Gold’s ‘Stupid Cheap’ Price Level Revealed; Lobo Tiggre On Next Buy Signal

If the AI trade wrongly puts copper on the oversold thing, like people are like, oh, we don't need any more copper because we're not going to build any more data centers, which wouldn't be true, like even if the spend just pulls back. Yeah. But Mr. Market always overreacts. That's right. So you don't like gold right now. You don't love it. So maybe that's the pair trade there. Special coverage from the floor of the Royal Symposium is brought to you by Palisades Gold. Pleased to welcome back to the show, friend of the show, Lobo Tigre of the Independent Speculator. You can check out his work, link down below, put his Twitter X page as well. Lobo's been on several times. He was on just a couple of weeks ago. We were talking about how low gold and silver will go. And this was an extension of our conversation earlier in late January when gold and silver had just reached its all-time highs. And so do check out Lobo's last interview with me, link down below. We're currently at the Rules Imposium. Welcome back to the show. So Lobo, good to see you again. So how much lower do we have to go? I mean, that's the question you've been bombarded with all day. Everybody wants to know. An extension of our last conversation. So my answer is, of course, I don't know. Nobody knows. My base case has been correction and consolidation before the next big move being up. People want to say I'm a bear because I'm not a raging bull. It's not true. my base case is still that the next big move is likely to be upwards. But that involves the correction and consolidation first, which means I'm not in any hurry to buy. I've got time to watch that develop before I decide to take it. Well, you did tell me last time, if it goes to $3,000 gold, you might buy more. That's the alternative. Now, this is not a projection. It's not a prediction. It's certainly not what I want to happen. But if we're looking at a repeat of the previous big surges, right? Gold retreats 50% plus or minus from those big peaks. So if gold, not silver, which is more volatile, but if gold retreats 50%, to me, that becomes like a Bitcoin or buying after the halving, right? And I know that halving is different from half the price, but roll with me on the cycle there. So if gold were to drop 50%, net, which would be sub 3,000, high 2,000s, then I think it just becomes a buy no matter what. I'd stop looking at the charts. I almost ignore the macro. It's just cheap enough. And if that happened, by the way, we're talking about the stocks. I didn't sell an ounce of bullion, silver or gold. If gold went sub 3,000, the stocks would crater, even if they were still making money. even your Agnico's of the world or whatever that can make money, actually lots of money at over 2,500. I think all the stocks would get creamed. And that would just be stupid cheap. And I'm happy to buy stupid cheap without worrying about where the market bottom is or whatever. So that's plan C or something like that. I certainly don't want that to happen. But that's an answer to your question. I don't know what's going to happen. But my base case says there's no rush to buy right now. It certainly still feels kind of catching, falling knifey, if that can be used as a phrase. But if it does go off a cliff, then I know what level would trigger me to go from fear to greed. I want to come back to gold and silver and more about the miners in just a bit. Broadly, though, you're looking around this investment landscape. What is appealing to you right now outside of metals? Well, outside of metals or commodities? Because if we have a set of metals, then it will be oil right now. And this is sort of hot off the presses. You're actually my first interview here at the show. Thank you. And I just published a new edition today. And what I stress to my readers is that the oil patch is getting to a point where I can't call it the deep discount rack quite yet, but many of the stocks are relatively on the sale. Some of them are significantly lower than pre-war levels. So oil has gone round trip to pre-war levels. But remember, with all the saber rattling going into the war, oil had risen. So I'm not as excited as some people are about pre-war levels, because those were high levels. I'd rather see low. I want to buy low, sell high. But it looks like we're getting there. And there are some analysts, Jeff Curry, people like that, Nuttall, who are calling a bottom here. So those stocks are already relatively on sale. And if that call is correct, it's not my call, but I'm just putting this out there as alternatives. You know, if the bulls are right and the bottom is being carved out now, then actually this right now, this week, is the time to load up on oil stocks. And I've got a shopping list for that. Personally, I'm not quite ready to go there. I have a feeling that even if oil itself carves out of bottom here, that won't stop the stocks from going lower on the narrative. And the narrative right now is there's people talking about an oil glut and all those ships that made a dash for it getting out of Hormuz and all those hundreds of millions of barrels suddenly hitting the market. And the US is still draining its SPR, the Strategic Political Reserve. Yeah, that's right. So I think there's potential for oil to go lower. And even if it doesn't, I think there's potential for the stocks to keep going lower. As we speak, I looked at my screen right before walking to this room for this interview. Oil was slightly up, but the major producers were significantly down. So that makes me not in a hurry to just go and buy everything on my shopping list. I don't pretend I can time the market. Yeah. But if oil does another big leg down and we get some panic here, capitulation. If I saw clear capitulation, then I'd be just buying. No holds barred. Absent that, I just need my wolf whiskers to feel comfortable that the worst is, I don't know exactly where it is, but likely behind us. And then I would be buying more. But either way, I'm being cautious about this is what I'm saying. But different independent speculators out there may want to make their own call. Because I know there are a lot of people that really are very bullish here and think, you know, reality is going to set in, all that shut-in production, just opening the Strait of Hormuz doesn't actually bring all that production back online and so on. And I get that. So if you're in that camp, you may want to think about buying. Or if you can handle buying now, seeing them go significantly lower, but then being right at the end of the day, if you're in that type of investor that has that intestinal fortitude to do that, then that's fine. But it's very difficult for me to tell anybody, yeah, just go ahead and buy when my whiskers are suggesting that there might be a better buying opportunity in the very near term. Before we continue with the video, let me tell you about one of the most important problems of owning gold. So gold has been a store of value for thousands of years for as long as people can remember, but it doesn't generate an income like many other assets. That's a problem. But that's also where today's sponsor Monetary Metals comes in. Monetary Metals offers investors a way to earn yield on their gold paid in physical gold. Through its leasing platform, investors can earn up to around 4% annually with yield paid monthly in ounces rather than dollars. That means your return is measured in gold itself. The gold remains your asset and can be redeemed at any time. Thousands of investors are already earning a monthly yield in gold through Monetary Metals. Visit monetary-metals.com slash Lynn, link down below, or scan the QR code here to learn more and get started. And you can start earning a real yield in gold today. How is the second half of 2026 going to be different from the first half? I'm talking about everything here. Well, assuming the war doesn't reignite, which is not a very safe assumption. And on one hand, you're talking macro, right? Yes. Okay. Yeah. What changes for all asset classes? So assuming the war doesn't reignite, then that does change the latter half of the year. Now we're in the wind down from war and the war fear, the war premium, the war penalty, all that stuff war related, that fades further and further into the rear view mirror. And I think maybe a clear market sign of this is the way recently the markets, the broader markets, have flipped from responding to war headlines to Fed-related headlines. So, you know, the most recent inflation prints, the most recent job numbers, those had much more impact in the last couple weeks than they did a couple months ago when everybody was just worried about the trade of hormones or the barrel of oil. and because the Fed's reaction function. And how is it going to be under the new hawkish wars, right? And I'm waving my arms and smiling when I say that because so far there's no actual evidence that the Fed is going to be hawkish. We know that Trump didn't want to put a hawk in there. All we have is words. And that's easy to try to set a tone with words. Would the economic data not be evidence? Harder inflation? The Fed. I'm talking about the Fed's reaction function. I'm not talking about the data. I'm saying we don't know yet what the Fed is going to do. They held, which they would have done anyway under Powell. There was no difference between the Fed under Powell and Borsch as of this last meeting. Only the tone is different. And I think it's dangerous to take the tone as hard data. That is the softest of soft data. So what I'm saying to answer your question is, assuming the war doesn't reignite or Ukraine goes up in a bigger way or something, then I do think that we'd go back to Fed watching primarily. I think monitoring fiscal policy, fiscal dominance becomes much more powerful again in the markets. And probably that makes for a generally upward and to the right kind of thing in that environment. real quick I must say even though I convinced the US wants out of this war I pretty sure the White House wants this war to be done and gone with The other side gets a vote I not so sure that Bibi wants this war to be done And he's got an election also. He's got to deal with. And if it seems to the average Israeli voter, I'm not there. I can't tell you. Maybe somebody in the audience who is can tell us. But if the feeling in Israel is the job isn't done, then maybe maybe bb needs to stir things up a little bit and try to get things going so i'm not making a prediction here but i am just trying to highlight that i think all of my answer about how the second half of 2026 might go is on the premise that the war doesn't reignite i think it probably doesn't but i i think the possibility that it might is it's not like one percent it's not like five percent it's a significant possibility that other parties may have a different agenda than that of the White House. Do you think the Fed's watching the war, for example, let's say it does reignite, you know, let's say it does, how would that change anything given that the Strait of Hormuz has always remained closed, it's still closed technically, and a reignition of the war means it's still closed. So from that perspective, the market has already normalized that outcome. So you're asking me to write a work of fiction here with my words. But the economist answer would be, on one hand, war could be seen as bad for the economy, you know, that demand destruction, destruction, destruction, and therefore the Fed needs to ease to support the economy during this trying time. On the other hand, this war, which sends oil prices north, can be seen as having an inflationary shock and that could make the other hand being the fed being more hawkish in response but and i don't know which way that goes i suspect it leans towards the inflationary side and what's interesting about that is that it it gives wash a free pass of sorts like if whatever deal he has with trump to get the job that he would be easy if we say oh well the war blew up again now now we have a reason why we We have to be more hawkish or we have to raise rates even or something like that. It gives them cover to do that. But I'm not sure that they would. And here's one of those things where you just don't know what does he really think versus what does he say and who are his audiences? Yeah, but Warsh has also indicated that perhaps he's going to skip a few data points, look at the bigger trend. The bigger trend is clearly higher inflation. Don't you agree? I do. Does he? And the other thing is, I think he's smart enough to understand some of the things that we've discussed with our friend Lynn Alden. Is monetary policy the right tool here? Is raising interest rates, the Fed funds rate, is that really going to help if the proximal cause is higher oil? I mean, that's not going to change the price of oil. Or, I mean, if it does, to raise rates enough to create actual demand destruction, And it's not just economic throttling. To create demand destruction for oil in the United States, not Sri Lanka or someplace, but to actually get people to drive less or use less oil in other ways in the United States, that would take some pretty serious shock therapy. People might spend less on luxuries and stuff like that, but you're still going to drive to work. You still got to drop the kids off at school. So I don't know. I don't know him. I'm not a Fed whisperer. But it seems like he might be smart enough from some of the things I've heard him say to understand that that tool, rates, may not help much in this environment. So we'll just kind of have to see how it goes. But I think the bottom line, what is, this isn't helping the audience very much to say on the one hand and on the other hand and not have a pretty clear answer. But whatever the Fed's reaction function may be, what is clear is that a re-ignition of the war would have a highly inflationary consequence in due course. And they don't just mean because of the oil price going up. It's the response to the war. It's the money printing in response to the war. So Peter Schiff does a good job of explaining this. If just oil goes up, then people will spend less money on something else to pay for that oil. So net-net, higher oil prices by themselves are not inflationary. But if oil prices go up and the government prints a bunch of money to pay for that, always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. That's right. And another aspect we have to be concerned about is the AI trade, which you talked about prior. And you warned that we could get a significant unwind of the AI trade sometime later in 2026. Earnings drive the stock market. And if earnings start to deteriorate, we can start to see a correction, which may prompt the Fed to be a bit more dovish. Could do, could do. We're starting to see, you know, the earnings have held together so far fairly well, but we're starting to see more concern about the spend. And that's interesting. It's kind of amazing how the narrative can shift and how Mr. Market's appetite from, you know, six months ago, spend good, now six months later, spend not so good. What do we get for the spend? by the time this data center is built, will those chips in it still even be the chips that we want? Or if we do build it, I think it's meta is one of the big hyperscalers that has already recently talked about renting out excess compute. So we haven't even finished the build out, the trillion dollars of hyperscaler build out that we're supposedly working on. They're also talking about going into cloud computing. Yeah, you're right. Yeah. So if people are starting to realize, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute, where's the return on all of this? Is it really going to be there? And there are serious questions about large language models even deserving to be called AI. Yeah. So if that unwinds, it has broad implications for the general markets. But for us as resource investors or speculators, to the degree that something like copper or even silver, certainly uranium, got a tailwind as AI picks and shovels play, then that tailwind can become a headwind. And I think that is still on the table. If the AI trade does unwind, let's say we have less capex spending, how does that impact commodities, specifically metals? Copper, by the way, was your top pick for 2026. Would it still be your top pick for the rest of 2026? If, let's say, we have an unwind of capex spending. Yeah. So my outlook on copper is very long term. And so I don't want to be guilty of schadenfreude. I don't want to wish for anything bad to happen to anybody. But as a person who wants more copper in my portfolio, I got to say, I would actually love for this to happen. If the AI trade wrongly puts copper on the oversold thing, like people like, oh, we don't need any more copper because we're not going to build any more data centers, which wouldn't be true, like even if the spend just pulls back. But Mr. Market always overreacts. That's right. So if there's this big like sphincter tightening moment and everybody reverse this direction, copper could wrongly be sold off in a big way. And I would take the other side of that. I would love to be able to take the other side of that. Don't know if that'll happen or not. If it does, I have a bunch of cash from the profits I took when we took last, ready to deploy in that space. Uranium, still your most bullish near-term call? Well, most bullish near-term call. Actually, no, I would say I'm more bullish on an oil rebound. It may go lower before it goes up, but if we're talking second half of 2026, I think we see oil come higher, significantly higher from where we are now, and certainly from where I think we might go lower. Would this Iranian war be not a long-term bearish for oil in the sense that it's, as you said last time, a paradigm shift for energy. And now there's probably a spur of demand long-term for alternative energy sources. Yeah, I don't think so. I mean, maybe if you're in a place where like Puerto Rico, we actually burn oil for electricity. And believe it or not, there's a nuclear power plant that was started and never finished in Puerto Rico from the 60s or something. You can see the show. In a place like that, if you win nuclear, it would make a big difference to their power consumption and the raw materials consumed. But no, it was probably more significant for coal and gas than for oil prices, which we use more for transportation. I mean, uranium, nuclear power, it sells 24-7 baseload power, always on power. Oil is much more affected by how often people drive the grandmots. If you had to lay out a pair trade, long something, short, or stay away from something else. Permit me to come back to that. I didn't finish answering the uranium question. Uranium question. My hesitation there is just, we're near the incentive price for uranium. Production, which is above 60. Well, I mean, that was a moving target. Inflation adjusted, I would say 80 plus or minus. Okay. And we're there. And there is production that is still coming online and being ramped up. People have not stopped trying to build out uranium at all. I also think the writing is on the wall where the industry expects higher prices. The long-term contract price is still above spot. And so that gets to the answer of your question. The spot price kind of, it's like a rubber band that shoots above and below the long-term contract price. but it never goes too far for too long and then it snaps back. And it has been consistently below the long-term contract price for months. So I think spot has another snapback coming, which would be upward and that would be good for the stock So I have high confidence in that but it not necessarily a huge move And I think a lot of people see this So the stocks are not particularly on sale whereas that why the oil answer came back again. A lot of the oil stocks really are on sale, at least compared to recent highs. I mean, many of them are below pre-war levels in price, which is interesting because oil looks like a higher for longer story. So yeah, I like uranium. I'm very bullish still on that thesis. It's just not super cheap, and I own a bunch already. Most of my portfolio right now is uranium stocks. So I'm not personally feeling any sense of urgency to add at this point. But it's such a solid thesis. I say this, but I think it has to be said. It would take a Chernobyl scale event to derail this. That is possible, but very unlikely. And absent that, this is as close to a sure thing as I have experience with in these markets. So if I didn't own any uranium stocks, I would seek to remedy that this week, like the next dip I'd buy. OK, pear trade. Pear trade. Well, I like peaches better than pears, but pear trade. Well, let's go over what you like. Oil, right? Long-term uranium, long-term copper. You don't like gold right now. You don't love it. So maybe that's the pear trade there. Yeah, so the one that I've actually, I get where you're going there, but I'm just collecting my thoughts. I know that dead time is not good for an interview, but I'm trying to give a real answer here. No, it's okay. Instead of shooting from the hip. And the one that I have actually commented to my readers is, look, if the war starts up again or continues, that's going to be bad for copper. So aside from the AI possible bubble popping, putting copper on sale, there is the possibility that the war or a war heats up again, and that's bad for Dr. Copper. Sorry, how would that be bad for Dr. Copper? Oh, because- Economic destruction. Economic, yeah, there you go. Okay, Dr. Copper, right. So if the war heats up again, bad for copper, good for oil. If the war ends, which seems to be where things are now, it's good for copper, which is closer to its all-time highs. It's bad for oil, so oil is down. So if I want a pair trade for this year or for the current context, it's oil versus copper. And it's interesting because they're both energy minerals or energy-related minerals. But the immediate course of geopolitics has an opposite effect on these. Okay. So Lobel, thinking back at your decades-long career of analyzing commodities, narrowing down on precious metals, what would you say are the most commonly cited misconceptions about gold that you're seeing playing out in 2026? Well, some of that has actually changed. Like the common misconceptions in the battle that we had to try to convince anybody to look at it anything other than a pet rock. Like actually that pet rock thing has gone away. The young people get it. Actually, to be fair, to give credit where due, the crypto crowd has done the gold bulls a huge favor by explaining to two whole younger generations the dangers of fiat. And the virtues of some hard asset that can't be printed by governments. And of course, they want to promote their favorite cryptocurrency. But the argument works for gold as well. And I know this for a fact. I talked to young people who really didn't pay any attention to economics or monetary policy or fiscal policy until they got interested in cryptos. And then once the scales fell from their eyes, they couldn't unsee the lesson learned. And it was just really obvious to look around and say, well, what else besides Bitcoin or Ether or whatever? and and that brought them to gold and silver like I have seen this I have talked to people that made that progression yeah so so that pet rock thing I think that's dead the other thing is the gold doesn't pay interest well a there is a company that's working on that you probably talked to them I don't want to tout any one company but it is possible to get paid interest in gold by the You paid interest in gold for your gold, which is interesting. But that's, it was always a silly argument. Okay, yeah, sure. Okay, gold doesn't pay interest. But if you, and you stick it in a safe, right? It doesn't pay interest. Well, if you put cash in a safe, it wouldn't pay you any interest either. And it would be subject to inflation. So it's just unfair to say gold has no yield and therefore I'm better off buying the S&P 500 or something like that. That gold is money. It's not a stock. Right. So so if you're going to compare it to other monies, you can say, oh, well, the dollar pays it. Well, the dollar by itself doesn't pay interest. You know, it's the bank accounts that make that possible. So apples to apples that that doesn't pay interest thing is just it's just a fallacy. But even that seems to have gone away. And I don't know if it was the central, the persistent, like high levels of central bank buying that changed this, or if it was just the multiple geopolitical shocks. But my sense is it's not just young people, but, you know, seasoned silver temple people on Wall Street and so on. They got the memo, like suddenly, you know, diversifying my risk with a bit of a gold hedge became a fashionable idea on Wall Street. Remember last year when the debasement trade became a Wall Street meme, which those of us who have been decades in the gold space, we're laughing like they've just discovered debasement. Like it was invented in 2025. But once you get that idea, again, it's like the scales falling from your eyes. Once you understand that it doesn't matter who's winning the fiat versus fiat battle, real assets have a hedging function against fiat versus fiat silliness. um i don't think you unlearn that lesson i think there's there are whole generations of financial professionals that hadn't seen gold do anything but gather dust since 1980 and then okay it spikes up in in the in 2008 9 10 11 after the the gfc and maybe some people could could write that off as just the gfc or a one-off thing um but that was new but now it's you know it never went back to $300. And it's a new all-time high since then. So I just think the world has changed. There has been a paradigm shift here. And the old tropes about gold, I don't know if anybody still believes those. Here's my conclusion on gold. You know, be free to chime in. It really depends on your time horizon, whether or not gold is something right for you. If you're somebody who's in the game for 30 years, yeah, it makes sense. It's never gone down below its previous peak, right? If you look at the prior bull cycles, it's never gone. Arguably, it's troughs. Yeah. It's gone below previous peaks. Yeah. Sorry. That's what I meant. Previous troughs. Previous troughs. Yeah. But here's the thing. If your time horizon is only five years, then you really have to lock in when you think the next bull cycle is going to start. And nobody knows for sure. Right. So it becomes more of a risky risk on trade from that perspective. And you also need to time the top because gold moves violently upwards. and also violently downwards. So it becomes money when you want to hold it as money. But if you want to trade it, it becomes significantly more difficult. And so those are different use cases. Perfectly true. It kind of makes me laugh when you hear mainstream commentators who are not steeped in the lore of the sector. They're like, oh, gold's down 1,500 from its peak just a few months ago. That proves that it's not a safe haven asset anymore. like a few months fluctuation matters to you know long-term buy and hold you know we've talked about this before to me the the answer the bedrock answer to all of this is if you look at the long-term chart of gold since it was freed from the dead weight of the dollar yeah 1971 to now that is the entire history of modern relevance of gold being free to fluctuate and you look at that versus the purchasing power of the dollar which is the main thing it's compared to and it's a giant X-shaped thing, which is what you're saying. So over the long term, there's no question. So people who pan it because it went down, well, if you bought gold in January 2025 because it was going vertical and you bought it because you thought it would go higher and you could make money on it, that's a completely different thing from saving, putting away your rainy day fund in something that can't be printed away. Completely different use case. There are two, sorry, just one more thing. So if I did want to do that, if I did want to trade based on what I thought were the market troughs and peaks and where we were and all that sort of thing. I wouldn't do it with bullion. You've got to pay manufacturing fees, storage fees. I wouldn't do that. I mean, that's my savings. If I had to do that and I want leverage, I'm buying the stocks. So yes, when I'm looking at the markets and I'm trying to buy low, sell high, that's the stocks. And as you know, I just sold high earlier this year, got a bunch of cash. And as we started with this interview, what would it take for me to buy? Either to see that that correction consolidation is done and I'm right about the next move up, or to get stupid cheap prices. But at that point, I'm talking, again, stocks, buy low, sell high. So as a trader, I wouldn't do it with gold anyway. I'd do it with the gold and silver stocks. So different use case. I think it's a mistake to apply the arguments of one to the other or the criticisms of one to the other. And sure, if I'm not thinking about, okay, gold's relatively on sale and I want to add to my savings, I could do that today. If I had excess cash that I wanted to put away for the long term, I wouldn't worry about the charts or the technicals or whatever. I'd just go and buy it. But if I'm trying to make money, I'm looking for capital gains, well, then it does matter. I want to have confidence that the bottom is in and that this is a buy low opportunity. And then I do it with the stocks for leverage. How do we decide which cycle gold is in? I'll give you two examples of two decades. prior to 2011 its then peak around $2,000 gold had a multi almost a decade long bull run from I think or in early 2000s all the way to 2011 it was a steady bull run that lasted multiple years ish but at any given time if you had bought in the early 2000s and you sold later in the decade you would have made money that wasn't the case in 2012 between 2012 2019 when it was just flat so if you had sold let's say let's say if you had bought some gold at the bottom in 2012 and you decided to sell a few years later 2012 was the 2011 was the top 2011 was the top and it went down in 2012 so between 2012 off a cliff in late 2012 early 2013 yeah and then sideways for the bottom is in 2019 well not really sideways it went down for four years right so the bottom was in late 2015 so in that particular decade gold didn't have a multi-decade bull run it was just flat for seven down and flat for seven eight years whereas in early 2000 to 2011, it was a steady upward trend. Investors have to decide which decade gold is going to be. I mean, I would start from a bottom. How do you know? You don't know where the bottom is when you're there. Looking back at the charts, I would start at the bottom in late 2001, up to that peak in 2011. And then looking back at the charts, the next low is in late 2015. and then going up really until now with volatility along the way, some shoulders and the patterns there. So the big question right now, a lot of people are asking is, are we on another shoulder and is it going to go higher still? For the moment, that is still my base case. But it is possible that January of this year was another one of those peaks, like 1980 or 2011, and that the next history of gold will be another one of these long sick local downs, a bear market. We will go into a bear market and we'll have another, I think, higher low going forward at some years in the future. Look, Lobo, what's your sentiment right now on the gold mining stocks? The overall sentiment is quite bearish. Yeah, that's interesting. We're at plus or minus $4,000 gold. When we hit $4,000 on the way up, people were popping champagne. That's right. At the exact same level. Well, same price. So if you're a gold miner, you're making as much money now, and people are jumping out of windows, or not quite, but they're crying into their beer instead of popping the champagne. Same price. And the companies are making the same margins. Well, I mean, prices might have gone up, but there's been consolidation and build out. So some of them are operating at better efficiencies now. There's been time enough there for optimization, let's say. so yeah i mean mr market can be very silly and that's actually how speculators make opportunity if the if the efficient market hypothesis was really true and if markets price things accurately in real time there'd be no or almost no opportunity for a speculator like me it's the fact that he gets so excited and gets overbought and oversold that creates an opportunity for that difference. Overbought and oversold means there's a difference between price and value. This is classic Doug Casey, what Papa Casey taught me when I was in diapers all those years ago when I started in the business, was there's a difference between price and value. And when the market gets manic or depressive, that spread, if you will, opens up. And that's the opportunity for the speculator to say, this is selling for more than it's worth or this is selling for less than it's worth. And I can bet on that gap closing. So we're at the real symposium right now. And there's a collection of companies that Rick Rule likes. What would you ask them to gauge whether or not they're doing what you believe would be shareholder value activities or pursuing strategies that you would like during this particular time when sentiment is low, but price is still relatively high yeah so actually times like this are a kind of a source of opportunity because in the real world as we were just saying four thousand dollar gold plus or minus that is a fantastic price actually for the business of mining gold or developing a gold project you plug four thousand dollars into your npv model and you'd have to have a really crappy project for it not to look rich at these levels. So that's good. If you walk around and you talk to people and they're whining about these difficult market conditions and you can't raise money when the market's irrationally negative, they're actually telling you something. Because if your project has merit at these levels, you're not going to have trouble raising money. Rick will pull out his checkbook for a good project at these levels, regardless of sentiment. So there's one easy litmus test. Anybody who says, oh, you know, in this crappy market conditions, we can't raise any money here. We don't get no respect. They pull a Rodney Dangerfield on you. Red flag. The other thing is, in terms of adding value, they should have done this already in terms of raising money. Anybody that is not flush with cash or hasn't recently taken advantage of the higher levels and the recent enthusiasm to raise money, that's probably a red flag. Like, why don't you have any money? Why were you unable to raise money when gold's over 5,000 and silver triple digits. So these kinds of things, when the markets fluctuate like this, they give you a chance to ask these questions. But the bottom line is, what are the deliverables, let's say, the next few quarters this year ahead? What's that going to cost? How much do you have in the bank? And the answer to those questions will key into these other things. And if they start whining about difficult market conditions, that's it. And somebody says to you, look, to your question, well, we're not raising capital now because the capital is not there. Right. Okay. Yeah. Capital's there. If you've got a good project, capital's there. Yeah. And they should have done it already. So, yeah. And beyond that, for due diligence purposes, you know, the more you know, the better the questions you'll ask to know, like, if they say, I mean, I guess if they say, oh, we're going to, we're producing now, we're going to double production. That's pretty obvious. Anybody can see that, okay, if they deliver on that, that should add value. But if they talk about the kind of geophysics they're doing and the signal response they're getting and their interpretation of the colorful blobs on their charts and so on, you probably need to know more about the science to decipher that and how helpful is this. um but but yeah it all comes down to um i discipline is my favorite word you know i want to see fiscal discipline and companies i want to see more money going into the ground for exploration and development than into gna yeah and promotion if we're a producer you know the bottom line really is the bottom line and i have i have no patience for companies you know gold companies that can't make money at $4,000 gold, let alone five. Yeah. There's no excuse for that. Okay. I mean, okay. A paper loss or something like a Forex, you know, that's different. But you better be generating cash, free cash flow, good free cash in this market. If not, there's something deeply wrong with your project. Right. Lobo, it was great talking to you. As always, my friend. Thank you for popping by. Tell us about what you're expecting at this conference. This is your first day. and then tell us a little about your own work and how you're participating here. So I'm not sure how many people are physically present at this conference, maybe 500 or so. I've got 50 RSVPs to my reader reception. So one in 10 people here are planning to come and ask me questions for my reception. It's funny, that's more than at PDAC, which is 30,000 attendees. So it's pretty striking. It seems like there's a strong overlap with people who like Rick Rule's disciplined way of doing things and people who like my way of doing things. So one of my reasons for doing this is it's my chance to meet. I live in Puerto Rico. How often am I going to run into my clients? I can meet and greet with my clients, and I appreciate that. That's probably the big thing that I get out of this more than anything else. The companies, you know, they would all return my phone call, let me just say. So I don't need to come here for the meetings. But the company meetings can be helpful. Sometimes they'll have some props, some rocks for me to look at that you can't see over the phone so easily or something. So there's information there. And you never know. Sometimes there's buzz on the floor of some new project, some new discovery that I hadn't caught wind of yet. That's useful. honestly I enjoy these I Rick's not paying me to say this but I have fun when I come here and you know I I these are my kind of people and I like coming here and hanging out a bit and talking with them and and it's great to get to meet people especially if my work has helped someone like I'm hey this morning I have been thanked profusely by at least six people That feels good. As a human being, that feels good. People are paying me and they're thanking me for that opportunity. How cool is that? Well, you've done great work for the community. So we all appreciate your work. Tell us where we can find your work if you're not already at this conference. Independencespeculator.com. My standard easy sales pitch, folks, is I have a free letter, a weekly macro letter. It's free. You may or may not agree with everything I do there, But if you like my way of thinking, you can explore other options. But the one promise deliverable is I will not spam. You get one weekly email notification and that's it. So there's a promise I can keep. Okay. Well, there's one job AI can't replace. You need someone to go to a mine to examine the rocks. Wait till the robots come along. All right. Thank you, Robo. Thank you. Good to see you. Thank you for watching. Don't forget to like, subscribe. you