Gold May Rally Up To $6,000-8,000/oz | Brien Lundin
Summary
Gold Bull Market Analysis: Brien Lundin discusses historical gold bull markets, suggesting that if the current cycle follows past trends, gold could reach $6,000-$8,000 per ounce.
Current Market Performance: Gold has risen 40% this year, silver nearly 50%, and mining stocks over 100%, indicating strong momentum in the precious metals sector.
Central Bank Influence: The current gold bull market is notably driven by central bank purchases, with Western investors only recently beginning to participate.
Inflation-Adjusted Gold Price: The inflation-adjusted price of gold has just reached levels seen in 1980, suggesting potential for much higher nominal prices.
Western Market Dynamics: Wall Street's growing interest in gold could lead to significant capital inflows, given the relatively small size of the gold market compared to broader financial markets.
Silver Market Potential: Silver is highlighted as an undervalued asset with strategic importance, with potential for increased demand from industrial and strategic uses.
Mining Sector Opportunities: The mining sector, particularly junior miners, presents significant investment opportunities, with many companies still undervalued relative to historical metrics.
Future of Currency Standards: There is speculation about a potential future reattachment of major currencies to gold or other standards to restore credibility and stability.
Transcript
The way I look at it is if you if you look at the timing is always difficult but if you look at the three previous gold bull markets the first one in the early 70s from trough to peak gold went up 5.6 times. The second one in the late 70s it went up from trough to peak 8.2 two times and the the early 2000s from say 2000 to 2011 it went up 7.9 times from trough to peak. If you call the bottom of this market about $1,50 in 2015 then we should end up 6 $8,000 at the end of this cycle. [Music] Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm its founder and your host, Adam Tagert. Gold is up 40% this year. Silver is up almost 50% and the mining stocks as a sector are up over 100%. So, has the big money in the precious metals now been made, or is the party just getting started? for answers to all things gold, silver, and the companies that mine them. We're fortunate to speak with Brian London, CEO of Jefferson Financial, publisher of Gold Newsletter.com, and producer of the excellent New Orleans Investment Conference. Brian, thanks so much for joining us today. Always a pleasure, Adam. Always a pleasure, especially in times like these for metals and miners. Well, you know, Brian, um, you know, you and I have known each other for a long time. I think well over a decade now. We've done a lot of interviews together. I got to imagine this has got to be one of the more fun times in your career to do an interview. Yeah, it it is. You know, gold is probably the world's oldest asset store of value, but it's only been an investable asset since 1971. Uh, and there have been three bull markets around before this one. And uh so I've been alive for every bull market in this 6,000y old asset. And but long way of saying yeah I've paid some dues. I've enjoyed some bull markets f before this one but this one is really special. It's a long time in coming and I think it's going to duplicate those previous three in a lot of ways. Okay. um you know we we in other assets you know we we've had um bubbles before right I mean throughout history but even in recent history we had the.com bubble we had the housing bubble now we have what many people refer to as the everything bubble right is there anything that I know we're early on in this bull market for the precious metals but is there anything that gives you um a sense that this time uh of the magnitude of this bull market versus the previous bull markets in gold. Yeah, it's it's a little scary frankly uh in recent weeks and you know we've had a few surges over this 18month bull market similarly to this but even over the last few weeks we've had a tremendous surge um and it's been violent and it's been abrupt and it's volatile volatile in one direction primarily up and uh and so we haven't seen anything like this I think than maybe since maybe January of 1980 when gold hit its last nominal high back then of $850 um when it went up, you know, tremendously over just a few weeks. But that's happened a couple of times in this market. And by that virtue alone, it's distinguished, I think, from any previous bull market that we've seen. But there are other aspects that are different like the fact that this one's been driven by central bank spying largely with the absence of western investors until recent months. Uh and those western investors are if they want to get involved and as they're trying to get involved in this sector, they see how far gold has come and they look at how they're going to enter the sector. And interestingly because central banks have driven it because central banks don't buy silver and they don't buy mining stocks the traditional levers for gold they uh they find that these sectors have lagged in the entering the the play via silver and gold. Um and we're starting to see that reaction as well. Um all right so couple of things. Um, one uh I saw a chart this morning uh that really I guess I had sort of known it but it really hammered home the point. Um it was a chart of the inflationadjusted price of gold and it was showing that essentially we have just now hit the um inflationadjusted price of gold that gold had hit in 1980. Right? Which gives you a sense of how crazy that mania was because essentially it took you it's taken you about 45 years if you were if you had top ticked the gold market back then. It's taken you 45 years to get to break even on an inflationadjusted basis with the crazy price you bought back then. which given how much inflation there's been over time and given all the other elements that have gone on kind of makes me think that you know the the nominal high of this bull market could potentially be a lot higher from here. Yeah, it it could be. So what gold is telling us by setting that record and meeting that record uh is that things are essentially as crazy as unsure uncertain today as they were in the 1970s. If you'll remember the 1970s, that was a hell of a decade. Good music, uncomfortable fashion, but a lot of other things going on in the world, primarily raging, rip roaring inflation and uncertainty as to what was going to happen for in the future for the entire financial system and the future of the dollar. Uh so if you look at it from that standpoint, we have some concerns about the dollar. We have some concerns about uh the financial infrastructure going forward, but we're nowhere near the worries that we had in the 1970s. Um and and so yeah, I think I think gold's saying that something is ahead and it's going to be disruptive. Uh but we're not quite there yet. So yeah, I think from that standpoint, we've got a good bit more to go on in this gold bull market. Okay. And of course, yeah, the central banks are buying. Um, we don't know what they're going to do in the future, but they they seem to uh their buying momentum seems unabated here. It doesn't seem to be waning at any point yet. Um, we know that, and we've talked about this for several years, Brian, that the Asian investor, the eastern investor, has been buying gold pretty handily over much of the past decade and seems to have been very happy to do so at the price at which the West is willing to sell it bullion. Um it seems like just recently uh the western investor has started to take note of the gold market and to buy in which we always said would would likely happen during the next gold bull market. Um so a couple questions for you around this one is Wall Street has not been a fan of gold in general in in history. Um, but what Wall Street's more likes more than it it it than any bias is it likes to make money. It likes to see where there's momentum and it likes to chase it, right? So, um, are we getting to the point where, you know, capital in the western markets is going to say, hey, you know what, I can't ignore this gold space anymore. I want to get part of that action and starts to move into the precious metal space. Um, and if so, um, what's your expectation on the the future price impact of that? Because the gold market, especially in the mining sector, real small relative to the amount of capital that's slloshing around the western financial markets. Yeah, it is tiny. It is tiny. And you're seeing the the major uh uh Wall Street houses, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America and the like uh coming out with constantly revised targets on gold, chasing the price up. And sometimes their their revised targets get overtaken by the gold price before the ink is dry on their last projections. Um and and frankly a lot of their validations, a lot of their justifications rather for higher gold prices are a bit convoluted and I think don't strike to the heart of the story. Uh so yeah I I the issue right now is that well every bull market in gold is monetarily based. is based on people uh looking forward and feeling that there will be a more rapid depreciation of the purchasing power of their currencies. That's what drives gold over the long term. And that's what gold is telling us now that that's going to happen. Now, as far as the relative sizes, the the if we just get a fraction, small fraction of the money that's out there in tech stocks and AI and in crypto and Bitcoin and whatever the the uh the hot word or the theme or the um theme of the of the day is on Wall Street, if we get just a few ladles full of that liquidity thrown into the mining sector, for example, even metals and mining, then the reaction would be explosive because the the market is so tiny. It's just a small fraction of the the giant oceans of liquidity that are sloshing around the world looking for a home. And that's starting to happen right now. We're starting to see people who are involved uh in those other sectors making a move into into gold. We see Tether Gold buying, you know, tons and tons of gold each month and putting hundred million dollars into a royalty joint venture. So, I think the the camel's nose is firmly under the tent now and it's just going to be more and more money coming into the sector. Okay. Um, if you had to make your best guess, uh, in terms of the Western financial system getting involved in the gold trade, what inning would you put us in here? Uh, I would tend toward earlier in the in the game. I'm thinking third inning, thereabouts. You know, it's hard to say anything earlier considering how far gold has come, but uh and it does feel a bit froley right now. You know, hardly anything goes up in a straight line, although this bull market in gold has been as close as you can get. I think uh the way I look at it is if you if you look at the timing is always difficult but if you look at the three previous gold bull markets the first one in the early7s from trough to peak gold went up 5.6 times the second one in the late7s it went up from trough to peak 8.2 two times and the the early 2000s from say 2000 to 2011 it went up 7.9 times from trough to peak. If you call the bottom of this market about $1,50 in 2015 then we should end up 6 $8,000 at the end of this cycle. Now that's the the thing. We don't know when that cycle is going to end. to hope it takes a a good healthy amount of time to get there so we can make a lot of money in the mining stocks along the way. But uh I think that's the endgame. I think that's where we're going with an outside chance of something much higher if they try to reattach gold to uh to the dollar andor other currencies in some way. So early innings relatively early innings I think. Okay. relatively early innings and and uh you know there's a lot of things that we have seen in past gold bubbles that we're not seeing yet right here in the west. Um, I remember one of the stories that stuck in my mind the most was talking to a a longtime gold uh dealer and uh he talked about how in the 80s he would have to um there was so much demand for product that he would run out and when he would would come into work in the morning there was a line around the block of the coin store u which of course if you go to a coin shop today odds are probably still pretty good you'll be the only person in it. Um, so we're not seeing those lines yet, but he would have to divide the line. He would have he would have to segregate out the sellers and put them first in line so that he could buy their precious metals and then have inventory to sell to the other people in line, right? So, we're nowhere near those days. And and quite frankly, uh the last time, you know, gold did did well, you know, 15 years ago, um I mean, you couldn't turn on a television or a radio and not hear the cash for gold ads, and I haven't I mean, I don't watch broadcast media the way I used to, but I'm not seeing that yet. Um similar to you, I mean, do you do you take those as gauges of where we are kind of in the the mania side of things? Yeah, again that's that's why this one is unique. It's it's not just that we haven't reached reached that mania portion of the bull market, but also that those investors typically the western investors, the western retail investors that have usually led a bull market are almost completely uninvolved at this point. If you talk to dealers in the trenches, you know, on the ground, they'll tell you that most of their transactions now are actually people selling their gold bullion rather than buying it in the US because the prices have gone up. And also because the the gold bugs have are kind of aging out, you know, they became uh uh kromagins long ago and bought their gold and now they they're trying to sell that gold to pass on the prices are high so they have something a little more liquid for their their kids, I guess. But uh interesting. I'm curious. Are their kids maybe more likely to want to be in crypto than gold? And so there's there's not a buying wave that you would expect because they're choosing a different medium. Uh perhaps I think it probably runs the spectrum. They're probably invested in crypto more. Some of them may be living in the basement unemployed but right not able to purchase more and more these days. But but yeah, they they look at, you know, they bought gold long ago and they look at this as their payoff for for their foresight. uh and you mentioned it earlier that the the east Asia is buying gold at these prices. Their outlook has always been of savers constantly saving in gold. That's the way they they keep their uh their savings or at least a part of it. But they've traditionally been buyers on declines, price declines. whenever there's a decline they they look at it as a bargain going on sale and they tend have always tended to support the market and not drive it. Uh and now they are part of the factor that's driving the market along with central banks and frankly along with other forces that I don't think we've got a good handle on. I think there's something out there, something big out there. Some really big buyers uh that are taking physical off the market that we have not got a clear idea of who they are. So that was where I wanted to go with my next question. So, um, I've been talking frequently with Andy Sheckchman, um, who I believe you're familiar with, Brian, like, and we we've been talking about exactly this, and in Andy's mind, uh, looking at the volumes that he's seeing, at least that are coming and and taking delivery from comics. Um, they're at such a volume that he's basically ruling out almost any other player besides sovereign ones. Um, I mean, I guess you could have a a massive corporate balance sheet, you know, an Apple or Google or something like that that that wants to do this as well. Um, but his suspicion is that it's it's sovereign players. And of course, you know, especially with the new administration, there's been uh in addition to their their big lean into crypto, there's a greater appreciation of gold. Secretary Bessant is famous for having been a pretty big investor in gold. There was talk initially when the administration came into power of better ways to monetize America's um you know the assets that are on its balance sheet and that immediately let led people to think about gold. Um do you think what do you think are the the odds that maybe America is actually playing a role here of of trying to stealthily uh amass more gold? I think it's a u I don't wouldn't say a high probability but it's it would not surprise me and and I think it may even be likely. Uh I actually posted on X uh yesterday or the day before a chart of the gold price. I got went on uh Grock and found the the number of mentions on on X of a audit of Fort Knox and it uh it peaked in February of this year but it got up steam in January peaked in February and applauded that against the gold price and you'll see that the gold price was kind of bouncing along talk of Fort Knox audit then the talk of Fort Knox went radio silent silent, at least from the administration, and the coal price took off. Seems awfully coincidental to me. And it and it and it would seem to indicate that somebody went up to Trump and even posted a a a Groen uh created image meme uh as a reply to that that post that they told somebody they told uh Trump and the administration stop talking about a Fort Knox audit until we can actually get the gold back in there. Until we can actually pass it. Yeah. and and you know the audit if and if it ever happens I'm pretty confident they're not going to go down to the granular level of looking at the serial numbers because nobody wants to know what that is and and and you know there's a very good chance that the serial numbers on the bars won't match. We actually published seinal research by a guy named Frank Veneroso in the late 90s on this topic uh where he I think proved that central banks were loaning out gold to bullion banks hand over fisk getting IUS in return and getting interest in return. But the bullion banks immediately sold that gold, bought US treasuries, and then used the treasuries as collateral for leverage bets and the tech boom and the like. Um, and so in a lot of these central bank reserves, their vaults instead of gold, they have IUS. We've never seen anything really to indicate that those IUs were paid off with gold and may in fact have been settled years ago in cash. And where's the gold? So everything we've seen has indicated that there's something squirrely going on with central bank gold reserves. Germany demands a repatriation of of half of its gold reserves that are in the US and the US says we can get it to you in seven years. Um that seems to be a pretty obvious indication that the gold's not there. When we do return the gold ahead of that schedule, it is immediately melted and recast. uh nobody looks at the serial numbers to see if it's the original gold. Uh you know, more and more indicators are out there showing that there's problems uh getting gold moved and getting gold where it should have been. And I think that, you know, it's not just the official purchases. It's not just Poland. It's not just uh Estonia. It's not just China building their gold reserves through official purchases, but I think a lot of it is replenishment and putting gold where it should have been all along. Uh the violence of the moves that we've seen just seem to indicate that. Okay. Um let me ask you a couple more questions about this and then we'll we'll get to your the bullseye of your area of expertise, which is the mining companies. Um but um uh let's see here. Um so if if indeed gold is becoming more strategically important on a sovereign level here in the US for whatever reason because we want to prove that we've got the gold in our vaults when we eventually do an audit. Um, you know, maybe we want to uh take up Julie Shelton, Judy Shelton on her idea of doing a a bond back 50-year US Treasury, sorry, gold back uh 50 US Treasury bond. Um, you know, other other countries seem to be caring more about gold, too. They're they're they're buying uh at this point actually they're buying more gold than they are buying treasuries. Um, and I I want to be real clear about this, too. It's it's not that they're not buying treasuries. Um there's a narrative out there that that foreign central banks, you know, just don't want treasuries. That's not true. At least in in aggregate, uh demand is still pretty steady. U but they have certainly ramped up their their buying of gold. And I think from a percent of balance sheet standpoint, I think gold has just surpassed US treasuries um in kind of the world central bank central banks in aggregate. Um but if I if if and as gold becomes more important um on a sovereign level, do you foresee a time where we start putting some controls on our shipment of bullion from west to east? Uh that's a good question. You know, the original uh controls were were placed on August 15th of 1971 when Nixon closed the gold window because uh uh the Bank of England and the damn French were turning in dollars and taking gold out of Fort Knox at a accelerating clip. And Nixon, you know, did what real frankly he had to do. He had to stop those flows. uh and so he severed that that bond. That was the original one. Um I don't know that we would uh do that in an official standpoint in the US, but I do think that at some point there will have to be some kind of a reattachment of gold to the dollar and frankly other fiat currencies because we're in this cycle of crisis, bubble bursting, rescue with lots of liquidity um over and over repeating cycle. Kind of like a Groundhog Day where the the the rescue creates the bubble which creates a crisis which they then come in and and do more than they did before because the the addict has grown tolerant to the drug and they have to just blow out everything they did before with even more liquidity. Um I think that these repeated cycles each time that happens it degrades the credibility of the currency and the only way you can really reattach that immediately uh rebuild that credibility is by putting some kind of a governor on on the spending and and currency creation which would mean attaching it to gold somehow. So whether that happens in the next crisis as some people say or the next or the next or down the road, I think the only thing we can do now is determine what the trend is and realize that you know we're going to want to own gold as this trend accelerates. Okay. Um so let me ask you this. Uh so so you you foresee a time might not be in the near term probably not but you foresee a time where the major world currencies um are tied to some sort of standard like you know could easily be gold. Some might argue it's going to be crypto or bitcoin or something like that. But but you you see us as as as getting off the pure fiat standard again. Uh, yes. I I think so. I think that this loss of credibility will will demand some type of an action like that at some point, but we don't really have to get to that point either. I mean, there there are interim steps that might even suffice. If gold and perhaps silver are legalized, once again, recognized as money, uh, you don't have to have a set exchange rate with the dollar. you can have a floating exchange rate. That the key is that no matter what the the powers that be due to the currency, no matter how they degrade uh the purchasing power of that currency and pull those levers, and you'll never be able to convince them not to be able to to have that power, then people can still protect themselves without the friction of taxes and the like by owning gold and silver. Uh, and that's really all you need. You know, give them the power to do whatever they want with the the currency that becomes increasingly worthless, but as long as you can protect yourself uh and hold wealth in a form that won't depreciate, you'll be okay. Okay. Now, some would argue, hey, well, Brian, I can own gold and silver today, so what's why can't we just do that today? And I guess your answer would be because it's it's taxed uh its gains are taxed. Yeah. And it's not taxed as capital gains. It's taxed at a weird collectible collectible rate. Yeah. 28% plus whatever the Obamacare sir charge is on that. So you know 30% thereabouts uh tax rate um on that gold that is you know declared and any large amount would be. So, um, yeah, that's the friction involved. That's what keeps Now, over the long term, that's fine. You're still going to keep ahead of the game, but that's the end goal as far as I'm concerned is removing that that friction of the tax rate. Okay. And I'm sure you're aware of the many movements underway in a lot of individual US states to to recognize the precious metals as currency. And there's varying Yeah. you know, degrees in in different states, but it it seems to be a movement that's moving towards your your goal there. Yeah, it is. And I've talked with a number of those groups and actually trying to organize a new group to address it on a federal level. I think there's a couple ways to do it on a federal level, either through the courts or or legislation. uh the idea of those doing it on a stateby-state level is uh you know uh you kill it by a thousand cuts if if it's accepted in the majority of states as a fat complement has to recognize it as well. Um so I think it helps the story on a federal level but I'd like to try and attack it on a federal level as well. Okay. All right. Well, look, um I'm sure a lot of folks watching that are, you know, cross their fingers and say, you know, let's hope we get there sooner rather than later. Um the reason I was asking you this is maybe this is a moot question now, but um I I if I if the fiat curren the current fiat currency itself or the current sovereign currencies themselves were to switch over to a new backed regime and we can let's assume it's gold for the time being. It could be anything, but let's just assume it's gold. The question I have is is would the US lead the way? And I I can make a pretty good argument that they wouldn't because no no central planner, no politician wants to be constrained by the constraint of of of backing of the currency. That's why we all want the currencies to be backed, right? they they place a constraint on rampant money creation. Um, and because the US is the biggest dog on the world stage and the world's currency and all that stuff, it gives us an exorbitant privilege. And so I don't think they would want to lose that. um unless and until somebody else whose material switches to a back currency that the world starts to prefer and as the you know Gresham's law as the world starts turning to the better currency um then uh you know then maybe at some point that might force the hand of a big player like the US. But do do you have a does that make sense or do you have a different opinion? Yeah, you know it's it's interesting. It's there's a lot of hypotheticals there. um the the key component of the dollar that the there are two things that keep the dollar at the uh world reserve currency really a lot of things but I think that the primary things are rule of law in the US you know there's a lot to criticize about the US rule of law but it's still the best in the world you know you don't know what side of bed she or Putin's going to wake up on tomorrow and you don't want your your funds international organizations governments uh have their money subject to the whims of one person. Uh and so rule of law is a big part of it. The other part is really the installed base, the network effect, right? Simple amount of debt that's already denominated in the dollar. That's going to be a huge burden to get over. Aircraft carriers have something to say about it, but I don't think as much as people really think. Now, if the if another major currency switched to gold, well, that solves the rule of law right there because even though you had rule of law in the US, you also have a very rapid creation of dollars. And if you put a restriction, a governor on that instinct to create new currency by attaching it to gold uh then it's kind of Gresham's law in reverse. the the better currency that's demanded more in right uh in commerce and I think that would create a a big um uh you know competitive competitor to the dollar. The issue again is will governments will uh people our monetary uh masters give up that power and that's the part that I I'm not sure that they will uh we would have to get into a point where currencies have lost all credibility and and that you have to reattach it to the dollar or to gold to do that. Again, there's an interim step. If they just say there's no taxation on gold and silver, then I think the situation gets solved. They can still pull their levers. Everybody is happy and everyone can protect themselves because it's human nature. They're going to do it anyway. Right. Right. Okay. Um, last question on this, then we'll get to the miners. Um, so moving on from gold to silver for a moment. Um, and silver is finally starting to to catch up to gold. Um, uh, this the above ground silver market is much smaller than the above ground gold market, right? I mean, as they say, pretty much, you know, almost every ounce of gold that's been mined, uh, you know, remains above ground, um, you know, in some someplace where somebody can get their hands on it. it's either in a central bank vault or it's in a private vault or it's it's someone's wearing it as jewelry, right? Whereas a lot of silver gets commercially used um and gets used in such small amounts that it's not economically recoverable. You know, maybe one day we'll start mining our our landfills, you know, for for those. But right now, um you know, a lot of uh a lot of silver that gets produced every year kind of gets dissipated out there in the world, right? So the the uh at any time the above ground silver stores are pretty small. I don't get why some billionaire you know or two or three but it wouldn't take that many right or even some big company Apple just says you know what I'm just going to buy a crap ton of silver. And I mean in theory they could they could buy the whole market almost or at least buy the whole above ground market. Um, and of course you get worries of what happened to the Hunt brothers and stuff like that, but you wouldn't necessarily have to try to corner the market, but you could just buy such a you could just take delivery of such a big chunk of the market that the market would automatically have to repric. And I just don't understand why one of these guys doesn't do that, right? Hey, you know, worst case scenario, best case scenario, I own a bunch of silver and all of a sudden the price doubles because I just proved to the market that it's much more vulnerable than it realized. Worst case scenario, the price doesn't move very much, but I'm now holding, you know, a very material percent of an increasingly strategic asset. Why? Why doesn't one of these guys do this? Well, I I think you might if if I had the cell phone number of Elon Musk, I could call him up and ask you, but it's going to happen regardless whether it's through a singular event by one or two people. Uh, you know, I've always for decades discounted the industrial demand of silver because most of its value comes from its monetary value, uh, its monetary cache, um, and very little from an industrial standpoint. But the industrial usage at right now is projected to take up every bit of silver minded in the world today annually uh on an annual basis within the next few years. So that alone you know if you have monetary demand driving the price and then all of a sudden you have industrial demand taking all the supply off then that creates quite the situation from a price standpoint for silver. So it is going to be uh the solar panel panel manufacturers and every other industrial use user of silver that's going to take that silver off the market over the next few years. It's a ma you know it's a a matter of of an ordinary business. The the fact of the matter is at some point uh these metals not just silver become strategic and at any price what an industry or even a country needs to do is is worry about security of supply more than the price and I think that's going to happen not just to some degree not just for silver but for metals a lot of metals across the board. Yeah. And um you know talking with Andy again uh he talks about um his understanding of of how much metal is used in warheads um you know missiles missile warheads and apparently it's a non-trivial amount and um so that's a in his mind maybe an increasing uh you know source of demand for for silver. Um, and of course that silver gets kind of vaporized, you know, when the missile explos. Difficult to recycle that. But also to your point, you know, when you're talking about, okay, you know, it becomes a strategic asset. Um, fewer things rank higher on the strategic list than things that are considered essential to warfare. Um, and actually, uh, there was, just, now that I'm thinking about this, there was an executive order, I think, um, that was recently passed, uh, I might get a little bit of this wrong, but I silver was recently added to a list, and I believe it's a draft list, but it's still important that it's been added to it, of strategic minerals, right? Yeah. Uh, and so in just in a number of ways, we're seeing some of the signs that you were just discussing there. Yeah. it it's it's security of supply. We've seen that over history that it's important in certain areas and and now it's becoming a uh you know the US is moving to um mimic a lot of the industrial policy of China. You know we're we're trying to establish rare earths. The the US government has taken a stake in the largest rare earth miner in the US. uh you know computer chips uh we've seen them take stakes there the golden shares and the like. So it it is a you know as much as we might be free marketers and in my case uh you know libertarian-minded uh there is a place for national security today and in sourcing these metals. Uh not so much gold yet but but silver assuredly. Um so let me ask you this and I should know the answer to this question. Um but I don't. Um now silverber is I think the best conductive element that we know of right the most efficient conductor. I believe that's the case. Gold is more efficient. Silver is very efficient. Um it is used in solar panels because it's easier to manufacture and very thin wires on the front of a silver panel of of a solar panel. It is highly conductive and it has applications perhaps in the future for superc conductivity. Okay. Uh so maybe not the most effective conductors but definitely one of one of the most effective conductors that is out there. Um we are now in a national arms race if you will around um electricity production. Mhm. Um, and you've probably seen the same charts I've seen, um, Brian, that show how China is just leaving us in the dust right now. I mean, it's it's multiples higher than us in, um, electrical production capacity, and it's got all the momentum so far. And if we want to win the AI race, uh, that's going to be won on the back of plentiful cheap energy, especially, you know, particularly electricity. And we're going to have to basically kind of rebuild our whole grid. and uh place huge uh investments in in productive capacity. Um so one might s one might think okay well then you're going to need a lot of conductivity to make that happen and therefore you'll have a lot of demand for sober a lot of more incremental demand for sober. I don't know if that's the case I'm asking you this but the the big question I'm trying to ask is is silver actually an AI play? Uh I don't think so much as I would like to say it is uh it it in electric component electrical components to some degree solar panels and the like interestingly gold in some applications because you don't need much of it to get that conductivity works well there but I think the AI plate are two other metals copper and uranium uh quite much more so okay and that makes sense. Yeah, for electrical transmission, you really can't innovate around copper. You know, for batteries, you can innovate and say, we'll use a little bit less cobalt, we use a little bit less graphite, we'll use a little bit less lithium, depending on what the pricing environment is. Can't get around copper for electrical motors, for for electrical transmission and wiring. uh about I've seen numbers or estimates that 6% of the capex in an AI data center is purely the copper within the the data center. Wow. Um and uranium is going to provide um in many cases and through small modular reactors that are going come online in the next few years will pro provide much of the power for those AI data centers. Okay. All right. Uh, interesting question, but but sounds like the answer specifically to that question is is hey, if you want to play that from the metals, go with uranium and and copper much more. Okay. All right. So, um, your day job is, um, publishing gold newsletter, which is one of the longest standing, maybe even the longest standing, and certainly one of the most high, highly respected newsletters out there for people who are investing in the precious metals mining space. and you know there you you sift a lot of the wheat from the chaff uh in that space and given your long-standing career uh of of building relationships and working with folks in the mining industry and hosting your conference which we'll talk about in just a moment. Um you've really gotten to know, you know, the companies that are out there and the people that are running them, probably even more importantly. Um and again, you you you do the separation of the wheat and the chaff. We're really looking at an industry that has a lot of a lot of minds that probably won't come to much of anything, but but then a subset that will do quite well and a subset of them that will do phenomenally well. So again, this must be a fun year for you. Um because uh I'm sure a lot of the companies that have been on your list have done quite well this year. Like I said, I think the GDX alone, which is just the the beta of the industry, is up over 100% year to date. Um and and I know from a few of the ones that I own, I wish I owned a lot more of them, but you know, they've been up a lot higher than that. So, um talk a bit about um what you're seeing in the uh in in the mining industry right now. And um I'll put up a chart in just a moment. I'll I'll look for it while you're you start your answer. But it seems like the gold miners to gold ratio while starting to begin to close still has a long way to go before it gets back to its historic mean. Yeah. If you look at it over history and if you as much as they move the big miners by a lot of standard metrics like price to net asset value, price to earnings and etc. They're still at the low ends of their ranges even after these big moves because the moves in gold have been so extraordinary and the miners have just started to respond to that. If you if you zero in a little bit and look at the GDX to gold ratio, you'll see that on August 1st almost to the day that they they took off like they were shot out of a cannon. Um, and that's impressive when you consider what has uh what gold has done since August 1st. So, it's they have been outperforming gold itself by a tremendous measure and you can see that on the chart. That's that last, you know, rocket shot up. They've got a long way to go and again gold's got a long way to go in my opinion. So, the gains are going to be remarkable and that's the big miners. Um certainly as you move down the food chain into the intermediates and then into the junior exploration development companies that we focus on in gold newsletter, your uh your risk goes up but so do your potential rewards. And in a market where rising tide is lifting all boats, your risk is being mitigated because even your losers aren't losing. your underperformers are still, you know, at least staying put or or gaining a little bit maybe and you don't have the big drops that you may have in a bare market uh in that sector. So, yeah, it's a very exciting area. We've seen some tremendous moves in the gold newsletter portfolio of recommended stocks. uh but we're coming up with other ones that this inefficient market has overlooked um and that we think have you know are going to be the big winners of the next year. Okay. So I just wanted to leave this chart up while you were talking just to really point out the fact that that rocket launch that you were referring to broke the this ratio out of a what a multi-year I mean really a decade sorry a 20-year channel more or less. So there's a trend line here that's finally broken through. This is what technicians love to see because it it shows that there might be sort of a phase change here. And um presumably, you know, there may be some reversion to the historic mean here, which which means that the minor prices could go a lot higher, at least relative to gold, right? Um and uh Brian, you mentioned uh so so real quick, I think most people watching understand this, but not maybe everybody does. The miners are kind of what you call a leveraged play on gold, right? So, so goes the gold price. The miners tend to go up substantially more in the direction that the gold price heads in. Gold price goes up a bit, miners go up a lot more, gold price goes down, miners go down a lot more because they're they're a leveraged play. Um, and uh, you know, there there's a whole spectrum uh of quality, both size and quality in this space. So there's the the what you might call the major minors. Um they're in the indices like GDX. Uh these are the big companies. These are the um Franco Neadas, the Agneo Eagles. Um you know, big company, big big deposits. They're producing a lot of gold every year. Um all the way down to the little, you know, tiny exploration companies, right? And as you said, the the greater the risk um the greater the potential return. Yeah. So, um you know, in a bull market, the the smaller companies, the juniors, if they will, um much higher probability they're going to fizzle out, but if they don't, uh they've got they've got more potential to go up by a lot. And by a lot, we're talking maybe thousands of percents. Um it it can get kind of crazy. Um and uh there's a point in a in a bull market in the minor space where animal spirits take over. And to your point when you were saying like hey your losers stop losing, right? Um they're I what I have heard from people that have analyzed this market over past cycles is is you can kind of get to a point near the end where it's like the junkier the company the better the stock performs where people are just looking for um you know whatever looks the most speculative. And I'm not saying that's a smart thing to do. I'm just saying it it seems to have been an observable dynamic. But I want to ask you, Brian, it doesn't sound like we're anywhere near that stage yet. Correct. No, it it we are not in my opinion. We're just starting to see that kind of excitement in the juniors. That said, most of the uh or a good number of the juniors have doubled and tripled over the past few months. They're still at historically low levels. That shows you how bombed out the market was and how that market was really just ignoring the rise in gold over the last 18 months or so. And Brian, when you say they're at low levels, do you mean sort of like from a price to earnings and price to sales basis or what ratios are you looking at? No, they're because they have no sales and they have no revenue. Well, the Explorers don't. Yeah. Yeah. The Explorers in particular and even the development companies, they're burning matches. uh and and so the way I look at it is essentially if a company has a uh a pro if it has a resource if it's found something and has a resource and maybe has the uh that resource defined and perhaps some economics on it. uh 6 8 months ago, there were great companies that were selling for the equivalent of $10 an ounce in the ground market cap for uh over gold resource um or less. And now those companies are selling for 20 or $30 per ounce in the ground. those kinds of deposits in a normal bull market, not in a bulliant bull market like we kind of are are in on the metals standpoint, um have typically sold for $150 an ounce. So, Oh, wow. Okay. So, yeah. So, quite low still historically. Still quite low. and and in a rollicking bull market where M&A and companies are out bidding each other and uh the big majors are spending like drunken sailors, then they they might go for $400 or $500 an ounce, especially when the price of gold is 37 3,800 even soon perhaps $4,000 an ounce. So, um that's the kind of environment that can and I think frankly will develop over the months and years to come. So there are still tremendous values even though they they've moved so much from the exploration standpoint. You know I there were companies that were trading for $5 million market caps $10 million market caps and now are trading for 20 to $30 million market caps without resources with really good targets and some excitement behind them and money to drill. um they those are the kinds of plays that if they find something could be worth many times those values on both a market cap and and share price level. So the game's changed a bit but it's not yet to the historic levels that would uh would be thought of as as being really frothy. Okay. All right. Um well let me ask you this. Um we're starting to get tight on time, but I want to still talk about your conference. um where in terms of where we are in the current cycle um where do you see the most opportunity that excites you right now in the mining space? I I think there's a couple of of if you look at it thematically I look at companies on an individual basis but if you look at it thematically the companies I just mentioned that have big resources have not been appropriately rerated. Uh there were for many years companies that had really big resources that were out of the money, uneconomic and then gold prices and they were uh supposedly leveraged bets on a rise in gold where all of a sudden they would become economic and then all this value would flow to the bottom line. uh all of those companies, every optionality play is now economic and economic as of a thousand dollars ago in the gold price and they have not yet been rerated by the market. So I think that's one thematic area that I like. The other area I like is um uh silver mining stocks, silver juniors because silver naturally leverages gold and silver stocks, equities, silver mining and exploration and development stocks leverage silver. So you can stack leverage on top of leverage by getting some of the top companies in that space. Um, so that that those are two, you know, two areas I like and I'm frankly I'm always a sucker for a good exploration play. So I throw some of those in no matter what's happening if I if I see one. Uh because there's nothing like the excitement of having a a company that you have a decent position in all of a sudden make a big hit. Yeah. Um okay, great. uh with silver juniors um there are there are few pure silver mines out there right I mean there's few pure any mines out there because you mine for something and you find other elements along with it but um let me put this way there are a lot more gold mines out there than there are silver mines right just because of how silver sober is concentrated in the earth uh yeah and you know what do you call a silver mine 70% % of the world's silver production is comes as a byproduct primarily of zinc but also copper and gold um and other metals. You know, one of our top recommendations right now in gold newsletter um has a big manganese component. Uh and if they weren't able to solve the metallurgy, as they appear to have done, that could have destroyed the whole value of the deposit or more than double the value of the deposit. Well, they seem to have solved the metallurgy and it looks like it's doubled the value of the deposit, but most of the value is going to come from manganesees um which is going to pay for all of the silver production. So, you know, it there's tradeoffs there. if if it's a pure silver play, it's directly exposed to the silver price, but there's something to like about a company that has it can produce millions of ounces of silver a year uh essentially for free at no cost. Uh so there's a lot of ways to play it, but very few uh largecale pure silver mines without being tainted by some other uh metal byproduct. Yeah. Uh in theory, you could kind of create your own pure play silver mine. Um uh or a company could by by being a pure play silver streamer, right? Um so we haven't talked about the royalty and streaming models, but these are basically ways in which you as a company secure the output or part of the output of a mine. Um and uh and there you could just buy this part of the silver output of of any given mine, right? Yeah. and and that's a wellestablished business practice, you know, for a company that has a big zinc project and its silver uh revenues are not really that crucial to its overall product mix. Uh they can sell forward all of their silver production or a good portion of it to a silver streamer, get cash in hand perhaps to use as capital to expand the mine. Um, and and that's been done for many years and there's some been there's been some very successful companies that do that. Okay. And I'm just curious your general thoughts on streamers and royalty companies, gold and silver in this market. Um, I got to imagine I mean I know the ones I've owned have done quite well, but I got to imagine very attractive business model in this climate because you've got no cost exposure. you've already locked in your price per ounce that you're going to get and uh you're just cashing checks after that. Yeah, they're they are highly valued on a from a PTE basis for that reason. They don't have as much risk involved in a single mine. Um but they they are a bit more expensive, but they do tend to outperform the other sectors. The key there is that you know there's a lot of junior royalty plays out there. The the key things you want to look at are what differentiates them from the other plays and how soon are they what what's their revenue curve, their income curve. Are they there are royalties on projects that are now producing and how does that look in the next few years? Yep. Okay. All right. All right. Well, look, um, for folks that are excited about following the precious metal, the the mining space, um, one of the things I always take care to tell people about is it's a highly volatile space, uh, even in the best of markets. And so, you've got to a be very eyes wide open about that at the beginning. Um, and it's a very difficult space um, to be consistently right in. Um, it's one of these spaces in general where you want to build a portfolio knowing that a good chunk of the portfolio is not going to do much. You're probably going to have several that just pure go out of business, but you're hoping that your few big successes are, you know, barn burners and they're going to make up for everything and then some. Um, and so you I recommend to people be very c if you're if you've not invested in them before, one be very cautious. just know that this is money you should basically be money that if if you lose you can sleep still at night with. And then um you know if you're going to be buying individual stocks in this space uh you should be looking over the shoulder of an expert who has done this for a long time and has a good track record. And only after having done that for however long it takes until you feel like you've really got your sea legs under you then start making your own individual decisions. So, I really recommend that people look at some of the experts like yourself, Brian, who publish uh their analysis and uh so I want to give you a chance here to tell people about gold newsletter. Um but it's one of the, you know, one of the top options that I tell people, hey, if you want to get into the space, go sign up for gold newsletter, you know, look over Brian's shoulder for as long as it takes. And I know a lot of people just say, hey, you know what? I don't even want to do the work anymore. Brian is he's he's smarter than I am. I'm just going to keep looking over his shoulder and doing what he does. Yeah, I think you're right. It's a riskier area. It's a higher potential reward, but it is risky and it should be you need to be able to afford uh and be suited for that level of risk. That said, I would not blindly follow my advice. I there are a lot of great people out there and and you you can with a little bit of leg work uh dedication of a little bit of money to subscribe to some of the better newsletters get a good idea of what the better companies are out there that are widely recommended by the right people who you know who have merit-based coverage not necessarily promotional paid coverage. Uh there are a lot of great conferences out there you can go to where you can meet the companies face to face. So I always tell people this area is you know if you're going to speculate and it is a speculation still do your leg work get educated in the sector it is inefficient and you can use that as an advantage you can find where the market has left the real values um on the ground waiting to be picked up temporarily overlooked and you can get in early on on new opportunities from great management teams and It's a lot of fun and it's exciting and the rewards can be dramatic but yes absolutely it's a speculative area. Uh you can find out more about gold newsletter at goldnewsletter.com. We have a report that is a real valuable special report. It is extensive. It's comprehensive called investors guide to gold and silver. Tells you about all of my competitors out there that I value that I think in the newsletter business deliver real value. all of my competitors out there in the conference business that deliver real value. Um, so it is an objective report that tells you soup to nuts on how to invest in in metals and mining uh from all across the spectrum. All right. Well, look, Brian, when I edit this, I'll put up the link to goldnewsletter.com on the screen there so folks know exactly where to go. Folks, the link will be in the description below this video as well. Um, so Brian, just to put you on the spot before we talk about your conference, um, are you willing to share one or two names uh, in the mining space right now that that have your interest? And again, this is not personal financial advice for anybody watching. These are just two companies that Brian is intrigued by. Yeah. Um, let me think. It's going to be hard for me to find anything I don't own. So, I'll just throw that disclaimer out there. I think I own I know I own these companies. I think Banyan Gold is a great company. It's moved a good bit. Uh but it is that company uh that example basically that I said of a company that had $10 an ounce in the ground. It's probably closer to 30 an ounce in the ground, but the resources growing 7 million ounces now. They're pro likely over eight in the near future and and headed higher. uh big resource, no economics on it yet, but growing resource and still uh largely undervalued. A an exploration company that I like a lot and I put money in the market uh on recently is Prospector Metals. It is a drill hole play. It is the riskier of the riskiest sector. Um, but I like what they're turning up in a uh target in the Yukon and they should have draw results out uh within days or a couple of weeks. All right. Um Okay. Well, this uh this video is going to launch a couple days after we record it. Um Brian, so hopefully those results haven't been released yet in case anybody wants to look at the company and decide. Maybe I'll look really smart. So, well, you already do. Um okay. So, uh, as we wrap up here, I want to let folks know about your upcoming conference as well. Um, you have a a, you know, you've got a a an amazing faculty that speaks there, and we'll talk about them in just a second. You you marry that with, um, a vendor hall where uh, you've got a lot of these companies, the very companies that we're talking about that are there where you can actually go talk to the management. um you know, they share all their data with you and you can really get a sense from each of these individual companies what they're up to and and make a much more informed decision about them. Um so again, if you're interested in mining companies, it's a great conference to go to, but it's a great conference to go to even if you're whether or not you're interested in mining or not, it's one of the best macro conferences uh I've been to as well. So tell us what you got cooking on this year. Last year was your 50th anniversary, right? So this is your 51st. This is the 51st. And you know, we pulled out all the stops last year trying to come up with an unbeatable roster of experts last year. And frankly, I think I've I've beaten it this year. I Congrats. Only one or two people that I wanted to get that couldn't make it. Um, but like you uh Adam, you know, I I think I have a good eye for the real value. The the thought leaders out there who have arguments and perspectives worth listening to. And my business model like yours is very simple. You just level layer value on top of value on top of value and just overwhelm people with with what you have. And and I think we do that with this roster. We've got Matt Taibbe. I think he's the most important journalist of our generation. My friend Rick Rule, we have Danielle D. Martino Booth, Brent Johnson, George Gammon. I'm reading now, but I'm not remembering all these by heart. Peter St. Vaver, Robert Kiyosaki, Mary Katherine Ham, Peter Bookvar, Jim Biano, Jim Aurorio. We have Adam Taggard there uh on our future of money panel. Good luck to that, sir. I I think after the last year it's going to be a walk in the park. Uh I don't know. I've talked to some of the people involved in in they're barely promising good behavior this year. Speaking of we have Peter Schiff, Adrien Day, Mike Maloney, Alex Green, Dave Colum, Robert Prector, uh Mark Scousin, Larry Leard, Dan Oliver. It it goes on and on. I really urge people to go to our website and uh and look at our speaker roster. It is absolutely amazing and I can say that because I've picked all the speakers and I'm a big big fan of all of them. Well, as someone who's been many many years, it's a great event. Uh, yes, I am going again this year. Would love to see you there. If you're watching and decide you want to go, um, one of the things I really value about Brian's conference is, um, he, Brian, as you can probably tell, he's uh, the consmate gentleman. He's consumate host. He puts together just a great experience and I think in addition to the learning that you get there, you get an a tremendous amount of value from the the the magic that happens at an in-person event. Um so you know the the other like-minded investors like you who were there idea sharing with um I know people have you know made lifelong friendships having met at this conference uh but also the ability just to bump into a lot of those speakers in the hallway and you know get a chance to talk to them directly and you know selfishly I love going because I get to sit in the green room and I get to talk you know uninterrupted with all these guys which is wonderful. I'm like a kid in the candy store. Um but I know for attendees uh the the you you've created an experience where you've sort of maximized the contact between the speakers and the attendees. So, that's great. And yeah, you know, many folks know that my um conference is happening the month before yours, Brian. Um and I think they're both super complimentary to each other. And the one thing I would say is the the the real plus about Brian's conference um definitely come to mine obviously but um the real plus about Brian's conference um is you know a the roster of speakers there's a lot of differentiation versus what I have uh the the vendor hall there if you're really interested in in these companies you can really get you know like I said primary exposure to them but but it really is that in-person magic right mine's a virtual conference there there is a surprising amount of community we create throughout the day inside the live chat and some of the things that go on there. But, um, when you're at a multi-day event and you're, you know, going out for drinks, uh, with somebody who you met there who just thinks the same way that you do, really wants to beat around the same questions that you do. Um, for some, you know, folks like me who just nerd out on this stuff, that's an experience you kind of kind of can't get anywhere else. Yeah. There's I call it an intellectual energy, you know, and an ambiance. Uh, everybody's in what is probably the most exotic location in the United States. Um, and our continental United States and you're in the same place at the same time with a lot of the same concerns and everyone is an overachiever to some degree. They're successful investors. They know what they're talking about and they're very willing to share their ideas. Um, some of the best ideas I've ever gotten at my conference I've gotten from attendees who say, "Go look at this company. You'd like and and I've made incredible discoveries that way. Everybody's sharing. Everybody's talking and enjoying. We bring a lot of the New Orleans uh uh uh culture into the event itself, but you can always go out and enjoy that as well. So yeah, I you know, if I didn't uh produce the event, I would be going to it because it's an awful lot of fun. All right. All right. Well, look, my friend, um your team provided me with a link to give to folks uh is a little bit long. So, what I did is I put up a redirect for it. So, folks, to learn more about Brian's event and hopefully register for it, just go to thoughtfulmoney.com um N O for New Orleans. Um, and you'll be sent directly to the, uh, event page that has all the details and the ability to buy tickets there if you want to. Um, all right, Brian. Well, look, my friend, um, such a joy. Always great catching up with you. Um, folks that again want to look at the thoughtful money conference, which again is the month before Saturday, October 18th, uh, you can learn more about that just by going to thoughtfulmoney.com/conference. But again, make sure you go to thoughtfulmoney.com to check out Brian's conference first. Um, Brian, my friend, really look forward to seeing you in what, that's like a month and a half from now, something like that. It's barreling uh up against me. I mean, we're it's very soon, but yeah, something to be said from attending an event. Your speakers are incredible. Attending event from the comfort of your easy chair is an unbelievable advantage. Uh, so I I'm looking forward to your event as well. But if you're a serious investor, you you you're going to cheat yourself if you don't go to both. Yeah, you're a very kind man. All right. Well, look, um folks, do me a favor. Please let Brian know how much you enjoyed him coming on and sharing so much of his expertise today by hitting that like button, then clicking on the subscribe button below, as well as that little bell icon right next to it. If you haven't clicked the subscribe button before, please do do that because we are getting very, very close to our 150,000 subscriber milestone. And I think we're just a couple hundred away. Maybe even the time this video uh comes out, we'll be almost there. So, if you can help us get over that milestone, we'd very much appreciate it. Brian, my friend, great speaking with you and like I said, look forward to seeing you in New Orleans in early November. Thanks, Adam. Always great to talk to you. All right, everybody else, thanks so much for watching.
Gold May Rally Up To $6,000-8,000/oz | Brien Lundin
Summary
Transcript
The way I look at it is if you if you look at the timing is always difficult but if you look at the three previous gold bull markets the first one in the early 70s from trough to peak gold went up 5.6 times. The second one in the late 70s it went up from trough to peak 8.2 two times and the the early 2000s from say 2000 to 2011 it went up 7.9 times from trough to peak. If you call the bottom of this market about $1,50 in 2015 then we should end up 6 $8,000 at the end of this cycle. [Music] Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm its founder and your host, Adam Tagert. Gold is up 40% this year. Silver is up almost 50% and the mining stocks as a sector are up over 100%. So, has the big money in the precious metals now been made, or is the party just getting started? for answers to all things gold, silver, and the companies that mine them. We're fortunate to speak with Brian London, CEO of Jefferson Financial, publisher of Gold Newsletter.com, and producer of the excellent New Orleans Investment Conference. Brian, thanks so much for joining us today. Always a pleasure, Adam. Always a pleasure, especially in times like these for metals and miners. Well, you know, Brian, um, you know, you and I have known each other for a long time. I think well over a decade now. We've done a lot of interviews together. I got to imagine this has got to be one of the more fun times in your career to do an interview. Yeah, it it is. You know, gold is probably the world's oldest asset store of value, but it's only been an investable asset since 1971. Uh, and there have been three bull markets around before this one. And uh so I've been alive for every bull market in this 6,000y old asset. And but long way of saying yeah I've paid some dues. I've enjoyed some bull markets f before this one but this one is really special. It's a long time in coming and I think it's going to duplicate those previous three in a lot of ways. Okay. um you know we we in other assets you know we we've had um bubbles before right I mean throughout history but even in recent history we had the.com bubble we had the housing bubble now we have what many people refer to as the everything bubble right is there anything that I know we're early on in this bull market for the precious metals but is there anything that gives you um a sense that this time uh of the magnitude of this bull market versus the previous bull markets in gold. Yeah, it's it's a little scary frankly uh in recent weeks and you know we've had a few surges over this 18month bull market similarly to this but even over the last few weeks we've had a tremendous surge um and it's been violent and it's been abrupt and it's volatile volatile in one direction primarily up and uh and so we haven't seen anything like this I think than maybe since maybe January of 1980 when gold hit its last nominal high back then of $850 um when it went up, you know, tremendously over just a few weeks. But that's happened a couple of times in this market. And by that virtue alone, it's distinguished, I think, from any previous bull market that we've seen. But there are other aspects that are different like the fact that this one's been driven by central bank spying largely with the absence of western investors until recent months. Uh and those western investors are if they want to get involved and as they're trying to get involved in this sector, they see how far gold has come and they look at how they're going to enter the sector. And interestingly because central banks have driven it because central banks don't buy silver and they don't buy mining stocks the traditional levers for gold they uh they find that these sectors have lagged in the entering the the play via silver and gold. Um and we're starting to see that reaction as well. Um all right so couple of things. Um, one uh I saw a chart this morning uh that really I guess I had sort of known it but it really hammered home the point. Um it was a chart of the inflationadjusted price of gold and it was showing that essentially we have just now hit the um inflationadjusted price of gold that gold had hit in 1980. Right? Which gives you a sense of how crazy that mania was because essentially it took you it's taken you about 45 years if you were if you had top ticked the gold market back then. It's taken you 45 years to get to break even on an inflationadjusted basis with the crazy price you bought back then. which given how much inflation there's been over time and given all the other elements that have gone on kind of makes me think that you know the the nominal high of this bull market could potentially be a lot higher from here. Yeah, it it could be. So what gold is telling us by setting that record and meeting that record uh is that things are essentially as crazy as unsure uncertain today as they were in the 1970s. If you'll remember the 1970s, that was a hell of a decade. Good music, uncomfortable fashion, but a lot of other things going on in the world, primarily raging, rip roaring inflation and uncertainty as to what was going to happen for in the future for the entire financial system and the future of the dollar. Uh so if you look at it from that standpoint, we have some concerns about the dollar. We have some concerns about uh the financial infrastructure going forward, but we're nowhere near the worries that we had in the 1970s. Um and and so yeah, I think I think gold's saying that something is ahead and it's going to be disruptive. Uh but we're not quite there yet. So yeah, I think from that standpoint, we've got a good bit more to go on in this gold bull market. Okay. And of course, yeah, the central banks are buying. Um, we don't know what they're going to do in the future, but they they seem to uh their buying momentum seems unabated here. It doesn't seem to be waning at any point yet. Um, we know that, and we've talked about this for several years, Brian, that the Asian investor, the eastern investor, has been buying gold pretty handily over much of the past decade and seems to have been very happy to do so at the price at which the West is willing to sell it bullion. Um it seems like just recently uh the western investor has started to take note of the gold market and to buy in which we always said would would likely happen during the next gold bull market. Um so a couple questions for you around this one is Wall Street has not been a fan of gold in general in in history. Um, but what Wall Street's more likes more than it it it than any bias is it likes to make money. It likes to see where there's momentum and it likes to chase it, right? So, um, are we getting to the point where, you know, capital in the western markets is going to say, hey, you know what, I can't ignore this gold space anymore. I want to get part of that action and starts to move into the precious metal space. Um, and if so, um, what's your expectation on the the future price impact of that? Because the gold market, especially in the mining sector, real small relative to the amount of capital that's slloshing around the western financial markets. Yeah, it is tiny. It is tiny. And you're seeing the the major uh uh Wall Street houses, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America and the like uh coming out with constantly revised targets on gold, chasing the price up. And sometimes their their revised targets get overtaken by the gold price before the ink is dry on their last projections. Um and and frankly a lot of their validations, a lot of their justifications rather for higher gold prices are a bit convoluted and I think don't strike to the heart of the story. Uh so yeah I I the issue right now is that well every bull market in gold is monetarily based. is based on people uh looking forward and feeling that there will be a more rapid depreciation of the purchasing power of their currencies. That's what drives gold over the long term. And that's what gold is telling us now that that's going to happen. Now, as far as the relative sizes, the the if we just get a fraction, small fraction of the money that's out there in tech stocks and AI and in crypto and Bitcoin and whatever the the uh the hot word or the theme or the um theme of the of the day is on Wall Street, if we get just a few ladles full of that liquidity thrown into the mining sector, for example, even metals and mining, then the reaction would be explosive because the the market is so tiny. It's just a small fraction of the the giant oceans of liquidity that are sloshing around the world looking for a home. And that's starting to happen right now. We're starting to see people who are involved uh in those other sectors making a move into into gold. We see Tether Gold buying, you know, tons and tons of gold each month and putting hundred million dollars into a royalty joint venture. So, I think the the camel's nose is firmly under the tent now and it's just going to be more and more money coming into the sector. Okay. Um, if you had to make your best guess, uh, in terms of the Western financial system getting involved in the gold trade, what inning would you put us in here? Uh, I would tend toward earlier in the in the game. I'm thinking third inning, thereabouts. You know, it's hard to say anything earlier considering how far gold has come, but uh and it does feel a bit froley right now. You know, hardly anything goes up in a straight line, although this bull market in gold has been as close as you can get. I think uh the way I look at it is if you if you look at the timing is always difficult but if you look at the three previous gold bull markets the first one in the early7s from trough to peak gold went up 5.6 times the second one in the late7s it went up from trough to peak 8.2 two times and the the early 2000s from say 2000 to 2011 it went up 7.9 times from trough to peak. If you call the bottom of this market about $1,50 in 2015 then we should end up 6 $8,000 at the end of this cycle. Now that's the the thing. We don't know when that cycle is going to end. to hope it takes a a good healthy amount of time to get there so we can make a lot of money in the mining stocks along the way. But uh I think that's the endgame. I think that's where we're going with an outside chance of something much higher if they try to reattach gold to uh to the dollar andor other currencies in some way. So early innings relatively early innings I think. Okay. relatively early innings and and uh you know there's a lot of things that we have seen in past gold bubbles that we're not seeing yet right here in the west. Um, I remember one of the stories that stuck in my mind the most was talking to a a longtime gold uh dealer and uh he talked about how in the 80s he would have to um there was so much demand for product that he would run out and when he would would come into work in the morning there was a line around the block of the coin store u which of course if you go to a coin shop today odds are probably still pretty good you'll be the only person in it. Um, so we're not seeing those lines yet, but he would have to divide the line. He would have he would have to segregate out the sellers and put them first in line so that he could buy their precious metals and then have inventory to sell to the other people in line, right? So, we're nowhere near those days. And and quite frankly, uh the last time, you know, gold did did well, you know, 15 years ago, um I mean, you couldn't turn on a television or a radio and not hear the cash for gold ads, and I haven't I mean, I don't watch broadcast media the way I used to, but I'm not seeing that yet. Um similar to you, I mean, do you do you take those as gauges of where we are kind of in the the mania side of things? Yeah, again that's that's why this one is unique. It's it's not just that we haven't reached reached that mania portion of the bull market, but also that those investors typically the western investors, the western retail investors that have usually led a bull market are almost completely uninvolved at this point. If you talk to dealers in the trenches, you know, on the ground, they'll tell you that most of their transactions now are actually people selling their gold bullion rather than buying it in the US because the prices have gone up. And also because the the gold bugs have are kind of aging out, you know, they became uh uh kromagins long ago and bought their gold and now they they're trying to sell that gold to pass on the prices are high so they have something a little more liquid for their their kids, I guess. But uh interesting. I'm curious. Are their kids maybe more likely to want to be in crypto than gold? And so there's there's not a buying wave that you would expect because they're choosing a different medium. Uh perhaps I think it probably runs the spectrum. They're probably invested in crypto more. Some of them may be living in the basement unemployed but right not able to purchase more and more these days. But but yeah, they they look at, you know, they bought gold long ago and they look at this as their payoff for for their foresight. uh and you mentioned it earlier that the the east Asia is buying gold at these prices. Their outlook has always been of savers constantly saving in gold. That's the way they they keep their uh their savings or at least a part of it. But they've traditionally been buyers on declines, price declines. whenever there's a decline they they look at it as a bargain going on sale and they tend have always tended to support the market and not drive it. Uh and now they are part of the factor that's driving the market along with central banks and frankly along with other forces that I don't think we've got a good handle on. I think there's something out there, something big out there. Some really big buyers uh that are taking physical off the market that we have not got a clear idea of who they are. So that was where I wanted to go with my next question. So, um, I've been talking frequently with Andy Sheckchman, um, who I believe you're familiar with, Brian, like, and we we've been talking about exactly this, and in Andy's mind, uh, looking at the volumes that he's seeing, at least that are coming and and taking delivery from comics. Um, they're at such a volume that he's basically ruling out almost any other player besides sovereign ones. Um, I mean, I guess you could have a a massive corporate balance sheet, you know, an Apple or Google or something like that that that wants to do this as well. Um, but his suspicion is that it's it's sovereign players. And of course, you know, especially with the new administration, there's been uh in addition to their their big lean into crypto, there's a greater appreciation of gold. Secretary Bessant is famous for having been a pretty big investor in gold. There was talk initially when the administration came into power of better ways to monetize America's um you know the assets that are on its balance sheet and that immediately let led people to think about gold. Um do you think what do you think are the the odds that maybe America is actually playing a role here of of trying to stealthily uh amass more gold? I think it's a u I don't wouldn't say a high probability but it's it would not surprise me and and I think it may even be likely. Uh I actually posted on X uh yesterday or the day before a chart of the gold price. I got went on uh Grock and found the the number of mentions on on X of a audit of Fort Knox and it uh it peaked in February of this year but it got up steam in January peaked in February and applauded that against the gold price and you'll see that the gold price was kind of bouncing along talk of Fort Knox audit then the talk of Fort Knox went radio silent silent, at least from the administration, and the coal price took off. Seems awfully coincidental to me. And it and it and it would seem to indicate that somebody went up to Trump and even posted a a a Groen uh created image meme uh as a reply to that that post that they told somebody they told uh Trump and the administration stop talking about a Fort Knox audit until we can actually get the gold back in there. Until we can actually pass it. Yeah. and and you know the audit if and if it ever happens I'm pretty confident they're not going to go down to the granular level of looking at the serial numbers because nobody wants to know what that is and and and you know there's a very good chance that the serial numbers on the bars won't match. We actually published seinal research by a guy named Frank Veneroso in the late 90s on this topic uh where he I think proved that central banks were loaning out gold to bullion banks hand over fisk getting IUS in return and getting interest in return. But the bullion banks immediately sold that gold, bought US treasuries, and then used the treasuries as collateral for leverage bets and the tech boom and the like. Um, and so in a lot of these central bank reserves, their vaults instead of gold, they have IUS. We've never seen anything really to indicate that those IUs were paid off with gold and may in fact have been settled years ago in cash. And where's the gold? So everything we've seen has indicated that there's something squirrely going on with central bank gold reserves. Germany demands a repatriation of of half of its gold reserves that are in the US and the US says we can get it to you in seven years. Um that seems to be a pretty obvious indication that the gold's not there. When we do return the gold ahead of that schedule, it is immediately melted and recast. uh nobody looks at the serial numbers to see if it's the original gold. Uh you know, more and more indicators are out there showing that there's problems uh getting gold moved and getting gold where it should have been. And I think that, you know, it's not just the official purchases. It's not just Poland. It's not just uh Estonia. It's not just China building their gold reserves through official purchases, but I think a lot of it is replenishment and putting gold where it should have been all along. Uh the violence of the moves that we've seen just seem to indicate that. Okay. Um let me ask you a couple more questions about this and then we'll we'll get to your the bullseye of your area of expertise, which is the mining companies. Um but um uh let's see here. Um so if if indeed gold is becoming more strategically important on a sovereign level here in the US for whatever reason because we want to prove that we've got the gold in our vaults when we eventually do an audit. Um, you know, maybe we want to uh take up Julie Shelton, Judy Shelton on her idea of doing a a bond back 50-year US Treasury, sorry, gold back uh 50 US Treasury bond. Um, you know, other other countries seem to be caring more about gold, too. They're they're they're buying uh at this point actually they're buying more gold than they are buying treasuries. Um, and I I want to be real clear about this, too. It's it's not that they're not buying treasuries. Um there's a narrative out there that that foreign central banks, you know, just don't want treasuries. That's not true. At least in in aggregate, uh demand is still pretty steady. U but they have certainly ramped up their their buying of gold. And I think from a percent of balance sheet standpoint, I think gold has just surpassed US treasuries um in kind of the world central bank central banks in aggregate. Um but if I if if and as gold becomes more important um on a sovereign level, do you foresee a time where we start putting some controls on our shipment of bullion from west to east? Uh that's a good question. You know, the original uh controls were were placed on August 15th of 1971 when Nixon closed the gold window because uh uh the Bank of England and the damn French were turning in dollars and taking gold out of Fort Knox at a accelerating clip. And Nixon, you know, did what real frankly he had to do. He had to stop those flows. uh and so he severed that that bond. That was the original one. Um I don't know that we would uh do that in an official standpoint in the US, but I do think that at some point there will have to be some kind of a reattachment of gold to the dollar and frankly other fiat currencies because we're in this cycle of crisis, bubble bursting, rescue with lots of liquidity um over and over repeating cycle. Kind of like a Groundhog Day where the the the rescue creates the bubble which creates a crisis which they then come in and and do more than they did before because the the addict has grown tolerant to the drug and they have to just blow out everything they did before with even more liquidity. Um I think that these repeated cycles each time that happens it degrades the credibility of the currency and the only way you can really reattach that immediately uh rebuild that credibility is by putting some kind of a governor on on the spending and and currency creation which would mean attaching it to gold somehow. So whether that happens in the next crisis as some people say or the next or the next or down the road, I think the only thing we can do now is determine what the trend is and realize that you know we're going to want to own gold as this trend accelerates. Okay. Um so let me ask you this. Uh so so you you foresee a time might not be in the near term probably not but you foresee a time where the major world currencies um are tied to some sort of standard like you know could easily be gold. Some might argue it's going to be crypto or bitcoin or something like that. But but you you see us as as as getting off the pure fiat standard again. Uh, yes. I I think so. I think that this loss of credibility will will demand some type of an action like that at some point, but we don't really have to get to that point either. I mean, there there are interim steps that might even suffice. If gold and perhaps silver are legalized, once again, recognized as money, uh, you don't have to have a set exchange rate with the dollar. you can have a floating exchange rate. That the key is that no matter what the the powers that be due to the currency, no matter how they degrade uh the purchasing power of that currency and pull those levers, and you'll never be able to convince them not to be able to to have that power, then people can still protect themselves without the friction of taxes and the like by owning gold and silver. Uh, and that's really all you need. You know, give them the power to do whatever they want with the the currency that becomes increasingly worthless, but as long as you can protect yourself uh and hold wealth in a form that won't depreciate, you'll be okay. Okay. Now, some would argue, hey, well, Brian, I can own gold and silver today, so what's why can't we just do that today? And I guess your answer would be because it's it's taxed uh its gains are taxed. Yeah. And it's not taxed as capital gains. It's taxed at a weird collectible collectible rate. Yeah. 28% plus whatever the Obamacare sir charge is on that. So you know 30% thereabouts uh tax rate um on that gold that is you know declared and any large amount would be. So, um, yeah, that's the friction involved. That's what keeps Now, over the long term, that's fine. You're still going to keep ahead of the game, but that's the end goal as far as I'm concerned is removing that that friction of the tax rate. Okay. And I'm sure you're aware of the many movements underway in a lot of individual US states to to recognize the precious metals as currency. And there's varying Yeah. you know, degrees in in different states, but it it seems to be a movement that's moving towards your your goal there. Yeah, it is. And I've talked with a number of those groups and actually trying to organize a new group to address it on a federal level. I think there's a couple ways to do it on a federal level, either through the courts or or legislation. uh the idea of those doing it on a stateby-state level is uh you know uh you kill it by a thousand cuts if if it's accepted in the majority of states as a fat complement has to recognize it as well. Um so I think it helps the story on a federal level but I'd like to try and attack it on a federal level as well. Okay. All right. Well, look, um I'm sure a lot of folks watching that are, you know, cross their fingers and say, you know, let's hope we get there sooner rather than later. Um the reason I was asking you this is maybe this is a moot question now, but um I I if I if the fiat curren the current fiat currency itself or the current sovereign currencies themselves were to switch over to a new backed regime and we can let's assume it's gold for the time being. It could be anything, but let's just assume it's gold. The question I have is is would the US lead the way? And I I can make a pretty good argument that they wouldn't because no no central planner, no politician wants to be constrained by the constraint of of of backing of the currency. That's why we all want the currencies to be backed, right? they they place a constraint on rampant money creation. Um, and because the US is the biggest dog on the world stage and the world's currency and all that stuff, it gives us an exorbitant privilege. And so I don't think they would want to lose that. um unless and until somebody else whose material switches to a back currency that the world starts to prefer and as the you know Gresham's law as the world starts turning to the better currency um then uh you know then maybe at some point that might force the hand of a big player like the US. But do do you have a does that make sense or do you have a different opinion? Yeah, you know it's it's interesting. It's there's a lot of hypotheticals there. um the the key component of the dollar that the there are two things that keep the dollar at the uh world reserve currency really a lot of things but I think that the primary things are rule of law in the US you know there's a lot to criticize about the US rule of law but it's still the best in the world you know you don't know what side of bed she or Putin's going to wake up on tomorrow and you don't want your your funds international organizations governments uh have their money subject to the whims of one person. Uh and so rule of law is a big part of it. The other part is really the installed base, the network effect, right? Simple amount of debt that's already denominated in the dollar. That's going to be a huge burden to get over. Aircraft carriers have something to say about it, but I don't think as much as people really think. Now, if the if another major currency switched to gold, well, that solves the rule of law right there because even though you had rule of law in the US, you also have a very rapid creation of dollars. And if you put a restriction, a governor on that instinct to create new currency by attaching it to gold uh then it's kind of Gresham's law in reverse. the the better currency that's demanded more in right uh in commerce and I think that would create a a big um uh you know competitive competitor to the dollar. The issue again is will governments will uh people our monetary uh masters give up that power and that's the part that I I'm not sure that they will uh we would have to get into a point where currencies have lost all credibility and and that you have to reattach it to the dollar or to gold to do that. Again, there's an interim step. If they just say there's no taxation on gold and silver, then I think the situation gets solved. They can still pull their levers. Everybody is happy and everyone can protect themselves because it's human nature. They're going to do it anyway. Right. Right. Okay. Um, last question on this, then we'll get to the miners. Um, so moving on from gold to silver for a moment. Um, and silver is finally starting to to catch up to gold. Um, uh, this the above ground silver market is much smaller than the above ground gold market, right? I mean, as they say, pretty much, you know, almost every ounce of gold that's been mined, uh, you know, remains above ground, um, you know, in some someplace where somebody can get their hands on it. it's either in a central bank vault or it's in a private vault or it's it's someone's wearing it as jewelry, right? Whereas a lot of silver gets commercially used um and gets used in such small amounts that it's not economically recoverable. You know, maybe one day we'll start mining our our landfills, you know, for for those. But right now, um you know, a lot of uh a lot of silver that gets produced every year kind of gets dissipated out there in the world, right? So the the uh at any time the above ground silver stores are pretty small. I don't get why some billionaire you know or two or three but it wouldn't take that many right or even some big company Apple just says you know what I'm just going to buy a crap ton of silver. And I mean in theory they could they could buy the whole market almost or at least buy the whole above ground market. Um, and of course you get worries of what happened to the Hunt brothers and stuff like that, but you wouldn't necessarily have to try to corner the market, but you could just buy such a you could just take delivery of such a big chunk of the market that the market would automatically have to repric. And I just don't understand why one of these guys doesn't do that, right? Hey, you know, worst case scenario, best case scenario, I own a bunch of silver and all of a sudden the price doubles because I just proved to the market that it's much more vulnerable than it realized. Worst case scenario, the price doesn't move very much, but I'm now holding, you know, a very material percent of an increasingly strategic asset. Why? Why doesn't one of these guys do this? Well, I I think you might if if I had the cell phone number of Elon Musk, I could call him up and ask you, but it's going to happen regardless whether it's through a singular event by one or two people. Uh, you know, I've always for decades discounted the industrial demand of silver because most of its value comes from its monetary value, uh, its monetary cache, um, and very little from an industrial standpoint. But the industrial usage at right now is projected to take up every bit of silver minded in the world today annually uh on an annual basis within the next few years. So that alone you know if you have monetary demand driving the price and then all of a sudden you have industrial demand taking all the supply off then that creates quite the situation from a price standpoint for silver. So it is going to be uh the solar panel panel manufacturers and every other industrial use user of silver that's going to take that silver off the market over the next few years. It's a ma you know it's a a matter of of an ordinary business. The the fact of the matter is at some point uh these metals not just silver become strategic and at any price what an industry or even a country needs to do is is worry about security of supply more than the price and I think that's going to happen not just to some degree not just for silver but for metals a lot of metals across the board. Yeah. And um you know talking with Andy again uh he talks about um his understanding of of how much metal is used in warheads um you know missiles missile warheads and apparently it's a non-trivial amount and um so that's a in his mind maybe an increasing uh you know source of demand for for silver. Um, and of course that silver gets kind of vaporized, you know, when the missile explos. Difficult to recycle that. But also to your point, you know, when you're talking about, okay, you know, it becomes a strategic asset. Um, fewer things rank higher on the strategic list than things that are considered essential to warfare. Um, and actually, uh, there was, just, now that I'm thinking about this, there was an executive order, I think, um, that was recently passed, uh, I might get a little bit of this wrong, but I silver was recently added to a list, and I believe it's a draft list, but it's still important that it's been added to it, of strategic minerals, right? Yeah. Uh, and so in just in a number of ways, we're seeing some of the signs that you were just discussing there. Yeah. it it's it's security of supply. We've seen that over history that it's important in certain areas and and now it's becoming a uh you know the US is moving to um mimic a lot of the industrial policy of China. You know we're we're trying to establish rare earths. The the US government has taken a stake in the largest rare earth miner in the US. uh you know computer chips uh we've seen them take stakes there the golden shares and the like. So it it is a you know as much as we might be free marketers and in my case uh you know libertarian-minded uh there is a place for national security today and in sourcing these metals. Uh not so much gold yet but but silver assuredly. Um so let me ask you this and I should know the answer to this question. Um but I don't. Um now silverber is I think the best conductive element that we know of right the most efficient conductor. I believe that's the case. Gold is more efficient. Silver is very efficient. Um it is used in solar panels because it's easier to manufacture and very thin wires on the front of a silver panel of of a solar panel. It is highly conductive and it has applications perhaps in the future for superc conductivity. Okay. Uh so maybe not the most effective conductors but definitely one of one of the most effective conductors that is out there. Um we are now in a national arms race if you will around um electricity production. Mhm. Um, and you've probably seen the same charts I've seen, um, Brian, that show how China is just leaving us in the dust right now. I mean, it's it's multiples higher than us in, um, electrical production capacity, and it's got all the momentum so far. And if we want to win the AI race, uh, that's going to be won on the back of plentiful cheap energy, especially, you know, particularly electricity. And we're going to have to basically kind of rebuild our whole grid. and uh place huge uh investments in in productive capacity. Um so one might s one might think okay well then you're going to need a lot of conductivity to make that happen and therefore you'll have a lot of demand for sober a lot of more incremental demand for sober. I don't know if that's the case I'm asking you this but the the big question I'm trying to ask is is silver actually an AI play? Uh I don't think so much as I would like to say it is uh it it in electric component electrical components to some degree solar panels and the like interestingly gold in some applications because you don't need much of it to get that conductivity works well there but I think the AI plate are two other metals copper and uranium uh quite much more so okay and that makes sense. Yeah, for electrical transmission, you really can't innovate around copper. You know, for batteries, you can innovate and say, we'll use a little bit less cobalt, we use a little bit less graphite, we'll use a little bit less lithium, depending on what the pricing environment is. Can't get around copper for electrical motors, for for electrical transmission and wiring. uh about I've seen numbers or estimates that 6% of the capex in an AI data center is purely the copper within the the data center. Wow. Um and uranium is going to provide um in many cases and through small modular reactors that are going come online in the next few years will pro provide much of the power for those AI data centers. Okay. All right. Uh, interesting question, but but sounds like the answer specifically to that question is is hey, if you want to play that from the metals, go with uranium and and copper much more. Okay. All right. So, um, your day job is, um, publishing gold newsletter, which is one of the longest standing, maybe even the longest standing, and certainly one of the most high, highly respected newsletters out there for people who are investing in the precious metals mining space. and you know there you you sift a lot of the wheat from the chaff uh in that space and given your long-standing career uh of of building relationships and working with folks in the mining industry and hosting your conference which we'll talk about in just a moment. Um you've really gotten to know, you know, the companies that are out there and the people that are running them, probably even more importantly. Um and again, you you you do the separation of the wheat and the chaff. We're really looking at an industry that has a lot of a lot of minds that probably won't come to much of anything, but but then a subset that will do quite well and a subset of them that will do phenomenally well. So again, this must be a fun year for you. Um because uh I'm sure a lot of the companies that have been on your list have done quite well this year. Like I said, I think the GDX alone, which is just the the beta of the industry, is up over 100% year to date. Um and and I know from a few of the ones that I own, I wish I owned a lot more of them, but you know, they've been up a lot higher than that. So, um talk a bit about um what you're seeing in the uh in in the mining industry right now. And um I'll put up a chart in just a moment. I'll I'll look for it while you're you start your answer. But it seems like the gold miners to gold ratio while starting to begin to close still has a long way to go before it gets back to its historic mean. Yeah. If you look at it over history and if you as much as they move the big miners by a lot of standard metrics like price to net asset value, price to earnings and etc. They're still at the low ends of their ranges even after these big moves because the moves in gold have been so extraordinary and the miners have just started to respond to that. If you if you zero in a little bit and look at the GDX to gold ratio, you'll see that on August 1st almost to the day that they they took off like they were shot out of a cannon. Um, and that's impressive when you consider what has uh what gold has done since August 1st. So, it's they have been outperforming gold itself by a tremendous measure and you can see that on the chart. That's that last, you know, rocket shot up. They've got a long way to go and again gold's got a long way to go in my opinion. So, the gains are going to be remarkable and that's the big miners. Um certainly as you move down the food chain into the intermediates and then into the junior exploration development companies that we focus on in gold newsletter, your uh your risk goes up but so do your potential rewards. And in a market where rising tide is lifting all boats, your risk is being mitigated because even your losers aren't losing. your underperformers are still, you know, at least staying put or or gaining a little bit maybe and you don't have the big drops that you may have in a bare market uh in that sector. So, yeah, it's a very exciting area. We've seen some tremendous moves in the gold newsletter portfolio of recommended stocks. uh but we're coming up with other ones that this inefficient market has overlooked um and that we think have you know are going to be the big winners of the next year. Okay. So I just wanted to leave this chart up while you were talking just to really point out the fact that that rocket launch that you were referring to broke the this ratio out of a what a multi-year I mean really a decade sorry a 20-year channel more or less. So there's a trend line here that's finally broken through. This is what technicians love to see because it it shows that there might be sort of a phase change here. And um presumably, you know, there may be some reversion to the historic mean here, which which means that the minor prices could go a lot higher, at least relative to gold, right? Um and uh Brian, you mentioned uh so so real quick, I think most people watching understand this, but not maybe everybody does. The miners are kind of what you call a leveraged play on gold, right? So, so goes the gold price. The miners tend to go up substantially more in the direction that the gold price heads in. Gold price goes up a bit, miners go up a lot more, gold price goes down, miners go down a lot more because they're they're a leveraged play. Um, and uh, you know, there there's a whole spectrum uh of quality, both size and quality in this space. So there's the the what you might call the major minors. Um they're in the indices like GDX. Uh these are the big companies. These are the um Franco Neadas, the Agneo Eagles. Um you know, big company, big big deposits. They're producing a lot of gold every year. Um all the way down to the little, you know, tiny exploration companies, right? And as you said, the the greater the risk um the greater the potential return. Yeah. So, um you know, in a bull market, the the smaller companies, the juniors, if they will, um much higher probability they're going to fizzle out, but if they don't, uh they've got they've got more potential to go up by a lot. And by a lot, we're talking maybe thousands of percents. Um it it can get kind of crazy. Um and uh there's a point in a in a bull market in the minor space where animal spirits take over. And to your point when you were saying like hey your losers stop losing, right? Um they're I what I have heard from people that have analyzed this market over past cycles is is you can kind of get to a point near the end where it's like the junkier the company the better the stock performs where people are just looking for um you know whatever looks the most speculative. And I'm not saying that's a smart thing to do. I'm just saying it it seems to have been an observable dynamic. But I want to ask you, Brian, it doesn't sound like we're anywhere near that stage yet. Correct. No, it it we are not in my opinion. We're just starting to see that kind of excitement in the juniors. That said, most of the uh or a good number of the juniors have doubled and tripled over the past few months. They're still at historically low levels. That shows you how bombed out the market was and how that market was really just ignoring the rise in gold over the last 18 months or so. And Brian, when you say they're at low levels, do you mean sort of like from a price to earnings and price to sales basis or what ratios are you looking at? No, they're because they have no sales and they have no revenue. Well, the Explorers don't. Yeah. Yeah. The Explorers in particular and even the development companies, they're burning matches. uh and and so the way I look at it is essentially if a company has a uh a pro if it has a resource if it's found something and has a resource and maybe has the uh that resource defined and perhaps some economics on it. uh 6 8 months ago, there were great companies that were selling for the equivalent of $10 an ounce in the ground market cap for uh over gold resource um or less. And now those companies are selling for 20 or $30 per ounce in the ground. those kinds of deposits in a normal bull market, not in a bulliant bull market like we kind of are are in on the metals standpoint, um have typically sold for $150 an ounce. So, Oh, wow. Okay. So, yeah. So, quite low still historically. Still quite low. and and in a rollicking bull market where M&A and companies are out bidding each other and uh the big majors are spending like drunken sailors, then they they might go for $400 or $500 an ounce, especially when the price of gold is 37 3,800 even soon perhaps $4,000 an ounce. So, um that's the kind of environment that can and I think frankly will develop over the months and years to come. So there are still tremendous values even though they they've moved so much from the exploration standpoint. You know I there were companies that were trading for $5 million market caps $10 million market caps and now are trading for 20 to $30 million market caps without resources with really good targets and some excitement behind them and money to drill. um they those are the kinds of plays that if they find something could be worth many times those values on both a market cap and and share price level. So the game's changed a bit but it's not yet to the historic levels that would uh would be thought of as as being really frothy. Okay. All right. Um well let me ask you this. Um we're starting to get tight on time, but I want to still talk about your conference. um where in terms of where we are in the current cycle um where do you see the most opportunity that excites you right now in the mining space? I I think there's a couple of of if you look at it thematically I look at companies on an individual basis but if you look at it thematically the companies I just mentioned that have big resources have not been appropriately rerated. Uh there were for many years companies that had really big resources that were out of the money, uneconomic and then gold prices and they were uh supposedly leveraged bets on a rise in gold where all of a sudden they would become economic and then all this value would flow to the bottom line. uh all of those companies, every optionality play is now economic and economic as of a thousand dollars ago in the gold price and they have not yet been rerated by the market. So I think that's one thematic area that I like. The other area I like is um uh silver mining stocks, silver juniors because silver naturally leverages gold and silver stocks, equities, silver mining and exploration and development stocks leverage silver. So you can stack leverage on top of leverage by getting some of the top companies in that space. Um, so that that those are two, you know, two areas I like and I'm frankly I'm always a sucker for a good exploration play. So I throw some of those in no matter what's happening if I if I see one. Uh because there's nothing like the excitement of having a a company that you have a decent position in all of a sudden make a big hit. Yeah. Um okay, great. uh with silver juniors um there are there are few pure silver mines out there right I mean there's few pure any mines out there because you mine for something and you find other elements along with it but um let me put this way there are a lot more gold mines out there than there are silver mines right just because of how silver sober is concentrated in the earth uh yeah and you know what do you call a silver mine 70% % of the world's silver production is comes as a byproduct primarily of zinc but also copper and gold um and other metals. You know, one of our top recommendations right now in gold newsletter um has a big manganese component. Uh and if they weren't able to solve the metallurgy, as they appear to have done, that could have destroyed the whole value of the deposit or more than double the value of the deposit. Well, they seem to have solved the metallurgy and it looks like it's doubled the value of the deposit, but most of the value is going to come from manganesees um which is going to pay for all of the silver production. So, you know, it there's tradeoffs there. if if it's a pure silver play, it's directly exposed to the silver price, but there's something to like about a company that has it can produce millions of ounces of silver a year uh essentially for free at no cost. Uh so there's a lot of ways to play it, but very few uh largecale pure silver mines without being tainted by some other uh metal byproduct. Yeah. Uh in theory, you could kind of create your own pure play silver mine. Um uh or a company could by by being a pure play silver streamer, right? Um so we haven't talked about the royalty and streaming models, but these are basically ways in which you as a company secure the output or part of the output of a mine. Um and uh and there you could just buy this part of the silver output of of any given mine, right? Yeah. and and that's a wellestablished business practice, you know, for a company that has a big zinc project and its silver uh revenues are not really that crucial to its overall product mix. Uh they can sell forward all of their silver production or a good portion of it to a silver streamer, get cash in hand perhaps to use as capital to expand the mine. Um, and and that's been done for many years and there's some been there's been some very successful companies that do that. Okay. And I'm just curious your general thoughts on streamers and royalty companies, gold and silver in this market. Um, I got to imagine I mean I know the ones I've owned have done quite well, but I got to imagine very attractive business model in this climate because you've got no cost exposure. you've already locked in your price per ounce that you're going to get and uh you're just cashing checks after that. Yeah, they're they are highly valued on a from a PTE basis for that reason. They don't have as much risk involved in a single mine. Um but they they are a bit more expensive, but they do tend to outperform the other sectors. The key there is that you know there's a lot of junior royalty plays out there. The the key things you want to look at are what differentiates them from the other plays and how soon are they what what's their revenue curve, their income curve. Are they there are royalties on projects that are now producing and how does that look in the next few years? Yep. Okay. All right. All right. Well, look, um, for folks that are excited about following the precious metal, the the mining space, um, one of the things I always take care to tell people about is it's a highly volatile space, uh, even in the best of markets. And so, you've got to a be very eyes wide open about that at the beginning. Um, and it's a very difficult space um, to be consistently right in. Um, it's one of these spaces in general where you want to build a portfolio knowing that a good chunk of the portfolio is not going to do much. You're probably going to have several that just pure go out of business, but you're hoping that your few big successes are, you know, barn burners and they're going to make up for everything and then some. Um, and so you I recommend to people be very c if you're if you've not invested in them before, one be very cautious. just know that this is money you should basically be money that if if you lose you can sleep still at night with. And then um you know if you're going to be buying individual stocks in this space uh you should be looking over the shoulder of an expert who has done this for a long time and has a good track record. And only after having done that for however long it takes until you feel like you've really got your sea legs under you then start making your own individual decisions. So, I really recommend that people look at some of the experts like yourself, Brian, who publish uh their analysis and uh so I want to give you a chance here to tell people about gold newsletter. Um but it's one of the, you know, one of the top options that I tell people, hey, if you want to get into the space, go sign up for gold newsletter, you know, look over Brian's shoulder for as long as it takes. And I know a lot of people just say, hey, you know what? I don't even want to do the work anymore. Brian is he's he's smarter than I am. I'm just going to keep looking over his shoulder and doing what he does. Yeah, I think you're right. It's a riskier area. It's a higher potential reward, but it is risky and it should be you need to be able to afford uh and be suited for that level of risk. That said, I would not blindly follow my advice. I there are a lot of great people out there and and you you can with a little bit of leg work uh dedication of a little bit of money to subscribe to some of the better newsletters get a good idea of what the better companies are out there that are widely recommended by the right people who you know who have merit-based coverage not necessarily promotional paid coverage. Uh there are a lot of great conferences out there you can go to where you can meet the companies face to face. So I always tell people this area is you know if you're going to speculate and it is a speculation still do your leg work get educated in the sector it is inefficient and you can use that as an advantage you can find where the market has left the real values um on the ground waiting to be picked up temporarily overlooked and you can get in early on on new opportunities from great management teams and It's a lot of fun and it's exciting and the rewards can be dramatic but yes absolutely it's a speculative area. Uh you can find out more about gold newsletter at goldnewsletter.com. We have a report that is a real valuable special report. It is extensive. It's comprehensive called investors guide to gold and silver. Tells you about all of my competitors out there that I value that I think in the newsletter business deliver real value. all of my competitors out there in the conference business that deliver real value. Um, so it is an objective report that tells you soup to nuts on how to invest in in metals and mining uh from all across the spectrum. All right. Well, look, Brian, when I edit this, I'll put up the link to goldnewsletter.com on the screen there so folks know exactly where to go. Folks, the link will be in the description below this video as well. Um, so Brian, just to put you on the spot before we talk about your conference, um, are you willing to share one or two names uh, in the mining space right now that that have your interest? And again, this is not personal financial advice for anybody watching. These are just two companies that Brian is intrigued by. Yeah. Um, let me think. It's going to be hard for me to find anything I don't own. So, I'll just throw that disclaimer out there. I think I own I know I own these companies. I think Banyan Gold is a great company. It's moved a good bit. Uh but it is that company uh that example basically that I said of a company that had $10 an ounce in the ground. It's probably closer to 30 an ounce in the ground, but the resources growing 7 million ounces now. They're pro likely over eight in the near future and and headed higher. uh big resource, no economics on it yet, but growing resource and still uh largely undervalued. A an exploration company that I like a lot and I put money in the market uh on recently is Prospector Metals. It is a drill hole play. It is the riskier of the riskiest sector. Um, but I like what they're turning up in a uh target in the Yukon and they should have draw results out uh within days or a couple of weeks. All right. Um Okay. Well, this uh this video is going to launch a couple days after we record it. Um Brian, so hopefully those results haven't been released yet in case anybody wants to look at the company and decide. Maybe I'll look really smart. So, well, you already do. Um okay. So, uh, as we wrap up here, I want to let folks know about your upcoming conference as well. Um, you have a a, you know, you've got a a an amazing faculty that speaks there, and we'll talk about them in just a second. You you marry that with, um, a vendor hall where uh, you've got a lot of these companies, the very companies that we're talking about that are there where you can actually go talk to the management. um you know, they share all their data with you and you can really get a sense from each of these individual companies what they're up to and and make a much more informed decision about them. Um so again, if you're interested in mining companies, it's a great conference to go to, but it's a great conference to go to even if you're whether or not you're interested in mining or not, it's one of the best macro conferences uh I've been to as well. So tell us what you got cooking on this year. Last year was your 50th anniversary, right? So this is your 51st. This is the 51st. And you know, we pulled out all the stops last year trying to come up with an unbeatable roster of experts last year. And frankly, I think I've I've beaten it this year. I Congrats. Only one or two people that I wanted to get that couldn't make it. Um, but like you uh Adam, you know, I I think I have a good eye for the real value. The the thought leaders out there who have arguments and perspectives worth listening to. And my business model like yours is very simple. You just level layer value on top of value on top of value and just overwhelm people with with what you have. And and I think we do that with this roster. We've got Matt Taibbe. I think he's the most important journalist of our generation. My friend Rick Rule, we have Danielle D. Martino Booth, Brent Johnson, George Gammon. I'm reading now, but I'm not remembering all these by heart. Peter St. Vaver, Robert Kiyosaki, Mary Katherine Ham, Peter Bookvar, Jim Biano, Jim Aurorio. We have Adam Taggard there uh on our future of money panel. Good luck to that, sir. I I think after the last year it's going to be a walk in the park. Uh I don't know. I've talked to some of the people involved in in they're barely promising good behavior this year. Speaking of we have Peter Schiff, Adrien Day, Mike Maloney, Alex Green, Dave Colum, Robert Prector, uh Mark Scousin, Larry Leard, Dan Oliver. It it goes on and on. I really urge people to go to our website and uh and look at our speaker roster. It is absolutely amazing and I can say that because I've picked all the speakers and I'm a big big fan of all of them. Well, as someone who's been many many years, it's a great event. Uh, yes, I am going again this year. Would love to see you there. If you're watching and decide you want to go, um, one of the things I really value about Brian's conference is, um, he, Brian, as you can probably tell, he's uh, the consmate gentleman. He's consumate host. He puts together just a great experience and I think in addition to the learning that you get there, you get an a tremendous amount of value from the the the magic that happens at an in-person event. Um so you know the the other like-minded investors like you who were there idea sharing with um I know people have you know made lifelong friendships having met at this conference uh but also the ability just to bump into a lot of those speakers in the hallway and you know get a chance to talk to them directly and you know selfishly I love going because I get to sit in the green room and I get to talk you know uninterrupted with all these guys which is wonderful. I'm like a kid in the candy store. Um but I know for attendees uh the the you you've created an experience where you've sort of maximized the contact between the speakers and the attendees. So, that's great. And yeah, you know, many folks know that my um conference is happening the month before yours, Brian. Um and I think they're both super complimentary to each other. And the one thing I would say is the the the real plus about Brian's conference um definitely come to mine obviously but um the real plus about Brian's conference um is you know a the roster of speakers there's a lot of differentiation versus what I have uh the the vendor hall there if you're really interested in in these companies you can really get you know like I said primary exposure to them but but it really is that in-person magic right mine's a virtual conference there there is a surprising amount of community we create throughout the day inside the live chat and some of the things that go on there. But, um, when you're at a multi-day event and you're, you know, going out for drinks, uh, with somebody who you met there who just thinks the same way that you do, really wants to beat around the same questions that you do. Um, for some, you know, folks like me who just nerd out on this stuff, that's an experience you kind of kind of can't get anywhere else. Yeah. There's I call it an intellectual energy, you know, and an ambiance. Uh, everybody's in what is probably the most exotic location in the United States. Um, and our continental United States and you're in the same place at the same time with a lot of the same concerns and everyone is an overachiever to some degree. They're successful investors. They know what they're talking about and they're very willing to share their ideas. Um, some of the best ideas I've ever gotten at my conference I've gotten from attendees who say, "Go look at this company. You'd like and and I've made incredible discoveries that way. Everybody's sharing. Everybody's talking and enjoying. We bring a lot of the New Orleans uh uh uh culture into the event itself, but you can always go out and enjoy that as well. So yeah, I you know, if I didn't uh produce the event, I would be going to it because it's an awful lot of fun. All right. All right. Well, look, my friend, um your team provided me with a link to give to folks uh is a little bit long. So, what I did is I put up a redirect for it. So, folks, to learn more about Brian's event and hopefully register for it, just go to thoughtfulmoney.com um N O for New Orleans. Um, and you'll be sent directly to the, uh, event page that has all the details and the ability to buy tickets there if you want to. Um, all right, Brian. Well, look, my friend, um, such a joy. Always great catching up with you. Um, folks that again want to look at the thoughtful money conference, which again is the month before Saturday, October 18th, uh, you can learn more about that just by going to thoughtfulmoney.com/conference. But again, make sure you go to thoughtfulmoney.com to check out Brian's conference first. Um, Brian, my friend, really look forward to seeing you in what, that's like a month and a half from now, something like that. It's barreling uh up against me. I mean, we're it's very soon, but yeah, something to be said from attending an event. Your speakers are incredible. Attending event from the comfort of your easy chair is an unbelievable advantage. Uh, so I I'm looking forward to your event as well. But if you're a serious investor, you you you're going to cheat yourself if you don't go to both. Yeah, you're a very kind man. All right. Well, look, um folks, do me a favor. Please let Brian know how much you enjoyed him coming on and sharing so much of his expertise today by hitting that like button, then clicking on the subscribe button below, as well as that little bell icon right next to it. If you haven't clicked the subscribe button before, please do do that because we are getting very, very close to our 150,000 subscriber milestone. And I think we're just a couple hundred away. Maybe even the time this video uh comes out, we'll be almost there. So, if you can help us get over that milestone, we'd very much appreciate it. Brian, my friend, great speaking with you and like I said, look forward to seeing you in New Orleans in early November. Thanks, Adam. Always great to talk to you. All right, everybody else, thanks so much for watching.