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