David Lin (Uncut) 01-17-2025
Is Silver Disappearing? Why Premiums Are Skyrocketing & What’s Next For Price | Shawn Khunkhun
Some unusual activity in the UK, in UK vaults. I’ve even heard anecdotal reports at the Vancouver Bullion and Currency Exchange last week. Essentially, for your viewers, what they need to understand is what’s happening is investors want to get their hands on the metal.
Sean Kunkun, CEO of Dolly Varden Silver, returns to the show to give us his outlook for commodities, inflation, the outlook for the economy. What investors need to know and pay attention to is commodities are the input for most of the things in our lives. Welcome back to the show, Sean.
Good to see you. David, very happy to be here. Happy 2025.
Happy New Year to you as well. We spoke last in August. People can check out that interview link down below.
We were talking about the depletion of silver, which is a very important issue, given that silver is a critical mineral. And we were talking about the economic outlook not looking so grim as priced in by silver. Maybe things have changed a little bit.
Maybe not. We’ll talk about it today. Since you were on the show in August, Trump has been elected as president.
His inauguration will be in a week from now, from the time of our taping today. Monetary policy has somewhat shifted. The Fed is less likely to cut rates again, following recent economic data.
And silver and gold have been trending higher ever since the beginning of the summer, but now down slightly since the beginning of October. So a lot of moving parts and forces. Your general outlook for the silver market, $73 target, do you still have that view? I do.
And actually, that’s just sort of an initial target. I have numbers that far exceed that longer term. But no, nothing’s changed in terms of my medium or long term view.
I am still wildly bullish for both gold and silver. And that has not changed. The protectionism aspect of Trump’s policies, as well as the fact that the dollar could appreciate because of tariffs, that has weighed down on gold.
And in fact, immediately after Trump’s election, we saw gold move down on the news. And it’s traded range bound around $2,600 to $2,700 ever since. Headwinds for gold and silver.
Do you see those on the horizon coming from the Trump administration? A couple things come to mind. Number one, I wonder if there’s going to be that period from election to inauguration where you have certain price action. For example, weakness in the precious metals, strong dollar.
But I think Mr. Trump, I think he’d probably be best served from a dollar that isn’t so strong throughout his presidency. So I wonder if a week from now, it marks the beginning of a reversal in the price direction we’ve seen since just proceeding probably one week before the night of the election. And then the other thing that comes to mind for me with Mr. Trump is I really want to own gold for the next one to two years because there’s so much uncertainty.
And I think gold will shine based on the uncertainty. And it’s not just about Mr. Trump, but if we look at some of the conflicts that are going, these are hot wars. Jim Rickards famously was quoted for talking about currency wars, trade wars, and then full on wars.
I think we’re in the midst of that. We’re in the throes of that. And I think gold has done very, very well in that environment.
We’ve seen gold prices double in recent years. And it looks like we’re on it. And I think about how well they’ve done in US dollar terms.
With this strong dollar, they’ve done even better. If we look at in our country in Canada, gold in Canadian dollar terms, you look at some of the other currencies globally where gold has even exceeded the performance we’ve seen in what we usually measure gold in, which is US dollars. We’re going to talk about the correlation of silver and gold in just a minute.
I’d like to get your outlook on whether or not silver is going to move trade or trade more like a gold asset or a copper kind of like asset. Take a look at this article from the Financial Post dated a couple of days ago, Sean. This is called Tariff Fears Spark Disconnected Silver and Copper Markets.
So copper and silver futures in New York are surging above rival international price benchmarks as traders ramp up bets that Donald Trump will impose hefty import tariffs on the metals as part of a broader escalation of his global trade war. Front month COMEX silver futures traded at above 90 cents announced premium over spot bullion prices set in London on Thursday, nearing a peak seen in December as traders react to Donald Trump’s pledges to apply universal tariffs on all goods. This is an interesting dynamic where we could potentially see, Sean, the spot price of silver not moving too much, but the premium on spot silver trading at record levels potentially.
What do you make of this dynamic? Is this something that is just short term noise in the market, or is this something that is going to possibly be a longer trend for you? So I was in Toronto last week attending the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame induction dinner last Thursday. And I was spending some time with a group that is one of the largest bullion dealers. I believe they have 500,000 customers around the world.
And they were reporting to me some unusual activity in the UK, in UK vaults. I’ve even heard anecdotal reports at the Vancouver Bullion and Currency Exchange last week. Essentially, for your viewers, what they need to understand is what’s happening is investors want to get their hands on the metal, and they want their hands on that metal before the 20th.
And so look, I think we’ve seen it, we’re seeing it. There was a report at a TD Securities that really highlighted all the reasons that they are bullish on silver. And one of the things that they did mention with the Trump tariffs, that has put an even greater bid on the silver price, but specifically, as you mentioned, the premiums are going up.
That’s right. And analysts have been commenting on this dynamic. So Saxo Bank, for example, investors around the world have started the year looking for protection against sticky and potentially rising inflation, fiscal debt worries, and the unpredictability of Trump.
All key themes that investors need to be paying attention to in 2025. How does the silver market fit into these kinds of fears here? Well, look, I think unless you’re a central bank, or unless you are ultra high net worth wealthy, gold has actually priced itself out of the hands of most investors. And silver has always been the gentleman’s metal.
And I think that’s where I think the masses are running out and they’re not going out and buying $3,500 an ounce Canadian gold, they’re buying $40 and $50 an ounce silver. So I think silver’s role as a monetary metal, as a hedge against inflation, as essentially gentleman’s gold, or some use a different term, poor man’s gold. I think it’s really shining as that monetary metal.
What is the role then for the silver markets for investors? Take a look at this silver chart here. And I’m just going to compare this to gold. So silver, no surprises, following gold quite closely throughout the year.
Although if we take a look at silver versus gold, they’ve both performed roughly equally. Before we move on to another metal to compare silver with, are you surprised that silver hasn’t outperformed gold on a year-over-year annual change basis, Sean, given that silver has in the past usually done better during bull markets and worse during bear markets? It’s just a higher beta gold play. So when I look at price activity, when I quote-unquote try to read the charts, I let the charts tell me, you know, I let the charts craft the narrative.
And what this tells me is we are in the early innings of the market. If silver was drastically, dramatically outperforming gold, I might consider profit-taking. I might consider, you know, starting to exit my precious metals position, potentially, right? The fact that silver is lagging gold and underperforming gold or just matching gold’s performance tells me there’s a lot of room to the upside.
What’s more important to me is, you know, the silver to gold relationship is very, very important. Other relationships I’m following is Dow to gold. You know, the Dow, I think right now the Dow to gold ratio is like 15 to 1. And just to put that into historical context, it was 1 to 1 when gold went to a record high in 1980.
It was 1 to 1. Today, it’s, you know, it requires 15 ounces of gold to own, you know, one share of the Dow. My point here is I think historically both precious metals are undervalued relative to other assets, you know, specifically the Dow in this case. The other thing to keep in mind is the relationship between silver and silver equities.
So last year was a year where silver was up about 20% in 2024. If you look at the ETF Siljay, which is, you know, owns the best in class junior silver equities, if we were in a bull market, Siljay would be up three times what silver was up. It would be up 60%.
But David, it was only up 6%. And so my, I think, you know, not only is silver not outperforming gold yet, but again, in previous precious metals bull markets, gold moves first, silver lags, and then it outperforms. And the same is true for silver equities.
All this is just telling me that we are in the early endings of the bull market. And the last thing I’ll say before I turn it back over to you, we are in bull market. And it’s evidenced by the chairman who was inducted into the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame, Sean Boyd, chairman of Agnico Eagle, who has built a $55 billion mining company.
Agnico was putting in 52 week highs. It’s a gold equity that like gold is trading at all time highs. And so the market’s on, we are in a bull market.
And I think it’s a great time for investors to start looking at aspects and instruments in the space that are next to perform. That’s an excellent point that you brought up, the use case for silver. So if you were to assume that silver is in its early innings of a bull market, are you then also making the assumption, Sean, that silver will continue to follow gold into this bull market? Or in 2025, will silver start to behave more like a base metal and follow a different path from gold, so to speak? In other words, if an investor were to ask you, Sean, how should I approach the silver market in 2025? Is it a base metal? Is it a precious metal? What’s your answer? That’s a really good question.
And it’s such an important, you need to understand what you’re investing in. You need to understand what you own. And my approach, and I’ve been around this stuff professionally for 21 years, but for 44 years, I’ve been around gold and silver.
I come from a family that for generations has been using gold primarily as a store of wealth. And so the way I’m considering my own expectations for the year is when gold continues to have big moments, we saw a big moment in 2016 when gold went up about 40%. We saw a big moment in 2020 when gold soared to a new all-time high in US dollar terms.
When gold had these big moments in recent history, 2016, 2020, we can go back to 2011, silver has dramatically outperformed. And it’s done it in, if it would take gold months, it’ll take silver days, and at the worst case scenario, weeks. So what I’m anticipating is gold continues to shine for the next two years, at least.
Silver will drastically outperform gold as it always has. However, there’s one caveat. If we get into a situation, and it’s entirely possible, you listen to experts and economists, people like Daniel DiMartino Booth, who I think has been on your program before.
And she speculates that the US may have entered into a recession last spring. And looking at recent recessions, the average duration being about 11 months, we may wake up to the fact that the US has been in recession since April of last year. We might wake up to that reality in March, during which time you may see some weakness in metals like copper, or in commodities like oil.
And in that moment, silver may trade more like a commodity than a monetary metal. And I think the fact that if you go back 100 years, 90% of the demand for silver was for money, money or slash jewelry. And today, that is only around 40%.
That silver is more of an industrial metal than it is a monetary metal today. So that is appropriate. But I think what makes silver so interesting, and the reason that 50% of my portfolio is in silver.
And the reason for that is because I think silver’s industrial demand is only going to further enhance its price movement. So I think there will come a time where investors will flock to silver for all the characteristics that gold embodies. The only difference being is they only have access to half the silver they’re accustomed to having, because the other half will be consumed by industry.
Let’s touch on this supply side dynamic in just a bit in more detail. I like charts, as you know, Sean. Here’s a chart showing the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index.
You’re aware of the Consumer Sentiment Index. It measures how good or bad segments of the consumer population are feeling according to a survey. I’ve just noticed something interesting.
Let’s overlay this with the silver price. Over the past couple of years, there’s been a longer-term correlation between consumer sentiment and metals, in particular silver in this particular case. A bit of a divergence in the recent couple of months, but the general trend is that whenever people are feeling better, metals tend to follow and or vice versa.
I’m not saying correlation is causation here. These are completely different things, but I think this narrative makes sense if you take a look at it from the perspective that silver has industrial properties, which you alluded to. If the economy is doing well, consumer sentiment is strong, you should see a boon in industrial metals.
What silver is perhaps signaling is that there’s a bit of a disconnect between market pricing and what people are feeling, is what this chart shows. I’ll let you comment on this. I think this is number one.
It’s a great chart here. What I’m curious to see is, I don’t know if you can also bring in copper onto the same chart. I would suspect that we’re going to see… Copper is the brown line now.
Okay. Silver, to your point, it is trading more like a industrial metal here and reacting more to sentiment. That really highlights that point.
I think the reality is in the last 100 years of modern history, silver has remained somewhat irrelevant as a large financial asset. It doesn’t have the liquidity or the size of market that gold does, but where it becomes very, very significant and important and relevant is when you are in that extreme bullish moment for gold. That’s when you want to own silver.
Again, I pointed out a few times, whether it’s 1980, 2011, 2016, 2020, you look at silver’s performance even this year. It’s performed very well. Silver’s performed better than copper.
Silver’s performed better than oil. Having both aspects, both the monetary but also the industrial, is why it’s my number one investment. Is there a reason for why silver is, according to many reports, in a deficit currently and projected to be in a bigger state of a deficit in the future? Your profession is on the supply side as a miner and explorer.
What is the industry doing, the industry being silver producers and explorers alike, doing to meet this rising industrial demand of silver used in solar panels, some batteries as well, the electrification of things, weapons, a whole host of industrial demand to rise? We have a fundamental challenge as a silver industry. The fundamental challenge that we have is silver is a byproduct metal. If the majority of silver is being thrown off of a lead mine, zinc mine, a copper mine, a gold mine, it’s difficult to prioritize and to focus primarily on silver.
If you look at the 11 silver producing companies, the quote unquote silver miners, and I say that because for some of them, their revenue from silver is 30% or less. So with silver’s price history over the last few decades, it’s been economically challenging to be a primary silver miner. I really only know of one company that only mines silver.
That’s the fundamental challenge that we have as an industry. To really answer your question, we’re mining about 800 million ounces a year. Thankfully, we’re recycling another 150 million ounces a year.
But with this increased industrial demand, we’re seeing demand for 1.2, 1.3 million ounces. We have a shortfall on an annual basis of about 250 million ounces a year. We’ve had it for the last four years.
It’s why I believe the price of silver has risen from about $16 an ounce before that deficit came in to about $30 an ounce today. Would the solution be to merge or consolidate with other base metals producers and or JVs just because silver is a byproduct metal? I’m just thinking what the industry could do to expand the chances of exploring for silver. Good question.
I think the other challenge that the industry faces is where silver deposits are found. We don’t have universal distribution of silver globally. There are certain companies that you have these primary silver mines.
Primary silver mines make up around 28% of the market. But they’re typically found in areas where we’ve seen some volatility in recent years. Places like Peru, Bolivia, Mexico, Argentina, this is where the world finds primary silver.
What you have to do as an industry is you have to rank the safety and the stability of these locations. We’ve seen large companies go into these jurisdictions, try to work with governments and do that with varying results. I’ve opted to take a different approach, David.
I think we’ve moved into an era, I go back to what I said about records earlier, the currency wars, the trade wars, the hot wars. We are in this protectionism, isolationist era that reminds me of 100 years ago. My solution is I think this is a time to stay close to home.
It’s a time to pay a premium for safety, for certainty. It’s why my business model and my philosophy has to focus in Canada. You mentioned to me offline, there’s only a handful of silver miners, at least in Canada or North America.
Not even miners, I guess they’re not technically miners yet, but explorers that are transitioning into production companies. This isn’t a trend that’s happening on a large scale. Those companies, the ones I mentioned before we went on air, I talked about, look, there are five companies that are non-producing.
There are five companies that are larger than a $200 million valuation. Those five companies are Visla Silver, which is in Mexico, Discovery Silver, also in Mexico, Abris Silver, which is in Argentina, and New Pacific Metals, which is Bolivia. There’s five companies, Dolly Varden Silver, my company, is the fifth.
Those other four are Argentina, Mexico, and Bolivia. There are only five companies. I think they’re all great companies.
I think they’re all great projects. My point that I was making to you off the air was when those 11 silver miners, there’s only 11, there was 13. Then there was two transactions that were announced in the last quarter of 2024, where Coor is buying Silvercrest, and where First Majestic is buying Gatot.
We’re going from 13 down to 11. When those 11 companies look to grow, and we saw those two transactions, they will look at the five companies that I mentioned. They will look at Visla, and they will look at Abra, and they will look at the other ones I mentioned, including Dolly.
That’s the pipeline for growth. I was just highlighting how small, how scarce, and how unique this market is. If you’re an investor, you can go out and you can pay $40 or $50, and you can pay monster premiums, and you can get your hands on physical ounces.
That is one thing you could do. You can buy ETFs. Reality, if you want to start buying equities, you’ve got the 11 producers to choose from, or you’ve got these five developers that are advanced explorers that are moving their projects forward, and then anything below that, and you’re really speculating down market.
Tell us about the plans for Dolly Varden in particular to make this transition come into fruition. At what point will you become a producing company, do you think? Well, look, I mentioned Sean Boyd and Agnico Eagle, who has got 16,000 employees and multiple minds. Agnico started as a $20 million company, and it’s now a $55 billion company.
It’s one of the great Canadian success stories. Five years ago, I started at Dolly Varden. We too were a $20 million company.
We too are a Canadian company. Today, we are a $300 million company. When silver prices were up at $35 in October, we actually traded as high as $450 million, so we are almost half a billion dollar company.
Dolly Varden is a very simple story. Dolly Varden is a company where we’ve got a large, high-grade, undeveloped, sovereign gold resource in a very prospective area known as the Golden Triangle. We’re surrounded by really big mines.
Essentially, all we’ve done, David, is we’ve bought – this industry is made up of three major components, people, project, and money. We took a great project, a world-class project, and we brought the right scientists to it, and we brought the appropriate capital. It brought out shareholders like Hecla, like Eric Sprott, like Fidelity.
It’s very, very simple. We went into an area where either previous explorers didn’t drill deep enough or didn’t drill enough, and we’re finding more. It’s that simple.
We’re doing it in a time where silver prices have doubled, and I think they’re going to double again. That’s my view. This is not investment advice, but based on the demand, based on the deficit, and based on the challenges that we’re seeing out of places like Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia, I look at the world we’re in today.
I want a project where I feel comfortable bringing my family. When I look at a prerequisite before making an investment decision, I ask myself, would I vacation there? Would I bring family there? In the case of our project, the answer is yes. What about the argument that grades are probably better in a higher-risk jurisdiction, that you probably wouldn’t vacation? Yeah.
You know what? It may not be necessarily grades. Sometimes it is. If you look at places like DRC or Papua New Guinea, where you have some of the best geology in the world, I would totally agree with you.
The strange thing is, though, up north, and it’s not a bad jurisdiction. It’s a jurisdiction that, because of the location, had lacked the infrastructure. I’m not in the famous mining camps of Nevada or Timmins.
I’m in an area where up until a few years ago, glaciers covered them and there was no infrastructure. I’ve gone in, and the reason we could find grades in the top 90 percentile in big projects is because what prevented and prohibited a lot of the development that should have happened was the remoteness. Now, the remoteness factor is being removed.
I would argue that if you look at the Keno Hill District in the Yukon, or if you look at the Triangle, where Dolly Varden’s projects are, these are the richest silver deposits in the world. You know what? We actually have a high-grade project, and it’s in a safe jurisdiction. To your point about Dolly Varden’s market cap growing over the years, that’s quite an accomplishment in itself.
But an investor would ask you, Sean, is there a way to make the stock a little bit less prone to the volatility of the underlying metal? If you take a look at this chart, for example, Dolly Varden, like all silver companies, moves pretty much in tandem with the price of silver. How would you respond to that? There’s one way to look at it as a yes, and another way to look at it as a no. That’s why you’re investing in a mining company to begin with, that leverage.
I think the one thing that we did to try to mitigate the volatility is we brought in a gold project called Homestake. That has insulated our investors for even greater volatility, and also just bringing up the size and the scale. But ultimately, I think one of the reasons you want to speculate in Dolly Varden’s shares and invest in the company is because of that volatility.
The fact that this is a security that went from a low of $0.60 in Q1 to a high of $1.45 in Q4. I think it did that based on our ability to access capital, our ability to unlock the discovery potential of the project. But it also did that because the silver price went from $25 to $35 throughout that same period of time.
Okay. You have some recent drill results to report to us. Is that correct? Yeah.
Essentially, the way to look at Dolly is it’s a series of large high-grade deposits. We think we found the next large high-grade deposit. We call it the Wolf deposit.
At Wolf, we had our team of scientists continue to step away from the known mineralization. The results we put out early last week were we stepped 120m away from the known mineralization, the last data point. We hit some incredible thickness.
We hit over 20m of almost 400g per tonne silver. The headline number was 379g per tonne over 21m. What’s unique about Dolly, in my opinion, that separates it from all the other companies that are out there, is this mineralization to me, particularly at a place like the Torbridge or the Wolf deposit, it’s a 15m to 20m wide deposit.
Whereas a lot of the other silver coves I looked at are very, very narrow. They’ve got 1m or 2m and they’re down at a depth of 1km below surface. Whereas the Dolly Varn silver mineralization, not only is it super high-grade and is it super wide and potentially amenable to bulk mining, which is a low-cost mining method, but it also projects right to surface.
Not only do you have a very large high-grade in a safe jurisdiction, but just the deposition style, the deposit style of the width, the grade, the proximity to surface, these are all things that I think are going to make the project very economic. David, Dolly Varn was a mine. It was the highest grade silver mine in the British Empire.
It was Canada’s third largest silver producer. I really believe what was a mine could once again be in mine. What we’re just trying to do in the meantime is we’re trying to build up a silver inventory through all these discoveries.
I ultimately think how we’ll get valued in the future is based on this large inventory, whether we develop it and we take those ounces and put them into a long sustaining mine plan, or somebody else comes in and pays us for those ounces. Maybe just explain to somebody like me who’s not a mining expert like you, you have a mine that was previously a mine, so it’s a brownfield project, I guess, by definition. What is the transition from taking a mine that used to be a mine just straight into production? Why can’t you just start up the mine again, so to speak? That question generally could have different answers depending on do you have a mill? Do you have a permit? Do you have enough resource? The reason that I’m employing the strategy that I have, which is not racing back into production, is going back to the silver’s underperformance and specifically the underperformance of equities.
I am a student of what I would describe as the greatest mine finance market of the last 100 years, which was the 2010 market. Mines that could never be fathomed, big open pit gold mines in Canada, like the Malartic, like Detour, those were ideas that you could have never dreamed of in the 90s, in the 80s, in the 70s. We were in an environment where there was so much capital and there was so much of an appetite because we had gold go from 300 to 1900.
To answer your question, what I think the most appropriate thing to do is to keep costs low, to not go out. Mining companies are subject to credit card interest rates to build their projects. That’s how scarce capital is to build projects today.
There is a lack of capital. There’s a lack of interest in the mining space. Therefore, the valuations are low.
Therefore, the cost of capital is low. Therefore, it is extremely dilutive for shareholders. The appropriate thing to do, in my opinion, based on my experience, is to stay lean, to stay nimble, to grow cost-effectively.
Then when we move into a market where you’re paid, when it goes from being an investor’s market to an issuer’s market, then we’ll go out and either sell the company for the appropriate price or we’ll be in an environment where it won’t be too dilutive to develop it ourselves. Finally, let’s take a look at your financial statements. We’ll close off here.
This is as of September 30. First of all, any substantial updates since the last quarter? No. We had a pretty intense drill program that completed.
We wrapped up camp just after these financial statements. We drilled a total of 32,000 meters. We’ve got some results from that drilling still pending.
That’s one thing I want to also tell your audience. We’ve probably got two dozen drill results that are pending from the homestake silver deposit and some exploration targets as well. We depleted from September 30 to January 13 about $4 million of exploration expenditures.
The Treasury today, just to be cautious and to be conservative, let’s say we’re at about $33 million of cash on hand. Okay. Slightly less than $38 million reported as of September 30.
What do you plan to do with the $33 million of cash? That’s my question. Acquisitions, just continuing drilling or all of the above? Yeah. We’re going to get out these drill results.
We’ll put out a program for this year. I’d like to see between a $40,000 and up to a $50,000 meter drill program. Let’s just be conservative and say maybe up to $20 million in exploration expenditures this year.
I’m of the view that the cash that we have in the Treasury was given to us to grow silver ounces in the ground. I’ll be leveraging the cash that we have on hand to do so. We’ll also be looking at M&A opportunities.
We’ve been very selective on that front. We’ve only done two M&A transactions in the last five years, but both, I think, particularly the Homestake transaction unquestionably transformed the company from a $50 million explorer to the company it is today. Drilling M&A and I think it’s really important to continue to communicate the message to prospective investors and existing shareholders.
Just a quick note before we finish off on M&A. Can you comment on the increase in current liabilities here from $146,000 to… Yeah. If you look at that period of December 31st, what happens is we explore heavy from May to October.
By December 31st, and this will be similar when we put out our financials here in the coming weeks for a year end, you won’t see a big payable number. But the reason you see the payables is on September 30th with active exploration and a million dollar invoice coming in for drilling. So you just have a higher degree.
If we were to compare September 30th, 2024 to September 30th, 2023, you’re going to see a significant elevation between accounts payable measuring the same period of time. So it just has to do with the active ongoing large exploration program. Okay.
And so finally, on M&A, you mentioned that back in 2010, that was a great period for expansion. I’ve also heard that back in 2011, 2010, mostly 2011 when the market peaked back then, a lot of mistakes were made on the M&A front from the seniors. What kinds of lessons have you learned from that period? And what are these lessons that you’re going to apply going forward when you do more of your own M&A? That’s a really good question.
It’s a great question. I think the thing to focus on is not getting too carried up in the moment. So staying disciplined.
I think what happened to really give a little detail to what occurred in those moments is as the gold price rose, the industry took on a lot of debt. If you look at the early 2000s, the industry went into the 2000s with a billion dollars in debt. I think we exited 2010 with over $40 billion in debt.
So the industry took on a lot of debt. There was a lot of very expensive M&A transactions. Essentially, the industry went to grow.
And they did that without a lot of adherence or discipline around growing on a per share basis. Was it accretive? They were just so desperate for growth. And I think the lesson for me is to try to stay disciplined for looking at projects that work using a three-year trailing price average, not spot, number one.
And number two, just again, adhering to grade. Grade works in all environments. I’d rather be conservative when it comes to M&A because in M&A, unless you are in the bottom of a bear market, you’re going to have to pay a premium to get a transaction done.
So I think anytime it’s an expensive proposition. And so I just think being disciplined. And we did a lot of work in what I would describe as the bear market.
We did some big transformational deals. We did some M&A transactions. So as the market rises and as more and more companies get valued for their assets, I would be less inclined to do a flurry of M&A transactions.
So being a contrarian. So I’d actually be more likely to sell and then be a buyer. Interesting.
All right. A lot more to catch up on and follow up on in a couple of weeks when I see you at the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference. I think Dolly Varden will have a presence there, correct? Absolutely.
Okay. So we’ll see you there. Link down below.
If you’d like to check out the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference and also link down below if you’d like to learn more about Dolly Varden Silver. In the meantime, thank you for coming on the show, Sean. Good to see you.
We’ll speak again very soon. Thanks for having me. See you soon.
And thank you for watching. Don’t forget to like and subscribe.