Latest / Trillions / Metal Mania
Transcript
- 0:05Speaker 1: Well, a chillions.
- 0:06Speaker 2: I'm Joel Webber and I'm Eric Balcunas.
- 0:11Speaker 3: Eric, there's a lot of stuff happening in the world
- 0:14Speaker 3: right now, but one theme that has been just kind
- 0:18Speaker 3: of like on a tear for more than a year
- 0:20Speaker 3: or two years even is metals. We're gonna have a
- 0:24Speaker 3: gentlemen join us, John Champalia, who's the CEO of sprot
- 0:28Speaker 3: Asset Management. Eric, what's interesting about metals and spots approach
- 0:33Speaker 3: in ETF investing.
- 0:35Speaker 2: Let me give you a statue. About two weeks ago,
- 0:38Speaker 2: the silver ETF SLV traded more in a week than
- 0:42Speaker 2: any stock on planet Earth, more than Navidia, more than Tesla.
- 0:47Speaker 2: A year ago, this ETF was ranked one hundred and
- 0:49Speaker 2: sixty eighth. This is crazy what happened with silver and gold?
- 0:53Speaker 2: Silver in particular felt like GameStop. It felt like, what
- 0:57Speaker 2: in the hell's going on? How does something that's mid
- 1:00Speaker 2: size takeover in terms of volume. So silver had this
- 1:04Speaker 2: just parabolic move up. Gold has been going up for
- 1:07Speaker 2: a year and a half. But between the two of them,
- 1:09Speaker 2: I think they combined for I want to say something
- 1:11Speaker 2: like sixty seventy billion in volume. That I mean, these
- 1:13Speaker 2: are ridiculous numbers, it's going to die down. It has
- 1:17Speaker 2: died down a little bit, there's been a sell off,
- 1:19Speaker 2: but for the most part, these two medals really just
- 1:22Speaker 2: went wild, particularly over the past couple months, and some
- 1:27Speaker 2: people are calling it part of the debasement trade. It
- 1:30Speaker 2: feels a little like fomo to me. People general investors
- 1:34Speaker 2: have for a while now been buying equities like normal,
- 1:36Speaker 2: but they've been buying gold. So gold has been a
- 1:39Speaker 2: story for about a year and a half. But silver
- 1:41Speaker 2: came out of nowhere and just went absolutely wild, and
- 1:45Speaker 2: that's just caught everybody's by surprise a little bit. But
- 1:48Speaker 2: the ETFs again, those volume numbers were absolutely ridiculous, and
- 1:52Speaker 2: then there's some of the things to unpack there. But
- 1:54Speaker 2: I think it's just one of those things where you
- 1:56Speaker 2: never know, Joel. Just when you know things are like
- 1:58Speaker 2: kind of going one direction, out thing comes from the
- 2:00Speaker 2: side door and just goes wild. And silver was that thing,
- 2:04Speaker 2: And where do we go from here? Both of these
- 2:06Speaker 2: metals are like really at extreme positions. So what happens
- 2:09Speaker 2: now also worth mentioning.
- 2:11Speaker 1: John's been on the podcast once.
- 2:12Speaker 3: Before a couple of years ago when we did a
- 2:14Speaker 3: uranium episode. So if you want to hear more, you
- 2:16Speaker 3: can listen back to that one this time I'm Tryin's
- 2:22Speaker 3: Metal Mania.
- 2:25Speaker 1: John.
- 2:25Speaker 4: Welcome back to trillions, Thanks for having me back.
- 2:27Speaker 3: Okay, So we mentioned this, this precious metals just having
- 2:31Speaker 3: this incredible run. There's also like no shortage of ETFs
- 2:34Speaker 3: that are offering exposure. So so curious what does SPRAT
- 2:37Speaker 3: do differently and why does that matter?
- 2:39Speaker 4: Right? Well, Sprout has a long history in metals of mining.
- 2:42Speaker 4: It's kind of our DNA, it's our culture and it's
- 2:44Speaker 4: all we do, so we know it really well. And
- 2:47Speaker 4: we do everything from investing in physical commodities and that
- 2:51Speaker 4: covers gold, silver, palladium, platinum, copper, and uranium all in
- 2:56Speaker 4: physical form, and we do most of the related equity
- 3:00Speaker 4: oriented categories and we also do active management as well
- 3:03Speaker 4: as some private investments. So we do everything in the
- 3:06Speaker 4: capital structure, both physical commodities, passive equities, and active equities
- 3:12Speaker 4: in metals of mining. So, you know, we saw a
- 3:15Speaker 4: lot of these trends starting to form three four, five
- 3:17Speaker 4: years ago, and we built a large suite of ETFs,
- 3:20Speaker 4: not just in the United States, but we also have
- 3:22Speaker 4: funds in Europe and Canada and they're really designed to
- 3:25Speaker 4: give investors opportunities to play a lot of these thematics,
- 3:29Speaker 4: which we think are still in the early stages of
- 3:31Speaker 4: their development.
- 3:32Speaker 3: So Eric mentioned the debasement trade, and I'm curious that
- 3:35Speaker 3: really became a theme, especially last year. It seems like
- 3:38Speaker 3: it's really gone mainstream. When did that thesis first resonate
- 3:42Speaker 3: with you? And what's changed even since then?
- 3:45Speaker 4: Well, at Sprott, I can tell you the deplacement trade
- 3:47Speaker 4: that that term we've been using since the Great Financial Crisis,
- 3:52Speaker 4: and it's only been in the last year, so it's
- 3:54Speaker 4: kind of entered the mainstream lexicon. And for your audience,
- 3:58Speaker 4: I think we should define what it means because it's
- 3:59Speaker 4: not a typical term we use in everyday language. But
- 4:02Speaker 4: the basement is a term to describe a situation where
- 4:06Speaker 4: very excessive levels of debt, very high levels of inflation
- 4:11Speaker 4: are basically eroding your real real after inflation returns, whether
- 4:16Speaker 4: you're investing in treasuries or currencies. And it's also a
- 4:20Speaker 4: part of currency devaluation. Currency evaluation is very common when
- 4:25Speaker 4: countries are in trade wars, which we're in right now,
- 4:28Speaker 4: and all of these things kind of point investors to say,
- 4:31Speaker 4: maybe I need to hedge myself against those risks. How
- 4:35Speaker 4: do I do that? Well. Precious metals, for not one
- 4:39Speaker 4: or two years, but for the last five thousand years,
- 4:41Speaker 4: have been an alternative form of storing your wealth. And
- 4:46Speaker 4: this is one of the reasons why gold and silver
- 4:49Speaker 4: and platinum have all been really well bid over the
- 4:52Speaker 4: last couple of years, because investors are rotating from let's
- 4:56Speaker 4: call it paper assets, whether those are treasuries or stocks
- 5:00Speaker 4: in some cases, two more real things that historically have
- 5:04Speaker 4: performed well in these par periods of debasement.
- 5:09Speaker 2: Let's talk about this so right now. I mean, inflation
- 5:12Speaker 2: isn't that bad, Debasement isn't that bad. I mean, it's
- 5:15Speaker 2: not like we just had a bunch of qi. It
- 5:17Speaker 2: feels a little more like fomo as well. It just
- 5:20Speaker 2: seems like gold started going up because people were buying
- 5:23Speaker 2: it for that reason. But then I think as it
- 5:25Speaker 2: goes up, it gets more fomo money. It just seems
- 5:27Speaker 2: like more of a craze than it does seem like
- 5:30Speaker 2: a general allocation to it for this long term inflation hedge.
- 5:35Speaker 2: What's your take on that.
- 5:35Speaker 4: We would describe it as a pivot, and the pivot
- 5:38Speaker 4: is really twofold. It's one. I'm going to bring this
- 5:42Speaker 4: more on a local basis. It's about running an economy
- 5:45Speaker 4: very hot in the United States. That means allowing inflation
- 5:48Speaker 4: to be higher than historic targets of two percent. That
- 5:51Speaker 4: means running very high physical death sits, which is what's happening.
- 5:56Speaker 4: It is also around very commoday to monetary policy, which
- 6:01Speaker 4: obviously the Trump administration is trying to engineer with new
- 6:06Speaker 4: FED chairman. So if you're running the economy hotter from
- 6:09Speaker 4: a fiscal and monetary perspective, I think that introduces a
- 6:13Speaker 4: different dynamic. But take a step back and look at
- 6:15Speaker 4: the big picture globally, this really started four years ago
- 6:19Speaker 4: when Russian invaded the Ukraine, and so what does this
- 6:23Speaker 4: have to do with gold? While six hundred billion dollars
- 6:26Speaker 4: of Russian assets were frozen with a few keystrokes on
- 6:29Speaker 4: the computer. And this was a real eye opener for
- 6:32Speaker 4: a lot of emergent markets and countries that aren't so
- 6:36Speaker 4: friendly with the United States and other Western countries that
- 6:39Speaker 4: their assets could be seized or frozen very easily. And
- 6:42Speaker 4: this is what really kick started and accelerated a shift
- 6:46Speaker 4: we call it dedollarization, basically where central banks around the
- 6:50Speaker 4: world and governments were basically selling treasuries or reducing their
- 6:54Speaker 4: dollar holdings, and what were they doing with the money.
- 6:57Speaker 4: They were basically recycling it into gold. The Chinese Central
- 7:01Speaker 4: Bank was really the primary proponent of this strategy. We
- 7:06Speaker 4: know they have hundreds of billions of dollars of treasures
- 7:09Speaker 4: that they are selling into the market and recycling in
- 7:12Speaker 4: hard assets. It's not just gold, it's infrastructure, it's energy, etc.
- 7:18Speaker 4: But there are a lot of central banks doing this India,
- 7:20Speaker 4: Poland Singapore. They are moving away from dollars and treasuries
- 7:25Speaker 4: as part of their foreign exchange reserves, and they're recycling
- 7:29Speaker 4: the money into physical gold. And you're starting to see
- 7:32Speaker 4: institutional investors mimic this behavior, which is why last year
- 7:37Speaker 4: we saw very good flows into gold based exchange listed offerings,
- 7:42Speaker 4: including the sprot Physical Gold Trust. And this trend, I
- 7:46Speaker 4: think is starting to trickle down into more of the
- 7:48Speaker 4: advisor channel and down to individual investors. They're kind of
- 7:52Speaker 4: minicking the behavior of these central banks. And so you
- 7:55Speaker 4: might say, well, is this a short term trend or
- 7:58Speaker 4: is this part of a longer term kind of fracture
- 8:01Speaker 4: of the global world order? And right now it feels
- 8:04Speaker 4: like the ladder to us, which is why you have
- 8:06Speaker 4: such a constant bid under the price of gold, why
- 8:09Speaker 4: it's been so resilient, and obviously in the last few
- 8:12Speaker 4: weeks it's hit an all time high.
- 8:14Speaker 3: So god, there was a lot there. I want to
- 8:16Speaker 3: ask about. You went from the institutional kind of to
- 8:19Speaker 3: the retail. So let's pivot, if we may, from the
- 8:22Speaker 3: institutional into the retail. And I'm curious, like, what role
- 8:27Speaker 3: should metals play in a retail investor's portfolio? Now, I
- 8:31Speaker 3: mean there was this sort of like old way and
- 8:34Speaker 3: if you're describing sort of a new world, like what
- 8:36Speaker 3: is the way that asset managers are financial advisors are
- 8:39Speaker 3: starting to talk to one another about this.
- 8:42Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean historically goal has always played a safe
- 8:44Speaker 4: haven role in a portfolio. It's always done very well,
- 8:47Speaker 4: particularly in financial dislocations or calamities. And the other assets
- 8:51Speaker 4: that always historically did well are things like US treasuries
- 8:54Speaker 4: and the US dollar. But last year the US dollar
- 8:56Speaker 4: went down ten percent against a basket of currency, so
- 9:00Speaker 4: didn't really provide the shock absorber against things going on
- 9:04Speaker 4: with trade wars and tariffs and the lake. So what
- 9:07Speaker 4: we see is some rotation of assets away from traditional
- 9:12Speaker 4: treasuries to gold, and we think it's displaying a more
- 9:17Speaker 4: effective hedge against some of the risks, whether it's currency, credit,
- 9:21Speaker 4: equity risk. And we've always told our investors, and this
- 9:25Speaker 4: is going back decades, that gold should always be kind
- 9:28Speaker 4: of the ballast in your portfolio. You should always have
- 9:30Speaker 4: some weight to it depending on what you know, what
- 9:33Speaker 4: you're trying to hedge against. But it obviously goes up
- 9:36Speaker 4: around eight to ten percent over long periods of time,
- 9:40Speaker 4: and then it obviously can can perform well against other
- 9:43Speaker 4: asset classes and a dislocation. But we've always said to
- 9:45Speaker 4: people you should have somewhere between five to ten percent
- 9:48Speaker 4: of your portfolio in physical gold help you stay invested
- 9:51Speaker 4: in other asset classes that historically have been more volatile.
- 9:55Speaker 3: Gold, but maybe maybe not silver. Right, So what's driving
- 9:59Speaker 3: the interest in in silver? Is it just price momentum
- 10:02Speaker 3: or is there something else going on?
- 10:04Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean silver obviously and gold are very tied together,
- 10:08Speaker 4: but there are some key differences between the two. Silver
- 10:11Speaker 4: is what we call a hybrid metal. That means it
- 10:14Speaker 4: has monetary elements to it and it has industrial elements
- 10:18Speaker 4: to it. And I think it's important to take a
- 10:21Speaker 4: step back and look at the price history of silver.
- 10:24Speaker 4: I mean, silver was fifty dollars an ounce in twenty eleven.
- 10:28Speaker 4: It meandered around for over ten years, and in the
- 10:32Speaker 4: last I guess three or four months, it was like
- 10:34Speaker 4: a coiled sprint. It had a huge catchup trade because
- 10:38Speaker 4: gold was rallying first. But there's also kind of a
- 10:42Speaker 4: geopolitical angle to silver as well, because silver is a
- 10:47Speaker 4: very important metal for anything that conducts electricity. So think
- 10:51Speaker 4: about defence industries, evs, things where you need very high
- 10:55Speaker 4: levels of electrical connectivity. Silver's your go to metal. China
- 11:00Speaker 4: has recently put export restrictions on silver, so there's some
- 11:04Speaker 4: challenges there. The other element that's got silver kind of
- 11:07Speaker 4: really going is substitution effects. So what does that mean. Well,
- 11:12Speaker 4: what it means is if you're an investor in a
- 11:14Speaker 4: place like India or another emerging market where you don't
- 11:18Speaker 4: trust your currency because of hyper inflation or whatever, gold
- 11:23Speaker 4: has become very expensive for those for those people. And
- 11:27Speaker 4: so what we see is that as the price of
- 11:29Speaker 4: gold becomes unaffordable for some groups in the world, they
- 11:33Speaker 4: switched to silver. So a really good example would be India,
- 11:36Speaker 4: you know, huge owners of physical gold. When the price
- 11:40Speaker 4: of gold kind of broke five thousand, we saw eighty
- 11:43Speaker 4: five million ounces of silver in the just a two
- 11:45Speaker 4: month period get imported into India, So they're basically hoarding
- 11:49Speaker 4: silver now as y're touched at the beginning. Was there
- 11:52Speaker 4: a bit of a fomo you know, memification going on
- 11:55Speaker 4: with silver in the last couple of weeks. Yeah, absolutely,
- 11:58Speaker 4: there was a absolute wild trading looking at some of
- 12:02Speaker 4: the ETFs you look at, we were watching the options
- 12:05Speaker 4: trading on some of the ETFs. It got very excessive,
- 12:08Speaker 4: and we've had kind of a correction here, which I
- 12:10Speaker 4: think is quite healthy. But we're holding at eighty dollars,
- 12:13Speaker 4: so you know, we were fifty dollars an ounce in
- 12:16Speaker 4: November and we obviously broke through one hundred and corrected
- 12:20Speaker 4: back down to eighty. But there's also a shortage of silver.
- 12:23Speaker 4: We've had a supply deficit for five years and that
- 12:26Speaker 4: is obviously starting to catch up to the marketplace.
- 12:29Speaker 2: So SLV alone traded one hundred and forty six billion
- 12:34Speaker 2: in the last week of January, and that's an enormous number.
- 12:38Speaker 2: And even leading up to that, we're talking like eight
- 12:41Speaker 2: ten times its average. Now, all that volume, all that return,
- 12:46Speaker 2: and yet no flows. This was interesting to me. I
- 12:48Speaker 2: want to get your take on this, so Joel. Normally,
- 12:51Speaker 2: like when gold started to go up, the flows came in,
- 12:53Speaker 2: like people were like, oh cool silver. No flows in
- 12:56Speaker 2: fact outflows, and I heard a theory and it feels
- 13:00Speaker 2: but I want to get your take on it. That
- 13:02Speaker 2: silver for a minute there and I'm not sure if
- 13:04Speaker 2: it still exists was so hot and demand physically, especially
- 13:07Speaker 2: in Asia and China. One guy tried to smuggle silver
- 13:10Speaker 2: in through Hong Kong, got busted and they put up
- 13:13Speaker 2: the picture all the silver he was trying to snuggle
- 13:15Speaker 2: it in these Danish cookie boxes. Anyway, I wouldn't mess
- 13:18Speaker 2: with the Chinese government, but that's just me. Anyway, he's
- 13:21Speaker 2: trying to get this in. And the thesis I heard
- 13:24Speaker 2: was that the traders out there were using SLV for
- 13:27Speaker 2: its silver stash. They were actually handing in chairs of
- 13:31Speaker 2: SLV to get physical silver back and then sell it
- 13:34Speaker 2: in arbitrage it in the open market, especially in Asia.
- 13:38Speaker 2: So it was almost like the ETF was getting raided
- 13:40Speaker 2: for its valuable thing that it held. And that's why
- 13:43Speaker 2: there could be outflows that overwhelmed the inflows from the
- 13:46Speaker 2: FOMO people. Thoughts.
- 13:48Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I think you have to look at
- 13:49Speaker 4: it fun by fund. So Sprott has a physical silver
- 13:52Speaker 4: trust that's actually been in net inflow, so we've been
- 13:56Speaker 4: accumulating new new dollars into the fund, and buying silver
- 13:59Speaker 4: with SLV is more of a trading instrument versus a
- 14:03Speaker 4: buy and hold, And obviously I think the options market
- 14:06Speaker 4: for that is more the tail wagging the dog on
- 14:09Speaker 4: that thing, just the way it trades. But yes, you're right,
- 14:12Speaker 4: there are some arbitrage opportunities by location. So for example,
- 14:17Speaker 4: there's too much metal sitting in North America right now
- 14:21Speaker 4: versus places like London, India or China, the other big
- 14:25Speaker 4: kind of metal markets. And we know that because there's
- 14:28Speaker 4: a price differential as to what the price of silver
- 14:32Speaker 4: trades for in Shanghai versus New York, and there is
- 14:35Speaker 4: a big spread, and traders are very opportunistic. If that
- 14:39Speaker 4: spread provides an arbitrage opportunity, they will physically move the silver,
- 14:44Speaker 4: put it on a ship, sail it around the world,
- 14:46Speaker 4: and deliver it and the vaults into whatever market. We
- 14:50Speaker 4: haven't quite seen that yet because there's not enough arbitrage there.
- 14:54Speaker 4: There is some vat taxes in China that makes that
- 14:58Speaker 4: arbitrage why than you would think, But we see that
- 15:02Speaker 4: all the time when markets dislocate. I think the great
- 15:05Speaker 4: example right now is copper. We obviously saw the price
- 15:09Speaker 4: of copper at one point trading over ten percent over
- 15:12Speaker 4: the price of copper in London and traders were basically
- 15:15Speaker 4: loading up ships and rushing it to the United States.
- 15:18Speaker 4: So these physical movements of metal actually happen.
- 15:22Speaker 1: We do it.
- 15:22Speaker 4: That's brought all the time. We have to buy metal
- 15:24Speaker 4: and move it around the world. But yeah, there's definitely
- 15:27Speaker 4: I think the volatility has been exacerbated by some of
- 15:31Speaker 4: the inventory mismatches right now going on.
- 15:33Speaker 1: Who's calls when you have to move metal like that?
- 15:37Speaker 4: Yeah, so we we obviously work with different banks and
- 15:40Speaker 4: shippers and believe it or not, silver, It just gives
- 15:44Speaker 4: you a quick background silver. So how do you move
- 15:47Speaker 4: around these one thousand ounce bars. Well, we put six
- 15:51Speaker 4: hundred of them on a semi flatbed tractor trailer, which
- 15:55Speaker 4: is a reinforced trailer, and we moved six hundred bars
- 15:58Speaker 4: at a time, and sometimes it'll take us six months
- 16:02Speaker 4: to move large quantities around to our vaults, but we
- 16:05Speaker 4: do it. It's a lot of work, but we have
- 16:06Speaker 4: a whole team of logistics people that organize this. And
- 16:10Speaker 4: gold is a little different. It's obviously it's obviously in
- 16:14Speaker 4: armored cars because of the volume to value, but silver
- 16:17Speaker 4: is so bulky you need to put it on flatbed trailers.
- 16:26Speaker 2: Interesting about all this, like moving this merchandise around and ships.
- 16:30Speaker 2: And I just finished a book project on bitcoin and
- 16:34Speaker 2: one of the chapters is called the Store of Value SmackDown,
- 16:37Speaker 2: and it's basically gold versus bitcoin. One of the big
- 16:41Speaker 2: arguments that the bitcoiners have is, hey, if you want
- 16:45Speaker 2: to move bitcoin, you just like basically click a button.
- 16:47Speaker 2: You can move it anywhere in the world. You don't
- 16:49Speaker 2: have to get it through a border, there's nobody who's
- 16:51Speaker 2: going to confiscate it. You don't have to call like
- 16:54Speaker 2: a big ship up, you don't have to ensure it.
- 16:56Speaker 2: It's just easy. So it's like better version of gold.
- 16:59Speaker 2: And obviously it has made that case pretty well. Even
- 17:02Speaker 2: seventy thousand dollars after this huge pullback, that's still a
- 17:05Speaker 2: lot of money per bitcoin, and it's been around seventeen years. Obviously,
- 17:09Speaker 2: gold has really crushed in the short term, and bitcoin
- 17:13Speaker 2: crushed maybe we'll call it twenty twenty twenty three and
- 17:16Speaker 2: twenty twenty four was up four hundred and fifty percent,
- 17:18Speaker 2: gold up way less. So they go back and forth.
- 17:21Speaker 2: But what's your take on bitcoin? Could it be used
- 17:24Speaker 2: as the same store of value in it as they
- 17:26Speaker 2: say a digital gold, and is it even better because
- 17:29Speaker 2: you don't have to worry about calling up a ship.
- 17:32Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a good question. I obviously get that all
- 17:34Speaker 4: the time. I'm going to use your seventeen year term
- 17:38Speaker 4: and say that gold's been a store of value for
- 17:40Speaker 4: five thousand plus years. So we have a long history
- 17:43Speaker 4: as humans in terms of our value and accumulation of gold.
- 17:49Speaker 4: So it stood the test of time over millennia. You know,
- 17:53Speaker 4: seventeen years. It sounds like a long time, but it's
- 17:55Speaker 4: still in its infancy in terms of a new asset class. So,
- 17:58Speaker 4: but yes, they have pros and they're very different there.
- 18:01Speaker 4: It's not a digital gold. We don't like to think
- 18:03Speaker 4: of it that way. It's a very different asset. Last obviously,
- 18:06Speaker 4: if it was digital gold, there wouldn't be a forty
- 18:08Speaker 4: percent difference in performance just over the last few months.
- 18:11Speaker 4: So they have very different audiences. They have some similarities. Yes,
- 18:16Speaker 4: you can zip it around digitally, but there's obviously trade
- 18:19Speaker 4: offs with security, whereas trying to steal gold is pretty
- 18:23Speaker 4: challenging given how heavy it is and how highly secure
- 18:27Speaker 4: it is. So they can compliment each other, but we
- 18:30Speaker 4: just we don't like to think of them as substitute.
- 18:31Speaker 4: That's brought.
- 18:33Speaker 2: Hold on, Joel. I have a trivia question for you.
- 18:37Speaker 2: How old is gold?
- 18:39Speaker 1: I mean, like from the beginning.
- 18:42Speaker 2: Yes, here's how old it is. It was mentioned in
- 18:45Speaker 2: the Old Testament three hundred fifty times. That's old, man.
- 18:49Speaker 2: If you get if you're like getting shout outs in
- 18:51Speaker 2: the Old Testament, I mean that is really old. And
- 18:54Speaker 2: that's why gold I do think it's it should get
- 18:57Speaker 2: respected more from the bitcoinners. It's like you're seventeen years old.
- 19:00Speaker 2: This thing is like has been through it, and every
- 19:03Speaker 2: human generation has come along has come on and say
- 19:05Speaker 2: gold is valuable. So that is definitely worth something. I
- 19:08Speaker 2: think they both can exist.
- 19:09Speaker 3: But you know, John, actually I'm curious do you think
- 19:12Speaker 3: that the kind of the rise and popularity of bitcoin
- 19:16Speaker 3: has that actually sparked an interest and expanded the interest
- 19:20Speaker 3: in more hard assets that are physically backed.
- 19:23Speaker 4: Look, I think there's similarities in terms of what people
- 19:26Speaker 4: are trying to do with each asset class. Right, people
- 19:28Speaker 4: are trying to diverse away at the fundamental base of
- 19:31Speaker 4: from FIA currencies, which are basically paper money which can
- 19:34Speaker 4: be printed as free will and debased. There's that term
- 19:39Speaker 4: again over time from excessive money printing, inflation, excessive debt levels,
- 19:43Speaker 4: et cetera. So there are some commonalities in terms of
- 19:47Speaker 4: what people are trying to avoid. So those are the
- 19:51Speaker 4: common I think the commonalities between the two. Obviously one
- 19:55Speaker 4: is a lot more volatile than the other. We don't
- 19:58Speaker 4: see central banks accumulating bitcoin yet. Maybe there are one
- 20:01Speaker 4: or two that I am not worre about of. But
- 20:03Speaker 4: we obviously have lots of central banks that a store
- 20:06Speaker 4: as in there as part of their foreign exchange reserves
- 20:09Speaker 4: as a liquid, tangible acid they can easily exchange for
- 20:13Speaker 4: whatever it wants to when it wants to. So we
- 20:15Speaker 4: haven't quite got central banks buying bitcoin. Maybe I'll Salvador,
- 20:19Speaker 4: but time will tell to see how they play out.
- 20:22Speaker 2: One more question on this, because one of the other
- 20:25Speaker 2: things that we bring up between bitcoiners as well, Okay,
- 20:28Speaker 2: gold is definitely scarce because one of the big you know,
- 20:31Speaker 2: reasons to buy bitcoin is there's only going to be
- 20:33Speaker 2: twenty one million, and twenty million are already done, so
- 20:36Speaker 2: you're almost at the capacity and it's locked in. That's
- 20:39Speaker 2: hard coded. Now gold two three percent is dug up
- 20:44Speaker 2: from the ground a year, right, so there's a little
- 20:46Speaker 2: bit of inflation. And then now they're talking about digging
- 20:49Speaker 2: up the ocean floor or even beyond that mining asteroids. Joel,
- 20:53Speaker 2: there's an asteroid called sixteen psych and did you know
- 20:57Speaker 2: it has seven hundred quintillion I think, not gold on it.
- 21:00Speaker 2: That's enough for ninety billion dollars per person on Earth.
- 21:03Speaker 2: I don't know that could really decrease the price of gold.
- 21:06Speaker 4: No, I think that's a pretty far fetch, well a theory.
- 21:10Speaker 3: But it also I will pivot that again, pivot into
- 21:14Speaker 3: a question about miners. There's the physical and the physical backstaff.
- 21:20Speaker 2: Hold on, but I want to get to miners.
- 21:21Speaker 1: But well, he would have exposure via miners.
- 21:24Speaker 2: Oh yeah, why don't they send the gold miners into
- 21:28Speaker 2: the ocean or to space space?
- 21:30Speaker 4: Well, how about when was the last time somebody landed
- 21:32Speaker 4: on the moon, let alone an asteroid? So I'm not
- 21:35Speaker 4: holding my wreath on that one. But you do raise
- 21:39Speaker 4: another question which is obviously being thirsty debated right now,
- 21:41Speaker 4: which is basically mining on the ocean floor. You know,
- 21:45Speaker 4: there are these polymetallic nodules that sit way down in
- 21:48Speaker 4: the bottom of the ocean, and there's a lot of
- 21:50Speaker 4: debate going on right now across government agencies and countries
- 21:54Speaker 4: around whether that is is fair game or is that
- 21:57Speaker 4: basically something we should not attempt to do. And it's
- 22:02Speaker 4: still not clear cut, but yeah, there's minerals all over
- 22:05Speaker 4: the place, whether they're at surface blow surface, at the
- 22:07Speaker 4: bottom of the ocean, so that I think we don't
- 22:10Speaker 4: have enough clarity on. But finding these minerals is not
- 22:15Speaker 4: easy to do. It takes a long time to find
- 22:17Speaker 4: a large scale deposit that has economically viable permitting, building minds, etc.
- 22:24Speaker 4: There's a long lead time with commodities, and I think
- 22:26Speaker 4: that's one of the interesting aspects of it. You might say, Okay,
- 22:30Speaker 4: all these commodity prices despike, so we're going to have
- 22:32Speaker 4: a huge supply response, right The answer is no, because
- 22:36Speaker 4: it takes so long to find these deposits bring them
- 22:38Speaker 4: to market. And yes, the incentives are very high right now,
- 22:42Speaker 4: but you know, it will take several years for new
- 22:44Speaker 4: deposits to come into production, which naturally, I think keeps
- 22:49Speaker 4: these bull markets running much longer than normal business cycles.
- 22:53Speaker 1: Okay, related to that, we hear a lot about rare earth.
- 22:58Speaker 3: The Trump administration obviously views this is a strategic competitive
- 23:02Speaker 3: competition with China. Obviously, there's nothing that looks like a
- 23:06Speaker 3: rare earth ETF maybe ever or yet at least, But
- 23:10Speaker 3: what would it actually take like, not only for markets,
- 23:14Speaker 3: but supply chains and regulation. What would a rare earth
- 23:17Speaker 3: vehicle look like?
- 23:19Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean we're investing a rare earth's it's brought
- 23:22Speaker 4: both passively inactive. We have a fun called the Sprought
- 23:25Speaker 4: Critical Materials ETF, and that does have exposure to rare earths.
- 23:29Speaker 4: And maybe we should take a step back and say,
- 23:31Speaker 4: what the heck are rare earths. Well, it's a group
- 23:33Speaker 4: of minerals. Most of them I can't even pronounce, so
- 23:36Speaker 4: they're so obscure. But they're very strategically important because they're
- 23:40Speaker 4: used in very small quantities for very important technologies defense industries.
- 23:45Speaker 4: Other technologies from the magnets are used in electric vehicles,
- 23:49Speaker 4: things like that. Now, so, yes, they're rare. They're usually
- 23:53Speaker 4: found in very small traces in other deposits, so they
- 23:57Speaker 4: come as a byproduct. They sometimes are produced smelting other materials. Okay,
- 24:02Speaker 4: why does all that matter? Well, why it matters is
- 24:04Speaker 4: that China controls between eighty of the processing of these
- 24:09Speaker 4: rare earths. So it's not so much that they control
- 24:12Speaker 4: of the mining, but it's the processing that they have
- 24:15Speaker 4: a stranglehold on. And we know that this is being weaponized. So,
- 24:19Speaker 4: for example, in the last few years, China gets into
- 24:22Speaker 4: a spat with Japan, China says that Japan, we're not
- 24:26Speaker 4: saying you anymore rare earths. And this is this has
- 24:29Speaker 4: not gone lost by many administrations around the world saying, look,
- 24:33Speaker 4: if we got cut off from these supply chains by China,
- 24:37Speaker 4: our industries could be crippled. And this is why the
- 24:41Speaker 4: Trump administration and even prior to the Bide administration, has
- 24:44Speaker 4: been taking steps to basically build the jargon is resilient
- 24:48Speaker 4: supply chains, which is code for diversify away from China.
- 24:52Speaker 4: And so what's happening is a lot of energy policy
- 24:57Speaker 4: and national security driven policy is driving the incentives to
- 25:03Speaker 4: produce rare earths. In the United States and other Western
- 25:06Speaker 4: countries to build processing facilities because it's not just the minerals.
- 25:11Speaker 4: You need the processing, which is very complex to ensure
- 25:15Speaker 4: that we have adequate supply. Now, just in the last week,
- 25:18Speaker 4: the Trump administrations announced something called Project Vault, and Project
- 25:23Speaker 4: Vault is twelve billion dollars of funding to stockpile critical
- 25:27Speaker 4: materials like rare earths. So this is basically going back.
- 25:30Speaker 4: We're going back to the Cold War where governments basically
- 25:33Speaker 4: stockpiled a lot of different minerals to ensure it was
- 25:37Speaker 4: not disrupted. And you know, the genesis of all this
- 25:41Speaker 4: is obviously in the nineteen seventies when Opek squeezed the
- 25:43Speaker 4: oil price. It was really the wake up call for
- 25:46Speaker 4: government saying, you know what, we're vulnerable here. If somebody
- 25:49Speaker 4: shuts off our oil or rare earth, you know, we
- 25:52Speaker 4: could be really screwed here. So government is basically taking
- 25:55Speaker 4: a very holistic approach to incentivize mining of rare earths
- 25:59Speaker 4: and minerals. In the United States, they're talking about public
- 26:04Speaker 4: private partnership, so that's things like loans to get these
- 26:07Speaker 4: projects off the ground. That Trump administration is even gone
- 26:11Speaker 4: as far as taking equity stakes in some of these
- 26:14Speaker 4: mining companies wear erth lithium, et cetera, and they're taking
- 26:18Speaker 4: in exchange for the equity off take agreements. So off
- 26:21Speaker 4: take is basically a promise to deliver me future production.
- 26:26Speaker 4: They're even contemplating in some cases price floors, which says
- 26:30Speaker 4: we will guarantee a price of X for all that
- 26:33Speaker 4: future delivery. That price of X may be above the
- 26:36Speaker 4: current spot price, So they're basically putting a floor under
- 26:40Speaker 4: the price so that it incentivizes and allows the project
- 26:44Speaker 4: to get to completion. And one of the big complaints
- 26:48Speaker 4: about China is over capacity, and they basically flood the
- 26:52Speaker 4: market with heavily subsidized production, which destroys the price and
- 26:57Speaker 4: doesn't allow mines around the world form me ever getting
- 27:01Speaker 4: off the ground. You know, in the last couple of years,
- 27:03Speaker 4: we've heard he's a here's a cobalt mine in Idaho
- 27:06Speaker 4: shut because the price collapse, you know, because China controls
- 27:10Speaker 4: the cobalt supply out of the Congo. So this is
- 27:14Speaker 4: the game, the chess game is playing right now geopolitically
- 27:17Speaker 4: around trying to wrestle control away from China of these
- 27:22Speaker 4: critical supply chains. It's happening right now in our earth.
- 27:25Speaker 4: It's happening in things like cut, excuse me, copper. These
- 27:29Speaker 4: are all metals that are very strategically important to the West.
- 27:33Speaker 1: How's that chess match going from your vantage so far?
- 27:36Speaker 4: Well, China has the benefit of playing a long game,
- 27:39Speaker 4: and we seem in the West to go administration by
- 27:42Speaker 4: administration in terms of new administration comes in and they
- 27:46Speaker 4: flip flop and unwind everything that the prior one did,
- 27:48Speaker 4: so we don't have the benefit of having a government
- 27:52Speaker 4: that can play out the next ten to twenty thirty years.
- 27:55Speaker 4: But I think it's basically a woke in the giant,
- 27:59Speaker 4: just like in in the midst nineteen seventies when the
- 28:01Speaker 4: Strategic Oil Reserve and the International Energy Agency was formed.
- 28:06Speaker 4: So it's not a fight over oil like it was
- 28:08Speaker 4: in nineteen seventies, a fight over metals. This is a
- 28:11Speaker 4: very different I think geopolitical struggle right now, and metals
- 28:14Speaker 4: are at the forefront of it. And the reason is
- 28:17Speaker 4: is because metals are a very vulnerable supply chain, and
- 28:20Speaker 4: metals are so ubiquitous in everything we do in our lives.
- 28:24Speaker 4: Just about every industry, technology, defense, AI, all these things
- 28:29Speaker 4: are very mineral intensive, so why are people fighting. It's
- 28:33Speaker 4: not about rocks. It's about controlling chips and missiles, it's
- 28:37Speaker 4: about controlling AI data centers. All of these things are
- 28:41Speaker 4: the new front line, and governments around the world are
- 28:44Speaker 4: really responding to this challenge.
- 28:53Speaker 2: We're going to wrap up here, but I wanted to
- 28:55Speaker 2: pivot to uranium since you are the issue of view.
- 28:57Speaker 2: RNM jewel Uranium miners are up twenty two percent this
- 29:01Speaker 2: year and I can't not do it. How much are
- 29:05Speaker 2: they up? Since yours truly pitched this ETF in the
- 29:07Speaker 2: Best New ETF Launch competition in early twenty twenty at
- 29:10Speaker 2: Inside ETFs and came in third place, even though I
- 29:13Speaker 2: should have won. Go ahead and tell you tie hundred
- 29:16Speaker 2: and fifty percent. I remember standing up there. I was
- 29:20Speaker 2: in front of a whole room, and I said, look
- 29:22Speaker 2: at this back test. It came started way up up
- 29:25Speaker 2: or left, down to the bottom right, and I said,
- 29:28Speaker 2: I trust a crappy back test. This thing has been
- 29:31Speaker 2: beaten up for ten years, so it had room to run.
- 29:34Speaker 2: And then I said to everybody, look, everybody here wants
- 29:37Speaker 2: to be like mister environmental, But how'd you get here?
- 29:39Speaker 2: You know, walk if we want to go from A
- 29:43Speaker 2: to Z in terms of like helping the environment, you
- 29:46Speaker 2: just can't do wind and solar. It's just not enough.
- 29:49Speaker 2: That was my pitch. I should have won, you know what,
- 29:52Speaker 2: it was jobs ahead of.
- 29:53Speaker 1: Rode wasn't in the audiences, I know, And.
- 29:55Speaker 2: Also they had employees from the conference in the competition.
- 30:00Speaker 2: It's just kind of suspect.
- 30:01Speaker 3: I gotta say, I don't know if you're bitterer still,
- 30:03Speaker 3: I can't tell.
- 30:05Speaker 2: Anyway, I was too ahead of my time. I think
- 30:08Speaker 2: if I had pitched this three years later, I would
- 30:10Speaker 2: have won, But I was super early. Anyway, you obviously
- 30:15Speaker 2: were all over this. How big is this going to be?
- 30:17Speaker 2: We actually reinvented this theme last year's roal. We said,
- 30:21Speaker 2: this is a backdoor way to play the AI revolution
- 30:23Speaker 2: because all these big mag seven companies seem to be
- 30:26Speaker 2: either renting or building nuclear facilities or buying to and
- 30:31Speaker 2: they're using uranium obviously to fund the AI. Huge energy suck.
- 30:36Speaker 2: What is the bull case here? Is it just the
- 30:38Speaker 2: AI or what else is going on?
- 30:40Speaker 4: Yeah? Well I think you've I think you've been winning
- 30:42Speaker 4: continuously for five years with your call. So congratulations. It's
- 30:46Speaker 4: been an incredible run for uranium and you're right, Okay,
- 30:49Speaker 4: basically was left for dead. It had a horrific ten
- 30:52Speaker 4: year bear market that basically wiped out most of the industry,
- 30:57Speaker 4: and in the last five years the industry has come
- 30:59Speaker 4: back to life. It's really being driven by a number
- 31:02Speaker 4: of really big pivots. One is around decarbonization. Governments are
- 31:07Speaker 4: focused on lower carbon forms of energy, but more recently
- 31:11Speaker 4: obviously energy security because uranium produces just abundant amount of
- 31:18Speaker 4: energy and affordable energy. And you're right, it is base
- 31:23Speaker 4: load power, which means it runs twenty four to seven
- 31:25Speaker 4: three sixty five, unlike wind and solar that run twenty
- 31:29Speaker 4: five to thirty five percent of the time. You obviously
- 31:31Speaker 4: cannot run very energy hungry data centers on intermittent or
- 31:36Speaker 4: variable energy. So this is part of this big shift
- 31:40Speaker 4: going on around energy security and national security. Just the
- 31:44Speaker 4: Quick Factory, About nineteen percent of the electricity United States
- 31:47Speaker 4: today is generated from NUKO, so it's a huge part
- 31:51Speaker 4: of the mix. It was forgotten and it's now going
- 31:54Speaker 4: through a new renaissance where governments are starting to take
- 31:59Speaker 4: you know, nuclear out of the penalty box and actually
- 32:02Speaker 4: provide incentives. The Trump administration has been very pro nuclear,
- 32:06Speaker 4: lots of executive orders, lots of funding available to build
- 32:09Speaker 4: new reactors, so it's coming. But the real story is China.
- 32:14Speaker 4: China is building like six to eight new reactors a year.
- 32:17Speaker 4: And so if you look at the West pivoting back
- 32:21Speaker 4: on top of places like India and China building tons
- 32:24Speaker 4: of new nuclear capacity to increase energy production, you're looking
- 32:30Speaker 4: at a uranium sector that between now and twenty forty
- 32:33Speaker 4: is forecast to double. So again, the cure for low
- 32:37Speaker 4: prices is low prices, and right now the uranium price
- 32:40Speaker 4: has gone from the twenty dollars per pound up to
- 32:43Speaker 4: the mid eighties, so it's doing its thing. The supply
- 32:47Speaker 4: response has still been kind of lukewarm because the industry
- 32:51Speaker 4: was so shut in for such a long time, and
- 32:53Speaker 4: so capital is finally coming back into the sector. It's
- 32:56Speaker 4: no this legacy stigma around the technology is largely gone,
- 33:02Speaker 4: and we've seen tremendous success in our suite of uranium ets.
- 33:06Speaker 4: We have the largest physical uranium fund in the world,
- 33:10Speaker 4: which is about seven billion dollars, and so it's been
- 33:14Speaker 4: a huge win for our clients the last few years
- 33:15Speaker 4: investing in the CUD.
- 33:16Speaker 2: Yeah, real quick on that this physical uranium etf Joel,
- 33:21Speaker 2: You guys get inflows. You have to go buy yellow cake,
- 33:24Speaker 2: I guess, and store it. How does that work? And
- 33:27Speaker 2: you ever been there? I mean it seems like unlike
- 33:30Speaker 2: gold or silver. You know, there's obviously some danger right
- 33:34Speaker 2: with storing you know, uranium?
- 33:37Speaker 4: No, no danger, I mean, I mean basically what we
- 33:40Speaker 4: store is something called U three awaight uranium oxide, and
- 33:44Speaker 4: it basically looks like a yellow powder and it's it's
- 33:47Speaker 4: stored and steeled drum just outside on a concrete pad
- 33:51Speaker 4: and to stock the barrels up.
- 33:52Speaker 2: Joel. No smoking, you can't let a cigarette in there, right,
- 33:57Speaker 2: is that a rule?
- 33:58Speaker 3: I hope there's no smoking anyway, Okay, but.
- 34:03Speaker 4: It's a fairly inert substance. And yeah, we have over
- 34:06Speaker 4: seventy five million pounds of the stuff that we stored
- 34:08Speaker 4: in the United States, Canada and France. And it's it's
- 34:13Speaker 4: obviously a very early stage product. It has to get
- 34:15Speaker 4: refined into enriched training, which obviously then goes into a
- 34:19Speaker 4: reactor core. But yeah, our investors have been huge supporters
- 34:23Speaker 4: of the vehicle and it has grown enormously since we
- 34:26Speaker 4: launched it almost five years ago.
- 34:28Speaker 3: Actually, I'll bring this back as a way of asking
- 34:31Speaker 3: you to answer a question that I teased but we
- 34:33Speaker 3: didn't ask. You have the physical back stuff, and we've
- 34:36Speaker 3: spent some time talking about that. You also, the portfolio
- 34:39Speaker 3: also includes a lot of miners. When do you, like,
- 34:43Speaker 3: what's the purpose of the miners and like when does
- 34:45Speaker 3: that take trade takeoff versus the physical back stuff? And
- 34:49Speaker 3: this goes for a portfolio, right, you've copper miners, uranium miners,
- 34:55Speaker 3: gold and silver miners. Like what's the relationship between the
- 34:58Speaker 3: physical back stuff and the and the miners?
- 35:02Speaker 4: Yeah, great question. I mean we try to offer our
- 35:04Speaker 4: clients both where we can options in physical metals, and
- 35:09Speaker 4: we do that in about six different metals and then
- 35:12Speaker 4: obviously the related mining companies, and they both have different
- 35:15Speaker 4: attributes the physicle commodities. You're playing the spot market, you're
- 35:19Speaker 4: playing a bullish view that the price of copper is
- 35:22Speaker 4: going to continue to go up, and copper recently had
- 35:24Speaker 4: an all time high like it has for silver, gold,
- 35:28Speaker 4: and platinum. The miners are obviously tied heavily to the
- 35:32Speaker 4: commodity price, but they obviously have enormous operating leverage, and
- 35:36Speaker 4: they also have a lot of optionality with the discoveries
- 35:40Speaker 4: and bringing new discoveries into production, so they are more volatile,
- 35:45Speaker 4: but they can obviously create tremendous value for investors when
- 35:50Speaker 4: they are benefiting from higher commodity prices, but also when
- 35:53Speaker 4: they're bringing new production to market. And right now, a
- 35:56Speaker 4: lot of these mining companies are minting profits because the
- 36:00Speaker 4: body prices are high and they are finally getting capital
- 36:04Speaker 4: to move their projects forward. You know, there was a
- 36:07Speaker 4: long period of time where nobody wanted to invest in
- 36:09Speaker 4: this segment. Everybody was invested in having a good time
- 36:12Speaker 4: in tech stocks, and we're seeing a rotation going on
- 36:16Speaker 4: right now where capitals finally in the last i would say,
- 36:19Speaker 4: twelve to eighteen months coming back into these sectors, which
- 36:22Speaker 4: is allowing many of these companies to move their projects forward,
- 36:25Speaker 4: which is how they ultimately create value for investors. So
- 36:29Speaker 4: we find most investors will invest in some ratio between
- 36:33Speaker 4: the two. Sometimes it's driven by relative value, sometimes it's
- 36:38Speaker 4: risk tolerance. So a lot of our institutional investors they
- 36:41Speaker 4: like to own, you know, the physical commodities sprinkled with
- 36:45Speaker 4: some of the hot sauces. Eric likes to call it.
- 36:48Speaker 4: So we don't have a prescribed formula, but we find
- 36:51Speaker 4: most of our investors hold these things in tandem.
- 36:55Speaker 2: And is there any commodity just you know, last question
- 36:57Speaker 2: that people are forgetting about, Like we just went over
- 37:01Speaker 2: some of the big ones, like how do you have
- 37:03Speaker 2: a nickel etf like? Is there anything? Like?
- 37:05Speaker 1: But everything's up right, is it? But Eric Tright, is
- 37:07Speaker 1: there anything that we haven't?
- 37:08Speaker 2: Yeah?
- 37:08Speaker 1: I thought? Or what else? What do you think?
- 37:10Speaker 2: Dark horse commodity right now?
- 37:13Speaker 4: Ooh, the dark horse commodity. That's a good question. They've
- 37:16Speaker 4: all they have all been moving together, which is very odd.
- 37:20Speaker 4: Commodities typically all have their own little cycles. Dark Horse commodity.
- 37:25Speaker 4: Maybe lithium. Lithium kind of came back to life last
- 37:29Speaker 4: year after getting really washed out after a period of
- 37:33Speaker 4: excessive pricing. That lithium has kind of come back to life.
- 37:37Speaker 4: Nickel is is stabilized. There was a period there where
- 37:42Speaker 4: Indonesia was kind of flooding the market with nickel. That
- 37:45Speaker 4: seems to be being put in check a little bit
- 37:48Speaker 4: as they've realized that they've disturbed the market. But the
- 37:51Speaker 4: other one that we're excited about is copper coppers finally
- 37:54Speaker 4: starting to hit new highs and what you find when
- 37:57Speaker 4: these metals finally break new highs. It provides kind of
- 37:59Speaker 4: a logical signal to investors. And the copper miners have
- 38:03Speaker 4: done incredibly well the last couple of years. They're really
- 38:07Speaker 4: printing money right now. And copper is so important for
- 38:10Speaker 4: so many different industries that and so much of it
- 38:14Speaker 4: is around electrification right now. So copper is another one.
- 38:18Speaker 4: We're pretty excited about it. John.
- 38:19Speaker 3: Final question, it's a personal one. I'm curious, is your
- 38:24Speaker 3: personal portfolio does it have anything other than medals in it?
- 38:29Speaker 3: Or like, do you own stocks and bonds or is
- 38:32Speaker 3: it just metals?
- 38:33Speaker 2: Oh, but goal miners don't count. I'm talking like regular stocks.
- 38:38Speaker 4: Oh absolutely, I invest in all kinds of tech stocks
- 38:41Speaker 4: and yeah, absolutely, I mean I get I have a
- 38:44Speaker 4: lot of economic exposure to these metals through my work income,
- 38:48Speaker 4: so I have a great hedge there. But yeah, absolutely,
- 38:51Speaker 4: I mean I am a proponent of having a diversified portfolio.
- 38:54Speaker 3: I'm going to ask a follow up question that's also
- 38:57Speaker 3: one that we ask a lot of in trillions. I
- 39:00Speaker 3: gotta say goldbug g Bug, great ticker. Yeah, that's a
- 39:04Speaker 3: world class ticker. Is there any ticker that you think
- 39:07Speaker 3: is better than that one.
- 39:08Speaker 4: That's a really great ticker, and when I found out
- 39:10Speaker 4: it was available, I said, let's grab it right away.
- 39:13Speaker 1: Yeah, I like.
- 39:14Speaker 2: I mean, he made like glitter g ltr. That's the
- 39:17Speaker 2: Aberdeen Physical Precious Metals Basket, which is a gold, silver, platinum, pladium.
- 39:24Speaker 2: That's pretty good, right.
- 39:25Speaker 1: Any other ticker envy? John?
- 39:28Speaker 4: Uh, you know, I was a little disappointed, to be
- 39:31Speaker 4: honest with you, when the ticker gold just got reassigned
- 39:34Speaker 4: to somebody after Barrick Mining dropped it, which was.
- 39:37Speaker 2: Who got it?
- 39:38Speaker 4: A puzzling thing. A company involved, I can't remember the
- 39:42Speaker 4: name of it, but a company involved probably met total
- 39:45Speaker 4: kind of cold you know, kind of precious metals and
- 39:48Speaker 4: coins and stuff. Okay, but that that's a killer ticker too.
- 39:51Speaker 3: Okay, all right, John, thanks so much for joining us
- 39:54Speaker 3: on trillions again.
- 39:55Speaker 4: Thanks so much. It was great to be back.
- 40:01Speaker 3: Thanks for listening to Trillions until next time. You can
- 40:04Speaker 3: find us on the Bloomberg terminal, Bloomberg dot com, Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
- 40:09Speaker 3: or wherever else you'd like to listen. We'd love to
- 40:11Speaker 3: hear from you. Hit us up on social I'm at
- 40:13Speaker 3: Joel Weber Show. He's at Eric Balchina's Trillions is produced
- 40:16Speaker 3: by Magnus Hendrickson