-term Reserves some of the

Mines uh that’s a that’s a very broad question I think that emx does get punished for political risk uh because they operate in a whole bunch of places but I think they get punished more because there was a big seller SSR and people don’t pay too much attention to the story which requires

Them to think uh they pay attention to momentum which causes them to feel uh people think because emx went down that it’s bad it’s interesting that if you think something is worth $2 and you see at a dollar you’re afraid to buy it whereas if you see at $3 you’re happy to buy

It I think that’s what’s happened uh to emx uh with regards to political risk my own belief Jason is that every jurisdiction in the world is bad there are no good political jurisdictions what you need to consider is what price you are paying for political risk the worst experience I

Personally have ever had with political risk was in California and the best jurisdiction in the world for me cash in cash out was Congo uh is Congo more politically risky than Juris jurisdiction than California yes but it’s priced very very very differently or or or making it hit

Closer to home for some of your listeners uh I wouldn’t invest in the Prov of British Columbia outside the traditional territories of the Talan and the Nishka I just wouldn’t do it uh I think the political risks in British Columbia are very very very high um but people that look like you

And I somehow believe that’s money that’s stolen from them by caucasians in English according to the rule of law through the legislature is less gone uh than it is in other cultures where the theft or the tax or the royalty occurs in a language other than our own with people whose complexion is

Different well being a contrarian requires discipline and you have to look at risk and reward and valuation so you brought up the Congo I actually was in 2008 financial crisis I was buying shares of lending mining at 30 cents because I saw that they had the partnership with free port macaran and

The mine was almost done that massive copper mine Tango fug fugar in the Democratic Republic of Congo and I was just reading all the comments on the message boards companies going bankrupt the military’s going to seize the mine and I was like well 30 cents I’m going

To buy 500 shares I didn’t I didn’t put like my whole life savings in it but risk reward was an excellent speculation and then the shares went to $5 uh about 18 months later Jason in particular at that point in time I was a very large shoulder shareholder at that particular

Time the company had 30 cents a share cash in it and it was selling for 30 cents a share so you were getting Tank fun Gumi and the londin for free the shares were selling at Cash now one of two things could happen either the company could go broke in

Which case you’d lose 30 cents or the company wouldn’t go broke they’d be able to hang on uh in which case you’d get $3 or $4 or $5 uh ultimately you’ll recall that that company uh got taken out uh first by lundine Mining and then of

Course ons sold to the Chinese uh and the total return had you hung on was $15 which from 30 cents is a wonderful outcome well I had just gotten into resource investing back then I was researching this with the bank balance and inflation I was researching the

History of the lundine family I mean they have a track record are very successful one of doing stuff like this look what they did with Fuda Del Norte and Ecuador I mean there was a lot of people that thought Ecuador would never approved mines and now it’s one of the

World’s top gold mines in terms of uh profit margins and free cash flow a superb mine and a mine where the risk uh extended Beyond Ecuador there were several different mineralized domains there which meant that you were mining a different style of rock in several different lobes of the deposit which

Means that you have to process them differently from each other which is very complex at the same time there were complex which is a euphemism for lousy ground conditions so it was a very very difficult uh mine to build uh and the lundine family and their contractors the jyc

Family uh did an absolute absolutely superb job there my hope is we were talking earlier about consolidation my hope is now that lundine gold having uh really truly put frut Del Norte de bed uh buys another development stage asset and does it again these guys are superb mind

Builders and superb operators and by the way there is nobody in the world that I know of that is better at uh Emerging Market uh local community uh sociology than the londin so I want to ask you about the situation in Panama with first Quantum the copper Miner and Franco Nevada the

Market just decided to write off the asset down to zero for Franco Nevada but it looks like there was actually a settlement what two years ago that was reasonable because the original royalty agreement I think was in 1996 or something along those lines which would seemed to be not really fair for the

Government that the mining company got like ridiculous terms and then there was a renegotiation two years ago but then look like all the protests and stuff the government caved do you think that there’s going to be a settlement there and that um the punishment that Franco Nevada shares it’s unfairly cheap right

Now well let’s look at Franco Nevada without a recovery let’s just look at the arithmetic uh an asset which was I think 16% of net asset value ostensibly went away and the share price declined by 40% so this is simple arithmetic you had a dollar bill

Somebody took 15 cents of it and the impressive is selling for 60 this is just straight math right uh then you get to your original question uh the original concession terms uh relative to the Affairs of Panama at the time that they signed the agreement were very fair Panama was a basket case

Uh Panama changed the concession terms retroactively in other words said we lied things are different we want more uh and the industry went along with it two years ago but they went along with it’s subject to International arbitration that mine has seen 8 billion dollar spent on it so if the

Nationalization uh holds the panamanians will be liable to First Quantum and Franklin Nevada for some substantial portion of $8 billion which is about 8 billion more than the panamanians can afford to pay separate and apart from that the mine was something like 7% of Panama’s GDP and over 25% of export

Earnings my suspicion is that well a settlement won’t occur quickly a settlement will occur particularly given now that the Panamanian authorities are beginning to um prosecute some of the protesters I think they’re setting the stage for another renegotiation so I suspect that there will be uh a a renegotiation in lie of a

Settlement I suspect that it’ll occur in the one to twoyear time frame which means that the amount of time to resolution is beyond the amount of time which most speculators allocate to a position most speculators seem to have trauma Holding stock over a long weekend uh and uh benefiting from this

Circumstance might might uh take two years there are recurring rumors uh that a transaction between baric uh and first Quantum might occur I can see why the first Quantum managers wouldn’t want to see this occur but there is nobody in the world who is better at achieving political reconciliation around large

Deposits than Mark Bristo he’s done it in Molly he did it in t Ania he just did it in Pakistan uh probably the best outcome for investors would be to see a transaction where first Quantum became part of baric and Franco NADA is sitting around

$15 a share so the share has been in a trading range for a while basically stuck until there’s some type of resolution I I hear a lot of the Bears for frankco NADA say that they have no more growth now but didn’t they pay for a lot of royalties and streams that are

Going to be coming online in late 2024 and 2025 right so there is growth that they paid for it’s just it hasn’t kicked in yet so the narrative now uh while the share price is weak is that they don’t have any growth uh what you say is true what the

Market ignores too is that growth that hasn’t occurred in the sense that both baric and weaton but nobody else uh have the balance sheet flexibility to participate in very large financings uh and there are six or seven very large financings out there to do when I say large financings I’m talking

About 5 to 10 billion doll financings uh there are only two companies in the world that have the ability to write one and a half two or three billion dollar checks and those are weaton and Franco and what the industry or at least what the financiers haven’t taken into account is the

Optionality around both Franco and weaton being able to participate in very large financings at a point in time where capital is scarce uh and where they can generate absolutely Superior Returns on Capital employed are you talking about gold or silver byproduct stream say on a copper mine uh there are

Those uh there are also some large mines where some portion of the ownership will likely change because part of that mine will be bought by a host government that doesn’t have any money uh there is also a sovereign which is a large royalty holder uh which is looking

To generate some cash without selling the royalties which is to say they would like to entertain the offer of a stream on PO on part of their royalty production these are not transactions that mortals can participate in these are transactions that are there waiting to be done that require very large

Balance sheet capabilities which both Franco and weaton or probably more likely given the scale of the transaction Franco and weaton cooperate on okay so those would be Syndicate agreements I I know syndicated agreements have been discussed for 10 years but we haven’t really seen any yet where Franco and Weeden or Royal Gold

All participa In A co-financing we haven’t really seen one of those ones yet they haven’t had to uh we have a circumstance now where there are any number of copper deposits that are five or six or seven or 10 billion dollars uh in construction there are also as I say these privatization

Opportunities where societies are seeing the upside in controlling part of their mineral wealth but they’re Bound by existing contracts not to retroactively change the fiscal terms the way that that could occur given the relatively low valuation of these deposits relative to The Net Present Value uh would be to finance

Either at the entity level or at the buyer level uh and that would likely uh include the sale of a stream for all or part of the equity component and let me add to on the demand side for copper I think the market hasn’t figured this out

Yet that for all these green Energy Technologies and electrical grid upgrades electric vehicles and even artificial intelligence there is a lot more copper required a lot more electricity required uh in order to use say something like artificial intelligence because you have to build more data centers you have to upgrade

Electrical grids electric vehicles uh if you have nuclear power plants you still have to have upgraded um power lines and all these other things I was looking at projections that if artificial intelligence for a higher end case if artificial intelligence uh catches on in the next like six or seven years that

Global electricity demand could actually double in the next six or seven years with artificial intelligence Investments That would be a lot more copper I think that even without artificial intelligence you and I look at rich people’s copper demand artificial intelligence electric vehicles there are a billion people on

Earth with no access to primary electricity at all there are another two billion people on Earth that have access to unaffordable or or intermittent electricity and because of polic ICS uh the grid uh in the western world hasn’t seen substantial investment for 80 years increasingly two the electorate favors

Inefficient intermittent forms of energy which require an addressable grid what I’m trying to say is that even without artificial intelligence even without a Tesla in every garage uh demand for grid upgrades uh and the general demands of the electrification of the glob global economy means that we’re going to be

Using much more copper in the 5 to 10 year time frame than we’re using now what you say with regards to the adoption of AI uh is from my point of view uh really the icing on the cake yeah I think the average person just thinks like artificial intelligence

Oh it’s chat GPT oh it’s a software program right well that’s only one component you have to stack all these Technologies you have to build like data centers so that’s tons more electricity usage tons of more data centers so you’re building out all these other all the infrastructure for artificial

Intelligence it’s not just a software program you have to uh the artificial intelligence programs draw on way more uh data usage so correct correct and to the extent that the voters decide that they want to operate on wind and solar you have to get that power from where

It’s generated where for instance the wind blows and people don’t want to live to where they do want to live and the power is consumed uh there is a massive massive grid upgrade to make the grid addressable and transferable that has to occur and all that requires a ton well a

Ton that’s the wrong phrase a lot of copper well even if you’re building nuclear power plants you still have to upgrade all the electrical plugin so if at your home I mean the average person doesn’t understand so like oh I want an electric vehicle it’s like well if you

Want to Rapid charge at your house you have to spend thousands of dollars on the um on the new copper wiring and stuff so you can get a supercharge plugin and if you’re going to build that power plant in hand for Washington or somewhere like that where you can build

It shared in Wyoming you have to get the power from the power plant to California or someplace where you’re going to use the power there’s I mean what you say separate apart from the details is very true what’s equally true is that humankind has underinvested in every aspect of copper production for 30

Years uh on a global basis we consume the acquire the equivalent of one Bingham Canyon every year and we are not replacing one Bingham Canyon a year so in addition to looking at the demand side for copper you have to look at the supply side where Decades of

Underinvestment uh are coming home to roost that’s one of the reasons why I think that people don’t understand the transactional opt optionality in the very large streaming companies I think that transactions are there to do in the copper space that will will require quasi equity in the form of

Streams yeah I agree I think there’s going to be a lot of opportunities we’re going to need a lot more copper uh the narrative out there uh for a lot of people a lot of hedge fund managers that are short-term oriented focused on short-term trading is that there’s going

To be a global recession or depression and that China’s housing bubble is going to cause copper to collapse well guess what Chinese copper demand shockingly actually grew in 2023 despite their housing bubble because they did electrical upgrades and they were installed ing more Advanced Technologies and building data centers so that I saw

An interview with the CEO free Port macaran copper and gold and he said and he showed like some of the numbers that Chinese copper demand shockingly grew in 2023 despite their housing bubble collapsing I’m not uh undisposed to the argument that we have a recession coming uh with the caveat that I’m no

Economist I joke that Doug Casey and I between us have correctly forecast 17 of the last three recessions um and what I’ve learned in 50 years of investing in resources is that if you have a recession while it scares the hell out of you when it’s occurring uh that the aftermath is

Unchanged a wonderful example of that would be to look at 60 years of stock charts for Burkshire Hathaway in 60 years that company has in four different 18-month periods fallen in price by half and if you look at a 60-year stock chart you can’t see the

Declines the point of all of that is that if you have investing Horizons that are long enough to be realistic in natural resources uh uh a recession postpones rather than eliminates the certainty that over time you have a supply demand squeeze in the copper business Buffett Warren Buffett famously

Says with regards to a stock two tests of quality the first is that you wouldn’t be you shouldn’t be willing to buy a share if you wouldn’t be willing if you were able to buy every share of the company at that same price per share in

Other words you buy the company not the stock more tellingly I think for most speculators he said that you shouldn’t buy a share if you weren’t certain enough about the company that you wouldn’t be delighted to see it fall 30% in price the month after you bought it so that

You could allocate more Capital with the same amount of work if that’s a tough test and by the way unfortunately I’ve been tested by it many times uh but I I think that puts the recession in its context we don’t know if one’s going to happen so perhaps

What one does is decide what allocation what percentage of their portfolio they’d like to see in the copper business uh and if they feel uncomfortable with the economy understanding that nobody has a crystal ball perhaps they take a half a position now uh and after a reasonable time frame

Particularly if we do see a recession uh and the economy and copper stocks fall then they deploy the other half well there what I’ve learned in my life is that being out of a market Where My Success was inevitable because I was afraid of some extraneous event was a mistake well

Crashes create opportunities and then you can get if you have cash like you said earlier optionality you can get deeply discounted you have to be contrarian though and that requires discipline most people don’t want to buy when there’s blood on the streets when some of these shares that were their 30

40 50% off all of a sudden people panic so a lot of the average person is probably going to sell or they’re not going to buy they’re not going to run the financial numbers like you but I I think there’s opportunities there we’ve seen this with Franco Nevada and we

Precious metals they’ve went in and bought gold or silver byproduct streams when there’s crashes I mean Franco grew Franco and we precious medals and Royal gold grew enormously during the gold and silver be Market from 2011 to 2018 they were buying tons and tons of byproduct streams taking advantage of miners with

Bad balance sheets and the circumstance that we see today with the certainty of large Capital expenditures over the next five to seven years time frame and the uncertainty as to whom might Supply that Capital uh makes a strong argument for the transactional optionality of both Franco uh and

Weaton I want to ask you about plat Reef do you think that that’s going to be the world’s best Platinum Group metal mine as it comes online the next 12 to 18 months uh I’m not sure it’ll come online the next 12 to 18 months uh I think

Robert is proceeding at a prudent Pace given the fact that it’s likely that most ni both nickel and PGM prices continue lower uh at least for the duration of hostility between Russia and the Ukraine or at least for as long as Russia has to disord platinum and

Pgms and I’m not sure that it will be the finest mine in the world uh being finer than something like mapan uh is a tough challenge but what I think happens is if you look at the valuation assigned to the plat Reef within ivanho uh I would I I would suggest to

You that the market capitalization of ivanho uh discounts the congales assets and Kushi but that you get flat Reef for free and that’s a very good price uh this is an okay nickel mine but it becomes a very very good co-product mine if you add the the uh pgms plus gold

Back into the nickel production I I think that your time frame uh may be compressed I think that Robert is proceeding deliberately rather than with all due haste and I think he’s wise to do that so they didn’t hedge then the uh base metal the nickel prices or anything

Like that in the short term nope nope uh nor I think do they have complete accommodation from the South African government with regards to fiscal stability power access and water access uh I think those are all transactions to be done that’s interesting because the Ivan home mine shares I mean I I haven’t

Looked at the chart in the last couple weeks but the shares were actually doing very very well the last six months oh you’ll you’ll note they haven’t made a lot of noise about it but you’ll note that it would appear that they have a third copper Discovery in Congo this

Time on 100% owned land uh the current share price uh I think factors in Cula which is in production camoa which is under uh under construction and the fact that both of those deposits are in effect 40% owned by ivanho the new discovery if it turns out

To be uh of reasonable tenor which I think it will be is on 100% owned land uh and that makes a big big difference or could make a big difference it’s interesting that you have a discovery that can make a difference to a company with the market cap the size of Ivan

Hos they have a lot of good base metal mines there I mean the Platinum Group mine looks uh looks really good the risk is South Africa but the the mine itself with the with the grades and all the different phases they have planned I mean it’s going to take years though for

Some of those phases looks like they’re going to be growing production through 2030 or longer uh I I think that’s absolutely true uh they are talking about recoverable reserves of precious metals of in excess of 80 million ounces it’s quite a deposit um uh and as

You say the fact that it’s going to be a large scale underground mine means that it will be producing uh free cash for ivanho shareholders or somebody’s shareholders uh after your time on Earth never mind after my time on Earth well I think I think the supply the industrial end users for platinum

And plaum they’re going to want sources outside of Russia so there’s not many countries that have reliable platinum and plaum sources outside of Russia because Russia is such a large supplier and of course those those same buyers who we talk to all the time uh want supplies outside of South Africa too uh

Yeah but Zimbabwe is other major producer right so I mean like your choice most of your choices are what Russia Zimbabwe or South Africa well what it means for me personally is in terms of PGM and nickel exploration I’m looking to Brazil uh I’m looking to other terrains with

Large uh Aran or protozoic terrains uh with large existing mafic or Ultra mafic endowments not saying that we’re going to be successful in financing companies exploring in those places but we have certainly heard from uh the oems and jock Mech uh even Glen cor uh the Metal Traders that there

Would be a huge premium on tier one deposits outside of uh South Africa Zimbabwe and Russia were they to occur sounds good in theory I mean um we’ll see it doesn’t look like there’s anything near term though no there isn’t anything near term there are a couple of

Explorers uh which I think are doing very well but they’re a long way from having proven up a tier one deposit which is what it would take so I want to transition now to uranium I just pulled up a chart of the uranium spot price and the last 12 months it’s gone absolutely

Bonkers uh it was below $50 around 12 months ago it’s at $103 a pound today do you think this is sustainable and do you think that the earning price could go higher uh if you if you give me the word the use of the word could I can sell you

Anything uh it doesn’t have to go up I I would suggest to you that the incentive price for new construction is about 80 what what speculators need to understand is I guess three things the first thing is that increasingly smaller volumes of uranium are sold in the spot market so

The spot Market is becoming useful as a measure of Syndicate of sentiment rather than the uranium price more transactions are taking place on the term Market the term Market is opaque and people can’t see it but because so they don’t pay attention to it the second thing is

Could the spot Market go higher yes because although the incentive price is lower than the spot price the incentive price won’t bring new production online for years in the case of shut in cico and Kazam prom production probably not within two years uh in the case of new mine construction things like

NextGen uh probably not for five to seven years in the interim Anything Could Happen what’s important for speculators to realize is that the spot price other in sentiment is becoming a floating abstraction because that’s not where pounds are being sold and what’s unique about uranium what could really drive

The market for the uranium equities in the next five years is with the coming uh prominence of the term Market uh and with the fact that new build reactors are often forced by their lenders to lock in supplies in the term market for long enough to amortize the

Loan that uranium producers will in the next two years have the highest visibility of future sales revenues of any Resource company gold unless it’s sold by way of a stream is priced at spot and spot changes every nanosecond uranium companies are entering into contracts that set a floor

Price over 10 years with escalators according to you know certain conditions which means that uh the revenue line of uranium producers in the next 10 to 15 years can be predicted with much more certainty than in any other commodity on the planet which means theoretically that uranium mines could be financed

With more certainty and H and hence at lower Co Capital costs than any other commodity on the planet and I don’t think that uranium speculators or uranium investors for the most part have factored into their own minds the importance of the term market and the importance of uh both the certainty and

The visibility of revenues in the 10-year time frame I think these are true game changers it also looks like kada prom is not going to be increasing production rapidly and flooding the market with new Supply like they were doing for six or seven years post Fukushima during the bare Market they

Actually announced recently that they’re actually having some production problems and they’re not going to hit their production guidance I think that’s true uh what kadam prom guided publicly 18 months ago was that they wouldn’t restart uh the suspended products projects pardon me until they had enough products so sold forward that

Uh they were guaranteed of receiving a reasonable return on Capital employed and until they had had uh most of the product sold forward at the incentive price for new production because Adam prom said that selling pounds for $40 a pound when Global Production was in a deficit and when the incentive price of

New production was $75 a pound was the same uh as stealing $35 a pound from the kazak people a pretty Pro profound statement the second thing that happened to Kazam Pro is that uh many people assumed that the process of starting up or restarting an ISR deposit was pretty

Straight forward you just Add Water Well turns out it’s fairly complex it’s like a water flood the injection of water has to be engineered so that the water advances across the r front in a consistent rable fashion uh easy to talk about a little bit tougher to do and so

Uh both technology and Market discipline uh have have combined to create a circumstance where the 15 million pounds a year of shut in production that Kaz Adam prom had that everybody myself included thought would occur uh in you know as soon as you had reasonable incentive prices is going to be

Delayed uh an awful lot of it is going to have to do with Kaz Adam prom’s ability to negotiate with various takers but in particular China General nuclear uh sufficient term agreements so in the near-term potential new Supply there’s only a few small producers like uranium en energy core

And a few others were starting is that it yeah that’s right uh I mean the big guns are cico and Kazam prom and it would appear that you aren’t going to see substantial production increases from them for at least 18 months and perhaps two years boss energ boss energy is coming

On there’s some odd and odds and sods production that’s coming on but even the production that you see from uranium uranium energy where the construction around New Start is imminent uh you aren’t going to see substantial production out of them for a couple of years I’m also cautiously optimistic

About some of the statements that have been coming out the last couple months from the United Kingdom about wanting to either restart or build new nuclear power plants and I think over 500 million in funding and then cop 28 I look at the electricity prices what has happened in the European Union during

The last two or three years with the elect uh the cost of electricity uh manufacturers threatening to leave some of the area small businesses shutting down I think they realize that they need much more stable cheaper base load and the only one that mathematically rationally works is nuclear power consistently absolutely positively

Correct I mean look a Germany had to bail out what a SE Seaman uh wind and solar division so I think they’re going to start even thinking about uh restarting or building new nuclear power plants too I’m laughing because my favorite meme uh if it is a meme uh is the Germans knocking

Down uh a wind farm to expand an open cut lignite Coal Mine uh that tells you almost everything you need to know about German energy policy so it looks like uranium and nuclear power is in a sweet spot at least for the next couple years it doesn’t look like any potential new

Supply could come and just drastically flood the market and we’ll see if the politicians they actually allocate the capital there could be some big demand drivers then for nuclear power and uranium too well I need to say Jason that uh with regards to nuclear power

When you and I were talking about it two years ago the stocks were cheap I think with regards to the uranium Juniors the easy money has been made you know a basket of those Juniors who uh exhibited at our uranium boot Camp two years ago that basket of stocks has

Tripled uh any rational Speculator when his portfolio has gone from being hated to being tolerated or even loved take some money off the table and I’ve sold enough of my uranium Juniors that I no longer have a cast cost basis in any of the stocks I happen to believe that over

The next five years because of the transition of the market from a spot Market to a term Market that the big money is ahead of us but it’s not ahead of us for the whole sector uh there are 80s something uranium Juniors probably only 12 of whom are viable I think if

You buy the sector for the next for the next five years uh it’s not going to matter about the structure because most of the Juniors don’t have any uranium you have to focus on those companies who will benefit from the structural changes and you have to understand in your own mind those

Structural changes that means because it requires work thinking as opposed to feeling that most speculators won’t make any money in the space well plus Rick and you know this better than I do that all the shell companies because uranium is the hot flavor right now for Commodities

All the shell companies in Vancouver the Juniors they’re going to transition to uranium now and they’re going to start marketing uranium plays very good point uh in the early part of the decade of the 2000s well coming into that bull market for Uranium there were five uranium Juniors that had survived a

20-year bare Market uh there were probably between 12 and 15 teams that were competent to look for Uranium so the probability the year uranium junor Jr had a good team team was a function of uh dividing the number of aspirants five by the number of teams 15 yielded you a very high probability

Of a good team at the top of the boom uh in 2008 uh the number of aspirants which is to say uranium Juniors was 500 and the number of teams was unchanged means that the arithmetic uh became substantially worse and will become substantially worse as uranium itself becomes more popular oh I think

You’re going to see name changes I think you’re going to see like crypto miners or gold Juniors you’re going to just see them change the name of the shell company to something uranium soon look at look at how many people went to the lithium business they had to they had to

Google it first to find out how to spell it uh and then they changed the name of their company from XYZ gold or XYZ cannabis to XYZ lithium with the same result so I know you go on vacations to South America and Argentina do you think

That Malay is going to be good for mining investment and oil and natural gas investment for foreigners uh I suspect he’ll probably fail in Argentina uh I say that with a heavy heart uh he is the best politician of my lifetime perhaps St praise um I don’t

Think that Argentina is ready to develop uh an apolitical future uh AR Argentina in Argentina politics is a is a full contact sport and Argentine see the role of government uh as being one of stealing from their neighbors while protecting them from their neighbors theft and I think that the El the

Election of melee was very much a protest vote against the peronistas uh rather than a vote for True change I would love to be wrong Jason um my experience in Argentina as an investor which goes back three decades would show it to be an unusually politicized which is a polite way of

Saying an unusually corrupt Society yeah we’ll see how much of his policies he gets to implement it it would be nice if he kind of copied what Quebec has done with um incentivizing mining companies to make investments there and incentivizing exploration drilling I think if he allowed for foreigners to have private property

Rights I I know a lot of the mining companies operating there don’t they have to set up like offshore shell companies or something for foreign currency transactions because in the past Argentinian government would try to steal the money in the banks uh you said a lot of things there uh the

Broadly yes the way that you sell a deposit if you succeed in Argentina is that you set up a shell generally in the British Virgin Islands that owns the shares of the Argentina asset and then rather than sell the Argentina asset uh and uh invoke transaction uh transactional taxes in

Argentina you sell the shares of the BVI company and avoid tax in Argentina it is also true that Argentina has had Draconian currency controls to the extent that when I was operating the oil and gas business in Argentina because we couldn’t uh repatriate uh the revenues from our oil

And gas business which was by the way highly profitable uh we had to use those revenues to buy shares of ypf which we could do because we were an oil company uh we had then to transport the shares physically to Uruguay sell them remit the money from the sale to Calgary

And then remit the money from Calgary to Argentina to pay the operating expenses uh truly insane circumstance that eventually caused us just to sell those assets to some argentines who could deal with taxes uh in a more traditional Argentine fashion that sounds like endless migraines that’s oh Jesus it was unbelievable

Um I I I dispute what you said with regards to incentives I think what uh is all about is end incentives I don’t want him to create Financial incentives government sponsored incentives for the mining industry uh I want him to abolish the mines Ministry I want him to create a

Circumstance where the government doesn’t get in his way I don’t want any government Nexus I don’t want to steal money from other citizens the way that Quebec does to subsidize Me In classical sense uh my answer to all of that is that’s a new fair you know leave me

Alone I wasn’t aware Quebec was was doing wealth redistribution like that I just thought that they were doing that to get uh investment in jobs so they can maybe get some tax revenues later they are they’re trying to steal from the Quebec taxpayer uh in order to provide

Jobs to certain writings that reelect them in other words they’re picking winners and losers and from my experience the government Mantra is if it makes money if it successful tax it if it fail subsidize it uh which I don’t think is a great prescription for an economy well in a perfect libertarian

World government would be smaller or not exists and there would be little to no taxes but unfortunately that’s not how um people vote and governments and bureaucrats politicians and bureaucrats like to do things agreed agreed so in in the next uh couple years right do you see a lot of mergers and

Acquisitions then because the cost of capital for a lot of different Commodities Industries if the cost if the markets don’t rebound if the share prices don’t go up if the cost of capital doesn’t increase you’re going to see a ton of mergers which I think is a very good

Thing I think it’s going to be out of necessity because of cost of capital right now I mean you you I’m listening to conference calls for some of these companies and no one saw that interest rates were going to be raised that quickly and stay at these

Levels uh your lips to God’s ears the mining industry has way too many management teams it has way too much GNA relative to AUM or free cash flow the best way to eliminate G uh uh GNA is for the really inefficient companies to die and for the marginally efficient companies to

Merge I think we need to see that in the royalty and streaming companies too it’s it’s already started in the last couple years I think it’s going to pick up because like you said the the future for financing some of these bace metal mines the copper mines these are going to be

Massive projects Enders no way that say like a small cap royalty and streaming company or mid-tier can handle all this stuff I think there’s going to have to be combination deals going forward I think there will be combination deals and I think that the royalty and streaming Market will bifurcate you’ll

Have one group of successful companies that can write the five to $25 million check you’ll have another group of companies that are going to be able to compete in Syndicate or alone in the $250 million check and you’re not going to see a lot of room in the

Middle um you know the the merger between Mavericks and triple triple flag I think is an example of a fantastic merger the resultant company uh operates twice the assets uh with the same GNA that they operated one of the assets they have larger scope larger scale larger opportunity for

Deployment uh and as a consequence of having larger Mass more Trader volume more trading volume and hence hence ultimately lower cost of capital that’s absolutely the recipe for the future of the entire mining industry including the royalty and streaming space and the new CEO that of Cisco gold

Royalty the board just hired I mean his resume includes selling I think three or four mining companies if you look it up on LinkedIn so it looks like that’s the route that they’re deciding to go too it would appear that oysco royalty it would appear that the owners of oysco royalty

The shareholders have decided that not be a holding company and a merchant bank for the rest of the asisco group uh if that’s true if they sell off their Equity stakes in the asisco companies and redeploy that money into royalty and streaming uh and or uh decide to either

Sell a Cisco royalty or buy a different royalty company and bulk up in the business that those shareholders like uh I I think that augures for very good things for a Cisco royalty well they own one great royalty right it’s Canadian malartic I would argue the rest of their

Portfolio is kind of mediocre but that one royalty I mean that would be something if I’m Franco Nevada that’s the one I want to own the rest of the stuff I don’t want and I think well frankly I like Elenor better than you might uh but uh I I think either Franco or

Weaton this is speculative uh could buy uh oysco uh sell off the assets that are to them second tier that wouldn’t be second tier you know to a Mavericks uh or somebody like that and greatly reduce the cost of acquiring uh the assets or asset that they wanted to keep we’re in

Agreement actually I I was actually suggesting that to Adrien day Adrien day said Franco Franco shouldn’t um sell any of their shares at the current valuation I was like no they should go and try to get that Canadian malartic royalty and then just hire an investment Bank Bank

In the US or Canada and sell off the other parts they don’t want to recoup the trans uh the transaction cost for getting that malartic royalty purely a function of price well I mean like these uh precious metal Royal and streaming companies I I think they should um you know sell the

Stuff they don’t want and be more efficient and focus on you know Frank Franco only wants to own the really really good royalties and streams so they don’t need some of the smaller ones so if they want to move the needle I mean malartic would be other than maybe

The young Davidson one from triple flag but that’s not as good as the Arctic one uh I would agree as I say I I have a different opinion of Elenor than you um well I really enjoyed our discussion today Rick I think we could talk for another hour or two I want to

Thank you so much for your time if my listeners want to check out Ro investment media also when’s your next uh conference well than thank you for all of that uh the first commercial would be if you like what I have to say about natural resources figure out what

I have to say about your resources specifically go to rural investment media.com list your natural resource stocks and I’ll personally rank them 1 to 10 no obligation no cost we have an upcoming boot camp which is an eight and a half hour long ons online session about Prospect generators and early

Stage exploration a really unloved and hence cheap part uh of the resource equities markets uh you can find out about that at rural investment media under boot camps and of course uh we have what I think is either the 29th or the 30 installment uh of the natural resources

Investment Symposium a a live and online conference July 11th part 11th through 17th I think it is in boka ratton Florida I quite simply believe this is the best uh retail natural resource investment conference on the planet both the boot camp uh and the live conference come with an absolute goldplated money

Back guarantee if you pay to attend either or both events and you don’t think you got your money’s worth simply email me and I’ll give you your money back and you had a lot of great speakers too at the Florida event last year what you had Grant Williams Nomi Prince Jim

Rickards you had very big names and it’s getting better this year uh in terms of executive Publishers uh pardon me executive sponsors uh we have uh Agora Inc the largest financial newsletter publisher on the planet we have the Mining Journal uh the for most industry publisher in the mining

Business we hope to announce very soon that we will have the northern Miner the most prestigious mining publication in Canada we have the same range of of very high-grade speakers and dare I say we have the best range of exhibitors of any conference on the planet for the simple

Reason that to be an exhibitor at our conference you have to be owned in accounts that are managed by us that doesn’t mean sadly that every stock we go that we buy goes up what it does mean is that we have vetted every exhibitor uh to the extent that we’re willing to

Own them uh at most investment conferences sadly the qualification to be an exhibitor is a check that cashes that’s it at our conference we have to know you well enough that we’ve invested our money in you and because of that confidence that we have in our speakers and our exhibitors we’re the only

Conference in the world that I know that offers attendees UPF front a full goldplated money back guarantee I may come down to Florida for that one I’m trying to get a vacation I was thinking about going to Florida anyway I would love to have you down there among other things uh we’re going

To have a a special room for a podcast holers and media people to interview our exhibitors and our speakers and you would be uh welcome to join uh 20 or so social media Outlets a and the established press as an example The Mining Journal and the northern Miner at the boa Raton

Conference excellent well I think there’s a lot of contrarian value opportunities I mean in the short term as things are with the contrarians they could keep getting cheaper so uh cash is probably having some cash is probably a good idea but I think over the next

Couple years I think there will be a lot of good opportunities and as you always say Rick the cure for low prices is low prices so there will be a bottom in these goals stocks there will be mergers and Acquisitions it might not be at the valuations that the shareholders of the

Company getting acquired want but the combined company may be good and then the cycle will eventually um shift I agree with you completely