A Mining Bull Market Won’t Save You, But Nicole Adshead-Bell's Rules Might

Summary

• Investment Strategy: Dr. Nicole Adshead-Bell emphasizes the importance of evaluating the quality of management teams in junior mining companies, noting that a strong team can extract value from mediocre projects, while a poor team can destroy value in good projects.
• Market Dynamics: The podcast discusses the cyclical nature of the mining sector, highlighting that generalist investors often enter the market during bull runs, leading to inflated valuations and eventual corrections.
• Jurisdictional Risk: Adshead-Bell argues that perceived risks in certain jurisdictions, like Brazil, may be overstated compared to regions like Queensland, Australia, where regulatory changes can occur more swiftly.
• Capital Management: The conversation highlights the necessity for junior mining companies to strategically manage their capital, avoiding frequent, small financings that can lead to shareholder dilution.
• Board Dynamics: The podcast discusses the importance of having diverse and independent boards that are not overly reliant on director fees, which can compromise their decision-making independence.
• Market Sentiment: Adshead-Bell notes that during bull markets, investors often overlook risks, leading to a focus on high-risk, high-reward investments, which can outperform but also crash hard.
• Long-term Industry Challenges: The discussion touches on the need for sustained investment in geological research and development to ensure long-term success and supply in the mining industry.
• Personal Investment Insights: Adshead-Bell shares her personal investment approach, emphasizing the importance of selling at the right time and not getting too attached to any single investment.

Transcript

Last month on resource ox uh I spoke to Dr. Neil Ated and he gave me a couple of inconvenient truths about junior mining and uh that got a lot of interesting feedback. Uh but that was really only the the warm-up as today Dr. Nicole Ladbell is here to give me some more of that and talk to me about how to keep my head on during a bull market. Uh just briefly for people watching or listening, if you want a summary of this conversation and all the other interviews that we do on resource talks, go to resource talks.com. There's a free newsletter. It goes out once a week with a bullet point summary of all the conversations from the week before. I'm sure most of you will know Dr. Nicole Atadell. She's a PhD geologist, mining finance professional, uh now co-leading Koopal Advisory, as well as an independent director of a couple of companies including Vendy Precious Metals and Altius Minerals. There's much more than I can say in the way of an introduction here, but enough of my yapping. Nicole, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you very much for having me, Antonio. Looking forward to the chat. Pleasure is all mine and and um I'm reflecting on on that conversation that I did with Neil because it it did get a lot of attention uh even interestingly enough mostly from people managing junior mining companies or related to them in one way or another. So during Beaver Creek, I got a lot of a lot of them walking up to me and talking to me about it. some of them not like not too happy trying to explain like oh what you said there you know it's got caveats and and some others being like oh we're exactly that company that he was describing um so that that's always funny but um I'm assuming you'll be similar for this one or I'm hoping for because it means it's impactful but what what caught your eye the most from that conversation which one of the so-called I think I called them ugly truths which is a bit clickbaity I'll admit that but what what do you think is the most prominent in the junior market right now from what he was talking But uh it's confirmation bias and obviously we have conversations about this but for me it's it's it's the people side of it as well. Uh it's it's a very low barrier to entry into the market uh unlike some other industry. So pretty much anybody out there can decide that they want to start a a junior resource company. And so in some ways maybe that's a good thing but in other ways that's a really negative thing because there's no quality control so to speak. And what you have in in mining investing is I would say most of the mining investing public is they're not they're not technical. And so how do you as a non-technical person judge the quality of the project and also if you don't have any history in the sector how do you judge the quality of the people and so that people equation from from my perspective and and geologists and and technical people will ask argue about that. They'll say, "Look, a great project, no matter who is running that, the the fundamentals, the technical fundamentals of a very very good project will will shine through." I would argue the opposite, actually. I think that you can have a a mediocre management team can destroy enormous value in a very good project and you can have a great management team extract a lot of value from a mediocre project. And so how do you best understand the quality of the people and and how will they drive that forward in terms of some very very basic things that Neil touches on is do you have the right strategy? Do you have the right understanding of how to raise money where where that amount of money supports that strategy? I mean this sounds like very very basic stuff but so often in our industry there's there's a mismatch between those those two key things. How do you do it? What are you looking for when you look at a team? team and also is it when you say a team, who are we really talking about? Is it the board that you're looking at or is it is it the people pointing the rigs and and collecting the capitals, the CEO and VP of X and and how do you judge them? It's everything and it and it really is jurisdiction dependent. So, so number one, it is uh if you look at a at a junior company, it is does that person there's does that company have technical expertise in what they're looking for? Number one. Number two, do they have uh capital markets expertise? Is there someone involved in a company that's either at the board level or the management level that that understands how to raise money that understands that investment bankers aren't always your friend? They'll pretend to be your friend, but they not necessarily are. And at the end of the day, the the broking community, they live on fees. They don't live they don't they don't have to live with any decision they make, whereas you, the company does. So, you do need to understand the business of the business. And sometimes you'll have a technical person that has a great idea, but then in an inability to finance that idea in in an appropriate way or to message that idea in an appropriate way. So that uh jurisdictional expertise or country expertise. So many times you'll see companies that go into name a country into Brazil or into Mexico or into Australia even whereas they don't they don't understand how that country works. They don't understand the culture. They don't understand the regulatory environment. they don't speak the language. So for me that's a really really big red flag and so many companies when they screw up it is they blame the country they don't look at their management of their own business within that country and so for me this is an I think an underlooked and a very very important thing and I've been involved in a couple of situations in Brazil and for me when you look at you'd speak to investors about Brazil for example and people talk about the failures but when you understand what caused a lot of those failures it was management of their business. So that number two uh so the third is obviously technical expertise and and really a a built forpurpose management team and board for the stage of the company and as companies advance and most companies will have an asset that they'll try and advance and take it through the development cycle uh do you have a people that I has a company surrounded with itself with appropriate expertise depending on where they are in the evolution of the life cycle of of that company and also I I think you need you don't want to see a border management team that's just a bunch of mates that have always worked together. Uh because you need to have healthy friction. You need to be able to have a culture and environment where people can have a different viewpoint that you can challenge maybe the narrative without people throwing their toys out the cop because I think uh robust discussions about risk it ultimately at the end of the day derisks the ultimate end outcome. And so diversity of diversity is an overused word and perhaps has become a bit of a dirty word but for me it's diversity of experience and and and a willingness to listen and I have experienced in the past as as if if you if you're one for example director on the board and you have very very different idea on strategy or how to execute the business plan uh you have no influence at all and so I think sometimes there's a misunderstanding uh even from experienced institutional investors of exactly how boards and management teams work. And and my advice to to those that have been on the buy side for a long time, and I was for a decent portion of my career, is to actually get some board experience because it it opens your eyes up to how these dynamics actually work within companies. You're sitting on a couple of boards, as I mentioned, Tabini. Now, would you ever leave or well, have you ever left the board of a company because you weren't happy with something that was going on there and and with or without naming names? Can you can you I don't know, tell me a story or something about that. Uh, yes, I have. Uh, and look, it's it's negative. It's negative for you because I've had some feedback that I can be considered to be difficult difficult to work with. And if by difficult you mean I'm trying to do my job, then probably I am. And and I come at it from being on the buy side for a very long time. And being on the buy side both through the beginning of the bull market in all commodities from 2003 to 2005 and then stepping back into it in 2011, which was the end of the glory years at the absolute height of the last the last gold bull market and then just seeing uh this incredible retracement down. And at the end of the day, if you're running a company, you're there to represent the interests of the owners of that business. And so my approach to being a director is to for to aiming to fulfill my fidiciary duty and duty of care as best as I can. And that sounds really basic, but sometimes that does not necessarily happen on boards. And so I've experienced situations where I didn't last very long and and and chose to leave. And that was really because there was a funal mismatch I think between uh I felt like I couldn't do my job properly. And if you can't do your job properly, I'm not just going to stay there to to to collect the the board fees the board fees that you get. And so sometimes that can cause a lot of problems. and and and that circles back to my initial statement previously, which is one person cannot enact change. And so sometimes I've had in uh investors or corporates come to me and say, "Look, Nikki, we'd like you to consider this joining this company. There's some issues and we'd like you basically to be involved in fixing them." And and my response to that is if you expect me to come in and act in positive change as as one individual, not going to happen. And frankly speaking, I had to be on boards to understand that. And it can be unbelievably frustrating when you're going, but all all I'm trying to do is what is good for the owners of the business. That's who we're representing here. And so I would say now I'm the learning lesson for me is to be very very choosy as to where I would be willing to go as a director. And you don't all have to think the same, but you have to be aligned on what you're trying to achieve. And if there is misalignment uh that's not really good for anybody for the for for the company or for you. I I think though you started your career with with sort of the smaller companies, right? that a small little junior that that you started your career with if I'm not mistaken and um it it I suppose it is different when when you talk about the beginning of a of a junior and how it is like obviously Dundee and and Altus large you know large entities and have diversified boards and so on but it is more difficult when you're talking about you know 2030 million uh junior although to to your point about board fees should they be receiving them board fees in in the first place in cash or should it be mostly options when when we're talking about you know the smaller companies where it's founder is essentially running the company I there's two schools of thought on that and the regulatory environment depending on what exchange you're listed in uh comes into play as well so for example Australian companies and the Australian regular environment is less in favor of directors having equity exposure and so if you go and look at compensation for example they'll be more they'll be compensating on the basis of cash. And the reason for that is is well the reason that is promulgated by the decision bodies within within Australia for example is if you have too much equity exposure you can't possibly be independent. I would argue I would argue to some degree the opposite. I do think you need to have skin in the game. If you're just there collecting a fee and that fee is there in perpetuity and whatever happens to the share price you have no exposure to. I I also think that can probably warp your decision making. So most investors outside of Australia want to see and it's a question that is always asked. How much does border management own? Are they aligned with me in terms of uh my willingness to be exposed to the company? Now everybody has different levels of I I suppose of financial capacity with which to either accept just compensation in the form of equity ownership or to buy shares versus having some sort of cash compensation. My my response to that is you cannot be independent as a director if you're relying on the compensation from that director role to live. How can you possibly be independent? So you you you have to have a certain amount of either outside sources of income or an existing level of of of maybe wealth otherwise I I don't know if if you need that job frankly if you need that job you're not independent is and so we have all of these different rules around independence uh and and sometimes when you look at decisions that companies make or where the boards seem to head in one direction go I don't really understand why they did that it doesn't make sense it doesn't create generate value per share. I think understanding compensation and interlocking board relationships is is also an important consideration. Well, it's funny that is a question that I ask at the beginning of all my interviews with CEOs, which I call the CEO barbecue because it's meant to grill the CEO. And I always ask them, what's the how would you define success this year? And what are the KPIs that you would base management compensation to reflect that success? A lot of them just go like, I don't know, we're too small to have those things. Like, we we don't have that. We have a base salary and that's that. And uh a lot of them, you know, a lot of CEOs I talk to don't know how their directors are compensated in the first place. Like some directors have options, others have, you know, a cash payment and so on and so forth. So I think it is it's quite a bit messier when you start going down the market cap trail. So when when you start going into the 2030 million Yeah, you do. and and and sometimes it used to be that you you have these proxy advisers ISS and Glass Lewis that have the most influence and they institutional investors react to recommendations from proxy advisers and it can sometimes be very very difficult to go against those recommendations and so they're the ones that write the rules and those rules sometimes are created with good intentions but have terrible terrible repercussions and so uh you can have and you you have rules around how How many boards can you be on? Uh you have rules around you can't be on boards. Used to be a big thing, it's less of a thing now. You can't have crossboarding. So you can't sit on two boards with the same person because that potentially could materially impact your independence. Uh there's duration. You shouldn't be able to sit on a board for more than 10 years. And if you do, we're going to recommend voting against your corporate governance committee. Then there's the whole diversity target that became a very very big focus over the last four or five years. less so I I would say now that that President Trump is in power, but was really a heavyhanded way of saying you have to meet diversity. Uh no consideration of diversity of experience, but it was diversity based on biology. It was diversity based on what you physically look like or what you identify. I'm not sure that was that helpful. And so one example I can think of where there was a board where there was only one woman on the board and she's exceptionally the company can be remain unnamed but she's very very very very good uh very well known and well respected in the industry was by no means kind of a token diversity high yet the proxy advisers recommended voting against her uh because there was only one woman on the board and she was chair of the corporate governance committee which is which is responsible for nominations. So you think about the inherent hypocrisies in that So you you have boards and that used to only be focused on the larger companies and now it's it's moved down down the food chain and there was this idea about 5 years ago that being a director of a junior company board wasn't anywhere near as ownorous as being a director of a larger company board and so junior TSX V-listed companies for example didn't used to count towards the number of boards that you could be on and currently that's five uh as dictated by the proxy advisor But then different funds will have different views on that. So Black Rockck uh for instance will say you can only be on four and if you're on more than four then we'll recommend we'll vote against you. So you have all of these kind of other outside forces that are dictating how do you populate your boards. Now having sat on larger company boards and smaller company boards, smaller company boards are a hell of a lot more work than larger company boards. You have to be just from the nature of the beast. you have to be engaged. They often need a lot more proactive help. Obviously, if you're a junior company and you're not generating positive cash flow, it is all about where your next dollar is coming from and and how do you raise money in the least dilutive way possible. And so, there was al also fascinating to me there was this disconnect about the level of whether it's personal exposure, the the the time commitment as the proxy advisers viewed it. Now that's changed and they say every board is equal but again junior company boards in in my opinion they they take you have to be willing to work very hard when you join a junior company board and if you are going to work very hard there should be some compensation for that but obviously small companies can't afford to pay a lot of cash and so what is the best way to be exposed that compensation it would be in in some form of shares and there's different ways you can do that uh it can be through in Canada again it's very different depending on the exchange and a recent evolution is DSUs and so that share exposure that you as a director don't you don't have access to until you leave the board and so when you think about that there's some interesting things it means that uh if you're not going to get comp really compensated until you depart a board there's an inherent mechanism that that forces new blood to come into the board uh and sorry while I'm on a segue into slightly different topic One of ISS Glass Lewis's is they will be very negatively predisposed towards people who stay on boards too long. Some directors add no value after 6 months and some directors can add enormous value after 20 years. And so to me that's a very individual thing and so having this very hamfisted approach from the proxy advisers is no matter what kind of uh contribution an individual director makes, we're going to say that you have to leave a board after 10 years. So we we we're trying to regulate a complex industry that has a whole bunch of dynamics where you have to have independent boards. You want to attract the best-in-class people to those boards and those people that have a profile. How do you do it in a way where I suppose both sides get to benefit? Because at the end of the day, nobody's going to do this for free. M is that some of the first things that you check when you start looking into a company before you decide whether you're going to get involved either at the corporate or at the project or at the equity level. What's kind of the initial checklist if you have that? What are the first things that you're looking at? Uh I think initially it's probably a cultural fit. It it is do you and and I would say the best boards either number one you ideally know at least some people on the board and you'll know whether or not there's a broad alignment or view on in in terms of how you should be conducting yourself uh as a director and as a company. And sometimes some companies don't seem to understand at the end of the day you're there to act in the best interests in as a Canadian company. It's it's in all of your stakeholders. And if you're a US or an Australian company, it's it's your shareholders. And there's a there's a an interesting legal debate around that which we can touch on later if anybody has any interest. But it is number one, can you can you work together? And that's enormously derisked. I had the advantage of of when I the first boards that I joined uh I I knew the assets intimately and I knew most of the people because um Pretim for example we were a sizable shareholder of of Pret and this was public at at some valley gold and so there was already I would say an awareness of of of what you were getting yourself into and so being in the sector has given me an advantage in in terms of understanding understanding those those key elements. Now, how I look at it, I've only ever been involved in one company from the very very start where I was involved in taking it public, intimately involved in raising money, involved in helping populate the board and that that was the that that was an fantastic experience at the start because you get you I I had the opportunity to implement I suppose some of these learnings over the last 25 years which is this is what I would do if I had power. And um to me power is almost actually getting to choose who you work with. That's that's true power is I I had the chance to implement how how I what I thought and obviously it's my view what the right way to do things and and that that's where we did hit all of the key ingredients and so that was Bravo and so it was we had Brazilian management team. We had a very strong Brazilian presence. You had Brazilian on the board. We had capital markets expertise. We had technical expertise. We had build expertise. The main assets were PGM assets. We had PGM expertise. And we were very very strategic in how we messaged this uh privately going into the IPO. We were very very strategic about how we raised money and who we had particip participate in those financing and and also very strategic for example of saying we're not going to do a financing uh with any warrants. No warrants. That's it. Uh that we were only going to issue employee options at the IPO price. Nobody received any money. we got exposed uh how it was derised for all of us is that we participated in a in a cheap founders round but that was to compensate for the fact that everybody was doing this through through blood sweat and tears and so I've had very few opportunities where I've I've been involved in helping create I suppose uh the the the recipe that should increase your chances of a success just for that last statement on warren I would want to put you on all the Canadian boards but I guess ISS is not going to be happy with you on being on too many boards. Uh but it might help though with the warrants uh with the warrant overhang in the market. Well, the problem is the is the the bankers and the brokers will always try and get you to do a warrant financing because it makes their job easier. And the fascinating thing with this particular company was the bankers expected broker warrants and as part of the fees because well we always get them. And I was a banker so I can be critical of bankers is my response to that was no absolutely no. We have been out there saying that we are not going to do a single financing with broker warrants. How do you expect as a brokers to the to this deal to get something that nobody else has gotten? And what I've realized is commonly management teams don't understand that you can say no at the end of the day. You can say no. You don't have to do everything that they ask of you. And so, uh, broker warrants too, they're not issued at the warrant price. Broker warrants are issued at the financing price. and the brokers will be exiting their position as soon as possible. So you think about that if you do a financing and it's got broker warrants and the share price starts to move and you want to get talk in your share price, they're going to get that liability off their books. This is this is money for jam. And so to have an expectation that they're going to be long-term and supportive that that just doesn't happen in reality. And so I think management teams need to understand how the markets work. they they need to understand and it's probably the biggest lack is understand what delution means. understand that uh brokers who might take you to great dinners or a golfing game and personally I hate golf so wouldn't do it for me but that they they uh they're fee clippers. Mhm. And so how do you how do you manage your business which is the most one of the most scarce things that you have and that you actually have control of which is which is your shares. Yeah. How do you how do you not obliterate obliterate your existing shareholders in shareholders into non-existence? And that almost is it's it's the biggest challenge. What they don't take you to cricket games then in that case. No, cricket's really I'm going to offend every Australian. I think I I think even the one day is anything that takes one day commitment. Nah, I've got Well, life is short. Life is short. I've got better things to do with my time. You you are right then, Nicole, because I and I was not a banker, but I'll still be critical of them because uh broker warrants are in my opinion absolutely value destructive. But I guess we might just have to start a campaign that that that is like just say no dot dot dot to warrants and and then you know finance that all across Canada. I guess we could do that. Um on on spending money on on stuff like that actually on that note, what about GNA? That's something I pay a lot of attention to myself and might not be right but I kind of have my own personal biases you know being being account an a bit of well an accountant by education a bit of an accountant by heart too but it's it's also a bit of controversial topic I suppose because there's a you know designated camps people saying more spending equals better performance and then there's people who want you know companies to spend zero and still outperform but like I for example look and I'm sorry if you're continuing on just kind of running thoughts here but I for example look at exploration to evaluation ratios. Uh so that means that how much money goes toward um exploration to administration ratio. Sorry. So how much money goes toward GNA versus how much is recorded as an exploration spend. And then I drill down further into that. I look at how much of that exploration spend in percentage term is actually drilling and assays versus you know consulting and travel and everything else that they might stuck into that exploration expense as well. Um but so how do you look at at GNA? Does it really matter as much as I think it does and and what are some of the best practices there? It doesn't matter in a bull market. Basically, nobody will care. Uh it really matters in a bare market and it is absolutely something that should be a focus. And again speaking from my time on the buy side is it was unbelievably frustrating from 2012 to 2015 when I when I resigned. And partly it was this personal visceral response. we weren't getting a bonus any of us that had worked that were working on the buyer side and if you you know if you had a had a long bias in in the bare market uh yet you saw management teams getting inordinately well paid for destroying shareholder value and there was and there was a massive focus on that during that time period that focus has shifted I don't hear conversations about GNA anymore particularly with the larger companies and and I think nobody has any problem with management teams getting inordinately well compensated if they're generating success. Now the problem when you go down the food chain is uh what is the cost to average run the average junior just the bare minimum for basic salaries and listing fees and lawyers and accountants uh it's probably at least a million a year. So when you step back from that and this comes back and Neil would have commented on this obviously which which is how do you how do you fund yourself so it's not just for salaries and so again everybody has a different financial background some people can afford to have much much less cash and have more predominantly share exposure which is I think what most people would want to see which is circles back to your you know the first thing you say is how much do you own and did you buy it or were you were you given it all versus how much are you paying yourself. And so you you you you want to see an alignment again with shareholders. Uh but if you're in Vancouver, for example, and and you're running a junior company out of Vancouver, this is a really really expensive city. And so what might be considered a really good salary, you know, 100 150,000, that doesn't get you very much in in Vancouver. And so I also think you need to have an understanding of of what someone maybe's financial background is uh where they're living, what is the cost of living, what is the cost of doing business. But seeing people getting paid extraordinary salaries in junior companies, that is a bit of a red flag as is paying a huge amount for marketing. You know, you see someone a junior with a million dollar marketing budget. Why? I mean results should really really good results should speak for themselves and you want to see most of the money being deployed into the ground. So and this comes back to understanding capital. So I'm just going to circle back to the Bravo example. What we did with Bravo was we raised a material amount of money privately. We raised, if I recall correctly, we raised 8 million US privately. And we we did that because we wanted to be able to go public without pressure. We wanted to dictate the terms, the valuation terms of of going public. And then what we did when we went public, we raised approximately 42 million about 4 months later Canadian in really bad markets. This was mid 2020 22 2022. Um it was in the summer, nobody cared. There wasn't a lot of interest and we did very very well. And that was, I think, partly because of uh the reputation of those of us that were involved. We had some key strategic interest. We had kind of the the some of the who's who in the mining investment side of things. And we were also strategic about how we placed the money. And it it was a very very good story. It was expiration without expiration risk. I don't need to go into all the details, but our messaging was we're raising enough money that we don't need to come back to the market for 3 years. And that is key. You'll have companies that go, well, we're going to raise a little bit now because our share price is going to go off and we're going to we're going to raise more at a higher price. That never happens unless you have a world-class drill drill hole. And so our thesis was and our messaging was if you want to get exposed at what we think is a reasonably undervalued proposition, you're going to have to get exposed in the IPO cuz we don't need to come back to market. And so what you want to do is you the the minute this this this this constant feeding at the trough we're going to drip feed of financing it is not going to be enough for us to enact our business. It's not even enough for one year. How do you get upwards pressure in your share price? People can just sit back and go they're going to come back for more. I there's nothing that forces me to make that buy decision. And so it's not just GNA, it's it's how much money have you raised and and is that money enough to execute your hopefully clear strategy uh that you're trying to implement that will hopefully generate buying interest, share price talk, positive share price performance. Hm. It It's funny you say it that way because that is also one of the questions that I ask when I interview companies and the way they would often try to get out of it is like, "Oh yeah, we have enough money to execute that strategy." And then a couple of minutes later down the road we start talking about marketing and they're like, "Oh, but we might have to raise money to keep the lights on." And it's like, I want to know the whole thing. You know, I asked you a couple of minutes ago like part of the strategy is you surviving in marketing as well. I mean that's part of the strategy as well, right? So, um, that's I guess why I use that exploration to administration ratio there. Um, yeah. Yeah. You and you never want to be raising money when you need money. And that's that seems so obvious and simple, but it almost it almost never happens because the minute everybody there is it is blood in the water and the sharks are feeding. So, unless you have something positive, you want to you you want to be doing doing the surprise financings. And I I talk about this in presentations I give. I show the Land curve and I show in fact I need to process on LinkedIn and and when you have that euphoria when you have that hopefully wonderful Drew result that turns into a real deposit not all of them do but when you have that share price performance like this but your your defendable values like this that gap that you should raise as much money as possible because that's accreative and nobody ever does that. Okay. the one group that has done that and it's the unicorn was great there. So you understanding you you get this mentality which is when when my share price is going like that it's going to continue to go like that. It never does. So when the ducks are cracking, you need to raise money. I I'm smiling to your uh great bear comments there because I'm sure someone's going to reach out to me after this and gonna be like, "We're that company. We're the next great beer." because it always happens and and and it's good actually. You need optimism. It's a it is is a business where you do need optimism. But operating on the basis of you thinking that you're going to be that one exception in so many thousands uh is not really sustainable business or at least it's not even up to me to comment whether it's sustainable or not. But it's not a business that I'm willing to finance. That that's how much I I know. Yes. And it's there's this back to the greed and fear response. And you know, obviously Buffett talks about this much more eloquently than I ever will is is uh momentum can really dictate behavior and you constantly have to be stepping back as a management team and board and it is astonishing how few companies actually do this and go what is our defendable value. So as a producing company you should be doing the same thing and not just relying on analyst consensus but going what are the pieces that make up our value? What's our base case? what's our high case and what's our low case and frankly speaking all of your strategic decisions should be around that. Now, having just come from the Denver Gold Forum, sorry, the mining forum America has changed its name uh and the Precious Metal Summit is it is astonishing how most companies will get in front of uh an audience and and focus on we're so undervalued, we're so undervalued, we're so undervalued, and they'll use all different charts to prove the point they're so undervalued. You could theoretically argue that if you're really undervalued, you're not doing your job properly. Whereas, if you've generated excess value above and beyond your NAV, that's an amazing thing that gives you it opens up the world of opportunity. So, if you're trading at a premium to NAV, you should be issuing equity acquiring something. So, boards and management teams should be asking that question of themselves every quarter. What do we think our defendable value is and where are we trading relative to that and what can we do because if you don't take advantage of being overvalued over the longer term I don't believe markets are efficient in the short term but over the long term you will you will trend towards fair value that long term might be years but you will ultimately trend towards fair value so don't drink the Kool-Aid about what your relative value is now if you're undervalued and that's probably more typically the case than being overvalued is that's a harder. And that is really h how do you strategize your business so you do the least damage to your capital structure? Mhm. Well, to your point, Buffett is great in being eloquent, but don't sell yourself short cuz he's like 100 years old and so you still have like 65 years to get there. So, you'll get there. I believe it. Uh, but on the note of this being a bull market, Nicole, I'm just reminded by my notes here that late last year, you said that you didn't think we were in a crazy bull market yet at the time, which was uh, let's call it October of 2024. Has that changed? Are we in a in a crazy bull market right now? No. No. I've experienced crazy bull markets. I was I I covered and and the one that was the most compressed and the most startling was when I joined I left the buy side joined the sell side in 2005 and I covered uranium and copper from 2005 to 2007 and that was an insane uranium bull market. It was insane. Uh so I was an analyst uh that started covering the uranium sector when nobody knew what uranium was. Nobody had looked at it for 30 years. There was no experts in the space. Nobody could spell uranium and the uranium share price the uranium price went from sub20 to 125 and it was insane and one of the reasons why I resigned for being an analyst was it was a clearly a bubble it was clearly going to burst I didn't predict that you know I resigned February 2007 and that turned out to be the top but it was scary we were going marketing into hedge funds in New York that literally couldn't spell uranium 6 months previously. That would sit there and argue with me about value. If you had uranium in your name, you could raise $50 million at in a heartbeat. If you had moose pasture in northern Canada, you had a with boulder samples, you had $100 million valuation. You had generalists coming in mass. We are not we're in a bull market. I think we're in a we were at the in a bull market last year. people weren't acting like we were and there was a huge number of opportunities and and the the slide that I point to and and I I have kind of adapted it or stolen it uh and I acknowledge uh first mining uh line lion selection they came up with this idea of a mining clock and I've taken that and adapted it and and the realization that you have to come to in this sector in the commodity sector is number one it's cyclical it always is it will go up it will go down duration can change. But what is really predictable is investing and corporate behavior. It is unbelievable. It's frustrating as anything, but you have to accept that and understand it. Most most behavior of most corporates and most investors is pretty predictable depending on where you are in the cycle. And for me, the crazy bull signatures are you have to see generalist money coming in in mass. We're not there yet. They're they're doing their homework. And in fact, Neil and I gave a short course uh at the mining forum Americas uh organizers of the conference and thank you very much for them to asking us to do this said that they had so many generalists that were coming to this conference for the first time and I suppose their complaint was we want to better understand this thing called mining. We're having lots of meetings. We're sitting in presentations but we don't really know the questions to ask and we want to better understand what the the technical aspects of mining and so a number of us give uh we give this short course called capital markets for geologists but then you know the the geohysicists got pissed off so then it became geoccientists and now it's for geoccientists and engineers and that's that's telling that the technical community about the capital market side of the business and it was interesting that this was the reverse it was talking to generalists about the technical side of the business and the things that you need to be thinking about and understanding. So generalists are doing their work and uh the organizers of the mining form America said that they the the attendees the investor attendees were up 30% but the corporate attendees were only up 6%. So you had a material increase in the number of investors that were coming and they were a lot more generalist investors. So my takeaway is there are more journalists that are doing their homework. They are not entering in a in a big way yet. And so the other indicators are uh you can finance anything. You know you could you'll have a hund00 million bought deals for very small companies. We have seen a ramp up in financing activity. We're seeing companies getting rewarded for doing M&A. We're seeing companies get rewarded for doing riskier M&A. But we're not we're not at crazy times yet. We'll get there. But we're not there yet. And my ex- boss at at at Sun Valley Gold, he made a really interesting observation and and it was at the start of a bull market when things start to go parabolic, you go, "Ah, I've missed it. It's done." And then it goes harder and faster than than you would you would contemplate. Having also said that is you you need to sell is we're all really really really good at buying. We're less good at selling. And so don't get trapped in this, oh, I sold too early. If you've made money in this sector, you've done an incredible job. Even if that's 10%, 20%. So, don't get wrapped up into just trying to ek out uh ek out those last final games when it gets euphoric. When you're feeling amazing and like a genius, because everything you bought went up and not because of you're particularly good or intelligent, it's rising tide floats or boats. You take money off the table. H have you seen I'm trying to find it but I'm probably not going to be able to find it now real time but have you seen that chart um it's it's on research gate um where is something about Napoleon and and and him buying a stock and kind of tricking himself into you know he bought he made money and then all of his friends made way so he bought he sold he made money all of his friends made way more money he was like oh but it it's done I'm out I'm not going to do it and then eventually near the top he starts going back in because he's like oh I'm going to you know I'm going to miss out on it and I think I think even uh who was it Stanley Trucken Miller has done stuff like that I think it's very human nature to to be tricked by the bull market in that way it it is and that fear of missing out it is such a driver o of behavior and there was an interesting study done and it was on it was on retail managers of uh people's money and they they said that the the most pissed off their clients got was when they sold too early. Not when they lost money, when they sold too early. You think about the inherent contradictions in that. So, it is it is constantly, I think, kind of stepping back and going uh doing a touch test on on where do you think we are in the cycle? And when you're feeling extraordinarily smart and happy with yourself, that's a that's a sell signal. Yeah, especially if that if that's happening by me. So if people see me feeling smart on camera, that's your sell signal. You know it's time to sell. Uh what is to go back to what's different during sort of that crazy bull market. Will you be looking differently at at news releases and especially assay results? So, for example, I don't know the just off the top of my head, 20 g or 20 m of 2 g at 200 m deep doesn't sound too interesting in a bare market at 1,800 gold, but at now nearly 4,000 gold, does that change the situation for you? Would you go in projects that are maybe of lower quality or lower grade? I think it depends on duration. I I during of your investment probably nobody will ever hold something in perpetuity and so it's where are you buying in the evolution of that company and let's just talk about a single asset junior uh in the context of the Land curve is uh in a crazy bull market you can go I'm going to buy that for a trade I'm going to buy that for a short-term trade that they've got due results they're interesting people. What happens is people have made money in in drill plays, they start to go, "Okay, I'm going to buy something because it just it hasn't moved yet." And so you get this recycling of capital going down the higher risk part of the cycle, higher risk part of the of the business and also for more mediocre results. It just it becomes euphoric. So I don't I don't tend to do trades like that. That's not really I am I am attracted to deep value but deep value ultimately needs a management team of of capable of extracting that deep value and so often deep value becomes it it becomes a value trap and so I I think the best trade I've ever done was back in 2015 it's when I left working for a precious metals fund it was peak negative sentiment it was gold prizes never going to go up. It's terrible, etc., etc. And I bought a bunch of leverage beta names. I didn't predict 2016. I don't think anybody did, but I went there. It's too negative. I'm going to buy companies that got leverage beta. Let's just tuck in I'll touch on leverage B beta in a second that have enough cash to last three years. That was my investment thesis. And that aren't building something because the minute you start to build, you cannot claw back that expenditure that has to occur. and then in a very bad market that leads to bankruptcy. So I did that and then 2016 occurred and it went crazy for 6 months and all those stocks were up material and I was out because they all had share price charts like that. So I I think you're the way that you invest again having the rigor and the discipline of going where do I think we are in the cycle and which names will will outperform that has to be part of the overall investment thesis because ultimately stocks move more are more likely to move due to beta. Uh alpha events positive alpha events will positively impact share prices whatever you are in wherever you are in the cycle. If you have amazing D results in a bare market, you'll sh you'll see outside share performance. Those are much much much harder to pick. So, sorry. Go on. No, no, go ahead. Uh, and I'm just going to circle back. So, to me, the leverage beta names, interestingly, have only just begun to move. That's that's kind of been interesting. It's it's when those assets when you start hearing everybody talk about ounces in the ground. Oh, this one's really cheap based on an ounce in the ground valuation. That's toppy investing behavior because that's assuming all ounces are created equal and we know they're not. Exactly. Um and and that's one of the reasons especially the last sentence one of the reasons why I don't like the the EV to ounce or pound in the ground ratio for for the uranium companies pound and and copper companies. But, uh, and I never liked that, especially uranium, uh, because of just how the metal energy is different. But that's a different topic. And I suppose I understand I'm a bit of a a cliche in this conversation, but it's never as good as it feels and it's never as bad as it feels. Uh, rings true in cyclical industries. So, I guess I guess yeah, it it'll be it'll be the same this time. Uh, that's what I'm that's what I'm assuming. I caught up with a fund manager I know was at the Beimo conference. I want to say it was beginning of 2022 and he said, "Look, I I think I think we're just really well positioned for gold." And he goes, "I'm really I'm I I feel terrible do doing it." And he named the company that he was buying. He was buying basically a crap company that had a lot of debt on the balance sheet, but had massive leverage to gold. And they're the companies that outperform in this kind of market. And he will have done very, very, very, very, very well with this kind of company. But again, you you you have to sell. And so the the experienced guys in this business that have seen a few cycles, I I think of an understanding of of what to buy depending on where you you are in the cycle. And so that's key. How are you going to do that? How are you going to sell? Is it is it sort of are you you personally or or w with clients or whatever it might be? Are you going to be scaling out or is there going to be like one major event where you're like, you know, sell it all today? Uh just like it was in the movie or how how are you going to do that? I I sold a position just the other day. You it was up was up reasonably within a couple of months. I mean, this is an example. I think it was up 80% in 3 months and I went right, I'm out. Uh and it will likely do better. Uh, so I I think you you constantly need to be thinking about selling something. Uh, I've got another position that I bought that I've owned for three years. Uh, producing company. Uh, it's done very very well. I will continue to hold that because I don't think we're near anywhere near the top yet. So, I I suppose don't fall in love with anything that you own. uh if you bought it for a specific purpose and having the discipline to write down this is why I bought this company and these are the things that I think will make it move up depending on obviously where we are in the cycle and then if those things occur sell that's the way that it's the discipline nobody talks about selling and it's the most important thing that you can do and the fund managers that perform the best over time are the ones that sell their losers the earliest and are willing to sell. And I am by no means perfect. I have owned one stock to bankruptcy. Uh so I'm speaking from experience here is after after probably you know 20 years that and it seems so obvious but you need to and you need to track you need to don't just buy something and then forget about it. And the biggest mistakes I've made are when I haven't been proactively monitoring. Don't just buy something and forget about it is super important. I think in a in a bull market there's reason I don't necessarily want to name names. It doesn't really matter, but it was recently a a post on online and on a message board someone came in and it's like this company disappeared from my portfolio. What happened? And it's like well the company got taken over 8 months ago. um that question there is is is there's a lesson in there in and of itself like that that you know if you hold 160 companies um can you really track it and and and so that that's a really really important point there I think yeah and be and be honest with yourself about that and also understand why you're buying something uh we live we live in a world where gurus or influencers can have an inordinate amount of influence on share price performance and so often people are looking for a guide or someone to tell them what to do. I think you need to understand whoever you're following or wherever you think that has influence in that and and ultimately momentum gets momentum and perception becomes reality is understand what's driving them. So if they're a newsletter writer, how are they getting compensated? If there's someone on on Twitter that has a lot of influence and they might be anonymous or they they might not be. try to understand what what their incentives are because blindly following people you you're you're likely to be you're you're you're getting you're not getting in at the price they're getting in at. Let's just say that. So you you need to be somewhat cynical in understanding what are the drivers of the people who are out there talking about things and and and ultimately making share price moves. And and you can have uh individuals that if they talk positively about something, they have a direct impact on share price. And that uh that that impact on share price will tend to get more exaggerated the more advanced you are in a bull market in my opinion because again people are running around going you heard about this thing called gold. I want to what what gold stock should I own or who and so there's there's this this there there's this desire in some ways to be told what to do which is fascinating and it's not just in the retail investment side of things that you see that you also see that with with big established portfolio managers going well what do you like out there um they're reading the message boards commonly that their behavior is also influenced by what everybody else is doing. really hard to be standing out in the crowd being being a lone voice sometimes. So just buying something because somebody So you think about that. Would you would you go and buy a house because your mate told you to go and buy it? Would you go and you the way that people invest sometimes is is astonishing and it can seem like play money, but at the end of the day that's that's real that's real money going in and out the door. And one of the reasons why you get a lot of in retail investor uh enthusiasm for the junior sector is you can have such outsized performance. I very few you said this at the start very few other sectors do you have where you can have a stock move 50% in 20 minutes can move a,000% in a couple of weeks based on a couple of pieces of information and that's in the form of draw results. when you're someone who's new to the sector or actively investing and you're choosing to follow an influencer, uh whether that's a mining Twitter influencer or a newsletter writer, understanding their incentives is is really really important. And also understanding if someone is pumping a stock, you're getting in after them and and in some ways you're providing the liquidity and the momentum for them to exit their position. So, so just be aware that blindly following somebody else is is not necessarily the best way to invest. And again, I'm going to say this over and over is understanding why you're investing and also when you should be exiting and monitoring it. Y absolutely. And that doesn't change during a bull market. You know, we were talking about what does change during a bull market earlier. I think that doesn't that was my take away from Beaver Creek essentially. Um, so yeah, it's uh yeah, it it's funny you say that people like being told what to do. I think my wife doesn't have that desire, especially when it comes down to food. So maybe you should talk to her one day. But do you I want to go back to the grade question here though because I'm still thinking about what you said um you know talking about how should non-technical people deal with uh you know technical news releases. Do you have minimum thresholds in terms of I know quick and dirty rules around grade like it's often talked about you know 100 100 gram meters when it's gold then it's interesting but different commodities have different thresholds um do you have those thresholds absolutely uh agree 100 g meters is uh I think that says I should be taking a look at it and it it's not just that in isolation it would be uh Look, the market with a discovery, the market doesn't care about reality and the discovery hurdle goes down in a bull market, i.e. people will respond more favorably to results that maybe would would not have moved share prices as much. So, you do need to take that into context. Uh so, uh and it also depends who's behind the company and who's behind the stock. I mean, you see some companies release true results that aren't, I would say, that are maybe a little underwhelming, but if you have a big name behind the company or someone out there promoting it or is generating influence going, but this is just the beginning. This is going to be an amazing discovery, blah blah blah, you can see a rush of enthusiasm. So I I think it comes down to the individual assets and the individual company and and and understanding maybe who's involved and who's behind those companies. Uh and also you can have share prices uh you can have sometimes a delayed reaction and so reunion was a really interesting example of this was they had drew results came out uh I can't remember exactly when it was number of years ago obviously it no longer exists but the market barely reacted and so you had this period of time where you could build a a position because the market wasn't taking any notice of these drew results that were clearly pointing towards a sizable discovery. And so that was a real opportunity and you don't necessarily see those all the time and we're in a different market now. But that for me gave me a chance to accumulate. And then suddenly everybody started talking about it and the share price started to go parabolic. But that probably occurred four to five months after those initial discovery drill results. And so it's not it's not the drill results in isolation. It's understanding okay what kind of terrain are they in? Are they in a terrain that you could potentially have uh deposit extensions? What has happened around those particular results? Do they have geophysics? What does their mapping say? Are there large deposits along strike? It's a whole bunch of things that you need to take into consideration. And that probably is where the technical person has the advantage. Yeah. Than the retail person, which is to go, this looks really interesting. Could this become something? Mhm. And so, and it's also about the messaging and the tone. I mean, the best companies, the absolute best companies, they resist, they resist the the impulse to oversell good news. They let momentum build and and Steven Quinn, who I've worked with on numerous occasions, XEO of Sherwood that merged with Capstone, and Xio Midas, which is now Perpetuous, said, uh, forecast in hindsight. only put something out into the public that you are absolutely damn sure you're going to deliver into. If you if companies can do that, they generate enormous trust and I I would say outside momentum. So when you see companies releasing on visuals, that's a that's a double-edged sword. So you you you don't want to get if if the stock is reacting before you put the good news out. And maybe that good news would have been good news, but because everybody's expectations became so outsized and then you put the good news out and the share price can sell off because there was a mismatch between expectations and reality. And what's the happiness equation is when reality exceeds expectations. So managing expectations, managing your news flow, avoiding that desire to upsell good news before it's out. Uh and also ideally if you have a good drill results is having being able to have support that momentum. So if you're releasing a set of drill results that you know that you've got more coming in behind that that can that can push that momentum and interest. That's an underrated point there. The last one and uh the way I've dealt with it as a as a non-technical person is that I've essentially sneakily befriended a bunch of geologists and I pay them with dad jokes even though I'm not a dad. and uh they get to use them, make their friends laugh. Um but so jokes aside though, Nicole, how do you do you think bull markets might be different also from the perspective of of jurisdiction and uh a lot of things have been happening in in in you know less stable jurisdictions, if you will, that normally during another market might have resulted in a in a dip in in the share price of these companies. Now I'm seeing some stuff happening. They're not resulting in a dip in the share price of these companies. So, is the way you're going to approach jurisdictions different than you would during a bare market? Jurisdictional risk, I want to touch on a couple of things with jurisdictional risk in a in a bull market risk, concerns about risk kind of go out the window. So whether it's jurisdictional risk, whether it's project risk, whether it's technical risk, whether it's people risk, people don't really care because euphoria overrides everything else. And to some degree, uh, as people are starting to look for outsiz performance, they want to take on more risk. And for a short time, that trade can work very, very well. I'm just going to touch on jurisdictional risk because I do think that there is a bias, and this is again an overused word, but there is probably an anglophone bias about risk and risk manifests itself very, very differently depending on what country you're in. uh in the cases of the states and Canada and Australia, it it comes down to what state you're in. But there's this idea, for example, and we really experienced this with with Bravo. Oh, Brazil, it's so risky. And you go, well, in Brazil, for Brazil to change the mining law, uh that requires a majority of uh Congress and the Senate. It's very, very, very difficult to do. Yet you had the Labour Party in Queensland at the drop of a hat change the royalties around coal in a very very material way for the coal mining industry. Based on those two examples, Queensland jurisdictional risk for mining is a hell of a lot higher than Brazil because your burden of being able to change the fiscal regime which dramatically impacts a company's ability to do business within that jurisdiction. It was way easier to do it in Queensland. And so there's a lack of understanding about what does jurisdictional risk mean? Uh so jurisdictional risk where where we've seen it manifest at material it would be more recently is in Marley. Uh with uh governments need money uh governments where you have mining companies that are producing or contributing material amount to the GDP. Uh and you see record underlying commodity prices an increase in cash. These are at the end of the day are these countries resources that are experiencing a depletion. There's a very uh rational I suppose I'm not saying I support it. There's but there's a rational response to that and these governments go well the mining companies are easy targets because I can they can't move their widget factory. So let's go and renegotiate the terms. So the jurisdictions that have the least risk are the ones that have the highest hurdle with which you have you that governments can change mining law can change taxes can change royalties. So some jurisdictions that are perceived by the market to be risky or more risky are not. And so there's this desire and you see mining companies say well I want to have exposure only in Canada or the states or Australia. uh jurisdictional risk changes all the time and so you have some jurisdictions that were risky 10 years ago and not risky now and vice versa but this idea that Anglohone countries are lower risk bunch of bollocks in my opinion and so it's about understanding individual risk and it's and sometimes noise around risk uh we saw it in Chile uh when you had a a leftist government come in talk about changing materially changing uh the fiscal regime with which m miners can operate within the country. There was a huge amount of scaremongering about that. But if you were close to people within the country or you had contacts and understood how the political system worked and understood the hurdles with which you needed to uh to achieve to actually enact real change. So there's a difference between real rhetoric and reality. So I think this this bias towards uh some of the English-speaking countries I think maybe that's a misplaced sense of risk and at the end of the day mining is not loved. We've done an absolutely appalling job of messaging what it is that we do and you will not lose votes as a politician if you come down hard on mining. That's the fundamental element that we have to understand. Uh so one of the biggest risks is is one of reputation. Now you do have governments around the world waking up to this idea of critical minerals and we instead of becoming more globalized we're starting to become more inward-looking and thinking about security of supply. I would say in a little bit of a ham hamfisted way but one of the things that President Trump has done whatever you think of him is been talking about things like rare earth in the public sphere. uh possibly in a way that I wouldn't be because I wouldn't be looking at Ukraine as as one of the biggest potential providers of rare earth minerals. But putting that aside is I don't think the average pundit knew what rare earth minerals were until he started talking about them and you started to see global newspapers talk about rare earth. So it behooves us to be talking about these critical commodities that form the basis of life as we know it. But there is there's such a lack of understanding from the average population from governments and decision bodies about what this thing called mining is and how do you secure a supply of of critical minerals for yourself. So that was a very long-winded way of saying that yes you think about jurisdictional risk but that in a bull market nobody really cares. They do care. They care they care in sorry they care in flat to negative markets for for people who believe that anglophone countries are are exempt from political risk. I have a story about salmon and pebbles if they want to listen to that. Um but I've got plenty of those. Um and and you know Nicole it's interesting though that you say here people don't care about risk in a bull market and and I guess that's true. Does that mean though that I shouldn't either? I mean, I often see the argument that, you know, garbage performs best during a bull market. Actually, the lowest quality companies were the most undervalued, I suppose, are the cheapest. Not undervalued because oftent times there is no real value, but they're the cheapest. So, is that really true or what do you think causes some companies to outperform in a bull market? Uh, I absolutely think that's true. Uh, it's because you just you have a rush into the sector and when something looks cheap, you go, well, that's that's undervalued. I need to buy that. We're in a bull market is going to outperform the companies that have the highest leverage to the gold price. So that's the optionality gold in the ground plays. That's the companies that have the more debt on the balance sheet that have the highest cost structure. The a 10% increase in the gold price impacts them more positively than a 10% in increase in the gold price does for a company that's incredibly well managed that has a very low cost profile. So it's it it it happens time and time and time again. So you start to see the really well-run companies, the ones with the lowest costs, the ones that are doing a very very good job, they tend to underperform in the later stages of a bull market. And and I suppose the way to the way that I think about a bull market, it is, you know, it's it's it's the riskoff trade. It is the highest risk, the talkiest names will outperform. And I would say technical people, this is the challenge of of of being technical. It's why almost every geologist that you speak to completely miss lithium. None of us were exposed to lithium because we're sitting there going, "Well, there's a lot of lithium in the world. It's going to be pretty quick and easy to bring it on. I don't think there's the the fundamental supply demand factors to drive excessive returns in lithium." We were all completely wrong. And so the struggle that people who are technical have is is we look at things for reality. And I would say the majority of the investing universe does not because that's what a technical background probably gives you. You're sitting there going that's that project is awful. It's never going to work. But you're a lone voice in the wilderness. Um I I was in a similar camp um on lithium there if that's any consolation. But I missed out on many other things. So maybe it isn't. just why wouldn't I buy why wouldn't I just go looking at the financials of companies and just buy companies with extending extended marketing budgets then I mean if if that's the only thing that kind of or or if that's the main thing that would push companies the companies that are the loudest that would push them the highest y perform why not switch my you know put my bull market cap on and just buy garbage with high marketing budget well you could I just I I can't do that I I I and and you will miss out on returns for not doing that. But I I struggle with at the end of the day, I'd like to support good companies with good management teams that are doing good things. Uh but that is not that's maybe a bit naive and and maybe I'm overindowed with a certain viewpoint but um uh the way to make outsiz returns is to is probably in all honesty to to aggressively buy the the very the companies that are that are that are underwhelming to say the least in all of those areas. uh so that the the talky and I I mean talk by both talking and share price but also talk uh those companies are out there and and generating attention ultimately they will crash and they will crash hard and that's the risk that you take trading those names because I don't think any of us ever pick the top and the bottom I think you can you pick when it's getting very toppy and you and you can pick when sentiment is very very low but you can decide to sell and everything moves up another 100, 200, 300% after you've done that. And the same you can decide to buy what you think is the bottom of a bare market and then share prices go down another 50 70%. So you're never going to pick the top or the bottom and I think you just have to decide what works for you the way that you look at the world and your investing style and and all of us are different. Personally, it's that's not what I do. I've been having some thoughts on that and I just opened up one of my my tweets that I want to read to you and you tell me if if you agree with that. Sounds like you might based on what you just told me. First of all, obviously yes, you do want to do the right thing and support the people who actually do want a good work over the long run. That's how you leave the industry a better place. It's it sounds cheesy but it is kind of obvious. Um but anyways, the tweet that I I put out after Beaver Creek and after having interviewed um people there, including Neil, um is and and I write it on here. I say this looks like a real bull market, but that doesn't mean it's time to lower your standards. A bull market is not an excuse for low quality. Although you shouldn't fight the bull market, you shouldn't rely on it to take care of bad projects and bad teams either. P.S. optionality exists, M&A rescues happen, junk rips, etc., etc. But I believe that over a long enough time horizon returns come from the quality of the process, project selection, position sizing, risk controls, catalyst, discipline, etc. not hope or random situations." End quote. What do you think of that? Absolutely agree. I mean, it may be confirmation bias, but agree. And and where it hurts us as an industry, you support crap and then it underperforms in a bare market and everybody loses their shirt, then they go, I don't want to ever invest in this sector again. Yeah. That is the the detrimental part of this business. And you've seen this with and and this is the problem with generalists coming in and I joke sometimes that generalists you know it's a less it it's the marginal investor and sometimes they're forced to come in and it's almost like you need a generational change. So I would argue the general generalists that will be coming in in this gold ball market none of them were probably exposed to the previous one which was 20 you know really from 2004 was upwards moving to really 2020 2012 is those guys have moved on because they would have gone I am never touching this sector it is awful it destroys value because it's it's I think what happens is somewhat facitious but when when the bubble bursts it's a bunch of generalist investors that have come in and they get to they're buying when their knowledge of the sector is relatively low. Their knowledge starts to increase over the time and they all wake up one day and go what I own this piece of crap sell. And so it's almost when knowledge about what you actually own occurs and normally there's some maybe there's a price a commodity price shift or something that makes that happen is you go oh I need to exit and and when people lose money in a sector there is an emotive response that occurs with that and then that sector gets tred with that with that negative brush. It gets painted with I am never going to expose myself to that again. That does not help us. Well, I think a lot of what we discussed today is is because of how much trust has been eroded in the junior space or in the mining space as a whole over the last um call it 10 to 15 years since that 2011 moment that you talked about and maybe even before that too. I mean there's there's nefarious things that happened before that also dealing with some of the locals communities and and so on and so forth. But what do you think has to happen for for mining to gain back that trust? Is it is it are we doomed to repeat the same mistakes forever and live in in this sort of cyclicality and and hated industry most of the time and and I mean is it is it even realistic to expect that it will change? No, I don't think it will ever change. I think you need to accept that as frustrating as that is and I actually think that's how you make money is is this idea we are doomed to repeat the same behavior time and time and time again. uh it's a maybe it's a fallibility of of humans is and that's so frustrating. So let you let's just talk about the sector. All of these mid and larger mining companies, the the development companies and some of the single asset companies were so depressed over the last four years and and management teams and boards were fatigued. You could have come in and just offered precedent transaction premium and gobbled up uh uh an infinite pipeline. Nobody did that. Nobody. And you had companies that have been had very strong balance sheets. You've had this run in the gold price from 2022 and you've only se seen it start to occur last year and this year. I mean that to me says we're we're destined or doomed to make the same mistakes over and over again. And now you have all of these companies running around going, "Oh, we need to grow. We need to grow." And and the thematics at the mining forum of America's everybody's presentation was about growth. And that's what investors want to talk about and that's happened last cycle is when everybody's feeling great, you're generating cash on the balance sheet. Uh it's what have you done for me lately? Where's your growth? And guess what? When the easiest way to grow is not to actually do what you should be doing, which is investing in the foundation of your business, which is your geologist and committing long-term capital to expiration. Smart expiration. Smart people will do smart things. Uh you're going to run around and you're going to buy something. competition has gone up enormously. All of these fatigued management teams and boards that now have seen their share prices move 100% this year are suddenly going you end up with having big kahones and going well we no longer want precedent transaction premium. We're not willing to do a deal. We can tap the markets. And so you have this uh okay well we're going to offer you above precedent transaction premium and when one company does something another company will do it. And so you just see this this behavior and it's so frustrating and it's so I just there and go roll my eyes and we do it time and time and time and time again. And we're doing it again already. You're seeing exactly that same behavior play out. And so everybody will run around. They'll want to do M&A. There'll be more competition. They will these companies all the good stuff will get gobbled up first. And arguably it has the various the lowhanging fruit, the highest quality assets and you'll start seeing companies go down the food chain again. So, and you'll be in this this this cycle of investors asking for growth and companies wanting to deliver on that growth and also seeing share prices get rewarded for growth. Uh you look at Discovery Silver or Aller. I would say 2 three years ago if you did M&A your share price probably would have gone down as if you're an acquirer. It is the opposite that is happening. So if companies are seeing companies getting rewarded in their share price for doing M&A, that just gives them more comfort that they should be doing M&A. Mhm. At some point that breaks down, but we're not there yet. What would you change about all of that? If you I don't know, if you had a a magic stick, what would you change about the way junior mining companies do business right now? The way that we do business creates opportunities, I think. So in a perfect world everything would be fair fairly valued. So if I was running a business or I had real influence uh okay if I was running BHP or Glen Core right now I'd be gobbling up every single copper developer out there. They haven't really moved that much. Are they doing it? No. I would be I would be using my balance sheet and I'd be using my size to secure future growth. I would also be doing what happened. I only think this happened 30 years ago and this is where Neil and I would probably quite vehemently disagree is how do you structure exploration in our business but when I was a young undergraduate student leaving finishing my degree in the early 1990s there was an opportunity that you could if and then you went on to do a PhD you could go and join the western minings the CRAAS the BHPs and you had a viable career option that was basically to be a thinking geologist was to go into these groups they had within the these large organizations and all of them had it and that's partly the the um the sheep like behavior that occurs in their sector. But they had think tanks and those think tanks were there focused on had a lot of money had the smartest technical people that they could hire and had a 5 to sevenyear time horizon about terrain scale expiration. We're still benefiting from that very very good work that was done in excess of 30 years ago. I don't think that happens anymore. And I think relying on juniors to do your expiration for you, I don't think that's una I think it's unsustainable. And the reason is is the market reacts to to drill results. And so I'm in a board of a junior um micro cap that is doing very very very good work. It is a board that's populated by geologists, very strong management team, strategic land position, but we haven't had any success drilling. And so that at at the end of the day is and that is why juniors go back and they recycle old projects and drill a few holes and hope there's going to be interest in the market is is how do you have that disconnect where you have to have a very long-term duration of capital and commitment to come up with new discoveries, but the markets they're not going to be there for you over that 5 to 6 years. And so majors do need to have a commitment. You cannot outsource it all to the juniors. And then I've been on a board with that had a major that was an investor. And that it was astonishing talking to that major about. So whenever you spoke with them, they were always focused on the share price and you're going why do you care about the share price? You're invested in this company because you think this company can do something that you can't do. And frankly speaking, if we're down that that gives you a lot more power or optionality about your strategic decisions around us as a company like to go in and a sophisticated mining company, a global defiide producer rabbiting on about share price and it's 0.001% of their value and what are you doing? So there is if I was to uh and this is going to be a a shout out to my fellow geologists out there out there. Joolologists are the R&D of our business and we get so badly mistreated. It's like being in an abusive relationship. We get punched in the face and we keep coming back for more. And it's why companies in the bad times they fire all of their technical people, their geologists. Geologists are the first to go. And in the good times, they're running around desperately trying to get them. And we have an aging industry. Uh you see, you know, you've got young people coming in with not much experience. To have a discovery, you need to actually know what a discovery is. And so, you have this this ecosystem that isn't isn't focused on generating, I think, long-term exploration success. Now because of that we live in an environment where you we have a porcity of supply. We're in a supply we're in a supply dur matter what happens with demand to some degree but in almost any any commodity and I'm a crazy copper bull but copper bull primary production starts to it starts to materially decline this year and the copper price is not incentivizing investment in new copper projects. And why is this occurring? It's because there hasn't been the foundational R&D investment from a capital perspective, a people perspective, and a time horizon perspective. So even though I'm winging about all of this, what this actually means is that ultimately you have to have rip roaring bull markets and some of these commodities to incentivize that money to come back into it. So I I would change geologists need to be paid like lawyers. We need to start we we need to start demanding the respect that we deserve. Damn it. So it you you just you you need to see this commitment and I don't I don't necessarily I don't necessarily see it. I have friends that are working for majors. I have friends that are working for juniors. Um the frust frustrating thing with majors I I think is that it becomes about process. It doesn't become about productivity. I don't think it has to be like that but that that's the way that it goes. And so I suppose there's positives and and and and negatives to everything, but expecting things to change. It's I've finally come to the realization after a very long time that they won't. But there's opportunity in that. Well, it's funny when you say that it it's um geologists, you know, it's kind of like being in an abusive relationship. That's what what investing in junior mining has felt like over the last couple of years. you get punched in the face and you keep coming back for more and and my hope is that the few of us who have stuck around will eventually get rewarded massively. Interesting to hear that there's stuff that you and Neil disagree about. Uh I I suppose uh that makes sense and you can agree on everything. So it might make sense to do an episode with the three of us and see what you guys disagree on within the industry. That would be a fun episode. I've kept you long enough though, Nicole. I don't want to I don't want to steal your entire day. What am I forgetting to ask you here? What did you come here hoping to talk about that you think I failed to bring up? Actually, I just want to say thanks to you. I think it's wonderful to see uh people who aren't the gray beards, metaphorically speaking, in this sector that are out there talking about it and and being proactive and building a following and building a a following that's I think very diversified. It's not just industry, it's external people. And we need so much more of that. And it's a big bug bear of mine. And uh I I think we touched on all of my topics which I talk probably way too much about, but it's also a shout out to you. Thank you very much. Thanks so much for saying that. I really appreciate it. Gray Beards talking to Orange Beards. That's maybe a podcast in and of itself. What are you What are you What are you up to uh yourself here over the over the short run uh with with Cool and and everything else that you're doing? Do you have anything uh that that you have coming up or anything else you want to share with me? Uh, no. I'm I'm probably doing the same thing that you are. The conferences, it was the first time I've been to the Precious Metal Summit or the Golf Forum Americas, sorry, Mining Form Americas, uh, with the luxury of not having to sit into endless meetings. And so, it was a real opportunity to sit down in front of presentations and get some new ideas. And so, one I sat in one in the in this is bullish behavior in the in the precious metal summit. And it was really good. It was very the guy didn't do the best job presenting which I thought was great because I thought well I have an opportunity to buy but very good technical people doing really good work looked very undervalued. You could see that the share price was going to go up and I had it on my list to spend some time doing a bit more work and potentially buy the next day but in that presentation that 15minute presentation the share price was up something like 50%. So clearly someone else in the audience had exactly the same reaction that I did. So I I am getting back into seriously looking at a few things after a couple of years of having to focus on other things, some health related stuff and Neil and I both do advisory work. So I've been doing some interesting stuff with that and obviously sit on sit on a few boards and then I'm getting some other interesting opportunities that are coming my way. So this is also an example of where we are in the cycle. So some private companies that have reached out that have some look interesting looking assets and so starting to starting to work on those. So fingers in a bunch of different pies. That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for this overview and thank you so much for sitting down with me. Thank you for your kind words as well and hopefully speak to you again soon. Sounds great. Thank you very much, Antonio.