Gold AND Copper: Why this is the Future of Commodities (Uncut) 02-20-2025

Gold AND Copper: Why this is the Future of Commodities

Ivan, it’s great to have you back, man. It’s great to be back. Okay, so lots I want to talk to you about, you know, I just wrapped up my annual conference and everybody wants to know about investor sentiment, right? How are investors feeling in today’s climate, gold’s ripping, the equities aren’t so much, some investors are confused, and you and I were chatting about this and you said it was bringing you back to like dot-com era when you entered the sector, you know, you founded Keegan Resources in 2005, so, you know, massive success, right? This became a mine, right? And then your next company, but going back to that era when you entered the sector, right? And then founded the company in 2005 in Ghana, like talking about the parallels that you’re seeing then and now.

Sure. So coming in as a 22 year old, as a stockbroker, trying to buy into the dot-com market where there was $100, $200 IPOs, it was super intimidating. And I read a book by Warren Buffett that said to be a contrarian and quickly started to take a like into the mining stocks, investing into those.

A lot of brokers around Vancouver said, Ivan was crazy, mining will never be what it was ever before. And this was like late 90s? This is 2000. This is 2000.

They were referring back to the 90s when there was a massive boom and a lot of money was made on discoveries and it took a few years, but finally I said, you know, they’re right. It’s way better than it ever was before. The most common thing that I saw in that first quarter of 2000 was the forced effort on dot-coms, the tech thing.

There was that big frenzy about a new tech thing that was coming out. It’s very reminiscent to AI and crypto, which I’ve done extremely well. You know, in February I bought my mama, Burnt Sands, the tech company, and in one week it went from $5 to $15 a share.

And then we bought Plaster Dome in a week or two after, went from $12 to $18 on gold spikes or $300 an ounce. And saying that with gold at 27 yards a day is quite obscure because of where we came from, where we are. The point of all that was I’m seeing a lot of parallels to a healthy run in the tech market.

I don’t know when the tech market breathes, but it’s been on a pretty good hockey stick. We all know Trump has come in recently. I think the future is crypto and AI, and I really believe in technology, but the mining sector has been lagging for about 13, 14 years and it’s had some windows, but the last three years have probably been the worst bear market in mining equities.

We started Keegan. It was on the rise of the mining market. We had an incredible discovery in Ghana.

We went from 10 cents to $9 per share from a million dollar market cap to $900 million market cap. Very proud of being able to achieve that off of 5 million ounce discovery in West Africa. Africa’s tough at the time.

The Lendins were there and Newmont was there, but it was really, really hard sledding until we had a real big run in the gold price. But we’re at a point where Keegan was at 575 per share in November of 2008 and it collapsed to 49 cents in January of 2009. And so in the correction there.

And none of my companies have been to 575 since. Keegan got sold for 360. If you own shares in it today of Agnico Eagle, it’s $11 a share, but that’s 10 years later, which is a great return.

The Orin, which we built to go find things, was predicated off of looking for bigger assets. The one lesson I learned is the bigger you swing, the longer it takes. And so back to my experience, it’s a big one and it’s tough and it’s easy in a bull market.

It’s tough in a bear market. The biggest mess that I’ve seen in equities, junior equities, mining equities, is people are taking the share price or lack of performance and they’re deciding fundamentals off of that. But when you’re looking for a big system like we are in some Sombrero and Copernico, we’re seeing indications that we’re really onto it, but no one seems to care.

And so that’s why myself and Keenan have been buying quite a bit of shares lately is because my head of X and my head of my technical committee, he was the head of exploration for BHP for five years until he joined us. And he bought 225,000 shares in the last few weeks. I bought about just over half a million.

My buying is not as impressive as his buying, because I always buy with shareholders when I can, because I believe in the model and what we’re going to do going next. In the case of Keenan Jennings, this guy has seen everything around the world multiple times. He worked with the largest miner running their exploration and seeing him buy, which is really rare by the way, to see geologists buy stock.

That’s the one that everyone should pay attention to because the science is complex. It’s understood at the level where he is at, then myself, and then it’ll filter down. But that’s a very bullish signal.

And a few weeks after we both bought, a forward looking statement here, we started to drill one of our most important holes to date, hole 14, which we’re still drilling. And it was about flipping our perception on geometry. We thought things were vertical, but it looks like they’re low angle, which is a lot better.

This is your current project in Peru. And so, Keegan Resources, you founded in 2005, that became a mine through Osanco. Osanco took that into production.

It became Galliano Gold. It’s producing quarter million ounces today. Producing quarter million ounces today in Ghana.

And then Caden was the next venture founded in 2010, 2011, which he sold to Agnico Eagle in 2014 for like 209 million, I believe. Yeah, 205. And it was 360 per share.

And if you never sold your Caden shares today, they’re $11 a share worth of Agnico. That’s how well Agnico Eagle has done after they bought us. Not because of it, but they’re a great company.

You know, what’s interesting about that is overlaying that career over the ups and downs of the mining sector during that same time. You referenced, you know, getting in the business in 2000. Everyone tells you you’re crazy.

Mining’s not coming back. We’ll get used to. We hear that daily today, you know.

And I’m going to be honest. Sometimes I find myself wondering, reflecting on the market from like 2009, 2010, 2011. Those years were so frothy and it’s been so long.

You think, you know, maybe that, will we see that market again, right? So you know, Keegan 2005, Caden 2010. So lots of cycles inside of that. I love the quote, the bigger you swing, the longer it takes.

That’s just like generally good advice. Well, take filo mining. That’s one of the biggest wins lately.

It’s copper win down in Chile and Argentina and the border. 22 years roughly to drill that hole. 22 years.

22 years. I was speaking to some of the big financiers of it. So explain that a little bit for somebody who’s not clear.

Why 22 years? So late 90s, they got onto that project. They drilled a lot of mineralization. They were finding it, but they didn’t drill street impressive mineralization, right? To really excel the share prices backed by the late Lucas Lundin, who is legend of industry.

And I was talking to them or the group, the group that financed them. And they’re saying in their early 2012, 14, that tough part of the market, he had to write a very big check to keep it going because the street didn’t even want to finance him. And he was one of the billionaires of our sector.

And and then, you know, he got the big hit later. And what happens in geology is you can get distracted by grade. You can distracted by chasing tonnage and mineralization.

But to kind of find that aha moment, could there be something bigger underneath here? Is it over there? That kind of shape of the ore body. Very few people will take those shots because there’ll be in a more development stage of a project. Yeah.

I worked with Dr. Roman Shkalenko. He found six major gold mines around the world with Placer Dome and beyond. And also on Sapuma, he was part of expanding that.

His specialty was understanding the direction of an ore body. And it actually was going this way, not that way. He was one of those people that just saw the geology from a different perspective.

And that’s what, in my view, what happened with Philo. We saw a week ago or this during your conference, Aurora Discovery by Bob Dickinson. I first bought shares in Amark in 2005, 10 cents a share.

And it took Bob 20 years to get this big discovery started up in BC. He stuck with it, persevered, amazing financier in industry, ran the Hunter Dickinson group. And so that’s just a reminder that big ones take time.

Now I’m not pitching 20 years for us at Sombrero before we hit the motherlode. We’ve taken a pretty serious approach. First off, very aggressive.

And we’re going to take big swings. We’re doing massive step outs everywhere. And so Sombrero, right? We’re talking about this is the Copernico Metals, a core project.

Copernico was one of the companies that you spun out of Oren Resources. That would have been like six years ago now? Three. Three years.

Three? Oh my goodness. Okay. Three years ago.

Yeah, yeah. So on that one, in 2015, we found an analog to Las Bombas. It was a very prolific mining belt down in Peru called the Ando-Huelas Yard.

And just for context, Las Bombas is one of the world’s biggest copper mines. They produce like 300 to 400,000 ounces per year. Yeah, it’s 11th largest producing copper mine in the world.

About 300,000 tons a year. 300,000 tons per year. It’s got about a hundred year mine life, which is incredible.

And that scale is what I’m after in my career. Things that could meet that kind of threat. This is like 200 kilometers west of you.

200 kilometers. We’re 200 kilometers west of Las Bombas. That’s correct.

Yes. Got it. The other way.

Yeah. And so there’s other mines besides Las Bombas, very substantial ones. Anticapay, Costancia, Tintaya.

It’s a very prolific belt that everybody thought went north-south. And the reason why they didn’t look to the western side of the belt, there’s two reasons. One was social challenges.

It took us nine years to solve that. We did. Now we’re in process of getting more and more permits.

The second one was a volcano erupted and covered a lot of the rocks. And there’s that perceived notion, if you can’t see it, it’s not there. We had some really brilliant geologists out of Newmont that came out and said, hey guys, look, there’s some erosional windows.

These rocks look the same over as the ones in the eastern side of the belt as the Bombas ones. And then we started dating the age, doing all the science, taking numerous samples. This project has really widespread, very rich copper and gold grades throughout the project.

You are exploring an 80% of a thin blanket of volcanic ash that cover the rocks. So you’re relying on something called geophysics. You’re relying on electrical currents and magnetic currents to try and give you a shape or something to drill beneath the surface.

That works well in some cases, but the problem we have, it’s a good one and a bad one. The good side of it is these targets are almost two kilometers long and kilometers wide. They’re massive.

The bad part is they’re big because you can miss big and you can also hit big. We’ve we’re on our 14th hole, took a very big wide approach around this horseshoe shape, seven kilometers, our first of three major targets on the system. And we’re looking for temperature and we’re looking for geometry and we’re trying to find the explanation of all the grade on surface and we’re trying to build a model.

And what hole 14 is doing for us, as I sit with you today, the one area where we had an intercept, we drilled 20 meters of half a percent. If we hit 50 to a hundred meters, it’s game on, let’s go. We drilled behind it on the, on the Eastern side, thinking it was a vertical shape as the model would imply.

And we didn’t, we saw a lot of limestone in hole 13. Then we went on the other side, we started drilling down and we hit a much wider intercept of the rock that could run. It looks similar to the rock that ran half a percent.

I don’t want to predict grades right now. I just want to say from a geological perspective, the model, it shows that it’s kind of like a sideways pizza wedge going towards the West. The big thing about this is that if it is mineralized, we’ll know before PDAC by the end of February, it goes forever, these things, they go for miles.

And that’s how you get to those big Peruvian giants pretty quickly. This is not the most prolific part of the area to explore. There’s eight drill holes in an area called Firaso that we don’t have permits to drill yet.

But we’ll get them later this year. And they all hit economic mineralization underneath 240 meters of half a percent copper, um, half a percent, half a percent copper on surface or within surface, open pit, not underground but open pit. In this environment, you have mine power above your head, there’s power lines right above the property.

There’s a highway to the property. There’s communities nearby, there’s water, moderate terrain. That’s like very, very, very high quality or that could be potentially mined from there.

So in that sense, we know we have the real obvious targets on the property. We’re not worried about making a discovery. We’re worried more about how big can we scale this? How many more large discoveries can we make? And we’re drilling with a bit of surprises, you know, good and bad.

I mean, the good part is what we’re doing today. The bad part is we haven’t put a hole out to the market in a few months and we’ve been more than patient. But I think you’re planning another aggressive program in 2025, like 30 holes, I believe, something like that.

So we’ve got, um, capital for 20 more holes. Yeah. Capital for 20.

Okay. And working capital into May of next year. Yes.

So we have about 11 million cash. That is incredibly important. On your copper panel, I think you asked me, what’s the most important thing when you look at these copper explorers at your conference and mine was capital and we did really well back last May.

Copper hit $5 a pound for two weeks last year, been down since. And in that timeframe, when it did, we raised $19.4 million. Tech bought 8.8 million or 9.9% of the company.

And then copper went to 393 a pound in December. And tech resources still owns that 9.9%. Yeah. I was with them last night at the hockey game.

It was great to catch up with them. So they’re interested. They’re very, very invested with us.

Very collaborative as needed. We brought in a world expert on SCARNs, that’s the type of geology we’re looking at. And at some points in a system, once you collect enough data, you just got to make sure your bias is not interfering with your perception of what you’re doing.

But the really good positive feedback was the scale of the system. Even though we drilled 14 holes, we’ve taken nothing away from it. The early indications were keep drilling, you’re going to get it.

And the common, I keep hearing from Keenan, from this expert, from the team is there’s no shortage of grade around. Just keep drilling until you get to the sweet spots to the grade. The good part is we’re starting to figure out geometry.

Going back to Keegan that we took to $9 per share, that was a series of drill holes into a rising market, gold market, right? Yeah. Caden to 360 per share. We drilled a hundred holes in a mediocre rising gold market.

Now where do I get my next hundred holes? Once my geometry works, our geometry works. It’s important to recognize that scale, the 100 holes, right? This is the scale that’s required, right? To actually discover something meaningful. Well, that’s the catalyst.

The catalyst that’s going to make us all money is drill holes. No matter how good I am at telling the story, no matter how exciting the story is, the drill bed is going to lead the charge. Well, it’s an important point because often investors will see a raise of maybe a million and a half, two and a half million dollars, and you got to think how much work can you get done with this capital before you come back to the market for more cash? How much value can you actually create, right? Which is 20 million is a different story.

19 million, you know, last year allows you a lot of runway to actually gather enough intelligence to come back to the market with something, right? Well, on that basis, if you said, Ivan, what are you known for? What’s one of your biggest strengths? Raising cash. But monetizing exploration success, mild or obvious, right? And I don’t mean that, I just mean like cash is one of the most undervalued resources in the resource business. Well, the reason why a lot of people will finance what we’re up to is because I will go lift the whole market with a good story because I work 18 hours a day.

I don’t quit. I try to build that global audience. The first thing in my strategy is find an asset big enough that everybody in the world should be paying attention to it as we drill it.

We’re drilling an analog to the 11th largest copper mine in the world when copper is going to go into deficit here in the next year or two. First check mark, right? So it’s big enough for everybody should be paying attention to it. Number two is how are you going to create catalysts in the share price? I do need participation from the copper price.

I certainly, we all do. The copper market, the copper price is much bigger than the best marketer of any of these companies. Yeah.

I think that’s going to come perfect timing with us as we start to reveal where this asset could go. Um, the project is extremely target rich, so we have a lot of longevity. This doesn’t die in a year, it doesn’t die in two years, it doesn’t die with this treasury and it will likely give us a chance to do a lot more with the treasury and keep going.

The strategy from a technical perspective is to keep adding more permits. You’ve seen us mentioned, we’re going to go to 200 drill pads, we’re going to expand our polygon. Again, there are very robust, obvious things to drill on this property that are quite substantial, but there’s now these other targets that we’re identifying through the cover that could really add to it.

So I’m sitting here with you today and I think we have a potential history making discovery in the works. We’re in the infancy of that. The science is complex.

The perspective is extremely positive, both internal and external people that have seen it. Um, I’ve been quiet for a few months. Everyone knows that.

I have not been on many interviews, I’ve been waiting for two reasons. Copper fell from 450 to 390 and I didn’t know where we were in the geology. I need to know that we’re going somewhere in a really good direction before I go out and push it.

We’re well funded. I had to be patient. Myself and Kenan started buying shares here right around Christmas time to let everyone know we still believe in this as much or more than we did before.

And I just pressed into that because I tell my subs all the time, whenever you’re getting pitched a story, your first question should be, okay, how many shares do you own? So I got to ask you, I haven’t, how many shares do you own? I think I’m now up to 7 million shares, roughly 7 million shares, roughly. Yeah. Okay.

The cost of that, including my Orin investments, about six plus million dollars for that. You’re fully baked into this. In the last few years I’ve put in about $400,000, which is more than my modest salary that I take for tax purposes, not because I’m here to make salaries, not that’s not how I make my money.

Yeah. Um, I’m a shareholder first. I’m a CEO second share price has to win.

Investors have to win. And that’s why I’m a big investor, if that makes sense to you. So everything that we do as a team is how can we create value in the share price for investors? Right.

It’s so important to have that tie in. Yeah. And, and having done it to $9 and having sold Caden, um, the only thing in my career, two things out of my 25 years of doing this, 22 have been successful in a market that’s been 80% negative and 20% of windows where you could make money.

That’s a big statement. And that’s my track record in my career. Um, the last two years were the toughest two years I’ve endured really by far this market.

Yeah. This market. And it’s good context for people to hear.

Yeah. And it took away from the fundamentals of what we’re up to, what we might find, um, our business strategy with Copernico is to grow through a creative acquisitions at the right time. If we get Sombrero online and a big discovery, there’s some low hanging fruit, some incredible juniors out there in terms of assets.

I was wondering. Yeah. So, so I would like to consolidate two or three more assets.

I would like to have the most compelling advanced copper exploration portfolio in the world. That’s our goal. The most compelling advanced copper exploration portfolio in the world.

That’s our goal. Yeah. And that is led by a big move in our share price.

So we have currency, we’re working towards that. We need a drill hole to ignite that. We think we have a good shot at it in the next month or two.

And then, um, and then we have our targets that we’d like to buy. Okay. Copper market moves slow until it moves quick and it takes a lot of money into a lot of companies.

There’s a lot of dilution and there’s a lot of beat up management teams that did not get $19 million last year. They’re not in the position or don’t have a Sombrero. Yes.

As hard as the market’s been, as hard as it’s been for shareholders, as tough as it’s been on any of the deals I’m involved in, we have some of the best assets in the world. I have an incredible technical team to work with. When I look out at your conference and look around the industry, I see money, I see shells, companies with capital, but I don’t see very many big swings.

And that’s something that people don’t realize is how hard it is to find quality. Being a prominent monetization of successes in this sector, I’ve had some great wins. A lot of people come to me and, Hey, Ivan, I’ve got, I’ve got a bunch of cash.

Let’s put a company together and go get something. Do you know any good assets? We’ve looked at over 200 in the last few years. It’s not many out there and not, I mean, nothing’s sitting on the desk.

It’s way harder to find these things a decade long to get here with Sombrero. That’s a statement and that’s a testament to how hard you have to work. So if you look at Copernico today, we raised all our money at 50 cents.

We’re down at 22, 25 cents per share. Insiders are buying stock. We have our first hole that we’re publicly excited about saying we may have got the geometry right.

If the system starts to go, we’ll have the best catalyst to perform in our share price and we have perfect timing with copper. That is where Copernico and Sombrero sits in a nutshell. When we split Orin into three companies in my last two years that were really difficult, I got a lot of critique for being spread too thin.

I got a lot of critique for the performance of those companies, which by the way, two of them traded above the combined value of Orin in the first six months of that split taking place. And then the markets collapsed in the resource sector. Why did I do it? You know, I was trying to time markets.

You can’t time them. They time you. But when I sold Caden and we started Orin, I brought about 15, 20% of our shareholders from Caden into Orin and it was trading at $4 per share.

I stopped because it was getting overvalued for what we had. We hadn’t made the discovery yet. So I was forced to go into other deals in the street and move great shareholders into other people’s deals and risk other management’s successes.

And we had some big wins there as well. And this is where I said to myself, I would like to have my own group of companies that I could channel or cascade the success from one to the other. But the most important fundamental in all of those is to have a big swing.

I want a huge swing at the end of the drill bit. I want a chance to find a top 10 or 20 mine in the world as this commodity market is going to take off. And I have succeeded with that.

It’s been a really big headache and I’ve had a lot of patients from a lot of incredible shareholders. I’ve lost some along the way. I hope they come back here as the market is obviously making a turn towards the better sector.

But when you look at my companies, you don’t want to ask me about the share price. You want to ask me about the asset. Is the asset good or not? The share price will sort itself out.

We certainly know how to create that value when the time is right on the project and in the right commodity market. But you want to ask me about the fundamentals of the project. As we discussed about Sombrero today, the fundamentals are turning overwhelmingly positive as I sit with you here today.

It will lag in our share price, but once it goes and the copper market starts to go, the chance to perform an incredible level for shareholders, it’s really high. A few dollars a share would not be worth my time. I’m aiming for something that could get us in the double digits based on the scope of what I see happening at Sombrero over time, the copper market and possibly growing a few different assets.

Again, I want to build one of the most compelling advanced copper exploration companies in the world. I’m fearless with my aggressive approach, but very disciplined. We are under budget and we’re on time with our spending that we set out since we raised that $19.4 million.

And that’s something I’m also very proud of because these things are expensive and money flies out the door on big systems and big programs. Our runway to capital is a plus a year and a few months from now, we have a lot of time and a lot of holes to drill before we have to say the F word again, which is financing. And so I’ve never been more excited with my project, with the timing of market, I’m really integrated on both sides of the border.

Big financiers around my deals are saying we’re at the edge of a bull market. And when I go to bed at night, I’m so excited that we have the assets that can make history and a few of these shots around the group. One works, all my other deals would come going because I’m going to buy them all, you know, and I would buy them all today.

I’ve been buying all of them, actually, I’m going to keep buying them at these cheap prices because right now I feel the market turning. Can you win on a discovery hole? Amark is the best example, TDG, those two companies, hockey stick tier in the last few days. Yep.

Massive volume, great discovery starting, it’s starting to get better for all of us. It’s good to see results like that get rewarded in the market because that’s not always the case, especially in a market like the last couple of years, right? Sometimes good news kind of gets punished. And when you see that sentiment begin to shift, that’s a real green shoot that means something.

Strategically, our timing was planned us, but it was serendipitous to the timing of the market. We got our permits in November, April, and we raised money in May. We didn’t plan the top two weeks of copper price at $5 a pound last year.

It planned us. Our timing was quite serendipitous. Now we’re turning a discovery as we go into phase two of that exciting copper outlook a lot closer towards the deficit.

We had to get through the US elections, there’s a lot of volatility and speculation of how that could go or not go, but one thing’s becoming more and more clear about our sector is that hard assets and metals are closer towards this bull market that we’ve all dreamed about for a long time. You can’t buy time and you can’t give it back to shareholders, but you can give them an incredible performance of a share price if you get the big one. I own shares in Aurelian and that went to $44 a share.

I sold out way too early. A few others, a few of the Lundin companies I own shares in. That reward eliminates the frustration and the weight, but you only get there if the swing is big enough and the team is experienced enough to give you that multi-dollar monetization and hopefully it’s a big enough prize to get to the double digits.

If I lose and I only get to $3 or $4, I’d call that a failure for myself based on the time and the scope of the system, based on where we are at the market. If I win, it’s going to be a double digit share price and I’m going to swing as hard as I can into a rising copper market with an incredible asset, incredible team, which I’m going to try to keep together regardless if we sell this company onward because I found some of the best people in the world. When I’m confident, charismatic, and with a lot of conviction, as you’re seeing here today, it’s my entire team that makes me that way.

I’m only as good as the geologists behind me, my admin team, my CFO, all of them. And I’m so thankful because they’ve been through it. They’ve seen really tough times.

They have not seen. You’re also obsessive, which I love about you, right? We don’t talk about anything except Copernico and we chat. We talk about the project that you’re on right now.

It’s always front and center for you 24-7 and that’s absolutely legitimate. Yeah, I spoke all morning to Tim Kingsley, our VPX, about the hole we’re drilling. I went for a run when I woke up because I got to be in shape to go out and market this company.

But then I spoke to our VPX all morning and then after this, I’m going to go talk to Keenan. He’s overseas and I’m going to just keep going. I’m obsessed about the science.

I’m obsessed about discovery because I know what it’ll mean if we find it. My thrill is the discovery. And I’ve been there a few times, monetize it well.

You love that business so much. I love it. I love it.

And the bigger the swing, the better. It’s just as much work to find something modest as it is to go after something huge. Just costs more money and I can raise money that’s based on reputation and things I’ve done before.

So I love going big. I love going big. Again, I’m 47.

I have some time left in this sector. I feel like I’m walking into my prime. The last 25 years have trained me for what I’m going to do next and the shareholders that are long and that might become long, they’re going to get to capitalize on that and the decade long effort to get to this point with Sombrero.

So from a high level perspective, timing couldn’t be better, inspired me to buy more shares. I just paid attention to my vision and where we’re at with the team and the project. And Keenan, I didn’t even know he was buying it until after he bought it.

But it’s really encouraging to see it at the board level from the head of our technical committee and his profile being there alongside me. So that’s as much of a nod as we can give of our excitement. And yeah, it’s a very, very exciting time for us.

I love it, man. I love it. You always fire me up.

I think you got a big 2025 ahead of you. You cashed up to put the program into place and we’ll look forward to news flow. Ivan, it’s always so great chatting with you, man.

Awesome chatting with you as well. Thank you again. It’s great to see you.

Of course. Appreciate you very much. Thank you.