Boom, Bust and BS are back from PDAC

#mining #investment #investing 

Welcome to The Oregon Group's new podcast. This week, Anthony Milewski and Christian Purefoy sit down to talk PDAC, including the highlights, opportunities and challenges the mining industry faces in 2025.

Find out more at The Oregon Group: https://theoregongroup.com/

#criticalminerals #miningnews #copper #uranium #lithium #invest #investor #PDAC #nickel 

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Transcript

0:53

So that's just my interpretation is that this money is about to flow down. You know, if gold price stays where it's at. But, you know, I think it's really hard. In fact, it's so many people are saying things like, it's the hardest it's been in 30 years. It's the hardest I've ever seen it. So and these are people with big, you know, medium small, you know, like a range of projects, you know, not obviously the majors and the producers, but the people have been around. Yeah. And I mean, the market's going through a bit of turmoil at the moment, and gold does seem to be holding up. So, you know, as you said before, if the gold miners don't move, then what are we in this business for? Yeah, if the gold, say,$3000 and the juniors don't move, you know, later this year, I don't know. I give up. What we do? Were you with me when we're in the lobby of the Shangri-La and I downloaded - what was it called?“pump.fun” Pump fund. And we were making meme coins in the lobby of the Shangri-La. So I think that's the future. If we don't get a market here for gold names. And you know, the other one is, of course, critical minerals. And you and I have talked about this before, you know, sort of everything is critical now. I mean, that's kind of one of the funny and funny parts of it. But certainly what I would call minor metals, which, you know, it's kind of like the industry name for them. They're all primarily refined in China, 90, 95% refined in China. And, some of these have had huge moves. Antimony is one, I actually like tungsten, I talked to some tungsten traders and physical tungsten is really tight, you know, in certain market segments. So I think tungsten is going to be big this year at some point, And if Google Google Trends, I mean, we just put out a story. Google Trends is anything to go by. The search terms on Google are just going up and up and up. And we haven't even got to Trump's plan on critical minerals yet. And then you move from there to what are called minor metals sitting under the banner of critical minerals, and then a lot of the base metals, quasi base metals are also fitting that category, like uranium, nickel, copper. You know, I think lithium, there's different lists. Different countries have different lists. But, they're all critical and they're all basically controlled by China to some extent. And so when I was working the conference floor and a couple of the workshops, that was what was very interesting was one in particular on critical minerals. You know, this whole thing of bifurcation of the prices, you know, China's controlling of all of the all of the processing. So how do you actually compete with that in the West and someone from one of the major car companies and the other miners, they're basically saying you can't. But what you can try and do is compete on the cost of manufacturing the facilities. So if you can bring the price down from those places. So the big drive amongst a lot of these miners and stuff is okay, we can't compete on, you know, managing your price. But if we can do the infrastructure to bring the infrastructure costs down, then the long term price comes down, It’s so cyclical and, you know, you need refineries, you need a mine and you need a refinery and, you know, I wonder like during the during the Cold War, the US government had huge stockpiles of a bunch of these things that were they deemed critical at the time they call them critical minerals, but and I actually I think it was called the War Minerals Act, right. where they stockpiled these different minerals that were important to the government. So, you know, I think that's coming in one form or another, and that will precipitate big moves in certain commodities. And, you know, their proxies, which are the equities will also move. I think it's kind of exciting for these names. You know, as usual, PDAC is a lot of people trying to put deals together. Another big theme that I saw was there are no management teams like no one either you have enough money and you don't want to run the deal or you know, you don't want to run the deal because everyone is going to sit around and criticize you and you can't sell your stock. So I think a pretty major theme that's not really being widely talked about is it's hard to find a management team. So even if you get even if you managed to get an asset that you think is interesting, people don't want to to kind of go through the pain. And so it will be interesting to see with that. Why? Why is that? I mean, what's going on? But we've obviously we've we've touched on the fact that there are less people coming into the industry, they’re getting older Everyone is happy to criticize you. And the thing about it is, even if the criticisms turns out not to be true, it doesn't matter because that criticism is adopted as sort of a fact. And, you know, when the commodity prices are going up, you know, investors are the smartest people in the world. Well, when the commodity price goes down, which is what the driver of most of those equities are, you know, the management team are scumbags and like and it's just this like thing which has developed in our industry where it's not a pleasant job. And I think it also takes certain skills and talents. And so I was kind of really impressed by the number of people I talked to, said, I've got this tungsten asset in America. Well, who's going to run the deal? I don't know. You've got this great gold asset in West Africa. It's good jurisdiction. Yeah, we've got the technical team, but, you know, no one really wants to market it. So, yeah, that will matter. And it will make a difference when a project can't stand on its own. I just mean it's early and so it needs the early dollars or, you know, there's a change in tactical strategy. And you know, having someone to tell those stories is important. So, yeah, I mean, mining's had a bad rap, right? I mean, but we we saw what was it, a furry at PDAC, they're obviously trying to fit in with the trend. But to be fair, the trend towards mining, the narrative, you know, we need these minerals basically does seem to be in in the favor of the industry but so you're still picking up that these you know, these companies... It’s still hard I mean, the tape might be coming our way, but it's not here, you know, like it’s not like you roll out and raise 5 million bucks. I mean, it's not it's not easy at all. And I don't see that that's changing kind of imminently. So I, I don't know if it doesn't change that we won't have the minerals. So, you know, like we always say, high prices are a cure for high prices and low prices area cure for low prices. So let's see if if we have to wait and let the prices keep going higher and higher before people actually start to invest those dollars to bring down the price through new production. It was interesting, when we were in there, you know, obviously it's great vibe, but when you looked at your phone and looked at the stock market and was all just sort of coming down and crypto coming down and I mean, not to get bogged down in obviously the details of why this is happening, the carry trade and refinancing US debt, all that sort of stuff. But one of the things out there does seem to be the idea, the Secretary, US Treasury secretary basically said he wants to move money out of tech. Basically. I do wonder if there's a big opportunity in what you just said, getting the liquidity back out of places like crypto and tech and into things like mining. People want to make money so they're not going to move it over for the sake of doing it, right. Yeah. And there is an opportunity in mining, right? I mean, it's an opportunity to try to capture the story but you still have to have a return, right? So I mean, I think if people always gravitate towards returns, returns haven't been in our sector for a decade really. I mean, find their hidden moments where people in Australia made a lot of money in lithium. And, you know, there have been kind of moments where people made money, but certainly its been much easier to be in other sectors. Okay, so how do we get that? How do we get, you know, let's say there is this money suddenly pouring out of all these other sectors. Mining should be ready for anything. You got to be there to tell the story. I think people need to be there to tell their story, why their commodity matters, why their project can be move forward, why it can be built, you know, the basic stuff. And, you know, interestingly, I think we're kind of at a moment where that's not I think the budgets for marketing, for instance, are probably lower than they have been in the past for a lot of these companies who simply don't have money. We have these trends around how marketing is effective, and it's effective through digital marketing primarily for retail. And so yeah, there's a lot of things going on. But in terms of capturing the the dollars, I think it's trying to be out there and tell a story about why investors make money with whatever it is that you're selling. And that's tough, right? Because these companies, they move I mean, time horizons of decades. And I mean, just on marketing right now, it's moving so fast. You've got, you know, AI, new tech, You've got just so many platforms you've got to try and reach. Your audience is everywhere. So many, you know, tick tock, Instagram, Snapchat, you know, all of these things. I've found that a lot of companies I speak to are struggling with that. They're not quite sure where and how to place themselves. Yeah. You can waste a lot of money if you don't know how to do it And I think, certainly, the executives don't know what they're doing. And I think even a lot of the IR professionals come from a different side of the industry. They're not coming from a digital background. So I think there's a big learning curve. In fact, you know, we’ve writing about it in Fast Company and Forbes quite a bit over the last year, just thinking about how to take advantage of things. But, you know, if if you're not marketing, you're failing, for sure. I think that's true. But at the same time, you know, you can't spend money you don't have. So it’s like a catch 22. And, you know, ultimately, if the price goes up for your commodity and it has a big move You'll catch a tailwind and be able to raise some money. Okay. We came into this saying good vibes at PDAC and now we seem to be in a bit of a down But yeah, I mean I, I maintain I think gold is going to be interesting this year. I think that there's going to be money to be made in gold names, junior gold names, if the gold price stays up. And I think, you know, you pick and choose around critical minerals, that's going to be interesting. Right? And we're going to have that big broad net that includes minor metals and then other things like the uranium and the nickels and the coppers of the world. Yeah. So boom for gold. Gold is happening, you know, probably sitting probably silver too, but yeah, silver is a little bit different. There is industrial demand for silver, like solar. And so, you know, solar alone should really be moving. So solar alone should be moving silver, but it hasn't quite happened yet. If you look at a lot of the charts, you know, Silver's also pretty darn interesting. So yeah, silver and gold. Okay. Yeah. Boom, bust. Yes, I would say PDAC. Yeah, it was it was a boom. But it's going to be certain minerals and certain geographies too. That was the big takeaway. And U.S. People aren't ready. I mean, the US is hot. Anything in the US is interesting. I don't think people are ready for a like super hairy jurisdictions yet, but they will be. You know, I'll give you another anecdote. I was with the CEO of a company who has a big copper project in Papua New Guinea and you know, they had something like 14 inbounds from major kind of, you know, sovereign semi sovereign organizations. And that's in Papua New Guinea, which is geographically blessed. But but also, you know, it's not Nevada. So that was interesting that maybe for certain things like copper where you really need to go where the deposits are, some of these jurisdictions will also get a bit. Any advice, last minute advice, before we cut off here. Any advice for companies on how to take advantage of all this? Yeah. My thoughts are you got to explore the gold names right now. Junior gold names. Find a few you like. Yeah. Great. All right. I think we're done till next time, Anthony. Thanks a lot,