 Today I have the pleasure of speaking with mining strategist and the founder of Halgarten and company Christopher Ecclestone. How are you Christopher? Very well thanks. I'm so happy that you could squeeze us in today because the market seemed to be raging. I mean absolutely raging. What is happening out there? We know we've seen a lift in gold and you were talking about zinc earlier. It's a very strange sort of moment because the oil price has risen and it's fallen and they're very conflicting signals there. But in the absence of anything else gold has sort of made a pretty significant move today of over $20. But interestingly silver has broken out and is heading towards $17 an ounce which is some territory it hasn't been at for a very long time. And then the base metals are lifting up and this is strange because generally when gold and silver is strong the base metals go down and vice versa. So they're all moving up at the same time. This may very well be the end of the many years of gloom that we've had in the mining sector. Too early though to call a definitive turn because that's been done before and people have ended up with egg on the face but quite a lot of positive signals at the moment. So maybe we're finally breaking out of the swoon. Well speaking of breaking out hopefully and possibly you're going to be coming to Toronto for the Clean Tech and Technology Metal Summit May 10th and May 11th. And we know that you're following a number of technology metals. Can you give us a little bit of an update on what's happening in the technology metals. All the focus is now on lithium. It's almost an obsession with lithium at the moment. Jaihopal spin off a spillover into the other metals as people make money on one they'll start so and what's the next one or get the feeling that they missed the boat on lithium. And certainly with some of the moves in the lithium space there is the temptation to think that there might be a pullback there. But people make money on one thing then they look around where to redeploy that money into the next thing. And if everything's rising I mean that can you know then have like a firestorm effect that it lifts a whole lot of boats at once. So it could be interesting to see whether we might actually see some movement in some of these very bad spaces like like rare earths which runs pretty much 50% on sediment and 50% on reality and we may see that happen. And then there's uranium as well which you are one not a technology metal. It's definitely an energy metal and is definitely in the dumpster and could well do with a lift. I think uranium being in the dumpster is definitely an overstatement in that it's been in the dumpster for so long. I was happy to see that you wrote another update on uranium this morning because I myself am a nuclear energy enthusiast. Can you tell us what is happening in the uranium market right now and what we need to see to see this turn around? Well the big problem is that you know Fukushima hit everyone for a six back when it happened but the Japanese had contracts for buying product. They kept buying it over all these years. So now that they've reopened a lot of people in the market imagine oh the Japanese are going to run out and buy product. No the Japanese are being stockpiling product because they were making good on their contracts to purchase. So we have this situation that there is no real Japanese you know kick to the market. Indeed Japanese are running down stockpiles that they've built up over a very long time when they weren't actually consuming the product. So what we really need is we need some of these plants. If you keep hearing about in China the 200 plants you know some of them to actually get finished and start soaking up what's tightening up the product. There's not a lot of product out there but the price is low. It wouldn't take much demand in the uranium space and people starting to go out and write forward contracts to get the contract price to rise because ultimately the spot price doesn't really matter. It's the contract price it does. I'd like to thank you Christopher reminding me I have a number of phone calls out to uranium companies. We'd like to see them at the Clean Tech and Technology Metal Summit and speaking of a kickoff you did a forecast column recently where you were saying that you anticipate zinc more than doubling and copper and lead up 50%. I think that was over several years obviously. Can you talk to us a little bit about that? Yeah that's a projection through to the end of 2019. So I have a long period for which that can potentially come to fruition. It's essentially an industrial reactivation story combined with severe under investment. We've had the under investment in zinc for a long long time but there hasn't been much demand so it didn't really matter and it didn't really show up. If we get even a modicum of recovery and demand that could be as a pretty important kick out for getting the zinc price up and what we've had is a severe attrition with mines closing down in recent times. Same thing but to a lesser degree in copper. Copper projects are very expensive to get going as are nickel projects and so there hasn't been much investment in really the last two or three years. So there will be a supply gap maybe not a crucial one in those metals but particularly in nickel you know there is a lot of supply out there. But copper, lead, zinc, I'm very bullish on where they could be going. Christopher you actually told me about neometals. You've been doing some great analysis in the last couple of years where you've been projecting and doing buy recommendations and a bang on. You brought neometals to me at two cents and I just like to congratulate you on this one. I saw a terrific report recently on Chesapeake Gold which is going through the roof. Can you talk to us a little bit about the highlights of some of your most recent reports? Yeah I've done it unfortunately the market has been with me on this because you can produce a report and nothing happens. But in the case of Chesapeake we've seen a 50% rise since our recent note went out. Hardy Gold is storming, it was storming before the note went out and it's kept storming upwards and neometals of course is up a thousand percent since I wrote that note at two cents. So a thousand percent, two thousand percent indeed. What's another thousand percent between braids? Well speaking of that you will be introducing neometals CEO or managing director Chris Reed who'll be presenting at lunch and of course Darren Townsend from Peak Resources will be there as well as well as Adrian Griffin from Lithium Australia. We're looking forward to see you and I'd like to thank you for joining us today Christopher thank you. Thank you.