Hi. I'm Montana, your host here at Cambridge House.
And I'm joined today by the one and only Byron King,
writer and editor of Whiskey and Gunpowder for your financial.
Byron. Thank you for being here.
Well, it's a pleasure to speak with you, Miss Montana.
Thank you.
Byron, as a veteran in the industry,
what is catching your eye on the market right now?
Well,
just in terms of what what what do I like?
I mean, I'm a I'm a hard asset guy, so you know, go, go, go.
You know, good companies in the gold, silver, precious metals space
in terms of industrial metals.
I mean, I love copper.
Copper, you know, copper is copper is a thing and it's becoming more of a thing.
There are many other ideas out there.
But let's watch.
Mean, we can we could spend all day talking about what I just mentioned.
Amazing.
Any particular companies catching your eye
Well,
for there are I mean, there's a broad universe out there
observing from these little nothing nobody companies that you never heard of.
All the great big guys you know.
And really, it depends on what you want as an investor.
I mean, if you want safety and security, you know, with some upside,
limited downside, you want to have a dividend
I mean, you know, I mean, the classic names, you know,
Rio Tinto, you know, big, big names like that, you know, new
you know, Newmont Gold, you know, Gold Corp,
those sorts of companies like that.
Those are those are the big names, you know, in the intermediate space.
I mean, again, well-run companies, great people
great assets, you know, companies like Agnico Eagle, for example,
you know, but then you start to get down into the junior space, you know,
and in terms of, you know, what are you looking for as a junior?
Again, you know,
if you're a novice investor, you're not too savvy on it or whatever.
You know, first of all, I'd be very cautionary about it
because this is a space where things go up and down and up for.
And you're wondering what why did that do that?
Well, you know, who knows?
I mean, that could be the phases of the moon, you know,
but I,
I certainly spent a lot of time, you know, covering the junior space up there.
And there are there are there are several companies.
I mean I mean, you want you want a couple of names.
I'll tell you, just to
do what I like you just looking at
I mentioned that I like copper.
Okay.
I think one of the really top notch up-And-Coming copper
exploration companies is is out in British Columbia.
It's called Kodiak Kodiak Copper.
Very, very great.
Very nice asset in terms of the geology, super strong management team.
Really outstanding, outstanding bunch of people.
And, you know, they're like, it's, it's pre-revenue new.
They're an exploration company.
They are they drill holes, they spend money.
They're not selling anything that, you know, but
but they've got a great story in terms of where they are.
Going, in terms of, you know, both what they're doing on the ground and then
in their arena of copper
Another company that I like quite a bit.
And it really was one of the absolute best performers in the junior space
back in way back in 20, 21 you know last year.
Yeah. You know
they were a three were a 12 cent stock and they wound up over a dollar.
So they did pretty well,
you know, in a year when the market was sort of drifting down.
And the name of that one is American Pacific, American Pacific they Trade,
you know, in the Canadian Venture Exchange and you know U.S.
ROTC over the counter they have three projects
which I like, I like, I like having more than one project,
you know, if you know what to do with it,
one of them is in a place that I'm sure you will recognize the name.
It's called a Montana.
Oh, yeah.
And American Pacific has a beautiful
right now.
It's you know, it's gold, silver and copper
play that they're working on in a place called Madison, Montana,
which is sort of in the Western side of the state.
You know, it's out in the rocky, you know, bear
to the mountains there of Montana.
But one of the great things about this particular deposit is
they've got somebody else paying the bills that somebody else has named Mr.
Rio Tinto.
Rio Tinto is putting literally millions of dollars into that
into the ground that they control.
The American Pacific controls the drill
up a beautiful, beautiful gold, silver copper plate already.
And underneath that, what Rio's looking for is
what's called a porphyry, which is like the big kahuna of copper deposit.
So that's just one of their one of their plays and down in a place called Nevada,
they have two
extremely promising gold plates in Nevada.
And again, both of these are
these are not that they're not the kind of big Carlton style gold.
They're they're more like the old traditional hard rock gold mining
super high grade like the old 1849 or
gold rush guys we're digging now so American Pacific is done
has done very well in in that regard
do you want you want some more I'll give it to you
absolutely as much as you're willing to give us if we have we're
I love to share in
in northern British Columbia there is a company
by the name of benchmark Benchmark Metals,
and they are an exploration company,
but they're exploring in an area that has known gold and silver.
I mean, it was a past producer
that kind of stopped producing back in the late eighties or early nineties
or so when the price of gold was just down in the dirt
and so far away too hard to mined, etc., etc.
And the price of gold isn't down there anymore.
Price goes up here, you know.
So in terms of what they're doing, the the the drilling program,
the just the crispness of the management is really sharp,
really good guys who are really good people who know what they're doing.
They're very aggressive program.
They have taken a very unknown
old deposit and in the last three years
built it into a very, very solid work
moving towards 2 million ounce type of deposit.
A lot of upside there, I think going ahead.
I mean, you know, go if gold just holds its own, let alone
if gold goes up, which could be a whole nother discussion.
Gold's going up.
So but I saw like benchmark and now we give you one final one.
Again, it's another Canadian plate
and that is
Sabina, ACB, Ayana, Sabina, Gold and Silver.
And they work way, way, way up north, like just up by the Arctic Circle
in Nunavut.
Kind of remote, the vast province of Canada.
Way up North
And what I really like about Sabina
I love their geology.
I mean, it's it's they have a
they have an all deposits called a banded iron formation.
And you say, well, I'm not a geologist until that's okay.
I'm going to tell you what it is.
I mean, it was laid down way over a billion years ago,
like in the in the early Earth when, you know, literally
there were deposits of pure iron that were laid down,
you know, in the in the ancient atmosphere, in the ancient
sea environment of an early, early earth.
Well, along with that banded iron, iron shirt, a lot of gold,
they they're sitting on a couple of million ounces of resource,
but it's way up north.
So as you can imagine, it's very expensive to develop that.
But about not too long ago, maybe a week and a half ago,
they announced a financing package
to be able to begin construction on a project to mine the school.
So so
this is a company that, you know, they're in the development stage.
You know, again, they're not a producer or not
they've already found they've found their gold.
You know, they could find more, but they found what they're looking for.
And it's hard to get to.
It's a remote jurisdiction, but they managed to raise enough money
to begin to build what they need to build to make it work.
And the great thing about a banded iron formation is that they go forever.
I mean, they just go for decades and decades.
And, you know, somebody will say, well, the life of the mine is only,
you know, ten years.
Yeah. And it's one of those situations
where they're going to have a ten year mine life for the next 100 years.
If the market doesn't reward you
for just being aggressive and growing your resource.
So you so you just you grow enough to get people's attention and then
but the mine just keeps on giving.
I mean, something like the home state mine in South Dakota, which lasted 125 years,
that was a banded iron formation or some of the other great iron place.
So so I just I just named four companies that I like
that I'm looking at that I, you know, I,
you know, in the sense that I'm not, I'm not anybody's personal financial advisor.
I don't give personal financial advice.
I'm just, I'm just telling you what to like, you know.
Right.
When you want to get there.
And I like it because, you know, I like the geology.
I like the people I like how things have developed in the last couple of years.
And, you know, obviously that includes the covid years when
all it's going to be a lot of a lot of great companies really took it
and took a big punch in the nose, you know,
in the last couple of years,
just couldn't travel, couldn't go to meetings, couldn't you know, people
couldn't get the site, couldn't couldn't get the geologists there, couldn't
get the rock samples back, couldn't get the samples back from the lab.
It's just been a real nasty couple of years in terms of getting things done.
But these are companies that have managed to get things done.
And just expanding on that.
What do you see that you are currently deploying capital
into any of these companies or any companies in general?
Oh, sure. I mean, you should you should.
Just as I said, I am not giving anybody personal
financial advice, but I would like to think that
people might want to know that I do eat my own cooking, you know,
and and so I'm I'm perfectly I'm perfectly happy to put
you know, to put my own funds into into companies like that.
Yeah. Amazing. Thank you so much.
Any other tips or tricks you would give junior investors investing or otherwise?
Well, again, the junior mining
space is a very it can be a very treacherous space.
I mean, because things move wildly.
Stories very you know, you you know, you hear all sorts
you hear these great stories and, you know, oh, I was in the chat room
and I heard about companies you know, I saw some some emails showed up
and it talked about this company, X, Y, Z, or something like.
Be very, very careful in those.
You know, it
went when somebody just sort of handing it to, you know, they're just saying,
you know, I'm going to give you this special offer, you know.
Yeah.
You and, you know, 20,000, 30,000 100,000 other people.
You all you all get the special offer, you know?
I know.
I said, well,
you, you're just named for for company you giving me the special offer too
it's not a special offer.
I'm not trying to sell you anything if you, if you have the slightest
even this functional skepticism about where I'm coming from,
don't, don't it don't even, don't even look at these companies, okay?
They don't you know,
they're going to do fine whether you buy in or buyout.
I mean, all I can say is that in my humble opinion, as the as
somebody who has you know
looked at the company, as somebody who, you know,
I mean, I like you know, I like these things
I've been doing this geology stuff for I mean, for many many years,
you know, I'm I'll just tell you that, you know, I started
I started acting like a geologist when I was a freshman in college.
And that was that was 49 years ago.
So so I've been doing this stuff for a while.
I know a few things.
And again, you know, you have to like the geology
and you have to, you have to understand it. And I do that.
That's just what I do.
I mean, when I'm not talking to people like yourself or when I'm not, you know,
just living my life or where I, you know, when I see it living my life,
this is my life, you know,
I mean, you don't see my desk, but I mean, I mean, yeah, this is
this is a chunk of copper, you know, this is copper here This is your thing.
Went off peninsula of Michigan.
This is what copper used to be, you know?
I mean, this is I mean, they chop this stuff right out of the rocks, you know,
it's it's what copper mining used to be today.
And they mined copper at a fraction of a gram per ton, you know,
a fraction of a percent of a fraction of a percent
for copper and gold at a fraction of a gram per ton.
You know,
my idea
is to find companies that are doing better than that, you know, like Kodiak or,
you know, like what's going on with American Pacific and Madison Montana,
you know,
so so I do think the hard asset route is is strong.
You know, the
we're living in an inflationary time.
All you have to do is have been reading the news of the newspaper
for the last couple of months, and you've seen these outrageous
spikes of inflation.
You know, the consumer price index was up.
You know what they said, seven and a half percent or something like that.
They like rugs.
You know, it's got to be 15%.
I mean, the price of used cars is up 40%.
The price of gasoline is up 50%.
You know, go to the store and try to, you know, go buy some,
go buy a steak or go buy a, you know, a pound of bacon.
Or something, you know, that prices up go the bakery, the price of bread.
It's, you know, it's everything.
It's housing, it's
coffee,
it's legal services, it's accounting services, you name it, everything's up.
So we're living in an inflationary time.
And then just I think it was yesterday they said that not only is the Consumer
Price Index up 7% or whatever it is, the
the producer price index is up over 9%.
You know, the producer price.
Now, that's that's not what you pay at the store where I so that's what
the people who produce the stuff at the store and that's what they pay
their prices are going up 9% for the for what they sell at the store.
What do you think
is going to happen at the store when the store goes to sell it to you?
You know well, guess what I mean, we're on this.
So so what do you do?
You know, it's like, well, gee, you know, I live in this economy.
And, you know, we use money, we use dollars,
you know, I mean, we use credit cards that are denominated
in dollars and, you know, yeah, that is how we do our thing.
You know, but at the same time, it's you want it you want to be protecting,
you know, what you have.
I mean, if you just if you just have
if you have a bunch of money, you know, a lot of big wad of cash,
and you stuff it in your mattress or you take it down to the bank and put
it in a savings account
next year, you'll have that same big wad of cash,
that same amount of money in the savings account
because the interest rates
are like nothing, you know, fraction of nothing, you know,
and you'll have less purchasing power.
You'll have lost, you know, seven and a half percent at the consumer level
nine and a half percent at the producer level.
Well, the value of that money.
So you want you want that money to try to stay ahead of the game.
And one of the angles for that
is to invest in hard assets,
real, you know, real companies that make real things, you know.
No, you know, not mining companies that exploration companies, they're out there,
they're turning they're turning rocks, just brown stains on hillside.
They're turning those into or deposits where deposits have a certain value
resources have value.
And so so that's that's where, you know, that's where I'm coming from.
People like me in in the in the sector, that's where we're coming from.
So you know, if you're not
familiar with the mining space, it can be treacherous.
You know, I mean, there's
a lot of just a lot of companies out there that just aren't any good
there are some that are, you know, pretty good.
And, you know, the effort you know, the idea is to just try to sift and filter
and and figure out, you know, who's got who's got the good assets
and who's got good management teams that can make things work.
You know, there are there are there are quite a few good companies out there.
But the idea is to be able to figure it out.
Awesome sound advice.
Thank you so much, Byron.
And you write an amazing newsletter.
Where can my listeners find that well,
I was writing one you mentioned that Whiskey and gunpowder for a while.
The publisher and I you know,
we suspended that a while back I'm working on another newsletter now.
It's called Lifetime Income Report,
which is part of it's what we used to call the Igor, a group.
But and it's still around.
But it's the modified the name.
We're in Saint Paul Publishing.
But if you go for a lifetime income report
and lifetime you report, Byron, you know, you will find your way.
You will wind your way to to a to a to a website.
And then there's another one that I write for, and you can
you can get on there
at a basic level, it really at no cost at all.
It's called Bonner Private Research.
Bonner, Bonner, New York, nice Irishman.
Bonner, Private Research to Substack.
Amazing. Thank you so much, Byron McGill.