GOLD & OIL: Getting AGGRESSIVE in 2025 (Uncut) 02-02-2025

GOLD & OIL: Getting AGGRESSIVE in 2025, Inflation & Tariffs | Rick Rule

You and I talked about it in a past interview. I think that the arithmetic around US debt and deficits means that we’re going to face higher inflation in years ahead than people believe we are, which will be very good for the gold price, irrespective of who leads what country. I’m much more aggressive towards Canadian oil and gas on the positive side.

I think that the thought that President Trump would impose a 25 percent tariff on Canadian oil and gas is, it’s a fantasy, it’s fiction, 50 percent of the audience is first timers. And it’s interesting that even with the first timers, the first timers seem to be better informed than the veterans used to be. That’s a very bullish sign.

Special coverage of the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference is brought to you by First Majestic Silver, listed on the TSX and the NYSE under the ticker AG. Hello and welcome back to Soar Financially here from the floor of the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference. As you know, my name is Kai Hoffman.

I’m the Ed.J.R. mining guy over on X, and I’m joined by none other than Rick Rule, co-founder of BattleBank. Rick, you’re omnipresent here. Thanks so much for making the time.

It’s good to see you. Pleasure. Thank you for having me back.

Absolutely. How can we not? How can we not, Rick? I don’t even know where to start. A lot’s going on in this sector.

A lot’s going on in this space. You’ve been on every stage, I think in every workshop room, giving presentations, part of keynotes. Where do we start? Let’s start geopolitics.

I think that’s an interesting one. I don’t want to talk politics, but maybe we can frame it that way. There’s turmoil.

There’s fresh blood everywhere. Canada’s getting a new premier at some point. The U.S. just got a new president today.

He’s been elected, and he’s been acting president. Europe is going through a lot of changes. Where do we start? Is mining getting more interesting now in those jurisdictions, maybe? Maybe we’ll start there.

Well, mining’s always been interesting. Understand that mining’s a long-term gain, and the idea that somebody necessarily makes a difference over four years in a 10-year game is a different circumstance. I think in the very near term, as an example to perhaps answer your question, the Trump regime will, I think, be more rational with regards to permitting than the regime that was just passed.

You’ll note as an example that one project in Arizona, the Resolution Deposit, 1.2 billion tons, a world-scale deposit of 1.5% copper, three times the average grade worldwide, has been stuck in permitting for 26 years. That’s a problem. To the extent that the regulatory climate becomes what I would describe as more rational, that will benefit people who mine in the U.S. Certainly in Canada, if you’re in the oil and gas business, the decision by Prime Minister Trudeau to pursue other employment opportunities is a wonderful circumstance.

The idea that the Prime Minister didn’t see that there was a business case for natural gas when all of his customers saw it… Germany begging for it. Germany begging for it, Japan begging for it, China begging for it, says a lot. And interestingly, the Trump election, I think, bodes well for Canadian oil and gas in the sense that Mr. Trump will perhaps remove some of the regulatory bottlenecks around the transmission of Canadian oil and gas out of Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast refiners and to LNG plants on the U.S. East Coast.

So I think there are certain circumstances where it makes a business case. I also think that the wind is in the sails for resource and precious metals reasons, for reasons that are not geopolitical. You and I talked about it in a past interview.

I think that the arithmetic around U.S. debt and deficits means that we’re going to face higher inflation in years ahead than people believe we are, which will be very good for the gold price, irrespective of who leads what country. And I think three decades of underinvestment in productive capacity around many materials and increasing numbers of people bode well for other industrial materials. And going back to geopolitics, the emerging conflicts between, as an example, China and the United States, the need for raw materials to support industrial growth in frontier markets where they need to displace existing people like the European community in the U.S. means that perhaps the cost of capital for resource companies come down as industrial producers OEM manufacturers, things like that, and places like Japan, places like Korea, places like the United States, places like China participate in this global geopolitical game.

Have you adjusted your investment profile in the last six months, since we’re on the topic of geopolitics with the changes? We talked about is Canada still a tier one mining jurisdiction in that context? Have you adjusted that? You know, Kai, my opinion is very unpleasant with regards to that. I think every jurisdiction in the world is bad. I don’t think there are any good ones.

I believe that the government that’s most dangerous is the one that’s closest to you. I’m here in British Columbia. People in British Columbia, because they understand the risks here, think it’s a great jurisdiction.

I think it’s a horrible jurisdiction. I’ve been treated better in Congo than I have in B.C., or California, for that matter, where I was from. So I think all the jurisdictions are lousy.

Within Canada, my preference would be to be in Alberta, in Saskatchewan, or in Quebec, rather than other provinces. If I was going to be in B.C., I’d want to be in Talltan land. I’d want to be in First Nations land, where the First Nations were intelligent and supportive of resource development.

I think the U.S. regulatory climate is going to get a bit better, but remember that Trump doesn’t control the individual states. So if you’re looking to play the Trump game, look to play the Trump game in Alaska, look to play the Trump game in Wyoming, look to play the Trump game in Nevada, look to play the Trump game in Texas, and be very careful everywhere else. You know, he’s not the boss.

In jurisdictions that look really, really, really bad, like Mexico, understand that the bark is probably worse than the bite. She has been dialing back some of her statements. Yes, she is a dyed-in-the-wool commie.

You know, she is. But she also understands that her party needs to get elected. And there are places in Mexico where, without mining, they’re literally picking corn and picking beans.

So what she has said is, to the extent that a mining project generates local support, local goodwill, that she will support it on a national level. What she has said is that localities are going to begin to control the process in Mexico. I happen to believe that’s a lie, but it’s a wonderful-sounding word, because that’s the way it should be in Mexico.

So politics, very, very, very mixed message. Yeah, but you haven’t adjusted anything. Nothing.

To put it in a nutshell, haven’t adjusted anything. Just playing it by ear. One exception to that would be, I’m much more aggressive towards Canadian oil and gas on the positive side.

I think that the thought that President Trump would impose a 25 percent tariff on Canadian oil and gas, it’s a fantasy. It’s fiction. Yeah, well, with the change to the Conservatives here in Canada, I think, as you mentioned, Keystone Pipeline.

Was it even Trump, I think, mentioned it, that it would be one of the first things he puts back on the agenda, understandably? So have you moved assets in that direction? I have. I have been buying. I mean, I had reasonable holdings of Canadian oil and gas stocks anyway, because they were cheap.

Now that the political winds have changed, there’s a catalyst in place which will make something cheap not so cheap, and I like that. So you’re not buying anymore? You’re just holding now? No, I’m buying. So you haven’t missed the boat just yet? Well, I already own them, and I’m buying much more.

OK, makes sense. All right, very catalyst-driven there. I gave a workshop here, and we’re trying to tie a lot of topics together here with Eurek.

We talked about the Fed and the sentiment on the junior space, and it sort of plays into the geopolitics question a little bit. But I noticed that the Fed, whenever they do something, the junior mining space reacts because we’re tied to a lot of risk capital as well. Back in March and May 2022, the Fed started raising rates, wallets went shut, nothing’s happened.

I finally had a chance to do my gut check and actually look at the charts and the volumes, and it completely dried out at that point. 50 basis point cut in May 2022, the sector was done, hasn’t come back yet. When you look at or when you listen to Fed media or Jerome Powell speak and you read the press conference details, what do you look for? Do you look at that as an impulse for this space as well? Is that even a factor? Not for me.

What interests me recently, and this has been a factor, is the fact that the Fed is cutting rates and the long-term rate has risen, which is to say that the Fed has lost control of the long end of the interest rate curve. What big investors are saying is that the Fed’s estimates of inflation going forward are wrong. They understand that the Fed is trying to lower interest rates despite a strong economy for political purposes, but the risks to them are increasing rather than decreasing.

So the Fed is lowering the short-term cost of funds and the market is taking up the long-term cost of funds. That’s extremely telling. The Fed wishes it wasn’t true, but the Fed is beginning, as it did in the Clinton years, to lose control of the long end of the interest rate, and that’s very interesting.

That term, bond vigilantes, comes to mind here, that a lot of people have mentioned here on the program as well, just really pushing or forcing the Fed’s hand. They shouldn’t be able to lower anymore. But that affects us negatively.

Let’s say that happens. Let’s say the 10-year goes to 5.5%, 6%. What does that do to the Fed? We have to play that game a little bit, but what does that do to our sector? That’s the end of the coin.

No, Kai, you have to. You trade stocks. I buy them for the four- or five-year context based on what I think they’re worth.

What the market tells me is that the gold price is going to go higher because inflation is going to go higher. It might be that there is less dumb money in the space as a consequence of a risk-on trade or a risk-off trade, and it might be that something that’s a 45-cent stock becomes a 30-cent stock. I don’t care much about that.

I care about a 45-cent stock where I’m okay if it went to 30 because I think it’s going to $4. So, for me, I look at things very, very differently. The near-term cost of funds doesn’t impact my decision at all because I’m not smart enough to be a trader.

I’m an old man, and if you take away most of my downside, you can have some of my upside, particularly the upside is due to time. When I look at the interest rates, I’m looking at something very different. I’m looking at the economic signals, not the flow funds.

Our sector reached $4.5 billion last year within companies below $1.5 billion market cap, financing below $100 million, just pure equity funds. You always use the term, like, well, the sector is overfunded. It’s way overfunded.

There’s 1,496 companies in our space. Like in Canada alone. I haven’t even looked at Australia.

Yep. Way too many. How many do we need? In this country, maybe 150.

Maybe 150? Yeah, I mean, the industry is way, way, way overfunded. A lot of companies, probably 80% of them in space, if they raise any capital at any price, their cost of funds is sub-zero because while they have a positive market cap, they have a negative enterprise value. They are, on a net present value, they’re worth less than nothing, and it would be lovely, although it would never happen, if we raised the same amount of companies, but we raised it for 90% fewer companies, so that we adequately funded the good companies, and we starved the bad companies.

It’ll never happen, but it’s something that speculators need to keep in the back of their heads. Yes, there’s so many financings, like alternative exchanges that are happening, like average financing size on one of the alternative exchanges is $1.3 million. The median is 580,000.

So let’s think about that just for fun. It probably costs $250,000 a year to run a public company for legal audit exchange fees before you’ve paid rent, before you’ve paid for the copier, and before you’ve paid salaries. Let’s say that bare bones GNA for an issuer is half a million bucks.

Let’s say that it is reasonable to spend a quarter of your capital deployment every year on GNA. What that means is that if your company isn’t spending $2 million a year, that they have too much GNA. What on earth is somebody going to do with a $600,000 financing? I’ll tell you what they’re going to do.

They’re going to salary it up. That’s what they’re going to do. So scale, even in the small companies, matters.

Companies that aren’t deploying $2 million a year are, by definition, spending too much in GNA. They’re inefficient. Yeah.

They’re just burning capital. There’s no value created. Besides some geophysics, which doesn’t move the stock, you’re not getting anything done.

Right. And I don’t care about moving the stock. I care about adding value to a property.

I’m really, really, really okay if they don’t move the stock as long as they add value. That’s what I mean. But usually, if it creates value, it moves the stock over time, right? Passive investing is another one.

I quickly want to talk about it. I’m jumping around a little bit today with you, Rick, but are you a fan of it? What do you think of the GDX, GDXJ? What are your thoughts? I used to be really, really, really negative on ETFs, despite the fact that I’m the largest shareholder of Sprott, which is an ETF sponsor. But I used to look at some of these indexes, and if there were 35 companies in an index, there might be 20 that I wouldn’t own with my own money.

And the idea that I’d pay somebody a fee to own stocks I wouldn’t own seemed inelegant. Then I recognized that most investors aren’t willing to do as much work with me. And for them, they want the beta.

They want to be in the market, but they want to be in a market in a way that allows them to spend time with their grandchildren, stuff like that. So I get it. I’ve come around there.

I would rather see them in the market than see them not in the market for their own purposes, not for the market’s purposes. So I’m more inclined towards ETFs now than I used to be. Somebody who gets in an ETF needs to understand that they’re going to slightly underperform the market beta because there’s a management team, you know, a management fee.

But I’m okay with that. I think that people, even in ETFs, overtrade. Let me give you a really funny anecdote, Kai, I don’t know if you know this.

The huge Fidelity mutual fund group looked at their whole investor base and they sliced it up by age, region, race, all kinds of things. And the component of their investor base that had the best investment returns over 10 years, you know what they were? Dead people. Dead people.

People who didn’t trade at all, didn’t chase the latest fade. They cut their customer base by every possible criterion. And the group that performed the best over time were dead people.

Because they don’t do anything. How do we take that over to the mining space though? Because the stories can change quickly. So how do we apply that? That’s easy.

Use common sense and don’t chase fads. I remember the first time you interviewed me, Kai, the uranium price was about 20 bucks a pound. 20 bucks a pound.

And nobody wanted to own uranium stocks, nobody. It cost the industry 60 dollars a pound to make the stuff. They were selling for 20, losing 40 bucks a pound and being dumb miners trying to make it up on volume.

Now, the price of uranium had to go up or the lights would go out. Germany proved it, right? Conclusively proved it. The narrative, I could explain about uranium, it was easy to understand, but because the price was lousy, because the stocks hadn’t performed, nobody cared.

Fast forward, the price goes from 20 bucks a pound to 100 bucks a pound. It doesn’t need to go up anymore. The stocks are up fourfold, fivefold, sixfold.

The narrative is the same, but now the narrative has been demonstrated by price. And everybody wants to own the space. Just in time for it to be over-owned and fall by half.

Natural resource investors need to understand that in natural resources, you are either a contrarian or you’re going to be a victim. Those are your two choices. They’re both okay with me.

But what that means is that you pay less attention to what’s hot and more attention to what’s not. Don’t pay attention to what’s in favor unless you’re looking to sell something. Pay attention to what’s out of favor.

I was just looking around here. It’s like I did a bit of a crosscut as well. It doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of lithium companies here.

There’s a few, but no one helium company, I think. What’s out of favor? What’s hot right now? I have a hard time putting a thumb on hot right now. I think lithium is going to be really out of favor in two years.

I don’t think the hate is done, but that’s a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful example. There was a proliferation of lithium companies four or five years ago. It was the flavor of the month.

And a bunch of people that failed a bunch of other businesses went to lithium. We said that there was a lithium shortage. There never was.

There was a shortage of lithium refining capacity. We went out looking for lithium because we’d never looked before. We used a lot of money.

We found a lot of it. Probably 150 deposits. Just go to Home Depot, buy a pack of sand, you’ll find some.

Correct. Correct. I think that 10 of those lithium deposits that we found get built over the next 10 years.

I think two years from now, the Flotsam and Jetsam, I think that the same hate will accompany lithium that accompanied silver, say January of last year, or uranium before that, will come to the lithium space. And when I see comments on X that just reflect genuine hate for lithium, I might look at it. The caveat is, of course, that people like MidAmerican Energy and ExxonMobil believe that direct lithium extraction from saltwater brines will work.

If that happens, the game’s over. All the lithium that’s going to be needed in the world will be produced by Exxon and Shell, by oil companies or geothermal energy companies. I don’t know if it’ll work.

I’m not making a technology call. I’m just saying that the caveat is all about technology and direct lithium extraction. Rio Tinto made a big bet.

I forgot the name of the company it bought, but it started with a big A. Massive deal. That was an amazing deal. That was one I had my eyes on, frankly.

And I thought I had two years to think about it. And Rio Tinto is really, really, really forward thinking. Rio Tinto, with Jadar and some other projects, would like to be the largest lithium producer in the world.

Rio Tinto could afford to be wrong. Or too early. Well, too early.

I think Rio Tinto likes to be too early, if they can get world-class assets. But also, if that asset was 5% of our asset base and they were wrong by half, it wouldn’t change anybody’s decision as to what to have for breakfast. But it was an interesting acquisition.

You see that Zijin recently did the same thing. So it may be that the circumstance I look for two years from now, which is to say widespread hate, doesn’t occur because the best assets in the space have already been picked off by majors. That could happen.

Every conference has a bit of a theme. There’s always that underlying conversation, always that one topic that keeps popping up. What have you picked up here? Or what do you think is the underlying theme here? You mentioned uncertainty a little bit.

The only reason I would listen for a theme is to generate a sell signal. Whatever’s popular is where I don’t want to be. I haven’t seen a theme.

What I have noticed is that attendance here is probably up by 20%. I am told by some of the exhibitors, I’m not an exhibitor, that the quality of the questions is better. In other words, there’s not just more people, there’s better informed people.

If that’s true, that’s a hugely bullish signal. A lot of first-timers. 50% of the audience is first-timers.

It’s interesting that even with the first-timers, the first-timers seem to be better informed than the veterans used to be. That’s a very bullish sign. Yeah, a lot of people that wanted to come here but never had a chance or just needed a little push, they made the trip.

So that’s interesting to see. If you juxtapose the general malaise that we’re seeing in resource equities relative to commodities prices with the fact that despite that malaise, attendance here is up and median IQ is up, that’s a fairly bullish dichotomy, I think. Absolutely.

Absolutely. What do you want investors to take away? You’ve been on a bunch of panels and I think you gave a workshop presentation as well. What was your idea? What did you want the investor to walk away with here? The first thing for speculative investors is to own fewer stocks.

Most investors operate under the theorem, got a hunch, bet a bunch. They prefer to feel rather than to think. And I think that investors need to think rather than to feel.

That would be my first thing. The second dictum is that you have to be a contrarian or you’re going to be a victim. Don’t chase the latest fade.

Remember fidelity. That’s important. And the third is that time has to be on your side.

I’ve now graded CHI 100,000 portfolios in 10 years. So I’ve learned a lot about how they invest and the mistakes that people make. And I would say that the most critical mistake, other than owning too many stocks, is that most people invest in pretty good narratives.

Five-year narratives, six-year narratives, secular narratives. But then they employ two or three-month strategies. Now if the strategy that you’re trying to invoke takes five years to unfold and the time frame that you’re willing to invest is two months or three months, how does that work? When I look back over the 10-baggers and 20-baggers and 30-baggers that I’ve enjoyed in my career, the average lap time is five or six years.

And speculators are really attracted to the 10-bagger or 20-bagger, but they’re not so attracted to the five or six years. If you aren’t willing to allow the accretion of value over time and the compounding, you’re not going to enjoy the game. So people need to accommodate themselves to the fact that they want something, which is to say exponential near-term gains, that’s unavailable.

You can’t have it. You can want it all you want, but it’s a very inefficient framework for decision-making. This sector doesn’t lend to two- or three-month thinking anyway.

It just doesn’t work. Like, drill campaigns, the laps take longer, you can’t apply that thinking. It just doesn’t work.

It’s a really good idea. If what you’re talking about is exploration success, likely it requires two drill campaigns. So that likely requires 18 months.

If you require 18 months to answer the unanswered question, and you have a two or three… If you get shaken out of a stock over a long weekend, you know, the problem’s in the market, the problem’s you. Rick, I always try to come up with questions that we haven’t talked about, because I know you do a ton of interviews, and I’m trying to come up with a certain one. And that’s why we’re jumping around a little bit.

But we haven’t talked about you buying debt in some mining companies, because you name yourself the credit guy as well. So, like, we’ve got to talk about how attractive is that to- do you even look at that, like, maybe as a baseline? I look at it a lot. People need to remember that the worst piece of debt is better than the best piece of equity on any individual balance sheet.

You’re ahead of them in terms of liquidation preference. The difficulty with Wall Street-generated debt is that the Wall Street firms structure the debt to favor the issuer, because that’s who pays them the commission. When I structure a piece of debt on behalf of my portfolio, on behalf of Orion, on behalf of Sprott, the covenants and conditions are very, very, very different.

I look at the covenants on debt that I see that’s structured by Wall Street, and it basically says that the issuer repays me if and as when convenient for them. That doesn’t work for me. When capital’s tough to raise, sometimes the conditions and restrictions become stricter.

And in those circumstances, I’m attracted to it. I remember back to the decade of the 80s when the oil and gas business fell apart. And I was able to buy convertible debentures that had strict covenants.

They had been written when interest rates were 12 and 15 percent, so they had 12 percent cover rates. And they were selling at 30, which meant that my running yield was at 25 percent, and my yield to maturity was 40 percent, and they were good covenants. I mean, that was when I made my name in the bond business.

You know, I noticed that incongruity. I called up a friend of mine named Doug Casey. I took him through the case, and he wrote one of the best newsletters ever written that month on those bonds and made a fortune for his subscribers, made a fortune for me.

It was really, truly circumstantial. I haven’t seen that circumstance yet. If we have a cataclysmically bad market at some point in time, I’d love to go back.

How far down the value chain do you go? When you look at that, like, like, like there’s certain, like, there’s rules like explorers with debt are no-go, for example. Like, for me, yeah, it’s like, you know, in general, it’s like, nothing’s no-go for me. I will do a private startup with extraordinarily high quality people.

You know, I’ll do that. So nothing’s off the table. For me, it’s always a juxtaposition of relative risk to reward.

I’m an old man now. If you take away most of my downside, you can have a bunch of my upside. I’m fine with that trade.

You know, but all the money I now invest sensibly, I made by speculating wildly and I’m good at it. So I enjoy that part of the market too. But the juxtaposition of risk to reward has to be favorable to me.

The more risk I take, the higher the quality of the person I take the risk with. Right? I mean, really, really, really, you know, really high quality people. And the riskier bet I take, the more out of favor the sector has to be.

Because I want the bump. When you go from hated to tolerated, that’s the free money. In uranium, when stuff went from hated to tolerated, I sold like 30% of my position and I had 70% for free.

You know, it was a wonderful circumstance. Nothing changed except for the outlook around uranium. So, you know, those are the two caveats I’d give you.

I will take lots and lots and lots of risk if there’s a really disaggregated bet. And that’s in my favor. What was your performance last year? I don’t know, but also, you know, because I don’t have products to be measured by anymore.

I will say this. I was really surprised. I thought, because I listened to too many interviewers who were depressed about the portfolio performance, that the last two years were pretty bad.

And then a couple of months ago, I looked at my own portfolios over the last two years. I had two really good years without knowing it. Because I don’t pay attention to the aggregate number of the portfolio.

I pay attention to some of the stocks in the portfolio. I pay attention to how much free cash I have. I don’t invest anymore for consumer goods.

I’ve already bought everything I want. So the sort of number at the end of the day is less important to me than how much risk I took, how much fun I had, all that kind of stuff. And I was really surprised.

One thing I did right is I concentrated for the most part on bigger companies. So the performance I had in things like Franco, Nevada and Exxon and Wheaton Precious were very, very, very good. But I surprised myself in retrospect with the returns I earned.

I earned on things like Philo, NGEX, G-Mining. You know, there were a couple of circumstances like that where I thought that the odds were really, really, really, truly in my favor. And I forgot how big a check I wrote.

That’s when you find that share certificate at the door. It’s like, yeah. No, but is that a function of the market? Like the bigger companies are moving, obviously, like they’ve done decently well, or is it just a function of you? At that point in time, it seemed like there was better risk and reward.

When Exxon got kicked out of the S&P 500 or out of the Dow 30, I said, well, they can only get kicked out once, right? So this is non-repeatable. The best asset allocator in the space, when they got kicked out, the yield was over eight. I thought, like, why should I buy a penny dreadful when I’m pretty sure I can get a triple on the most stable, best asset allocator in the space? Why on earth would I take risk if I think I can get a 30 percent annualized rate of return over five years in the best name in the space? Why would I buy a penny dreadful when Exxon is going to pay me 8 percent current yield and it’s going to triple in five years? So that’s what I did.

So, Rick, if we sit down on December 31st, 2025, and you look back at the year, what were you going to talk about? That’s a really good question, and the answer is I don’t know. I suspect that the Canadian oil and gas sector will be more closely, closer to fully priced. So we probably won’t be there.

Some of it will have to do with whether we have peace in the Middle East and peace in the Ukraine. I don’t know the answer to that, but that would probably make me more generously bullish, except in the case of the oil and gas business. My suspicion is that the surprise this coming year is that gold will do better than people think it is because people have an expectation with regards to inflation that I think is unrealistically low.

I think the problem that we have around, in particular, U.S. debt and deficits and the interplay between interest rates, which are low, and the inflation rate, which is higher than people think it is, is very, very, very bullish to gold. Whether or not that plays out in 2025 or whether or not it takes the market longer to realize that, recognize that, I don’t know. So gold is beating the S&P 500 again this year? I think so.

That’s an interesting question, too. People tell me, and I don’t know because I’m not a generalist investor, that the S&P is horrifically overpriced. I look at the S&P and it would appear that all the leaderships in 10 or 12 stocks, there are some components of the S&P 500 that, although I’m not a consumer products analyst or something like that, don’t appear to me to be irrationally overpriced.

As I say, I’m not a generalist investor, but I think what you see is that the market cap space, less than $5 billion, but particularly less than a billion dollars, is much less efficiently priced than the high-tech growth stocks. I’m not in that space, so it doesn’t particularly matter to me. But I wonder about the aggregate level of valuations, given the very, very, very, very narrow breadth of market participation.

Well, I think NVIDIA was responsible for 22 percent of the S&P gains last year, which is ridiculous, if you think about it, just context. Wow. Rick, I always appreciate your time.

Thank you so much for stopping by. Where can we send our viewers? I’ll give you an incentive. Any viewers who like what I have to say about natural resources can personalize it.

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Fantastic. Rick, really appreciate it. Always good to see you.

Happy New Year again. And we’ll catch up very soon again. Everybody else, thank you so much for tuning in here to soar financially from the floor of the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference.

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Thank you.