The Maven Letter: 14 February 2024
Last week, I said I was only going to comment on macroeconomics every three or four weeks because rarely do things change enough on a weekly basis to impact a metals investment thesis. The market immediately decided to prove me wrong. So I have a macro article to start, on why it’s clear rates are not going to be cut anytime soon…and why economic strength means that, instead of setting up for a risk-off gold run, we might be setting up for a growth-driven multi-metal bull market that brings gold along for the ride. Then I run through my thesis for buying Scorpio Gold (TSXV: SGN). SGN’s share price ticked up 25% today, annoyingly, but I am optimistic it will ease back some over the coming days, given that the price has bounced between $0.20 and $0.27 for months. I will try to enter around $0.22. There was drill results from Headwater, a new resource from Alaska Energy Metals, a debt conversion for Encore Energy, an idea to test mine at Ana Paula to pay for underground development, and drill results from Vizsla. I will cover those tomorrow. ————————————————————————————————————— The Metals Thesis Shifts What a week. Two […]
The Maven Letter: 7 February 2024
Monthly Macro: Rate Cuts Paused (sigh). Uranium: the Kazatomprom Effect. Maven Buys: Skyharbour Resources (TSXV: SYH; USOTC: SYHBF). Portfolio Table. Portfolio Updates: Artemis, Banyan, Calibre, Cameco, Founders, West Red Lake Gold Mines.
Silver Stock Investor: February 2024
February 6, 2024 I recently spent five days in Vancouver, aka junior mining central, to meet with companies either in the portfolio or being considered, as well as to speak at the Metals Investor Forum (MIF) and the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference (VRIC). But here’s the single most interesting thing that happened in those five days. At the end of the last day I bumped into one of those new investors in the street that I had met two days earlier at MIF. We’ll call him Charlie. He told me he’s a blueberry farmer in British Columbia, and he’d spent the entire four days listening to newsletter writers, company presentations, and talking with CEOs and geologists. And then he shocked me. Charlie said he was in the process of buying about $40,000 of silver and asked me what I thought. I told him I couldn’t give him any personal investment advice, but that I did think owning silver was a great way to get started in this sector. I also said he would do well to assess his own risk tolerance, and how that was crucial in determining how he might allocate funds across the silver investment space. I also […]
The Maven Letter: 31 January 2024
So Many Portfolio Updates!!! Analysis of news from 12 portfolio holdings
Silver Stock Investor: January 30, 2024 Alert
Silver Stock Investor Alert January 30, 2024 The old SILJ ETFMG Prime Junior Silver Miners ETF was acquired by Amplify ETF Trust, and will now be called the Amplify Junior Silver Miners ETF. But Amplify stopped following the Prime Junior Miners Silver Index, and now tracks the NASDAQ METALS FOCUS SILVER MINERS INDEX, which holds no explorers, only producers and developers. It does seem that even some of their existing holdings were sold to free up cash and rebalance with new names. They clearly threw the baby out with the bath water, and created tremendous opportunity in the highest quality junior explorers. That created big (panic?) selling on January 29, when these names were already suffering from lousy sentiment. The names in the Silver Stock Investor portfolio that seem to have been sold off because of this rebalancing are: Pan American Silver, First Majestic, GoGold Resources, Discovery Silver, New Pacific, Dolly Varden, Kootenay Silver, and Summa Silver. Already, this morning, some of these names are up significantly from yesterday’s close. I think it would make sense for anyone who feels they don’t have the full exposure they wanted prior, to average down in those quality names. I think over […]
Evergreen Investing: January 2024
Uranium Resurgence The Green Transition’s Nuclear Catalyst We’re spending the next few months looking at each of the arenas we bought into to create a portfolio with exposure to the inputs and innovations needed for the green transition. We went through each in the first six months of the letter…but that was almost a year ago! So it’s time to revisit our rationales, to help newer subscribers understand these investment theses and to update expectations based on how things played out in 2023. Peter took us through the updated agri-foods thesis last month. This month I will revisit the first green investment arena I introduced in this newsletter: nuclear energy. And it’s an incredible time to look at this investment arena. This is the starting point. This is a 25-year chart of the spot price of uranium. It was low and boring through the 1990s and early 2000s, which meant new mines weren’t built. By 2005 that left the market tight and the price soared. It was a short event. At that time there was actually a fair bit of uranium warehoused here and there that was put up for sale when the price jumped. In addition, Kazakhstan was just […]
The Maven Letter: 25 January 2024
Ross Beaty Revived My Gold Optimism (and prompted me to buy two gold midtiers!). Stock-Specific Conference Thoughts. Uranium!!! Near-Term Forces and What To Buy Today. Mailbox. Portfolio Table.
The Maven Letter: 17 January 2024
Reasonable Rate Cut Expectations & Gold. Oh My Uranium. Wrapping Up the $200,000 Portfolio. New Portfolio Approach. Portfolio Table. Portfolio Updates: Arizona Sonoran, Founders, Sanu, Vizsla, Uranium Energy, West Red Lake.
Silver Stock Investor: January 2024 Mid-month Update
January 17, 2024 As we enter a new year, I’d like to wish you all a wonderful 2024 filled with peace, happiness, health and prosperity. Before looking ahead to what 2024 might bring, I like to look back at some of the events that shaped 2023. One of the most significant is the likely end to US Fed rate hikes since the middle of last year. There have been no hikes since, and although we can only guess when cuts will come, the equity and precious metals markets have already begun to price those in. As a result, we saw gold and silver bottom in early October, just as the US dollar was peaking. The US longer term treasury market yields peaked just shortly after that. It does seem the surge in yields is taking a breather with the 10-year Treasury yield dropping from 5% to 4% in just two months, and that could continue for awhile as Fed rate cuts approach. We also had the US banking crisis in late March. That was triggered as a result of the Fed aggressively hiking rates starting in early 2022, causing long term bonds held by a number of US banks to […]
The Maven Letter: 10 January 2024
Happy New Year! I hope everyone had some rest and joy over the holiday period. Now it’s back to business. January always arrives full force in the junior mining scene for two reasons. First, lots of companies are still awaiting results from late summer/fall drilling and no one issues (good) news after about December 13th because people start eyeing up holidays rather than portfolios, so there’s usually a rush of results to start the year. Second, three conferences happen back to back to back in the second half of January so companies try to get news out before those big marketing opportunities. Getting back into the swing of things therefore requires reading and assessing news from lots of companies (the list of companies I follow is multiples of the list that’s in the portfolio), while also chewing through outlook reports, new macro data points, and sentiment readings. From all of that, I start with a brief recap of what happened in the markets – overall and metals – over the holidays. Then I run through the world of copper development projects, a comment sparked by a summary table I saw over the holidays that underlines how more than half of […]