Hints at impending upward correction in mining equities
Since its formation, EMX Royalty Corp (EMX:TSXV) has consistently outperformed industry benchmarks with an average annual compounded growth rate of 17%. This success is due, in no small part, to the measured approach of EMX founder, President and CEO, David Cole.
Cole formed EMX in 1996 following an 18 year career as an exploration geologist with Newmont Mining. His commitment to organic royalty generation through strategic land acquisitions has underlied the company’s corporate strategy since its inception. EMX currently holds mining real-estate assets on 5 continents and enjoys steady cash flows from a multitude of NSR agreements.
Cole recently sat down with Ronald-Peter Stoeferle, managing partner of Incrementum AG and co-founder of the acclaimed In Gold We Trust report, via video conference. The two industry experts produced a compelling conversation that explores the strategy behind EMX’ success, the muted response of gold prices to inflation and the reasons why the base metals bull market is only just beginning.
Financial Markets Analysis and Insight on EMX Business Model and Growth
Ronald-Peter Stoeferle:
Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a great pleasure having Mr. Dave Cole here with me, president and CEO of EMX Royalty. Dave, it’s a pleasure.
David Cole:
Thank you, Ronnie.
Ronald-Peter Stoeferle:
Where are you currently, if I may ask?
David Cole:
I’m currently in Colorado, yeah.
Ronald-Peter Stoeferle:
So the last time we saw each other, Dave, I think it was the Precious Metals Summit in Beaver Creek. We primarily talked about skiing. We talked about we had to go powder skiing best. Yeah, we both enjoy going skiing quite a lot. You living in Colorado, I’m living in Austria. Actually, we’re experiencing our fourth lockdown here in Austria, but getting used to it. Dave, I would like to take the opportunity, as you are one of our esteemed premium partners of the In Gold We Trust report, to talk a little bit about the price of gold, the commodity market in general. But then of course, especially, have a conversation with you about your company. What, really, you are most excited about, what’s going on at EMX. I think that should be a very, very interesting discussion that I greatly look forward to.
David Cole:
So Ronnie, there’s a lot within that, right? And it’s really fun to talk about commodity prices and follow these capital markets. The fact that governments continue to print more money. Politicians love to print more money. Loose monetary policy looks like it’s here to stay for a while. And of course that bodes well for precious metals. But there’s other large picture aspects of the commodity markets that are worthy of paying attention to and class creep around the globe. As people move from lower class to middle class, the consumption levels increase dramatically and that’s happening throughout the developing world, and has been for some time. And that’s been driving commodity consumption. And some of the commodities that we’re most interested in are copper, nickel and zinc. We think the metals markets are really poised to move ahead. And there’s another interesting aspect and that is supply inelasticity. It takes a long time to bring on new mines. Much longer than it does to drill a new oil well, for example. The oil industry can respond to increased prices very quickly. It’s much more difficult in the mining business. And so that creates that supply inelasticity, which can exacerbate price moves. And another one that’s interesting, also part of the loose monetary policy, is these crazy low interest rates. So we’re seeing bond prices at the highest that they’ve ever been in history, thousands of year high. And with negative real interest rates here in the United States approaching four or 5%. And it’s rather astonishing. And of course that free money is just fueling economic activity and contributing to supply shortages. It’s an interesting scenario to be in. And then you layer on top of that, the fact that we need an immense amount of metal to electrify transportation. That’s on top of all the other things that are going on. And that puts us in a situation where we’re very, very bullish on metals, long-term.
Ronald-Peter Stoeferle:
I couldn’t agree more, Dave. And I think, if we look back last December 2020, inflation was running at 1.1%. Now we’re at roughly 7%, and I think that everybody would have expected gold to go significantly higher in this inflationary environment. So, the question that we often get asked is what happened to gold and is gold dead? Has gold lost its mojo? And, from my point of view, I think that people should not get too greedy, first of all. I think that gold did a tremendous job last year, like a solid defender in your portfolio. It was a pretty decent hedge against the turmoil in equity markets. It was a recession hedge. And I think that gold very early on sniffed out that inflation is around the corner. Now, we shouldn’t forget that gold went from $1200, basically, up to its all time high at $2070, without any major correction. So from my point of view, that’s my take, I think we are just taking a breather at the moment and gold is already discounting that the federal reserve will have to make, at some point, a U-turn back to even more dovish policy, to more aggressive central bank action. I mean, it’s hard to explain or to think how they could get even more dovish. But I think that the last year, 2020, has clearly shown us that all taboos are being broken, and that actually nobody really cares about those big numbers anymore. Because a trillion dollar used to be lots of money. Nowadays, that’s just peanuts, it seems to me. But what I think, Dave, is most interesting and that’s also the segue to your view on commodities in general; our view is, and we explained that in our recent keynote called The Monetary Tipping Point, I think we really saw a move from monetary dominance to fiscal dominance. So I think market participants should focus less on what central bankers are doing and focus more on what politicians are doing. So we expect much more aggressive fiscal policy. I think that politicians actually quite enjoy their position, basically fine-tuning the economic cycle. And I think, with the whole green transformation, with electrification, with green new deals, with infrastructure deals around the corner, I think that’s exactly what you refer to, this inelasticity of supply that we are seeing, especially in the base metals area.
David Cole:
Yes. Yeah. This is a fascinating topic, isn’t it? I think of all the different layers. We’re talking about politicians, we’re talking about economic cycles, we’re talking about consumption demands, we’re talking about transformation of power grid, on and on and on. It really is a fascinating time to be in the mining business. But I just want to make a couple of points, and that is that the best indicator of future behavior is past behavior. And so we know what politicians have been doing, and I think it’s fair to say that they’ll continue doing that, and that bodes well for precious metals prices with respect to how gold has reacted. Gold tends to move in anticipation of inflation, not necessarily when the inflation actually transpires. And we’ve seen that many, many times. It tends to be a leading indicator of where inflation is going. And, big picture, when I was a kid prospecting for gold with my grandfather here in Colorado the price of gold was $35 an ounce. Today it’s close to $1,800 an ounce. So the price of gold has done phenomenally well. I will point out that major gold companies around the world are bankrolling cash every day.
Ronald-Peter Stoeferle:
Yeah, well, I would like to get your view. I mean, over here in Europe, I think that inflation is a big concern and it is that gold is a bit in our, let’s say, in our monetary DNA, in Austria and especially in Germany due to the hyper inflation. So inflation is a big topic again. And I just saw that John Deere, which is obviously quite an important company, they had a strike for five weeks and it has just ended. And the outcome of the strike is an increase in retirement benefits, 10% immediate salary bumps, 5% wage increases in 2023 and 2025, and quarterly cost of living adjustments that were negotiated along with a US$8,500 bonus. Well, Dave, for me this sounds like a wage price spiral. So what do you see in North America when it comes to the topic of inflation at the moment?
David Cole:
We see a number of things. Of course, everyone’s seeing on the news, the backing up of shipping containers at the major ports such as Los Angeles. They’re not able to get the containers out because of the demand. There’s concern over people not getting their Christmas presents, because we just can’t get things moving. There’s a labor shortage across the country. When we go up to the ski resorts there’s restaurants that are closed because they don’t have enough people, and shops are closed for the same reason. It’s not uncommon to see a sign on the door saying “sorry, we’re closed on Tuesdays. We don’t have anybody to work.” And so this is a phenomenon, it’s fascinating to see, and it has been exacerbated by the policies that were put in place during the pandemic.
Ronald-Peter Stoeferle:
Yeah, that’s very similar to what I experience over here in Europe. And I saw a brilliant chart recently that basically confirmed the thesis that people, basically, they lost interest in getting back to work. And that actually, it correlates very well with the development of equity markets. So it seems that many people say, well, I can make much more money trading cryptocurrencies and just holding Tesla, Facebook, Amazon, whatever, compared to doing my job at a restaurant. Of course, at some point, this is going to change. And we saw that the market breadth is getting weaker and weaker, so it’s a really narrow rally that we are seeing in equity markets. So, many, many sectors are already telling us, well, there is something deteriorating below the surface. And this, in combination with the Federal Reserve now having made its u-turn with J. Powell now trying to sound a bit more hawkish. That’s probably a very dangerous combination. Dave, I would like to show a couple of charts that I prepared and that you hopefully enjoy having a look at as well.
David Cole:
Ronnie, when you say that, I can’t help but think about the fact that these guys like to sound hawkish, but they don’t act hawkish.
Ronald-Peter Stoeferle:
Of course.
David Cole:
That’s a completely different thing.
Ronald-Peter Stoeferle:
Dave Rosenberg, from my point of view one of the greatest economists and market strategists out there, he recently had a piece that showed the accuracy of the Federal Reserve. And I tweeted out: probably a drunk and blindfolded monkey has got a higher hit rate than the economists at the federal reserve. It was really astonishing. I thought, okay, they’re always way behind the curve, but I really didn’t expect them to be that bad in their forecasting.
David Cole:
Interesting that you bring that up. We have a mineral economist that advises EMX, and we’re looking at commodity prices moving forward and thinking about how to build our portfolio from that information. And we’ve gone back and looked at analyst consensus pricing. It’s been wrong more often than it’s been right. If you did the opposite, you would have a higher hit rate. And that same mineral economist, by the way, conservatively predicts that we will consume as much copper in the forthcoming 20 years as we have consumed throughout all of history by mankind.
Ronald-Peter Stoeferle:
Yeah. So Dave, can you see my screen?
David Cole:
Sure can. Yes.
Ronald-Peter Stoeferle:
Excellent. So this is a part of a keynote that I just gave. And it’s a part about the mining space that I’m especially fond of. And Warren Buffet, probably not the worst investor, he said “price is what you pay and value is what you get.” And I think this slide is particularly interesting because we all know that the mining space is probably the most hated sector these days. Nobody really cares. And it’s not only cheap relative to its own history, but the GDM index, for example, is particularly cheap compared to the S&P 500 for example. And here you can see a number of ratios, for example. I mean, the P/E ratio in the GDM is at 13, price/cash, price/EBITDA and so on. We can see that the margins are spectacular. We can see that the GDM index has a dividend yield of 2.3%. And we can see that most of the companies really did a great job in getting their balance sheets in order. So I would say the mining space has really done its homework. I think, Schumpeter would have called it creative destruction, that happened in the sector was very, very healthy. So at the moment it seems we have got this, for an investor, this great divergence between fundamentals that are phenomenal and probably better than I saw them in the last 15 years that I’m in the business, and market sentiment that is very, very bearish. So what’s your view as a CEO? Would you confirm that? Do you see interest coming in from generalists, for example, or is it primarily really the long-only gold investors that you’re talking to at the moment?
David Cole:
Yeah, that’s fascinating. And every investor has a little bit different psychology, but let’s go back and review some of these facts that you pointed out. First of all, as I said previously, the gold companies are now bankrolling cash. And these numbers that you show here illustrate that. The other thing that’s fascinating is that traditionally, throughout my entire career, gold companies have traded at a premium because of the demand for diversification within people’s portfolios. This is the first time that I can remember where gold stocks are now value stocks. We’re talking about them having high dividend yields, building up cash balances, the kind of stocks that would attract somebody such as Warren Buffet. And that’s rather fascinating. And there is this bifurcation, as you mentioned, where the price of metals across the board, not just gold, but the price of metals across the board have performed really well. The mining companies are making money, but the equities have performed exceedingly poorly. Well, that means that those two things have to correct themselves. Either commodity prices will go down and we’re completely wrong, or the price of the equities have to go up.
Ronald-Peter Stoeferle:
Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. And I think, given the macro picture, I really don’t see gold trading or commodities trading significantly lower because this would, on the other hand, imply that real rates would have to become positive or less negative. And I just don’t see that really happening. Here we’ve got a great chart showing that the free cashflow of the top 50 miners by market cap are making a new all time high, basically. So gold mining is more profitable than ever. And this is something that I wanted to show you, Dave, because we crunch the numbers and analyze what does actually work in inflation? And actually the highest inflation beta, so the highest sensitivity to rising inflation, can be found at the commodity space and in gold. So I think this should bode pretty well for your portfolio of investments and royalties.
David Cole:
Couldn’t agree more. The value of mineral rights is just going to go up over time. We want to control and own as many mineral rights as possible. The best way to own mineral rights is to have royalties.
Ronald-Peter Stoeferle:
And just one final chart to make everybody even more excited about the commodity bull market, actually a commodity bull market that nobody is really invested in, because most of the institutional players that I talk to say, “well, it has gone too far, too quickly, already. This bull market is over.” So this seems to be the general sentiment. And we know that, for many institutional players, it’s not easy anymore, also due to ESG regulations, to invest in commodities. So I think this is also a great case for institutional players investing more into commodity equities from the commodity space to producers and royalties developers and so on, and less into the commodities themselves. But I think this is a fantastic chart. I love those long term charts. It starts at 1815, and it shows the 10 year rolling compound annual growth rate of commodities. And it shows you that we have basically just bounced off a bit from this low. And if this cycle is correct again, this should really be a cycle that will last at least for 10, 15, or perhaps even 20 years.
David Cole:
That’s a fascinating chart.
Ronald-Peter Stoeferle:
So, Dave, I haven’t introduced you yet. I mean, it’s exciting that we jumped into the discussion right away. But for our viewers that don’t know you, I will just make a brief introduction. I won’t read the whole bio, but just the most important things. Dave, you’ve got more than 30 years of industry experience coming to EMX from Newmont Mining Corporation, where you worked for more than 18 years. You worked as an exploration geologist in Nevada, Southeast Asia, South America, Europe, and Central Asia. So basically all over the globe. You’ve been highly successful with Newmont’s exploration team, including contributions at the world class Carlin Trend and Yanacocha. You studied geology at Colorado State University, earning an MS. And for 18 years now, you are working at EMX. So you did set up the company 18 years ago. Congratulations. It’s really fascinating for me as an entrepreneur as well. I did set up Incrementum with my colleagues nine years ago. And yeah, I mean, that’s probably something that every business owner can confirm is probably the most rewarding, but also the most challenging, task or job that you can have. It gives you sleepless nights sometimes, but it’s also something that we all really, really enjoy. So, Dave, EMX now is trading at the market cap of more than CA$300M. It did perform tremendously well. Could you give me the brief elevator pitch, the two minute overview about the company and what makes it so special?
David Cole:
Yeah. Well, Ronnie, thanks for all that. I’d be more than happy to. I left Newmont Mining Corporation 18, almost 19, years ago now to found this company, to pursue my passion, which is value creation through the discovery process and through the management and ownership of mineral rights. And as I said, you can’t own enough royalties. And we believe that the royalty instrument, which is a phenomenal financial instrument that exposes you to all this upside optionality. And optionality is an important word when you’re discussing royalties. Commodity price optionality, but also discovery optionality. All that comes at no cost to the royalty holder. So we believe that royalties are the right way to capture the value of mineral rights going forward. So I left Newmont 19 years ago to found this company, and just continued to build this portfolio. It’s been a lot of fun. I’ll point out that our compounded annual growth rate, you’re talking about compounded annual growth rates here. A very, very important way to measure the success of a business model. We first financed this company at CA$0.15. And, given the prices we’re at now, that’s about 18 years with 17% to 18% compounded annual growth rate in our share price, albeit with some big swings along that pathway. I believe that we can continue that type of compounded annual growth rate into the future, if not even better. And that’s our goal. That’s why we’re here.
Ronald-Peter Stoeferle:
I think the beauty of this business is that it’s highly anti-fragile and I think we will write a special chapter about the royalty and streaming sector for upcoming In Gold We Trust report. And I think that the beauty of it is that you’re, by nature, also a contrarian investor. So you basically provide capital in an environment where companies really struggle raising capital. So what do you see at the moment? I mean, it’s been a tough year in the mining space. Do you see many opportunities out there? I mean, you have been tremendously busy making so many deals over the last couple of years. And I had a look at the webpage before, I had a look at the presentation, both done very, very well. And therefore I would love to know, do you see now, are capital markets drying up a bit, or is this flood of liquidity that we are seeing, basically in all areas of asset markets, is it still around in the mining space?
David Cole:
Yeah, so two different topics here. One is where are we at with respect to the capital market cycle within the natural resource space? And it’s cool. People with good projects are able to raise money, but they’re not raising money at the valuations that they would like to raise that money at, which is not unusual within our space. Within EMX, we have more of a long-term view. Our view here is that we just want to continue to accumulate great assets and build this portfolio because, long-term we’re very bullish on metal prices. We’re very bullish on the value of mineral real estate. And so our view looking forward is just continue to accumulate great assets, allocate our capital astutely within whatever phase of the market that we are in. And that’s the way we’ve approached it from the very beginning.
Ronald-Peter Stoeferle:
Dave, could you give me, as I’ve said, you’ve been so active. What, from your point of view, are the most exciting deals that you’ve done over the last couple of months?
David Cole:
Well, the people love to get excited about the big deal we did with SSR Mining Corporation, buying their portfolio of royalties, a CA$100M deal. CA$66M was paid up front, half shares, half stock. Excuse me, half shares, half cash. And we’re delighted to have them as a shareholder and a partner of ours going forward. And a key component to get that deal to happen is for them to become a large shareholder in EMX. They wanted that upside from the portfolio. And their portfolio with our portfolio melded together exceptionally well, because we’ve been building the base of our pyramid with lots of long-term optionality now for nearly two decades. And we’re adding substantial cash flow at the top of the pyramid, which is really going to awaken the market to what the whole pyramid contains; cashflow at the top and the long term potential at the base. And so those two together, I think, are particularly powerful. We love the Caserones Steel that we did as well. Buying cash flow off a porphyry copper mine in Chile, and we’re bullish long-term copper. We think it’s great to be exposed to such a long lived asset as that big copper mine there. But the organic side of our business, Ronnie, which is us out acquiring prospective mineral rights, adding value by building geologic models and selling those mineral rights onto an industry for cash shares, annual payments, and always a production royalty at the end of the day. That side of our business is the most astute allocation of capital. It doesn’t get as much investor interest. It’s not as exciting as buying a big portfolio from SSR, but that’s the side of our business that is really building long-term value. And that side of our business just continues to crank. It operates like a Swiss watch. We just continue to acquire more prospective mineral rights, utilizing our alpha, which is economic geologic talent, adding value by building those geologic models and selling them on. And we’ve never seen such strong demand, as we have today, across the periodic table: zinc projects, copper-zinc projects, copper-cobalt projects, gold projects, you name it. There’s a strong demand out there. People see that there’s going to be a large demand for metals going forward. And we see that with respect to customer interest.
Ronald-Peter Stoeferle:
Now, Dave, in these crazy markets, diversification is key and EMX is not only very well-diversified from a geographical point of view. And these days I think that political risks, they’re growing every day and probably this trend will continue. But you’re also very broadly diversified when it comes to commodities and metals that you’ve got deals on. Could you give our viewers a rough overview of how diversified you are? So what are the top jurisdictions? What’s the percentage of several of the various commodities?
David Cole:
Let’s talk about the commodity diversification and talk about the political diversification next. So we talk about the commodity diversification. Our attitude from the very beginning has always been that we love to be exposed to highly prospective mineral rights in places in the world where they can be developed. And it’s interesting, for the bulk of my career, royalty companies would always advertise the percent of their portfolio that is precious metals because the dominant stock buyers and equity buyers were interested in precious metals. I’m seeing a shift now towards people saying, “well, we’re happy that you have some gold in the portfolio, but we’re very interested in your nickel and your copper exposure, because we’re interested in that because everybody understands there’s going to be huge demand increase as we move forward,” specifically relating to those two metals. So there’s a transformation that’s going on. We’re not responding to that transformation. We’ve always believed that diversification across the metal space was the appropriate thing to do. And so we’re delighted to be exposed to precious metals, base metals, and battery metals, and have done so for many years now. We will continue down that pathway. But now let’s talk about political risk and about political diversification. It’s interesting, everybody reads about this and sees it on TV, reads about it in newspapers. So my view is that political risk is fully valued if not overvalued in the marketplace. But technical risk, engineering and geologic risk specifically, commonly are less well understood. And that’s where the inefficiency exists. And I’ll point out that a place that can be a great place to sell cell phones and very politically stable, might not be the best place to build a mine. Those are two very different types of political risk. And so there’s some interesting dynamics to take into account there. And EMX has taken advantage of some of these inefficiencies throughout our history in the acquisition of mineral rights. We even went so far as to work in Haiti. At one point in time, we sold that whole portfolio to Newmont Mining Corporation profitably and kept a royalty on those assets, as an outlying example. But we’re also the largest single mineral rights holder in all of Fennoscandia: Norway, Sweden, and Finland combined. We believe that’s a fabulous place to work with very well-established labor laws, mining laws, environmental laws, that create excellent stability. And I’ll point out that the geology there is phenomenal. So it’s a mixture of all these different variables. It’s a fascinating topic to review.
Ronald-Peter Stoeferle:
That’s a great point that you are bringing up. I also agree that political risks are probably valued very quickly by the market, while technical risks are probably much more difficult to gauge. Dave, one question that’s highly interesting for me is, we are living now with COVID. I think one year ago everybody would have thought, well, if the vaccine is here then this thing will be over. Now, we’ve got the new variant. So, I mean, as you’ve got such a strong technical team and, of course, normally lots of traveling involved, how did you have to accommodate to this new COVID regime? How does it affect your planning and your boots on the ground, stuff like that?
David Cole:
Yeah. Great question. And I think that, us today, right here doing our virtual conference, is a fantastic example. We just learned to be more efficient. Our travel budget got cut in half or more and so we’re saving a lot of money. And we’ve learned to trust the people that are in the areas of the world where we’re working, and utilize video conferencing as a technique to be able to communicate with people. So it’s actually pushed us towards greater efficiency throughout the business. But of course, the geologists have to get their boots on the ground and the customers have to come out and look at the projects before they buy them, with respect to our organic growth of our royalty portfolio. And that has been a challenge, but we’ve been able to work our way through that. I believe that in 2021 we will sell 25 projects. And then last year, 2020, right in the heart of the pandemic, we sold 20 projects creating 20 new royalties through execution of that model. So we’ve shown that we can continue to sell projects, but we have learned how to do it more efficiently.
Ronald-Peter Stoeferle:
Great, great. Dave, you’ve had a pretty large equity raise and everybody is excited about M&A activities picking up. We saw quite a lot of big transactions recently with, for example, with Great Bear and also with Pretium being taken over. Are you working on a major new transaction now? That’s probably the big question that the market has, but probably a question that you won’t be able to answer, but I still have to ask you.
David Cole:
Sure. Well, we always have a lot of pans on the stovetop, and we’re always working on our strategic investing, working on our organic growth, working on acquisition growth, the same business model that we’ve executed now for two decades. We continue down that pathway. Of course, everybody would like to buy EMX. Everybody in the royalty space, nearly everybody in the royalty space would like to buy us because of the fat pyramid that we have, particularly the base of our pyramid. And so we would look very favorable into some of these perhaps more overvalued competitors that we have. And this has resulted because our business model, our differentiating factor, is that the bulk of our portfolio was grown organically through the execution of royalty generation, not through royalty acquisition, as opposed to my competitors that have been simply buying portfolios and buying individual assets at high valuations. So that’s created a situation here where our pyramid is fatter relative to our share price, and makes us a candidate to be purchased by these other companies. So it’s fair to say that we’ve been approached many times, we probably will continue to be approached. And our view is that we’re here for the betterment of our share holders on the long term. And I’ve been quoted as saying, I’ll say it again: We don’t want to sell at $4 a share, we want to sell for $24. And the fruit on our tree are just starting to ripen. We’re at the transformative point where we’re going to become distinctly positive cash flow in ’22 and ’23. Moving forward our incipient cash flows look fantastic. So it would be premature for us to sell at this point in time. And I believe that my long-term shareholders that control substantial percentage of the company are of the same opinion.
Ronald-Peter Stoeferle:
And you are a major shareholder of the company so obviously it’s in your best interest. Dave, from your point of view, what excites you most, having a look at your portfolio of mineral rights and assets? From your point of view, what’s the market missing that really excites you at the moment?
David Cole:
That immense embedded optionality. I keep coming back to that. And the fact that we have exposure to four and a half million acres, which is 1.8 million hectares of mineral rights globally. And with royalties across that portfolio. And everybody that’s spending money, tens of millions of dollars a year in exploratory drilling, hundreds of millions of dollars a year in mine development. That is at no cost to us. That is benefiting our portfolio through our counterparty companies expending monies on those assets. And we’re along for the ride on those. All those upsides, discoveries being made, mines being built. And of course, I think what the market finds most exciting is the incipient cashflow coming from the top of the pyramid. What I actually am most excited about is the long term potential emanating from the base of the pyramid. And that’s a multiplication of these aspects of optionality. A new deposit is discovered and the price of gold goes up 20%. Boom. That looks excellent.
Ronald-Peter Stoeferle:
Excellent. Excellent reply. Thanks. Now, on a slightly more personal note, you did set up the company 18, almost 19, years ago. Dave, from your point of view, what makes you most proud, in this long, long, long career in a, let’s say, very challenging industry? You’ve experienced big booms and big busts. What are you most proud of and what was the biggest lesson perhaps that you want to share with our viewers?
David Cole:
Yeah, let’s talk about the first one. What am I most proud of? And, from the very beginning as a founder of the company, I always focused on the acquisition of the right human resources. And the team that we’ve built here is just a fantastic group of individuals. And I’m humbled with the opportunity to work with many of these people. And that’s what I’m most proud of, and one of the reasons why we’re in no hurry to sell this company, because we have immense talent throughout the company that can build this company over time, and have built it for two decades and will continue to do so in the decades moving forward. So that’s what I’m most proud of is the team. They’re wonderful people to work with. They like to challenge each other and challenge me to continue to learn from our mistakes and capitalize on our wins, which we’ve done for 20 years. And we certainly have stubbed our toe on things. Coming back to a skiing lesson, if you’re not falling, you’re not getting any better. And so we’ve stubbed our toes on strategic investments, but we’ve also had some huge wins from our strategic investing portfolio. We learned very early on that when you’re working with major mining companies, that you need to treat them as the customer and the customer’s always right. Even if you may disagree with them on certain aspects, but you need to work in a manner that’s for the betterment of the project that they’re working on. And so we fine tuned how we work with them. And I always try to approach it from the standpoint that the counterparty is the one spending the money. We need to help them spend it appropriately. So there’ve been some lessons we’ve learned on that early in the history of the company. It’s been a fantastic run.
Ronald-Peter Stoeferle:
Thank you very much. And I think that was a great lesson that I also have made developing a company, a company culture, bringing on new talent, working with them, seeing them grow, that this is really something very, very satisfying for everybody running a company. Well, Dave, this has been a great, great pleasure. I hope we can do that again soon. I’m really, really humbled. I really enjoyed this. And all that I can say is thank you very much for being a premium partner of the In Gold We Trust report. Happy holidays. A happy new year. Continue doing such a tremendous job. And of course, I wish you lots of powder and great skiing, Dave, thank you very much.
David Cole:
Ronnie, thank you. My pleasure.
Ronald-Peter Stoeferle:
All the best. Thank you. Bye-bye.
