Transcription
Welcome to this week in focus. I'm Jeremy Saffron, and we're wrapping up an incredible week here on the floor at the Rule Symposium, the beautiful Boca Raton Resort in Florida. A resort that is, uh, stunning, by the way.
Now, before anything else, a quick thank you to every guest who sat down with us, and to everyone who came up this week just to say hello, and to shake a hand, and to tell us what Kiko has meant to you. That means more than you know.
And let me say one more thing that I don't get to say often. Kiko News remains an independent news organization. And in a business full of people selling something, we answer to you, the viewer, and to the facts, not the sponsor, not the stock. And as a journalist, that independence is the thing that I'm proudest of. And it's why these conversations you're about to hear can be as honest as they are.
So here's what stuck with me this week. Now, gold ran to the moon, then corrected hard, and it split this room right down the middle. Let me show you.
All right, I start with the man whose name is on the building here, Rick Rule. I asked him about the mood after this correction.
"Asking me about the mood at my conference around natural resources is like going to evangelical church and asking the choir if they believe in God."
Yeah, it's true.
"Okay, let me ask you a different way. Are they, are people greedy or are they scared right now?"
"No, people are greedy. People are greedy. Now, understand that this audience has been conditioned. We've taught them to learn to know that soft markets are sales."
But talk to the people who manage the money, and you hear the opposite. Here's veteran value investor Adrian Day.
"The negative sentiment on gold equities among the broader investment public right now is, and I say this literally, the worst sentiment I have ever seen in my 50 years managing money in any sector at any time. But one day, two weeks ago, one day two weeks ago, we actually had zero bullish."
Okay, a greedy room in the most washed-out sentiment a 50-year veteran has ever seen. And Day was honest about the risk, too. He told me gold could break its last low and fall towards 3,600 before this is done. Nobody up here is promising you a straight line.
Now, underneath the price, almost everyone pointed to the same thing. A change in what? Gold even is mine builder Bob Quartermain, named to the Order of Canada just last week, framed it as structural. Gold now has surpassed US Treasuries. Now, it hasn't surpassed, you know, US dollars if you look at all types of dollar investments, but, you know, gold represents what, 23 to 25% based on the World Gold Council of central banks' holdings. So, you know, that's different. We're finding central banks continuing to buy.
Now, hard money analyst Lynette Zang took it even further here. She says that the price itself is the signal.
"You've got to understand a rise in gold price is an indication of a failing currency. And if you get that, once you get that, well, frankly, you start to make different choices. You need to think about gold and silver as money and not a trade."
And from a true insider, former Goldman and Bear Stearns, uh, banker Nomi Prins, a contrarian read on the Fed that cuts against this week's headlines.
"I think ultimately the Fed will have to reduce rates in order for us to service our debt. I think that Kevin Walsh is waiting, but by being non-forward guiding, he actually has more flexibility to move rates. And I read that as flexibility to reduce rates."
Now, whether or not she's right, her longer point stuck with me. She says, I guess since the early '90s, she says $100 in cash has lost 60% of its value, while the real assets did the opposite.
All right. Now, no metal ran harder or fell harder than silver. It hit $121 this year, then got cut by roughly a half. Now, I asked the loudest silver bull in the world, Keith Neumeyer, what that correction really was.
"So the whole system was really on the verge of breaking."
And on where silver should trade, forget the old ratios. He watches a different one.
"Uh, you know, we, we mine 8:1. So for every 1 oz of gold, 8 ounces of silver is being mined worldwide by the mining industry. So divide the current gold price by 8, and that should be the silver price."
Now, he made his triple-digit call back in 2012 and got laughed at for about 14 years, right up until it happened. Will it happen again? His answer was simple. Absolutely. He just won't say when.
And for Rick Rule, the bigger opportunity isn't even the metal everyone came to talk about. It's copper. And he's blunt about why he'll bet on it over the trade dominating every other channel.
"People ask me here at the conference, 'Well, what do you think of Nvidia?' The truth is, I don't think of it at all. I can't spell it. I understand copper."
Now, 30 years of underinvestment, he says, meeting a world that wants more of everything. You can't fix that in a hurry.
And if there's one theme this week, it wasn't a price target. It was discipline. Adrian Day's rule for surviving a market this volatile.
"Well, I think one would be, and, and this sounds, one is know yourself."
"Yeah."
"And one is know what you're investing in. Know yourself. I can't tell you how many people when I talk to them, when they're opening an account and I talk to them, 'Oh yeah, I'm, I'm fine. I'm a long-term investor. I'm a long-term investor. Oh yeah, I'm fine with volatility. I can stand volatility, don't worry.' Nobody, nobody, nobody has ever come to me and said, 'I'm a nervous Nelly.' Nobody."
"So that's the first thing. Look in the mirror and really know yourself. If you cannot tolerate volatility, you need very low exposure to gold stocks because by their nature, they are volatile."
And Bob Quartermain's advice to his younger self and to anyone starting out, two things: Focus on good geology and be willing to take risk.
And I'll leave you with Rick Rule. One of the, one things that he hopes everyone walked out of the room understanding is that the number you're told may not be the number you live in.
"There's a wonderful phrase that the CPI is the CP lie. I would invite any of your listeners to informally construct a basket of goods and services that their family consumes. Look at the prices that they paid for that basket of goods and services in 2020 and the price that they pay today. The government will tell you that the dollar is losing its purchasing power to the extent of 2.5% a year. The real number for your family is eight."
Now, whatever you take from these conversations, take this one, too. You heard them tested, not just repeated, because that's the job. Now, Kiko stays independent, and that's a promise, not a slogan.
For the entire Kiko News team, from the Rick Rule Symposium here in Boca Raton, I'm Jeremy Saffron. We'll see you next week.