Gold has surged this year, and uranium demand is rising as central banks, tech giants, and major players pour into these metals. James Connor interviews John Ciampaglia, CEO of Sprott—a $30+ billion asset manager specializing in precious metals—to reveal why gold is seen as a shield against economic risks and why uranium is crucial to big tech’s massive AI expansion plans. Learn how these strategic assets could protect your wealth and strengthen your portfolio.
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John Ciampaglia 0:00
We also see institutional investors coming back to gold in the last two months after largely ignoring it for the previous 10 months. So that’s a very bullish sign. Central banks are increasingly shifting their foreign exchange reserves away from us, dollars and other currencies and treasuries to to gold. That’s a very interesting dynamic that we think will play out for many decades. At the end of the day, you need to buy because, you know, fuel is absolutely critical, and there’s no way to substitute uranium for something else like you can with other commodities.
James Connor 0:36
Hi and welcome to wealthion. I’m James Connor. The days of a 6040, investment portfolio or over and now there’s so many different asset classes and options available to investors. If you would like to learn more about these asset classes and how they can benefit your portfolio, consider having a discussion with a wealthion endorsed financial advisor. You can find out more information@wealthion.com slash free. Once again, That’s wealthion.com/free now onto the show, John, thank you very much for joining us today. How are things in Toronto?
John Ciampaglia 1:11
Hey, things are great. Great to be back, John. For
James Connor 1:15
those who might not be familiar with fraud and its various investment products, maybe you can tell us a little bit about the company and what sort of products you have. Of products you have for investors?
John Ciampaglia 1:23
Yeah, sure. So sprott’s been around multiple decades, and I think people that know us are very familiar with our focus and expertise on all things related to metals and mining. We run multi billion dollars of physical commodity funds that cover everything from gold, silver, platinum, palladium, copper and uranium, which are all very unique offerings. And we also offer a whole range of different equity oriented ETFs that focus on mostly the mining sector across multiple types of metals in both passive strategies as well as active, actively managed strategies.
James Connor 2:02
And of all those different metals that you just mentioned, which one has had the best performance this year and maybe the most flows from investors?
John Ciampaglia 2:10
Yeah, so I you know, obviously it’s been a year for precious metals. They they were clearly in the doldrums last year. They seem to wake up late about 12 months ago, actually, in October of 2023 gold, kind of hit $1,800 an ounce, and we’ve obviously had a really great rally up to 2700 and change per ounce. So gold has been this the attention grabber for sure, in the last 12 months. Silver, technically, is outperformed it a little bit, but I think gold has really been part of the conversation because of a number of really interesting developments. One, central banks are increasingly shifting their foreign exchange reserves away from us, dollars and other currencies and treasuries to to gold. That’s a very interesting dynamic that we think will play out for many decades. It’s, it’s not just it’s not just China, it’s India, it’s Singapore, it’s Turkey, Poland. They’re all adding to their gold reserves, and that’s, I think, provided a lot of durable buying support. But we also see institutional investors coming back to gold in the last two months after largely ignoring it for the previous 10 months. So that’s a very bullish sign. And then finally, I would say Chinese retail investors, which obviously provide an enormous amount of collective savings, they’ve been coming back to gold, and the reasons, we think are their economy is sputtering. Their real estate market has clearly been in a bubble for some time and has popped, and their equity market has performed very poorly. And so when you have very limited options to invest in China, gold is kind of reasserting itself as kind of a tried and true asset. So we’re seeing a lot of retail investors in China starting to buy little, little quantities of gold. Again, I think all these things are are really helping propel gold to new highs of late.
James Connor 4:12
So you made mention of the fact that central banks have been buying it, and also Chinese investors. What about North American investors? Yeah, I
John Ciampaglia 4:20
would say North American investors, you know, whether they’re more retail oriented, have largely continued to hold the goal they have. We don’t see a ton of new buying interest, and we obviously track different metrics related to, you know, sales of coins and bars as one proxy for that. But in the last couple of months, you know, we’ve definitely seen a pickup in in flows into gold, ETFs, including our own at Sprott. But it’s only been in the last two months. So it’s, it’s written a really interesting dynamic that gold basically went from 1800 to $2,500 an ounce. And over that period of time, we saw. A consistent selling of gold out of out of the ETFs, and it’s only been in the last couple of months that trend is reversed. But what’s interesting to us is that while the trend has reversed, we’ve gone from a bottom of around 81 million ounces of gold held globally in ETFs. We’re only at about 83 84 million ounces. And a year ago, we were closer to 90, just a little over 90 million ounces of gold. So we went from kind of 90 to 81 and now we’re, we’re back to kind of 8384 so hardly a lot of inflows, given the price move of gold, which you obviously don’t think of as of an asset that, you know goes up 30 plus percent in a year. And
James Connor 5:44
why do you think there’s such little interest, especially with the big O performance this year in gold, I
John Ciampaglia 5:50
just think, I just don’t think people are paying attention. It’s only been in the last couple of months where people are starting to get a little bit more concerned about different emerging risks, whether those are geopolitical risks, obviously, with Russia, China, the Middle East, people are concerned about election risks in the US, obviously, and we’re starting to see not just in the physical market, but also in the futures market, people are adding insurance in their portfolio through exposure to gold. So we think these elevated risks are helping to shift investor interest back to gold, because gold typically is in these turbulent times market times, tends to be more of a safe haven asset. And I think people are definitely but institutional investors, I think, on the whole, are still not kind of buying into the whole gold story. So it’s been an interesting kind of almost Delve rally, which I think is bullish, because if the price of gold can go from 18 to almost 20 $100 without a lot of Western investors pushing on the price, I think that tells you it has a lot more upside potential if they decide to, you know, increase their participation.
James Connor 7:05
And this lack of interest from institutional investors is that because there’s just too many other asset classes that are performing better? Yeah, look,
John Ciampaglia 7:14
I mean, I think there’s a lot of fixation still on things that have worked over a long time. Uh, obviously technology stocks and some of the stocks related to AI specifically have captured, captured a lot of the headlines and flows. And just generally speaking, I mean, institutional investors are still very underweight or zero weight in many natural resource parts of the market and commodities, they just have not really got behind them again. And you know, we think that’s changing in the last two to three years. In particular, more and more institutions are realizing the importance of not just gold and silver to be part of your portfolio, but a number of very critical minerals, everything from uranium to copper, some of the battery metals, these are all going to become much more important elements of our economy as we increase everything from electrification, moving away from fossil fuels, adding wealth to emerging markets, which then leads to an increase in electricity consumption per capita, many reshoring activities going on, everything from semiconductors, defense industries, pharmaceuticals, electric vehicles, processing of critical minerals. I mean, there is a huge number of things going on since the inflation Reduction Act has come into law that is really incentivizing new capital formation in many different manufacturing sectors. Those are all very electricity intensive, and that’s why you’re starting to hear people you know, talk about low growth for the fun. For the first time in 20 years, we’re seeing increasing low growth on on the US electrical grid, and we think a lot of capital needs to go into that sector to make that happen.
James Connor 8:58
And I do want to ask you about some of those other metals associated with electrification. But before I do that, I want to stick with the precious metals. And silver is also having a very good year. It’s up around 35% on the year. Maybe you can just speak to the flows you’re seeing in those products. Yeah, we’ve
John Ciampaglia 9:15
definitely seen some inflows into silver products, including our own, over the last few months. I mean, it is a much smaller market than gold. I mean, gold is one of the most liquid currencies in the world. Silver is a much smaller market because of its value and just sheer size. But what you’re seeing is silver is really benefiting from its dual role as a monetary metal and also as an industrial metal, and so investors typically will hold silver as a hedge against risks or an inflation hedge, or in many cases, in emerging markets where gold becomes too expensive for them to buy, they sometimes transition to buying silver as a substitute. We see that right now happening in India. So more and more people are buying silver in India than gold. Because of the price differential. But silver is also a beneficiary of a growing number of clean energy technologies that are very silver intensive. The most common is obviously solar panels, because silver is so conductive in terms of exciting electrons in those panels. They essentially create a silver pace that they put inside these solar panels to make them more efficient. And as the world is deploying record amounts of solar panels because the cost of them have collapsed over the last few years, more and more demand for silver is not going for investment purposes or medical uses or whatnot. It’s going specifically for solar panels. And what you find is that at the end of the life of those solar panels, which might be 20 or 25 years, it’s very hard to recycle those metals inside there, so it generally gets wasted. Unlike other metals, you know, there’s a lot of value in them. It’s there’s a lot of effort to recycle those metals. We don’t think a lot of that silver is going to come back to the market. So it’s essentially used and consumed for forever.
James Connor 11:10
Sprott also offers palladium product, and this is a product I’m not too familiar with, but when I was doing my research on it, I was really surprised by the volatility in this middle. Maybe you can just speak to that and what it’s used for, and why so much volatility. Yeah,
John Ciampaglia 11:25
palladium is very interesting metal, and I’ve been having a lot of investors ask me about it the last few weeks in particular. So if people are wondering, what is palladium, well, it’s basically an industrial metal, and what does most of the Palladium that we produce is used for it’s used in the catalytic converters as a catalyst to basically clean the exhaust from gasoline engine catalytic converters. So that’s its primary use. So it has huge impact on, you know, car sales. And the other interesting thing about Palladium is that Russia produces 40% of the global supply. So given our deteriorating position and relationship with Russia, obviously this is a metal that is more susceptible to disruption. Putin in September, threatened that they would cut palladium shipments off to, you know, countries that have sanctioned Russia More recently, the g7 is encouraging memberships to sanction Russian palladium like they have with things like oil and aluminum. So if these sanctions were to impact the Palladium supply, you could definitely have a bit of a shortage, and it’s one of the reasons why the Palladium price in the last few weeks, you know, had a bit of a bounce from $1,000 announced to 1200 it’s come back a little bit. But when the war in Ukraine first broke out, the price of palladium actually zoomed all the way up to $3,000 an ounce. So it was the real star performer, as people were concerned about its supply, given all the sanctions being being levied against Russia. When those sanctions did not materialize on palladium itself, the price basically unwound and went all the way back to 1000 so it’s been a real roller coaster ride. But, you know, it is obviously a precious metal, because it is incredibly rare and has incredible value, but it’s its fundamental purpose is clearly industrial.
James Connor 13:29
So if Russia produces 40% who produces the other 60? So it’s
John Ciampaglia 13:33
spread around the world, but the the next largest that most people focus on is South Africa. So South Africa, historically, has produced very high amounts of both platinum and palladium, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to produce both of those metals in South Africa for a few reasons. One, the mines are very, very old there. They’re very deep in the Earth’s crust, which makes the working conditions very challenging, and the electricity reliability in South Africa is notoriously bad. So it’s hard to run a mine when electricity is turned off, because they have regularly occurring brownouts. So platinum and palladium, I think, are two metals that are very concentrated in two countries, which are Russia and South Africa, and it’s very hard to substitute them for other metals because they are so efficient at as acting as these catalysts that go into catalytic converters. So most people have no idea that’s what were you we use them for? Obviously, there’s a secondary market for platinum with jewelry, but it’s, it’s, it’s much smaller than the primary use, which is in for auto use.
Andrew Brill 14:45
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James Connor 15:23
So let’s move on now discuss uranium. And I’m sure you would agree with me when I say no other commodity has such a positive backdrop as uranium does. But this isn’t really being reflected in the price or in the equity prices, and why don’t we just first start with the spot price? Maybe you can give us some color. How many pounds of traded this year, and how does that compare to last year?
John Ciampaglia 15:45
Yeah, sure. So. The Iranian market’s been a bit of a head scratcher this year. Last year we had a huge breakout in the price where we ended, ended up 2023 at a price of $91 a pound in the spot market, which was up 89% for the calendar year. So it really broke out on very strong fundamentals increased, you know, shift back to nuclear energy in many countries. And coupled with supply challenges, a lot of mines that have restarted have had some production hiccups to start. And the world’s largest producer in Kazakhstan, you know, finally acknowledged in August that it was not going to be able to meet its higher production targets that it had given a year earlier. So we’ve got a growing demand profile. We have a kind of choppy and somewhat, you know, uncertain supply outlook and yet, with that backdrop, the price of of uranium has gone from about $91 at the beginning of the year, as I mentioned, to right now we’re sitting at about $80 and so people are kind of questioning, okay, with this very bullish backdrop, why is the price corrected? And we think there’s a few factors obviously at play. We think that one, you know, I think it’s a natural it’s a natural event to have a bit of a healthy correction as part of an overall bull market. We see that all the time where commodity prices can go up hundreds of percent over multi multiple year bear market, bull markets, but along the way, can have many, 30, 40% corrections, which you know can shake out investors. So yes, we’ve had a bit of a correction right now, but we also think that the primary buyers of uranium, which are utilities, have been distracted by a lot of things this year. One, the United States banned the importation of Russian enriched uranium. That became law in August, and that created a big distraction. There are waivers that are being granted to for a period of time where utility can plead their case for Department of Energy to say, look, I don’t have an alternative supplier, so I need to continue to take these deliveries from Russia. Those are just starting to be given out, but only for this year and next. So there’s some uncertainty about what happens after that. Putin has threatened like palladium to cut off the west from uranium and retaliation for all of these sanctions. So there’s been a lot of noise geopolitically and from a regulatory perspective. And utilities, I think, have really stepped to the stop sidelines and have not procured as much uranium this year as you would think they would. And we see the volumes in the spot market come down significantly, the volumes in the term market, while they started to pick up in the last month or so, it’s all been China driven. So China continues to accumulate large amounts of uranium, because they are building the most number of new reactors in the world, and they’re very smartly ensuring they’ve got their security of supply with with fuel to meet their future needs. But we get the sense that Western utilities are sitting on the sidelines with the belief or the hope that prices will come down, and so they don’t have to buy immediately. They can wait the market out. And it seems as though we have a bit of a stalemate between sellers and buyers. And you know, the sellers have largely sold production forward for a number of years, so they’re not in a rush to lower prices or sell more, because they’ve sold a lot of material on forward contracts. And you know, it’s getting harder and harder to bring new production online. The sellers, excuse me, the buyers are clearly of the belief that prices will come down. So, you know, be patient, and you know, it’ll be interesting to see how this goes. But at the end of the day, you know, I think it’s, it’s fair to say that you can delay and defer your purchases, but at the end of the day, you need to buy because, you know, fuel is absolutely critical, and there’s no way to substitute uranium for something else, like you can with other commodities. And
James Connor 19:53
John, I should have asked this at the beginning of our conversation on uranium, but maybe you can just explain to investors. What’s the difference between the spa market and the term market?
John Ciampaglia 20:03
Yeah, sure. So the spot market is, is a, is a fairly small market relative to the term market. And what? What the, what? The big difference is, people are purchasing and trading uranium for today’s price for delivery in a very short period of time. For example, in 30 days. If you’re buying uranium on in the term market, what you’re doing is you’re simply signing a contract today that spells out the terms and conditions by which you will take delivery of uranium, sometimes many years in the future, and the deliveries will continue for often, many years in the future. So a very simple example would be, I sign a contract today, in four years from now, you will start to deliver me 1 million pounds of uranium each year for the next eight years. So you all you have is a paper transaction. And then you need to figure out what is the pricing mechanism? Because remember, I haven’t got anything today. I’m going to get it in year four and five and six and so on. So essentially, there is a pricing formula that the parties agree on that says, on data delivery, we’re going to have a mechanism that determines what the price will be, and those prices are subject to CAPS, meaning maximum prices and floors, meaning minimum prices that the buyer will pay. And right now, what we’re hearing is that those prices, the caps and the floors, are somewhere in the neighborhood of $75 in the low end and $135 at the high end. And right now the spot price is about $80 so I could buy at $80 today, or I could sign a contract for future delivery. And I don’t know exactly what the price is going to be, but it’s some are going to be, you know, 75 plus 235 ish, and that’s how utilities typically buy uranium. It’s under these long term arrangements. And the spot market is really a market as more focused on financial players or utilities that need to come in and just buy a little bit to help, you know, increase their inventory. So spot market, typically, five to 15% of utility needs are fulfilled there, and the bulk of their of their purchases are done in this fair market.
James Connor 22:17
And who would be the top three producers of uranium in the world? Well,
John Ciampaglia 22:21
this is the interesting thing about it, is that there’s really only two big producers in the world. And so if you think about a critical mineral that produces 20% of US electricity, 10% of global electricity, you’ve got basically two, you know, companies that produce the vast majority that which is one is a state owned company in Kazakhstan called kasat from the other one is a Canadian company called Cameco. You know, those two companies are the largest producers of uranium in the world. There are a number of producers that are at much smaller scale, that are either in the process of restarting old mines that have been closed when the price of uranium was, you know, $30 or less per pound. Now that the price of uranium is sending out the right signals and there’s improved demand, those owners of those mines are slowly turning them back all online, we’ve seen a number of mines come back to production this year, and many more that are working on coming back in the production. And that’s why the equities in the uranium sector, I think, have performed really well. If you take a step back and look how they’ve done over the last four years, they are more volatile because they’re smaller cap companies, many of which are just getting back into generating cash flow, but the stocks have done very well over the last four years on the back of these improving fundamentals and obviously improved uranium prices.
James Connor 23:52
And the world’s largest consumer of uranium is the US. They consume approximately 45 to 50 million pounds a year, but they don’t produce any so maybe you can speak to that. And where does the US get its uranium from? Yeah, it’s a really
John Ciampaglia 24:09
interesting point. I think you could have the same discussion about multiple commodities that the US is a very large consumer of, but doesn’t produce a lot in country anymore. There was a time in the early 1980s that the US produced around 40 million pounds of uranium a year, as you said, in contrast to its its annual needs today, which are closer to 50 billion pounds per year. But you know, the US hasn’t produced much uranium in 10 plus years. Last year, the number was a little over 300,000 pounds. And this year, that number is slowly growing, with new mines restarting. But you know, even at the at the at the at the end of the last cycle, the US was still only producing about 4 million pounds a year. So total. Dependent, or heavily dependent, on other countries. You know, thankfully, places like Canada have a lot of uranium that is being sold the US. Kazakhstan has been also an exporter of uranium to the US. So that hasn’t been lost on on regulators and politicians that that the US wants to become less dependent on countries for some of the key you know, supply chains, uranium, I would put in that camp, things related to battery, metals, defense industries, semiconductors, even pharmaceuticals. This has been a real Wake Up Call in the last few years between COVID and and the invasion of Ukraine that you know you need to have resilient supply chains, because Russia was a very reliable and and the lowest cost provider of enriched uranium to the world for 30 plus years. And now the world, you know why I should cry myself, the western world is trying to transition its itself off of that supply chain, and it’s going to take several years to do that, because we’ve been so dependent for decades on Russia. So
James Connor 26:11
there’s been so much big news coming out this year on nuclear energy, and, by extension, uranium. And I guess the most recent news is just the emergence of big tech into nuclear energy, maybe you can speak to that.
John Ciampaglia 26:24
Yeah. So in the last few weeks, there’s been a lot of exciting news developments and announcements related to big tech. So big tech kind of covers, you know, Microsoft, Amazon, cloud, Google, meta, Apple and Oracle, and they’re all kind of following a similar strategy, which is they need to source large quantities of electricity, and preferably clean, meaning no greenhouse gasses or low greenhouse gasses, and preferably firm, firm, meaning The electricity source runs all the time, or provide electricity all the time, versus variable or into or intermittent energy sources like renewables. And they’re doing this because they are all developing a technology, and they’re all in a race to be leaders in artificial intelligence. And why? Why this is so linked to electricity is because the data centers that run these essentially super computers that do this artificial intelligence are incredibly electricity intensive relative to traditional data centers. And some estimates I’ve seen are seven to 10 times more electricity intensive than a typical data center that, you know, we would use for, you know, surfing the web or, you know, loading photos up or whatever. So it’s, it’s a race to to be a leader here. And what these technology companies have figured out that one of the biggest obstacles is not the technology, it’s sourcing the electricity. And that’s because if you look at the US grid, for example, low growth on it for the last 20 years has been almost zero. And so we haven’t had a lot of energy addition. We’ve had a lot of changes in energy mix, but overall, the low growth has been largely static. Now you’re seeing these big tech companies signaling to their local utilities. Hey, we need a lot more electricity. I’m just going to put this into context the let’s, let’s, let’s pick on Microsoft for a minute, because they’re obviously one of the leaders of AI in the world. They currently have 19 gigawatts of electricity contracted, mostly renewables to power its AI data centers, and has another 10 gigawatt of electricity to be built, mostly with the partnership they signed few months with Brookfield. So you know, you might say, Okay, well, what does that equate to? Well, that’s an enormous amount of power. That is the equivalent of powering millions of homes and businesses each year. So they have an incredible appetite for more electricity, and what they’re doing is they’re approaching utilities, and they’re signing power purchase agreements, which are basically agreements that say, Look, if you provide me the power, I will provide you. I will be your fixed customer for the next 20 years, and will agree on a price, and that price that the these big tech companies are willing to pay is materially higher than the current prices electricity. And so the one that caught everyone’s attention a few weeks back was Microsoft signing a deal with consolation energy, which is the US utility that operates the largest number of nuclear power stations in the country, and they signed one of these 20 year power purchase agreements, and they’re going to restart a nuclear power station that’s been closed for five years, and that has never happened before a plant closing. And five years later, saying we need this power. We need this clean and firm power, and we’re willing to pay for it. And since that announcement, a whole handful of other tech companies have made similar announcements, not about restarting existing or, you know, shuttered power stations, but signaling that they would be financing the construction of a number of small modular reactors, which are, you know, smaller scale nuclear power stations specifically to provide power for their AI data centers. So this is kind of a new case study or use case for, you know, nuclear power and big tech, and why everyone’s excited about it is because big tech has big money. You know, they’re sitting on massive hoards of cash, and they have the ability to finance these in some cases, first of a kind technologies that utilities may be reluctant to take the financial risk to build these new technologies. So in the absence of government capital or a centralized government, you know, power generation model, it’s very important to get capital outside, capital coming in, in some cases, with with government money and assistance, to really start building more capacity. And that, you know, is not going to impact the demand for uranium today, but in five years from now, 10 years from now and so on, if this becomes an option that really scales and grows, you could see a new source of uranium demand that even a year ago, nobody really thought about it reminds me
James Connor 31:36
of what Elon Musk did with SpaceX and SpaceX did something that NASA couldn’t do, right? And it’s just amazing. And I almost wonder if big tech is going to do the same thing with nuclear energy and all these other new technologies like SMRs. Yeah, it’s a great
John Ciampaglia 31:55
example. And you know, if you think about big tech companies, they’re incredibly innovative. They’re they’re not afraid of first of a kind. It’s all about market leadership. The product cycles move very quickly. And if you think about utilities that produce electricity, it’s the polar opposite, highly conservative, very slow moving. And you can imagine, in the clash you have, so to speak, with big tech wanting to race at light speed and utilities moving very, very slowly because they haven’t had to for 20 years in the absence of low growth. And this is why big tech is saying, You know what? We’re going to solve our own problem here. We are going to sign these big contracts with private companies, and we are going to fund and help bring more capacity. And I gotta go back to this term clean and firm, because they have very aggressive net zero or low carbon targets at these companies. They also need power that’s firm so that these data centers are available. 24/7, and if you think about powering a data center with a electricity source that runs on average 25% of the time like solar, that’s not the ideal match. You don’t want to be dependent on the weather. You want to have something that provides firm base load power, and that’s what Nuclear Energy provides
James Connor 33:21
one of the things I find confounding about this year when it comes to equity valuations is how poorly a lot of these uranium names have done. And if you look at the world’s largest uranium producer, it’s kazatoprom, it’s down on the year. But when you look at some of these utilities you mentioned Constellation Energy, it’s up over 100% on the year. VISTA, another big nuclear energy producer. It’s up over, I think, 200% on the year. Why do you think there’s so much more out performance on the utility side versus the production side?
John Ciampaglia 33:52
Yeah, well, the uranium stocks that they said they’ve, they’ve performed really well over the last three, four years. We have, we have been told by a number of different industry participants and sell side analysts and and trading shops that some capital has rotated out of the uranium thematic, let’s say, and into the downstream part of the trade, which is the nuclear power stations, which you know, were completely off the radar For people a few years ago. So yeah, I acknowledge we’ve definitely had some rotation of capital moving into the downstream part of the sector. Now, the last couple of months, the uranium stocks have performed much better. I mean, June, July and August were really, really challenging. It tends to be a seasonal pattern that we see in the summer, where uranium stocks tend to underperform, as well as the uranium price itself. And for whatever reason, you know, we seem to come out of summer and into September and October, and we just start getting more news flow, more catalysts. And the sector I you know, tends to. Respond very quickly. So yes, we had kind of a very tough three month correction where sentiment was very low. Last couple of months, they’ve been amongst the better performers across the resource spectrum. So it feels to us like we’re coming out of that, that air pocket, and people are getting refocused on the upstream companies again.
James Connor 35:21
And as we head into year end, what should investors be looking out for in terms of anything to do with nuclear energy or uranium that might move the price higher? Yeah,
John Ciampaglia 35:30
well, you know, it’s hard to believe we don’t have that many weeks to go. And unfortunately, with with all of the, you know, election to play out, and and monetary policy by the Fed. There’s still going to be some macro noise affecting the price. But from a uranium specific sector, I think what we’re looking for is one. What do the production numbers look like from the various companies? Are they having growing pains? Are they going to be cutting or or increasing production forecasts for 2025, and then what is happening on the buying side, meaning our utilities coming back to the market to buy uranium. And I think it’s fair to say that they’re this year anyway, they’ve signed a very small amount of contracts. Now remember, this is for not today’s use for tomorrow, but multiple years in a four in the future. So if you don’t buy today, you’re basically deferring, you know, deferring that purchase to another day. It’s going to happen. It’s, you know, it’s just a matter of when, not if. So we’re watching those stats very carefully. It seems as though to us that, with the exception of the Chinese utilities, everyone else seems to be dragging their feet with this expectation that there’s going to be plenty uranium for everybody. And we know in mining that is not always the case. There are always little bumps along the road, and the geopolitical risks related to Uranium are absolutely higher relative to other commodities because of the very high concentration of uranium production, essentially outside of the Western countries. So this is something that we’re watching for. Public sentiments around nuclear is it continues to improve. I think these technology companies are really highlighting the value that nuclear power provides. It’s raising a lot of awareness amongst generalist investors, and we’ve been incredibly busy. It’s brought the last two months talking to, you know, in many cases, institutions for the very first time, who are saying, Okay, what’s going on here with Microsoft and Google? You know, how does this all fit into into the into the systems, electricity systems and the grids, and how is this going to play out for uranium? What’s the what’s the knock on effect? So we’ve been very busy, but I also say there’s been a lot of distractions with some of these macro factors that it seems to us that a lot of money is waiting for the US election to pass to get some some clarity. Well, John,
James Connor 37:56
that was a great discussion, and I want to thank you very much for spending time with us today. If someone would like to learn more about Sprott and its various products, where can they go? Yeah,
John Ciampaglia 38:05
just head over to sprott.com that’s s, p, r, o, t, t.com, we’ve got a great education section on our website that provides everything from monthly reports on precious metals critical minerals. We’ve got a great roster of podcasts there, some cases can be very technical, with in house experts, external, you know, guests and experts. And it’s, it’s, we focus a ton of our our energy and our time on just investor education. So we, we’d encourage you to take advantage of our,
James Connor 38:37
of our efforts there, once again, John, thank you.
John Ciampaglia 38:41
Thank you for having me, and always nice to talk to you. Well,
James Connor 38:44
I hope you enjoyed that discussion with John Chappell on alternative investments, including gold. If you would like to learn more about gold and how it can add safety and diversification to your portfolio, visit our sister company, hard assets alliance.com. Hard assets Alliance is a trusted platform that’s being used by over 100,000 institutional and retail clients to buy and store physical gold. Once again, that’s hard assets. Alliance.com there’s a link below in the show notes. Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel, like and also leave a comment. And if you want to check out more content, watch this video now.
