Transcription
Hello and welcome back to Soore Financially here from the floor of the Deutsche Gold Messa, the German gold show in Frankfurt. My name is Kai Hoffman, the host of the dogey miss, but also the host of sore financially, and I'm really excited to welcome back Lobo Tiger. He's the independent speculator, the due diligence guy. Lobo, thanks for joining us in Frankfurt again. It's great to see you.
It's always a fun show, the gold zi dome.
Okay. No, tremendously appreciate you being here. We recently had a conversation on Soore Financially on our YouTube channel, and I think the audience understood that, or might have taken away from it, that you called the top in gold and silver, and perhaps the miners as well. Um, share some of the feedback that you've gotten. And are we at a top?
Well, I'll tell you, Kai, I thought about, normally I don't travel with lots of suitcases. I travel light, fast on my four paws. I thought about bringing a check bag this time so I could bring a shield and my helmet, my Darth Vader helmet, because obviously Darth Silver has stricken again, right? But it's, I I can't, I don't know his name, so I can't call anybody out in particular. But there was one guy on the on the comments who said something like, "Oh yeah, that Lobo guy, he's such an idiot. He was bragging about selling all his stocks in January and and I bet now he's buying because silver was up that day or whatever it was." And it's like people don't listen to what you say. They listen to what they think you said, or they inter, they remember their interpretation, not what you actually said. And maybe this is hopeless. Maybe there's nothing we can do to convince emotional people like that to calm down, take a deep breath, and try to use the information more creatively, constructively. But for that 1% chance that we might help somebody, like if I say something in my interview with Kai or whatever, and you get mad at me, I'm not your problem. I'm just presenting data. The person who's getting mad, that's the person who's got to ask, you know, who's making these investment decisions and on what basis, how I feel about that. So, but to your to your point, no, I did not call a market top. My base case is and has been a period of correction, consolidation before the next big move, which I do expect to be higher, like in 2020, right? We had a big ramp up, three years of correction, consolidation before gold and silver took off again. Um, that's my base case. But, you know, if if that's what's going to happen, that momentum breaks, things that have just been going and going, they they can change direction. Mr. Market doesn't really seem to care about the fundamentals. If if it's not going up, then it's bad, right? And in that environment, it makes sense to be careful. Uh, and specifically to to January, I mean, I did I did take a lot of flak at at VRIC, that smaller conference, not as good as the Deutsche Gomez, of course not, right? For for talking about taking profits and rotating into the next opportunity to buy low.
So, you know, if you want to be religious about your favorite metal going higher and you can't hear anything other than it's going higher, you are asking for trouble, 'cause at some point it won't. Even even if it does later, like your fundamentals don't tell you, no fundamentals ever tell you what the market's going to do next, right? Your thesis, dollarization, right? Whatever these are multi-year things that take time to play out, and Mr. Market doesn't always cooperate. So, lots of directions to go there. My plea would be to the audience, right? Whatever Kai and I say next, if you disagree with me, fine. Think about it. Push back, counterargue. And that anger does not help you to make good investment decisions.
Yeah. Think about why you got mad. Actually, like analyze like what triggered that emotion, right? Because emotional investing is never a good idea anyway.
That's the point. Yeah. Yeah.
Right. So, um, maybe coming back to the interview again, like we we had a really good discussion about like the margins, like when is it time to perhaps maybe like jumping ship is the wrong term, but like margins per perhaps are shrinking because costs will increase inevitably, like they they will. And I fully agree with the point you made there. But the question is, like, what's a healthy margin for a gold miner? Perhaps like, and I should have asked that during the interview as well, because right now we're looking at maybe, let's say, $2,500 to $3,000 and margin, roughly depends on the bid on the producer. And Barrick sort of proved my case a little because I gave you some counter um when you said, well, you know, margins are shrinking. Barrick actually managed to reduce their all-in sustaining cost by 4%. Um, it's a it's a blip. It's a one quarter, of course. But the question is though, what's a healthy margin for a gold miner? Is it $2,500? Is it $3,000? Is it $4,000? Or is it $1,500 or even $500? What's what's a healthy margin? Like, I'm trying to put that into perspective because of course emotions and greed come into into this as well. Um, because if margins shrink, we we tend to discard like, "Oh, this is not healthy. This is not looking good. It's trending down." But what's healthy? What's normal?
So, two answers. One is rationally, any of the margins right now are going to be great. As a as a business with a moat and mining, you know, using Buffett-y terms, mining is one of the best businesses in the world in that sense of the moat because it takes years to make a discovery, more to get it permitted, more to build the mine. So, okay. Hey, gold and silver went up so much last year. You might think high prices will cure high prices. No, it takes years. I mean, mining has some of the biggest moats. They dig them literally, right? So, it's a So, when you have margins blow out, that's fantastic. And especially, this isn't just gold and silver, of course, but especially in the gold and silver space, you are literally making money. You're you're pulling it raw out of the earth. Gold is money. So is silver. So, it's it's a fantastic business to be in when your margins blow out. Uh, objectively, I would say that any of the margins that we're seeing now for the profitable producers are great.
And you could average that and call that a number. But, as we were just discussing, Mr. Market is emotional, right? Momentum and momentum chasing matters, and the direction of change matters a lot. So, you got margins blowing out. That's great. People get excited. People pile in. And maybe they're late, especially in the mining sector, but especially in gold mining, because the gold miners disappointed people so much in the last big bull market, right? They they famously in in the ramp up from 2001 to 2011 turned a seven-fold increase in the underlying commodity into increased negative free cash flow. Like seven times more on the top line and less on the bottom line. Um, or or the the wherewithal from the cash flow to do something with that. So, so that disappointment caused the gold stocks to lag gold itself this time, I think, more than usual. So you think, okay, well, now now's the time. But if the direction of travel changes, Mr. Market overwrites everything. Like objectively, right now, the margins, as you're just talking about, this is the time. This is now when when the miners should be getting rewarded. They've had discipline. They haven't made, you know, stupid acquisitions the way they did the last time. Okay, they're not perfect, but most of them are just literally printing cash right now, and there's a moat. So you would think that that would be easily defendable. You would think that the objective investor out there would do the math, would see the margins expanded, and say, "This is a great business. I should invest." But no, um, you know, the direction matters. And if if while margins were blowing out, people were excited, while margins are flattening, and Barrick is one example, but there's others that we've seen the costs go way up, so the margins starting to compress again, that's the wrong direction. So, even though objectively right now the margins are great, the fact that they're not blowing out anymore and maybe starting to close, I think that's going to keep investors from piling. I would not expect the gold stocks to soar while gold is going sideways.
No matter how great the margins are, no matter how much money they're making, that's unlikely to happen. And one more thing, the last ships, as our friend Brent Johnson likes to say, the last ships have arrived and unloaded their cargos. So, to the degree that you had that that floating inventory of oil cushioning the closure of Hormuz, that's gone now. And shortages, you know, we hear about in jet fuel and diesel now, that's starting to affect, you know, the real world. And that really matters to mining because it's often done in remote areas. You know, if we discovered a gold deposit under this hotel, we probably wouldn't mine it because it's in the middle of Frankfurt and the real estate is more valuable as hotels and stores and all that. So out in the countryside, away from the cities, where you do mine stuff, well, you often don't have the power out there. So you run on diesel generators. A lot of mines run on diesel gensets, and that's really expensive. Those things drink diesel. And if you're looking at not just higher prices, but shortages, how's that going to affect those margins? So I can, we can hypothesize about that. We won't know until we have quarterlys looking back and they say, "Oh yeah, well, we had a tough quarter on diesel costs." Very rare for management to come out ahead of that and say, "Hey, yeah, we expect much higher diesel costs this quarter." That nobody does that.
Yeah. So, buyer beware, my friend. I get your point, but we could see not just, you know, gold go sideways for a while. We could see significant margin compression starting this quarter.
Right. The war isn't over yet.
Yeah. And because also gold is now $200 lower than it was in the first quarter. So, we see gold price coming down.
Still. Well, come on. $4,500. You know, your mine was built on a $2,000 assumption. You know, I'm I can't complain about $4,500. You know, when when we were at $56, sorry, we were $56. I don't know if I said this in an interview with you, but I know I said it in several. I said, you know, gold could drop $1,000 an ounce and it would still be a fantastic level for the actual business of mining the stuff. But what would investors think? And and I was I was right. Sorry, I was. But, you know, dropping from $56 to $46 or $45, and people like panicking like, "Oh my god, what are we going to do with only $4,500 gold?"
It's It's that famous Matthew McConaughey meme, right? On on the way up, he looks super great in his Cadillac. And on the way down, he's the true detective.
Yes, that's exactly right. And it's the same price. I think we even posted a meme like that. You know, $4,500 on the way up, $4,500 on the way down, it was different numbers. But but that that McConaughey meme is exactly right. And okay, it's funny but sad. But that that's market reality. That's how, again, you know, people get mad at me. You know, gold is real money and you know, fine. But our purpose here, we want to soar financially. The goal is to make money. And I'm not talking about bullion. I'm talking about stocks. And as a stock speculator, it matters to me whether Mr. Market's going to be irrational and if he's going to sell when he should be buying. If I if I have a feeling what's coming, then that's how I have to play the odds.
Well, the data is sort of pointing in the in the direction you're going. Like we we got PPI data, we got CPI data this week as well. All beat expectations, unfortunately, to the higher side, not to the lower end. Um, what do you make of that when you look at it like even X energy, like inflation is increasing and accelerating as well, which CPI and PPI, and that that's really interesting, you know, excluding such trivialities as energy and food, you know, who needs that, right? You know, excluding those, we still had higher than expected inflation. And of course, on the producer side, that's yet to be passed on to the consumer. Um, though we should take a time out and then quoting my fellow Puerto Rican Peter Schiff, that famous Puerto Rican family, the Schiff family. Uh, you know, he does a really good job of reminding people that inflation is, it's not just always and everywhere of a monetary phenomenon. It is money printing. It is the money supply. That's what inflation is. And consumer price increases are a result of the inflation through the long and variable lags, famously. So, you know, economists have known this forever. And I know there's there's politics here and people don't want to say anything that might look bad for their side. But again, if our purpose is not to to be loyal or disloyal to anybody, but to make money in the markets, we have to be objective about this. So, you know, Peter really bites the bullet on this and he keeps reminding people that the so-called, you know, the Biden inflation, long and variable lags, that was a result of Trump policies in Trump 1.0. And then, you know, Trump walks in to lower inflation and Trump 2.0. Well, that was a result of the Fed tightening when Biden was still there.
Long and variable lags. And now it's going back up again. And, you know, Trump can't blame the inflation now on Biden.
And it's going up. And these latest reports, you could write it off and say, "Oh, it's just the war or it's just one-off." Well, you know, the reality is it's both CPI and PCE have been going up for several months. They carved out a a bottom months ago during the Trump term and they have been heading up. And now on top of that, you got the war, which, and again, even if you say, "Oh, it's just the war." Well, it was a war of choice.
You know, we didn't have to have this war. Now, you know, Trump decided to do it. Trump and Bibi decided, hey, yeah, let's go.
So, and and I'm not defending Iran either. Like, people want to, they're going to, if they're going to attack me, they're going to find something to attack no matter what I say. But I hope that people will remember that we're trying to make money here, is the point. And the reality is that we are looking at higher inflation, and we are looking at war or non-war. We are looking at economic knock-on effects and weakness. That's stagflation. And even, you know, maybe not tinfoil hat Lobo, but Ray Dalio is talking stagflation, others. I mean, just it's it's interesting that that that impossibility is reality now, the stagflation thing. And two things on that, it's bullish for anything that governments can't print. All commodities as a class, as a whole. Um, but it's particularly bullish for monetary metals because everybody knows what did well during the stagflationary period of the 1970s.
All right, so I got to ask the the non-economist economist here, uh, Lobo Tiger. Today's a fantastic example. Like headline news again, we're not going to open the strait for moves, there's no pressure to do so, blah, blah, blah, headlines. But gold reacted negatively, silver even more so. What, why is that? Like you were talking about stagflation, meaning okay, weaker economic growth, higher inflation. But yet gold is inversely trading to it right now, at least based on headline news. Put that into context with what you just said there a little bit.
So, there's there's two main competing explanations. Uh, one is the knee-jerk reaction. And I I'm sure some of this is happening because you can see like the wiggles on the charts intraday on the headlines and the news that that the metals are responding to. So, we're seeing that tired old mechanism of, well, anything that looks like inflation means higher rates, and gold doesn't pay interest, so sell gold. And, you know, 2025 demonstrated that that was completely specious. That's that logic is is simply flawed. But many programs, pro, sorry, trading programs are built on that wrong logic. And we can see that happening in the market now. And we we see things where anything, any headline, any news that seems to hint at higher inflation, maybe stronger dollar in the future, right? Gold gets sold. So that's one of the things that's happening. And normally you'd say, well, gee, there's a war. It's scary. Why isn't gold acting more as a safe haven? Well, this war is choking off oil supply and creating an oil shock and an inflation fear. So, it's not the war that's bad for gold. It's this war's impact on oil and the economy that's triggering this incorrect response, I think. And by the way, you know, for all the people that are mad at me for saying, or which I didn't, you know, that gold and silver topped, you know, think about what I'm saying. The market is making a mistake.
If if we're right and the market is wrong, that is a source of opportunity, right? So, the other thing though, is so, you know, anybody who says, "Oh, this is the explanation. I know the answer." Right? That's really dangerous. This explanation, I think, is part of it, but there's also the story that we've had of a lot of sovereigns selling gold. And it's not just Russia paying for its war and Turkey paying for its inflation. Um, it's apparently Gulf States selling gold. And we won't know until in hindsight we get the reports, if they even report, but there are informal reports out there that a lot of a lot of countries have been selling gold, um, dipping into their rainy day fund, which is in many ways actually a very good thing for gold. It shows gold doing its job. It shows it being a safe haven. And, you know, what do you want a safe haven for? In case you need it, right? So, you've got drones falling and blowing up, you know, your five-star hotels in Dubai or something. Suddenly you need your rainy day fund. Um, so if that's true, and the last numbers I saw between Turkey and Russia, which is not even counting these Gulf States, between Turkey and Russia, they sold more gold in the previous reporting period than all the other buyers combined. It was the first time I saw where the net sovereign or central bank gold position was negative. The change was negative because there was that much selling. So this may sound like, oh, there's Lobo being bearish again, but actually I think this is very bullish. If gold can hold $4,500, which is again, objectively a fantastic level for the business of actually mining the stuff. Like gold can hold $4,500 in the face of massive central bank selling. That's actually pretty bullish because at some point the war does end. At some point that selling goes away, and then what happens?
Well, we've seen gold wanting to break out and silver as well. Gold wasn't able to confirm it yet. Silver broke down again as well. So, we'll see who wants to.
Though, you know, my my Darth Silver haters may not remember or blank out on me saying this, but I thought it was actually quite impressive the other day where silver popped like seven bucks or something in the day when gold was down. And, you know, the Darth me has to say, well, you know, that's kind of a reminder of silver's industrial side. Copper was moving. You know, sometimes silver moves with copper more than gold. Uh, but I don't see that as a bad thing. You know, I come if if this stagflationary scenario plays out, I actually see more upside in silver than gold.
Yeah.
And uh, you know, that's something coming from Darth Silver. Well, it could have been Modi pushing the markets because his speech only mentioned gold. He, I think later on I saw gold and silver being mentioned. But
I that's really interesting and it's funny you bring that up. I I did sort of an informal poll on my X account. I asked of my 50,000 very best friends, right? How many of you from India? What do you think about this? And there was one guy who jumped in to defend, you know, "Oh, well, yes, the government's doing the right thing and we, you know, patriotic Indians, our great hero Modi, he's he's got a sort of Trump vibe going, I guess, there in India and there's people that just want to defend him no matter what." But I think that was one guy and all the other responses were, "Well, if Modi doesn't want me to buy gold, that makes me want to buy more gold."
I want gold for my wedding. I'll get gold for my wedding.
That's right. Right. So, um, you you just mentioned copper. We haven't talked about copper much, but copper price is exploding. We're at $6.60 roughly a pound right now, all-time high.
By the way, that bastard Lobo Tiger at the Deutsche Gold Messe last year said that copper was his top pick, not gold. What's up with that?
What's wrong with him?
Yeah.
Should we invite him back?
Maybe we should have a copper Messe.
There you go. The Deutsche Gold and Copper Show.
That's right.
No, but let's quickly talk about it because I also want to talk producers a little bit. I don't have them too much on my radar screen. I need to learn more about them. I'm a bit underweight actually also in our fund, copper, and I want more in there, more exposure. What, what do you make of the copper price right now and to be the copper miners in general?
Yeah. So, uh, this is one of those painful things where I was right, but I didn't make money on it. Oh, okay. I did buy one more copper stock, but I didn't I didn't move big into copper despite my confidence here last year about copper. Um, I guess the short version, we we had a long conversation about this, but all the reasons for my bullish list last year, they continue. I think the structural shortage in supply in the copper space is not just a multi-year, but probably a multi-decade story. Uh, Jensen Huang just came out today, uh, or maybe it was last night, depending on your time zone, saying that the way the world is going to need not just 10x, not just 100x, but 1,000x, not 1,000%, 1,000x the amount of energy supply, um, that we have now in order to go where the world is going with compute in the future. And and, you know, fully integrated, always-on AI in everything. We need a 1,000x. That's obviously bullish for the energy commodities and and for that much energy. Sorry, windmills aren't going to cut it, right? It it and even coal, if we, you know, the the energy density needed is is really, uranium is the answer, like nuclear power is the answer. So, extremely bullish for all energy commodities, but I think particularly uranium. But we started asking about copper. It's funny. I I tweeted something about this and somebody is like, "Oh, you know, copper is not scalable." And like, what? Copper is not an energy mineral in the sense, you know, like we don't squeeze copper and get electrons out of it. It's it's for transmission and connection. And this 1,000x in generation capacity, how's that going to get into the devices? Actually, it's bullish for aluminum, too, 'cause 'cause high-tension transmission wires, those aren't copper. Those are aluminum. And aluminum goes into a lot of other things, but for windings and connections and and energy bus bars, like these data centers, they use massive amounts of copper. And and not just in little wires. By the way, silver, too.
Um, as on its industrial side, right? You know, that's why I think of silver as a win-win. The industrial side of silver adds to its monetary, but sorry, we're we're talking copper.
The bottom line is the the thesis, I think, is extremely sound for many years, if not decades to come. And, you know, mines big enough to matter. Everybody's all excited about this one that the Lundins have made in in South America. Well, that's one. We need like one of those every year, a couple of them every year to do to be able to do where we're going. And we and they're not happening. And by the way, that one great discovery, the Lundins had that property 30 years ago when I first got in this business, that was, you know, already known in the in the portfolio of one of their companies. So, you know, their their overnight success was was three decades in the making, right? So, you you look at the pipeline, it's just not there.
And unlike uranium, there's no like copper reactor meltdown that can suddenly scare everybody out of copper. So, this is an extremely solid thesis. I I literally see no way that this can blow up on us. The only caveat I have is, you know, as you and I speak, copper has just barely jotted back from an all-time high, at least nominally. And the idea is buy low, sell high. Not at least for me, you know, you can buy high and sell higher if if it becomes a flavor of the day or something like that. Momentum is a real thing in markets, but I try to buy low, sell high, which is to the first words I gave an answer to your question. I've been watching this copper story. I've been right about this copper story, but I've only had minimal exposure in my portfolio to copper because I was looking for better entry points and I and I haven't quite had them. Even even last year, copper, I don't know if you remember this, maybe the audience does, mid-year last year, copper fell off a cliff on a tweet. And then, you know, it was tweets and then like the reality of the so-called copper tariffs or, you know, and what was it? It wasn't included. Huge fluctuations, but it didn't put the stocks on sale like I that opportunity. I was right, like, you know, I was right about copper, but the stocks didn't go on sale. So I'm hoping to have a second shot at that this year. I think the knock-on effects from the war that we were just talking about on inflation, all that stuff, you know, it's Dr. Copper, we call it for its PhD in economics. As the economic effects of the war put a scare into the market, I do think it likely that we will have a buying opportunity in copper. I I might be wrong, but but I have to play the odds. And and since I think that's likely, that's where I'm looking to to deploy. And and sorry, one more question. You said you you asked which company. Remember. But before we go to the company, real quick, just one quick follow-up 'cause
usually the market anticipates and copper doesn't seem to be anticipating a global, let's call it a meltdown for for more drama. Doesn't anticipate a global like depression, even, right? So why, why is that? Like shouldn't it be front-running what we expect to happen?
It could be front-running inflation if we want to give the market more credit. I think the market is just wrong. This is another one of those things where if as a contrarian thinker, independent thinker, you have a thesis and and the market, the broader market doesn't get it, you're wrong, you're wrong. You can lose money if you bet accordingly. But if you're right, you can make a lot of money when when the mass realizes, you know, in the screeching turn in direction. So I think I think the markets, they maybe with some reason, they they they think that the war will end soon. Like Trump clearly wants out of this war. You know, he he, you know, first it was going to be a couple days and then it was going to be a couple weeks. War has been within a couple weeks of ending since the beginning, and here we are two months in plus going on three. Um, but I I don't think the markets are wrong for looking at that and saying, "Well, gee, clearly, you know, Trump wants out, this war is going to end one way or the other soon, and then it and here's the mistake, and then everything will be fine again. Everything's not going to be fine again." Like, even if Trump declares victory now, walks away, well, then what? The, you know, the Iranians haven't opened their side of the strait and, you know, the mess is going to take a while to clean up. If they try to force it open with the military, that I think could happen. It would be expensive, probably take boots on the ground, and probably take months. So, I think the markets are being, I think the markets are wrong. I think they're being naive, like way way over overly optimistic about the outcome and the economic outcome of this war.
And so, they're mispricing the future.
They're they're price, I think the markets are pricing an optimistic outcome that's just not in the cards.
Like, even if the war ends today, which is not.
Yeah. So, our audience, like to to find out the best copper companies, perhaps they need to subscribe to the independent speculator.
You know, I don't give stock tips away, but I will I will be helpful here. I think, you know, if I'm right about this, we're talking about massive moves in the underlying commodity. You don't need to get cute. You don't need to be super smart. Like obviously the the blue chips in the space, the major players in the space, they will track the commodity. So if I'm right and the commodity gets whacked, those stocks get whacked harder. That's a buying opportunity. And then once the the shortages and the the, you know, the need, the demand side catches up again, and the stagflationary environment, then copper goes up again, and those stocks go up again with it. So, you know, you don't need me to pick those stocks. You know who they are. There aren't that many in the copper space.
And I think they're obvious candidates. You know, why make it more difficult than that?
Yeah, look, maybe to summarize the conversation, um, as well, like what, what, what is one thing you want the investor to take away from your talk tomorrow, your keynote?
Okay. All right. So, we've touched on related things, but here, here's, here's the, here's the one thing. I'm not predicting the crash of 2026, but I feel my wolf whiskers are twitching, if you will. Um, I feel that the chances of a major market reversal, ala 2008, or even just 2020, a flash crash instantly cured by massive money printing, um, are higher than normal this year. The war itself is a is a major potential cause of reversals in the market space. When when that optimism fades, it could not just fade, but just, you know, stairs up, elevator down, or the private credit thing could blow up, or the AI bubble could blow up. The the number of black swans out there, you know, any one of them lands hard, and we could see a a major market reversal. And I bring this up because probably on a monthly basis, somebody writes to me and says, "Oh, XYZ guru said the markets are going to crash. What should we do?" And my answer is always, the markets always have that potential. There's always some guru out there who says the markets are going to crash. Um, so, you know, breathe deep, don't panic. You know, prepare, harden your portfolio in case of that. But don't like sell everything because the markets are going to crash, and then what happens if they don't? You get left behind. Well, this time, I'm not saying the markets are going to crash, but the chances are elevated. Like, if if there's normally, let's say, a background level of radiation, say 5% chance that markets will crash this year, maybe it's 25% now. Not the, not let's say even 30%. That's not the big probability, it's not 70%, it's just 30%. But a 30% chance of a big event like that, I think you want to have a lot of cash on hand for that. So, it just so happens that I have taken a lot of profits. I am sitting on a large amount of cash. For me, it, I've never been this cash-rich before. My portfolio right now in the independent speculator is 80% cash, and I just don't do that. Normally, I put my money to work for me.
You know, even even approaching 50% would be too much cash for me. But right now, given this outlook, given, and again, people are going to say, "Oh, there he is. He's being negative. He's calling for a crash." No, I'm saying there's a potentially a life-changing buying opportunity ahead. And I want the cash. Um, if you've talked to Rick Rule recently, he he's been saying this in recent interviews, he might have said this to you as well. The single biggest period of wealth accumulation in his entire career was after the crash of 2008. He he was liquid. Like when that liquidity crunch put the squeeze on everybody, he was one of the ones who was able to take advantage of it instead of being taken advantage of by it. I was there in that market too, and I was illiquid, and I, you know, I didn't suffer humongously because I wasn't leveraged or anything, but I saw like screaming buying opportunities, like, you know, blue chips on sale for 5 cents on the dollar, that sort of thing, and I had no cash to act on that, and it was it was agonizing. And I got, you know, I got the emails from from readers who got it, you know, they they understood and they wanted to act too, but they they were all in already. They couldn't do anything. So this year, I'm holding, not just willing, I am I'm reporting, I'm telling you, I'm holding a lot of cash, much more than usual, because if that buying opportunity comes, I will be able to back up the truck big time. And it will, if if I play this right, it will add a zero to my net worth, maybe more, but a zero to my net worth. That's not bad. So, so, you know, I'm people get mad at me for for saying things they don't want to hear, but what I'm saying is, if this thing happens that we don't want to happen, but you're ready for it, you can turn that crisis into opportunity. Classic Casey style speculation, which Doug taught me.
Yeah. Well, we'll have him speak tomorrow. I'm looking forward to it.
Part of a fireside chat here. So, Lobo, tremendously appreciate you coming out to Frankfurt again. It's always a pleasure to have you, host you, and really appreciate you engaging and being a keynote speaker, of course, as well. Independent Speculator dot com, still the domain hasn't changed.
Independentspeculator.com. Still have a free weekly letter, which I can promise I'll piss off a lot of people with, but I can also promise that we will not spam you with a flood of daily advertisements. I hate that. You get one email notification per week, and then decide what to do from there.
Fantastic. Thank you so much for coming out. And of course, everybody else, thanks so much for tuning in. Really appreciate you watching here our conversation from the floor of the Deutsche Gold Messe. Help us out with the algorithm. Hit that like and subscribe button. It helps us tremendously. And if you want to leave a comment as well, that would be much appreciated. Thank you so much and take care out there.