[music] I'm Charlotte Mloud at investingnews.com and here today with me is Nick Hodgej, publisher at Digest Publishing. Thank you so much for being here. Great to >> always a pleasure to be with you, Charlotte. I appreciate it. >> Yes, nice to see you in person here at the New Orleans Investment Conference and we've made it to the end of day two. So, I wanted to start by asking, you were just out on the show floor in a big crowd of people. What is the sentiment right now? Any takeaways from you?
>> Well, we're obviously in a bull market for many metals, precious, uh, industrial, energy metals. So, um, it's a buoyant atmosphere for sure. The attendance is up. I noticed that there was 10 or 12 additional rows of chairs added over in the in the speaker hall that aren't normally there or haven't been there in the past couple of years. I I know that attendance is is up significantly from the the past couple of years. And um I see a bit of a younger crowd which is good folks coming
into the the precious metals given uh what's going on out there. I also think and I was saying this 10 8 years ago that the crypto market was going to train soldiers for the gold army. I gave a talk here about that many years ago that said that um crypto investors were going to learn about what fiat meant, what counterparty risk meant, and that ultimately they were going to through that lens understand gold. And I believe that's happening in some respects. I've talked to some folks here who are
younger that were previously from the crypto market and u money is being raised and and news is being announced. So, it's quite a good atmosphere. Sure. >> Yeah, I would say the same. That's what I've been hearing feedback on as I sit here. I haven't been able to get out yet. So, let's talk about what's going on with the gold price cuz that's a topic that's on everybody's minds here. I think there's a lot of focus on how we're in a pullback right now. This is a
buying opportunity. I'm wondering where you would place us in the cycle right now just to contextualize where we're at. >> Well, everybody said that the, you know, the easy money has been made. It's tough to know where we're at on the cycle because I don't know how the cycle is going to end. If you listen to the arithmetic that Rick Rule talks about, the unfunded liabilities and hundreds of trillions of dollars. You know, I've been doing this long enough that I've
seen many kickings of the can down the road. And so, it's tough to say, you know, when the cycle's going to evolve and what the next catalyst for gold is going to be. Um, we're clearly in a bull market that's run a couple of years now. Um, but the underlying fundamentals of that bull market don't seem to be deteriorating at all. I.e. continued Asian buying, continued central bank buying, continue continued running up of the debt by the US, which by the way said they were going to not do that
under Trump and Doge. And me and Jardo were saying last year that Doge wasn't going to matter. So, you know, I don't know. Everybody does baseball parliament. I don't want to do that. I'll say we're in the middle of it. We're in the middle of a precious metals bull market. Um, silver hasn't had its day yet. So, I think that's a pretty good indicator that we've still got some time to go. >> It's interesting you say silver hasn't had its day because I think people got
pretty excited seeing it get past $50 and of course now we're also pulling back there. Anything further you'd add on on silver? >> Well, just that you know the the natural propensity of a precious metals bull market is for silver to catch up and be more violent, right? it's the um erratic stepchild to to gold, if you will. And so um it has higher to go. It's more of an industrial metal. So we have to see if the economy can continue to support that. Um I don't see recession in the US
anytime in the next 6 months. So that bodess well for um silver and um I would just look for it uh to continue to base out here. I'm going to go back to gold and silver. So we're at 4,000 as we record this. That's short-term support. Um it could go down to $3,600 gold um and still be in a bull market. Don't be surprised if that happens. Um the bull market could potentially be in question if that breaks. Then for silver, it's something like $46 in the short term or something like that. We need that
support to hold. Um you know, I say a lot that trees don't grow to the sky. So it's okay to digest some gains to consolidate sideways for a second. Um but I think over the next couple of years, given what's going on in the world, given the debt burdens, given the way that central banks are dealing with it, that we have to see higher precious metals prices. Well, and I think the people who are here are also looking on for ideas on how they can strategize during this pullback. What's the best
way to make sure that they're positioned for that next move higher in the precious metals. So, any any thoughts, ideas that you had there? >> Absolutely. Um, we actually took a little bit of profit. So, I do a couple of things as you might know. I have a macro letter that's monthly and then I do more speculative stuff. Um, coming into October, we were some 40% in gold and precious metals equities, i.e. GLD, GDXJ, um, and a silver ETF. We took some money off the table in the first week of
October when things were getting silly. So, um, you know, if we were at 40%, we took it down to some 30%, right? You know, for gold bugs, that means you're not bullish gold anymore, that you're not on their bandwagon, etc. For me, it's just pruning and planting, right? So, when we sold some of that GDXJ, which is the junior gold miners ETF, ETF, we redeployed into an ETF that's more broad-based uh industrial and base metals, steel and uh metallurgical coal and copper and nickel. Um, you know, we
still got inflation with us and we can rotate profits into things that haven't run yet. Like, I still think that energy metals are going to have their day. Um there's lots of stuff going on in that arena with uranium and um resource nationalism here in the US and tariff spats with China. So you know um just taking a little bit of money off the table and redeploying it into those other sectors. >> Yeah. Did you redeploy anywhere else or mainly into that the base industrial? >> Mostly into the base and industrial
materials for now. Yeah. >> Interesting. Interesting. All right. Well, that's that's a great topic to go into because I know people are definitely wondering about taking profits and that kind of thing. I also want to talk with you about a topic we covered last year which was the battery passport idea and this was part of your presentation here. It was something that we talked about together and it was essentially about you you were mentioning a company that was helping to track where the components of batteries
come from which is becoming more important to governments around the world. So is that still a theme that you are interested in right now? >> Yeah 100%. I mean mining is still an antiquated industry. It still needs to come into the to the modern times in terms of um tracking and so battery passports are just one thing you described it well. is, you know, having a sticker on your window that says um what what metals are in the battery, manganesees, lithium, cobalt, etc. and and the emissions profile associated
with that. So, we got to track all that data. Um but it's much bigger than that, right? So, the company was called Minehub and they also do iron ore and copper and aluminum and they've partnered with some of the well the largest copper miner in the world, Cadelco and some of the largest wire makers. But the problems continue like um there was just problems in the past couple of weeks on the LME with silver, right? So we need to be tracking all these things and um perhaps more importantly they've partnered and they
were partnered back then with a company called Abacks which has launched a new physicalbacked commodity exchange. So physically deliverable contracts of lithium um and gold so far but but going to go into other commodities and uh that company ABX has come back and invested up to 19.9% in Minehub over the past year. By the way those shares are up 300% since we discussed it a year ago. are going quite well. Um, and that's sort of a natural suitor for that company, right? They need all that data
input for those physically backed commodity contracts because they need to know where the lithium came from, where the gold came from, and it's verifiable. And then one more important point to hear a lot about capital and the cost of capital in this business. And one of the reasons it's tough to get lending uh to get capital that's fast and cheap is because the industry is so opaque. It's literally a hole in the ground, Mark Twain would add, with a liar standing on top. Um, Minehub takes the liar out of
the equation because it's all transparent data. And last point on that is it's very sticky. So when you onboard a Codelco, the largest copper company in the world, imagine the list of suppliers and other companies that they work with to mine all that copper, refine it, smelt it, ship it, get it delivered to its final um place or exchange. Um, all those uh people that that company works with become potential clients uh for MineHub. And in that way, it's sort of like a flywheel. So I'm very excited
about that idea. Yeah, I think it's still early days and and we've had some success with it so far. >> Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned Minehub is up significantly since you got in since we last spoke as well. Is that the main way that you would play this? Are there other ways to do it? >> I mean, that's that's the main public way. There's a couple of private companies that that do the same thing in Europe, but um no. As as far as the tracking, as far as I'm concerned,
MineHub is the main way. Now, there's um adjacent technologies or there's other um adjacent arenas that I'm interested in that aren't quite that, but like um mineral recycling for example or battery recycling or things like that. I think you're going to see those sort of things come into the four more as um this critical metals, supply demand, national resource uh national resource nationalism, etc. continues to play out. Yeah, the battery recycling angle is something I'm I'm kind of surprised that
it's not more of a a theme yet, but you see that coming potentially. >> Well, 100%. I mean, look, the EVs haven't been around in um scale for very long. Many of those batteries aren't ready to be recycled yet. So, I think that yes, it will come on. And not just batteries, right? Um there's another company that I'm invested in that that recycles hard drives, right? They take the rare earth magnets out of the hard drives and they recycle the um the rare earths that are necessary for those for
those magnets that we read about in the news over the past couple of weeks with the Chinese banning and um tariffs and all that sort of stuff. So um yeah, those are some arenas that I'd be interested in. Recycling, reprocessing, tailings, reprocessing and ways that are non-traditional mining that are technologydriven. Well, and so this works partially at least because governments want to know what's in the batteries. They want to know they want to have recycling and things like that. Governments are also
providing a lot of support for critical minerals right now. And I'm wondering if there are I'm sure there are ways what ways you are approaching that that in critical minerals. >> Yeah. So I mean just by nature of the way we invest we've been invested in a couple of companies that have already received fast 41 permitting. That's the fasttrack um uh permitting process under the Trump administration, which isn't really new. That came into being under the first Trump administration, but
they've really accelerated it um amid the trade wars uh and amid some of the announcements that you've seen for um executive actions, right, for um cutting the red tape for energy and mineral production um needing to increase the electricity production for data centers and and all those sort of things. So, you've seen in a big way over the past 6 or 12 months the US government come in. We can debate the merits or whether it's socialism or or not. But they've invested directly into companies like MP
Materials and and even provided them a a price floor um and other companies they've invested in as well. Lithium Americas, there was an an executive order, executive action on the Amler Road, the the Trilogy project, for example, and the company took a a direct stake via private placement into into Trilogy as well. So, um I think it's very real. uh it's very beneficial to the industry and um so let me back let me step back for a second. You know it takes a long time for projects to get
approved. There's a company called Midas Gold that we've been involved in since 2012 which is now called Perpetua and we were saying for the past decade this is likely going to be the only source of antimony in the US and the government just had their head in the sand. I mean I probably told you because I say it in a lot of interviews that that project went into permitting when my first daughter was born. So, they just got their permit earlier this year and and she's 9 years old. So, um but now it's
the flavor of the day, right? Because the government put a spotlight on it. So, the Department of Defense has given them money. They're fasttrack permitted and it's an it's an overnight 15-year success. They just broke ground on that project. They're now building it. Um so, we're already invested in some of the projects via the due diligence we did. I might have talked to you in past years about being a a green metal baron. like um if you're going to build all these things or whatever, even the clean
technologies, they need the inputs from the the mining and it's always been that way. There was just um a lack of willpower, a lack of investment and an overabundance of red tape from from governments that didn't allow it to happen. Now that red tape is being cut, the governments itself is is putting capital into those plays. Um and so it's a very real investment theme and some of those stocks have doubled, tripled, quadrupled, quintupled, sectup sectupled in a matter of days, weeks and and
months here in the past six months. So and last point on that is you can go to that fast 41 permitting website and you can see there's less than 60 projects that have been selected so far, but it's a very easily navigable table where you can just go in and see what projects and which companies have been selected. And I would be asking management of prospective companies that you're doing due diligence on if that's a track that they plan on taking or pursuing. >> Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to
ask you. Should you if you want to pursue that type of angle, should you look for companies with projects that could get that fast 41? Yes. >> Yes. But the the unanswered question is how do you get it? So, you know, I'm involved with a company called Headwater Gold that just received fast 41 permitting for a copper gold project. And I asked them how I asked the CEO, "How did you get that?" And he said, "I don't know. I I shook all the trees, right? I talked to state congressmen. I
talked to, you know, US congressmen and senators. I talked to people on key committees and industry organizations. And he couldn't point to one thing that got him that designation. And so, you know, um, for me, it just goes back to some of the foundational things that I look for. That's qual quality management teams, people who know what they're doing, um that are good stewards of your capital and and work work until they get the things they want. You also have to be invested in projects that are um you
know, targeting metals that are deemed critical by the you know, the US Geological Society or the Department of Defense or whatever it is, and that's easy to look up. Um so yeah, by all means, I would be focused on on some of those potential projects. >> That's that's very interesting. Hard to know what exactly did it. All right. Maybe we'll get some clarity at some point. If you So, you mentioned you you've been aware of Antimony and the company you mentioned that is working on
that for for years at this point. And I'm wondering it it can seem I think to investors that these antimony and different commodities seem to come out of nowhere sometimes and then they're very important. Any thoughts on how to get ahead of the next one to know what the next one might be that's coming? >> Oo, that's an interesting question. Let me say that um they don't come out of nowhere. We're just not aware of them in the in North America cuz we were keen and content to outsource their
production for the past generation. So we had a deletion of their um the the their names from our from our common lexicon, right? The reason we don't know about gallium and indium and turbium and dprosium and yrium and antimony is because we don't produce them in the United States or or largely Canada because we exported all that. And that's the problem that we're seeing now. So, um, look, go look at the the the critical metals list from from the US government. Copper was just added this
year. So, you can sort of see what metals. Um, maybe I'll just go down a couple. So, we've been seeing a lot about rare earths. Um, and I see the New York Times writing about it and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, but nobody's has real expertise. Certainly not the journalist that's writing the article. He does. He's not a rare earth expert, right? So, the the details get glossed over. there's a group of rare earths um and light rare earths and and heavy rare
earths and then we see announcements like I just said where the US government invests three or or or 400 um million dollars into a company like MP Materials but MP Materials isn't even producing the the heavy rare earths yet the ones that we truly need for defense applications etc. So spend some time maybe learning about those minerals. Those are the ones that are going to truly be needed. And then when you're looking at potential um rare earth investments, make sure you're asking them about the the the heavy rare
earths, etc. Um and maybe just getting away from the metals for a second, looking at the minology, right? Because this is such a complex business. There's so many facets to it. I I focus only mostly on capital and share structure. I'm not a geologist, but you know, some of these uh metals are and minerals are are locked in rocks and structures that you can't get them out of, right? So, and some companies will be content to still promote that asset even though it doesn't have great metallurgy or
minology. So, brush up on that stuff. Learn about clay deposits for lithium. Learn about monocytes, sand deposits for for rare earths, and and and do your homework because there's a lot to learn out there. >> Yeah, there definitely is. And as we're getting toward the end, here's my my fun question that I'm trying to ask everybody. What would your pick for best performing asset of 2026 be? And it could be a commodity, but it doesn't have to be. >> Yeah. Um, I would probably go back and
forth between copper and uranium. So, uh, copper had an interesting year because, uh, Mr. Trump put tariffs on it back in July and then he reiged on those tariffs almost immediately when someone whispered in his ear, "Hey, Mr. President, we don't have enough capacity in the US to to meet our needs." Um, and so I think that's going to trickle uh through the industry. I think that copper has a lot of drivers, right? It's um we hear a lot about the grid buildout, but um you know, there was a
report recently that some 90% of the US GDP was being driven by AI and and data centers. you need a lot of copper to build those out to connect them to the grid to conduct the electricity. Um, and in a very real real way, the the supply demand curve for for copper is going to get much worse in the in the coming years. So, at 2026, I don't know, but it seems like gold's had a good move and um, hey, copper came back down, right? We we saw how fast it could go up back in July when you put the tariffs on.
It's come back down into equilib equilibrium on the COMX versus the LME. Um, but I still think you have higher prices ahead for copper and uranium is an easy pick. I always talk about uranium, but maybe we'll just leave it out for today. >> Sure. I'll I'll one small followup. Your your preferred ways to get exposure to those two. >> Oh, okay. So, a couple of things. I just mentioned earlier that I do two things. I run like a macro letter and I run a speculative letter. And that's a good
lens uh through which to to view it. So, um, in the in the monthly macro letter, we might own a a copper ETF that owns big producers like BHP and and FCX. And we actually were in that ETF and then sold it during that July spike. And we went into an individual company called Ivanho, which is Robert Freedelland's company, because you get a little granular, but it had a portion of its mine that flooded. They were having some trouble and then the stock went down. So, we sold the copper ETF and we went
into Ivano. That mine's not going away. He's got two other mines that are producing. Um and so that's a large producer way to play it. And then um the speculative things that I do are invest in copper explorers and developers. I don't have to mention any names here, but um yeah, people that are that are drilling and um developing copper assets in North America. Maybe that's how and in in good jurisdictions that could potentially supply the Western Hemisphere. and they don't have to be in
the US to um be selected by the the US federal government for um capital assistance, right? So, I think you'll see more announcements in that vein. The US government investing in projects in in Canada and Mexico and South America. >> Yeah, which is quite interesting. All right. Well, we will wrap it up. I'll send you back out onto the show floor unless you had any final thoughts to leave. >> No, I I appreciate you having me. I think that the critical medals have a a big run ahead of them as a as a group,
right? I think that um a trade truce with with China is a kicking of the can and there's still a lot of capital that has to be invested to truly make the US even quasi or relatively independent from that Chinese strangle hold on processing. So um a long row to hoe there and I think the US is actually serious about it this time as evidenced by the capital they deployed already and the the talk that we're hearing. The Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant was just mentioning rare earth this week.
When's the last time you heard a US Treasury Secretary talk about rare earth minerals? Couldn't tell you, >> right? >> All right. Well, we'll let you go. Thank you so much for coming on. Always good to talk to you. >> Appreciate Appreciate it, Charlotte. Thank you. >> Of course. And once again, I'm Charlotte Mloud with investingnews.com and this is Nick Hodgej.
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