Veteran investor and natural resource expert Lobo Tiggre (The Independent Speculator) joins Trey Reik to share his bold 2025 strategy, anchored on gold and uranium. In this high-conviction interview, Lobo explains why he believes we’re entering a “Trump Shock” era: a massive economic transformation aimed at reindustrializing America, what he sees as the biggest shift since Nixon closed the gold window in 1971.
You’ll also learn:
- Why Lobo sees gold and uranium as a “win-win” portfolio this year
- How AI, energy demand, and military-adjacent industry are reshaping the case for uranium and copper
- Why he’s cautious on silver and waiting for better entry points on copper
- The unique “Pre-Production Sweet Spot” in miners that helped him outperform during past cycles
- Why most gold miners underperform, and how to find the exceptions
Whether you’re focused on macro trends, inflation, or junior mining stocks, this is a must-watch conversation for active investors.
Volatility got you concerned? Get a free portfolio review with Wealthion’s endorsed financial advisors at https://bit.ly/3HkpXc6
Hard Assets Alliance – The Best Way to Invest in Gold and Silver: https://www.hardassetsalliance.com/?aff=WTH
Lobo Tiggre 0:00
For Trump to try to re industrialize the United States, to change the basis of its economy is is, in my mind, similar in magnitude to what Nixon did, and therefore the consequences, the bumps on the road, are going to be major, even if we assume success.
Trey Reik 0:21
Greetings and welcome to our wealthion show. My name is Trey Reich of Bristol Gold Group, and we’re here today with a legend in the metal space. Lobo Tigray, founder and editor of a fascinating and popular newsletter titled The Independent speculator. So Lobo, thanks for taking the time to visit with us
Lobo Tiggre 0:44
today. Thank you very much, Trey. So
Trey Reik 0:47
since my name’s Trey Reich, and Trey is a nickname for William the third, which is a little bit more boring, I cannot resist asking, Is Lobo Tigre, written on your birth certificate? No,
Lobo Tiggre 1:03
it is on my passport. There’s, there’s a long story there we won’t get into, but, but yes, I’ve always been called Lobo since I was a little boy, and the rest is too long to get into, but it I decided to harmonize My names, and here we are and strange looking name that we use, Louis James at Casey Research, because it was more normal sounding, you know, for a proper financial publication. But Doug Casey kept outing me on my real name. So, you know, if I’m trying to be transparent with people, I figured, you know, to heck with it. I’ll just use my real name,
Trey Reik 1:39
right? And if that had been your full birth certificate name I was going to ask you for the middle name, but anyway, I love the name. It has great flair. And thanks for joining us. I thought we would start with a brief description of your firm and your newsletter. So how does your firm make money? And how do you make money for your clients? Those
Lobo Tiggre 2:01
are excellent questions. And I wonder, when you ask those, how often you expect to get an honest answer? Because everybody’s going to say, Oh, of course, I make my money working for my clients. So but here we are. Truth of the matter is, believe it or not, I take money only from my clients, from paying subscribers. I don’t take any money from any issuers for anything. We don’t do ad placements in the newsletter. I don’t even let them buy me lunch when I go kick rocks on the project, if I can at all help it. You know, sometimes you’re in a mind camp, and the only thing there is Dunkin Donuts, sandwiches that they have, and it’s not much you can do about it. But on the way there, I pay for my own airfare, my own hotels, you know, the whole nine yards. So nobody can ever say, oh, yeah, you know, of course, you said nice things about them. They paid for you to go on a junket to Tahiti or something, right? So it’s a very simple subscription model. I have a free weekly newsletter, which, if anybody subscribes to, it’s called speculators digest. You may or may not like my way of thinking and my opinions. If we talk about silver, then I’ll give you maybe a reason to hate me, but I can promise that I won’t spam you. I hate that you get one email per week, and that’s it. My paid services are twofold. One is, as you mentioned, the independent speculator, which is, it’s the Brent cook model. It’s what I’m doing with my own money. My own portfolio is the core of that service, and it has an alert service, and the whole, you know, all the bells and whistles of a full service newsletter, the other one, called my take, is more like Consumer Reports. There is a weekly, sorry, a monthly letter, but that’s not really the service. The service is a database, which currently cut tracks about 1000 resource stocks. I have a team. Obviously, even I can’t keep up with that many companies, but it’s a frequently updated database that can be searched and sorted and sliced and diced to get shopping lists or sell lists, tax law season lists, you know, whatever you’re interested in. And again, I’m fallible. I don’t promise that I get everything right, but I do promise that I’m not for sale. And so if there’s a company in there with a thumbs up, there’s no amount of money they could pay me to get that. It’s what me and my team determine with our due diligence, is the appropriate thumb up or thumb down. And so it’s really sort of like if you can’t afford to hire a geologist to fly around the world and kick the rocks for you, then my take is the next best thing, right? You can hire me and my team to be your due diligence guys. So
Trey Reik 4:29
for someone who is a subscriber to the independent speculator, do you have a portfolio that you recommend, or do you go stock by stock?
Lobo Tiggre 4:40
There is a portfolio, but it is stock by stock. I mean, a truly great speculation. You’ve been in the business longer than those. You can’t do this every month. It’s not like this month. I’m going to have a brilliant idea. Well, this one too. You’ll end up compromising if you try to publish a brilliant idea every month. So. Don’t. And sometimes I think I’ve had as many as four new picks in one month, and as and I’ve gone as many as four months without any new picks, because I won’t compromise on what makes for a great idea. And the criteria is for the for the main portfolio is, would I invest myself? And I do, and I put screenshots of my my confirms from the broker, and people can see what the fees were, Forex, anything else, all in costs and the track record that I have on my website. It’s not a theoretical or a model portfolio. It’s not calculated on arbitrary January 2 to December 31 chunks. It’s the actual track record of all of my completed trades, all of them since I started the independent speculator. And so, you know, some people, they can’t bend their minds around that they want to see, you know, a yearly result. So we have a report card like that. But I think the real track record is what I’ve actually done with my money, and currently that’s running around two thirds wins versus 1/3 losses, and the average gain is around 41% if I recall correctly, something like that.
Trey Reik 6:08
So this was all an introduction in establishing in all of this work, what do you consider your area of expertise?
Lobo Tiggre 6:18
Natural Resources writ large, though, I have to say, I’m much more of a metals and mining guy than an oil and gas guy, and I do have, you know, have a team, I have backup, and I also have a network in the industry. So when I’m stumped on something, or I haven’t seen something before, I can still call Doug Casey and say, Hey, Doug, what do you think of this? Right? But he’s busy, so I have other people, other contacts, actually, Rick Rule has been extremely useful on the oil pack side. He spent a whole day once educating me, and I’ll never be able to thank him. And I don’t know what his hourly rate would be, but I know I couldn’t have afforded it. He just contributed to my education in that way. And yeah, so I don’t claim to know everything, but I hope to have the integrity that when I run into something I’m not familiar with, I can and will hire. I mean, I’ve hired metallurgists before. I’ve hired engineers to look at something when I get stumped, but I have been doing this for 20 odd years. So, you know, I’ve kicked a lot of rocks, and I have a pretty good idea for what to look for in
Trey Reik 7:20
support of your limited staff. Comments when I ran big money in the gold space, I used to get asked all the time, you know, where’s your staff? And it was small like yours. And I would point out at the time that we were big investors in Oyo Tolgoi, and it was being built. And, you know, I pointed out that sometimes building a mine is a file cabinet business. It’s not about getting, you know, on an earnings call four times a year. I mean, if you want to check in, well, we ported more concrete. You know, the airport’s done. The concentrator is coming. So I understand that when you follow a select group of companies over a long period, as you have, you get to know them pretty well.
Lobo Tiggre 8:06
And you know the people you know, you know, I have a metaphorical Little Black Book of people who lied to me and, or, I mean really literally, like, just flat out lied to me, or, let’s just say, didn’t run the business as advertised, and I never forget that
Trey Reik 8:25
100% know exactly what you mean. So now that we’ve established your area of expertise, I’m going to go the other direction, having watched some of your, you know, your recent presentations. While you’re a self proclaimed rock kicker, you’re also a dabbler, I think, in macroeconomics, and you’ve developed sort of a thesis here recently, which you call the Trump shock. And I was just interested as a way to start, for those who are interested in red pill truths, you know your development of Trump shock versus Trump session. So everybody always asks you this question, so let’s just get it out of the way. How do you see that all unfolding?
Lobo Tiggre 9:09
Sure, I always like to preface answers to questions like this by specifying that I am a rock kicker. I’m a due diligence guy. I’m not an economist. And I honestly, I think sometimes that’s an advantage, because the profession of economics, they’re all driven by these models, and it seems like they’re always wrong, because the models are always wrong. And they, you know, adjust their model with this little input, and they get these crazy results. And it’s like the weatherman just look out their frickin window, look on Main Street and tell me the economy is fine, that sort of thing. So the Trump shock thing is obviously a play on Nixon shock, and that’s deliberate, because I think you know watching him now. You know the mantra on the mainstream media is that you have to take Trump seriously, but you shouldn’t take him literally. And there is a grain of truth in that it’s not knocking on Trump here. It’s just you. Uh, you know, at best, he’s such a TV performer, speaking to various audiences that it’s difficult to square all the things he says with each other and what he’s doing. And, you know, a lot of people just say, Oh, it’s all chaos. But if you look at what he’s doing and what the what the executive orders call for, the overall pattern in the actions is pretty consistent, and it’s not really about tariffs or fairness in international trade. He, it seems to me, is really trying to change the basis of the United States economy. He’s trying to reverse decades of history and stop the United States from being a so called, you know, consumer driven economy, or services economy, and make it an industrial economy again. Now he paints pictures of, you know, blue collar workers, you know, with their quality jobs like back in the 50s or something that’s obviously never going to happen. These new factories are going to be full of robots. So you know, if you want to work at one of these new factories that’s getting built, you better be studying robotics, not going to shop. You know, shop class to learn how to operate a drill press or something, lathe, yes. Oh, that was fun. Did you do that in shop class? Absolutely. I don’t want to get distracted, but, oh, that was fun. At RPI, they had lathes that anybody could use for mission, for for milling iron and steel, not just wood. You can go in there and make anything you wanted anyway. I love that stuff, but I wouldn’t bank on that as a career, certainly not with the robots coming down the pike. And, you know, robot factories all this stuff, even if the factory wasn’t robotic sized, if Optimus can hold of, you know, a drill more steadily than you can, you’re going to have a hard time committing competing with optimists and that we don’t want to get down the AI rabbit hole to answer your question. The point is, what Trump is trying to do is really big. It’s not just about tariff fairness or international trade. And you know, the maybe most positive way of looking at this is, if you look at what he’s trying to do, this re industrialization, it all seems to focus on what our friend doomberg likes to call military adjacent industries. So you want to make tanks, you need auto industries. Obviously, you can’t depend on your greatest geopolitical adversary to make your military gear and kit. That makes no sense. So it looks like, you know, my way of looking at this is Trump’s not, it’s not just an America First agenda. It’s an it’s a fortress America first agenda. And if you look at it through that lens, you know, is all the crazy things that you hear coming out of the White House. It actually all kind of makes sense. It all fits in this pattern. And it’s worth if you believe that, especially if you believe that conflict with China is inevitable, or maybe even Putin reassembles the USSR and becomes a bigger threat in the future, if you believe these are real threats, then it kind of makes sense that you want to look at the trouble the Europeans are having now, because they kind of disarmed and disbanded their defense industries, and now they’re scrambling to reassemble their capacity. You want to be in that boat when there’s a shooting war right on your doorstep? Fortunately, we have oceans on either side, you know, so we have a little bit of time here. But I think this is, this is the real agenda. I don’t, I don’t know. I’m just a guy here, just a due diligence guy, but it seems to me that this is the real agenda, and this is huge. And if that’s really what you’re after, you’re willing to take a fair amount of economic pain, because it’s not really about, you know, creating those old blue collar jobs of the 50s. It’s about building fortress America and protecting it for the next century. And now whether the public will go along with that is another question. And hence the Trump shot, because, you know, this is going to put America, I mean, to change something so dramatically is a really big, big deal. And I think this is a, this goes back to, you know, something as huge as Nixon shock. When, when Nixon took, you know, nowadays, people, you know, younger generations, don’t even remember or know, but to sever the dollar from gold. You know, if a young person looks at that, oh, the gold standard, that’s archaic. You know, it made sense. You know, we have, you know, digital gold now. So why do we even need that gold standard thing that was ancient, but at the time, you know, gold was money, and the dollar was only accepted and became the world reserve currency. You know that the Bretton Woods Accord and all that stuff, because it was supposed to be as good as gold, and because you could, if you were a central bank from another country, you could redeem your dollars for gold. So it was really just a more convenient way of continuing the gold standard. So for Nixon to slam the gold window shut on that, that Nixon shock, it didn’t just change the nature of the US economy. It changed the whole global economy. The whole world order changed. And you look at all these charts, from inflation to money supply to all kinds of derivatives and things, and they all go nuts. So after 1971 when Nixon did this, and it just anybody who cares to look, can see the magnitude of Nixon, Nixon shock and I and here’s so here’s here’s the warning, here’s the red pill, right? If I’m right, if this is what Trump is trying to do. It’s on that order, like even, even the end of the Cold War and the peace dividend and the globalization, those are big changes, and they had, you know, large economic impacts, but it was sort of continuing the existing trends. The peace dividend just turbocharged what was already happening, whereas for Trump to try to re industrialize the United States to change the basis of its economy is is, in my mind, similar in magnitude to what Nixon did. And therefore the consequences the bumps on the road, are going to be major, even if we assume success.
Trey Reik 15:56
And to I totally agree with you. And to add to that, I would point out that all of our friends on Wall Street and in the media who are horrified about what Trump has done so far are not the folks that He’s appealing to. So the 10% of Americans who own 90% of stocks are a little bit upset, but that next 40% that own the 10% and then the 50% that don’t own any are not upset. And I think that that’s something that the media really still hasn’t come to terms with yet. And they
Lobo Tiggre 16:31
vote like, you know, the media keeps getting the polls wrong, and they keep underestimating Trump, and you know, they will never say it after the lesson of Hillary. But I think that if you shot one of them with a truth beam, or injected them with enough sodium pentothal, but not so much, to put them to sleep, you know, they would, they would use that deplorable word. You know, it’s these unwashed deplorables out there to support Trump. And they, they, they can’t think that actually, the silent majority, even even people who don’t necessarily agree with Trump on many important things, the overall agenda is pro business. You know, it is, in some ways, Reaganesque, you know, get the government off the little guy’s back. You can keep more of your money. It is, you know, unabashedly populist, and honestly, a lot of it is is kind of more Democrat than Republican. You know, there’s, there’s things in that agenda, you know, like price controlling pharmaceuticals. That’s not a, that’s not a GOP idea. Fortunately, I’m a libertarian, so I can look at these things. I think maybe a little more. Sometimes it’s an advantage, you know, you to be outside. You know the red or the blue. Rick Rule
Trey Reik 17:45
has perfected the libertarian lane for 25 years, so it keeps you out of everybody’s I
Lobo Tiggre 17:52
understand that there’s people in our audience who are Republicans and maybe even a few Democrats. You know that one guy over there, but so I’m not trying to offend anybody, but I do actually think this helps. And, you know, people like Doug, you know, my old mentor, Doug Casey, he’s kind of reckless in some ways. And, you know, he’s, he’s pretty adventurous. And I’m not sure that his whole career would have worked out so well if he hadn’t been a libertarian. Because if he drank the, you know, say the conservative GOP Kool Aid, and he just followed the masses, then maybe his recklessness would have resulted in train wrecks. But as a libertarian who was outside of that mindset and not having the blinders on of left or right, then it was a very creative force for him. That’s my and I’ve
Trey Reik 18:39
been in public presentations where people have literally hissed at Doug on things he said about the military and stuff.
Speaker 1 18:49
Were you at Freedom Fest and the one right after 911
Trey Reik 18:52
Oh, my God, a lot of people got up and walked
Lobo Tiggre 18:55
out. I was there, it was and he stood there. And this is a big hall, like 1000 people, and half of them get up and walk out, you know, the hissing, hairy eyeball, the whole thing. I’ll never forget this. He leans forward, he grabs his little glass of water, takes a sip, and said, good. I didn’t think they were paying attention. It just keeps right on going. I’m not trying to throw fire bombs in the audience, but I’m making an argument here for independence, you know, independence of what? So
Trey Reik 19:27
backing up from the Trump thing, which I think you explained very well, one of the things that I haven’t heard you talk about in public much is the Fed. And I’m a bit surprised that you don’t have a Fed shtick. So I’m gonna, I’m going to put you on the spot, because I’ve spent a lot of time studying the Fed and what I consider to be their erosion of credibility all the way down to the 2020 120 billion of QE a month with GDP at six. And see. CPI already going from five to seven, and unemployment all the way down from four. You know, I think that 21 will be, you know, the worst year of Fed monetary policy in history. When history looks back, there are totally but I’m setting the stage. Do you have a Fed view? I do,
Lobo Tiggre 20:19
and maybe it’s a little bit of recency bias here, until Trump, Trump shock set in. You know, the Fed was calling the shots. He was fed. You know, when, you know, like, as you and I are speaking, we just got PCE out. I don’t know when this will go live, but as we’re recording, we just got PCE out, and the market didn’t even care.
Trey Reik 20:37
It was right on target.
Lobo Tiggre 20:39
It was slightly lower, but, right, but, but, you know, at the same time, we’ve got the court slapping Trump’s tariffs around, and that’s really all Mr. Market is focused on. Right now, what I’m saying is, six months ago, or a year ago, that PCE print would have rocked the markets. We would have seen, you know, easily, a 345, 100 point move in the Dow, and, you know, similar echoes in the s, p, and so what I’m what I’m saying is, you may be seeing me focus less on the Fed this year, because it seems
Trey Reik 21:11
to understand you’re saying that the PCE was was low, was tame, was under control. Is that what you’re saying it was point one and two year,
Lobo Tiggre 21:20
there was a range of expectations from point one to point two, and the annual number came in. I think point one less than the analyst consensus. Your
Trey Reik 21:29
point is inflation is kind of under control. Is that your point? Or am I putting words? No, my
Lobo Tiggre 21:34
point is that the market, a year ago, with it, with an inflation beat, the Dow, would have went up 500 or 1000 points. You know, interest rates are gonna gonna go down, and that’s gonna be great for us, right? And and today, it was a nothing burger because we had, we had the court slapping the Trumps tariffs down, and then up again and sideways. Nobody knows what’s going on. But so the bigger answer to your question is, of course, the Fed is important. Of course, monetary policy is extremely important. And my overall view is that Powell is probably going to go down as another burns and not a Volcker despite his greatest wishes, as low as inflation seems to be getting now those could be, that could be the result of Trump shock, rather than control of inflation. And to bring another friend in here, Lynn Alden, if you’ve ever interviewed her, you know that she focuses on her fiscal dominance thesis. And to be frank, I underestimated this, basically my layman’s translation of Lynn’s very erudite and history backed and data driven analysis of this is simply the money helicopters are still in the air. And I thought, you know, after, you know, the insanity of the of the COVID lockdowns and all the stuff they did pulling out the stops, I thought, surely, you couldn’t keep that up, right? The money helicopters would have to land after a while, some semblance of sanity, and then they’d be ready to go for the next one. But they never did. We’ve been running, you know, trillion to multi trillion dollar deficits since the COVID lockdowns. It never stopped. You know, the Biden administration tried to tell us we had the greatest economy ever, but somehow this justified wartime levels of deficit spending. And now Trump’s trying to tell us we’re having the best economy ever now in 100 days, but somehow we need a new budget with $6 trillion much of spending, or whatever it is, right? And no debt ceiling until after he’s out of office. These things don’t square. But there’s 2.1 is, of course, the Fed matters, and at some point when they start reacting. And I, you know, I think Mr. Market will remember how important monetary policy is. But don’t forget, there’s also fiscal policy. And there is, there. There is no force in Washington, I think that can prevent fiscal largesse. I mean, this is the GOP right now that’s trying to ramp through this, you know, multi trillion dollar spending package with promised cuts. You know, in the next decade. Of course, they always spend now and promise to cut later, and it never happens. So this is highly inflationary, and this is why I think that, to answer your question, I think that Powell goes down as it burns, because it’s not entirely up to the Fed this. It’s not just the Trump shock. It’s the fiscal policy, fiscal dominance as well. And I think their hand will be forced. So
Trey Reik 24:34
this has been laying the groundwork, because I think we share this view. Do you think it is an exaggeration to say that we are on the cusp of a global monetary reset? No,
Lobo Tiggre 24:49
but it depends on what you mean by cusp. Because I have heard people argue that that’s where we are. Probably my entire career, 100%
Trey Reik 24:57
20 years I’ve been.
Unknown Speaker 24:59
Certainly,
Trey Reik 25:04
excuse me for interrupting. No, no,
Lobo Tiggre 25:06
no, it’s we’re on the same page. I mean, I remember all too painfully sort of drinking the Kool Aid on this after the GFC. And, you know, it’s such a big blow up, it was hard to believe that paper this over or kick the can down the road. And, you know, Doug and my seniors in the space, everybody thought this was it. The House of Cards was coming down. It didn’t.
Trey Reik 25:25
But gold’s acting different. And the other thing that you and I have been doing for two decades is waiting for gold to go up for the quote, unquote, right reasons. There are all these other reasons. You know, CPI, Fed rate decisions, geopolitical shocks, while they’re all important, I’ve always said those are the those aren’t the reasons that we put all this work in. So it sure seems like gold. Let me rephrase the question. Gold was up 27% last year, and through today, it’s up another 26% are you surprised by how strongly gold is performing in the first half of this year? No,
Lobo Tiggre 26:07
and yes, I mean, I have to say, you know, I was nobody’s more pleased than me to see the hockey stick last year. I had, I had for 23 my highest confidence trade was actually the other yellow metal, uranium. That worked out really well for 24 it was gold, not uranium that worked out really well. Uranium went into reverse, and we know what gold did. I’m still a gold bull. All the reasons for gold to go up are still there. And you know, I wouldn’t say so much this time is different. But actually, if you pull back and look at the big picture, if you look using the government’s own statistics, at the purchasing power of the dollar, you know, this long curve down since 1971 and you look at the gold dollar exchange rate, I think gold is money, so I really object to calling it the gold price. I call it the gold dollar exchange rate. It’s a Forex question in my mind, and it is going the other way. If you look at Gold versus the purchasing power of the dollar, even using CPI, it’s a giant X over the last 70 years, 50 years. And there’s other measures. So if you look at the big picture, just look at m2 for example. If you plot m2 cumulative m2 and gold, that gold wiggles more, there’s more volatility. But the lines, you know, it’s very clear that they’re there. Let me put it this way, the correlation is over 90% or point nine, if you want to be precise, that’s that’s a very high correlation, and which reminds us of percent Professor Friedman’s dictum, right? Of always in everywhere, a monetary phenomenon. These things being the case, it seems to me that there’s an argument for just don’t fret the noise, the near term noise and the volatility. You do base your paper currency in anything real, like gold or silver or copper, right? It’s going to go the other direction, because you print more of the fake stuff, and it’s going to take more of it to buy the real stuff. There’s, there’s no surprise there. It’s, it’s when you get into shorter term comparisons and you get into trouble or hoping you know what we what do I do this year? What’s it going to do this year? The answer your question is, we got a hockey stick last year to ask for another hockey stick this year was a big ask. So it’s not that I was bearish, these big picture things that I’m talking about. It’s all there. It’s all bullish for gold, but we got that hockey stick last year. So you know, I’m bullish on gold, but I can’t say it’s dirt cheap. And by the way, if you look at a gold chart adjusted for CPI, and I know that CPI is a CPI and all that stuff, but still, it’s the number we have. If you adjust for CPI, the 1980 peak in gold is around 3500 today, right? So isn’t it interesting that it hit that level and then, you know, backed off. It
Trey Reik 28:56
was seven cents above 3500 for one minute. So, you know, in the middle of the night, it wasn’t exactly trading there for a week, but yes, it did touch it, and obviously excited a lot of algorithms, because it was down, I think, $182 within the next 32 hours. So, and
Lobo Tiggre 29:15
the good news on that, if you think about it like, you kiss an all time high, like a real, supposedly real, all time high, and you bounce off it, that’s the sort of thing you would think would trigger just a lot of selling and stops and profit taking. You know, gold bugs, they’re never going to sell, but the but these traders on Wall Street, or the comics guys, they’re not religious about gold. They’re just looking to make a buck and so, so some technical trigger sets in, you know, whatever, the fact that it only dropped a couple percent, you know, and then here we are, months later, and we’re holding, you know, around 3300 you know, drops to 32 and then comes back up again. It was at 34 just last week. And here we are, 3300 again. That’s. A a fantastic number for the actual business of mining or exploring. You know the projects now, it used to be like a ridiculously optimistic price assumption, to assume $2,000 gold, and now you know it’s, it’s actually, if you look at the three year trailing average, it’s like 2500 or something, which it’s hard for me to accept that in a feasibility study. You know, 2500 just sounds too high, but that’s that’s 800 bucks lower than we are now. So for the actual business of mining, the stuff, and for, you know, building a mine, the current range is fantastic.
Trey Reik 30:42
Still, still values reserves in the 1400 to $1,700 range. Well, yeah,
Lobo Tiggre 30:48
I think it’s moved a little bit. But just as an example, barracks, existing mines were built on a 12 to $1,300 assumption. And you know, we were close to three times that? Not that Barrick made that much money, but that’s a whole nother question.
Trey Reik 31:06
So we’ll get to the miners in a minute. But backing up, I’ve heard you say recently that your four favorite metals are gold, silver, copper and uranium. So after teasing you in a good natured fashion that that’s pretty much 100% of the gold space I was interested in. I mean, the metal space, those are certainly the four that capture most of the imagination and attention. How would you rank the I know that you originally said copper was your pick this year, and then copper did very well. It’s come back a little bit. So how would you rank the four?
Lobo Tiggre 31:42
It’s still there. You know, gold has exceeded my expectations, but my reasons for for picking copper over gold this year as my my top bet for the year haven’t changed. The Money helicopters we were talking about before Trump’s agenda again, the RE industrialization, the things he’s doing, the nuclear energy, you know, even he’s embracing AI in the data centers, even the crypto aspect, that’s all very bullish, actually, for copper and energy mineral. And you know, data centers are like airports or hospitals. You need 24/7, you know, always there. Always on abundant energy. And, sorry, just windmills and batteries aren’t going to cut it for something like that. And this isn’t just me, libertarian anarchist who hates windmills. I do have a Don Quixote thing, and, you know, I think of it every time I see a windmill, but it’s, you know, what’s his face? The pasty face kid from Facebook, the CEO Zuckerberg, yes, right. Sorry, I’m having, I’m having a senior moment there. You know, even, you know, Zuckerberg and Microsoft and Oracle, they’re all talking nuclear for these people, because they get it that, you know, if you have an engineering or technical background, you know reality matters and you need baseload power. So I’m very bullish on uranium, and I was before the AI craze. You know, that’s the existing fleet needs more uranium, let alone everything else that’s coming, the small modular reactors, whatever. But you know, the uranium price did go up a lot, and there are mothballed mines being brought online now. There are new mines being built now, so we’re in the process of finding out if high prices have cured high prices, or if it wasn’t enough and they have to move higher still. That that is being determined now, like I say,
Trey Reik 33:33
ignore this is your Yes, yes position. Do you want to elaborate on that a little?
Lobo Tiggre 33:38
Okay, let me come back to I’m addressing the Four Horsemen here. So, you know, I like gold a lot, but it went up so much last year, it’s hard for me to say, Ooh, it has to keep going, right? I like copper a lot, but with the Trump turmoil, it’s Dr copper response to economic unease. So that’s not an immediate one. But because of the money helicopters we were talking about before this is all highly inflationary. Copper is necessary for basically everything. So I’m extremely bullish on copper, after the kerfuffle. So there’s gold, there’s copper, uranium, I like a lot, but we are, as I say, in this space of seeing whether high prices cure high prices or not, and then silver, which is still a monetary metal, but it does have very obviously, measurably and sorry people, you know, silver bulls get upset with me. Sometimes call me Darth silver and all that stuff. But it clearly has a much larger industrial side than ever, and that weighs on it. There’s times when you see it, it’s just tracking copper and not gold. That happens. Now, the good news is that I’m bullish on copper and gold this year. So for me, that that’s a no brainer. Of course, I like silver, but it does make me less in a hurry to rush out and buy any silver stocks today, because if gold is kind of, you know, training sideways and copper is going down. Because of the next Trump shock, I suspect that silver will be under pressure until that clears up. Ultimately, I’m bullish on all four. And now the answer your question, you jumped in with the win, win portfolio, for me, for this year, is actually golden uranium, the two yellow miles. Because if things go bad and things get scary, you know. And there’s, there’s a flight to safety, safe haven assets and things like that, that clearly benefits gold. That might not be so great for uranium or any industrial minerals, depending on how that plays out. So there’s, you know, but, but my gold will make me proud. My gold stocks will pay me if it goes the other way. I’m wrong to worry about the difficulties of getting put into the negotiation table, or any of these other things that I worry about, and things calm down, and Trump’s tax cuts and his deregulation just produces an immediate, not eventual, but an immediate boom in the US economy. Well, my copper will do great, but the uranium will go nuts, and maybe the gold maybe people won’t feel the need for safe havens so much. So maybe my gold stocks will underperform, but my uranium stocks, they should go through the roof. My base case is actually for both of them to go up, both yellow metals, by the end of this year. But if, but if I’m wrong one way or the other, then one will go up and it’ll hedge me against losses on the other side. And I’d honestly, believe it or not, you know, maybe Gold Bug lights gold isn’t much of a headline. But I don’t see a scenario. I’m looking at the possibilities in front of us. I don’t see a scenario where uranium and gold go down. Like, what would do that? What would what would make people feel calm and everything’s great. So we don’t need safe havens, but we don’t need abundant baseload power either. Like I just that I don’t see that scenario. So I either make money on both, which is what I’m actually betting with my portfolio right now, or one of them hedges me against the other, in case I’m wrong, got it on
Trey Reik 36:59
the gold side at your firm, with your colleagues, do you engage in the exercise of trying to determine what gold’s fair value may be at any point in time, or in the field? No,
Lobo Tiggre 37:17
those giant X charts, or, you know, m2 and gold like, you know, the big picture is all I care for. Okay? The rest is sorry. It’s just, at best, an academic exercise, because it’s never it, never it. It never has predictive power. So
Trey Reik 37:33
then let’s sorry. Let’s flip it around. How, how high? Like when you, you mentioned earlier the m2 connection to gold, etc. And people talk about the Fed’s balance sheet and the 25% cover clause. You know, a skeptic would say, Well, so what? What does that have to do with gold? How? How high do you do? You have a target for gold? I’m
Lobo Tiggre 37:57
happy, just to get the direction right, so I never give price targets. But as we mentioned, if you adjust for CPI three, 500 was an all time high. So that was potentially a resistance level. That doesn’t mean that that’s where it should go. It means like, if you, if you believe in any technical analysis, that if it breaks through that, you know, sky’s the limit, and if it bounces off that, that’s maybe bad news, but that’s CPI. If you use shadow stats, it’s like twice that high. I don’t even want to say loud, right? But you know, it’s huge. And there are numbers I forget which one we used. We were just playing with different types of inflation, and there was one number that a real all time high was going to be over $12,000 an ounce. It’s not a prediction. It’s not a promise. Please don’t put that in the click bait headline. But there are ways of looking at adjusting gold for inflation that would that would call for that. And it’s interesting that you know a four digit number like that that coincides with math like you’re talking about that some of these people have done, like, if you wanted to back all the dollars in existence with the gold allegedly at Fort Knox, it would take something north of $10,000 an ounce to do it right. So it’s it’s interesting that that kind of aligns. And another interesting thing is there’s talk out there, which somebody even asked Scott bessent about this in an interview, and it’s not just the auditing of Fort Knox, but Trump himself said, Well, it’d be difficult to go back on a gold standard, but wouldn’t that be great? You know, for for a president united states to even say that is pretty jaw dropping. But the interesting idea here is that if you do allow gold to hit its real price, and then you revalue the gold reserves in United States, you maybe don’t completely fix the United States’s balance sheet overnight, but you make it a whole lot stronger, just like. At So for all these decades, the central banks have been the enemy. The Fed has been the enemy of the gold bug, right? You know, they’re suppressing the price of gold. The government doesn’t want people to know how worthless the fiat currency is is, so they’re suppressing the price of gold all this stuff. We could actually be in a world where they want gold to go up so they can revalue the reserves, and then suddenly the balance sheet looks better. The US gets its triple A rating back again, and everybody lives happily ever after, or at least, you know, I’m not sure that they can do that. I still think there’s too many people who don’t want to admit how far the dollar has gone, because if you do that, you’re admitting that $1 is is not one three thousandths of an ounce of a gold. It’s 130 thousandths of an ounce of gold, or whatever it is, right? That’s a huge admission, and I have a hard time thinking that the powers that be would really be okay with this. But it’s a it’s an interesting thing that this is actually in public discourse. Now. This isn’t a libertarian, tinfoil hat theory. They’re asking the Secretary of the Treasury about it, and he’s saying, Well, you know, that’s not my idea, but it’s out there
Trey Reik 41:06
interesting. So in the gold space, we’ve both spent a lot of time waiting for the beta to bullion of gold miners to catch up. And when you look back, it is amazing. In the first quarter of last year, the average gold price was 2071 second quarter, 2003 38/3 quarter, 2004 76/4 quarter, 2,006/61 quarter of this year, 2858 and April was 3218 So aren’t you a little surprised that we haven’t started to see some of that earnings leverage, you know, out the Gazoo yet?
Lobo Tiggre 41:50
Yes, and no, I mean the past bull markets and the only you know, I didn’t own stocks in the in the 80s or in 1980 when gold hit that peak. I actually was long, but I was long silver, physical silver. I was a kid, and all my lawn mower money and babysitting money went into silver rounds, Morgan dollars, that sort of thing. But I was there for the run up to 2011 and the $1,900 peak there, and you know, so I saw the stocks deliver with leverage and that they as a as a group, or have been underperforming this time around, you know. So yeah, there’s, there’s some surprise there. But as our friend Rick Rule likes to point out, during that same cycle, from you know, $258 to 19 $11 an ounce, somehow the mining industry as a whole managed to turn that into increased negative cash flow. And I actually charted this. There’s a free article on the website called, are gold stocks broken, which I did last year 24 on this very topic, and I charted it. You can see how, you know, the gold price goes like this, and the margins go like that with the free cash flow. It’s just like, you know, it takes, Rick likes to say it takes real talent to take a seven fold increase in your underlying commodity and turn that into, you know, less cash. Like, how do you do that without trying? But the point, though, is that, if that’s your recency bias, that’s the last big run up. Now we have this one. Why would anybody pile into the gold stocks if the last time they did that, like the actual miners, the business of mining gold, managed to drop the football? You know, they fumbled.
Trey Reik 43:31
So your your point is, they have to show yes, they’re not going to do that again. And then we’re going to have a big catch. And we already
Lobo Tiggre 43:40
have data on this trade. Because if you you probably know this as well as you know last year, if you differentiated without naming names or throwing anybody under the bus, like if you, if you look at the gold miners that are known for operational excellence, and you compare to them, the ones that are you know have nationalized mines or operating difficulties and so on. So the GDX roughly tracked gold last year, which is basically useless, like if, if you’re not going to have any, if you’re not going to have leverage to the gold price, why bother with the mining stocks? There’s less risk just buying the gold, right? So that’s to track gold. That’s not good enough. You need to more than track gold. If you looked at the better companies, they way outperformed even last year. So this whole thing of, oh, the gold stocks aren’t going anywhere. It’s actually not true as an average Sure, look at the GDX looks that way. But if you look at the better companies, they did great. They did like, 2x 3x and we’re seeing that now that. So I think, you know, this is actual data telling us that, yes, investors will look at gold stocks when they actually start doing what they’re supposed to do. And fortunately, we’re seeing that now even last year’s underperformers are doing better this year. Then the next question is, when does it trickle down to the juniors? You know, we we like to look. For our 10 baggers, you know, and these little juniors that pop, and they really, as a group, haven’t been loved. But again, the people that have made world class discoveries, you know, they they are getting love in the market. They’re getting takeover offers. The people that have been building, or have, you know, development projects, or they’re building, you know, a high margin mine, same thing, those stocks are getting rewarded and they’re getting and or they’re getting taken over. So it seems to me that the answer the question is just, you know, Mr. Market is once bitten twice shy on this, and he’s being a little savvier this time around. So you, you got to do your due diligence. You got to you can’t just buy the ETF or buy the market, you need to be a stock picker in this market. Until proven otherwise,
Trey Reik 45:45
you mentioned the GDX, and I’m sure we share the opinion that the GDX suffers a bit from what I call negative survivorship bias. So in most industries, if you buy the largest, highest quality names, you’re in pretty good shape. But in gold mining, if you look at the top holdings of the GDX, and again, without naming names, except for Agnico, whoops, that slipped out, but if you look at some of the big names, you know they’re facing the challenge of replacing reserves, and that leads to all sorts of behavior and decisions that you know may not be ideal. So assuming we share that assumption, what part of the food chain is your newsletter focusing on? Now, even though you’ve already said you’re not super, super bullish about any sector, but if you’re going to look at gold miners, where, where should investors focus?
Lobo Tiggre 46:45
There’s two answers. One is, is a general strategy? I have a, my own version of a barbell strategy. And then as I’ll have a few of the blue chips. You know the best names, you know, cream of the cream and and I, but I don’t just buy those all the time. You know, if I own one, it’s because it hit a cyclical low, and I’ve owned it for a while. You know, those, those top names, and you mentioned some, we all know who they are, but those top names, if you buy them, when gold is down, gold is unloved, the stocks run are unloved. You can almost guarantee you’ll make money. The market will turn at some point, those stocks will go up, and you could do that repeatedly. Washrooms repeat like buy whenever the markets at a cyclical low, take profits or sell when you get highs, multi years highs, and just keep doing that. But you that alone could be a money making portfolio kind of boring, and it takes a long time, but, but we reliable, so the the safe end of my barbell is a few of the majors, and then the the high risk, high alpha, looking for hockey sticks. On the junior end is the other end of my barbell. And I combine these to try to have a more reasonable overall average result as for on the junior end. That’s the overall strategy, like, what kinds of stocks I like? There’s a couple things I really like, the pre production sweet spot. This is perhaps my claim to fame in this space. As far as I know, I’m the first one to do statistically robust analysis of this and come up with actual numbers, and they’re startling. So I like the pre production sweet spot, but there’s only a couple of those a year. I mean, it’s not every year that a junior makes that transition from mining to production.
Trey Reik 48:28
And so your pre production sweet spot, just sort of looking at the Lausanne curve, is that after completion of the project, before commercial production, no, a little earlier
Lobo Tiggre 48:40
it, yeah, it’s, you know, Lausanne curbs goes up in the discovery phase, goes down into the boring engineering phase, or the so called orphan phase, and then it goes up to production. So it’s that up to production is the pre production sweet spot. I certainly met that name. It was already there. But, you know, the quick version of this story is back in my Casey days, I asked Doug, well, I’m looking for ideas and where to invest I go. How much is the gain in that pre production sweet spot? How sweet is it? He says, Well, everybody can see who’s building a mine, so it’s not much, you know, maybe 20% something like that, because everybody sees it. It’s priced in so, but he didn’t know. So I got with my team, and we put together some numbers, and it wasn’t 20% the first number I got was well over 100% like 140% I was like, No, that can’t be right. So I sent him back, and we got more, and we got a couple dozen examples, and it was still over 100% I showed it to Doug, and he couldn’t believe it. But then, you know, he looked at the examples and he remembered them all. He’s like, Well, I guess that’s right. So, so this was the beginning, and there’s a lot, there’s a free report on this on the website. If you, if you go to the website, use little magnifying glass and type ppss for pre production sweet font. You can download that. But the key numbers. Are that the average gain from a construction decision to first poor or first plate or first production or whatever it is, average is about a double. Takes about two years. Average is about a double. And 90% of the companies plus get there. Now they don’t all. 90% don’t deliver doubles, but 90% get there. And the best data that I love about this is that this works even in a bear market. Not all of them get there in a bear market, but the average gain from construction decision to first pour in a bear market is still about 25 or 30% because it makes sense. If you think about it, you’re spending money literally pouring into holes in the ground is your diamond drilling and so on to making money. You know, getting it out of one big hole in the ground the mine that deserves a re rate you go from burning money to making money. Of course, there’s a rewrite, so it makes perfect sense. But as far as I knew, no nobody had ever actually done the math on this before. Doug couldn’t believe it until we proved it to him, and then I showed it to Rick, and this is one of my favorite things. I showed it to Rick, and he went away, and he came back a few weeks later, and he said that he’d given it to his bright boys in the back room to kick around and see, and he said we could find no flaw. That’s a
Trey Reik 51:16
pretty upbeat for brick for Rick.
Lobo Tiggre 51:19
That was, that was my finger sits in the ground for a week. So sorry. We talked about, what do I like buying? So when I can find a good ppss play, I’m all over it. I love that, but there’s just not many of them. There’s something else I call success in progress, which is the early part of the song curve. I’m not It’s not pre discovery. Nobody knows who’s going to make a discovery. Not Rick, not Doug, not certainly not me. And the way to catch that is to have a whole bunch of socks, right? And, you know, a bunch of Prospect generators, all stuff. And maybe you’ll get one of these. But that first part of the Lausanne curve, it’s not just the discovery hole, it’s not, you know, nothing. And then discovery hole, and then boring engineering phase, there’s a lot of work to do before you get in that boring engineering phase, you got to drill off a deposit. So between the discovery hole and that first 43, 101, resource or thereabouts, there’s a lot of success in progress. Like, when you’ve really got a real discovery, that first drill hole is followed up by another one, and you have a model. Like, it’s a vein. It goes like this. So we drill it this way, and you keep hitting that success in progress. It’s not just, you know, a one hit wonder or something. It’s a model that has predictive value and it delivers drill results. Yes, if you wait for that confirmation, the success for the first discovery to happen. The point is, that’s not the end of the Lassen curve. There’s this whole success and progress phase from that discovery to that resource, where they just keep drilling and hitting and every press release is great. You know, there’s recent discoveries an example in the Yukon. Everybody knows what I’m talking about, right? It just keeps going. It’s a freaking Energizer Bunny of drill results, and the market loves that. So if you you don’t have to predict the discovery, but if you can jump on that success and progress train wagon, you can, you can make a lot of money. So ideas like that, I I try very hard to look for things where the odds are in my favor.
Trey Reik 53:12
So really appreciate all of that. And looking forward, I guess my my last question would be, for those who were contemplating subscribing to your newsletter, which I would encourage everyone to do, what would they find your current positioning is for the second half of 2025 where? Where should investors be looking for the balance of the year? And I know that’s usually too short a time period to get you to focus on with a long treatise. But, but what are your thoughts? It’s,
Lobo Tiggre 53:47
it’s consistent with what we’ve been talking about. My my actual positioning right now is long gold, long uranium, smattering of silver waiting to deploy into copper. I just, I just don’t think we’re done with Trump shock yet. I think we’re going to get a better buying opportunity. And I’m building cash right now, and absolutely come the day, the top of the shopping list will be copper, perfect.
Trey Reik 54:13
Well, Lobo, thank you so much for your time. I think there’s a million things here for people to think about and react to, and to be honest with you, I threw away my question list when we were halfway through, so I have all sorts of other things I’d love to ask you, but we’re going to have to give you a break and check back in six months or so next
Unknown Speaker 54:33
Time. Thank you very much, Trey. Thank you, sir.
