What Gold and Silver Stocks I'm Buying | Clive Thompson and Jimmy Connor
Summary
Market Outlook: The podcast discusses the significant rise in gold prices, with projections suggesting it could reach $4,000, driven by uncertainty around the US dollar and increased demand for safe-haven assets.
Gold Investment: Gold mining stocks are highlighted as attractive investments due to reasonable price-earnings multiples and expected profit growth from rising gold prices.
Company Insights: Muan Inc. and Ramelius Resources are mentioned as promising gold and silver mining companies, with potential for significant growth due to strategic acquisitions and market conditions.
Silver Market: Silver is also experiencing a price surge, driven by industrial demand and potential strategic stockpiling by the US, with expectations of continued price increases.
Investment Strategies: The podcast suggests using exchange-traded funds (ETFs) like GDX for diversified exposure to gold mining stocks, reducing individual company risk.
AI and Investment: The discussion touches on the impact of AI on employment and investment analysis, highlighting tools like ChatGPT for evaluating gold mining companies' future profitability.
Tokenization and AI: The potential of tokenizing assets like gold and silver is explored, along with the transformative impact of AI on various industries, including investment analysis.
Future Prospects: The conversation concludes with a bullish outlook on both gold and silver, emphasizing the potential for significant gains in the coming years due to market dynamics and technological advancements.
Transcript
[Music] Clyde, thank you very much for joining us today. How are things in Geneva? Hello, James. Well, thank you very much for having having us back. It's uh a great pleasure. Well, you know, the Swiss Frank just keeps going up and up and up. It makes Switzerland more and more expensive for those people who are arriving. Uh but of course uh plenty of people would like to come here and live here because you could earn a much higher you know a secret a qualified secretary will probably get more than a bank manager somewhere else in Europe uh or certainly some in some some countries. Uh so we've got you know strong demand of people to get in but there's nowhere for them to live. All the accommodation is completely chucka block and uh it's very very expensive. So we kind of got this problem with the um everyone wants to live here and they're allowed to because it's the under the FA rules and European Union rules which Switzerland's not part of but we have to join in with that. They can come but they can't find anywhere to live. So uh there's the dilemma for people who'd like to get these high salaries in Switzerland. Yes, I was there recently. I flew into Geneva, rented a car and drove all the way to Zurich. stopped in at half a dozen places in between and I it's just an amazing country. I can't say enough about it. And I always I always forget that they have their own currency because I brought euros with me thinking I could use them and nobody wanted them. Well, I'm surprised at that. Most most pe places should take euros. They'll probably give you I mean in the old days they used to give you one to one against the Swiss Frank because the euro was worth more than the Swiss Frank. Uh so we used to have an exchange rate of 120. uh that was in about 2015 when there was a peg to the euro and so if a Swiss person took a euro on one to one they were making a 20% profit almost immediately but of course now the euro is worth a lot less than the Swiss Frank uh so nobody's going to take euros anymore they're going down so we got to talk about gold seeing how Switzerland is like one of the gold capitals of the world and it's having an amazing year it's finally catching a bid here was up 25% in 2024. It's up over 50% now in 2025 and we still have a few months to go in the year. What are your thoughts on gold here and does it keep going? Well, first of all, it surprised an awful lot of people who made predictions a year ago. I was just going through my u uh my LinkedIn posts from about a year and a half ago and I came across a post I'd done on gold and I said uh the post went like this. It looks like gold is about to go through $2,000. And if it does so, that'll be very bullish. Um, and of course it has done. And now we've seen pro projection after projection from all the major banks always forecasting a price of $200 or $100 higher than the present price. So, we're starting to see banks now come out and forecast a price of $4,000. Uh, and we could potentially get there very, very quickly. I mean, I don't know if we might even be there by the time this goes comes out. Uh, so what what do I see happening to the price of gold? Long-term, I think it's destined to go much higher. Um, these things never go in straight lines, but we seem to have gone in a straight line for a long time. Um, so it would not surprise me if we have a a bad day, week, month, uh, but not a year, I don't think. Um we're we're in a very unusual situation, one which we have never seen before, and that is one where dollar holders don't know what to expect tomorrow. Uh you know, if we go back a few years ago, uh you could be fairly sure that if you had a a dollar receipt coming in, you knew roughly where it would be 6 months from now or a year from now, you trusted it. Now people are saying, I can't tell what's going to happen tomorrow. there's, you know, tariffs and uh surprises and political agendas going on and and it's all over. So although the dollar isn't really moving, there's this uncert this general feeling of uncertainty and people are saying, you know what, they weaponized the dollar. There's this going on, there's that going on. I'm not sure I can keep everything in dollars anymore. And so part of it moving into this safe haven. I mean, they're looking around for safe havens and you can't put it, you can't call Nvidia a safe haven anymore. So, uh, I think I think some of the money which is looking for that lower volatility, that greater degree of safety is heading into gold because people are saying, well, I don't know about the dollar, but I'm pretty damn sure my gold will still be there next year. I pretty sure it will buy something. And I think there's that certainty which is driving gold higher. U, on top of that, we've got the central banks. uh they're not buying as much as they were a year ago, but they're still steady buyers of gold and to a smaller extent we've got the public starting to come in and buy into the gold ETFs uh where the number of tons in the ETFs have been starting to rise. It's not again it's not spectacular I would say um but there's been a sort of little bit of a trend change from the public the man in the street who's starting to say maybe I should have a little bit of gold just because you know I can't have it all in Nvidia. Yes. And you rais a very interesting point there because I recall back in January, February, Numa, which is the largest gold producer in the world. They produce over 6 million ounces a year. One of the worstrun companies also in that sector. Uh it was actually down on the year, okay, back in Q1. Here we are closing in on the end of the year. It's up 125%. It's the second best performing stock in the S&P. It's the only gold name in the S&P, but it's up uh 125%. the number one performing stock I believe it's Palenter but it's just on pneumont beric is up over 100% finally that was another big leager's up over 100% many stocks are up 200% so uh maybe you can tell us about some of your favorite gold equities so first of all as a generality uh the price earnings multiples of these gold mining stocks are pretty reasonable there's plenty around which are price mult earnings multiples around head or low teens. Um, and when you compare that with the rest of the stock market at 25 times, it's relatively cheap. So, despite the rises, they're still not expensive in general. And the other uh point about all gold mining and silver mining stocks is that the profits are set to grow very rapidly. Why is that? It's because the gold price has risen, but it takes time before a rise in the gold price makes its way its way through to the bottom line profits. Uh because a lot of these gold mining companies will have sold the gold that they uh dug out of the ground this year at last year's prices because they'll have done some forward sales. Uh but as time marches on, the current prices will start to factor into the price at which they're selling the gold and their profit will be rising. So if we're on a price earnings ratio for a typical company of 10 or 12 times now it's quite likely that next year that very same company will be on a price earnings ratio of six. Now if you take a company which is fast growing which it will be next year they they all will be they'll be fast growing because of the higher profits they shouldn't be on low price earnings ratios. So I think what we're going to get with gold mining companies is the double whammy of first of all more profits pushing up the share price but secondly because they are now showing a track record of growth in their sales and their earnings we'll be seeing higher multiples applied. So investors normally apply a higher price earnings multiple to something which is growing. Uh there's all kinds of algorithms out there which do the maths for you. But if something's growing at 10% a year, it's likely to have a higher price earnings ratio than something growing at 1% a year. And so these gold mining companies are likely to be growing at 40 or many of them 40 or 50% a year by this time next year in terms of earnings per share. So I'm expecting uh not only the share prices to be higher than they are now due to the higher earnings, but also higher due to the higher multiple. So you've got this double whammy being applied. Uh and I think a lot of people have woken up to that. That explains the amazing rise we've seen in gold mining shares in general, but they're still not expensive be compared with what we're we've got coming down the line. Um in in terms of uh companies I like um now obviously I want to say these are not investment recommendations. Uh but you know I can mention one uh as an example. It's Muan Inc. U run by Rob Mchuan. Uh he's the guy who took uh I think it was Gold Corp or was it Gold Fields? I can't remember. But he he took it from something like a 50 million company to an $8 billion company. Um now the special feature about that company, it's a by the way, it's a gold and silver mining company. Uh and it's on a reasonably low price ratio based on the projected earnings for the current year. Uh but the the interesting feature about it is they also own a huge or share of a huge copper company. Uh it's called Mchuan Copper actually uh which is in has got a a lot of copper in Argentina and it's just likely in the next uh month or so to get the uh feasibility study completed. Uh and that would be the catalyst to push the share price a lot higher. Now Rob Muan is a serial entrepreneur who in in respect to this particular company is taking $1 a year as a salary and has a huge stake in the company. So his interest is completely aligned with the shareholders interest. Um as far as the subsidiary company the I think it's 47% of muan copper they own. So they've got so murk owns 47% of muan copper. I think that's the number. I might have got it wrong. Um, there are some other significant shareholders in Muan Copper, such as Stalantis, which is the Netherlands-based uh car manufacturer. And you might say, well, what's a car manufacturer doing investing in a copper mining company? Well, they they've done their work. They believe the copper's there and they're securing for themselves a long-term supply of copper which is going to be used a lot more in cars going down the uh in motorcars going down the road due to electrification and so forth. Um, so I think this is quite an interesting company because it's benefiting at the moment from the higher gold and silver price, but down the line we're going to have a lot more copper usage on the planet and just as this copper starts to come on stream, uh, we'll probably be we will pro I I think we'll be seeing a higher copper price, too. So, I kind of like that one uh quite a lot and it's the the forecast gold and silver to come out of this murink is set to rise rapidly. Uh so that's a that's quite a good one. Um another one which I like is in Australia. U it's called Ramilius Resources. Uh they recently made a a fantastic purchase of a company called Spartan. Now Spartan has huge resources of gold uh but they didn't have any money to dig it up. And Romelius Resources has uh both before and after the acquisition a lot of net cash in the bank and they say that they're going to uh start digging this gold up and they reckon that by 20 by 2030 this is the company's own projections and I can't give you the number because they gave but they did give it it's going to be a huge increase in the number of ounces of gold coming out of the ground compared with today. Um so again want to say these are not investment recommendations they're things I have bought myself because I believe that the amount of gold coming out of the ground will go up. I believe that the gold price will be higher and I believe that uh the the profit on what they dig up is going to be because of the higher gold price that much higher. So and and they're but all of these are reasonable multiples. Those are both new names for me. So I'm going to have to do some work on them. But one thing I was thinking about when I was when I mentioned that Numont's up 125% on the year, that tells me the generalist is coming back to the marketplace because a lot of people don't know anything about the gold market. They don't know anything about gold mining. So they say, "Okay, new months in the S&P, I'm going to buy that one." And so we know the generalists are coming back into the market, but what about other investors, retail investors, etc. like if they're not involved in the market yet and they think, "Okay, gold's up 50% on the year. It's at $4,000. I can't bring myself to buy it or it's gone too far too fast." Do you think there's still lots of time for people to step into the gold market, whether they buy the physical or they buy gold equities, or is it too late? Uh there's an awful lot of people who wish they bought at last week's price or last month's price. So, what we've seen recently is every time there's a short-term pullback of a day or two in the gold price or in the gold mining stocks, the next day, almost the next day, there's surges of buyers coming in and pushing it back to the previous price and higher. Uh, so, you know, there's a lot of people waiting for that dip. Uh, and I don't that means that when the when there are these dips, not going to go far because everyone's trying to second guess when they go in and they want to be before everybody else. And the minute it starts going back up again, they say, "Quick, I better get in before it moves." And then there's that this race as people leaprog each other putting their bids in to try and buy the share price. The the other thing for people who don't know what they're doing really, there's the gold mining exchangeraded funds. Now, an exchange traded fund is a a fund which holds hundreds of or tens of investments, maybe 40 or 50 investments in the in a particular sector. So the one which most people can look at is known as the van gold miners index. It symbol is GDX letter G for golf D for delta and X for X-ray. Uh so GDX uh basically will trade at the net asset value of those underlying 40 or 50 shares which are held by it. It's a very very large fund. It's in the billions. Uh so when you buy the GDX you're getting exposure to a basket of 40 or 50 stocks which will move in line with the average of the gold mining stocks up and down. Uh so that's a very interesting one to uh get into uh because you don't have to think about this one is this gold mining company better than that one. Uh but of course there is an effect when people put money into the GDX. The GDX has to buy everything in the underlying index. So the good and the bad all get pushed up on a rising tide by the purchases purchasers of ETFs like the GDX. But I think that's a very uh safe way to get in because you're not exposed to the specific risks of a single company. We must forget mustn't forget that uh gold mining is a very uh risky business for most gold miners. They you know they they have the risks of cave-ins, landslides, mud flows. uh that there's obviously in many countries uh industrial re industrial action there's electricity shortages in South Africa maybe for example uh there's political risks in lots of countries because most of these gold and silver values are they're not in nice safe Australia or Canada or North America they're in places like a you know Africa or Peru or Mexico where the politics are not at all the same and you never know so if you're into a uh an exchange traded fund. You own a bit of everything and you've got gold mines all around the world and some of them will go bad because of politics or because of some disaster somewhere but collectively they should do very well. You rais a very interesting point there jurisdiction when it comes to mining that's my number one criteria uh like I I want to be in Canada or the US or Australia and therefore you know they respect the rule of law and I don't have to worry about their assets being nationalized. Uh, one of the names I like is Igno. 75% of the gold production comes out of Canada. So, I don't have to worry about them losing their assets. So, uh, if I speak to you in one year from now, let's just say Q4 of 2026, where do you think the gold price is going to be? I'm putting you on the spot now. Well, it's going it's been going up much much faster than I expected. Um, and I think that continues at a similar pace. So, we could easily add another $1,000 in the course of the next 18 months. Um, I think uh which would push us uh almost almost to 5,000. And I'm not excluding the possibility it might go a lot faster than that. There's there's a whole bunch of things which might happen between now and then which might push the gold price up to I'm going to say strut, you know, could go much much higher. uh we might even see uh and I don't think it's a likely probability in the next 18 months but it's a possibility we might even see uh some sort of currency crisis where there's a panic about uh a particular currency and it doesn't matter which one it is whether it's the yen the pound or the dollar uh if we get a currency crisis and people start to say oh my god this currency I don't want it uh and that everyone's rushing down to the shops it can spiral across borders very very quickly so let's say the Japanese yen were to fail as an example. Um, everyone in every other country is going to say, "What if we're next?" And that what what do you do? What do you do if you fear you're going to be next? You take the money you've got and try and get something else, but suddenly you find nobody wants to take your money. Yes. Very, very good points. Um, one other thing I should touch on, you did touch on this, but the margins associated with these gold producers now. So, with inflation, uh, the government's telling us inflation's under control. I don't believe them, but anyhow, it did peak in 2022 at 9%. Um, and it's been coming down ever since then. So, we did have problems with with inflation within the mining sector back in 22,23, even the early part of 24, but it seems like it's under control. Now, the price of oil is really helping because that's one of the largest inputs into a mining company. So, the oil is hanging around 65 bucks a barrel, give or take. So that's having a big impact. So providing oil stays here, these margins are just going to keep exploding, right? Like it's just going to and that's well in any case when I do my maths on a gold mining company and I perhaps talk about how your viewers can value a gold mining company, um I'm assuming a rather uh bearish case for inflation. I'm assuming that the cost of gold mining will rise by about 10% a year. Now, that's probably uh over overly pessimistic, but perhaps just to help everybody who's looking at whether they should buy an individual gold mining company, I'm going to tell your viewers how to do the maths. And uh the even if you're not much of a uh much not much good at maths, we have a wonderful thing these days called chat GBT, which will do it for you. So, but I'll I'll tell you how to do it, then I'll just tell you the the faster way via chat chat GBT. So what you want to know is for any particular gold commanding company what the cost of production of the gold is that's called in called the allin sustaining cost or a s right and you know what price they should be selling it it at they should be selling it at the spot price there may be a lag here but they should be saying so the difference between the two figures tells you how much profit per ounce they are making. Now the next question is how many ounces of gold are they producing and if you look if you go to the com so when you look at the company's website and and look at their annual report and accounts or the last report every gold mining company tells you how many ounces they produce they might say gold equivalent ounces geo gold equivalent ounces cuz sometimes they translate silver into gold uh at a certain ratio or they translate gold into silver so they call it gold equivalent ounces uh so you know how many ounces they produce you know what the profit is. That's the gross profit of what they're selling it for. You're taking today's price minus what the allin sustaining cost is. So you now you've got the gross profit, but you also can see in the accounts all the other expenses they've got because they got lots of other expenses like taxes, like prospecting, like management overheads and so forth. So you have to knock that figure off. And by doing that you can forecast what the profit would be if the gold price stays where it is today. So you now have the net profit. You can now take that net profit and divide it by the number of shares in existence which is also in the company accounts. And you know the earnings per share. Now you can compare that number that earnings per share number with what was last reported to see first of all how fast it's growing its earnings per share. But secondly, you can apply a multiple to the earnings per share of 10 times or 15 times the market. That's called the price earnings ratio. So you apply whatever price ratio you think is appropriate. But I I usually take 10 to 15 times and see where the share price ought to be if next year's profits are where the gold are based on the gold price day. Now if you think the gold price is going up, you could take a higher number. I quite often look forward to 2027 and take a number of $5,000 an ounce for 2027 as an average price and work out what the profits will be gross knock off the other expenses then divide by the the net result divide it by the number of shares to get the earning per share and then I multiply that result by say 10 or 15 times to get where I think the share price will be and in almost every case I get to a share price which is much higher many multip multiples of today's price. Anything from two and a half times to eight times 10 times sometimes today's share price. Uh which tells me that we've got a lot of upside left. Now I've just told you I probably lost a lot of people with what I explained. So I'm going to tell you the easy way to do this. What you do and I I have the paid version of chatb. It's $20 a month but it'll work with uh probably work with the unpaid version. But chatb can do an awful lot of things it couldn't do 3 months ago. It can actually go and look at websites and work numbers out. So all you have to do is say go to the website of this company. You name the company. Look at all the all the papers you can find, the annual reporting accounts, the earnings calls, the quarterly results, and tell me how much money you think it will be making in 2027 based on a gold price of $5,000, for example, and based on an earnings uh price earnings ratio of 10 times. And it will tell you, and it will do it for you. It'll give you investment advice and it will tell you what it thinks the share price will be. Then all you have to do is look at the share price and compare it with today's price and say, "Do I like that number?" And that's dead easy because you're not having to go to the website yourself and pull out papers and study them. You're just saying to chat to me, go look at the website yourself, do the work, and tell me where the share price will be, and it will do it for you. Now, it's amazing how far we've come. You couldn't have done that 3 months ago. Uh, and of course, Chachi Pin is not the only one which will do that. Uh, Grock is uh, G R O K will do it very well. And if you really want to get sophisticated and pay a little bit more money, uh, there's Manis, M A N U S AI, uh, which is really good at doing that sort of thing as well. Yes, great insights. I spend a lot of time on chat. Uh, oh man, like continuously throughout the day, I'm spending a lot of time on there. It's providing so much information and it does it so damn fast. All right. So, you're bullish on gold, which is great to see as as am I. Uh what about silver now? It's up 60% on the year. It's not making new all-time highs like gold is, but uh it's damn close. What are your views on silver? Well, first of all, I think we're going past the all-time high um over time. Uh I don't think and I don't think that time is particularly long. Um we do know from looking at the silver institute's numbers that the mind supply of silver is considerably less than the industrial use. And that has been the case for about 3 or 4 years. And that explains why the silver price has been going higher because the only way you can get the silver you need to meet the demand is by recycling. So to get recycled silver, you have to have a higher price so that your granny brings in her candlesticks to the pawn shop and uh some investor says, "I've got this bunch of bars or coins I bought 5 years ago. I've got a nice profit." And they take it along to uh a gold and silver shop. We I don't know if it where it is everywhere in the world, but here in Switzerland, we've got places all over the place say we buy gold, we buy silver. So people take their stuff down, hand it over, and get the money because they like the silver price. And the higher the price goes, the more it will get people out. So that's what that explains why the silver prices had to go higher to suck out this silver for recycling. Um and I think the the silver demand continues to rise for two re well I suppose well one main reason but they kind of it's two reasons related in fact. The first and main reason is we're not the the main usage of silver is in the electronics industry. We are not going to have less electronics in the future than we have today. uh we've just seen uh very recently uh the US uh I I the government anyway some US agency which part of the government uh say that strate silver is now going to be a strategic uh mineral for the United States uh because they used to have a strategic stockpile of silver uh which was used by the military uh cuz it's used a lot by military that's completely gone now they've decided it should be a strategic mineral which means means that they should start to build a stockpile again. Uh because and they specifically say what the risk is. The risk is we might not be able to get silver out of Mexico. So if they suddenly can't buy all the because that's where most of the silver a lot of silver comes from. If they can't get silver from Mexico because of maybe some political problem or internal uh industrial re action or maybe some civil war or who knows what. Uh it would be a problem for the United States because it would damage US industry. It would damage the weapons industry. So I think that that could be another factor that this stockpile potentially might be rebuilt. Uh and the the trouble with that is there is no silver cuz it's all consumed by industrial use. So they'd have to push the price the price would be pushed higher if they go into the market and start buying. Now uh if they do so I suppose they'll do it very gently because they don't want to overpay. Uh but that's a factor. So the first of all that's the first thing the electronics industry in general it's not going to go backwards and we've got the potential stockpile but the second thing I think we've got to say is China is trying to stimulate its economy and you know the solar panel industry uh is likely to be a getting a big push out of the Chinese government because that's something which is uh an easy to sell uh to everyone in the world you know get cheap energy and cheap energy they call it clean energy energy. Uh so I think we've got this non-stop u push from China to make more and more solar panels which use and consume silver and of course the solar panel industry has been a big driver in the increase of use of silver. Uh I think two years ago we saw something like a 30% increase or the amount of silver being used in solar panels went up by something at 30% in a year. Uh it's not so much last year. uh but it's certainly increasing all the time because we're I mean even I'm going to have my solar panels put on my roof uh starting tomorrow. So and and I can say uh I'm here in Switzerland but we've got this huge pressure from the Swiss government basically saying everybody has got to do something to reduce their power consumption by using uh more economic methods of heating their homes in the winter and so forth. Uh so and from so it's coming from a sort of every angle a tax angle you you in other words you had one thing you had to do in Switzerland is if you were using electricity you had to report yourself to the government I fill in a form to say I'm using electricity for heating so they can keep an eye on you and come back by I think the deadline is 2033 you've got to find another method before then solar panel solar panels I mean you can only do what you can do But there's two main technologies used here as well. One's called heat pumps. Uh and the other one is called solar panels. Uh so you got to do one of the two by then. Interesting. Um okay. So you're bullish on silver now. Many of the stocks have had massive moves. You know, 100% 200%. Pan-American silver largest silver producer in the world. It's up 90%. First Majestic another large producer is up 120%. What silver names do you like? Um, I'd have to have a look. Um, give me give me give give me a a second because I actually have I wasn't prepared for that question and I I have bought a few names and I just want to see what I bought recently. Just looking for my spreadsheet. Okay, here we go. Um, so names I like and which I do have. Um, I've got Silver Corp, Endeavor Silver, uh, Silver X, uh, Santa Cruz Silver Mining. Um, and then there's a few which have sort of mixed uh, like Perseus mining and precious metals and so forth. Uh so you know to be to to home in on one um I I actually did a very uh extensive research of all the stocks which were in the SIL that's the silver mining ETF and the ones I chose um were the ones I just mentioned. Just give me a second. I'm just going to check those for you. Uh so yes, so Global X uh silver miners was one of mine. That's uh quoted in the USA. Uh Fresnillo in the UK. I don't know if you know that company. I bought that one. Um that's F R E S N I L O PLC. I think they mine in Mexico. Um, uh, sorry, ignore the silver X. I did buy it, but then I changed my mind on it, so that's not what I would buy anymore. Uh, then I bought Silver Metals, uh, Inc. that's quoted in New York. I said Endeavor Silver. I think I bought that. That was a good one. So, I can't really um tell you more about them individually because there was so many of them that I just went through and I end up buying what I thought was the best of the bunch based on my analysis at the time. But then to say I physically remember the specifics of each and every one, I can't tell you that. All I can tell you is those names I mentioned came out at the top of the list. Yeah. Well, you mentioned a lot of the largest uh silver companies there. And I have to correct myself. You mentioned Friselo. That is the largest silver producer in the world. I said it was Pan-American. I believe Pan-American's number two, but uh yeah, you got some great names there. So, where do you see the price of silver going? I think it Yeah, you're putting me on the spot. I mean, I think it continues higher for the supply and demand and I think it's also heavily influenced by gold. uh you know the one of the things we do have uh in the demand when I say industrial demand it's part of that is not really industrial demand it's investor demand and the the estimate from the silver institute is that 200 million ounces will be bought by investors this year I think that's going to prove to be a big underestimate because if you think about it 200 million ounces uh and work divide take the population of this planet which is 9 billion people roughly and divide and take that 200 million ounces. That means only one in 40 uh one in 45 people will get one ounce and I think more than one in 45 people are going to be making their first silver purchase this year and I don't think all of them will be buying just one ounce. I think some of them will be buying 10 ounces or 100 ounces or a thousand ounces. So the assumption that only 1 ounce will be bought by every 45 people on the planet for investment purposes seems to me to be an underestimate in the current environment when silver the silver price is rising and people are starting to notice it because people when something is moving in price they tend to hear about it they've got a friend who says hey I made some money on silver and then they talk about it and then they say oh I'll buy a silver coin I want to be like you know we all want to be part of a colleague uh you know if you go to a particular a church your friend goes to a church you might want to go to the same church if your friend's a member of a club a keep fit club you join the keep fit club if your friend buys some silver coins you might buy some silver coins it's a way of making that connection so I think that uh because people will be talking about their silver purchases I think it will bring in a lot of people to buy their first silver coins this year and I think that 200 million is going to be a big underestimate and to put that in context I think it's the annual production of silver is about 800 million ounces a year. So it's uh maybe 900 million ounces a year. It it's it's it wouldn't take much if we buy one ounce for every 22 and a half people instead of every 45 people. Uh that would take the uh it would be half of the global mine supply going into investment pots. Yeah. Like these silver stocks, you know, under the right environment, uh they can just explode to the upside. like we really haven't seen anything yet. And you know, to your point, it's a lot cheaper to buy, you know, spend 50 bucks on an ounce of silver versus 4,000 bucks on an ounce of gold. So, they can really take off. Um, I I I just to tell you, I bought my last uh coin, silver coin. I bought it just a few days ago. Um, now I paid about 50 bucks. Uh, but it's more of a a collector type coin. It's the 2026 uh Luna horse which has come out of Australia 1 oz. It's a 1 oz coin. I also bought the the gold version. So that was a little bit more expensive but about 80 times more expensive but so I got the uh the in Australia they they produce these coins called the Luna collection uh which is a different zodiac animal every year. So every year you get a new animal based on the zodiac calendar and the so 2026 will be the horse. Uh so they've just brought it out and you have to get them quickly before they're all sold out because they have limited production. Uh so every year when the new one comes out, not only for that collection, but that's what that the one I could get. I rush down to the coin shop and buy the coin. Uh and I have most of the coins going because this is on the third series. So, they've been going for 12 years, followed by 12 years. Now, we're in the third period of 12 years. I've got almost every one of those in at least in silver. Not not all of them in gold, I'm afraid. Um, and uh, you know, I I I think it's a lot of fun to collect coins, and I don't mind paying a little bit over the odds to get something which is part of the collection. Well, your son's going to enjoy that. He's going to be very happy that you made that investment in those gold coins. Yeah, of of course if you buy these things, you know, if you buy these things after 6 months have passed, they become very difficult to find. So, if you're if you've got part of the collection, you want to get the missing coin from 5 years ago or 10 years ago, it's much much harder to find. So, the time to get it is when they're fresh. Uh, and then from time to time, you'll come across the older ones, you know, uh, in an auction or from a friend or something and you can buy them, but you'll be paying more for the older ones than than the new ones. I just want to touch on or make one more point about silver. I recently interviewed somebody uh Michael Oliver. I'm not sure if you're familiar with him. He's more of a technical analyst and the way he measures this move in the silver price. He just looks at it from a historical point of view. The price of silver versus the price of gold. He says historically it's around 2%. So if gold's at 4,000 bucks, silver should historically based on historical prices be around $80 an ounce. So that's a significant move and he thinks even that is still very much undervalued. So I think it's going to be an interesting year. Silver is finally waking up which is good to see. CL if you go back to I was going to say if you go back 1920s it was like the ratio was like so 19 or 20 to1. Yeah, I want to get your view on one more point and I'm reading a lot about tokenization and a lot of companies or firms are trying to tokenize various assets. The CEO of Robin Hood recently said that tokenization of assets and a freight is a freight train coming to major markets and what are your views on this and do you think it's possible to tokenize gold or silver? Um, well, it already is. There's plenty of uh uh cryptos you could buy where you're able to exchange gold for the crypto or you could exchange the crypto for gold such as Pax Gold would be one. There there's also one from uh um Tether I forgot what it's called maybe called Tether Gold. I don't know the exact name. So there are cryptos out there which are convertible into gold and vice versa at a a fixed ratio of the number of coins or crypto coins if you like versus an ounce of gold. Uh of course you can't do it for a single ounce. You have to do it for a good delivery bar which is probably 400 ounces. Maybe they do 100 oz bars as well. But if you think about it even a 100 ounce bars uh what's that? That's um $350,000 US. So it's not changing backwards and forwards from gold to crypto is not for mom and pop. But of course, if you don't if you if you just want to buy the tokens, you can buy them on all the cryp on many of the crypto exchanges and you will benefit to some extent from the gold price because if the crypto price uh deviates too far away from the gold price, the arbitrageers step in and redeem the crypto for the gold or they redeem gold for crypto depending on which which side of the uh which way it's gone. I want to move on now and get your thoughts on artificial intelligence. you know a lot about this and it's hard to believe it was just three years ago that Open AAI released their first version of Chat GBT to the public in November of 2022. They recently did a raise $6.6 billion which now values that company at 500 billion if you can believe that number and it's still private. But what are your thoughts on AI? Like do you think it's just another bubble waiting to burst or is it overhyped? Is it is it have a lot more to go? Um well, it's going to bring uh huge changes to mankind in in lots of different ways just as the arrival of email then the worldwide web uh with the um websites did. Uh so it's a it's a freight train. It is a tra freight train which is coming at us and it's going to arrive very very fast and a large number of people are going to be impacted some positively probably more negatively uh at least in the early stages because they're going to lose their jobs. Um you know I uh I have a friend who lost his job uh probably a day or two ago. Um he was doing translations for a bank. So the bank would produce their documents in English and then they'd need to be translated into uh another language was called Italian for simplicity. Uh and every time he had a document they would pay him 700 bucks and he'd get maybe four or five translations a month. The bank has now decided they don't need a translator anymore because it can all be done by AI and then proof read by an Italian. They have Italian employees. it can be proof read by an Italian employee. So there's no real need to have that external translator doing the work. Of course, he'll go off and find some something else to do. And I expect that he was already uh having gone from manually translating the documents. He was probably already himself using AI, I suspect. Uh but that's just one example. But we saw the other day uh Nova Nordisk in uh Denmark announced that they're laying off 11,000 people uh reducing their workforce by 10%. Now, they didn't say it's because of artificial intelligence, but I can put two and two together because a few months before that, they wrote in one of their uh annual reports or quarterly reports, uh they wrote that because of artificial intelligence, they're now saving lives faster. And why are they saving lives faster? If you read between the lines, it turns out that it used to take, let's say, five months to produce a report with 50 people working on a report for the Federal Drug Administration. And they were saying, "Now we could do it in a week with just three people." So they gone from 50 people down to three and from six, five months down to a week. And that was their their pitch. So we're because we get quicker approvals or we can get it to the FDA quicker, we're saving lives faster thanks to artificial intellis. The pitch was artificial intelligence is saving lives. Perfectly good. Now they're firing 10,000 pe 11,000 people. Well, my conclusion is whatever they say the reason is, the reality probably is that a lot of those people uh are surplus to requirements because they have the other nine nine out of 10 people who are still who still got their jobs. some of that nine out of 10 have learned to master artificial intelligence and they no longer need an assistant. So, uh to give you another example, I saw somebody uh writing on LinkedIn just today. Uh he's saying uh if you're a chief executive and you go home before 11:00 at night, you're not you're not your competition will take you over. And there was no mention of artificial intelligence. But what I'm thinking is this guy two years ago if he would get uh what let's say one of his uh heads heads of departments would send him a uh a document a 30-page document with uh a report. He would have to pretend to read it and craft a intelligent sounding reply which makes it look like he actually read it. Of course he wouldn't have had time to read it but he would have pretended to read it. Uh that 30-page report. Well, today if he's doing his job right, he doesn't have to open his email because a a halfpage summary of what that 30-page document says should be in front of him with the specimen reply waiting for him to say go. So he's moved his time from spending maybe an hour pretending to read the document and and crafting a reply to 5 minutes. So across the world this will be happening. Now the real problem we've got uh the real problem enterprises have got at the moment is there's so few people who figured out how to harness the power of AI. I mean, everyone can go to chat GPD and say, uh, write a reply to this letter. That's that's the easy stuff. But there's so many tasks which are much more complicated and and and harder than that. You have to know if you're doing it if you're doing it right. You have to know which AI to use, which task. You have to know how much it's costing per token. That's how they they measure the cost because every AI has got different cost per token. You have to know how to frame the question. You have to know how to put the context. You have to know how to describe the audience for the AI, which who who is it speaking to? Is it speaking to a a classroom full of kids or is it speaking to sophisticated nuclear engineers who know who know what they're talking about? Uh you have to describe how you want the out the output to look. Do you want it in a PDF format? Do you want it well-designed? You want colors? Uh do do you do you do you want it to be uh with short sentences? Do you want it to have headings? You you have to be able to describe what you're looking for uh in in that respect. uh and you have to know how to iterate which means do you give the entire prompt 150 lines to the AI up front and say here's 150 lines just go do it or do you say do this bit and then it comes back and you say now do do the next bit and then you describe how it does next bit then you say the do the next bit you keep iterating backwards and forwards so all of these things are skill sets um which need to be understood and then of course you've got to implement uh in if you're doing it really well you've got to be able to harness the power of uh Python or other uh programming languages to uh manipulate the data which is being given to you or to manipulate the AI itself. So the number of people who can do all of these things is pretty thin on the ground. Of course, there's plenty who can, but it's just not enough for what's required by all the companies in the world who would like to press forward with AI. But they're all going hell for leather, and they're all, if you look at the advertisements, you see a lot of job advertisements for people who are called prompt engineers, and they're willing to take people who know how to say, "How do I grow potatoes?" Because that's the best they could get. The good ones are gone. So there's a lot that I want to unpack there. But the first thing I should say just because you were talking about um the various prompts to use etc. But you developed a template or a guideline for people that they can use when they use these various AI platforms. So if somebody wants to get that template, where can they go? Uh well, if they contact me on LinkedIn and it's the only place I'll reply, um I'll be happy to send them a copy of the AI instruction sheet. So it's it's a like a it's a few pages. You can spend two hours on it if you want or even an hour. Uh and you'll become if you haven't got a lot of experience in AI if the best you've ever done is say write a reply to this email. You'll become after reading that 10 times better at harnessing and using AI. And there will be some there is a in that uh sheet a specimen prompt which will move you from that one sentence to 15 sentences which will give you much better much more satisfactory results. And Clive you you touched on the impact that AI is having on unemployment people losing their jobs. Uh what did you say? Novartis is laying off 11,000 people. No uh Nova Nordisk. Okay. The other company I read about was Salesforce. I believe they're laying off uh over a thousand people because of AI and the large uh consulting firm Asenture has also announced massive layoffs associated with using AI more. I believe it was 11,000 people also. But I was recently listening to a podcast uh the New York Times put puts out a podcast called the Daily. They were talking about computer programming uh a computer science degree and how people are are coming out of university with these degrees for computer programming or computer science and they can't get a job like 10 years ago 15 years ago that was the degree to have but now you can't get a job because they're being replaced with AI. I mean uh I I am not a programmer. Uh but about uh I retired three and a half years ago and about a year ago uh I saw somebody write something uh saying I'm I was something to do with investments. I must look at this using Python. I thought that's interesting. How can Python help me look at investments? So I contacted him on LinkedIn and said I heard you're using Python to do something with investments. How does that work? He said, "Well, actually, Clive, I teach Python. If you want to take lessons, I'll give you lessons, you know, paid lessons." So, I I paid for the lessons. I had eight lessons and I learned Python. But as I learned Python, I learned that there's a shortcut. All you have to do is throw it into an AI like Claude. I use that's my preferred one. I throw it into AI like Claude and say, "Uh, here's what I've written. I want you to improve it or I want you to do this. I want you to add that." So once you've got the basic idea of what you want to do, you just say to Claude the AI, you say improve this or add that feature or add a add a box here or add to change the color or and little by little you can build some very sophisticated programs without knowing anything about programming at all. And so I've I've I've actually done that. You know, I've written a chess program. Uh uh now not not that I I know about chess but I don't know anything about enough computing to write a chess program. I've written programs to read by email. I've written programs to uh analyze stocks. I've written programs to um uh there's one I wrote which goes and hunts through if you put in a search term hunts through the internet pulls out or finds all the pages which are most likely to have the answer for what you're looking at. downloads all the pages and then uses AI to interpret them into a single document which is more complete than having to visit lots of different websites to get your answer. So there's many many things you could do with pro the combination of programming Python in my case uh or it could be HTML or whatever it doesn't have to be but but uh programming and AI by putting those two together you can make a lot of things without knowing anything about programming other than how to give an instruction really. So no wonder programmers are losing their jobs. Uh they don't have to know anything about programming. They just have to know how to design an end product and tell the AI to do the rest. But just imagine how frustrating that is. You go to university into a very tough program like computer science or computer engineering. You're expecting to get this good paying job when you come out maybe in Silicon Valley or some big tech company and then you can't get a job. Like on this podcast they've said the unemployment rate for people with a computer science degree is 7%. This is in the US now. And for somebody with a biology degree it's 3%. Yeah. Well the trouble is this is going to come everywhere. So it doesn't matter whether you're uh when you're if you're coming out of university and you know everything about whatever your pet subject is. The reality now is the the firms which are hiring you probably don't need you because in the past they'd hire the university graduate to do some tasks. But now the man at the the next layer up who's giving you those tasks won't ask the human being to do it. He's going to say to the AI, "Write me, write me a report on this investment or uh study the impact of u sugar on the blood level," you know, whatever it is. And because we want to produce a report on it and so why would he have a university graduate who's going to take a week to do the job and isn't going to do it as well as the AI can do in a few minutes? It makes, you know, makes no sense. You know, if you think about it, AI, it doesn't need a cubicle. It doesn't need a a chair. It doesn't need a desk. It doesn't spend its time going to the coffee machine and chatting about last night's Netflix program. It it it doesn't take holidays. It doesn't have sick days. It doesn't have any kids. It's not asking for a payriseise. It's not upsetting the the the pretty girl in aisle number in booth number 42. It's not causing any problems with your boss or having having sick days or anything like that. You know, AI works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. if you need it. Why would you get a human to do it? I mean, you should, for social reasons, employ the human, but if you employ the human, your competitor is going to employ the AI and they'll be ahead of you. So, it's coming with a with a vengeance. It's going to be interesting to see how things evolve in the coming years. Well, Clyde, I always enjoy these discussions and we started this discussion by talking about Switzerland, what a beautiful country it is to to visit and uh I've only been there in the early fall and so I've done lots of hiking, but I've never skied there yet. What's your favorite place to ski in Switzerland? Well, a lot of people like Crom Montana or Zerat. They're very popular or Verbier. Uh so any any of those three locations are very very popular. Uh they're all uh very heavily English-speaking. I mean, not because they're full of English, but because the the tourist industry is so big. Um everybody in those towns will speak fluid English, more or less. Um and uh they've all got great ski slopes. Uh I'm not much of a skier myself. I did when I was younger, but I don't these days. But my my little boy, who's 8 years old, uh will go to one of these resorts every winter and take lessons there. And but they have lovely all of these Trenbontana, Verbier and Zerat as examples have lovely wide slopes uh ski schools uh lots and lots of choice of where you can ski and uh they're naturally compared with wherever you're coming from in the world going to be expensive. Uh but that's Switzerland for you. But you get what you pay for. uh you know you you you are getting a uh a quality and you're getting a level of uh let's say comfort from a safety perspective. Uh now I'm not saying that other places are unsafe particularly but in these very expensive places they're not the sort of places where criminals can afford to stay. So, you're probably not going to find your valuables stolen from your hotel or uh being mugged in the street or anything like that. I mean, it's it's unheard of really. Um, so, you know, if you're a person who can afford that extra cost and you're willing to pay $6 for a cup of coffee or $8 for a beer, uh, you know, it it's a great place to go. Well, I am definitely going to have to get there. Now you've already told us that if somebody wants to get your information on um the AI platforms and what prompts they use etc they can reach out to you on LinkedIn. Why don't you tell us about your YouTube channel? Yeah, so I I had a lot of demand uh from people saying uh I was getting questions non-stop about investing money. I've been investing in stocks now for 50 odd years and I was kind of interested before I was even 18 years old but I made my first investment at the age of 18 give or take and uh I've been investing for 50 years getting a lot of punches on the nose making mistakes and so every time I get a punch on the nose I learn something and try not to make that mistake again. I've also learned some very interesting lessons about ways of making money. And in a way, I think the stock market now is like a a tree with lowhanging fruit. You just have to pluck it or maybe you know have how you have to know how not to pluck the bad apples. Um but it it's there for the taking. So what I what I've realized is the world is a wash with people who'd like to do the same thing. Uh but they've never taught it in school. So what I've done I've started these YouTube channels. I'm doing a lot about investments. It's all about investments really. Uh teaching people uh different things they need to know, different aspects of investing in stocks and how to make money, how to pick the best stocks, how to analyze them, uh and different tricks they can use. Uh so I've done a um there was a video I did a couple days ago about how to make a lot of money really fast in the stock market, uh using one tech. It's just one technique and I've got one coming out in the coming days which is another way of how to make a lot of money. uh it's not quite so fast but uh I'll give it to you in simple English so people know what what's coming and but they have to watch the video to see it in full but the the trick uh in the what I'm going to describe is it's looking specifically at investment companies these are companies which exist to buy lots of investments uh quoted investments or unqued like private companies and they trade on the stock market but the share price is often different from the net asset value. It can be higher or it can be lower. So the first part of the trick is to identify those where the share price is a lot lower than the net asset value. But the second part of the trick is discover those companies where there is a catalyst which will close the gap between the price you pay on the stock market and the net asset value. And in some cases there is a catalyst. I give you I'll give you a very easy example. Everyone will understand here. You may remember the Grayscale Bitcoin Investment Trust. GBTC was the symbol. This is going back a few years ago. It was actually 2024. So, in I think it was August August 2024, GBDC won a court case against the SEC which would allow it to convert itself from an investment company into an exchangeraded fund. And the shares of GBTC were trading 25% below the Bitcoin value that it held. So it had more Bitcoin. It held by 1.25 Bitcoin for every share. It was in other words had a lot more Bitcoin than the share price reflected. So all you had to do was buy the shares of GBTC knowing that when it was finally approved for an ETF, you would have a 25% uplift. Now that approval took 4 and 1/2 months to come from the time from the time they won the court case to the time it was actually approved. So in 4 and a half months there was a 25% uplift. Now in the interim period the bitcoin price went up. So people actually bought on that day when I wrote about it on LinkedIn would have made 90% 90%. And because the bitcoin price went up and they closed the 25% discount gap. Uh if you bought it 6 months before that you'd have had a gap more like 35%. Uh so that was an example where there was a specific catalyst to say that the gap the discount will close. So with that specific example that was one of them but there's many other reasons why the the gap will uh close between net asset value and uh the share price. Other words you want the share price to go up to the net asset value. Of course you got market fluctuations in the meantime. So you might go up and down, but what you're looking for is this gap to get closer and closer together so that the odds are stacked on your side. So another example would be uh where a company is announced that it's going to go into liquidation, distribute all the proceeds back to the shareholders. And in my video, I'll be talking about two companies which are doing exactly that where the gap is very large and the time scale is a year or two before you'll get your money. Um but the another one I wrote about um I did a YouTube video on it. Um three months ago um it was process P R O SUS S. I said this is uh I can't remember why I put I said this is the number one AI company is $150 billion company where you're going to make a or you could make a lot of money by the gap closing. The reason the gap was closing was because the reason for the discount was a very large holding that process had in a particular company called 10-centent. Yet I could see by studying it that every day process was selling half a million 10-centent shares and guess through the stock exchange and every day 10-centent was buying half a million shares buying it back its own share stock. So and this was going on day after day after day for months and months and months. So, but that big discount is existed because proess had a huge holding of 10-centent and people didn't want to have all their eggs in one basket. But they were rectifying the problem and that meant that the the catalyst was rectification of the overconentration in one stock. Guess what? Anybody who went into process now has probably got at least 50% profit in a couple of months. Well, that sounds like it's going to be a very interesting video and I will be sure to keep an eye out for it and watch your LinkedIn profile. And once again, your the name of your YouTube channel is it's just Clive Thompson. It's got a few letters and numbers after it which YouTuber aside, but it's basically look up Clive Thompson and I'm sure you're going to find me. I think I'm the only guy with that name uh talking about stocks. I'm a subscriber by the way. Well, listen, Clive, I want to thank you very much for making the time. I do appreciate all your insights. Thank you, James. And uh look forward to talking with you again. And uh I hope your video does well. Thumbs up. And uh and also like to thank your viewers for the lovely comments they made last time I was on your show. Yes. The last interview you and I did uh had 95,000 views. So hopefully we can get over 100,000 this time. Wow. That's amazing. I don't get that number. I don't quite get that number of views on my channel, but hopefully some people will now look up Clive Thompson on YouTube and start to be subscribers and maybe I'll get up to your your kind of numbers. I'm sure they will. Once again, Clive, thank you. Thank you very much. Bye-bye now. [Music]
What Gold and Silver Stocks I'm Buying | Clive Thompson and Jimmy Connor
Summary
Transcript
[Music] Clyde, thank you very much for joining us today. How are things in Geneva? Hello, James. Well, thank you very much for having having us back. It's uh a great pleasure. Well, you know, the Swiss Frank just keeps going up and up and up. It makes Switzerland more and more expensive for those people who are arriving. Uh but of course uh plenty of people would like to come here and live here because you could earn a much higher you know a secret a qualified secretary will probably get more than a bank manager somewhere else in Europe uh or certainly some in some some countries. Uh so we've got you know strong demand of people to get in but there's nowhere for them to live. All the accommodation is completely chucka block and uh it's very very expensive. So we kind of got this problem with the um everyone wants to live here and they're allowed to because it's the under the FA rules and European Union rules which Switzerland's not part of but we have to join in with that. They can come but they can't find anywhere to live. So uh there's the dilemma for people who'd like to get these high salaries in Switzerland. Yes, I was there recently. I flew into Geneva, rented a car and drove all the way to Zurich. stopped in at half a dozen places in between and I it's just an amazing country. I can't say enough about it. And I always I always forget that they have their own currency because I brought euros with me thinking I could use them and nobody wanted them. Well, I'm surprised at that. Most most pe places should take euros. They'll probably give you I mean in the old days they used to give you one to one against the Swiss Frank because the euro was worth more than the Swiss Frank. Uh so we used to have an exchange rate of 120. uh that was in about 2015 when there was a peg to the euro and so if a Swiss person took a euro on one to one they were making a 20% profit almost immediately but of course now the euro is worth a lot less than the Swiss Frank uh so nobody's going to take euros anymore they're going down so we got to talk about gold seeing how Switzerland is like one of the gold capitals of the world and it's having an amazing year it's finally catching a bid here was up 25% in 2024. It's up over 50% now in 2025 and we still have a few months to go in the year. What are your thoughts on gold here and does it keep going? Well, first of all, it surprised an awful lot of people who made predictions a year ago. I was just going through my u uh my LinkedIn posts from about a year and a half ago and I came across a post I'd done on gold and I said uh the post went like this. It looks like gold is about to go through $2,000. And if it does so, that'll be very bullish. Um, and of course it has done. And now we've seen pro projection after projection from all the major banks always forecasting a price of $200 or $100 higher than the present price. So, we're starting to see banks now come out and forecast a price of $4,000. Uh, and we could potentially get there very, very quickly. I mean, I don't know if we might even be there by the time this goes comes out. Uh, so what what do I see happening to the price of gold? Long-term, I think it's destined to go much higher. Um, these things never go in straight lines, but we seem to have gone in a straight line for a long time. Um, so it would not surprise me if we have a a bad day, week, month, uh, but not a year, I don't think. Um we're we're in a very unusual situation, one which we have never seen before, and that is one where dollar holders don't know what to expect tomorrow. Uh you know, if we go back a few years ago, uh you could be fairly sure that if you had a a dollar receipt coming in, you knew roughly where it would be 6 months from now or a year from now, you trusted it. Now people are saying, I can't tell what's going to happen tomorrow. there's, you know, tariffs and uh surprises and political agendas going on and and it's all over. So although the dollar isn't really moving, there's this uncert this general feeling of uncertainty and people are saying, you know what, they weaponized the dollar. There's this going on, there's that going on. I'm not sure I can keep everything in dollars anymore. And so part of it moving into this safe haven. I mean, they're looking around for safe havens and you can't put it, you can't call Nvidia a safe haven anymore. So, uh, I think I think some of the money which is looking for that lower volatility, that greater degree of safety is heading into gold because people are saying, well, I don't know about the dollar, but I'm pretty damn sure my gold will still be there next year. I pretty sure it will buy something. And I think there's that certainty which is driving gold higher. U, on top of that, we've got the central banks. uh they're not buying as much as they were a year ago, but they're still steady buyers of gold and to a smaller extent we've got the public starting to come in and buy into the gold ETFs uh where the number of tons in the ETFs have been starting to rise. It's not again it's not spectacular I would say um but there's been a sort of little bit of a trend change from the public the man in the street who's starting to say maybe I should have a little bit of gold just because you know I can't have it all in Nvidia. Yes. And you rais a very interesting point there because I recall back in January, February, Numa, which is the largest gold producer in the world. They produce over 6 million ounces a year. One of the worstrun companies also in that sector. Uh it was actually down on the year, okay, back in Q1. Here we are closing in on the end of the year. It's up 125%. It's the second best performing stock in the S&P. It's the only gold name in the S&P, but it's up uh 125%. the number one performing stock I believe it's Palenter but it's just on pneumont beric is up over 100% finally that was another big leager's up over 100% many stocks are up 200% so uh maybe you can tell us about some of your favorite gold equities so first of all as a generality uh the price earnings multiples of these gold mining stocks are pretty reasonable there's plenty around which are price mult earnings multiples around head or low teens. Um, and when you compare that with the rest of the stock market at 25 times, it's relatively cheap. So, despite the rises, they're still not expensive in general. And the other uh point about all gold mining and silver mining stocks is that the profits are set to grow very rapidly. Why is that? It's because the gold price has risen, but it takes time before a rise in the gold price makes its way its way through to the bottom line profits. Uh because a lot of these gold mining companies will have sold the gold that they uh dug out of the ground this year at last year's prices because they'll have done some forward sales. Uh but as time marches on, the current prices will start to factor into the price at which they're selling the gold and their profit will be rising. So if we're on a price earnings ratio for a typical company of 10 or 12 times now it's quite likely that next year that very same company will be on a price earnings ratio of six. Now if you take a company which is fast growing which it will be next year they they all will be they'll be fast growing because of the higher profits they shouldn't be on low price earnings ratios. So I think what we're going to get with gold mining companies is the double whammy of first of all more profits pushing up the share price but secondly because they are now showing a track record of growth in their sales and their earnings we'll be seeing higher multiples applied. So investors normally apply a higher price earnings multiple to something which is growing. Uh there's all kinds of algorithms out there which do the maths for you. But if something's growing at 10% a year, it's likely to have a higher price earnings ratio than something growing at 1% a year. And so these gold mining companies are likely to be growing at 40 or many of them 40 or 50% a year by this time next year in terms of earnings per share. So I'm expecting uh not only the share prices to be higher than they are now due to the higher earnings, but also higher due to the higher multiple. So you've got this double whammy being applied. Uh and I think a lot of people have woken up to that. That explains the amazing rise we've seen in gold mining shares in general, but they're still not expensive be compared with what we're we've got coming down the line. Um in in terms of uh companies I like um now obviously I want to say these are not investment recommendations. Uh but you know I can mention one uh as an example. It's Muan Inc. U run by Rob Mchuan. Uh he's the guy who took uh I think it was Gold Corp or was it Gold Fields? I can't remember. But he he took it from something like a 50 million company to an $8 billion company. Um now the special feature about that company, it's a by the way, it's a gold and silver mining company. Uh and it's on a reasonably low price ratio based on the projected earnings for the current year. Uh but the the interesting feature about it is they also own a huge or share of a huge copper company. Uh it's called Mchuan Copper actually uh which is in has got a a lot of copper in Argentina and it's just likely in the next uh month or so to get the uh feasibility study completed. Uh and that would be the catalyst to push the share price a lot higher. Now Rob Muan is a serial entrepreneur who in in respect to this particular company is taking $1 a year as a salary and has a huge stake in the company. So his interest is completely aligned with the shareholders interest. Um as far as the subsidiary company the I think it's 47% of muan copper they own. So they've got so murk owns 47% of muan copper. I think that's the number. I might have got it wrong. Um, there are some other significant shareholders in Muan Copper, such as Stalantis, which is the Netherlands-based uh car manufacturer. And you might say, well, what's a car manufacturer doing investing in a copper mining company? Well, they they've done their work. They believe the copper's there and they're securing for themselves a long-term supply of copper which is going to be used a lot more in cars going down the uh in motorcars going down the road due to electrification and so forth. Um, so I think this is quite an interesting company because it's benefiting at the moment from the higher gold and silver price, but down the line we're going to have a lot more copper usage on the planet and just as this copper starts to come on stream, uh, we'll probably be we will pro I I think we'll be seeing a higher copper price, too. So, I kind of like that one uh quite a lot and it's the the forecast gold and silver to come out of this murink is set to rise rapidly. Uh so that's a that's quite a good one. Um another one which I like is in Australia. U it's called Ramilius Resources. Uh they recently made a a fantastic purchase of a company called Spartan. Now Spartan has huge resources of gold uh but they didn't have any money to dig it up. And Romelius Resources has uh both before and after the acquisition a lot of net cash in the bank and they say that they're going to uh start digging this gold up and they reckon that by 20 by 2030 this is the company's own projections and I can't give you the number because they gave but they did give it it's going to be a huge increase in the number of ounces of gold coming out of the ground compared with today. Um so again want to say these are not investment recommendations they're things I have bought myself because I believe that the amount of gold coming out of the ground will go up. I believe that the gold price will be higher and I believe that uh the the profit on what they dig up is going to be because of the higher gold price that much higher. So and and they're but all of these are reasonable multiples. Those are both new names for me. So I'm going to have to do some work on them. But one thing I was thinking about when I was when I mentioned that Numont's up 125% on the year, that tells me the generalist is coming back to the marketplace because a lot of people don't know anything about the gold market. They don't know anything about gold mining. So they say, "Okay, new months in the S&P, I'm going to buy that one." And so we know the generalists are coming back into the market, but what about other investors, retail investors, etc. like if they're not involved in the market yet and they think, "Okay, gold's up 50% on the year. It's at $4,000. I can't bring myself to buy it or it's gone too far too fast." Do you think there's still lots of time for people to step into the gold market, whether they buy the physical or they buy gold equities, or is it too late? Uh there's an awful lot of people who wish they bought at last week's price or last month's price. So, what we've seen recently is every time there's a short-term pullback of a day or two in the gold price or in the gold mining stocks, the next day, almost the next day, there's surges of buyers coming in and pushing it back to the previous price and higher. Uh, so, you know, there's a lot of people waiting for that dip. Uh, and I don't that means that when the when there are these dips, not going to go far because everyone's trying to second guess when they go in and they want to be before everybody else. And the minute it starts going back up again, they say, "Quick, I better get in before it moves." And then there's that this race as people leaprog each other putting their bids in to try and buy the share price. The the other thing for people who don't know what they're doing really, there's the gold mining exchangeraded funds. Now, an exchange traded fund is a a fund which holds hundreds of or tens of investments, maybe 40 or 50 investments in the in a particular sector. So the one which most people can look at is known as the van gold miners index. It symbol is GDX letter G for golf D for delta and X for X-ray. Uh so GDX uh basically will trade at the net asset value of those underlying 40 or 50 shares which are held by it. It's a very very large fund. It's in the billions. Uh so when you buy the GDX you're getting exposure to a basket of 40 or 50 stocks which will move in line with the average of the gold mining stocks up and down. Uh so that's a very interesting one to uh get into uh because you don't have to think about this one is this gold mining company better than that one. Uh but of course there is an effect when people put money into the GDX. The GDX has to buy everything in the underlying index. So the good and the bad all get pushed up on a rising tide by the purchases purchasers of ETFs like the GDX. But I think that's a very uh safe way to get in because you're not exposed to the specific risks of a single company. We must forget mustn't forget that uh gold mining is a very uh risky business for most gold miners. They you know they they have the risks of cave-ins, landslides, mud flows. uh that there's obviously in many countries uh industrial re industrial action there's electricity shortages in South Africa maybe for example uh there's political risks in lots of countries because most of these gold and silver values are they're not in nice safe Australia or Canada or North America they're in places like a you know Africa or Peru or Mexico where the politics are not at all the same and you never know so if you're into a uh an exchange traded fund. You own a bit of everything and you've got gold mines all around the world and some of them will go bad because of politics or because of some disaster somewhere but collectively they should do very well. You rais a very interesting point there jurisdiction when it comes to mining that's my number one criteria uh like I I want to be in Canada or the US or Australia and therefore you know they respect the rule of law and I don't have to worry about their assets being nationalized. Uh, one of the names I like is Igno. 75% of the gold production comes out of Canada. So, I don't have to worry about them losing their assets. So, uh, if I speak to you in one year from now, let's just say Q4 of 2026, where do you think the gold price is going to be? I'm putting you on the spot now. Well, it's going it's been going up much much faster than I expected. Um, and I think that continues at a similar pace. So, we could easily add another $1,000 in the course of the next 18 months. Um, I think uh which would push us uh almost almost to 5,000. And I'm not excluding the possibility it might go a lot faster than that. There's there's a whole bunch of things which might happen between now and then which might push the gold price up to I'm going to say strut, you know, could go much much higher. uh we might even see uh and I don't think it's a likely probability in the next 18 months but it's a possibility we might even see uh some sort of currency crisis where there's a panic about uh a particular currency and it doesn't matter which one it is whether it's the yen the pound or the dollar uh if we get a currency crisis and people start to say oh my god this currency I don't want it uh and that everyone's rushing down to the shops it can spiral across borders very very quickly so let's say the Japanese yen were to fail as an example. Um, everyone in every other country is going to say, "What if we're next?" And that what what do you do? What do you do if you fear you're going to be next? You take the money you've got and try and get something else, but suddenly you find nobody wants to take your money. Yes. Very, very good points. Um, one other thing I should touch on, you did touch on this, but the margins associated with these gold producers now. So, with inflation, uh, the government's telling us inflation's under control. I don't believe them, but anyhow, it did peak in 2022 at 9%. Um, and it's been coming down ever since then. So, we did have problems with with inflation within the mining sector back in 22,23, even the early part of 24, but it seems like it's under control. Now, the price of oil is really helping because that's one of the largest inputs into a mining company. So, the oil is hanging around 65 bucks a barrel, give or take. So that's having a big impact. So providing oil stays here, these margins are just going to keep exploding, right? Like it's just going to and that's well in any case when I do my maths on a gold mining company and I perhaps talk about how your viewers can value a gold mining company, um I'm assuming a rather uh bearish case for inflation. I'm assuming that the cost of gold mining will rise by about 10% a year. Now, that's probably uh over overly pessimistic, but perhaps just to help everybody who's looking at whether they should buy an individual gold mining company, I'm going to tell your viewers how to do the maths. And uh the even if you're not much of a uh much not much good at maths, we have a wonderful thing these days called chat GBT, which will do it for you. So, but I'll I'll tell you how to do it, then I'll just tell you the the faster way via chat chat GBT. So what you want to know is for any particular gold commanding company what the cost of production of the gold is that's called in called the allin sustaining cost or a s right and you know what price they should be selling it it at they should be selling it at the spot price there may be a lag here but they should be saying so the difference between the two figures tells you how much profit per ounce they are making. Now the next question is how many ounces of gold are they producing and if you look if you go to the com so when you look at the company's website and and look at their annual report and accounts or the last report every gold mining company tells you how many ounces they produce they might say gold equivalent ounces geo gold equivalent ounces cuz sometimes they translate silver into gold uh at a certain ratio or they translate gold into silver so they call it gold equivalent ounces uh so you know how many ounces they produce you know what the profit is. That's the gross profit of what they're selling it for. You're taking today's price minus what the allin sustaining cost is. So you now you've got the gross profit, but you also can see in the accounts all the other expenses they've got because they got lots of other expenses like taxes, like prospecting, like management overheads and so forth. So you have to knock that figure off. And by doing that you can forecast what the profit would be if the gold price stays where it is today. So you now have the net profit. You can now take that net profit and divide it by the number of shares in existence which is also in the company accounts. And you know the earnings per share. Now you can compare that number that earnings per share number with what was last reported to see first of all how fast it's growing its earnings per share. But secondly, you can apply a multiple to the earnings per share of 10 times or 15 times the market. That's called the price earnings ratio. So you apply whatever price ratio you think is appropriate. But I I usually take 10 to 15 times and see where the share price ought to be if next year's profits are where the gold are based on the gold price day. Now if you think the gold price is going up, you could take a higher number. I quite often look forward to 2027 and take a number of $5,000 an ounce for 2027 as an average price and work out what the profits will be gross knock off the other expenses then divide by the the net result divide it by the number of shares to get the earning per share and then I multiply that result by say 10 or 15 times to get where I think the share price will be and in almost every case I get to a share price which is much higher many multip multiples of today's price. Anything from two and a half times to eight times 10 times sometimes today's share price. Uh which tells me that we've got a lot of upside left. Now I've just told you I probably lost a lot of people with what I explained. So I'm going to tell you the easy way to do this. What you do and I I have the paid version of chatb. It's $20 a month but it'll work with uh probably work with the unpaid version. But chatb can do an awful lot of things it couldn't do 3 months ago. It can actually go and look at websites and work numbers out. So all you have to do is say go to the website of this company. You name the company. Look at all the all the papers you can find, the annual reporting accounts, the earnings calls, the quarterly results, and tell me how much money you think it will be making in 2027 based on a gold price of $5,000, for example, and based on an earnings uh price earnings ratio of 10 times. And it will tell you, and it will do it for you. It'll give you investment advice and it will tell you what it thinks the share price will be. Then all you have to do is look at the share price and compare it with today's price and say, "Do I like that number?" And that's dead easy because you're not having to go to the website yourself and pull out papers and study them. You're just saying to chat to me, go look at the website yourself, do the work, and tell me where the share price will be, and it will do it for you. Now, it's amazing how far we've come. You couldn't have done that 3 months ago. Uh, and of course, Chachi Pin is not the only one which will do that. Uh, Grock is uh, G R O K will do it very well. And if you really want to get sophisticated and pay a little bit more money, uh, there's Manis, M A N U S AI, uh, which is really good at doing that sort of thing as well. Yes, great insights. I spend a lot of time on chat. Uh, oh man, like continuously throughout the day, I'm spending a lot of time on there. It's providing so much information and it does it so damn fast. All right. So, you're bullish on gold, which is great to see as as am I. Uh what about silver now? It's up 60% on the year. It's not making new all-time highs like gold is, but uh it's damn close. What are your views on silver? Well, first of all, I think we're going past the all-time high um over time. Uh I don't think and I don't think that time is particularly long. Um we do know from looking at the silver institute's numbers that the mind supply of silver is considerably less than the industrial use. And that has been the case for about 3 or 4 years. And that explains why the silver price has been going higher because the only way you can get the silver you need to meet the demand is by recycling. So to get recycled silver, you have to have a higher price so that your granny brings in her candlesticks to the pawn shop and uh some investor says, "I've got this bunch of bars or coins I bought 5 years ago. I've got a nice profit." And they take it along to uh a gold and silver shop. We I don't know if it where it is everywhere in the world, but here in Switzerland, we've got places all over the place say we buy gold, we buy silver. So people take their stuff down, hand it over, and get the money because they like the silver price. And the higher the price goes, the more it will get people out. So that's what that explains why the silver prices had to go higher to suck out this silver for recycling. Um and I think the the silver demand continues to rise for two re well I suppose well one main reason but they kind of it's two reasons related in fact. The first and main reason is we're not the the main usage of silver is in the electronics industry. We are not going to have less electronics in the future than we have today. uh we've just seen uh very recently uh the US uh I I the government anyway some US agency which part of the government uh say that strate silver is now going to be a strategic uh mineral for the United States uh because they used to have a strategic stockpile of silver uh which was used by the military uh cuz it's used a lot by military that's completely gone now they've decided it should be a strategic mineral which means means that they should start to build a stockpile again. Uh because and they specifically say what the risk is. The risk is we might not be able to get silver out of Mexico. So if they suddenly can't buy all the because that's where most of the silver a lot of silver comes from. If they can't get silver from Mexico because of maybe some political problem or internal uh industrial re action or maybe some civil war or who knows what. Uh it would be a problem for the United States because it would damage US industry. It would damage the weapons industry. So I think that that could be another factor that this stockpile potentially might be rebuilt. Uh and the the trouble with that is there is no silver cuz it's all consumed by industrial use. So they'd have to push the price the price would be pushed higher if they go into the market and start buying. Now uh if they do so I suppose they'll do it very gently because they don't want to overpay. Uh but that's a factor. So the first of all that's the first thing the electronics industry in general it's not going to go backwards and we've got the potential stockpile but the second thing I think we've got to say is China is trying to stimulate its economy and you know the solar panel industry uh is likely to be a getting a big push out of the Chinese government because that's something which is uh an easy to sell uh to everyone in the world you know get cheap energy and cheap energy they call it clean energy energy. Uh so I think we've got this non-stop u push from China to make more and more solar panels which use and consume silver and of course the solar panel industry has been a big driver in the increase of use of silver. Uh I think two years ago we saw something like a 30% increase or the amount of silver being used in solar panels went up by something at 30% in a year. Uh it's not so much last year. uh but it's certainly increasing all the time because we're I mean even I'm going to have my solar panels put on my roof uh starting tomorrow. So and and I can say uh I'm here in Switzerland but we've got this huge pressure from the Swiss government basically saying everybody has got to do something to reduce their power consumption by using uh more economic methods of heating their homes in the winter and so forth. Uh so and from so it's coming from a sort of every angle a tax angle you you in other words you had one thing you had to do in Switzerland is if you were using electricity you had to report yourself to the government I fill in a form to say I'm using electricity for heating so they can keep an eye on you and come back by I think the deadline is 2033 you've got to find another method before then solar panel solar panels I mean you can only do what you can do But there's two main technologies used here as well. One's called heat pumps. Uh and the other one is called solar panels. Uh so you got to do one of the two by then. Interesting. Um okay. So you're bullish on silver now. Many of the stocks have had massive moves. You know, 100% 200%. Pan-American silver largest silver producer in the world. It's up 90%. First Majestic another large producer is up 120%. What silver names do you like? Um, I'd have to have a look. Um, give me give me give give me a a second because I actually have I wasn't prepared for that question and I I have bought a few names and I just want to see what I bought recently. Just looking for my spreadsheet. Okay, here we go. Um, so names I like and which I do have. Um, I've got Silver Corp, Endeavor Silver, uh, Silver X, uh, Santa Cruz Silver Mining. Um, and then there's a few which have sort of mixed uh, like Perseus mining and precious metals and so forth. Uh so you know to be to to home in on one um I I actually did a very uh extensive research of all the stocks which were in the SIL that's the silver mining ETF and the ones I chose um were the ones I just mentioned. Just give me a second. I'm just going to check those for you. Uh so yes, so Global X uh silver miners was one of mine. That's uh quoted in the USA. Uh Fresnillo in the UK. I don't know if you know that company. I bought that one. Um that's F R E S N I L O PLC. I think they mine in Mexico. Um, uh, sorry, ignore the silver X. I did buy it, but then I changed my mind on it, so that's not what I would buy anymore. Uh, then I bought Silver Metals, uh, Inc. that's quoted in New York. I said Endeavor Silver. I think I bought that. That was a good one. So, I can't really um tell you more about them individually because there was so many of them that I just went through and I end up buying what I thought was the best of the bunch based on my analysis at the time. But then to say I physically remember the specifics of each and every one, I can't tell you that. All I can tell you is those names I mentioned came out at the top of the list. Yeah. Well, you mentioned a lot of the largest uh silver companies there. And I have to correct myself. You mentioned Friselo. That is the largest silver producer in the world. I said it was Pan-American. I believe Pan-American's number two, but uh yeah, you got some great names there. So, where do you see the price of silver going? I think it Yeah, you're putting me on the spot. I mean, I think it continues higher for the supply and demand and I think it's also heavily influenced by gold. uh you know the one of the things we do have uh in the demand when I say industrial demand it's part of that is not really industrial demand it's investor demand and the the estimate from the silver institute is that 200 million ounces will be bought by investors this year I think that's going to prove to be a big underestimate because if you think about it 200 million ounces uh and work divide take the population of this planet which is 9 billion people roughly and divide and take that 200 million ounces. That means only one in 40 uh one in 45 people will get one ounce and I think more than one in 45 people are going to be making their first silver purchase this year and I don't think all of them will be buying just one ounce. I think some of them will be buying 10 ounces or 100 ounces or a thousand ounces. So the assumption that only 1 ounce will be bought by every 45 people on the planet for investment purposes seems to me to be an underestimate in the current environment when silver the silver price is rising and people are starting to notice it because people when something is moving in price they tend to hear about it they've got a friend who says hey I made some money on silver and then they talk about it and then they say oh I'll buy a silver coin I want to be like you know we all want to be part of a colleague uh you know if you go to a particular a church your friend goes to a church you might want to go to the same church if your friend's a member of a club a keep fit club you join the keep fit club if your friend buys some silver coins you might buy some silver coins it's a way of making that connection so I think that uh because people will be talking about their silver purchases I think it will bring in a lot of people to buy their first silver coins this year and I think that 200 million is going to be a big underestimate and to put that in context I think it's the annual production of silver is about 800 million ounces a year. So it's uh maybe 900 million ounces a year. It it's it's it wouldn't take much if we buy one ounce for every 22 and a half people instead of every 45 people. Uh that would take the uh it would be half of the global mine supply going into investment pots. Yeah. Like these silver stocks, you know, under the right environment, uh they can just explode to the upside. like we really haven't seen anything yet. And you know, to your point, it's a lot cheaper to buy, you know, spend 50 bucks on an ounce of silver versus 4,000 bucks on an ounce of gold. So, they can really take off. Um, I I I just to tell you, I bought my last uh coin, silver coin. I bought it just a few days ago. Um, now I paid about 50 bucks. Uh, but it's more of a a collector type coin. It's the 2026 uh Luna horse which has come out of Australia 1 oz. It's a 1 oz coin. I also bought the the gold version. So that was a little bit more expensive but about 80 times more expensive but so I got the uh the in Australia they they produce these coins called the Luna collection uh which is a different zodiac animal every year. So every year you get a new animal based on the zodiac calendar and the so 2026 will be the horse. Uh so they've just brought it out and you have to get them quickly before they're all sold out because they have limited production. Uh so every year when the new one comes out, not only for that collection, but that's what that the one I could get. I rush down to the coin shop and buy the coin. Uh and I have most of the coins going because this is on the third series. So, they've been going for 12 years, followed by 12 years. Now, we're in the third period of 12 years. I've got almost every one of those in at least in silver. Not not all of them in gold, I'm afraid. Um, and uh, you know, I I I think it's a lot of fun to collect coins, and I don't mind paying a little bit over the odds to get something which is part of the collection. Well, your son's going to enjoy that. He's going to be very happy that you made that investment in those gold coins. Yeah, of of course if you buy these things, you know, if you buy these things after 6 months have passed, they become very difficult to find. So, if you're if you've got part of the collection, you want to get the missing coin from 5 years ago or 10 years ago, it's much much harder to find. So, the time to get it is when they're fresh. Uh, and then from time to time, you'll come across the older ones, you know, uh, in an auction or from a friend or something and you can buy them, but you'll be paying more for the older ones than than the new ones. I just want to touch on or make one more point about silver. I recently interviewed somebody uh Michael Oliver. I'm not sure if you're familiar with him. He's more of a technical analyst and the way he measures this move in the silver price. He just looks at it from a historical point of view. The price of silver versus the price of gold. He says historically it's around 2%. So if gold's at 4,000 bucks, silver should historically based on historical prices be around $80 an ounce. So that's a significant move and he thinks even that is still very much undervalued. So I think it's going to be an interesting year. Silver is finally waking up which is good to see. CL if you go back to I was going to say if you go back 1920s it was like the ratio was like so 19 or 20 to1. Yeah, I want to get your view on one more point and I'm reading a lot about tokenization and a lot of companies or firms are trying to tokenize various assets. The CEO of Robin Hood recently said that tokenization of assets and a freight is a freight train coming to major markets and what are your views on this and do you think it's possible to tokenize gold or silver? Um, well, it already is. There's plenty of uh uh cryptos you could buy where you're able to exchange gold for the crypto or you could exchange the crypto for gold such as Pax Gold would be one. There there's also one from uh um Tether I forgot what it's called maybe called Tether Gold. I don't know the exact name. So there are cryptos out there which are convertible into gold and vice versa at a a fixed ratio of the number of coins or crypto coins if you like versus an ounce of gold. Uh of course you can't do it for a single ounce. You have to do it for a good delivery bar which is probably 400 ounces. Maybe they do 100 oz bars as well. But if you think about it even a 100 ounce bars uh what's that? That's um $350,000 US. So it's not changing backwards and forwards from gold to crypto is not for mom and pop. But of course, if you don't if you if you just want to buy the tokens, you can buy them on all the cryp on many of the crypto exchanges and you will benefit to some extent from the gold price because if the crypto price uh deviates too far away from the gold price, the arbitrageers step in and redeem the crypto for the gold or they redeem gold for crypto depending on which which side of the uh which way it's gone. I want to move on now and get your thoughts on artificial intelligence. you know a lot about this and it's hard to believe it was just three years ago that Open AAI released their first version of Chat GBT to the public in November of 2022. They recently did a raise $6.6 billion which now values that company at 500 billion if you can believe that number and it's still private. But what are your thoughts on AI? Like do you think it's just another bubble waiting to burst or is it overhyped? Is it is it have a lot more to go? Um well, it's going to bring uh huge changes to mankind in in lots of different ways just as the arrival of email then the worldwide web uh with the um websites did. Uh so it's a it's a freight train. It is a tra freight train which is coming at us and it's going to arrive very very fast and a large number of people are going to be impacted some positively probably more negatively uh at least in the early stages because they're going to lose their jobs. Um you know I uh I have a friend who lost his job uh probably a day or two ago. Um he was doing translations for a bank. So the bank would produce their documents in English and then they'd need to be translated into uh another language was called Italian for simplicity. Uh and every time he had a document they would pay him 700 bucks and he'd get maybe four or five translations a month. The bank has now decided they don't need a translator anymore because it can all be done by AI and then proof read by an Italian. They have Italian employees. it can be proof read by an Italian employee. So there's no real need to have that external translator doing the work. Of course, he'll go off and find some something else to do. And I expect that he was already uh having gone from manually translating the documents. He was probably already himself using AI, I suspect. Uh but that's just one example. But we saw the other day uh Nova Nordisk in uh Denmark announced that they're laying off 11,000 people uh reducing their workforce by 10%. Now, they didn't say it's because of artificial intelligence, but I can put two and two together because a few months before that, they wrote in one of their uh annual reports or quarterly reports, uh they wrote that because of artificial intelligence, they're now saving lives faster. And why are they saving lives faster? If you read between the lines, it turns out that it used to take, let's say, five months to produce a report with 50 people working on a report for the Federal Drug Administration. And they were saying, "Now we could do it in a week with just three people." So they gone from 50 people down to three and from six, five months down to a week. And that was their their pitch. So we're because we get quicker approvals or we can get it to the FDA quicker, we're saving lives faster thanks to artificial intellis. The pitch was artificial intelligence is saving lives. Perfectly good. Now they're firing 10,000 pe 11,000 people. Well, my conclusion is whatever they say the reason is, the reality probably is that a lot of those people uh are surplus to requirements because they have the other nine nine out of 10 people who are still who still got their jobs. some of that nine out of 10 have learned to master artificial intelligence and they no longer need an assistant. So, uh to give you another example, I saw somebody uh writing on LinkedIn just today. Uh he's saying uh if you're a chief executive and you go home before 11:00 at night, you're not you're not your competition will take you over. And there was no mention of artificial intelligence. But what I'm thinking is this guy two years ago if he would get uh what let's say one of his uh heads heads of departments would send him a uh a document a 30-page document with uh a report. He would have to pretend to read it and craft a intelligent sounding reply which makes it look like he actually read it. Of course he wouldn't have had time to read it but he would have pretended to read it. Uh that 30-page report. Well, today if he's doing his job right, he doesn't have to open his email because a a halfpage summary of what that 30-page document says should be in front of him with the specimen reply waiting for him to say go. So he's moved his time from spending maybe an hour pretending to read the document and and crafting a reply to 5 minutes. So across the world this will be happening. Now the real problem we've got uh the real problem enterprises have got at the moment is there's so few people who figured out how to harness the power of AI. I mean, everyone can go to chat GPD and say, uh, write a reply to this letter. That's that's the easy stuff. But there's so many tasks which are much more complicated and and and harder than that. You have to know if you're doing it if you're doing it right. You have to know which AI to use, which task. You have to know how much it's costing per token. That's how they they measure the cost because every AI has got different cost per token. You have to know how to frame the question. You have to know how to put the context. You have to know how to describe the audience for the AI, which who who is it speaking to? Is it speaking to a a classroom full of kids or is it speaking to sophisticated nuclear engineers who know who know what they're talking about? Uh you have to describe how you want the out the output to look. Do you want it in a PDF format? Do you want it well-designed? You want colors? Uh do do you do you do you want it to be uh with short sentences? Do you want it to have headings? You you have to be able to describe what you're looking for uh in in that respect. uh and you have to know how to iterate which means do you give the entire prompt 150 lines to the AI up front and say here's 150 lines just go do it or do you say do this bit and then it comes back and you say now do do the next bit and then you describe how it does next bit then you say the do the next bit you keep iterating backwards and forwards so all of these things are skill sets um which need to be understood and then of course you've got to implement uh in if you're doing it really well you've got to be able to harness the power of uh Python or other uh programming languages to uh manipulate the data which is being given to you or to manipulate the AI itself. So the number of people who can do all of these things is pretty thin on the ground. Of course, there's plenty who can, but it's just not enough for what's required by all the companies in the world who would like to press forward with AI. But they're all going hell for leather, and they're all, if you look at the advertisements, you see a lot of job advertisements for people who are called prompt engineers, and they're willing to take people who know how to say, "How do I grow potatoes?" Because that's the best they could get. The good ones are gone. So there's a lot that I want to unpack there. But the first thing I should say just because you were talking about um the various prompts to use etc. But you developed a template or a guideline for people that they can use when they use these various AI platforms. So if somebody wants to get that template, where can they go? Uh well, if they contact me on LinkedIn and it's the only place I'll reply, um I'll be happy to send them a copy of the AI instruction sheet. So it's it's a like a it's a few pages. You can spend two hours on it if you want or even an hour. Uh and you'll become if you haven't got a lot of experience in AI if the best you've ever done is say write a reply to this email. You'll become after reading that 10 times better at harnessing and using AI. And there will be some there is a in that uh sheet a specimen prompt which will move you from that one sentence to 15 sentences which will give you much better much more satisfactory results. And Clive you you touched on the impact that AI is having on unemployment people losing their jobs. Uh what did you say? Novartis is laying off 11,000 people. No uh Nova Nordisk. Okay. The other company I read about was Salesforce. I believe they're laying off uh over a thousand people because of AI and the large uh consulting firm Asenture has also announced massive layoffs associated with using AI more. I believe it was 11,000 people also. But I was recently listening to a podcast uh the New York Times put puts out a podcast called the Daily. They were talking about computer programming uh a computer science degree and how people are are coming out of university with these degrees for computer programming or computer science and they can't get a job like 10 years ago 15 years ago that was the degree to have but now you can't get a job because they're being replaced with AI. I mean uh I I am not a programmer. Uh but about uh I retired three and a half years ago and about a year ago uh I saw somebody write something uh saying I'm I was something to do with investments. I must look at this using Python. I thought that's interesting. How can Python help me look at investments? So I contacted him on LinkedIn and said I heard you're using Python to do something with investments. How does that work? He said, "Well, actually, Clive, I teach Python. If you want to take lessons, I'll give you lessons, you know, paid lessons." So, I I paid for the lessons. I had eight lessons and I learned Python. But as I learned Python, I learned that there's a shortcut. All you have to do is throw it into an AI like Claude. I use that's my preferred one. I throw it into AI like Claude and say, "Uh, here's what I've written. I want you to improve it or I want you to do this. I want you to add that." So once you've got the basic idea of what you want to do, you just say to Claude the AI, you say improve this or add that feature or add a add a box here or add to change the color or and little by little you can build some very sophisticated programs without knowing anything about programming at all. And so I've I've I've actually done that. You know, I've written a chess program. Uh uh now not not that I I know about chess but I don't know anything about enough computing to write a chess program. I've written programs to read by email. I've written programs to uh analyze stocks. I've written programs to um uh there's one I wrote which goes and hunts through if you put in a search term hunts through the internet pulls out or finds all the pages which are most likely to have the answer for what you're looking at. downloads all the pages and then uses AI to interpret them into a single document which is more complete than having to visit lots of different websites to get your answer. So there's many many things you could do with pro the combination of programming Python in my case uh or it could be HTML or whatever it doesn't have to be but but uh programming and AI by putting those two together you can make a lot of things without knowing anything about programming other than how to give an instruction really. So no wonder programmers are losing their jobs. Uh they don't have to know anything about programming. They just have to know how to design an end product and tell the AI to do the rest. But just imagine how frustrating that is. You go to university into a very tough program like computer science or computer engineering. You're expecting to get this good paying job when you come out maybe in Silicon Valley or some big tech company and then you can't get a job. Like on this podcast they've said the unemployment rate for people with a computer science degree is 7%. This is in the US now. And for somebody with a biology degree it's 3%. Yeah. Well the trouble is this is going to come everywhere. So it doesn't matter whether you're uh when you're if you're coming out of university and you know everything about whatever your pet subject is. The reality now is the the firms which are hiring you probably don't need you because in the past they'd hire the university graduate to do some tasks. But now the man at the the next layer up who's giving you those tasks won't ask the human being to do it. He's going to say to the AI, "Write me, write me a report on this investment or uh study the impact of u sugar on the blood level," you know, whatever it is. And because we want to produce a report on it and so why would he have a university graduate who's going to take a week to do the job and isn't going to do it as well as the AI can do in a few minutes? It makes, you know, makes no sense. You know, if you think about it, AI, it doesn't need a cubicle. It doesn't need a a chair. It doesn't need a desk. It doesn't spend its time going to the coffee machine and chatting about last night's Netflix program. It it it doesn't take holidays. It doesn't have sick days. It doesn't have any kids. It's not asking for a payriseise. It's not upsetting the the the pretty girl in aisle number in booth number 42. It's not causing any problems with your boss or having having sick days or anything like that. You know, AI works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. if you need it. Why would you get a human to do it? I mean, you should, for social reasons, employ the human, but if you employ the human, your competitor is going to employ the AI and they'll be ahead of you. So, it's coming with a with a vengeance. It's going to be interesting to see how things evolve in the coming years. Well, Clyde, I always enjoy these discussions and we started this discussion by talking about Switzerland, what a beautiful country it is to to visit and uh I've only been there in the early fall and so I've done lots of hiking, but I've never skied there yet. What's your favorite place to ski in Switzerland? Well, a lot of people like Crom Montana or Zerat. They're very popular or Verbier. Uh so any any of those three locations are very very popular. Uh they're all uh very heavily English-speaking. I mean, not because they're full of English, but because the the tourist industry is so big. Um everybody in those towns will speak fluid English, more or less. Um and uh they've all got great ski slopes. Uh I'm not much of a skier myself. I did when I was younger, but I don't these days. But my my little boy, who's 8 years old, uh will go to one of these resorts every winter and take lessons there. And but they have lovely all of these Trenbontana, Verbier and Zerat as examples have lovely wide slopes uh ski schools uh lots and lots of choice of where you can ski and uh they're naturally compared with wherever you're coming from in the world going to be expensive. Uh but that's Switzerland for you. But you get what you pay for. uh you know you you you are getting a uh a quality and you're getting a level of uh let's say comfort from a safety perspective. Uh now I'm not saying that other places are unsafe particularly but in these very expensive places they're not the sort of places where criminals can afford to stay. So, you're probably not going to find your valuables stolen from your hotel or uh being mugged in the street or anything like that. I mean, it's it's unheard of really. Um, so, you know, if you're a person who can afford that extra cost and you're willing to pay $6 for a cup of coffee or $8 for a beer, uh, you know, it it's a great place to go. Well, I am definitely going to have to get there. Now you've already told us that if somebody wants to get your information on um the AI platforms and what prompts they use etc they can reach out to you on LinkedIn. Why don't you tell us about your YouTube channel? Yeah, so I I had a lot of demand uh from people saying uh I was getting questions non-stop about investing money. I've been investing in stocks now for 50 odd years and I was kind of interested before I was even 18 years old but I made my first investment at the age of 18 give or take and uh I've been investing for 50 years getting a lot of punches on the nose making mistakes and so every time I get a punch on the nose I learn something and try not to make that mistake again. I've also learned some very interesting lessons about ways of making money. And in a way, I think the stock market now is like a a tree with lowhanging fruit. You just have to pluck it or maybe you know have how you have to know how not to pluck the bad apples. Um but it it's there for the taking. So what I what I've realized is the world is a wash with people who'd like to do the same thing. Uh but they've never taught it in school. So what I've done I've started these YouTube channels. I'm doing a lot about investments. It's all about investments really. Uh teaching people uh different things they need to know, different aspects of investing in stocks and how to make money, how to pick the best stocks, how to analyze them, uh and different tricks they can use. Uh so I've done a um there was a video I did a couple days ago about how to make a lot of money really fast in the stock market, uh using one tech. It's just one technique and I've got one coming out in the coming days which is another way of how to make a lot of money. uh it's not quite so fast but uh I'll give it to you in simple English so people know what what's coming and but they have to watch the video to see it in full but the the trick uh in the what I'm going to describe is it's looking specifically at investment companies these are companies which exist to buy lots of investments uh quoted investments or unqued like private companies and they trade on the stock market but the share price is often different from the net asset value. It can be higher or it can be lower. So the first part of the trick is to identify those where the share price is a lot lower than the net asset value. But the second part of the trick is discover those companies where there is a catalyst which will close the gap between the price you pay on the stock market and the net asset value. And in some cases there is a catalyst. I give you I'll give you a very easy example. Everyone will understand here. You may remember the Grayscale Bitcoin Investment Trust. GBTC was the symbol. This is going back a few years ago. It was actually 2024. So, in I think it was August August 2024, GBDC won a court case against the SEC which would allow it to convert itself from an investment company into an exchangeraded fund. And the shares of GBTC were trading 25% below the Bitcoin value that it held. So it had more Bitcoin. It held by 1.25 Bitcoin for every share. It was in other words had a lot more Bitcoin than the share price reflected. So all you had to do was buy the shares of GBTC knowing that when it was finally approved for an ETF, you would have a 25% uplift. Now that approval took 4 and 1/2 months to come from the time from the time they won the court case to the time it was actually approved. So in 4 and a half months there was a 25% uplift. Now in the interim period the bitcoin price went up. So people actually bought on that day when I wrote about it on LinkedIn would have made 90% 90%. And because the bitcoin price went up and they closed the 25% discount gap. Uh if you bought it 6 months before that you'd have had a gap more like 35%. Uh so that was an example where there was a specific catalyst to say that the gap the discount will close. So with that specific example that was one of them but there's many other reasons why the the gap will uh close between net asset value and uh the share price. Other words you want the share price to go up to the net asset value. Of course you got market fluctuations in the meantime. So you might go up and down, but what you're looking for is this gap to get closer and closer together so that the odds are stacked on your side. So another example would be uh where a company is announced that it's going to go into liquidation, distribute all the proceeds back to the shareholders. And in my video, I'll be talking about two companies which are doing exactly that where the gap is very large and the time scale is a year or two before you'll get your money. Um but the another one I wrote about um I did a YouTube video on it. Um three months ago um it was process P R O SUS S. I said this is uh I can't remember why I put I said this is the number one AI company is $150 billion company where you're going to make a or you could make a lot of money by the gap closing. The reason the gap was closing was because the reason for the discount was a very large holding that process had in a particular company called 10-centent. Yet I could see by studying it that every day process was selling half a million 10-centent shares and guess through the stock exchange and every day 10-centent was buying half a million shares buying it back its own share stock. So and this was going on day after day after day for months and months and months. So, but that big discount is existed because proess had a huge holding of 10-centent and people didn't want to have all their eggs in one basket. But they were rectifying the problem and that meant that the the catalyst was rectification of the overconentration in one stock. Guess what? Anybody who went into process now has probably got at least 50% profit in a couple of months. Well, that sounds like it's going to be a very interesting video and I will be sure to keep an eye out for it and watch your LinkedIn profile. And once again, your the name of your YouTube channel is it's just Clive Thompson. It's got a few letters and numbers after it which YouTuber aside, but it's basically look up Clive Thompson and I'm sure you're going to find me. I think I'm the only guy with that name uh talking about stocks. I'm a subscriber by the way. Well, listen, Clive, I want to thank you very much for making the time. I do appreciate all your insights. Thank you, James. And uh look forward to talking with you again. And uh I hope your video does well. Thumbs up. And uh and also like to thank your viewers for the lovely comments they made last time I was on your show. Yes. The last interview you and I did uh had 95,000 views. So hopefully we can get over 100,000 this time. Wow. That's amazing. I don't get that number. I don't quite get that number of views on my channel, but hopefully some people will now look up Clive Thompson on YouTube and start to be subscribers and maybe I'll get up to your your kind of numbers. I'm sure they will. Once again, Clive, thank you. Thank you very much. Bye-bye now. [Music]