Byron King: Gold, Silver Upside "Wide Open," Hard Assets Heating Up
Summary
Market Outlook: Strong bullish sentiment on resources with a focus on gold and silver pullbacks being temporary, limited downside, and long-term upside amid sticky inflation and constrained Fed policy.
Gold Miners Strategy: Preference for profitable producers first, then advanced developers and quality explorers as the cycle progresses, given high margins at current gold prices.
Contango ORE (CTGO): Highlighted as a current idea with production in Alaska, toll-processing high-grade ore with Kinross, plus development (Lucky Shot) and exploration upside (Johnson Tract).
Rare Earths: Emphasis on end-market criticality (electronics, autos, defense), processing bottlenecks, and U.S. onshoring push; MP Materials (MP) discussed as a key name while stressing the importance of downstream refining capability.
Policy and Timing: U.S. rare earth buildout framed as a de facto Manhattan Project with bipartisan support, aiming for new processing capacity by 2026–2027 amid China embargo risks.
Platinum: Re-rating case tied to durable internal combustion demand and broad industrial uses (chemicals, refining, aerospace, electronics) after a long period of underperformance.
Antimony: Identified as strategically critical for munitions, fireproofing, and metallurgy with fragile supply chains; Perpetua Resources (PPTA) and the Stibnite, Idaho district highlighted as key U.S. leverage.
Helium: Niche opportunity driven by essential role in semiconductor fabrication; scarcity of high-purity sources creates potential for select high-quality plays.
Transcript
[music] I'm Charlotte Mloud with investingnews.com and here today with me is Byron King of Paradigm Press was formerly Agora Financial. He is a longtime newsletter writer, a geologist and he works closely with Jim Records. Thank you so much for being here. Great to have you. >> It is a pleasure to be with you. We've we we've missed each other a couple of a couple of conferences in a row, so we can finally catch up. >> Yes, I caught you this time and we're here at the New Orleans Investment Conference for context. And we've gotten to the end of day three, so I think I can ask if you have any takeaways you'd share in terms of sentiment, things you're hearing on the show floor. >> The sentiment is very positive. I mean, as we speak today, they tell me, I don't know, but they tell me the market's selling down. I think that's just a thing. uh what you hear at this conference both from the the the attendees and from the exhibitors is that there is a robustness to the resource sector. Gold, silver of course, but others as well, you know, copper, lead, zinc, rare earth, uranium, all these things. Uh one one person put it really well. He said he said it used to be that when a company went out to raise money, they would raise $3 million or 5 million or 10 million was considered a big raise. Now, really good companies with management teams and a and a good project, they can raise 20 million, 50 million bucks. And so, that's not insider money. That's not like our little mining sector money coming in. That's generalist money coming in from the other the other side of the market from, you know, all that all that vapor wear over there on the other side. >> Well, I think those are really good takeaways and you're right, it's very very positive sentiment here, especially around the precious metals. I will spend a little bit of time with you I think on this pullback that we're seeing in gold and silver and maybe you can add some context there because although there is positivity there is also some concern about how long this might last when do we start to go back up again so what thoughts would you share there >> well the that's a nice question of you know when do we start to go back up again I think the first thing to do is just kind of reassure yourself if you're in this market or if you're looking to get into this market let's say you're somebody out there and you've just you just haven't done it because you've had other priorities in life, you've got other other interests. You know, should I get in now or should I wait or or you know, should I should there be a big pullback? Whatever. These are the kind of questions people have whether you're in the market or whether you're not. Uh I do think based on what I've heard here and just on my own research just as the newsletter writer guy um I think that where we are now with say gold and silver you know gold in the let's call it $4,000 range it might be in the 3900s but that that's statistical noise in a lot of respects you know uh silver in the pick a number $48 range it might be 47 again statistical noise you know uh what's the downside risk I don't think the downside risk is big I mean at $4,000 gold. Are we going to see $3,000 gold? I doubt it. We going to see $2,000 gold. It would be I I cannot conceive of that, but you know, I never say never, but I just I just don't think it's possible. Is the upside potential still there? Yeah, absolutely. Uh how soon? Uh you know, uh looking at what's going on, you know, not tomorrow, not next week, not next month, but but you know, if you're in it for the long term, the answer is absolutely yes. uh you know what are you know it's it's the usual litany of national embarrassments you know inflation is sticky inflation is permanent uh the Federal Reserve simply cannot raise rates uh Brian London our dear friend Brian who sponsors this conference in in the in his talk on Sunday night his welcome welcome aboard talk to 600 people or 700 people whatever it was in the in the audience uh he basically made a point he showed a few slides made a point that the Federal Reserve is really constrained basically ally forever from raising interest rates because when they raise rates the interest on the national debt goes up and the country United States cannot afford to pay high interest on the national debt. we can't afford to pay the interest we pay now, you know. So, but national embarrassments, you know, inflation is there. It's sticky. Uh uh we're we're we're really stuck in an interest rate and bro, you know, uh swamp, you might say. Uh you know, federal deficits are just, you know, bottomless, endless, you know. I mean, I mean, we never pass a budget anyhow. The government's, you know, as we speak, the government's shut down. Maybe it'll open up in the next couple days. I don't know. But, uh uh national debt 38 trillion. interest on the debt 1.7 trillion. You know that this all comes you the numbers simply do not add up. Uh Rick Rule yesterday gave a brilliant talk uh where he he did add up the numbers and they don't add up. You know I mean I think you may have seen it. Uh you know you know he show he he basically listed all the numbers and you know here's the numbers. Do they add up? Well they do add up but they don't add up if you know what I mean. So uh what does that mean for gold silver? You know it's the downside's limited the upside is wide open. What does that mean for gold, silver, miners? Again, every company can have its have its bad day, what have you. A good company with good management, good assets, uh, is destined for success far more so than, you know, than your typical vaporware company. Um, and as far as the other hard assets of the world, I mean, you know, you've got your gold, silver, monetary metals. Then you've got everything else, you know, copper, lead, zinc, uh, antimony, tungsten, rare earth, all, you know, the periodic table of the military metals as I I I like to call them. You know, the stuff that you can actually do things with, you know, run an industrial economy, certainly have a a military establishment. >> Okay, we've got so many topics that we could go on the plate here. Sorry. A small small followup on the gold and silver stocks right now just because I think people are wondering how they should strategize there right now especially if when they saw the prices go up maybe they took profits but people might be thinking now you know you hear early on in the bull market you should go for the producers then you can move on down the chain so maybe just any thoughts on on where people might want to focus right now. >> Sure. And where people might focus depends on who those people are. Absolutely. I mean, if you're if you're a low-risk person, you want to focus on on mining companies that are producing, you know, companies that are producing gold because right now, a lot of the cost per ounce to produce that gold, 1200, 14, 15, $1,800 bucks in a $4,000 world. There's a lot of there's a lot of a lot of profit on that. You and so, uh, some of these companies are showing blowout earnings. And even though they show the blowout earnings, Wall Street still hasn't figured this out. You know, if you if you buy stocks because you think that they have a value proposition to them, what could be more value proposition than a company that's making, you know, 2,000 bucks an ounce on the gold that it mines out of the ground? You know, this is this is that's an easy one. Uh I I like uh advanced developers who are on their way towards production uh to the extent that they're on their way towards production or to the extent that they're going to get bought by somebody who just, you know, they they just want to bring them into the bring them into the camp. Um as you move down the development, you know, scale into say advanced exploration. There's a lot of really great advanced exploration companies that like Rodney Dangerfield, they got no respect for the last, you know, five, six, seven years, whatever. But they they've been out there working. They've been out there drilling, finding uh building models, uh you know, uh putting ounces on the paper, you know, putting ounces on the paper, pounds in the ground, you know, uh good numbers, and uh there's a whole lot there's a whole lot of really nice companies like that. I mean, I uh I'm I'm not ashamed to mention Contango or CTG. Contango, they're one of the exhibitors here. Uh and uh they give you some of everything. They are a they are a producer in Alaska. They are actually producing high-grade 8 gram per ton ore which they then you know ship up to Kin Ross and they process it. Split the money. That's okay. Uh and then uh then they have another project that's an advanced development project called Lucky Shot and I've been I visited it in July. I was up in Alaska. I went down into the tunnel with my hard hat and my boots and and all my vest and all that good stuff and I literally stood at the or seam and I put my finger on the or bodies and I was looking at it. you know, it's it's it's developing and it's it's going to turn into something good. And then they have a a sort of an advanced exploration at a place called Johnson Tract, which is about 130 miles southwest of Anchorage. Visited that and oh my goodness, the stuff that they're pulling out of the ground in the course on the drills is phenomenal. And so there's exploration upside like you wouldn't believe. So, you know, I know I know everybody wants, you know, they want ideas. Contango or CTGO. There you go. >> Thank you very much for sharing. And while we're on the note of precious metals, when we were corresponding ahead of this interview, you mentioned you're you're going in a lot of directions right now. Platinum is one of them. So, I wanted to bring it up. For me, it it reminds me of silver with kind of that prolonged deficit and now we're we've seen the price move this year. What are your thoughts on platinum? How are you approaching that one? platinum's problem uh so to speak for let's say 10 years has been that there is this global idea that internal combustion engines are going to go away and one of the big uses for platinum was in a catalytic converter on a combustion car on your on your gasoline engine and when people say well you know in the future we're going to do away with these internal combustion cars we're going to drive little electric cars and you know that that really caused uh the the whole platinum sector to just wither you know you know I mean it didn't high, but it it withered. And you had really great companies like say Saban Stillwater out in Montana that were just they were just barely keeping the doors open. I mean, they were literally they were laying people off just cuz they they just couldn't couldn't make it work. But they didn't close the mine. Good for them. And uh but anyhow, the you know what people have figured out in the last oh year or so is that, you know, no, our our future is not all EVs. our future is going to include internal combustion for the next you know generation or two or three and uh and so you know so that revitalized the platinum sector we saw platinum go from pick a number you know 900 bucks to whatever it is now 1617 you know so uh there there's a nice future for platinum it is a it's a very important industrial metal it's used in chemicals industry petroleum refining aerospace lot lots of lot you know electronics lots of uses besides just platinum jewelry and you know coins and what whatever else. Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. Lots of applications there. Okay. We'll we'll leave precious metals behind because we have a lot to cover and I want to make sure we get into critical minerals because I think this is really important. I'm going to start with rare earth because there's been so much attention. I'm seeing mainstream media headlines about rare earth because of the US China tensions and I know that that is ramped down a little bit right now, but I can't I can't imagine that this is something that's not going to rear its head again in the future. But for people who are looking at that and thinking, "All right, maybe I do want to get into rare earths." How should they approach it? Maybe the time is not now because it's so heated. But what do you think? >> Well, the first thing you should do is, you know, read up on it uh you know, a little bit. I mean, I'm not asking everybody to take a a course in, you know, advanced uh mineral chemistry or something like that. But, you know, you should understand what these things are. But basically, uh, your, you know, your life, my life out there in watcher land and viewer land, our lives are run by rare earth. You just don't know it. Uh, I I I I put my coat behind the tape, my chair here, but I would usually pull out my cell phone at this point and point to it and say, "My cell phone, out of 92 elements on the periodic table, my cell phone has 63 of them in it." You know, none of them by accident, including a bunch of the rare earth elements. But electronics don't work without rare earths. uh magnets, motors, uh if you're in your car and you push a little button and the window goes up or down or you move your seat back and forth or you move the steering wheel or the power steering, none of that works without rare earth because you've got these these little booster motors in your car that make these things worth work. Let alone the, you know, the the electric vehicles, let alone so much else. And and then then you get into the whole military angle to it. You know, the whole I mean pretty much every weapon that's worth having other than maybe a rock or a spear, you know, has has, you know, has rare earth component to it. I mean, when my son came back from from Iraq, you know, he had to turn in all his classified electronic gear and everything else. And I was thinking about all that stuff that he's handing across the table back to the, you know, back to the back to the quartermaster or whatever. And uh you know all that stuff, your night vision goggles, certain of the communications gear, optics on the rifles and everything else. It all uh it it it all has rare earth in it. You know, the the guidance systems, the missiles, the jet engines, the F-35s, the submarines, the destroyers, they all they all they all have uh rare earth in them in one form or another. Electronics, magnets, optics, uh very, you know, so so many different things. Yeah. Uh yep. I didn't answer the question though. >> Oh yes yes yes. Well yeah I guess the question is essentially so very hot right now. We could see all the applications. Should you come into the space right now? >> It's not a bad idea. Uh but you got to come into the space understanding what's out there. You know the really hot name has been MP Materials and say well MP materials they have this rare earth mine in California. Yeah they do. And yes, there are rare earths in what they mine. It's, you know, as a geologist, as a minology guy, it's not quite the right ore for all the rare earths you want. There are other places, there are other and better rare earth deposits in America, in Canada, elsewhere in Australia, elsewhere in the world. Um, and uh uh and and so that that that question turns the whole idea of rare earths into, you know, where's your feed stock? And then the next question is what do you do with this stuff once you mine it? Because if all you do is mine rock and anybody just about anybody can mine rock, you know, um you can take the rock and you can crush it into little stones or whatever, but if you if you can't process it into something else that you can use, you may as well just sell it to the railroad to use as track ballast. You know, use sell it to the highway department for road bed. You have to turn the rock into a product. And that is where uh the refinement you know comes in. Uh and now the question is you know can MP materials do that? Can some of these other rare earth wannabes you know do that? Uh are there good companies out there doing that that are not called you know China? U the the answer is yes. I mean I mean China has a very brute force approach to you know doing rare earths. They've been doing it for 40 years. They mine a lot of stuff. They crush it up. They dissolve it in acid and they do a lot of chemistry and they uh it takes a lot of time and a lot of resources and it's an environmental mess but but they do have a whole food chain or a whole processing chain to get it down to very very very high quality uh you know end products uh can in can the west leapfrog probably a generation or even two generations of technology and cut catch up with them? The answer is yes. And I actually have a really great company that can do that, but I'm not going to tell you what the name is because I saved that for the readers. And it's a it's a backend part, one of the things, but but it it it won't be too hard to figure out. They're building a plant in Louisiana. So, not just just right up the river in Alexandria from from where we are. >> Okay. Well, well, hopefully people can find the clues and and do some digging there. So, when it comes to rare earths, we we should think about being in the sector. We've got to keep an eye on the processing. The other thing I wanted to ask you about when it comes to that and you mentioned MP materials and we've had the government get involved there. It seems like the US government is starting to get more serious about rare earth and the other critical minerals but rare earths. >> Absolutely. The you know there are flashes in the pan that they come and they go and there are other things that are not flashes in the pan. I think right now it is very fair, it is very safe to say that rare earth development in the west in general, the USA in particular, rare earth development is a bipartisan national strategic priority. I mean, you've got you've got President Trump, you've got the whole administration, you know, pushing these ideas and you say, well, they're supporting this company, that company, whatever. Yeah, but they're doing that for a reason, you know. I mean, it's because China has said, we're going to embargo rare earth. they have embargoed rare earths. Uh then recently they said not only are we, you know, really restricting rare earth, we're going to restrict the rare earth that if you buy them from us and you put them in another product, we're going to restrict that product, too. And uh the Treasury Secretary Scott Besson just not too long ago said, you know, China really crossed the line on that. I I think he was just waiting for an excuse to say that. Uh from the standpoint of managing American uh strategic safety, North American strategic safety, throw Canada in there, too. I mean, you know, you're you're part of North America whether you like it or not, you know. Uh but uh in terms of managing the strategic security of this continent. Uh there is no way that the military complex can rely in the future on China as a supplier. They are an unreliable supplier. They are politically, you know, motivated to hurt us. They've weaponized it. They've shown how they weaponized it. Not that we don't weaponize stuff against them, too, but but this is too important. This is truly the jugular vein. It's the it's the corateed artery. It's the it's the left anterior descending, you know, vein out of your heart. You you you break that one and you're you're you're killing the economy. You really you are you are destroying not just the military, you're destroying the automotive sector, the electronic sector, you know, just a whole lot of sectors. They just go away and the military, you know, kind of dies on the vine as well. So there I would call it a uh a quiet Manhattan project. I mean, the Manhattan Project was so secret that nobody knew what it was, but everybody knows what the Manhattan Project was now. You saw the movie Oppenheimer. Yeah. Okay. No, everybody knows rare earths are another Manhattan project, but they're being done, you know, without calling it that. Uh, in terms of get it done, get it done fast, get it done right, you know, get the science right, and we're going to work out the engineering. Build those plants as quickly as you can. We want them online by the middle of 2026, and we want them producing stuff by early 2027. And those dates are magic dates in the in in geopolitics because, you know, Xi Jinping said that by 2027, we want the Chinese army to be ready to retake Taiwan, which is another way of saying by 2027, we want to have a war in the Pacific. And um and so uh you know, we may or may not have a war in the Pacific, but you can't plan as if you're not going to have it. If you plan to have the war, maybe you won't. You know, if you don't plan to have a war, you probably will. So, >> so rare earth clearly highly important right now, but but it's not just rare earths that the US government is interested in right now and I think investors might be wondering all right so what else should I be looking for because it seems a lot of the time you mentioned antimony I think earlier in the conversation and it sometimes seems like these things come out of nowhere and I know that they don't they come out of somewhere but it might feel like that to people and and to to find the next one the next one that's going to be something that's talked about and should be looked at might be pretty tricky. So, any any advice there? >> Sure. Well, we mentioned antimony. I mean, uh if you if you you know, if you if you went to a NFL football stadium on Sunday and you you know, talked to 60,000 people and you said, "How many of you know who who can tell me anything about antimony?" You might find a couple of hundred people in that whole stadium who could tell you anything about antimony, let alone anything, you know, critical or important about it. Um we're we're in this nice Hilton Hotel here in New Orleans. The the carpet is fireproofed with an antimony based chemical. Uh if you ride on an airplane, it's antimony based fireproofing. Um the uh it's it is a metal hardener. Your your car um your your airplane, your aircraft engines, your locomotives, you know, the the train wheels on the tracks and everything, they are they're hardened with antimony. Uh um antimony is absolutely critical to making ammunition. It's used as a primer to, you know, fire the round. Uh so it's critical in you know whether it's just your little just a little 9mm round or whether it's you know something bigger whether it's 155 millimeter round or whether it's a big 500 lb bomb or whether it's a rocket motor what have you um antimony is is critical now you say well how much antimony do we produce in the United States right now just about none you know I mean and where do we get our antimony from well we used to get it from China how much has China exported to us in the last year that's an easy number zero this much they embargoed that uh don't think that the Department of Defense, Department of War, whatever, hasn't figured that out. Um, where do we get our antimoney? Well, we've scred around other places in the world. I mean, Russia produces it. Uh, North Korea produces it. Nice reliable supplier there. You know, uh, there are other countries in the world that produce it, but they're not they're not reliable suppliers. You know, China, Russia, North Korea, come on. You know, come on, guys. You know, Kazakhstan, Usbekiststan, you know, kind of far away and problematic chains to get here. Um, is are there plays in the United States? Yeah, sure. I mean, I'll I'll mention Perpetual, which is as it's uh we I've known you for a while. It goes back to uh what's called Radius Gold. Radius Gold was a gold company with an antimony angle to it. They after after a while, they figured it out. They they became an antimony company with a gold angle to it. It's how you market it. Uh but they're in Idaho in a place called Stibn Knight. And that's interesting because the principal ore of antimony is Stibn Knight, you know. So uh in in the second world war much of this uh antimony that was used in the US military came from Stite Idaho. Uh and in fact I I remember talking to somebody who said one of the largest single uses of antimony in human history was the battle of Euima where you know dozens of American battleships and cruisers lined up offshore of Euima in in February of 1945 and just bombarded the island for weeks you know with big big guns these big 16inch guns and those big powder bags that were explo they had antimony in them to accelerate the the the explosion. So uh you you you so you you know you can't do metal hardening, you can't do fireproofing, can't do ammunition, you can't do explosive, you can't do rocket motors without antimony and uh so again you know China has be proven to be an unfriendly unreliable supplier of the material. What are you going to do? You are strategically going to make a decision to build your own separate antimony uh supply chain. you know, from the mine to the mill to the refinement to the end product and you're going to do it as close as you possibly can to, you know, keep your cards to your chest. Uh, so that would, you know, so the United States, if we can do it interior, that's great. US and Canada together, whatever. US, Canada, Australia. Yeah. Other parts of, uh, Europe, NATO, Europe. Um, yeah, sure. We'll we'll work with everybody for that. >> Yeah. Well, if you didn't know what antimony was, I think now this is a pretty good overview. So, we've run than you wanted to know for us. >> No, no, I don't know. We We need to learn about it. And I I think that we've run through some of your favorites right now. I want to ask you a question that I've been trying to bring to everybody here, which is if we look forward to 2026, what would your pick for the top performing asset be for the year? >> Oh wow. Holy smokes. Um I I I think gold has has more to run in the sense that so many people own gold, so many people own silver. uh, you know, $4,000 gold could be, you know, could be, you know, $5,000 gold. When you say what's going to be the top performing, what's going to produce the most amount of money for the most amount of people, it'll probably be, you know, rising gold. uh you know some people will make money in antimony or in tungsten or in other exotic but but but you know the the big the big uh uh savior of of of wealth to the investing classes out there, the investing people out there, the big uh salvation of your wealth is going to be backing it up with precious metals, you know, gold and silver. Throw some platinum in there, what have you. uh be because the the the you know when when gold goes up it doesn't mean that the gold itself has changed it's still gold is gold is gold you know it it means that the value of the dollar is going down it means that the people's perception of the usefulness of a dollar is going down it mean I mean the the rest of the world is ddollarizing I mean you know we you know you know America Canada we have a stock market culture we don't have a gold silver culture you know uh and you go to the rest of the world you know India China Middle East you South America, you know, and you say, "Well, you know, how do you hold your wealth?" Well, I they won't even tell you, but what they really want to say is, "I I have my wealth in gold and silver and, you know, precious precious gems or something like that, you know." So, uh best performing class in the next year. Uh you know, don't don't overthink it, you know, stick stick with uh stick with stick with the basics. Uh you know, gold, silver, if you want to get exotic, yes, sure, you can get into rare earth, you can get into antimony, things like that. Um uh you know I have a I I'm I'm I'm working on a on a helium play and you say helium yeah most of the companies out there that are doing helium I have really you know low percentage helium coming out of the ground in their gas and it's you know a lot of it's you know coming out with natural gas you got to separate the hydrocarbons out of it and everything else. I've got you know I'm working on one of the best you know pure play heliums I've ever seen anywhere. It's geologically fascinating. Uh and uh again I I'm sorry guys, but saving that one for the subscribers. They we talked about it in Nashville, Tennessee a couple weeks ago at a at a conference. But uh uh but yeah, so uh uh there you say why helium party balloons? No, don't use helium for party balloons. But he you cannot make chips in a fabrication facility, silicon chips or semiconductor chips without helium. They do not bake uh these these substrates in this oxygen nitrogen atmosphere. you'll just burn up your substrate. You have to do it in an inert atmosphere. Well, what's a nice inert gas? Oh, helium. Yeah. So, they use helium and uh so there there's there's so much out there if you, you know, if you want to look at it and you want to get interested in it. So, and it's it's a it's a pleasure to be able to do this kind of stuff for a living and and I love speaking with people like you. I love writing about it. I love trying to convey this level of thinking to people and if you if you invest in it and make some money, even better, you know. >> Well, and I I love hearing from you. We we started with gold, we ended with gold, we have a little bit of everything else in between. So, thank you so much for coming on as always. It was great to have you. >> It's a pleasure. I wish you well. Anybody out there, if you're still watching, thank you for watching. Um, she's wonderful. Uh, you know what? What more can I say? >> Well, thank you so much. Once again, I'm Charlotte Mloud with investingnews.com and this is Byron King.
Byron King: Gold, Silver Upside "Wide Open," Hard Assets Heating Up
Summary
Transcript
[music] I'm Charlotte Mloud with investingnews.com and here today with me is Byron King of Paradigm Press was formerly Agora Financial. He is a longtime newsletter writer, a geologist and he works closely with Jim Records. Thank you so much for being here. Great to have you. >> It is a pleasure to be with you. We've we we've missed each other a couple of a couple of conferences in a row, so we can finally catch up. >> Yes, I caught you this time and we're here at the New Orleans Investment Conference for context. And we've gotten to the end of day three, so I think I can ask if you have any takeaways you'd share in terms of sentiment, things you're hearing on the show floor. >> The sentiment is very positive. I mean, as we speak today, they tell me, I don't know, but they tell me the market's selling down. I think that's just a thing. uh what you hear at this conference both from the the the attendees and from the exhibitors is that there is a robustness to the resource sector. Gold, silver of course, but others as well, you know, copper, lead, zinc, rare earth, uranium, all these things. Uh one one person put it really well. He said he said it used to be that when a company went out to raise money, they would raise $3 million or 5 million or 10 million was considered a big raise. Now, really good companies with management teams and a and a good project, they can raise 20 million, 50 million bucks. And so, that's not insider money. That's not like our little mining sector money coming in. That's generalist money coming in from the other the other side of the market from, you know, all that all that vapor wear over there on the other side. >> Well, I think those are really good takeaways and you're right, it's very very positive sentiment here, especially around the precious metals. I will spend a little bit of time with you I think on this pullback that we're seeing in gold and silver and maybe you can add some context there because although there is positivity there is also some concern about how long this might last when do we start to go back up again so what thoughts would you share there >> well the that's a nice question of you know when do we start to go back up again I think the first thing to do is just kind of reassure yourself if you're in this market or if you're looking to get into this market let's say you're somebody out there and you've just you just haven't done it because you've had other priorities in life, you've got other other interests. You know, should I get in now or should I wait or or you know, should I should there be a big pullback? Whatever. These are the kind of questions people have whether you're in the market or whether you're not. Uh I do think based on what I've heard here and just on my own research just as the newsletter writer guy um I think that where we are now with say gold and silver you know gold in the let's call it $4,000 range it might be in the 3900s but that that's statistical noise in a lot of respects you know uh silver in the pick a number $48 range it might be 47 again statistical noise you know uh what's the downside risk I don't think the downside risk is big I mean at $4,000 gold. Are we going to see $3,000 gold? I doubt it. We going to see $2,000 gold. It would be I I cannot conceive of that, but you know, I never say never, but I just I just don't think it's possible. Is the upside potential still there? Yeah, absolutely. Uh how soon? Uh you know, uh looking at what's going on, you know, not tomorrow, not next week, not next month, but but you know, if you're in it for the long term, the answer is absolutely yes. uh you know what are you know it's it's the usual litany of national embarrassments you know inflation is sticky inflation is permanent uh the Federal Reserve simply cannot raise rates uh Brian London our dear friend Brian who sponsors this conference in in the in his talk on Sunday night his welcome welcome aboard talk to 600 people or 700 people whatever it was in the in the audience uh he basically made a point he showed a few slides made a point that the Federal Reserve is really constrained basically ally forever from raising interest rates because when they raise rates the interest on the national debt goes up and the country United States cannot afford to pay high interest on the national debt. we can't afford to pay the interest we pay now, you know. So, but national embarrassments, you know, inflation is there. It's sticky. Uh uh we're we're we're really stuck in an interest rate and bro, you know, uh swamp, you might say. Uh you know, federal deficits are just, you know, bottomless, endless, you know. I mean, I mean, we never pass a budget anyhow. The government's, you know, as we speak, the government's shut down. Maybe it'll open up in the next couple days. I don't know. But, uh uh national debt 38 trillion. interest on the debt 1.7 trillion. You know that this all comes you the numbers simply do not add up. Uh Rick Rule yesterday gave a brilliant talk uh where he he did add up the numbers and they don't add up. You know I mean I think you may have seen it. Uh you know you know he show he he basically listed all the numbers and you know here's the numbers. Do they add up? Well they do add up but they don't add up if you know what I mean. So uh what does that mean for gold silver? You know it's the downside's limited the upside is wide open. What does that mean for gold, silver, miners? Again, every company can have its have its bad day, what have you. A good company with good management, good assets, uh, is destined for success far more so than, you know, than your typical vaporware company. Um, and as far as the other hard assets of the world, I mean, you know, you've got your gold, silver, monetary metals. Then you've got everything else, you know, copper, lead, zinc, uh, antimony, tungsten, rare earth, all, you know, the periodic table of the military metals as I I I like to call them. You know, the stuff that you can actually do things with, you know, run an industrial economy, certainly have a a military establishment. >> Okay, we've got so many topics that we could go on the plate here. Sorry. A small small followup on the gold and silver stocks right now just because I think people are wondering how they should strategize there right now especially if when they saw the prices go up maybe they took profits but people might be thinking now you know you hear early on in the bull market you should go for the producers then you can move on down the chain so maybe just any thoughts on on where people might want to focus right now. >> Sure. And where people might focus depends on who those people are. Absolutely. I mean, if you're if you're a low-risk person, you want to focus on on mining companies that are producing, you know, companies that are producing gold because right now, a lot of the cost per ounce to produce that gold, 1200, 14, 15, $1,800 bucks in a $4,000 world. There's a lot of there's a lot of a lot of profit on that. You and so, uh, some of these companies are showing blowout earnings. And even though they show the blowout earnings, Wall Street still hasn't figured this out. You know, if you if you buy stocks because you think that they have a value proposition to them, what could be more value proposition than a company that's making, you know, 2,000 bucks an ounce on the gold that it mines out of the ground? You know, this is this is that's an easy one. Uh I I like uh advanced developers who are on their way towards production uh to the extent that they're on their way towards production or to the extent that they're going to get bought by somebody who just, you know, they they just want to bring them into the bring them into the camp. Um as you move down the development, you know, scale into say advanced exploration. There's a lot of really great advanced exploration companies that like Rodney Dangerfield, they got no respect for the last, you know, five, six, seven years, whatever. But they they've been out there working. They've been out there drilling, finding uh building models, uh you know, uh putting ounces on the paper, you know, putting ounces on the paper, pounds in the ground, you know, uh good numbers, and uh there's a whole lot there's a whole lot of really nice companies like that. I mean, I uh I'm I'm not ashamed to mention Contango or CTG. Contango, they're one of the exhibitors here. Uh and uh they give you some of everything. They are a they are a producer in Alaska. They are actually producing high-grade 8 gram per ton ore which they then you know ship up to Kin Ross and they process it. Split the money. That's okay. Uh and then uh then they have another project that's an advanced development project called Lucky Shot and I've been I visited it in July. I was up in Alaska. I went down into the tunnel with my hard hat and my boots and and all my vest and all that good stuff and I literally stood at the or seam and I put my finger on the or bodies and I was looking at it. you know, it's it's it's developing and it's it's going to turn into something good. And then they have a a sort of an advanced exploration at a place called Johnson Tract, which is about 130 miles southwest of Anchorage. Visited that and oh my goodness, the stuff that they're pulling out of the ground in the course on the drills is phenomenal. And so there's exploration upside like you wouldn't believe. So, you know, I know I know everybody wants, you know, they want ideas. Contango or CTGO. There you go. >> Thank you very much for sharing. And while we're on the note of precious metals, when we were corresponding ahead of this interview, you mentioned you're you're going in a lot of directions right now. Platinum is one of them. So, I wanted to bring it up. For me, it it reminds me of silver with kind of that prolonged deficit and now we're we've seen the price move this year. What are your thoughts on platinum? How are you approaching that one? platinum's problem uh so to speak for let's say 10 years has been that there is this global idea that internal combustion engines are going to go away and one of the big uses for platinum was in a catalytic converter on a combustion car on your on your gasoline engine and when people say well you know in the future we're going to do away with these internal combustion cars we're going to drive little electric cars and you know that that really caused uh the the whole platinum sector to just wither you know you know I mean it didn't high, but it it withered. And you had really great companies like say Saban Stillwater out in Montana that were just they were just barely keeping the doors open. I mean, they were literally they were laying people off just cuz they they just couldn't couldn't make it work. But they didn't close the mine. Good for them. And uh but anyhow, the you know what people have figured out in the last oh year or so is that, you know, no, our our future is not all EVs. our future is going to include internal combustion for the next you know generation or two or three and uh and so you know so that revitalized the platinum sector we saw platinum go from pick a number you know 900 bucks to whatever it is now 1617 you know so uh there there's a nice future for platinum it is a it's a very important industrial metal it's used in chemicals industry petroleum refining aerospace lot lots of lot you know electronics lots of uses besides just platinum jewelry and you know coins and what whatever else. Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. Lots of applications there. Okay. We'll we'll leave precious metals behind because we have a lot to cover and I want to make sure we get into critical minerals because I think this is really important. I'm going to start with rare earth because there's been so much attention. I'm seeing mainstream media headlines about rare earth because of the US China tensions and I know that that is ramped down a little bit right now, but I can't I can't imagine that this is something that's not going to rear its head again in the future. But for people who are looking at that and thinking, "All right, maybe I do want to get into rare earths." How should they approach it? Maybe the time is not now because it's so heated. But what do you think? >> Well, the first thing you should do is, you know, read up on it uh you know, a little bit. I mean, I'm not asking everybody to take a a course in, you know, advanced uh mineral chemistry or something like that. But, you know, you should understand what these things are. But basically, uh, your, you know, your life, my life out there in watcher land and viewer land, our lives are run by rare earth. You just don't know it. Uh, I I I I put my coat behind the tape, my chair here, but I would usually pull out my cell phone at this point and point to it and say, "My cell phone, out of 92 elements on the periodic table, my cell phone has 63 of them in it." You know, none of them by accident, including a bunch of the rare earth elements. But electronics don't work without rare earths. uh magnets, motors, uh if you're in your car and you push a little button and the window goes up or down or you move your seat back and forth or you move the steering wheel or the power steering, none of that works without rare earth because you've got these these little booster motors in your car that make these things worth work. Let alone the, you know, the the electric vehicles, let alone so much else. And and then then you get into the whole military angle to it. You know, the whole I mean pretty much every weapon that's worth having other than maybe a rock or a spear, you know, has has, you know, has rare earth component to it. I mean, when my son came back from from Iraq, you know, he had to turn in all his classified electronic gear and everything else. And I was thinking about all that stuff that he's handing across the table back to the, you know, back to the back to the quartermaster or whatever. And uh you know all that stuff, your night vision goggles, certain of the communications gear, optics on the rifles and everything else. It all uh it it it all has rare earth in it. You know, the the guidance systems, the missiles, the jet engines, the F-35s, the submarines, the destroyers, they all they all they all have uh rare earth in them in one form or another. Electronics, magnets, optics, uh very, you know, so so many different things. Yeah. Uh yep. I didn't answer the question though. >> Oh yes yes yes. Well yeah I guess the question is essentially so very hot right now. We could see all the applications. Should you come into the space right now? >> It's not a bad idea. Uh but you got to come into the space understanding what's out there. You know the really hot name has been MP Materials and say well MP materials they have this rare earth mine in California. Yeah they do. And yes, there are rare earths in what they mine. It's, you know, as a geologist, as a minology guy, it's not quite the right ore for all the rare earths you want. There are other places, there are other and better rare earth deposits in America, in Canada, elsewhere in Australia, elsewhere in the world. Um, and uh uh and and so that that that question turns the whole idea of rare earths into, you know, where's your feed stock? And then the next question is what do you do with this stuff once you mine it? Because if all you do is mine rock and anybody just about anybody can mine rock, you know, um you can take the rock and you can crush it into little stones or whatever, but if you if you can't process it into something else that you can use, you may as well just sell it to the railroad to use as track ballast. You know, use sell it to the highway department for road bed. You have to turn the rock into a product. And that is where uh the refinement you know comes in. Uh and now the question is you know can MP materials do that? Can some of these other rare earth wannabes you know do that? Uh are there good companies out there doing that that are not called you know China? U the the answer is yes. I mean I mean China has a very brute force approach to you know doing rare earths. They've been doing it for 40 years. They mine a lot of stuff. They crush it up. They dissolve it in acid and they do a lot of chemistry and they uh it takes a lot of time and a lot of resources and it's an environmental mess but but they do have a whole food chain or a whole processing chain to get it down to very very very high quality uh you know end products uh can in can the west leapfrog probably a generation or even two generations of technology and cut catch up with them? The answer is yes. And I actually have a really great company that can do that, but I'm not going to tell you what the name is because I saved that for the readers. And it's a it's a backend part, one of the things, but but it it it won't be too hard to figure out. They're building a plant in Louisiana. So, not just just right up the river in Alexandria from from where we are. >> Okay. Well, well, hopefully people can find the clues and and do some digging there. So, when it comes to rare earths, we we should think about being in the sector. We've got to keep an eye on the processing. The other thing I wanted to ask you about when it comes to that and you mentioned MP materials and we've had the government get involved there. It seems like the US government is starting to get more serious about rare earth and the other critical minerals but rare earths. >> Absolutely. The you know there are flashes in the pan that they come and they go and there are other things that are not flashes in the pan. I think right now it is very fair, it is very safe to say that rare earth development in the west in general, the USA in particular, rare earth development is a bipartisan national strategic priority. I mean, you've got you've got President Trump, you've got the whole administration, you know, pushing these ideas and you say, well, they're supporting this company, that company, whatever. Yeah, but they're doing that for a reason, you know. I mean, it's because China has said, we're going to embargo rare earth. they have embargoed rare earths. Uh then recently they said not only are we, you know, really restricting rare earth, we're going to restrict the rare earth that if you buy them from us and you put them in another product, we're going to restrict that product, too. And uh the Treasury Secretary Scott Besson just not too long ago said, you know, China really crossed the line on that. I I think he was just waiting for an excuse to say that. Uh from the standpoint of managing American uh strategic safety, North American strategic safety, throw Canada in there, too. I mean, you know, you're you're part of North America whether you like it or not, you know. Uh but uh in terms of managing the strategic security of this continent. Uh there is no way that the military complex can rely in the future on China as a supplier. They are an unreliable supplier. They are politically, you know, motivated to hurt us. They've weaponized it. They've shown how they weaponized it. Not that we don't weaponize stuff against them, too, but but this is too important. This is truly the jugular vein. It's the it's the corateed artery. It's the it's the left anterior descending, you know, vein out of your heart. You you you break that one and you're you're you're killing the economy. You really you are you are destroying not just the military, you're destroying the automotive sector, the electronic sector, you know, just a whole lot of sectors. They just go away and the military, you know, kind of dies on the vine as well. So there I would call it a uh a quiet Manhattan project. I mean, the Manhattan Project was so secret that nobody knew what it was, but everybody knows what the Manhattan Project was now. You saw the movie Oppenheimer. Yeah. Okay. No, everybody knows rare earths are another Manhattan project, but they're being done, you know, without calling it that. Uh, in terms of get it done, get it done fast, get it done right, you know, get the science right, and we're going to work out the engineering. Build those plants as quickly as you can. We want them online by the middle of 2026, and we want them producing stuff by early 2027. And those dates are magic dates in the in in geopolitics because, you know, Xi Jinping said that by 2027, we want the Chinese army to be ready to retake Taiwan, which is another way of saying by 2027, we want to have a war in the Pacific. And um and so uh you know, we may or may not have a war in the Pacific, but you can't plan as if you're not going to have it. If you plan to have the war, maybe you won't. You know, if you don't plan to have a war, you probably will. So, >> so rare earth clearly highly important right now, but but it's not just rare earths that the US government is interested in right now and I think investors might be wondering all right so what else should I be looking for because it seems a lot of the time you mentioned antimony I think earlier in the conversation and it sometimes seems like these things come out of nowhere and I know that they don't they come out of somewhere but it might feel like that to people and and to to find the next one the next one that's going to be something that's talked about and should be looked at might be pretty tricky. So, any any advice there? >> Sure. Well, we mentioned antimony. I mean, uh if you if you you know, if you if you went to a NFL football stadium on Sunday and you you know, talked to 60,000 people and you said, "How many of you know who who can tell me anything about antimony?" You might find a couple of hundred people in that whole stadium who could tell you anything about antimony, let alone anything, you know, critical or important about it. Um we're we're in this nice Hilton Hotel here in New Orleans. The the carpet is fireproofed with an antimony based chemical. Uh if you ride on an airplane, it's antimony based fireproofing. Um the uh it's it is a metal hardener. Your your car um your your airplane, your aircraft engines, your locomotives, you know, the the train wheels on the tracks and everything, they are they're hardened with antimony. Uh um antimony is absolutely critical to making ammunition. It's used as a primer to, you know, fire the round. Uh so it's critical in you know whether it's just your little just a little 9mm round or whether it's you know something bigger whether it's 155 millimeter round or whether it's a big 500 lb bomb or whether it's a rocket motor what have you um antimony is is critical now you say well how much antimony do we produce in the United States right now just about none you know I mean and where do we get our antimony from well we used to get it from China how much has China exported to us in the last year that's an easy number zero this much they embargoed that uh don't think that the Department of Defense, Department of War, whatever, hasn't figured that out. Um, where do we get our antimoney? Well, we've scred around other places in the world. I mean, Russia produces it. Uh, North Korea produces it. Nice reliable supplier there. You know, uh, there are other countries in the world that produce it, but they're not they're not reliable suppliers. You know, China, Russia, North Korea, come on. You know, come on, guys. You know, Kazakhstan, Usbekiststan, you know, kind of far away and problematic chains to get here. Um, is are there plays in the United States? Yeah, sure. I mean, I'll I'll mention Perpetual, which is as it's uh we I've known you for a while. It goes back to uh what's called Radius Gold. Radius Gold was a gold company with an antimony angle to it. They after after a while, they figured it out. They they became an antimony company with a gold angle to it. It's how you market it. Uh but they're in Idaho in a place called Stibn Knight. And that's interesting because the principal ore of antimony is Stibn Knight, you know. So uh in in the second world war much of this uh antimony that was used in the US military came from Stite Idaho. Uh and in fact I I remember talking to somebody who said one of the largest single uses of antimony in human history was the battle of Euima where you know dozens of American battleships and cruisers lined up offshore of Euima in in February of 1945 and just bombarded the island for weeks you know with big big guns these big 16inch guns and those big powder bags that were explo they had antimony in them to accelerate the the the explosion. So uh you you you so you you know you can't do metal hardening, you can't do fireproofing, can't do ammunition, you can't do explosive, you can't do rocket motors without antimony and uh so again you know China has be proven to be an unfriendly unreliable supplier of the material. What are you going to do? You are strategically going to make a decision to build your own separate antimony uh supply chain. you know, from the mine to the mill to the refinement to the end product and you're going to do it as close as you possibly can to, you know, keep your cards to your chest. Uh, so that would, you know, so the United States, if we can do it interior, that's great. US and Canada together, whatever. US, Canada, Australia. Yeah. Other parts of, uh, Europe, NATO, Europe. Um, yeah, sure. We'll we'll work with everybody for that. >> Yeah. Well, if you didn't know what antimony was, I think now this is a pretty good overview. So, we've run than you wanted to know for us. >> No, no, I don't know. We We need to learn about it. And I I think that we've run through some of your favorites right now. I want to ask you a question that I've been trying to bring to everybody here, which is if we look forward to 2026, what would your pick for the top performing asset be for the year? >> Oh wow. Holy smokes. Um I I I think gold has has more to run in the sense that so many people own gold, so many people own silver. uh, you know, $4,000 gold could be, you know, could be, you know, $5,000 gold. When you say what's going to be the top performing, what's going to produce the most amount of money for the most amount of people, it'll probably be, you know, rising gold. uh you know some people will make money in antimony or in tungsten or in other exotic but but but you know the the big the big uh uh savior of of of wealth to the investing classes out there, the investing people out there, the big uh salvation of your wealth is going to be backing it up with precious metals, you know, gold and silver. Throw some platinum in there, what have you. uh be because the the the you know when when gold goes up it doesn't mean that the gold itself has changed it's still gold is gold is gold you know it it means that the value of the dollar is going down it means that the people's perception of the usefulness of a dollar is going down it mean I mean the the rest of the world is ddollarizing I mean you know we you know you know America Canada we have a stock market culture we don't have a gold silver culture you know uh and you go to the rest of the world you know India China Middle East you South America, you know, and you say, "Well, you know, how do you hold your wealth?" Well, I they won't even tell you, but what they really want to say is, "I I have my wealth in gold and silver and, you know, precious precious gems or something like that, you know." So, uh best performing class in the next year. Uh you know, don't don't overthink it, you know, stick stick with uh stick with stick with the basics. Uh you know, gold, silver, if you want to get exotic, yes, sure, you can get into rare earth, you can get into antimony, things like that. Um uh you know I have a I I'm I'm I'm working on a on a helium play and you say helium yeah most of the companies out there that are doing helium I have really you know low percentage helium coming out of the ground in their gas and it's you know a lot of it's you know coming out with natural gas you got to separate the hydrocarbons out of it and everything else. I've got you know I'm working on one of the best you know pure play heliums I've ever seen anywhere. It's geologically fascinating. Uh and uh again I I'm sorry guys, but saving that one for the subscribers. They we talked about it in Nashville, Tennessee a couple weeks ago at a at a conference. But uh uh but yeah, so uh uh there you say why helium party balloons? No, don't use helium for party balloons. But he you cannot make chips in a fabrication facility, silicon chips or semiconductor chips without helium. They do not bake uh these these substrates in this oxygen nitrogen atmosphere. you'll just burn up your substrate. You have to do it in an inert atmosphere. Well, what's a nice inert gas? Oh, helium. Yeah. So, they use helium and uh so there there's there's so much out there if you, you know, if you want to look at it and you want to get interested in it. So, and it's it's a it's a pleasure to be able to do this kind of stuff for a living and and I love speaking with people like you. I love writing about it. I love trying to convey this level of thinking to people and if you if you invest in it and make some money, even better, you know. >> Well, and I I love hearing from you. We we started with gold, we ended with gold, we have a little bit of everything else in between. So, thank you so much for coming on as always. It was great to have you. >> It's a pleasure. I wish you well. Anybody out there, if you're still watching, thank you for watching. Um, she's wonderful. Uh, you know what? What more can I say? >> Well, thank you so much. Once again, I'm Charlotte Mloud with investingnews.com and this is Byron King.