 Welcome to The Bull and Bear Show. I'm your host Rich from Rich TV Live with our very special guest. Second time on the show, John Fennec. How you doing today, John? Very good, Rich. Thanks for having me back. Hey, always a pleasure. Very excited to have you back on the show. And for those of you that don't know John, he is a commodities expert and he has a wide range of knowledge and experience, formerly with Merrill Lynch for 26 years, I believe, as an equity analyst. And now Merrill Lynch is actually BlackRock, the largest institution in the world, holding some of the largest assets on the planet. And very excited to have you on the show today, John. And my first question is about Bricks, August 22nd to 24th. What do you got for us? Well, you know, for the, in the interest of time, I would direct people to two things. One is Andy Schechtman did a great interview with Jesse Day of commodity culture. That can be referenced on YouTube. And he went deep into what the Bricks currency might mean, a potential, you know, competitor to the U.S. dollar, maybe, and to the dollar, into commodities like silver and gold. And, you know, the other one is one I just did yesterday with Don Duret, who I have a lot of respect for. I'm interviewing him monthly now on my YouTube channel. And Don got pretty deep as well into the potential for an announcement of an alternative currency. So I'll just touch on it briefly though, Rich. Bricks stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, of course. And this coalition was formed back in 2009, 2010. Basically, we have seen a massive amount of interest in joining this group just in the last, you know, number of months. And that total now is 22 different countries have formally asked to be included in the Bricks. And so that's kind of what I see for next week more than an announcement of a currency. I mean, look, if we saw any hint to alternative currency backed by gold announced the next week, it would catch the market by surprise. The dollar would drop, gold would rally, and gold and silver miners would catch a bid, I think. And that would be wonderful. I just don't know if we're gonna see that just yet. But if we see, you know, 22 different countries saying, yes, I want to join, and then 20 other countries have said we informally want to join as well, that's 42 different countries. And as I talked to CEOs, I talked to 21 different CEOs in the last two weeks in the mining space, I don't think maybe more than three or four of them would have said that that was even on the table, right? I think we have countries that would surprise you in that 42 that are looking at this as a real alternative to the US dollar. So how do you think that's gonna affect the US dollar? Do you think there's a lot of people predicting that the US dollar is going to tank because of Bricks? Because all these countries are now going to be doing transactions in a currency other than the US dollar is gonna put a lot of pressure on the US dollar and could even potentially collapse the US dollar. One of the big people that's talking about this is Donald Trump. Donald Trump is essentially saying that if he was still president, this would never have happened. Do you think that Bricks and this coalition that is growing with countries, just like you said, potentially 40 plus countries, do you think that this could potentially collapse the powerful US dollar? It will take a long time. I mean, I've heard of like every possible theory about why gold should be headed higher, why silver should be headed higher. And something like silver heading higher is something that we hear all the time from very smart people and it never happens. So like you have to look at the way we look at the world rich and the way we invest is looking at every single thing, like almost like the Fed does, like if they're data dependent there, then we're gonna be data dependent too. Next week is the beginning of something that could create de-dollarization and or a drop in the dollar over time. But it's not going to be this knee-jerk reaction where the dollar just drops 3% a day or something insane. I just don't see that. I think, you know, the beginnings of things next week will be interesting because smart money is already putting a bit on gold, right? If you look at gold, it is traded over a $1,900 an ounce until this past week for over 140 consecutive days. I don't know the exact number, but it's insane. It's over four months, right? We've never seen that in history. I think this would create more of a base on gold and silver as precious metals, right? Like as something that you can buy that's tangible, that can create a hedge in a portfolio and that is gonna be awesome because we need that. We need some type of love here to follow up what we saw in the financial crisis of March, right? I do call it a crisis because when you see five entities go out within a month of each other, I mean, show me another period in history where that happened. It hasn't happened ever. We're at a point rich right now where we're seeing a lot of firsts, right? We've never had an economy this strong for this long, meaning the stock market bottomed in 2009 as represented by the S&P 500. And now as we sit here 14 plus years later, it's still rocking and rolling. It's like unbelievable to me because we've never seen a 14 year run. And so where does a correction look like? I don't know. A standard correction looks like 20% obviously, right? So that's very doable I think in the next 12 months we could see a 20% correction in the S&P. We're already seeing it back off. If you look at what happened in the last say month, we saw August 1st with Fitch downgrading the US, right? That's big news in any other market that isn't this one where it's just pure euphoria. August 8th, we saw Moody's downgrade 10 US banks. That's a week apart. Two major ratings agencies saying, we're seeing cracks in the system. Then it took a few days, but it actually is starting to feed on itself a little bit now this kind of doubt of will markets make new all-time highs? I've definitely been in the camp that they won't. I've been writing about that in my newsletter, the Fenton Commodities Report since probably April or May that we weren't, we were following the tape and we were saying, we're not gonna short here this summer much, but we're definitely not gonna be going long because it's gonna be a short-lived phenomenon. And if you look at the SPY just as a proxy for the S&P, you can see it bounced right off of technical resistance. Yeah, it's a really crazy time. Like I'm a day trader and investor and I felt like July we hit a top and I was calling for the top at about 35,000 Dow and 35,000 Dow just felt like we were way overbought. Everything was hitting all-time highs. NVIDIA all-time highs, Tesla 52-week highs, Apple all-time highs, Google, Meta, Amazon all hitting 52-week highs. I mean, to me that was my signal to sell and I sold literally everything that was doing well. So I took advantage of that because I just felt like we were way overblown and I felt like there's a lot of divergence, right? Like why is the market doing so well? People aren't doing that well. So how is the market doing so well? So the divergence to me was extremely concerning and I haven't even taken any trades in August because I've been feeling like we're gonna go lower. I wanted to wait for the volatility. The volatility has come. We're seeing three weeks in a row with the market going down after a huge run up pretty much all year. And I feel like, like you said, like the market's kind of doing a pullback which is a natural pullback that it has to do. And I almost feel like this is a seasonal thing and I feel like this is gonna last until the end of September. We're probably gonna have a pullback because seasonality says typically September is pretty bad for the market too. So September is bad for the market. So we're probably gonna have another five, six weeks I think of downward pressure, volatility. And I personally think that's gonna set us up for another run up. Most likely I think in October, November, that's kind of what I see happening. I don't know, what do you think about that? You think that's a possibility? I think it's a possibility. I do think that this last run though on the S&P and NASDAQ just felt very fluffy to me. Like you had said, you know, narrow leadership is I guess a better way to put it as you did Tesla, Apple, like some of these names and go with the charts guys. I mean, AAPL after earnings, not looking good. Tesla looks worse, the chart to me, TSLA. Well, the crazy thing about Apple is they've been showing slowing earnings for I think three or four quarters in a row despite the fact that the stock hit all-time highs. To me, that is signaling divergence. Like that's just everything inside of me is like, yo, something's not right here. You know, like butterflies in the crater, you're like, this isn't right, this can't last. It's a bubble. Let's examine the psyche or psychology of portfolio managers that I used to represent, right? Like at places like BlackRock, if you're a large cap core fund, right? A mutual fund that manages billions of dollars, that portfolio manager, and I'm going from a couple of years ago, okay? So I don't know that this is current, but I'll just give your listeners kind of an idea. You're gonna get bonus at the end of the year based on your track record, not just on three, five, 10 years, but what you did over the last one year, right? So now if you're a large cap core manager, trying to keep up with the SPY, the S&P 500, you're having a rough year, right? Because you are forced to go into technology. You don't have a choice. You're not gonna keep up. You're not gonna be the awesome stock picker of the century and be able to keep up with an index that that's heavy in one sector. That sector is kicking butt this year, right? So it's like you are forced to buy Apple. You are forced to buy Google. You're forced to buy Meta, and that is super risky. That's the problem right now is that most of these mutual funds and ETFs make up large percentages of retirees and investors like you and me, you know, 401k plans, four or three B plans, 529 plans for your kids. Like this is serious. Like, I mean, I've never seen anything like this since 0809, but you know what happened in 0809. It didn't end well. We saw a lot of this same kind of buying the same kind of stuff. I call it herd mentality, right? We are the opposite of that. We're value managers. We're gonna look at something super boring like Pfizer bottoming out at, you know, 34, 35 here with a beautiful dividend and say, okay, these guys are a real company. The chart looks terrible. Yes, but you know, we can clip a nice coupon here and probably make money. You know, we've traded that stock successfully three or four times in the last few years. But you know, as mining and energy guys, that's not gonna be part of those portfolios, right? That would just be like a long short kind of thing that I do on the side. And I've had a lot of success in shorting the market over a long period of time. You know, in short periods of time, those trades can look really bad. Like we shorted, you know, some retail stocks, couple of them worked out really well like Dollar General and Target. And one hasn't worked out yet, which is called Ross. You know, they just came out with another good quarter. But look how many stores they're opening, right? Like I get really worried as you lead up to a recession where people just keep like, they have blinders on them. They're just opening more stores. Like they're the best thing ever. Have you been in a Ross? I mean, like this is a discount retailer. Like this isn't like a Nordstrom, okay? And I'm not putting a dissing Ross. To me it feels like a giant garage sale. Like I go in there and it's like, there's total disorganization. No one's on the floor to help you. It's like $119 stock. I mean, this thing hits $69 on the two-year chart. So like, to me there's downside risk, right? We look at every trade rich with risk and reward. You know, I'll give you an example real quick and then we'll jump to whatever you want, okay? Yeah, go ahead. So uranium is something I think we touched on last time, but you know, it's definitely a hotter sector of the market, right? It's right on the verge of a breakout as we speak, some of these equities. And some of them like CCJ have already broken out. But like this little stock I mentioned on another podcast, Forum Energy Metals was trading at four cents, right? And I'm like, this thing hit 47 cents on the three-year chart. You know, is it going to 47? No, was 47 unrealistic? Probably, absolutely, you know, in fact. But that's 90 something percent off from the three-year high. So what's your downside risk? Well, call the company. They just did a raise for X amount of millions of dollars. They just got a $3 million investment from somewhere else. So let's just call it they have 5 million Canadian and cash just from that. They clearly can do a drill program this summer. So if you're interested in drill stories, like most mining guys are, then this is worth the risk, right? It's like you buy it at four cents, you see what happens with the drill results in the assays over the next two, three months. What's your risk? Three cents, I mean, they're not going bankrupt. They're not. Rick Mazer has been in the business 40 years. Like, so you look for senior management that knows how to navigate difficult times and you say, look, I'm not going to see 47 probably, but I could see 10. You know, that's 250% of my money from four. 100%, I mean, we're always excited about looking for opportunities like that in the market that are going to go up 1x, 2x, 5x, 10x. It's just been a really interesting year because I'm in a lot of group chats and I'm more of a long-term investor and a swing trader, but I'm in a lot of group chats where guys are doing momentum trading. Man, it's crazy how these guys trade because they literally will see a stock that's up 50, 100% pre-market and then as soon as the market opens, they buy it. And it's like a lot of times they just go right back down and then guys are wondering, oh man, how do you guys do this? It's so difficult. I'm like, man, you guys don't even know what the company's financials are. You don't even know what their news is. You don't even know what their share structure is. They're buying stocks that are like going bankrupt. And that's really what's going on right now. There's day traders out there that really have no clue what they're doing. They're in these group chats and guys give an alert on an 8-cent penny stock that's up 100%, but what they don't know is the company's about to go bankrupt. This is the type of stuff that people are doing out there. So I feel like there's a huge need out there on education when it comes to investing. It's not just about buying momentum. I think you need to understand these companies. Like you said, you need to understand the management team. You need to understand their fundamentals. You need to understand their debt-to-equity ratios. You need to understand their assets. You understand the news. There's so much that goes into making investments, but the more you know about the company, the better chance you have of having success. And I think you know and I know that even when you know everything about the company and you think it's got everything that you need to check mark, sometimes it still doesn't succeed. Oh, of course, I'll give you an example of that. So I was asked to speak at a dinner in March at PDAC, which stands, well, it's the largest Toronto-based, you know, mining conference in the world. I think they had like 18 to 20,000 people this year. So I spoke at a dinner with a few other people and it was for SilverX. SilverX is a Peruvian silver producer. And at that time, the chart looked beautiful, right? The company was firing on all cylinders, growing production, have a real story in Peru that they're developing nicely, senior management, all, you know, checking a lot of good boxes. Then I look around the room and I see Brian London, I see Adrian Day, I see other guys that I respect in the mining business, right, that have been doing it longer than I have. So that always gives you more of a positive feel, right? But to your point, they then came out with news, I'd say like about a month ago, that basically said, hey, we're gonna have to take a breather on our operations in Peru for 30 to 45 days. Now the stock was trading around 22 US when that news came out. It closed at 14 and a half-ish yesterday. I mean, that's a big haircut for something where the PR just, the press release just said, we're pausing our ops for like a month to a month and a half. You have to understand, and most investors don't, that they have conservative attorneys that are helping write these PRs or helping edit these PRs, right? They didn't want to put that in writing. They have to put it in writing. They have to cover themselves, right? Like they're not saying we're putting the mind on care and maintenance and going away for a year. They're saying we have to deal with something or we're gonna deal with it and then we're full steam ahead. So that's what we look at as a value manager and say, okay, good management. They have real production growth over the next two to three years. I did an interview with Jose Garcia that's on my YouTube channel, Phenic Commodities Report. If anyone wants to check it out, I think it gives you a good, you know, deeper dive for a half hour on what the company's about. But like this is the kind of stuff that we're interested in buying. Something, again, double topped around 35, 36 US, trading at 14 now and the three year low is 12. So, you know, what's your risk? It tests 12? Sure, it can test 12, absolutely. But it's going back to 20. How about the Fed at the whole Wyoming symposium, August 24th to 26th? Yes. What can you tell us about that? I can tell you that my best year in mining was 2016. I was up 149% and I got out of 50% of my position before Jackson Hole because I didn't trust what Fisher and Janet Yellen were gonna do at that meeting. And I was right because they flip-flopped and the support that was there for things like old and silver and mining stocks the rug got pulled hard. And we had a terrible run, if you remember, from fall of 16, all of 17, all of 18, it was brutal. And so you have to respect Jackson Hole, you know, because this is when, think about it like this, Rich, I mean, every one of these Fed members has become sort of a rock star. If you looked at it like in the old days of Greenspan, could you name all the voting members? I couldn't, now you can because they're all over the press, man. Like look at CNBC, look at CNN, these guys are all over the place and they're gonna use this platform to talk their book and talk their strategy, right? So like you have to respect that, that someone may say something that's out of left field. There are guys and women that do move the markets with their statements. And so it is something to look at and that's why I've been warning my clients and followers for about two months now, hey, we could get a nice result out of the bricks and then get whipsawed by the Fed. Like you have to be careful this week coming up. It's a lot of things to digest. Yeah, and like I talked about earlier, I felt like we were way overbought. So it's almost like the perfect storm because all these things are happening all at the same time, last few weeks of summer, people going on vacation, couple of weeks here in Canada and couple of weeks kids are going back to school. So just one of those slower times for news flow, slower times for investing, a lot of people not even looking at the market. And I think what's happening with a lot of investors, especially like short-term day traders, they're almost getting desperate the way they're trading. That's the way I feel when I see people just buying garbage stocks that are making like pump and dump moves and guys are just jumping into them to make a quick five or 10%. To me, that's too risky. Like I'm not buying a stock for five to 10%. You know, like if I can't make at least, like if I can't make at least 20 to 30% on something, I'm not even gonna invest in it. Yeah, that's a good point. Like what's the use of getting into a stock for five to 10% and then when I talk to people in these groups and I'm like, why are you buying these stocks? They're garbage. Oh, I'm just scalping for five to 10%. Yeah, but what about when it drops 30%? Yeah, you have to watch earnings. I mean, because you can see even bigger cap stuff get really knocked down during the earnings season, which we're actually wrapping up right now. But I mean, I never buy stuff before earnings and cross my fingers because I've just done this for 30 years. I know that most times I'll be wrong, right? It's like a really good blackjack player. If you can win 51% of the time, you're stoked. But if you're gonna lose 60% of the time, then what's the point? I mean, that's how buying stuff and at least in mining is before earnings. Look at, don't take my word for it. Look at NEM, Newmont, bad earnings perception, right? Stock has not recovered since that earnings report and it's right now on the precipice of it's four year low, which is unbelievable to say, but like, I mean, a stock that leads a sector with a 4.5% yield is trading pennies off of below. And so if I didn't own so much GDX, I'd be buying something like that right now, but Newmont is the largest holding in GDX, so I don't wanna have overlap. But yeah, you're seeing some crazy values in the mining space right now. And again, this isn't live yet, we're editing it, but Don Doret and I had a discussion yesterday for about an hour, one of our topics was the disconnect between the price of gold and say gold miners like Newmont. It's maddening for investors, believe me, I get it. It's like you're seeing gold just trend here, but really at high prices historically, right? And so Newmonts should kill it given what their all-in-sustaining cost is out of the ground per ounce. But right now, no one cares. And so, look, the way we look at it, so in August for us have been months to just find stuff like this and start positions or add to positions because we wanna hold something for a year and a day plus and get that long-term capital gain. And this is a great time to look at stuff that's on sale. Now you mentioned earlier that the S&P 500 failed at resistance in August. What does that mean for the markets? So I always wrap things for either the broad market or for mining, because that's what we do. And so for the broad market, that's unhealthy, right? Because there's a lot of people talking about all-time highs, right? That did not happen. I don't think it's going to happen to your point. Like if we have a six-week sell-off, like you said, I don't think we wrap rally to all-time highs from there, I don't. And I know I'm sort of, I don't know if I'm in the minority there, it seems like it on certain days. I mean, there's a lot of people talking up new highs and I just don't see it. I think this break was the last, this last attempt was maybe the last one for this year. I don't know about next year. I don't look that far out, but it feels like September being the worst market, the worst month for the market going back to 1929, that's not going to work in your favor. October is not the best month either. And then you've got tax loss selling. So why are you going to break out to new highs, right? Like I don't really see it, but it could happen. I mean, what we need in mining though, Rich, is we need to see the S&P break through, these moving averages, right? We need to see it break through 4,400, 4,200, 4,000, big, you know, big round numbers. And if you look at the September 30 close of last year, that quarterly close was ugly. It was, I can't remember the exact number, I don't want to misspeak, but let's just say it was 36 to 3,800, right? Somewhere down there, it was ugly. And then it just rallied, you know, from there slowly and had a great year so far this year as the NASDAQ has, but that doesn't mean it continues. So you kind of have to look at what happened here and say, was the downgrade by Fitch merited? Yup, was the downgrade by Moody's merited? Yup, so like that's real, you know? Those are real concerns based on what is reality, not what, you know, has been happening, which in our view has been a market that's been led by a handful of names. It's a pretty crazy time right now, because here in Canada, we're going through, I would say a really big major housing crisis, like major, major housing crisis. Here in Vancouver, they put out a statement that in order to afford a two bedroom apartment in Vancouver and in Toronto, two of the larger markets in Canada, you have to make 83,000 a year to have a two bedroom apartment. So to me, when I look at that, I think how many people make 80,000 a year? Maybe 10% like maybe. So that's a problem. When families can't afford to pay for housing, what does that mean for our economy? Then on top of that, the price of food is going through the roof. The price of our gas is going through the roof. So housing, food and gas, three necessities are astronomical here for people. So the cost of living is becoming harder. Everything is becoming harder. So with that in mind, how can the markets keep going up? Who's buying these stocks, right? Like when I'm sitting here like who's doing the buying? It can't be the average person. If anything, they're selling so that they can keep their home, so that they can pay their credit card, which credit cards are also at all time highs for North Americans. So we've got a major problem right now and I think it's all connected. So what I don't understand is how could we possibly be going to all time highs in the market when the market's supposed to be a reflection of the economy and the economy's broken? The economy's broken. It's a long answer. People can afford to eat. Probably isn't worthy of its own podcast, but I mean, let's just point out a few facts that may surprise people, right? Auto stocks are doing, I mean auto, the stocks that I follow in the auto space like CarMax, like Carvana are actually in an uptrend, right? I think they're terrible names at this point in the cycle. I just, like Carvana could go bankrupt, I think. I mean, I'm going out on a limb, I realize, but I just don't get the business model, you know? I don't believe in it. I'm not the only one. But to rally from under five bucks to 35 plus on air, you know, I mean, yeah, their numbers are better. Are their numbers great? No, you know, like, I think, look at auto defaults right now, Rich. They're near or at all time highs in 2023. What is that telling you? That's telling you people aren't over their skis. They're, to your point, am I gonna put my family in a two bedroom house apartment or am I gonna buy a Range Rover for 130 grand? I mean, you're gonna do what you gotta do for your family, right? You're not gonna pay your car up. You're not gonna pay your credit card bill off either. We have $17 trillion in credit card debt right now. As we speak, the number is crazy. I have friends of mine that have way lower means that are just buying their like three and four and five year olds, iPads, iPhones. I'm like, where are you coming up with this money? It's just credit, right? It's like the keeping up with the Joneses, you know? I don't know. I grew up really poor and I didn't have a lot and I feel very grounded for like what I have today and what I've earned. And I don't ever try to get over my skis. And if I do, I have a talk with myself and just say, you know, humble up because it's like, this is like an awesome position people like you and I are in, you know? And it's like, I don't take it for granted. But there are a lot of people that just take things for granted right now. And I think that's part of your answer is that people are super greedy right now and greed is good in the movie Wall Street but it's not good at this point in the business cycle, you know? Yeah, and that's where I feel like it's, people are getting desperate with the way they're investing and they're just buying anything because they're trying to make a quick buck. But this is not the type of market where you can really make a quick buck. I think it's shown us that, you know? If you wanna make money in this market you gotta kind of find good quality companies that have momentum, that have good fundamentals or you're buying the Carvan as like you said that don't have good fundamentals and are just running on hype. And you know, at some point they're gonna crash. So it's very, very stressful for investing right now. I think you need to have a really sound plan and you need to stick to it. And I think if you're just trying to buy something because your buddy said so you're probably gonna have a really tough time in this market. I wanna talk to you a little bit about precious metals because that's your expertise. Let's talk about gold, let's talk about silver, copper, nickel. Where are you looking right now as an investor in gold? Like it's down like you said. So as an investor it's a great time to buy. Is this time to buy gold stocks? Is there any specific gold stocks you're looking at? You mentioned Neumann gold, anything else that you're looking at in gold? I think for someone getting interested in the space, you know, let's say a physical gold holder and you're trying to buy some equities for the first time or you have a portfolio and you kinda wanna figure out what names are producers, what names are developers, what names are explorers. These are all the kind of things that our service is helpful with, right? Is this company a large cap company? Is it a royalty company? Is it cash strapped and it's gonna have to raise money? Like all these things are important in portfolio construction. So to give you like a handful of names not knowing your audience's risk tolerance, it's like these things are somewhat hard for that reason. But I'll just say something like Neumann again, that's a great starting point, right? Like Neumann's a real company, it's trading pennies off of a low here, a multi-year low, why? I mean, it didn't have a great quarter but you have to kinda look out a year to two years from now and say, if I believe gold is gonna be 2,200 an ounce these guys should be printing money, you know? And at that point it'll be a $55 to $60 stock and it's trading at 38, right? Now, 38 to 55 for us is interesting but it's not really that interesting considering that I wanna make outsized returns. And so Neumann will be a portion of what we own but it's not gonna be a 5% position, right? Like we're gonna put a 5% position on something we have conviction in that we've known for months or years we feel very comfortable with and something like that comes to mind that isn't like, you know, I've known this company for about a year now to be frank, okay? But Cartier Resources just put out a press release about a week, week and a half ago and put in their second bullet point, hey, you know, our Chimo property has this many ounces on the ground which is around 2.5 million ounces of gold and this represents 25% of our land package and they've never put that out before. And so I picked up the phone and I said to Philippe, is this new information? I mean, I know you, you know now that it's public, you can talk about it and he said, yeah, this is the first time we've ever disclosed that this might only represent a quarter of our land. And you know, you can infer that that means, okay let's just multiply 2.5 million ounces of gold by four and we get 10 million ounces. Well, let's say it's five let's say they take this 2.5 million known resource and they make it 5 million. Do you think that, you know, mid cap and large cap gold stocks are gonna be knocking on their door? Absolutely. The stock's at five and a half cents US. I mean, it was a 37 cents high on the three-year chart. So again, why not buy it at five and a half? It's gonna go to 10, 12, right? Like you're gonna make a lot of money in percentage growth and that's why something like Newmont is less attracted to us, right? At 38, could it go to 76? Sure, it went to over 80 on the three-year chart but what's the likelihood of something that large moving that fast, right? Cartier could just basically, you know come out with some drill results and assays that get them to three, three and a half million ounces and now people are starting to knock down their door because Agnico owns 15 and a half percent of the company already, right? So we look for those kind of things, Rich where if you own 15 and a half percent why not take it to 19.9 or just buy the company out, right? Majors like Agnico want Cartier to do most of the work then they're gonna swoop in and make an offer, right? And the offer in a market like this is not gonna be wonderful. That's why we want these companies to remain independent until we get to 2000 plus gold and then they get a real offer, right? Figure it out, like if it goes from five and a half to let's say 10 in a gold market that's, you know, a little bit better well then Cartier is gonna get an offer maybe at 15, right? And at 15 cents, will they even take it? I don't know. I mean, Philippe's a really good leader. He has shareholder interest at heart. He's buying alongside of us in the open market. You can look at Cedar and see this, right? And so these are the kind of names that we like to look at a little bit deeper. How about bear gold? I've bought bear gold a few times. I like to look for that $17 in Canada price which is its 52 week low. It's currently sitting at 2115. It's 52 week high is 28. Do you think this is a reasonable entry point if you wanted to get into bear gold? Because I've been thinking about buying it and they have a decent dividend too. They're a large holder, excuse me, a large holding in GDX as well just like the Amon, just like Agnico, right? So I do like gold, G-O-L-D. I don't own it individually of the three. I only own Agnico individually right now because they're the most conservative I think of the three. So when I own large cap stuff I want to be like very, very conservative. You know, it's over. We would own Pan American, P-A-S, you know because they're a top three silver play. And by the way, they're also the number one holding as we speak as of July 31st in all three major silver equity ETFs, right? So those are the little things we look for. If that stock pops, or excuse me, if silver does well, where do you think money managers are gonna put money? They're gonna put it into silver equity ETFs and P-A-S represents more than 12% in each of those ETFs. It's an insane percentage right now. You see these anomalies from time to time, but that stock will crank when silver takes off. So we want companies that are larger that have the ability to move, you know? And yeah, to answer your question, I like Barrick. I mean, I don't have a problem with it. I don't, because we own so much GDX so rich we don't like usually go out and buy these names individually. You know, unless we just see something crazy like we're probably gonna buy some more silver corp here that's a holding in GDX and probably GDXJ that's SVM in the States because they broke 250 on the close yesterday. And their three year low is the $1.99, I think. If it gets to $2 or $1.99, it's gonna be an insane buy, I think. I mean, they're just one of the only profitable silver companies. You know, we spend so much time looking at silver companies, gold companies, gradient companies that don't make any money. You know, this is a company that's actually making people money and it's not getting any low. So, you know, we're trying to combine in our portfolio construction names like Newmont, Agnico, Silver Corp that are proven names and combine them with some of the names I gave your listeners earlier on the exploration side. So Pan American Silver Corp, great company, great pick, thank you for that. It's currently trading at $20.64 in Canada, 52 week low of $18.14, 52 week high of $26.54. So, pretty close to a 52 week low. For me, as a fundamental investor, I love buying, like you said, top three in its class, near a 52 week low, that screams buy to me all day long. But what do you think about silver right now? Is that an area where you're putting money into silver? Is silver undervalued right now? Is silver gonna make a move? What do you think about silver over the next 12 to 24 months? So my relationship with silver goes back 23 years. So I bought physical silver in year 2000 when I started to get smoked on tech stocks. I went to my advisor and I said, hey, help me here. And he's like, you gotta buy some gold and silver. And it got me interested in the metals. And by 2008, I was already buying positions in the miners, right? So when I look at silver, I've had a relationship, you know, going back 23 years with this metal. It is the most frustrating precious metal and it may be the most frustrating commodity of all time. You know, it's really hard to put a finger on. Yes, there's manipulation that's been proven. But we don't need to talk about that today. I mean, what we need to talk about is technical resistance and support, right? Like, I mean, if I have, you know, another guy talk about like $100 silver with nothing to back it up. Like there's guys like Don Doret that talk about this but have a path to getting there. I can live with that, right? But if you're just gonna talk about it to talk your book, like that's not intelligent. Like we haven't broken $30 guys in many, many, many months, right? It's quadruple resistance. So it's like when 30 breaks, you better be in position because it's gonna run to 35 real quick, you know? That's, you know, that's the awesome thing about silver is when it breaks out, it breaks out hard. It doesn't look back. We're just not there yet, you know? We're looking at does this metal go to 20 bucks and test 20 an ounce again and make a higher low off the low we saw last fall. Or does it go past 25 again and try to hit that 26 to 28 level, which I really hope we do. And if we do that this year, that would be extremely bullish, you know, for some of these smaller names, as well as the larger ones we just talked about in silver. How about copper? I know that copper is one of the key elements in electric vehicles. I've been very excited about copper over the last few years. I've interviewed a lot of companies in the copper space. The more research I've done in copper, the more I realized copper is being used in so many things. What do you think about copper right now in copper stocks? Is this a good time to get into copper? Yeah, absolutely. I talked to a lot of, not a lot of traders, but I talked to a handful of traders that I trust and they're still seeing, you know, supply demand imbalances in copper. It's not showing up in the price though. When you look at CPER, which is the, the ETF I use to track the price of copper, right? It's lower than where it was, Jan 1. Unbelievable. How is copper, you know, in every magazine, every newspaper, financially, and it's getting no love? I mean, the commodity is actually down here today. It's unbelievable. So what is that doing to small-cap copper stocks? They're getting killed. I mean, it's not even, it's not even rational. Like some of these names like World Copper, I mean, it's trading at 9 cents US. It just hit 9.2 cents yesterday, Friday, and it rallied a little bit. But I mean, it had held like 10, 11 for months and it just broke on the three-year chart, literally yesterday. So yeah, we bought a little more of that because, you know, they have two projects, one's in Chile, one's in Arizona. Both are copper prolific parts of the world, right? Like they'll probably end up selling one and keeping the other and then unlocking value for shareholders. You know, I just, I feel like you have to take a flyer on some names like that, that are real companies. If you look at their two projects, they're already, they already both have PEAs, right? I mean, you know this. I mean, there's a lot of companies out there that don't even have a 43-101 yet. And it's like these, this company already has two. They spent a lot of money, you know, through the process to get, you know, that done. And I just think that when copper gets above four, above 450, really, and starts rocking and rolling towards that all-time high that we saw, you know, established not too long ago, you're gonna wish you owned this stuff because, you know, looking out two to three years, copper's gonna be needed way more than it is today. And guess what? There's not any more production coming online, really. I mean, Barron's did a really good piece on this in January and just said, it's gonna be five to seven years before we see production really pick up. So what happens for the next five to seven years? We just stopped doing things. I mean, it's going to be a crunch. And I realized that copper juniors aren't for everyone of your listeners. So I would also take a look at COPX. COPX is an ETF that is comprised, sort of like a GDX for gold stocks. It's larger cap copper stocks like Freeport and like. How about Nickel? I know that Nickel's another element that's being used for electric vehicles. Electric vehicles is one of the fastest growing industries in the world. We've seen Tesla be a huge success. Elon Musk become the richest man in the world because of his vision in having more electric vehicles on the road because it's better for the environment, cheaper as far as not having to worry about paying gas. So Nickel's another one of those elements in electric vehicles and used in many other things as well. What's your outlook on Nickel? I really like Nickel. It is more of an industrial metal, of course. And so if you get like a real Chinese slowdown copper and Nickel, just to point out for your listeners, will not do as well as gold and silver will do, right? Because gold and silver are precious metals. They are more safe haven than say copper or Nickel. But Nickel is, man, I'll say it's almost as maddening as silver is this year where, I mean, some of these juniors are getting deals. Like to your point, talent got a deal with Tesla months ago, right? We just bought talent for the first time two days ago. They got totally bombed out. I mean, it's again, approaching a three-year low and the stock was, I think, around 80, 85 US. It's trading, we got filled at 17.3 the other day. I mean, I mentioned Stillwater on your show last time. The update people that did get a 9.9% investment from Glencore, top three commodity name in the world and ran from 12.5 US on that news to 17.3 and then pulled back to 12.5 again Friday. I mean, I just bought it again at 12.5. It was like, what just happened? Like this news came out in late June and now literally less than two months later it's round-tripped its game. Does that mean that anything negative has happened? Absolutely not. They got almost $5 million Canadian from a major player that's gonna have their back. That's a positive, right? So when you see anomalies like that, you just have to buy. Did you get a chance to look at Rosoro Mining? I don't know. I mentioned it to you on our last podcast. It was at 30 cents. It hit a high of 52 cents in the last month. It did pull back this week to 28 and now bounce back. I believe they're at 44 again. So it's up about 50% since I brought it to you. They have a $1 billion settlement that they're waiting on with the government of Venezuela. That should be, I think there should be around October 23rd that they're going to make that decision on that settlement. If they do get that settlement, a $1 billion settlement, $1 billion plus, I think it has to be grossly undervalued at 44 cents. Did you look at Rosoro Mining at all? Did you do any due diligence? And if so, what's your opinion on it? I haven't, my apologies. Yeah, I've been super slammed here, but I'll look at it before our next interview and gave your listeners my thoughts on it. I think, I mean, yeah, this is a billion dollars for a small company. That's, you know, it's insane if they get any ending close to that, right? Look at what happened. That's what I'm thinking. So what happened? Well, just so you know, so the symbol in Canada is RML. The symbol in America is RMLFF Rosoro Mining. And they've gone from five cents to 50 cents this year in a market for metals that just hasn't done well. They've been at 10 outs. They've pulled back a little bit. They're at 44 cents, but considering they started at five cents just a few months ago, doing quite well. So there's obviously a lot of people interested in this. Obviously that's a massive catalyst. Those are the types of things I look for as an investor. You don't see these types of scenarios very often, but obviously someone's buying the stock because it traded 2 million shares on Friday. Stock at 44 cents traded 2 million shares. That's a lot of equity for a small cap, especially in this market right now. Another thing I wanted to ask you is small caps have been really kind of dead for the last few years, being small cap investors, you and I, it's gotta be a little bit frustrating right now. I know it's frustrating for me to see that there just isn't the volume, there isn't the deals, there isn't the acquisitions, there isn't big news. It's kind of really been a lull in small caps for about two years now. Do you see that changing anytime soon? Do you see small caps getting a bid? Because at some point, all these large caps have done well. Maybe the money will start to shift into small caps because smart money will realize that a lot of these large caps are overbought. Do you think that that's a possibility that we might see small caps get back into favor? Yeah, I mean, again, with regards to the mining space, to your point, volumes have been pretty bad, depending on the name. There's a lot of shenanigans, I would say, in terms of naked shorting going on and a lot of the names that I track, I try to alert the CEOs to weird stuff that I'm seeing. I'll call my BD about it. They'll give me some run around story on why things are happening, dark pools this, market maker that. The bottom line is, yes, it's depressing because as investors, we're watching this price action. I think it's worth pointing out though, you have to look at the volume that's done. When you see a stock tank, you have to look at the volume that's done at that level. I mean, I was just following vortex metals and it's a copper gold play in Mexico and in Chile. I'm out there at 0701 with about 20,000 shares this week. So a small $1,400 order because I was one 100th of a penny ahead of a block of 200,000 shares at seven. So I'm just sitting out there waiting to get filled and they print 200 shares at 0.0469. Okay, how did that happen? I mean, there's literally 220,000 shares waiting at seven for a fill, right? I've talked to my broker door for 42 minutes about this. No good answer. Not gonna name who that is, but let's just say it's a top five name in the US. They couldn't tell me why it happened. I talked to the CEO, they were shocked that this happened. We'll go look at the chart. It's a VMSSF in the States. It broke, the chart broke. And now if you don't do your homework, you think, well, hey, I can get this stock at five, right? No, that traded for $9 down there, you know? It's trading at seven cents north for months, you know? So it's like weird stuff like this in the small cap market can be an opportunity. You just have to kind of know what's happening and take a second look before you make assumptions. So to answer your question, look, everyone's waiting for the junior market to take back off. I think you're gonna need to see something like the catalyst, like something developed in Russia, something developed in BRICS, something happened with China, Taiwan, something happened with just an outside event that is beyond the S&P just crashing or the NASDAQ crashing. I think you're gonna see something like an outside event with something like BRICS potentially could be really, really positive over time for the dollar dropping and gold and silver catching a bit and therefore miners falling. So, John, we got six minutes, I know you have to go. So my question to you is, can you give us just a little bit about John Fennett Consulting, which you started in 2019? Tell us a little bit about how you help small and mid cap metals and mining companies gain exposure. Sure. So, mostly I started in 2019 with no clients. I mean, it was a real risk for me. I had spoken at Beaver Creek where actually if any of you guys are gonna be there, Beaver Creek Colorado puts on, I think the best junior mining conference in the US and that's happening September 12th through the 15th. I'm gonna be the first speaker there September 12th at 8 a.m. And feel free to come up to me and ask me any questions you'd like. But I basically had three CEOs come up to me after that presentation and say, hey, you have a lot of passion for the space. You're articulate, we need more people like you in this sector. And I literally started my business the following Monday. And I had no clients. I had no retail clients. I had no idea what I was doing. Honestly, I was just trying to figure it out on the fly because I have a good mind for business and I've been an executive for 25 years prior to that. So I basically took my passion for mining and made a business about it. And I love it. Every day I wake up and I feel fortunate to be doing what I'm doing. But then the pandemic hit, right? And if you look at March of 2020's action rich, it was disgusting. GDX and GDXJ were both getting pummeled, right? There was a company called Direction which offered JNugget and Nugget. If you remember those ETFs providing three exposure, right? Three X exposure to those ETFs. There was major slippage. I called the company five times to try to talk about it before I went to print with this, but I co-wrote an article on Kiko about this and it's still out there. I got a call the following day from two large podcast hosts like yourself and said, that took a lot of guts when you come on our show. And I said, sure. I had no idea what I was doing with podcast or radio or any of that. So fast forward three and a half years and this is a major part of how I attract new U.S. and Canadian and European retail investors. And I'm really excited to be in the position I'm in. Our track record now, if you look at our performance tab on fennecconsulting.com, our track record for seven and a half years is really done well over all time periods. I think we're about 7% ahead of GDXJ year to date. So we're continuing to try to produce alpha in a difficult sector. It's extremely hard to do, I'll tell you that. I mean, it's a full-time job for me. But, you know, we have a newsletter rich, which we put out to talk about all commodities. So we do gold, silver, nickel, copper, palladium, oil, gas, et cetera, which I think makes this unique because a lot of our competitors are just gold and silver all day long. And we also have what we call real-time updates where we're sending something out on Wednesday, right after five minutes after the Fed minutes, I put out a piece that said, this is interesting because the Fed minutes show that there may be another rate hike on the horizon, which is clearly not factored into the CME's website right now or sentiment and, you know, watch out if you're along the broad market kind of thing. And the broad market did not like that news, right? Because the broad market is expecting a pause and further cuts down the road in 2024. So to hear about a possible another hike was definitely not good news, right? And so that's where the real-time aspect of what we do is helpful. We're gonna do that this coming week with GDP. We're gonna do it the following week with non-farm payrolls. We're gonna do it with major macro news that can affect both the broad market and mining and energy stocks. Oh, fantastic. Thank you so much for all of your time today. Congratulations on all of your success. Anyone that's interested in getting in contact with John Fennett Consulting, I'll have a link in the description of the video. So feel free to get in contact with John directly. And John, thank you for joining us today. My pleasure, Rich. Thanks a lot for having me. Always a pleasure. Love to have you back again soon. Hopefully in the next month or so we get you back on the show. John from John Fennett Consulting and have a great day. Enjoy the rest of your weekend and we'll talk to you soon. And keep winning and beating those markets. Thanks, Rich. You too. Okay, John, we'll talk to you later. Have a nice day. Thanks. All right, guys, that's John from John Fennett Consulting and John began his career in 1992 as an equity analyst on Merrill Lynch Global Allocation Fund, Malix. From 1993 to 2019, John was a senior executive for Mutual Fund and ETF providers, spending most of his career at Merrill Lynch Funds, now known as BlackRock and JP Morgan Chase Funds. He was ranked number one in both gross and net sales once at Merrill Lynch and three times at JP Morgan Chase, out of 40 senior executives. He has contributed articles to Kitco since 2017 and was asked to be a regular contributor to Kitco at Kitco.com. In June of 2021, Kitco is the world's leading resource of information about metals and mining over the past 40 plus years and has over 450,000 followers. John has made multiple appearances on Kitco as a featured guest. He's been the keynote speaker at over 250 client seminars and webinars and has been a participant in investment roundtables at four global events. So really exciting to have John join us. Hopefully we'll get him on again soon. He was a member of the Precious Metals PM team at Sprott in 2017 and has developed a compelling track record based on a proprietary methodology which combines technical analysis and public information gathered from direct interaction with senior management of commodities companies. He believes that building a diversified portfolio of 25 to 50 exceptional resource stocks is critical to success. The commodity sector is the most volatile of all the sectors. So John's go anywhere approach allows him greater flexibility than the average person that is in this industry or fund manager who is many times constrained by prospectus, language such as holding 5% or less in any one stock, focusing on tax efficiency at the potential expense of total return being 80% invested at all times, et cetera. I think it's important right now in these markets to be extremely versatile. I think you'd need to really understand what's going on in the markets. In 2019, John started Fennec Consulting Group LLC based on demand from commodity companies, especially those in the metals and mining sector. Fennec Consulting Group LLC helps small and mid cap companies to raise awareness about their brand. The enterprise also works with H&W financial advisors and clients educating them about the opportunities and risks in the financial markets and specifically in the commodities market. Now, if anyone wants to learn more about John, we're gonna have a link to his website right in the description of this video and feel free to like the video if you like the video, comment on the video, subscribe and share the video everywhere for future updates. So one of the things that we really wanna do here at Rich TV Live is we really wanna educate investors. I just feel like there's investors out there that are throwing money at things and they don't even know what they're buying. So one of the things that we really wanna do here is we wanna create compelling shows, have compelling guests and have lots of different types of guests on the show so we can get different opinions. But we also wanna bring on experts, CEOs, people in the investing industry so that we can get a better feel for what's going on in the markets. And when we get the CEOs on the show, the whole idea is to be able to get a better feel for those companies, get a feel for the CEO, get a feel for the industry and get a good feel of what's really gonna go on with those companies in the future. Hopefully this content is helping you, hopefully you're getting educated and hopefully you're learning more. I must remind you that Rich TV Live is strictly for information and education purposes. Please do your due diligence and do your research before you invest in anything that we've talked about on our show today. Remember that past performance is not always an indication of future results. I do not hold the markets up. I can't guarantee anything in the markets either. The markets are gonna go where they wanna go. What we're doing is we're breaking them down so that we can make the most of every single situation in the markets. Hopefully you're learning, hopefully you're getting educated. I'm your host with the most, your boy Rich and Rich TV. If you're not winning, you're probably not watching. You bring in the winners, bring your CEO interviews, like I said, compelling guests, breaking news, trending topics and we bring it to you first. Thank you for watching everybody. It's your boy Rich from Rich TV Live saying have a nice day. We'll see you soon.