“The longer I invest the more I realize you get 1-2 really great opportunities every few years. The rest of the time is spent wondering if you will ever get another great opportunity again and convincing yourself to own mediocre opportunities while you wait.” –Ian Cassel
I invest as a hobby. I enjoy following markets and stock picking. I have no background in finance.
I started investing in individual companies in around 2017. As a resident of Vancouver, Canada, it was only natural that I was initially drawn into the natural resource sector (yes, some penny stocks). After some success and a period of engrossment, I’ve transitioned from purely speculative plays to a more top-down commodity-focused approach.
This blog serves as a place for me to flesh out my ideas and test theses. It is not financial advice by any means, nor do I claim to be an expert.
Investing Interests
Precious Metals? Not really
Given the destructive nature of mining in general, I can’t find any reason why North American governments will continue to permit precious metals mines. Here are some reasons:
- Gold (and largely silver) provide virtually no utility. At great efforts, we extract it and then it sits in a vault.
- We’ll be getting enough gold through copper-gold porphyries in the future (the same can be said for silver in base-metal mines), so there’s no reason to rip up a swath of earth specifically for that purpose.
- As part of the electrification narrative, we’re going to need to permit a lot more base and battery metal mines. This will be a challenging enough task in itself politically; I don’t think there will be enough political or public will to permit and build precious metals mines.
As such, I believe gold is a sunset industry (as a friend put it). We’re already seeing major gold producers like Barrick shift towards copper, which is evidence. Here’s a good article from Stephan Lezak on the topic.
Commodities? Yes
I’m following the markets of
- uranium
- vanadium
- lithium
- copper
- nickel
I believe we’re entering a period of growth for commodity producers, i.e. an upturn in the cycle, partially in North America where we’ve begun to decouple our supply chains from China and Russia.
More ideas to follow.
MB