Insider Drops KEY INTEL on the Silver Market (Uncut) 02-22-2025

Insider Drops KEY INTEL on the Silver Market (be on the lookout for this!) | Shawn Khunkhun

If you’re looking to really make outsized returns, it’s in the developer category and then it’s in the exploration category. And as this market matures, you have the trickle-down effect from the metal to the royalty companies, to the producers, and then down. And then once you have the explore codes in bold territory, and a great exchange to monitor where capital flows are and where interest is in the sector, is the TSX Venture Exchange.

My point to you is the Venture Exchange just broke out. It just broke out. You’re watching Capital Cosm.

My name is Danny. Today’s guest is a CEO of Dolly Varden Silver, Sean Cooncoon. Sean, thank you so much for making your maiden voyage on the show.

Danny, thanks for having me on. Yeah, it’s a total pleasure. For people who may not know who you are though, Sean, give us a little bit of a background on your journey up until this point and tell us about Dolly Varden Silver, why you think it’s a unique silver stock.

And you also have gold resources as well, I believe. So yeah, I’ll let you take it from here. Okay, right on.

So look, starting with myself, born and raised in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Got into the mining industry in my early 20s. And I’ve been around gold my entire life, being the son of two Indian immigrants.

The idea of using gold as a store of value and something to pass on to future generations is something that has been an idea around my family for generations. So when I naturally went into the mining industry and have focused the last 22 years on precious metals mining, I’ve got a lot of experience around exploration, development, and production. And my role within this organization is I’ve built up relationships with institutional investors, investors that your audience would know like Eric Sprott, companies like Hecla Mining, which is America’s number one silver miner.

And so we’ve leveraged decades of relationships. Next to me here in the office is a very well-known mining entrepreneur, Frank Giustra, who has built some of the biggest mining companies. The building blocks of what is Newmont today, Frank had created.

The building blocks of what is Wheaton Precious Metals today was a Frank Giustra idea. So I’ve surrounded myself. Half the battle in life and in business is just being around people that help move you ahead in life.

And so I’ve been very, very fortunate to surround myself with brilliant scientists and really, really strong company builders. And I’ve taken all of that information, those relationships, the experiences I’ve had. And when I came across Dolly Varden, and the story of Dolly Varden is an incredible story.

Just behind me here is actually a certificate when the company first listed its shares on the Canadian Stock Exchange. Yeah, and coincidentally, it was listed on the same day my daughter was born, which I find an interesting piece of history. But the bottom line is the Dolly Varden silver mine goes back 100 years.

It was the richest silver mine in the British Empire. It was Canada’s third largest silver producer. It’s got this strong, rich history.

And what I’ve done is I’ve taken a lot of capital. So I’ve taken about $120 million of capital from myself, my network, institutions, corporates. And we are putting some of the smartest scientists in the world with some of the newest technology and with the ample capital to try to unlock more discoveries.

My strategy, Danny, is when I started this journey at Dolly five years ago, the price of silver was half of what it is today. And my strategy was not to rush in and start pulling metal out of the ground and selling it and giving it away for $16. It was, let’s understand what it is we have.

Let’s grow the resource through exploration, through acquisition. And once that we believe silver was getting fair market value, and once we’ve unlocked the discovery potential and proven up a significant resource, you know, the strategy was the company is going to be worth a lot more than it was. And how that’s played out is we started at a $20 million valuation.

Today, the company is valued at over $320 million. So we’re starting to see that realization. But for any of your viewers who are new to silver stocks, to the silver mining industry, to silver itself, if you look back historically, and you don’t have to go far, go back 40 or 50 years, there is a tremendous correlation between the price of silver and silver stocks.

And what we’ve traditionally seen as we go into bull markets for the metal, the silver stocks dramatically outperform the metal. And so what Dolly Varden represents to me is it’s a silver bank. It’s high grade silver in a safe jurisdiction, owned and run by industry professionals.

Yeah, yeah. So let’s touch on the silver market here for a second. We’ll circle back to Dolly Varden.

We’ll make a complete full 360 here. But what is your overall take on the silver market right now? The gold market has been making new all time highs. It’s seemingly on fire.

The LBMA is getting emptied out. Their deliveries are being stretched out to four to eight weeks now, which took a fraction of the time of that. But on the silver side, we’re still kind of slowly moving higher.

We’re at a little over $32.50 at the moment. But what do you make of the current silver market? It’s a great question. I was sitting at the dinner table with my 16 year old last night and he asked me, Dad, what’s silver doing? And so we pulled up a chart and we looked at, you know, from call it April of last year to today, silver is up about 45%.

And so, you know, it seems like it’s quiet. It seems like it’s underperforming. But the actual fact is this asset class is up 50% since the spring of last year.

And the reason for that is really, really, really interesting. You know, silver was predominantly used in an industry for really, you know, just one application in the majority of the users in the photography. Right.

And that has now become obsolete with digital cameras and people not printing pictures like they used to. And so what’s taken up the slack is EVs. It’s solar panels.

And we’ve gone, so 100 years ago, only 10% of all silver mined was used in industry. Today, that 10% number is 55%. So industry needs silver.

And that use is growing, you know. And so at the same time, the biggest moves historically for silver have come on the back of bull markets for gold. You know, it’s very, very simple.

You know, gold is for kings, silver is for gentlemen. There’s a lot more gentlemen than there are kings. So when the kings are out there buying gold, and today, you know, we have central banks and we have billionaire investors that are going out and they’re trying to protect themselves through the money printing, through the inflation by buying gold, which is now seen as a tier one asset.

So gold has gone up to a record high in every single currency under the sun. And there’s no end in sight with the printing and, you know, the debt and the deficit spending and servicing of all those things. So, you know, that trend will continue.

And gold is scarce. You know, one of the reasons it is, you know, a top asset in the world and has been for the last 5,000 years is because of all those scarcity attributes and many other factors. But the bottom line is really simply, if we go back to times in history, and again, we don’t have to go back beyond the last 50 years, when the gold price moves to a record high, 1980, 2011, silver outperforms.

And what today’s market is telling me is gold’s got a lot further to go because silver’s still lagging. It’s when silver starts going into the triple digits and wildly outperforming gold that it may be a sign that we are heading into a more mature bull market. And we are no longer in the early innings of a bull market.

We are moving into a much more mature bull. Yeah, so what you’re saying is that despite this 2,900 handle on the price of gold, we’re still in early innings nonetheless, because silver has yet to really, really, really catch a bit. Sure, it’s up on multi-year highs, but on an all-time basis, I believe it’s still, what, a little over 35% down from its all-time high? And it depends on what currency that you’re looking at.

Like, if we’re talking Aussie dollars, if we’re talking Canadian dollars, silver’s actually flirting with all-time highs and it’s putting in all-time highs in some currencies. In the U.S. dollar though, you’re absolutely right, whereas gold has taken out its old highs. But I, listen, the other thing that silver has that gold doesn’t is that strong industrial usage.

And so, you know, all the gold that’s ever been mined is still with us. You know, gold is so valuable and it’s priced significantly higher than silver that gold gets recycled, whereas a lot of silver just gets discarded. So, you know, last year we mined approximately 800 million ounces as an industry globally, 800 million ounces of silver globally was mined.

There’s about 150 million ounces that were recycled. So, you see a pretty significant recycling component in silver, but it’s nowhere near like almost 100% of gold gets recycled. You know, as you can see that percentage, you know, it’s 20% or something, right? So, it’s not as significant.

But I, listen, I’ve been around commodities professionally for 22 years and I have not always been a silver investor and a silver enthusiast. I have become one in the last five years because I spent the first 15 years of my professional life focused on gold. And the last five years I’ve dedicated it to silver.

And as I’ve gone to the big silver mines globally, as I’ve gone to the mints, as I’ve met the CEOs, as I’ve met the explorers, what I’ve learned from all that time that I’ve invested in the sector is that it is next to impossible to dramatically increase the silver from a production standpoint. So, what you have to appreciate is in order to get pure silver, there’s only one in every four mines that is a primary silver mine. Most silver comes as a byproduct.

So, Danny, if the silver price goes to $50, $60, $70, $100, if, you know, Samsung says, you know, we’ve got these kilo batteries that we’re putting in the EV, it’s kilos of silver that enable cars to go 900km on a nine-minute charge. If they need silver, you can’t throw money at the problem. You can’t just go, okay, we’re going to throw billions of dollars and we’ll get more silver.

It doesn’t work that way. That’s not how the mining industry works. It takes time.

It often takes decades. It takes, you know, tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars of investment to increase that production. So, I think we’re in a situation right now where when the bid comes into silver and it’s started, we’re starting, you know, having the asset up 50% in the last 10 months is the beginnings of a baby bull.

But we’re going to see moments where you’re going to wake up and it’ll go up 50% in hours, if not minutes. And that’s the type of market we’re moving towards. And people, you know, if you really want to get your hands on physical, I’ll give you an example.

You talked about, you know, when we were off air about, you know, in 2020, how, you know, you started really focusing on commodity stocks. And that was a time where I went out and I tried to get my hands on as much physical silver as possible because the digital price, the paper price showed me that silver was trading for $11.94 an ounce in March of 2020. So, when I went out to secure my physical silver at $12 an ounce, I couldn’t get it.

Best prices I got for physical were $18. It was evident for me in that moment, there is a discrepancy between the digital price that I’m being quoted of these metals that are predominantly on the futures exchanges and the physical market. And what’s happening now in the world is as more and more investors want, you know, possession is nine tenths of the law, right? As more central banks say, I want my metal home.

You know, we want to, you know, as metal comes from its owners out of the storage facilities, you know, I think we’re going to get into a moment where you’ll get real price discovery. And that moment’s coming. It’s happening in gold.

It’s manifesting. I’ve been watching this play out, you know, from when gold was sub $200 an ounce to where it is today in U.S. dollars terms just under $3,000. In Canada, we’ve got $4,100 gold.

We’ve got silver at $46 an ounce. There hasn’t been a better place to protect your wealth in Canada than in the precious metals. Now, Sean, I want you to put on your speculative hat for a second.

There’s been all this discussion about the LBMA getting emptied out because of these potential tariffs to hit Mexico, to hit Canada to the tune of 25 percent sometime the next few weeks should a deal not arise between the U.S. and Canada and Mexico. Is this an adequate explanation to what is transpiring at the LBMA? I’ve also and also when do we start seeing the same thing occur in silver? Does the silver do the silver vault start getting emptying out at some point? Is this is this a an a ploy to get as much of the gold and silver into the United States to kind of build a monetary fortress, let’s say, because you kind of hear these talks about gold revaluation, silver revaluation on the balance sheet of the U.S. Treasury every every few years here and there. But it hasn’t seemed as real as as it does now.

I spoke to a good friend of mine, Ed Steer, on it the other day, and he said the exact same thing. You know, this idea comes up from time to time to revalue gold back to from $42 to what it what it’s on the balance sheet to a fair market fair market price, which would be $29.50 today. On the silver side of things, if you look at the balance sheet, the balance the U.S. balance sheet currently or the yeah, the U.S. Treasury balance sheet currently has silver priced at $1.29. So that would be a pretty much a 30x multiple to the price of silver on the U.S. balance sheet.

And then once you do that, you effectively create a base silver. If if silver is 30 some odd dollars on the U.S. balance sheet, does that mean that it can no longer get below that price? Do you create a sort of a bench, a base, so to speak, for the price of silver? How do you how do you see silver playing out from a geopolitical standpoint? As we see, we’re seeing this deglobalization take place. Every country is starting to kind of bring everything back internally.

And in the same way that globalization was deflationary, deglobalization, ergo, would be inflationary because there’s less trade being done. There’s tariffs and all this other stuff. So what are some of the geopolitical hotspots that you see playing a role in the silver market as we kind of move towards this deglobalization trend? There’s a lot to unpack in that.

And, you know, some of the things that come to mind is the fact that Vladimir Putin, for the first time, as part of a precious metal strategy, is including silver in the central bank strategy to accumulate, you know, non-dollar denominated firms. And so I think you’re absolutely right. It’s interesting, you know, 400 years ago, I think global trade and globalization really took precedent.

And it was an emperor in China that had started taxing his citizens in silver. And he went on to become the wealthiest person on the planet. You know, unfortunately, the Chinese traded that silver for opium with the East Indian Trading Company coming in.

But I think we can learn from the lessons of the past, right? He who has the gold, he who has the silver is king and makes the rules. And I do see that this is a trend. You know, I remember you talk about putting in a floor on these prices.

If you go back to the Indian central bank at $900, I want to say it was maybe 2009, they put a big floor into the price of silver. And we’ve seen central banks and sometimes we’ve seen some central banks ask for their Gold back. And not only did they not get their Gold back, but they were invaded.

And you look at, you know, countries like Libya, or you look at places like Venezuela that have seen a lot of uprest and unrest. So it’s really interesting, those who’ve asked for their Gold, there’s precedent. And there is a history of instability that comes forth for those nations that maybe aren’t as strong as others who are looking to break.

Or in the case of some European nations, it takes a long time to get their metal back. And I think it was Germany took over a year to get metal out of New York. So look, we’re seeing this trend emerge where we’re moving from, we’re moving back to hard assets.

And it’s not just Gold and Silver. It’s basically we’re moving from the unreal to the real. We’re moving in and that’s going to, you know, that, you know, I used to attend when I first started this industry, I used to attend a conference that was called the hard asset conference.

Right. And I really think that if you look at where some of the high flying tech stocks are trading relative to, you know, the commodity stocks, you’ve never seen such a disparity, a discrepancy in terms of value. And it’s unfortunate that, you know, the stock market is one of the few markets in the world where when things are showing value, when things are, you know, quote, unquote, on sale, we don’t rush in.

You know, it seems that most investors want to buy high and sell higher versus, you know, buying low and selling high. And I think there’s so much value in the things we need. And the difference in terms of the commodity complex with Gold and Silver is the monetary and sort of, you know, the monetary aspects of the metal.

Yeah, yeah. Earlier on in the conversation, you mentioned kind of the order of events that transpired. First, you have your Gold run and then on the back end of the precious metals run, Silver really takes the charge.

Does Silver have any added torque relative to the Gold price? I.e., is there a kind of like, could you view Silver as some sort of leverage play on the price of Gold after Gold rises 100 percent? Could we anticipate Silver rising 150 percent, 200 percent? Absolutely. And that’s that’s actually, listen, I am true and true a Gold buck, right? Like I am to my core. I am actually trying to use Silver to get more Gold.

And, you know, naturally in the Earth’s crust, there is a natural relationship, 16 to 1 relationship for, you know, Silver is 16 times more abundant than Gold. And historically, it is traded 10 to 1, 15 to 1. That’s been the historic relationship between the two. I don’t know exactly where the ratio is today.

I think it’s somewhere in the 80s. But, you know, I think that ratio is out of whack. And I think that ratio will come in line, whether it goes to 20 to 1, 10 to 1, I don’t know.

But it’s definitely not going to live at 80 to 1. So, look, you know, for anyone watching this, you know, we’re talking about, you know, Gold, we’re talking about Silver. But what do you do? What are the action items? How do you protect yourself? How do you prosper? And I think the answer is, look, I’ll go back to what I said. Physical Gold, in quantity, in size, it’s historically been for kings.

Today, it’s for central banks. It’s for the uber, uber, ultra, ultra, ultra high net worth and wealthy. And that doesn’t represent, you know, probably your audience or necessarily the bulk of my shareholders.

So, what you typically see is you see the price of Gold moving, then you see the Gold stocks moving, then you see the price of Silver moving, and then you see the Silver stocks. And the Silver stock category is your highest torque category. And it’s because it’s scarce.

I’ll give you some statistics here. So, as scarce as Gold is, it is, in a lot of ways, you know, there’s a lot more Gold projects, primary Gold projects. For example, there’s 170 Gold projects in Canada and the U.S. that have at least 750,000 ounces of Gold.

There’s 170, right? Whereas for Silver, there are only 33 projects that have a minimum of 25 million ounces. So, you got 170 versus 33. So, there are only 11 producing Silver Co’s that trade on the board.

You know, these are companies like Pan American Silver, Coor, Hecla. And Silver is so scarce and so hard to come by that actually the revenue that helps build these Silver Co’s is derived from Lead, Zinc, Copper, Gold. So, the revenue is actually not Silver dominant.

There’s only one Silver Co that is a pure Silver Co that is within that group. So, it’s very, very scarce. What my company, Dolly Varden, represents is it represents four companies globally that have a minimum of a $200 million valuation.

So, you’ve got companies like Visla Silver, you’ve got Abrasilver, you’ve got New Age Pacific, and you’ve got Dolly Varden. You’ve got four companies for the 11 big ones to potentially feed their Silver pipeline. And these companies in this category are developing and advancing and trying to build Co’s to get into this category or be acquired by this category.

And so, for the investor, the torque is in the Silver equities. But it all depends on, you know, you really need to understand your investing style. You know, if you’re risk averse, you know, stick with Bullion, stick with Gold, stick with Silver.

If you want to come down into more torque assets, you know, you can buy a royalty company, you can buy a large producer. But if you’re looking to really make outsized returns, it’s in the developer category and then it’s in the exploration category. And as this market matures, you have the trickle down effect from the metal to the royalty companies, to the producers, and then down.

And then once you have the Explore Co’s in bull territory and a great exchange to monitor where capital flows are and where interest is in the sector is the TSX Venture Exchange. Now, the TSX Venture Exchange a few years ago was valued over 3300 points. In the COVID low, we got sold down to 400 points.

So we went from 3300 down to 400. There’s some other points in history we can mark like in 2008, that exchange fell from over 3000 points to 685 points. Okay.

And then it rose again to over 2000 as the market came back and QE came into effect in 09, 2010. My point to you is the Venture Exchange just broke out. It just broke out.

It was a two year breakout. It’s somewhere around 800 points right now. It’s still sub 1000.

Like this exchange can legitimately go up five times in value. And when you start to see it double, triple, quadruple, quintuple in price, that’s when that’s another indicator. Just like triple digit silver will be an indicator that we’re in a mature market and you should move from being a buyer to taking some profits.

Yeah, I’m glad you brought up the torque aspect that you can kind of go through the daisy chain. Silver has torque to gold. Silver stocks have torque to the silver price.

And then silver producers have torque to the silver price. Developers have torque to the producers and exploration companies have torque to the developers. So I pulled up a chart here.

I think it’s very interesting to look at. And it is the Dolly Varden stock chart. And I’ve juxtaposed the silver price on it.

Give me one second. I was looking at this chart with my son yesterday. We were looking at Dolly and we were looking at silver.

And going back to May, they were both up exactly the same, 45%. Now, when you know you’re in a bull market, and Dolly, in my opinion, is a best-in-class explorer. Now, it’s because it’s got a great asset and there’s a great team there and it’s funded.

If you looked at the best-in-class junior silver companies, they were up 6% last year. 6%. So they’re underperforming the metal.

So in 2024 calendar year, you had the metal up over 20%, you had Dolly up over 20%, you had SLJ up 6%. What you want to see, another indicator that we’re moving into a bull market, is you should see three times return on the equities than you do the metal. So instead of 6%, SLJ should be up 60% to a metal that’s up 20%.

That’s why you own the equities. But that doesn’t happen until you’ve got the capital flows and you’re in a mature market where investors are making money in the larger cap names. Now, the good news is, if you look at gold at 2900, or if you look at stocks like IGNICO or Newmont or Barrick, specifically IGNICO, best-in-class, one of the best-run companies in the space, $55 billion market cap, it’s doing very, very well.

I think the share price, I haven’t looked at it in the last couple of days, but around $120 a share. I’m a shareholder, happy one. And my point in all this is the torque is in silver and the torque is really in silver coats.

Yep. Yep. So we’ve got the white line down here.

This is the silver price over the last five years. And I chose five years because that was the, we had that crash in 2020. So that was like a reset point.

That’s like a nice little reset point for the entire market. And if you track the price between Dolly Varden, which you have here above, and the silver price here in white below, you’ll notice, I mean, you guys outperformed the silver price by many multiples. Danny, it’s funny.

So I’m at the kitchen table last night with my son and we’re looking at all this stuff. And it just so happened to be yesterday that it was my five-year anniversary at Dolly Varden. So February 18th, 2020 is, so exactly five years yesterday is when I thought it was the moment to go all into silver.

Now, a month later, we had the COVID crash and everything went significantly lower, you know, 30, 40% lower. So my timing was, you know, I was 30 days off, but you got to be early. You can’t be late.

And for anybody who thinks they’ve missed it, go back and look at charts from 2006. Go look at the gold price after it broke out. So for when I first got into this industry professionally, people would say gold is never going through 500.

And when it finally did, the gold stocks didn’t react right away. You know, a bull markets, they say climb a wall of worry, right? And bull markets move up with the fewest amount of participants. And so as we went through 300, 400, 500, 600, it wasn’t until gold went up to $730 an ounce in May of 2006, that the stocks went boom.

And they shot up in hours, not days, not weeks, not months, but hours. You go back to May of 2006, phenomenal market. 2007, great market.

2009, 10, 11, legendary markets, best markets in the last 100 years for mine finance. Now we’re starting to see that market build up again. And we’re starting to see, I watch this stuff daily.

I’m in an office here that’s one of the most active in the world globally for the Fiori group, for micro cap resource stocks. The office put up two deals yesterday, a non-brokered deal in the base metal space and a precious metals deal. And both deals were wildly oversubscribed.

So one deal was 500% oversubscribed. So meaning company went out to raise 12 million and they had $60 million in orders. Another company went out to raise 36, they had $70 million in orders.

These are the signs that the smart money is starting to come into and want to get exposure. And these are really good signs. Yeah.

Yeah. So I’ve also added in all the other names that you mentioned, SILJ, GDX, GDXJ, the gold price, SIL. And you can see them here at the very bottom.

These are all the various ETFs and such. And each one of them, they appear to be tracking one another. But again, I mean, that is the torque you are referring to here, Sean.

And I’ll tell you, Dan, you just want to leave you with one point. If you put up the venture exchange, because what you’re looking at there with GDX, GDXJ, SILJ, is those are really best in class peers. But the reality is 20% of capital is returned, excuse me, 80% of capital is returned by 20% of participants.

Okay. So my point to you here is if you were to look at a broader index, like the CDNX, or in this case, maybe it’s quoted under TSXV. My point to you here is total underperformance, total underperformance.

And so, you know, my point about Dolly Varden is if we can be up, you know, 125% when these other indexes are up single digit percentage points, and those are the best in class peers. The reality is 80% of our peers are down significantly. And if we can build at a time where capital is scarce, the sector is unloved, there’s not a lot of, you know, most people are speculating on Nvidia and Tesla and other names and other sectors.

If I can go out and raise $122 million for a pre-revenue company in a hated sector, what can we do when the market turns on? Right, and that’s the key. Now that we’re heading into a bull market, this is when, you know, what my experience has taught me is that 90% of the money is made from the seventh inning to the end of the game. And so, you know, where we are probably right now for silver, you know, we’re probably in the third inning.

We’ve got a lot to go here. It’s started, it’s doubled from the lows, and we’re starting to build some momentum. The fundamentals are phenomenal.

There’s scarcity, there’s shortages. You know, every year for the last four years, we’ve had 250 million ounce deficits. And that’s in a market where, you know, you didn’t have positive price momentum.

And going back to some of my earlier comments, most investors are chasing. Most investors are herd investing. And, you know, very few investors take the alligator approach to investing, which is, you know, being right, sitting tight, being early, and waiting for a thesis to play out.

Yeah, totally. Well, hey, Sean, it’s been a pleasure having you on. Anything else you want to talk about before we wrap up? No, Danny, listen, like your channel a lot, and happy to be on.

And again, like, you know, we’ve got a big team here at Dolly. If any of your viewers want to communicate with us, there’s lots of ways to do that. We’ve got a great website that’s got all of our contact information.

So if you want to learn more, we’d love to tell you about it. Yep, we’ll have the website down below. We also have the ticker symbol somewhere on the screen here as well.

So if you guys are interested, be sure to check out the website and check out the ticker symbols there. Sean, thank you so much for coming on, my friend. Any other things you want to plug before we sign off? No, that’s it.

You know, we’re focused on Dolly Varden here. All right, awesome. Well, hey, if you guys enjoyed this program, be sure to give us a like and subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already so you don’t miss an episode.

Also, go, Sean, go in the comment section if you agreed with Sean’s analysis. If you disagreed with anything, do let me know. I do read the comments.

So I am interested in getting your takes here, guys. And then, yeah, thank you guys so much for watching, and I will catch you in the next episode. Bye, y’all.