A New World Order Is Fueling Gold’s Boom | Jay Martin
Summary
Precious Metals Rally: Gold and silver are experiencing significant momentum, with prices expected to continue rising despite positive geopolitical news.
Investment Perspective: The current gold rally is not just another asset rally; it signals systemic issues, with central banks buying gold due to reduced confidence in the existing financial system.
Market Strategy: Investors are advised to derisk by taking profits from speculative positions and reallocating to more stable investments, as the gold bull market is expected to continue.
Geopolitical Impact: The geopolitical landscape is shifting with countries like Saudi Arabia and China forming new alliances, impacting global trade and currency dynamics.
De-dollarization Trend: Countries are increasingly moving away from the US dollar in international trade, with significant deals being made in other currencies, highlighting a shift in global economic power.
Government Involvement: The US government is increasing its stake in critical mineral companies, signaling a strategic shift towards securing resources and boosting domestic production capabilities.
Investment Caution: In a hot market, investors should remain vigilant and adhere to disciplined investment strategies, focusing on companies with proven management and track records.
Educational Resources: The Commodity University offers courses to help investors understand the mining sector and make informed decisions, emphasizing the importance of education in navigating complex markets.
Transcript
Gold is rallying, silver is rallying, yet we're getting positive news from the geopolitical front, and the precious metals don't seem to care. Massive momentum behind the precious metals prices here in general. And probably the second we release this video, gold and silver are going to be higher than when we're speaking right now. Uh it's fascinating or the the time is absolutely fascinating that we live in right now. And uh I've invited a fantastic guest to discuss what is happening. What's driving gold? What is driving silver? Is this just part of the everything rally, the everything bubble that we're in, or is gold and silver, are they different? Should we be looking at them from a very different perspective? Lots of interesting questions that need to be answered. But before I switch over to my guest, please hit that like and subscribe button. It helps us out tremendously and we much much appreciate it. Did I mention it's free by the way? So, thanks so much for doing that. Now, it is my pleasure to introduce Jay Martin. He's the host of the Jay Martin show and of course the host of the Verick Conference, the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference happening happening every January in Vancouver. Jay, it is great to see you again. Thanks so much for joining me. >> Guy, it's great to see you. Great to be here. >> Jay, as we probably spoke like gold's probably up another $2 and silver is probably up another five cents here from the time hitting the record button. Massive momentum behind the precious metals. We need to dissect what is driving gold and silver prices right now. give us your first impression like what what are like at the 30,000 foot level what what is happening? >> Well, my first impression is that a lot of investors and I don't mean uh mining investors like you and I Kai or precious metals investors but a lot of generalist investors are watching this gold rally and they seem to be uh comparing it to just like the next asset rally. They watched crypto rally. They watched AI stocks rally. And now it's gold's turn. And that's how this is being interpreted. And I caution investors to remember that this is not just the next asset rally. Good news for gold investors is bad news for pretty much everybody else. Gold is like the the smoke signal that something is breaking in the system. And you know this this cycle began uh you know about 12 years ago and really began to speed up through 2020 2021. We started seeing the central banks start accumulating in gross numbers larger numbers than we've seen central banks buying gold in 50 plus years and they maintained uh these quantities for a couple of years, right? And so the first question is like what's that about? Right? If we get back to sort of the heart of today's gold rally and where it began and the genesis of it, you got to go there. And you got to just remember that all that that was was central banks having less confidence in the system that they've used for the last 40 years than they used to. And when you have less confidence in the system, you want to find an option. You want to find an alternative, a lifeboat that it's just adjacent to the current system, not far from it, right? But right there. And that's what gold is, right? I would argue it's as liquid as US dollars, but you don't have the counterparty risk. And so that's why it's the logical step for central banks and gold investors are always impatient, right? We see the gold price rally. Equity investors are curious like why aren't the equities following suit right away, right away, right away. And that's what we saw in 2020 and kind of the false start in 2016 a little bit. But this gold rally, this gold market, Kai, I just believe has been as textbook as any of us could ever have imagined in the way it's so patiently and logically um fled through the system from the precious metal price back in 2023 to the end of that year. The best-in-class royalties started to outperform and about 6 to 12 months later, the best-in-class miners followed suit. And today the funded developers, the earlier stage companies with world-class management teams or companies that seem to be on the cusp of a world-class discovery are getting that share price appreciation. But we're like two and a half years in at this point. So it's been a very slow and methodical trickle of capital. I personally love that because that's very healthy market, right? And so anybody who's in the gold equities right now, I encourage you um drisk. The market's giving you a gift. If you've been a gold equity investor for two years or longer, right? Whether it's been 20 years or two years, you've experienced some hard times. That much is for sure. If you've been in this market that long, the market's now handed you a gift. I encourage you to derisk from your earlier stage positions. I don't think this gold market is anywhere close to over. I believe we're just getting started. I'm sure we're going to get into that. But if you're in the speculation side of this industry, now is an opportunity for you to take a bit of principle off the table, park that in a safer bet, you know, a new Agneo, something that you can ride uh through the long-term market because as you know, Kai, even inside of a long bull market, there's short periods of volatility and those earlier stage companies feel at the worst. So when the market hands you a gift like that, you take it, you reinvest that somewhere else, the more stable side of the barbell and then wait for your next move. Absolutely very solid advice. I've been doing some of the same as well. Just just selling some of those higher risk positions that have been up quite a bit actually on as you said those gifts. Um you got to unwrap them and put them away at some point, right? Um but we'll get we'll get to the miners later in the conversation. Jay, I want to stay on the macro level because mantra of the channel is we discuss the macro to understand the micro. Micro for us is gold and the mining stocks of course here. Um let's take a look at some of the macro factors in influencing gold and silver here in particular. Um I mentioned in my intro on the geopolitical side it seems like we're we're moving towards world peace and I'm trying to say that you know facitiously here a little bit but uh of course the Middle East seems to be uh calming down. Um what are some of those macro drivers? Maybe start with geopolitics. How much of a factor is that and how much is priced in in the gold price right now? Because we've seen a bit of a dip last week that was quickly bought up. >> Yeah, I think it's a a core um driver of this gold market. Kai, we're we're witnessing the reshuffleling of the geopolitical chessboard. That much is certain, right? The era that that you and I grew up in, the era of globalization for the last 40 years, that's over. And and what happens next, we can debate that. Call it del globalization, friend shoring. It's going to take time to shake out. What we do know is it's going to be different than it was from the last 40 years. And countries recognize that. That's why they're hedging their bets back to their uh non-dollar hedges. Um, but it's difficult to say what that chessboard's going to look like in as short a period of time as five years, you know, and we've seen some really material headlines lately, like, you know, we we now may beat a peace deal in the Middle East. Time will tell how material that is, but it wasn't that long ago that we saw this headline about the bombing in Doha, in Qatar. And this kind of shocked the world because uh Qatari national has never been bombed inside their country ever before. And obviously after this occurred, there was zero recourse from Israel's strategic partner being the United States and Qatar, a country that six months ago the headline was they were gifting the American president a 400 um million dollar airplane. So, you know, it was curious, right? And that event got a lot of coverage. But the event that followed it that didn't get a lot of coverage and should have was the Saudis response to that. Right two weeks after that occurred, Saudi Arabia signed a defense pact with Pakistan. Now Pakistan's the only Muslim majority nuclear armed country in the world and notably they got that nuclear technology from China which puts Saudi Arabia de facto under the Chinese nuclear umbrella. The reason that's so significant is because that bucks in the face everything we've known about the petro dollar system for that much time. We would trade oil in dollars and in exchange Saudis would get military protection from the United States. The Saudis are now military protected by the Chinese nuclear umbrella. That is a seismic shift because there are countries all over the world that are trying to thread the needle of neutrality amidst the US China trade war. You know, Canada might be one. They they claim they're trying to find neutral ground. They're opening up new markets. Just signed a big trade deal with Indonesia where I am. And a country like Canada has the world's longest coastline access to three oceans and therefore every global market in the world. And they should try to open up new markets. But at the end of the day, Canada is never going to be neutral. They're always going to be massively aligned with the Americans because they also share the largest land border in the world. And it's never going to be more cost-effective to trade anywhere else. no matter what kind of coastline you have and letting product just fall across the border. And that's why over$2 billion dollars worth of product goes back and forth on that border every single day. But a country like Australia, right, they're militarily aligned with the Americans, but from a trade standpoint, they're more aligned with the Chinese. And from a proximity, a geographic standpoint, they're more aligned with the South Pacific. And so that's a country that has been threading the needle of neutrality very effectively. And the reason I mentioned Saudi Arabia is because that's a country that can do it. they have the the the the commodity strength and the wealth and therefore the leverage to appease both parties and play both sides for as long as they want to. So that's why this agreement with Pakistan and de facto China is so material and by the way Pakistan's followed up and said the doors open for anybody else right these defense packs are available which obviously is not Pakistan saying that that's China saying it through a proxy but the message is the same and that is a seismic shift and you know a country like Australia another one of these neutral nations um you know last week yes everybody was talking about the rare earth restrictions and Trump's response and this just absorbed all headlines and all attention. Um to be quite frank with you, when I saw this Kai, I was like, "This is a nothing burger. Uh China's dominance and rare earths has been baked into the cake for 20 years. They're just leveraging this now." Um there was an announcement that came out of China that same week and didn't get any press coverage, but it it should have. And at the end of September, what occurred was that China, who's the world's largest purchaser of iron ore, told BHP, "We're putting a suspension, a pause on all new orders of iron ore in US dollars." Now, they weren't pausing purchases of iron ore, just purchases in US dollars. And China's BHP's biggest customer. So, this brought them to the negotiating table. They struck a new deal. All future contracts for iron ore bought by China from BHP will be compensated in 30% Renmin B. So China got a lot of leverage and wiggle room in their currency. Now they're able to transact with Renman B for BHP. The reason it's so significant is because this isn't Vietnam or Indonesia. It's not a a bricks economy like Brazil or India. BHP is an Australian company, a G8 nation, a western aligned country who's now accepted the fact that there's a new player at the table. They're making demands to transact outside of US dollars and they have to concede to it, right? And this is seismic because this is new precedence. It's never it's never a one-off event when these things happen. You know, it's always the start or the part of a trajectory and it's generally new precedent. And this is big precedent because China can now go to the world inside of that ddollarization conversation and say this is how we do business now. We do business in renmanb when we want to and US dollars if we want to. And guess what? The deal was good enough for BHP so it's going to be good enough for you. It was good enough for Australia so it's going to be good enough for you. And this is a big shift, right? And that's just to say we don't know what alliances and adversarial relationships are going to look like in the very near term. The Shanghai Cooperation Summit just a month ago had over 40 companies participate. Uh it's never been that big, never even close to that big. And the amount of performative politics that we saw on stage, I mean, most notably the the minister of South Korea shaking hands with Kim Jong-un on stage, it was performative. But the purpose was President Xi was sending a message to the world. We can steward peace. We've got this under control, right? Trust us. And we're the new leaders of the of the the multipolarity, whatever you want to call it. But, you know, these are big announcements, right? The Saudis aligning with with um Pakistan, you know, BHP transacting and keep in mind like there's two sides to every transaction. So if BHP is doing tens of billions of dollars in ren minimi every year, they're accumulating a treasury of ren minimi that they now have to spend somewhere and they could just convert it to US dollars. But you know navigating those currency exchanges is tough. I mean that was China's problem. That's why they didn't want to do it. So they've offloaded that problem to BHP. What's far more likely is BHP is going to try to find a a supplier who will accept Ren Minb as payment. Right? they're now incentivized to see more of the world ddollarized BHPs because they're accumulating revenue themselves. And so that's sort of like the the ripple effects of these decisions that they're happening and they're big and a lot of the times they don't get coverage, right? Instead, we get the headline that covers what Trump tweeted yesterday, right? Which is far less significant. It's interesting, right? But it's not those aren't the seismic shifts that really change things. >> Yeah. They usually get more clicks, too. That's the problem, right? So the news is chasing whatever gets them the most views. Uh sadly enough uh because another interesting fact on the dollization trend topic is uh Switzerland is buying euros instead of US dollars. They stopped buying euros uh sorry US dollars and the euro is now the most important reserve currency that they hold in the in the SMB Swiss National Bank portfolio 39% versus 37% and they stop buying US dollars. Um just as a random fact here um on on that ddollarization trend in general um Jay Based on your assessment do you think the US can actually do something to reverse that trend? Is it is there a possibility or a scenario where the US could step in or not not step in but step up step step it up and say hey the dollar is the currency it'll stay that currency um besides threatening tariffs and war. Well, I'm I'm sure there is, but I believe they are running out of options and the current strategy is definitely not working. I mean, if if I were to like throw an analogy out, the way the world is functioning right now is kind of like a hammer and an anvil, right? And the United States is the hammer and China is the anvil. And the hammer is parading around the world, swinging at everything. Sanctions, trade restrictions, import taxes, all of this stuff. But as any metalmith knows, no matter how hard you swing the hammer, it's the anvil that changes the form of the object. And every time we see these massive announcements come out from a trade aggression standpoint, it's kind of like when you punch water, like you make impact, but the water just displaces and goes somewhere else. And that's what we're seeing. The United States exiled Iran from the global economy. Iran has the second or third largest oil and gas reserves in the world and they were exiled from the global economy. But that energy didn't disappear. It just began flowing to China. And China now gets over 50% of its oil massively discounted from Iran. When the United States sanctioned Russia and demanded that the Western countries and Europe stop buying Russian energy, that energy didn't disappear. It started flowing to China. Right? This is what's happening. China is the anvil. It's reshaping the world order because of what the hammer's doing, not because of what the anvil's doing. And there's there's more, you know, uh, aces up the sleeve, I'm sure, but if you look at the the sort of diplomatic relations and how they've been formed over the last 40 years, there's been two very distinct strategies. One from the east and one from the west, meaning the US and China. And China's had its belt and road initiative. This is uh sort of born out of the 2008 financial crisis when western economies were all bankrupt and stopped buying Chinese goods and China said we need to fund the next generation of consumer and hedge our bets build some optionality in the developing world and so they began funding infrastructure ports bridges rail mines refineries to get the developing world online from a consumer standpoint to buy more Chinese goods in the event that developed nations stopped again right and to date over a trillion dollars has been invested Ed, I think over 147 countries have accepted these loans and that's how China built trade relationships with the majority of the world and simultaneously the United States ran their weapons diplomacy program. They sell weapons to about 97 countries around the world. So, you know, we'll we'll arm you and defend you or we'll loan you cash to build up infrastructure and participate in the global economy. And that's how friends are bought, right, from from each side. >> But that's become a bit of a problem. And this is where the rare earth element conversation does become very relevant because um you know 97% of American advanced weapons require rare earth elements. You know so if you're the country that prides itself on having the most advanced weaponry and military but you can't build those things without the ingredients from your adversary. It's kind of a non-starter. Which is honestly why when people talk about, you know, the uh deputy assistant to the secretary of defense, Elbridge KBY is massively outspoken about an incoming hot conflict between the United States and China. But let me ask you a question. Like if if I have to buy the bullets from you, am I going to point my gun at you? Like I'm not going to do that. It's it's just it doesn't it doesn't fit, you know? And just last week, the United States Department of Defense canled a bunch of a bunch of contracts to ship missiles to Europe. Denmark had a bunch of Patriot missiles on order. Contract was inked. Deal looked good. This is exactly in line with the president's wishes that European economies start investing in defense more. But at the buzzer, they paused the contract and cancelled the order. And it was again, it was Albridge Kby who came out and said at the end of the day, these missiles are more valuable to us at home than the money we could make. Uh that's a bit of a problem. What that speaks to is a is the bigger issue of manufacturing weapons and how the United States is really struggling to do it. If you look at the delivery timelines of Loheed Martin, they are consistently two to five years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. I think the American Air Force today when they're training cadets, they train on 20% of their inventory. Meaning if they have a hundred planes to train on, only 20 are in the sky and the other 80 are waiting for parts upgrades. And the bottleneck in accessing those parts is the problem. And again, it comes down to the ingredients, right? We all agreed in the west that we wanted advanced technology. We wanted smartphones and iPads and laptops and EVs and renewable energy. Um, and we wanted to design that stuff at home so we could control the interface and the applications and the features, but we didn't want a very specific part of the supply chain, right? The dirty part, the toxic part, the refining of these rare earth minerals. And thankfully, China raised their hand and said, "We we will do that. We will seed the environmental concessions and we will leverage our cheap labor to make sure you can have that cheap iPhone." All right, that's what happened. We all signed that contract. That's how we got here. We shouldn't be surprised by this. That's how China became indispensable to every major economy and every major technology company in the world. That was a 30-year journey. And now we're trying to quickly reshore manufacturing like in a two-year term. Give me a break. We don't have the political will, right? There's advantages to not having elections. It's that you can push projects forward on your own time, right? We can't do that. I'm not saying that I want that system, but that's the problem, right? That's the problem when you're trying to play catchup and you're thinking in two-year cycles or four year cycles and the other economy is thinking in forever cycles. >> We're thinking quarterly. Jane, let me jump in here real quick before we go too far of that because I got a follow-up question there for you. It's just it's it's a society um is now criticizing that the US or Europe is stepping in and trying to play catchup very aggressively. Like just over the weekend um headlines been circulating the US is buying a billion dollars worth of critical minerals. We're taking stakes in companies or no we're the governments are taking stakes in companies. It's it's very controversial because it goes against the free market that we've been advocating for the longest time. Like where where do you stand on that topic? Like do you think government should step in to secure supply or do you think the free market should uh should figure it out for itself? >> First of all, I would just say that how I feel about it I I does not matter, right? I I have a high conviction of what's going to happen and it sounds like it's probably the same as you. We are going to see increased state creep into private enterprise in the west. And the reason we're going to see that is because if we step back and look at the world as if every country was a corporation, right? We have one corporation who has very effectively leveraged state resources to boost private enterprise and then another that has not and has suddenly realized the opportunity. And so yes, just in this administration, what have we seen? uh the United States government take a 10% stake in Intel, a golden share in US Steel, a 5% share in Lithium Americas, a 10% stake in Trilogy Metals. That was just yesterday. And there's more coming. Uh 15% stake in MP Materials, the Department of Defense. And so, yeah, you know, here's how I would how how I would look at this though, Kai. This is incredibly bullish for commodity investors because there is suddenly a new strategic investor at the table and they don't just have deep pockets, they have the ability to shift policy. You look at that Trilogy Metals deal that was just inked like yesterday, right? Uh the the the the block with this deal over the last six years has been that road up to Alaska, the uh the Elmer road. I can't recall Rambler. >> Yes. Thank you. Thank you. So this was blocked under the Biden administration. And this is the power of this new strategic investor taking a position in these companies and then using their weight to push policy whatever way they need it to be. That I mean say what you like. I'm I'm a small business entrepreneur, right? I'm a I'm a free market guy. So I like the government out of my business. But the government's coming into our business like it or not. So it doesn't matter how I feel about it, right? But at the end of the day, this is incredibly bullish for commodity investors because of the power and influence that comes with this new pocketbook, not just in the form of capital. And by the way, the US government's going to keep printing money. We know this, right? I would rather that they spent that money on something productive, right? on securing resources, on securing supply of key raw materials and commodities, on building infrastructure that boosts the economy instead of just lighting it up in smoke, which is what we've seen the majority of over the last 12 years. So, if the paper if the money printer is not going to slow down, at least let's put it to productive use. That seems to be what's happening here. And you know, so that's how I interpret this, right? It's it's questionable news, but it's happening whether I like it or not. And there's reasons to be optimistic about it. Good segue to the mining space, Jay. Um, talking about this like we we're massively profiting from the critical minerals push of course, but gold and silver prices are pushing everything higher. Um, trying to think things like a a what are your expectations for Q3 financials, but I also want to get a bit more granular. What do you expect or what do you want investors to do moving forward here? >> Well, I'll restate what we mentioned at the front end of this call. Uh way too often I've seen investors receive this gift of momentum and sentiment into the market and I'm in a handful of you know WhatsApp and Signal investor groups where we share ideas what we're looking at and I'm seeing way too many investors celebrating a 300% 600% win and not taking any principle off the table because they have some price determined in their imagination that once I get there I will sell. Uh, fine. Wait, wait for that. But derisk along the way, right? And I'm not reinventing the wheel here. You look at the uh household name investors in our industry or any industry. What they all do extraordinarily well is not lose money. They're all amazing sellers. I would argue that the best investors in our industry, the the Rick Rules, the Thomas Kaplan, the Gestras, they're not much better at buying than we are than anybody is, but they are much better sellers. They're very quick to take profits because rule number one is don't lose money. Rule number one is stay alive, stay in the game, right? Duration wins. Uh, you know, Rick's been in this industry for like nearly 45 years, right? Warren Buffett is the Oracle of Omaha because he started investing in his teens. He's still doing it in his mid 90s. He's been in the market for over 80 years. Duration, right? Duration. >> That's how you win in this game. But you only participate in duration if you stay at the table. when the market gives you a gift like this. Right now, I would I would encourage gold and silver investors to remember the difference between investments and speculations because usually we know that difference and then once the market gets hot, people tend to forget, right? We're in a secular gold bull market. I have high conviction of that and there are certain companies that you can park cash in and forget about for the duration of this market and for me I'd say that's at least five years, right? But those are companies like Agnico Eagle, uh, Newmont, Wheat and Precious Metals, companies like this with strong cash flows, operating businesses. They're investments. A speculation doesn't have cash flow. A speculation is a company that you're betting a catalyst will appreciate the share price, right? And that catalyst could be anything from drill results to jurisdictional shifts to market sentiment and momentum, which happened now. So, the catalyst is here. Now, it's time to take your profits, derisk, and reallocate that capital somewhere more stable and wait for the next opportunity. So, um, that's what I'm interpreting this, that's what I'm strongly encouraging my audience to do right now and and the the folks that I speak to, my subscribers, is it's a great time to take some skin off the table. You can withdraw your whole principle in some of these cases, and then you have a completely risk-free ride, which should always be the goal. If you can participate in the early stage miners with no risk, like, take that opportunity. Well, there's less upside for me because I wish you some of my friends yet. That doesn't matter. There's a new bus every 15 minutes. Guess what? So, take some cash off the table. Be patient. Be patient. >> What I was trying to get at, and I phrased my question quite poorly, actually, Jay, because it was quite repetitive what you said earlier, but I was really is like a word of caution to the investors as well, because I've seen a lot of deals come to come to market in the last couple of weeks here that are just appalling quite honestly. um from what I've seen capital structure project management to a degree like how how do you warn investors these days like and you run a conference so you you do have a bit of a um responsibility I'd say to to sort of make sure uh that investors are at least educated like they need to make their own investment decisions we can make them for them but how do we educate them what should they be paying attention to when it comes to that that's my biggest worry right now that the tide lifts all all turds and uh we all know the turds float at the top and we got to be careful not to to swim through them. >> You're you're absolutely right and you're bang on. Hey, uh diligence gets way harder in a hot market because there's far more hot money deals on your desk. Uh promotion looks great and everybody's feeling really smart and you're feeling a bit rich because maybe you're up you're you're paper rich at the moment, right? So, it's it's the best question to ask. And you know, I I guess what I would come back to is in in a bare market, you have rules and usually you're pretty disciplined with those because you know how hard it is to make money. When it becomes easier, you let some of those rules slide. And that's the mistake that most investors make. Me personally, because I have a podcast and uh you know, a couple investor clubs, I teach at the commodity university and I run a conference business. These are all people businesses in our industry. And so people are my competitive advantage, right? I I speak to geoss and engineers, but I know the people in this business extraordinarily well and that is my competitive advantage. So, I stick with that. And as a consequence, most of my audience thinks similarly about the market. I I bet Brent Cook's audience thinks about rocks. Mine thinks about people, right? Because that's what we do very well. And uh right now, it's it's hyper important to stick with the teams who have a proven track record of success. And if you're new to the industry, you know, there's many things you can do. When I first got into junior mining investing about 15 years ago, I I I I put I put my head down and found about 20 names, 20 serely successful CEOs, entrepreneurs, investors, and money managers in our industry, Kai. And then I set Google alerts for all of their names. So, I would get an email whenever any of the names popped up in a press release. And it allowed me to start following what they were doing, right? And it didn't point me to the answers outright, but I began to to determine patterns in the kind of companies they looked in. Oh, Eric Sprat's investing in this. Ross Bey just took a piece of this, whatever that was, right? And I could see what did they see in this company. So I I built my initial portfolio that way. And today, you know, I tend to stick with teams that have made me money in the past. And there's some great like incubator shops in the junior mining sector. And these are great places to start, right? I would look at a organization like a Fior Capital, right? This is founded by the chairman Frank Gustra, a legendary mining investor and entrepreneur and they've got about eight or nine companies under their umbrella. And there's other firms like this. There's actually dozens of these incubator shops. The benefit of investing in companies that are part of these these teams inside a larger firm is that they can borrow resources. They can reduce their cost through economies of scale. uh sharing back-end costs like admin and and admin support, but more importantly, they get to share their struggles and their best ideas in the boardroom with seven or eight other entrepreneurs. And so, you get to borrow the brain capital of eight or nine other thinkers whenever you're looking at an opportunity or a challenge. And you're far more likely to succeed as a consequence when you're part of a team like that. Now, it's the junior mining sector. So, if there's a hundred of these incubator organizations, most of them are trash. And you got to watch out for that, right? But there are some extraordinarily good ones. Fury is one. Invented Capital might be another. I like Craig Perry. He's a seriously successful entrepreneur in this sector. Created billions of dollars of wealth for his shareholders. And now running Invented Capital, they incubate deals like this. And so they're good places to start because you begin to look at deals as part of a network, like as part of a team. And just a shameless plug, I mean, we run the Commodity University. uh for anybody who's new to the industry, that's what we built it for, right? It was I kept on meeting investors at my conference who would say, "I feel like I'm in the right spot. I'm glad that I'm here, but how do I get started?" Right? And as you know, there's a hundred answers to that question. And they're all right, depending on who you are, your risk tolerance, your available capital. So, we built a commodity university for that investor, somebody who's maybe not new to investing, but new to mining, which is such a nuanced and complex industry. And it starts with commodities 101, which if you need to know, it starts with what is a commodity. But then we have 11 instructors, you know, courses that walk you through the ins and outs of the royalty and the streaming business, how to value junior gold and silver companies, uranium 101, gold and silver 101, all of this stuff, right? Uh, amazing instructors, new course drops every single month, the commodityuniversity.com, check it out. Uh, and we have a a mastermind meet up once per month with all the instructors and the students. So, it's tons of fun. >> Fantastic. Yeah. No, fantastic. Jay, really great conversation. Like we we could chat for hours. We got so many touching points of course um here here together, but uh maybe one last plug here. Vancouver Resource Investment Conference January 25th and 26th if I'm not mistaken. How can investors register for it and what can they expect? >> Yeah, thank you Kai and I'm glad you're going to be there. I'm looking forward to hanging out again. But it's vricdia.com. Vancouver Resource Investment Conference. VRC media.com. January 25th and 26th in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia. gorgeous place in January. It's not, but it's productive and it's amazing conference. You know, we have about 9,000 investors that attend this event, 300 companies in the trade show. These are all uh junior or mid-tier mining companies. And we surround the trade show with about six stages. So, I'll fly in about a 100 keynote speakers, anybody who can speak intelligently and with a positive track record of allocating capital into the commodity sector. Our main hall, we cover a lot of major topics, the biggest sort of macro and geopolitical themes and how they impact the raw material sector. And then on our smaller stages, we get right into capital allocation. And so you'll hear from a who's who of the industry and where they're putting the cash in the year ahead. >> Fantastic, Jay. Really looking forward to seeing you in person in Vancouver. It is it is a nice place. I used to live there and uh you know, you can dash off to Whistler if you have to as well. So fantastic, Jay. Thank you so much for coming on. Very insightful. We need to catch up more often. Absolutely. Uh because we as I said we have so many touching points especially on the mining side we can learn or you you can educate our viewers so much uh or so well and they need to make use of that commodity university as well. So thanks so much for coming on Jay. It was great to see you and looking forward to catching up in Vancouver. Thanks so much everybody else. Thanks so much for tuning in. Hope you enjoyed this conversation with Jay Martin. It's always great to understand or look at the the drivers what is happening behind the gold and silver price move right now. It's not just a single tweet or a single post that has been moving the gold and silver price higher lately. It's a factor of things. We discuss geopolitics and ddollarization uh at length today. Those are just a couple of the drivers. There's so much more. Uh but we we can't host 10-hour podcasts, although we should actually cuz it is such a complex topic these days. It's not as simple anymore as it used to be. In the meantime, before we, you know, we we've got some fantastic guests coming on later this week to discuss even more in depth what is happening in the world of macroeconomics, geopolitics, and much more. Hit that like and subscribe button not to miss an episode, and we appreciate the support. Thanks so much for tuning in. We'll be back with more. Take care out there. [Music]
A New World Order Is Fueling Gold’s Boom | Jay Martin
Summary
Transcript
Gold is rallying, silver is rallying, yet we're getting positive news from the geopolitical front, and the precious metals don't seem to care. Massive momentum behind the precious metals prices here in general. And probably the second we release this video, gold and silver are going to be higher than when we're speaking right now. Uh it's fascinating or the the time is absolutely fascinating that we live in right now. And uh I've invited a fantastic guest to discuss what is happening. What's driving gold? What is driving silver? Is this just part of the everything rally, the everything bubble that we're in, or is gold and silver, are they different? Should we be looking at them from a very different perspective? Lots of interesting questions that need to be answered. But before I switch over to my guest, please hit that like and subscribe button. It helps us out tremendously and we much much appreciate it. Did I mention it's free by the way? So, thanks so much for doing that. Now, it is my pleasure to introduce Jay Martin. He's the host of the Jay Martin show and of course the host of the Verick Conference, the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference happening happening every January in Vancouver. Jay, it is great to see you again. Thanks so much for joining me. >> Guy, it's great to see you. Great to be here. >> Jay, as we probably spoke like gold's probably up another $2 and silver is probably up another five cents here from the time hitting the record button. Massive momentum behind the precious metals. We need to dissect what is driving gold and silver prices right now. give us your first impression like what what are like at the 30,000 foot level what what is happening? >> Well, my first impression is that a lot of investors and I don't mean uh mining investors like you and I Kai or precious metals investors but a lot of generalist investors are watching this gold rally and they seem to be uh comparing it to just like the next asset rally. They watched crypto rally. They watched AI stocks rally. And now it's gold's turn. And that's how this is being interpreted. And I caution investors to remember that this is not just the next asset rally. Good news for gold investors is bad news for pretty much everybody else. Gold is like the the smoke signal that something is breaking in the system. And you know this this cycle began uh you know about 12 years ago and really began to speed up through 2020 2021. We started seeing the central banks start accumulating in gross numbers larger numbers than we've seen central banks buying gold in 50 plus years and they maintained uh these quantities for a couple of years, right? And so the first question is like what's that about? Right? If we get back to sort of the heart of today's gold rally and where it began and the genesis of it, you got to go there. And you got to just remember that all that that was was central banks having less confidence in the system that they've used for the last 40 years than they used to. And when you have less confidence in the system, you want to find an option. You want to find an alternative, a lifeboat that it's just adjacent to the current system, not far from it, right? But right there. And that's what gold is, right? I would argue it's as liquid as US dollars, but you don't have the counterparty risk. And so that's why it's the logical step for central banks and gold investors are always impatient, right? We see the gold price rally. Equity investors are curious like why aren't the equities following suit right away, right away, right away. And that's what we saw in 2020 and kind of the false start in 2016 a little bit. But this gold rally, this gold market, Kai, I just believe has been as textbook as any of us could ever have imagined in the way it's so patiently and logically um fled through the system from the precious metal price back in 2023 to the end of that year. The best-in-class royalties started to outperform and about 6 to 12 months later, the best-in-class miners followed suit. And today the funded developers, the earlier stage companies with world-class management teams or companies that seem to be on the cusp of a world-class discovery are getting that share price appreciation. But we're like two and a half years in at this point. So it's been a very slow and methodical trickle of capital. I personally love that because that's very healthy market, right? And so anybody who's in the gold equities right now, I encourage you um drisk. The market's giving you a gift. If you've been a gold equity investor for two years or longer, right? Whether it's been 20 years or two years, you've experienced some hard times. That much is for sure. If you've been in this market that long, the market's now handed you a gift. I encourage you to derisk from your earlier stage positions. I don't think this gold market is anywhere close to over. I believe we're just getting started. I'm sure we're going to get into that. But if you're in the speculation side of this industry, now is an opportunity for you to take a bit of principle off the table, park that in a safer bet, you know, a new Agneo, something that you can ride uh through the long-term market because as you know, Kai, even inside of a long bull market, there's short periods of volatility and those earlier stage companies feel at the worst. So when the market hands you a gift like that, you take it, you reinvest that somewhere else, the more stable side of the barbell and then wait for your next move. Absolutely very solid advice. I've been doing some of the same as well. Just just selling some of those higher risk positions that have been up quite a bit actually on as you said those gifts. Um you got to unwrap them and put them away at some point, right? Um but we'll get we'll get to the miners later in the conversation. Jay, I want to stay on the macro level because mantra of the channel is we discuss the macro to understand the micro. Micro for us is gold and the mining stocks of course here. Um let's take a look at some of the macro factors in influencing gold and silver here in particular. Um I mentioned in my intro on the geopolitical side it seems like we're we're moving towards world peace and I'm trying to say that you know facitiously here a little bit but uh of course the Middle East seems to be uh calming down. Um what are some of those macro drivers? Maybe start with geopolitics. How much of a factor is that and how much is priced in in the gold price right now? Because we've seen a bit of a dip last week that was quickly bought up. >> Yeah, I think it's a a core um driver of this gold market. Kai, we're we're witnessing the reshuffleling of the geopolitical chessboard. That much is certain, right? The era that that you and I grew up in, the era of globalization for the last 40 years, that's over. And and what happens next, we can debate that. Call it del globalization, friend shoring. It's going to take time to shake out. What we do know is it's going to be different than it was from the last 40 years. And countries recognize that. That's why they're hedging their bets back to their uh non-dollar hedges. Um, but it's difficult to say what that chessboard's going to look like in as short a period of time as five years, you know, and we've seen some really material headlines lately, like, you know, we we now may beat a peace deal in the Middle East. Time will tell how material that is, but it wasn't that long ago that we saw this headline about the bombing in Doha, in Qatar. And this kind of shocked the world because uh Qatari national has never been bombed inside their country ever before. And obviously after this occurred, there was zero recourse from Israel's strategic partner being the United States and Qatar, a country that six months ago the headline was they were gifting the American president a 400 um million dollar airplane. So, you know, it was curious, right? And that event got a lot of coverage. But the event that followed it that didn't get a lot of coverage and should have was the Saudis response to that. Right two weeks after that occurred, Saudi Arabia signed a defense pact with Pakistan. Now Pakistan's the only Muslim majority nuclear armed country in the world and notably they got that nuclear technology from China which puts Saudi Arabia de facto under the Chinese nuclear umbrella. The reason that's so significant is because that bucks in the face everything we've known about the petro dollar system for that much time. We would trade oil in dollars and in exchange Saudis would get military protection from the United States. The Saudis are now military protected by the Chinese nuclear umbrella. That is a seismic shift because there are countries all over the world that are trying to thread the needle of neutrality amidst the US China trade war. You know, Canada might be one. They they claim they're trying to find neutral ground. They're opening up new markets. Just signed a big trade deal with Indonesia where I am. And a country like Canada has the world's longest coastline access to three oceans and therefore every global market in the world. And they should try to open up new markets. But at the end of the day, Canada is never going to be neutral. They're always going to be massively aligned with the Americans because they also share the largest land border in the world. And it's never going to be more cost-effective to trade anywhere else. no matter what kind of coastline you have and letting product just fall across the border. And that's why over$2 billion dollars worth of product goes back and forth on that border every single day. But a country like Australia, right, they're militarily aligned with the Americans, but from a trade standpoint, they're more aligned with the Chinese. And from a proximity, a geographic standpoint, they're more aligned with the South Pacific. And so that's a country that has been threading the needle of neutrality very effectively. And the reason I mentioned Saudi Arabia is because that's a country that can do it. they have the the the the commodity strength and the wealth and therefore the leverage to appease both parties and play both sides for as long as they want to. So that's why this agreement with Pakistan and de facto China is so material and by the way Pakistan's followed up and said the doors open for anybody else right these defense packs are available which obviously is not Pakistan saying that that's China saying it through a proxy but the message is the same and that is a seismic shift and you know a country like Australia another one of these neutral nations um you know last week yes everybody was talking about the rare earth restrictions and Trump's response and this just absorbed all headlines and all attention. Um to be quite frank with you, when I saw this Kai, I was like, "This is a nothing burger. Uh China's dominance and rare earths has been baked into the cake for 20 years. They're just leveraging this now." Um there was an announcement that came out of China that same week and didn't get any press coverage, but it it should have. And at the end of September, what occurred was that China, who's the world's largest purchaser of iron ore, told BHP, "We're putting a suspension, a pause on all new orders of iron ore in US dollars." Now, they weren't pausing purchases of iron ore, just purchases in US dollars. And China's BHP's biggest customer. So, this brought them to the negotiating table. They struck a new deal. All future contracts for iron ore bought by China from BHP will be compensated in 30% Renmin B. So China got a lot of leverage and wiggle room in their currency. Now they're able to transact with Renman B for BHP. The reason it's so significant is because this isn't Vietnam or Indonesia. It's not a a bricks economy like Brazil or India. BHP is an Australian company, a G8 nation, a western aligned country who's now accepted the fact that there's a new player at the table. They're making demands to transact outside of US dollars and they have to concede to it, right? And this is seismic because this is new precedence. It's never it's never a one-off event when these things happen. You know, it's always the start or the part of a trajectory and it's generally new precedent. And this is big precedent because China can now go to the world inside of that ddollarization conversation and say this is how we do business now. We do business in renmanb when we want to and US dollars if we want to. And guess what? The deal was good enough for BHP so it's going to be good enough for you. It was good enough for Australia so it's going to be good enough for you. And this is a big shift, right? And that's just to say we don't know what alliances and adversarial relationships are going to look like in the very near term. The Shanghai Cooperation Summit just a month ago had over 40 companies participate. Uh it's never been that big, never even close to that big. And the amount of performative politics that we saw on stage, I mean, most notably the the minister of South Korea shaking hands with Kim Jong-un on stage, it was performative. But the purpose was President Xi was sending a message to the world. We can steward peace. We've got this under control, right? Trust us. And we're the new leaders of the of the the multipolarity, whatever you want to call it. But, you know, these are big announcements, right? The Saudis aligning with with um Pakistan, you know, BHP transacting and keep in mind like there's two sides to every transaction. So if BHP is doing tens of billions of dollars in ren minimi every year, they're accumulating a treasury of ren minimi that they now have to spend somewhere and they could just convert it to US dollars. But you know navigating those currency exchanges is tough. I mean that was China's problem. That's why they didn't want to do it. So they've offloaded that problem to BHP. What's far more likely is BHP is going to try to find a a supplier who will accept Ren Minb as payment. Right? they're now incentivized to see more of the world ddollarized BHPs because they're accumulating revenue themselves. And so that's sort of like the the ripple effects of these decisions that they're happening and they're big and a lot of the times they don't get coverage, right? Instead, we get the headline that covers what Trump tweeted yesterday, right? Which is far less significant. It's interesting, right? But it's not those aren't the seismic shifts that really change things. >> Yeah. They usually get more clicks, too. That's the problem, right? So the news is chasing whatever gets them the most views. Uh sadly enough uh because another interesting fact on the dollization trend topic is uh Switzerland is buying euros instead of US dollars. They stopped buying euros uh sorry US dollars and the euro is now the most important reserve currency that they hold in the in the SMB Swiss National Bank portfolio 39% versus 37% and they stop buying US dollars. Um just as a random fact here um on on that ddollarization trend in general um Jay Based on your assessment do you think the US can actually do something to reverse that trend? Is it is there a possibility or a scenario where the US could step in or not not step in but step up step step it up and say hey the dollar is the currency it'll stay that currency um besides threatening tariffs and war. Well, I'm I'm sure there is, but I believe they are running out of options and the current strategy is definitely not working. I mean, if if I were to like throw an analogy out, the way the world is functioning right now is kind of like a hammer and an anvil, right? And the United States is the hammer and China is the anvil. And the hammer is parading around the world, swinging at everything. Sanctions, trade restrictions, import taxes, all of this stuff. But as any metalmith knows, no matter how hard you swing the hammer, it's the anvil that changes the form of the object. And every time we see these massive announcements come out from a trade aggression standpoint, it's kind of like when you punch water, like you make impact, but the water just displaces and goes somewhere else. And that's what we're seeing. The United States exiled Iran from the global economy. Iran has the second or third largest oil and gas reserves in the world and they were exiled from the global economy. But that energy didn't disappear. It just began flowing to China. And China now gets over 50% of its oil massively discounted from Iran. When the United States sanctioned Russia and demanded that the Western countries and Europe stop buying Russian energy, that energy didn't disappear. It started flowing to China. Right? This is what's happening. China is the anvil. It's reshaping the world order because of what the hammer's doing, not because of what the anvil's doing. And there's there's more, you know, uh, aces up the sleeve, I'm sure, but if you look at the the sort of diplomatic relations and how they've been formed over the last 40 years, there's been two very distinct strategies. One from the east and one from the west, meaning the US and China. And China's had its belt and road initiative. This is uh sort of born out of the 2008 financial crisis when western economies were all bankrupt and stopped buying Chinese goods and China said we need to fund the next generation of consumer and hedge our bets build some optionality in the developing world and so they began funding infrastructure ports bridges rail mines refineries to get the developing world online from a consumer standpoint to buy more Chinese goods in the event that developed nations stopped again right and to date over a trillion dollars has been invested Ed, I think over 147 countries have accepted these loans and that's how China built trade relationships with the majority of the world and simultaneously the United States ran their weapons diplomacy program. They sell weapons to about 97 countries around the world. So, you know, we'll we'll arm you and defend you or we'll loan you cash to build up infrastructure and participate in the global economy. And that's how friends are bought, right, from from each side. >> But that's become a bit of a problem. And this is where the rare earth element conversation does become very relevant because um you know 97% of American advanced weapons require rare earth elements. You know so if you're the country that prides itself on having the most advanced weaponry and military but you can't build those things without the ingredients from your adversary. It's kind of a non-starter. Which is honestly why when people talk about, you know, the uh deputy assistant to the secretary of defense, Elbridge KBY is massively outspoken about an incoming hot conflict between the United States and China. But let me ask you a question. Like if if I have to buy the bullets from you, am I going to point my gun at you? Like I'm not going to do that. It's it's just it doesn't it doesn't fit, you know? And just last week, the United States Department of Defense canled a bunch of a bunch of contracts to ship missiles to Europe. Denmark had a bunch of Patriot missiles on order. Contract was inked. Deal looked good. This is exactly in line with the president's wishes that European economies start investing in defense more. But at the buzzer, they paused the contract and cancelled the order. And it was again, it was Albridge Kby who came out and said at the end of the day, these missiles are more valuable to us at home than the money we could make. Uh that's a bit of a problem. What that speaks to is a is the bigger issue of manufacturing weapons and how the United States is really struggling to do it. If you look at the delivery timelines of Loheed Martin, they are consistently two to five years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. I think the American Air Force today when they're training cadets, they train on 20% of their inventory. Meaning if they have a hundred planes to train on, only 20 are in the sky and the other 80 are waiting for parts upgrades. And the bottleneck in accessing those parts is the problem. And again, it comes down to the ingredients, right? We all agreed in the west that we wanted advanced technology. We wanted smartphones and iPads and laptops and EVs and renewable energy. Um, and we wanted to design that stuff at home so we could control the interface and the applications and the features, but we didn't want a very specific part of the supply chain, right? The dirty part, the toxic part, the refining of these rare earth minerals. And thankfully, China raised their hand and said, "We we will do that. We will seed the environmental concessions and we will leverage our cheap labor to make sure you can have that cheap iPhone." All right, that's what happened. We all signed that contract. That's how we got here. We shouldn't be surprised by this. That's how China became indispensable to every major economy and every major technology company in the world. That was a 30-year journey. And now we're trying to quickly reshore manufacturing like in a two-year term. Give me a break. We don't have the political will, right? There's advantages to not having elections. It's that you can push projects forward on your own time, right? We can't do that. I'm not saying that I want that system, but that's the problem, right? That's the problem when you're trying to play catchup and you're thinking in two-year cycles or four year cycles and the other economy is thinking in forever cycles. >> We're thinking quarterly. Jane, let me jump in here real quick before we go too far of that because I got a follow-up question there for you. It's just it's it's a society um is now criticizing that the US or Europe is stepping in and trying to play catchup very aggressively. Like just over the weekend um headlines been circulating the US is buying a billion dollars worth of critical minerals. We're taking stakes in companies or no we're the governments are taking stakes in companies. It's it's very controversial because it goes against the free market that we've been advocating for the longest time. Like where where do you stand on that topic? Like do you think government should step in to secure supply or do you think the free market should uh should figure it out for itself? >> First of all, I would just say that how I feel about it I I does not matter, right? I I have a high conviction of what's going to happen and it sounds like it's probably the same as you. We are going to see increased state creep into private enterprise in the west. And the reason we're going to see that is because if we step back and look at the world as if every country was a corporation, right? We have one corporation who has very effectively leveraged state resources to boost private enterprise and then another that has not and has suddenly realized the opportunity. And so yes, just in this administration, what have we seen? uh the United States government take a 10% stake in Intel, a golden share in US Steel, a 5% share in Lithium Americas, a 10% stake in Trilogy Metals. That was just yesterday. And there's more coming. Uh 15% stake in MP Materials, the Department of Defense. And so, yeah, you know, here's how I would how how I would look at this though, Kai. This is incredibly bullish for commodity investors because there is suddenly a new strategic investor at the table and they don't just have deep pockets, they have the ability to shift policy. You look at that Trilogy Metals deal that was just inked like yesterday, right? Uh the the the the block with this deal over the last six years has been that road up to Alaska, the uh the Elmer road. I can't recall Rambler. >> Yes. Thank you. Thank you. So this was blocked under the Biden administration. And this is the power of this new strategic investor taking a position in these companies and then using their weight to push policy whatever way they need it to be. That I mean say what you like. I'm I'm a small business entrepreneur, right? I'm a I'm a free market guy. So I like the government out of my business. But the government's coming into our business like it or not. So it doesn't matter how I feel about it, right? But at the end of the day, this is incredibly bullish for commodity investors because of the power and influence that comes with this new pocketbook, not just in the form of capital. And by the way, the US government's going to keep printing money. We know this, right? I would rather that they spent that money on something productive, right? on securing resources, on securing supply of key raw materials and commodities, on building infrastructure that boosts the economy instead of just lighting it up in smoke, which is what we've seen the majority of over the last 12 years. So, if the paper if the money printer is not going to slow down, at least let's put it to productive use. That seems to be what's happening here. And you know, so that's how I interpret this, right? It's it's questionable news, but it's happening whether I like it or not. And there's reasons to be optimistic about it. Good segue to the mining space, Jay. Um, talking about this like we we're massively profiting from the critical minerals push of course, but gold and silver prices are pushing everything higher. Um, trying to think things like a a what are your expectations for Q3 financials, but I also want to get a bit more granular. What do you expect or what do you want investors to do moving forward here? >> Well, I'll restate what we mentioned at the front end of this call. Uh way too often I've seen investors receive this gift of momentum and sentiment into the market and I'm in a handful of you know WhatsApp and Signal investor groups where we share ideas what we're looking at and I'm seeing way too many investors celebrating a 300% 600% win and not taking any principle off the table because they have some price determined in their imagination that once I get there I will sell. Uh, fine. Wait, wait for that. But derisk along the way, right? And I'm not reinventing the wheel here. You look at the uh household name investors in our industry or any industry. What they all do extraordinarily well is not lose money. They're all amazing sellers. I would argue that the best investors in our industry, the the Rick Rules, the Thomas Kaplan, the Gestras, they're not much better at buying than we are than anybody is, but they are much better sellers. They're very quick to take profits because rule number one is don't lose money. Rule number one is stay alive, stay in the game, right? Duration wins. Uh, you know, Rick's been in this industry for like nearly 45 years, right? Warren Buffett is the Oracle of Omaha because he started investing in his teens. He's still doing it in his mid 90s. He's been in the market for over 80 years. Duration, right? Duration. >> That's how you win in this game. But you only participate in duration if you stay at the table. when the market gives you a gift like this. Right now, I would I would encourage gold and silver investors to remember the difference between investments and speculations because usually we know that difference and then once the market gets hot, people tend to forget, right? We're in a secular gold bull market. I have high conviction of that and there are certain companies that you can park cash in and forget about for the duration of this market and for me I'd say that's at least five years, right? But those are companies like Agnico Eagle, uh, Newmont, Wheat and Precious Metals, companies like this with strong cash flows, operating businesses. They're investments. A speculation doesn't have cash flow. A speculation is a company that you're betting a catalyst will appreciate the share price, right? And that catalyst could be anything from drill results to jurisdictional shifts to market sentiment and momentum, which happened now. So, the catalyst is here. Now, it's time to take your profits, derisk, and reallocate that capital somewhere more stable and wait for the next opportunity. So, um, that's what I'm interpreting this, that's what I'm strongly encouraging my audience to do right now and and the the folks that I speak to, my subscribers, is it's a great time to take some skin off the table. You can withdraw your whole principle in some of these cases, and then you have a completely risk-free ride, which should always be the goal. If you can participate in the early stage miners with no risk, like, take that opportunity. Well, there's less upside for me because I wish you some of my friends yet. That doesn't matter. There's a new bus every 15 minutes. Guess what? So, take some cash off the table. Be patient. Be patient. >> What I was trying to get at, and I phrased my question quite poorly, actually, Jay, because it was quite repetitive what you said earlier, but I was really is like a word of caution to the investors as well, because I've seen a lot of deals come to come to market in the last couple of weeks here that are just appalling quite honestly. um from what I've seen capital structure project management to a degree like how how do you warn investors these days like and you run a conference so you you do have a bit of a um responsibility I'd say to to sort of make sure uh that investors are at least educated like they need to make their own investment decisions we can make them for them but how do we educate them what should they be paying attention to when it comes to that that's my biggest worry right now that the tide lifts all all turds and uh we all know the turds float at the top and we got to be careful not to to swim through them. >> You're you're absolutely right and you're bang on. Hey, uh diligence gets way harder in a hot market because there's far more hot money deals on your desk. Uh promotion looks great and everybody's feeling really smart and you're feeling a bit rich because maybe you're up you're you're paper rich at the moment, right? So, it's it's the best question to ask. And you know, I I guess what I would come back to is in in a bare market, you have rules and usually you're pretty disciplined with those because you know how hard it is to make money. When it becomes easier, you let some of those rules slide. And that's the mistake that most investors make. Me personally, because I have a podcast and uh you know, a couple investor clubs, I teach at the commodity university and I run a conference business. These are all people businesses in our industry. And so people are my competitive advantage, right? I I speak to geoss and engineers, but I know the people in this business extraordinarily well and that is my competitive advantage. So, I stick with that. And as a consequence, most of my audience thinks similarly about the market. I I bet Brent Cook's audience thinks about rocks. Mine thinks about people, right? Because that's what we do very well. And uh right now, it's it's hyper important to stick with the teams who have a proven track record of success. And if you're new to the industry, you know, there's many things you can do. When I first got into junior mining investing about 15 years ago, I I I I put I put my head down and found about 20 names, 20 serely successful CEOs, entrepreneurs, investors, and money managers in our industry, Kai. And then I set Google alerts for all of their names. So, I would get an email whenever any of the names popped up in a press release. And it allowed me to start following what they were doing, right? And it didn't point me to the answers outright, but I began to to determine patterns in the kind of companies they looked in. Oh, Eric Sprat's investing in this. Ross Bey just took a piece of this, whatever that was, right? And I could see what did they see in this company. So I I built my initial portfolio that way. And today, you know, I tend to stick with teams that have made me money in the past. And there's some great like incubator shops in the junior mining sector. And these are great places to start, right? I would look at a organization like a Fior Capital, right? This is founded by the chairman Frank Gustra, a legendary mining investor and entrepreneur and they've got about eight or nine companies under their umbrella. And there's other firms like this. There's actually dozens of these incubator shops. The benefit of investing in companies that are part of these these teams inside a larger firm is that they can borrow resources. They can reduce their cost through economies of scale. uh sharing back-end costs like admin and and admin support, but more importantly, they get to share their struggles and their best ideas in the boardroom with seven or eight other entrepreneurs. And so, you get to borrow the brain capital of eight or nine other thinkers whenever you're looking at an opportunity or a challenge. And you're far more likely to succeed as a consequence when you're part of a team like that. Now, it's the junior mining sector. So, if there's a hundred of these incubator organizations, most of them are trash. And you got to watch out for that, right? But there are some extraordinarily good ones. Fury is one. Invented Capital might be another. I like Craig Perry. He's a seriously successful entrepreneur in this sector. Created billions of dollars of wealth for his shareholders. And now running Invented Capital, they incubate deals like this. And so they're good places to start because you begin to look at deals as part of a network, like as part of a team. And just a shameless plug, I mean, we run the Commodity University. uh for anybody who's new to the industry, that's what we built it for, right? It was I kept on meeting investors at my conference who would say, "I feel like I'm in the right spot. I'm glad that I'm here, but how do I get started?" Right? And as you know, there's a hundred answers to that question. And they're all right, depending on who you are, your risk tolerance, your available capital. So, we built a commodity university for that investor, somebody who's maybe not new to investing, but new to mining, which is such a nuanced and complex industry. And it starts with commodities 101, which if you need to know, it starts with what is a commodity. But then we have 11 instructors, you know, courses that walk you through the ins and outs of the royalty and the streaming business, how to value junior gold and silver companies, uranium 101, gold and silver 101, all of this stuff, right? Uh, amazing instructors, new course drops every single month, the commodityuniversity.com, check it out. Uh, and we have a a mastermind meet up once per month with all the instructors and the students. So, it's tons of fun. >> Fantastic. Yeah. No, fantastic. Jay, really great conversation. Like we we could chat for hours. We got so many touching points of course um here here together, but uh maybe one last plug here. Vancouver Resource Investment Conference January 25th and 26th if I'm not mistaken. How can investors register for it and what can they expect? >> Yeah, thank you Kai and I'm glad you're going to be there. I'm looking forward to hanging out again. But it's vricdia.com. Vancouver Resource Investment Conference. VRC media.com. January 25th and 26th in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia. gorgeous place in January. It's not, but it's productive and it's amazing conference. You know, we have about 9,000 investors that attend this event, 300 companies in the trade show. These are all uh junior or mid-tier mining companies. And we surround the trade show with about six stages. So, I'll fly in about a 100 keynote speakers, anybody who can speak intelligently and with a positive track record of allocating capital into the commodity sector. Our main hall, we cover a lot of major topics, the biggest sort of macro and geopolitical themes and how they impact the raw material sector. And then on our smaller stages, we get right into capital allocation. And so you'll hear from a who's who of the industry and where they're putting the cash in the year ahead. >> Fantastic, Jay. Really looking forward to seeing you in person in Vancouver. It is it is a nice place. I used to live there and uh you know, you can dash off to Whistler if you have to as well. So fantastic, Jay. Thank you so much for coming on. Very insightful. We need to catch up more often. Absolutely. Uh because we as I said we have so many touching points especially on the mining side we can learn or you you can educate our viewers so much uh or so well and they need to make use of that commodity university as well. So thanks so much for coming on Jay. It was great to see you and looking forward to catching up in Vancouver. Thanks so much everybody else. Thanks so much for tuning in. Hope you enjoyed this conversation with Jay Martin. It's always great to understand or look at the the drivers what is happening behind the gold and silver price move right now. It's not just a single tweet or a single post that has been moving the gold and silver price higher lately. It's a factor of things. We discuss geopolitics and ddollarization uh at length today. Those are just a couple of the drivers. There's so much more. Uh but we we can't host 10-hour podcasts, although we should actually cuz it is such a complex topic these days. It's not as simple anymore as it used to be. In the meantime, before we, you know, we we've got some fantastic guests coming on later this week to discuss even more in depth what is happening in the world of macroeconomics, geopolitics, and much more. Hit that like and subscribe button not to miss an episode, and we appreciate the support. Thanks so much for tuning in. We'll be back with more. Take care out there. [Music]