Special coverage from the floor of the Rural Symposium is brought to you by Palisades Gold. It's a gold market in a bull or bear market. Well, there's no better indicator of where the markets are headed than the mining sector itself. We're here at the Rural Symposium in Boca Raton, Florida, and here with me is Colin Cantal, CEO of Palisades Gold. Welcome to the show, Colin. This is a symposium, a gathering of companies that Rick, legendary in the space, has personally handpicked and companies that he likes himself. Now, there's a sort of different kinds of companies and business models here. Tell us about Palisades Gold, the model that you follow, and more or less how you're different from an investment standpoint than a junior or a developer or even a senior. Yeah, so Palisades Gold Corp is an investment company. There are some investment companies in Canada, but we look around the room and we're definitely very unique against most of the other companies that Rick has brought here as well. We have focused the last 18 months on a very unique business model, which is we've been a very active financier in Canada. We've actually participated in about 450 financing, so about one financing a day over the last 18 months. And in doing that, we've invested about $500 million into the sector. We've been focused on trying to identify the highest quality explorers, developers, and production companies. But core to the investments we've been making is looking for warrant coverage so that our investors, as a public company, get access to the leverage that's only afforded by warrants and the upside of warrants in a bull market. So that's part of what we do. The other thing is we're active company builders. We founded a company called Newfound Gold Corp that I was the CEO of for about four and a half years until I handed that on to a group of mine builders. We also founded companies out of that called Earth Labs, Nevada King, Made in America Gold, Radio Fuels. So we do kind of two things, active company building, and then we have this warrant strategy that we're currently very excited about. I want to come back to your company and your investments that you're making and the capital aspect. But just talk about the market itself first. Examine the next statement, true or false. there's no capital right now for the junior mining space. Definitely false. Because I get that sometimes from companies. Like, why aren't you raising? Well, because there's no capital. You know, I think it is specific to certain companies, but here's what I can tell you from what we've seen. We were getting very, very high quality companies that we were able to participate in with the caveat that we did want to do it with a warrant. Now, companies, if they had it their way, they would issue shares to people as a straight share. They don't want the dilution that a warrant gives. What we've seen, particularly starting since Q4 of 2025 and the Q1 2026, is it's very hard to get a warrant on a long duration. Also, the unit prices are going up because a lot of these high quality companies, they do have stock share prices that have materially moved up. So we see a lot of competition that was not there last year, the year before. If a generalist investor were to ask you, hey, Colin, it sounds like you're a VC in the resource space. Is that a fair comparison to make? Yeah, I think that that's an excellent comparison to make. We very much are a venture capital. We're focused and most interested on the highest beta portion of the sector, and that is the micro caps. It tends to be the explorers and developers. That's where we want to get the most leverage, and that's why we've designed the strategy we have so that when the money trickles down, as they say, and those things start to move, we're going to see an outsized move. Tech VCs understand for the most part that not everything in the portfolio is going to be a winner. But as long as they can get one or two unicorns, it offsets their losses. Is that your philosophy as well? That's certainly part of it. So because we have 330 companies in our portfolio, even if you don't hit a raging bull market, the chances you're going to see a drill hole hit and somebody make a discovery or a development story hit a critical milestone. And we have seen that. But we also very much are believers in the gold market. And we think that what's going to really carry us to the promised land here is going to be money flows coming into the sector. Right. And an investor would ask you, well, Colin, you've got 330 companies in your portfolio. That's a very diversified portfolio. Why invest with you? Why not just invest in an index fund? PDXJ, for example, how would you answer that? So ETFs can't properly service the junior market and historically through past full cycles what happens is typically a Canadian investment company ends up filling that niche. ETFs are not allowed to participate in financings so they can't get the benefit of a warrant and ETFs generally can't buy things that are less than a 50 million dollar market cap despite the fact that those companies oftentimes provide the biggest return. So what we're able to do by the nature that we're not an ETF, but we're an investment company as a designation, is we can participate in these financings, build a basket. And yes, you're right, we have 330 companies, but most of those are through warrant positions, which means we don't actually have capital or equity at stake in those positions right now. We just have a free lever to upside at this point. Once we participate in the financing, if we decide to sell the shares and we just hold the warrants well we no longer have anything further riding on that position until those warrants come in the money And so it gives us like 330 different levers where we don think they all going to be wildly successful But if we get a flow of capital into the space, we think quite a few of them are going to go well above exercise price for the benefit of our shareholders. Roughly what percentage of warrants are exercised? Well, right now, 32% of our warrants are in the money out of our 450 warrants. Just for clarity's sake, I say 450 financings, but 330 companies. Some companies we finance multiple times, and that's the discrepancy between those two numbers. So, yeah, 32% of them are in the money. And I showed a chart this morning during my talk where in August of 2025, so 11 months ago, our warrants were worth about $2.5 million on an intrinsic value, so almost nothing. And then the first inning of the game began, and we saw a great rise from August to January of this year. Our warrants went from $2.5 million to $130 million in the money, 25x return. That's just our warrants, not our newfound gold position or equity positions. Since then, it's pulled back to $60 million. So it's still markedly higher than it was at the beginning of the move back in August. And now we're just waiting for that next flow of capital to come into the space to see where things go next. When gold hit 5,000, and I'm guessing then most of your warrants were in the money at the time, did you think it's time to execute on some of these trades or exercise some of these warrants right at the top there? We took just a couple off the table, but that was more so because certain equities maybe got way out of line. But no, we didn't feel that way. And the reason is when we were accumulating the warrants, we focused on long duration. So from today, we have a 27 month average duration on our entire warrant portfolio, which runs until November of 2028. So our average expiration is still two years and three months out, which means, you know, back in January, we had a, you know, over two and a half years on those things. We just think that this market is very nascent. We don't think that retail money has come in. Look at the TSX Venture Exchange, which went from $600 to $3,400 in the 2002 to 2011 period. Right now, it's at $900. So, you know, this is a very starved sector in terms of investor interest. Yes, there are other capital writers at this point that are putting checks in and competing with us. But from a perspective of money coming in and lifting the sector, we don't think it's happened yet. Okay. Anything significantly fundamentally different with the financing space now versus, and I'll give you different timeframes. So right now gold is at $4,000. What's different now versus last year when gold was at $4,000? Presumably a lot, even though the price level is entirely the same, but it seems like back then when gold was rising from $3,000 to $4,000, sentiment was euphoric. And now that it's come back from $5,000 to $4,000, the sentiment has gone $180,000. Yeah, I think you've just touched on human nature and what we all fall prey to. In terms of the psychology of the companies, though, I think this is important. In 2025 and 2024, they were coming out of a long bear market. They didn't have capital. They took the opportunity to raise capital. So now, if you're a high-quality issuer and your share price, let's say, went from $1 in January to 50 cents today, but you have $20 million in your balance sheet, you're not going to go to market. You have the ability to say, let me just wait it out. And so the financing side of it's fundamentally different because you had the urgency at that time and the need for those companies to grab money, which you don't have anymore. If there's a company that has no money right now, it means they're a new company or something was a little off that they didn't take any money last year or the year before, right? There was periods where money was abundant and people were taking the capital. So, okay. Yeah. Let's drill deeper, no pun intended, onto your investment philosophy. So your company is called Palisades Gold, but it's not just gold in your portfolio. You've also taken a stake in Copper Giant, I see. You've taken an ownership stake in First Majestic's Silver Storm, other major positions, Global Atomic, Gunnison Copper, Talisker metals, surge battery metals. You're pretty diversified. Tell us what you're thinking about. Well, the commodity breakdown that we have in our portfolio, I would say is roughly equivalent to the commodity breakdown of the Toronto Venture Exchange. That is, we're relatively commodity agnostic. We're more so focused on the terms. And if you asked me if gold or copper are going to perform better, or gold or copper equities, I don't have a strong opinion on that because I think that in a bull market, you're kind of like in a bicycle race where you've got a leader, a peloton, a laggard, and those positions can switch along the way. But what we like about the position we're in is we've got broad coverage to all of those. You know, you named some of what I would consider our marquee investments. And those really signify the high quality companies that we were able to finance in 2024 and 2025. Most of those companies now are financing with straight shares or with minimal warrant coverage and at much higher prices. So when we look at the portfolio, we have a very high quality group of companies, you know like the names that you had suggested where we see Silverstorm just poured their first silver bar they going back into production You know Copper Giant one of four or five very large late exploration early development stage projects and in improving jurisdiction. We have stuff in there that we're genuinely excited about and we view these as long-term positions for our portfolio. Your warrant portfolio, let's go back to that, 1.7 billion warrants. The scale is quite unprecedented in this space, is it not? Yeah, it's, as far as we know, the largest book of warrants out there, it's certainly the largest one that's held in the public. Why have you pursued this strategy versus just buying equity outright? My father, when I was growing up, was big into the junior investing space. And he really became a disciple of what warrants can do in terms of the upside potential. And so at a young age, I was exposed to that. And I saw in very real time, how much money one could make in a bull market with warrants. I then was introduced to people like Rick Rule, who, you know, have also talked about the benefits that a warrant can produce. And when we looked at the environment in 2024 and 2025, there were very few check writers and nobody was focused on doing a warrant kind of strategy around it. And we decided that this was quite likely potentially the trade of a lifetime if we could go into it and get the market behind it. A warrant fundamentally limits your downside risk, but how does it limit your upside? Well, a warrant is an option but not an obligation to buy a security for a set period of time at a set price. So our downside is limited in that if we sell the equity portion of the unit, so we subscribe to a unit, we get a share and a warrant. If we sell the share, then we're riding free on the warrant. And that warrant might be good for two, three, or five years. So anytime during the next five years, if that company goes markedly up, our warrant is going to become worth a lot of money. And then we can go ahead and sell it just like it is an equity. We exercise it and sell the position. So I'll give you a real life example. There's a company called Galantis Gold. I talked about it in my chat this morning. Very high quality company. They were starting off in December of last year and they raised money at eight cents with a full three year warrant at 12. We went ahead and sold our shares four months after we bought it at 40 cents. So we made a lot of money on that particular trade. So we took $800,000. We sold it for four million. We still have 10 million warrants that are exercisable at 12 cents. The stock's at 50. So those are 38 cents in the money. That's $3.6 million. If that security over the next two and a half years, while those warrants are still good, goes to two or three bucks, like some of the analyst community are calling, those warrants are going to be worth $25 million. We have no downside because we've already taken our principal off the table and then some. And so this is what we've done over numerous different situations. So at this point, we have 22 warrants per share of Palisades. Palisades has 72 million shares out. We have 1.7 billion warrants. You take 1.7 billion divided by our shares, you get 22 sector warrants for each share of Palisades that you buy. And an individual investor were to replicate this, they could probably, in theory, do it for one company, but not 330. But that's where you come in, right? Yeah, I think there's, you know, even looking at this from my own perspective, if I wanted to do it, there's a lot of benefits to doing it within a company. First of all, you need enough capital to be able to command terms. And so we had that. We had, you know, 40 or $50 million sitting there at the right time that we said, we can go out. We can offer $3 million, $5 million, $8 million for financing. We have the capital behind us to do it. The second thing is if somebody wakes up today and says, David, I've got this great idea. We're going to go do this warrant thing. You could say, well, I understand that the terms are not the same that they were, you know, in 2024 and 2025. And I would argue very strongly that's the case. So, you know, your potential returns from this point forward are going to be far smaller than the warrants we managed to put together during 2024 and 2025. Okay. Tell us about your team. So I'll start with the management team. There's myself. There's a gentleman named Phil O'Neill. I met Phil back in 2003. He actually worked with my dad for a short period of time. He became quite active in the uranium space, worked with Doug Casey and Rick Rule over at Casey Research in his early days. And then he was a CEO of a company that he founded. I have a deep level of respect for Phil and Phil understands the game better than anybody. There's more subjective understanding that goes into making money and financing some private placements than objective data can provide. So it's very much so a feel having done it before. We also, our CFO is here, Jeff Stieber, and he's a fantastic recent addition to the team. And And he's fantastic. I also want to talk on the board of directors. We have a very distinguished board. So there's a gentleman named Gregor Gregerson who founded a company called Silver Bullion SG. And they've just opened the reserve, which is the largest silver vault in the world. In Singapore. In Singapore. And they can store something like half of an entire year's production of silver in that one room. So it's just massive. He built the company from nothing and he a big supporter of ours Betty Harrison is also on our board She a retired but head lawyer at Ferris LLP which is the largest law firm in British Columbia independent law firm And then just this week, we added a gentleman by the name of Colonel Douglas McGregor to the board, and he's a decorated combat veteran, fought in the Gulf War. He's also is one of the advisors to the Secretary of Defense under the first Trump administration and just a huge proponent of the need for domestic supply of metals in the way that the world is going where it's going to put more pressure on commodities because countries are looking back inward and they're starting to try to source metals internally. Something China's been doing for a while, but now you're seeing the United States and other countries really going, oh, we better fix this problem. So that's really his big theme. he's decided to join the board, which is a great addition for us. I had McGregor on. We love McGregor. He's been on the show before. Very strong character. What's the next investment milestone for you? Oh, that's a good question. So right now we're continuing to be open to looking at doing more deals that come up. We're continuing to have dialogue around Made in America gold, radio fuels on potentially either monetizing those or doing joint ventures on the assets. What we think is the next step for the portfolio is really letting the bull market take hold and seeing the fruits bear from our labors of doing this large activity of financing during 2024 and 2025. Sometimes what you need is time, and we think the time is really going to allow the portfolio to grow and to see what these warrants can be worth as they get closer to expiry. What is the term to maturity of most of your warrants again? So 27 months is the weighted average. Okay, so here's my question. A lot of these companies in the junior space, their stocks don't move unless they have company-specific milestones. So let's say an environmental assessment or let's say a PEA or let's say company-specific news that it's almost impossible to predict. Even the management team has no idea whether they're going to get an EA approved, for example, right? So how do you justify a 27-month warrant when it could take years before a major move happens? You know, of course, we would prefer that there be a 40 or 50 month tail on the expiration of the warrants, but we're very happy with 20, 27 months because it's not the end of the road. When warrants start to expire in 27 and 28, we do have capital and we're going to make decisions and we're going to say, okay, this company, its prospects are right. We're going to exercise this. We're going to put the money up and we're going to hold the shares. And this now becomes a long equity position. So we take a very long-term view on the Gold Bowl market and where these juniors are going. The tactic that we took behind that strategy is we wanted to stack the odds in our favor and have the best starting point so that our capital could grow as much as possible. Let's finish off on you, Colin. Tell us about your background. You talked about your father earlier in the interview and how that's impacted your youth, working with him and learning under him, but your professional background leading up to founding Palisades Gold. Yeah, I founded Palisades right out of school. I actually didn't finish my undergrad. Yeah, I didn't finish my undergrad. I did all four years, but I didn't end up graduating. Neither did Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. All right, I'll take it. And then I pretty quickly, I knew that I wanted to be a capitalist in the sense of I wanted to have capital to be able to deploy to build things. And I didn't have any capital. So I started off doing a little bit of investor relations consulting and use that to build up a capital base. Pretty quickly started what became Newfound Gold by staking the ground in Newfoundland, staking ground in Nevada, which is now Nevada King and Made in America gold. And I did that in 2015, which in retrospect ended up being a very good time. It was the bottom of the market. And Newfound Gold really changed the trajectory. And it was like throwing accelerants on the fire that I was trying to start. You know, one day I woke up and had a market cap over a billion dollars. And, you know, we own 50% of that on IPO data. It was incredible. Finally, if someone were interested in dipping their toes in the water in the resource space as an investor, somebody who has previously never invested in the resource space in any commodity, at any level, where should they start? How should they start? I would start at the Rule Symposium. You know, I know I'm at Rick's conference, so of course I'm going to say great things about Rick. But honestly, to this day, Rick does like what, five, 10 interviews a week. It's incredible. And I find myself listening to two or three Rick interviews a week because even at the knowledge base that I find myself at, there's so many tidbits of wonderful information and just nuggets of things that I haven't thought about. But Rick is able to talk to people from the very beginning all the way to the end. And I think that the group of people he's brought together here is incredible. I mean, it's been the best conference that we've participated. All right. Well, congrats for your success so far, Colin. I look forward to many more successful stories. Tell us where we can learn more about Palisades Gold and the ticker that we can follow. Yeah, so the ticker is P-A-L-I on the venture, palisades, which is plural, .ca. And then feel free to email me directly, Colin, C-O-L-L-I-N, at palisades.ca. All right. Well, I appreciate you coming on the show, Colin. Great to have you, and I look forward to speak with you again. Absolutely. Thanks so much. Please do follow Palisades Gold. I'll put the links down below. And stay up to date with news on Collins Company, Palisades Gold. Take care for now.
