Fireside chat with Rick Van Nieuwenhuyse and Ronald-Peter Stöferle

0:04 Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where in the world you're logging in from. I'm very lucky to have with me today, Ronald Peters Schafferle, Fund Manager at Incrementum, publisher of In Gold We Trust and general gold aficionado. And Rick Van Nuenheise, CEO of Contango Silver and Gold. Gentlemen, how are you today? Good morning.

0:21 Good evening from Vienna. Yeah, we spend quite a few time zones today from Alaska through Mexico and Vienna. So appreciate everybody joining us. I know the audience spends many time zones as well, so I really appreciate everybody's time today. We have a great discussion today planned. Here's how it's going to work. Ronnie is going to walk us through a couple of slides going through the Ngobi Trust perspective on current metals environment. Just as a lead in, Then we're going to do some planned questions, but then we will have time to take questions from the live audience. So that chat button at the

0:50 bottom of your screen, you can use at any point during today's event. Please do ask questions. There's a chance I won't be able to get to them because we do have a lot of content planned for today, especially really specific questions about Contango. We may pass on to their team afterwards rather than answer them today. It really depends on how much time that we have left. But I'll also say before we get into the action, today's event is being recorded and will be available for replay probably midday Eastern time. It'll pop right in your inbox, but it'll also be available on the same link and also on Six's YouTube channel. But let's get into the protein. Ronnie, I'm pretty excited to walk through your slides, love you. Share your screen, just to lead us off today. Let's get into the protein.

1:30 Never heard this term, but I think I kind of know what you mean

1:37 That's my intro is empty carbs, this is the good stuff Can you see my slides?

1:42 We can yes. Okay, perfect. So so good evening from from from Vienna from Austria Today's no World Cup game. So we all have time to think about gold. Yeah, I will. Thanks for having me, Romeo. It's a great pleasure to do this webinar together with Rick. I will give you a very, very quick view from our point of view from the InGoldWithTrust team, what's going on, where we see the market at the moment. And yeah, then let's talk about markets and about Contango. So quick overview of what we actually do at…

2:24 There we go. For some reason... Oh, sorry. Now it works. What we do, we do publish the In Gold We Trust report for 19 years now. So this year's edition, Back to the Monetary Future, was the 20th edition. It is, I don't know if it's the best, but it's at least the longest report on gold. This year we wrote again 450 pages. And it's not about gold actually, it's about everything. It's about interest rates, it's about macro, it's about inflation, It's about geopolitics, about de-dollarization. And then every year we try to ride a little bit less and we end up with a new all-time high. So I think this year's publication is a pretty interesting one again. It's called, again, Back to the Monetary Future.

3:16 But we aren't just gold pundits because everybody can say our gold will go to 10,000 whatever. Primarily we are asset managers so we're making our money from managing investment funds. I'm managing 2 funds one of them is an active gold product. So, actually we publish daily NAVs and I think that really differentiates us from people just writing newsletters about gold. We actually manage capital. We're still a boutique. We've managed 580 million Swiss francs. But I think that's always important to emphasize. Now what happened in the gold market? Let's briefly talk about this big U-turn that we saw in interest rate expectations.

4:09 Let's not forget we went into 2026 with the expectation that we would see one, probably 2 rate cuts. And this has completely reversed. So at the moment, the market is seeing at least 1 rate hike this year and 2 additional ones next year. And I think this, in combination with a couple of other drivers is really the driving factor for gold at the moment. The correlations have changed. The story has changed a little bit, at least the story that the media is talking about. And I think that interest rate expectations were really crucial. Where I'm pretty confident that the market is wrong regarding interest rates is the fact that inflation expectations, So inflation break-evens, for example, collapsed over the last couple of weeks. So actually, we are seeing the lowest inflation expectations actually since the inauguration of Donald Trump. So this could, with a big if, if the situation in Iran doesn't escalate again.

5:23 This could be a driver for actually rate cuts and you know, we've got midterm elections coming up, We know that Donald Trump is quite vocal when it comes to lowering interest rates and then that there will be enormous amount of pressure on Kevin Walsh. But of course, I mean, he's the new guy. He wants to show some strength. But from my point of view, we'll rather see rate cuts than rate hikes. Another driver or another reason why the market is taking a breather is, Let's not forget, ladies and gentlemen, that gold was up 64% last year in dollar terms. I mean, that's a really spectacular performance in 1 year.

6:12 And year to date, we're down 5.5%. So I always compare it to, you know, you cannot run up the Mount Everest. You have to, you know, take your time. You have to get used to the altitude, settle down for a couple of days and then, you know, start the next part of the expedition. So we are now taking the big breather when it comes to gold. But I think after this spectacular performance last year, I think that's just normal. If we do the inverse, if we say that it's not the price of gold that is actually rising, but rather the purchasing power of money that is falling. I think that's exactly the same numbers, the same data, but just inverted. So, we're Changing the perspective.

7:01 And I think that's always pretty interesting to see that actually since the year 2000, the US dollar has devalued 93% versus gold. The Euro has devalued 92% versus gold. So last year it was down 39%. So a loss of purchasing power of 39%. And this year the dollar has gained slightly 5.8%. But I think it's really interesting to have that perspective. Now, where are the limits? Well, we've seen this spectacular all-time high in January. And now we're basically exactly at the 25% correction level.

7:50 We saw gold dipping below 4000 very, very quickly, but we also saw that Chinese were buying hand over fist below 4000. So now there's all this today, there's pressure on gold again, but I think that below 4000, there is an enormous amount of buying power. So I don't really see a significant correction below those levels because gold is already very, very oversold. Have a look at this chart. That's the drawdown and gold price is a percentage of the 200-day moving average. Extremely oversold. If you have a look at this level, the daily sentiment index, extremely oversold. So, we should at least see a bigger bounce over the next couple of weeks.

8:39 Now this is a very interesting slide by Sentiment Trader. And it reminded me of Jim Grant saying the only permanent truth in finance is that people will get bullish at the top and bearish at the bottom. So Sentiment Trader analyzed the data and they said that the last 8 times sentiment got this washed out since 2008. Gold was higher 1 month later, every one of them, and a year out the same story. So, this enormous amount of bearishness is from a contrarian point of view, it's actually a gift. Our signal that we are using in one of our funds that I'm managing, the Active Aurum signal, it showed us actually already in March that we shouldn't hit the brakes but take the foot off the gas pedal and become a little bit more conservative.

9:39 So now we are running like 65, almost 70% cash, which is a great opportunity for us because we can go shopping at bargain prices. A little bit like Warren Buffett once said from the 1970s, he felt like a little kid in a candy store. We're seeing an enormous amount

9:58 of value in the mining sector. But the good thing is for us that we hold big cash levels while most other investors actually they're long only so they're always fully allocated. So we can allocate capital now which makes me very very happy and confident. Now we can also see that central banks were the major drivers of this bull market in gold, obviously. And last year only, we saw that gold ETFs started piling in. And they got pretty negative recently. So we saw some bigger outflows from the gold ETFs, which is telling me investors, Western financial investors, they are still acting on a tactical basis, not on a strategic basis.

10:47 While central banks continue

10:49 to buy significant amounts of gold, first quarter of this year again more than 250 tons of gold. But we don't see any major inflows from the gold ETFs at the moment. Now is gold already expensive? Well it's not the extreme contrarian buy that it was 3 or 4 years ago. However if we measure it in equities for example, actually you can see that we're not really super overvalued. We are now basically still above the long-term median measured in the Dow gold ratio. Now every big bull market in gold obviously ends with extremes, with lows at extreme levels and we are still far away from that. So my message has always been over the last couple of months, We're in a bull market and this bull market is taking a breather, but we haven't seen the top of this bull market yet.

11:54 Now, in monetary terms, gold is still, I would say, fairly cheap at the moment. This is the so-called shadow gold price, which shows the gold price that is required to back the monetary base. So, we saw in the 1930s, 1940s and also in 1980

12:11 that actually more than 100% of the monetary base was backed by gold. At the moment, it's less than 25%. So I would say from a monetary point of view, gold is still very, very cheap. Now, can we go back to 100% backing of the monetary base? I don't see it for the time being. But as you see here, it happens every couple of decades. So would I rule it out? No, definitely not. So in monetary terms, gold is still pretty cheap. We wrote about the 6 vectors of the gold remonetization in this year's In Gold We Trust report. So if there's 1 chapter from this year's report that I really

13:00 encourage you to definitely read, it's this one because it shows you the big picture. And as investors we tend to look at the short term view and today is a weekday but then actually we have to zoom out. And I think it's really important

13:19 to really connect the dots and this is what we're doing in this chapter. So there's 6 different vectors that are leading to this gold remonetization. And they're independent from each other but actually they stimulate themselves. So from my point of view, this is not a structural story. It is really a story of a gold remonetization

13:44 that we are expecting for the next couple of years. Now, is gold already expensive? I already tried to talk about that very quickly. But I think if we compare it to the 1980s, For example, we can see that the gold allocation by private investors at the moment, 2.7%.

14:07 In the 1980s, it was 8.3% actually. Central bank gold reserves in the 1980s, 62%. Now it's 26%. So I think this is a bull market, but this is not, you know, the irrational exuberance that we usually see at the end of a secular bull market. So we haven't really seen the mania yet. January was obviously it was a little bit frothy. But I think that for the end of a big bull market, you will see a completely different levels of euphoria. And one reason for that is actually that usually at the end of every cycle you're seeing crazy M&A.

14:57 What we're seeing at the moment is I think that Most of the deals, also Dolly with Contango, I think those deals totally made sense. What we're seeing now is that the sector is producing a record amount of free cash flow. Have a look at the earnings per share. Have a look at the growth of earnings per share, plus 350% since 2023. Have a look at the PE of the GDX. It's coming down actually. Have a look at the profitability of the sector. So from my point of view at the end of this cycle we will see crazy M&A. We'll see ridiculous premiums being paid but we haven't seen that yet. So that already leads me to my conclusion.

15:48 I think we're right on track for our long-term price target, which is 8,900 US dollars by the end of this golden decade. And we published this report called the dawning of a golden decade in 2020. And we said 4800 is our base case scenario and 8900 is our forecast if

16:11 the 2020s should become an inflationary decade. And clearly inflation is one of the primary drivers in this decade. So 8900 is still very much realistic from our point of view based on our models based on our views. So therefore I think we should all embrace this correction within the secular bull market. I think I won't go through all the bullet points. Romeo said that we can make the slides available. So there was a very, very quick view on the market that we're seeing and now I look forward to our conversation. Thank you very much. Awesome, appreciate that so much, Ronny. And like you said, I'm gonna make slides available to everybody who registered for this webinar. So you should get those into your inbox. Thanks. Thanks for joining. Thanks for sharing that with us.

17:03 Now, I would love to get into a conversation because as always your slides Spark information and want me to get to the bottom of some stuff and I want to get Rick into this too But I will start with you. I run just based on those slides to my layman's eyes I'm gonna get into politics right away. So I apologize to the people's IR teams watching, something strange is happening with gold. The U.S.-Iran ceasefire collapsed this week. There are missile strikes on tankers in the strait. There are strikes on Iran. Iran's hitting Bahrain and Kuwait. An oil surge. Textbook says gold should have ripped higher, but as of the beginning of this webinar, it was right back to its seeming new floor at $4,000. So the market's reading

17:42 geopolitical escalation as a rate hike story or inflation rather than safe haven. What broke in the old playbook and what do you think gold needs to get moving again?

17:54 Well I think that's the thing that fascinates me about markets. They're always moving, they're always changing and there's no correlation that holds forever. So previously we had basically the very tight correlation with real interest rates and the price of gold, but that also changed dramatically. So Why did gold fall in this geopolitical

18:21 escalation? I think first of all, it's that Hormuz basically cut the recycling loop of the petrodollar, which is very significant because gulf producers, they had been recycling their dollar surpluses into gold for many, many years. So this bit did kind of disappear. The second thing is the deleveraging. We're seeing rising yields, we're seeing a stronger dollar, we're seeing margin calls. So gold is not getting sold. It is getting sold not despite its liquidity, but because of it. So there were many days actually in the second quarter where we saw daily trading volume in gold of more than 500 billion per day. So this enormous liquidity is definitely an advantage, but in times like this, it's also a disadvantage.

19:22 But I think, Romeo, the cyclical story is now a stronger US dollar, rising yields, and a more hawkish Federal Reserve. Those are all headwinds for gold. Yeah. No question about that. And those forces kind of justified lower prices. But then let's let's zoom out again. Let's talk about the structural story. Fiscal deficits they continue to widen. We're seeing that sovereign debt burdens remain extremely elevated. We're seeing that central banks continue to diversify their reserves into gold. We're seeing de-dollarization continuing. So and then On the other hand, we're seeing still extremely low allocations when it comes to gold. So there was a UBS study, for example, quite recently, family offices.

20:09 And those family offices actually, they should have like a very long term perspective. Their allocation on average is below 3% in gold. So I would say that's not really a hedge.

20:23 So that makes me pretty relaxed I have to say. But of course, bull markets are more fun than bear markets. But we all know that actually you make the big money over the course of the bear market because that's the time when you should really allocate your capital.

20:39 Sure. This is when we get to have the fun conversations as Pnud and Bill. Rick, I'll get you in here on the same question. What do you think gold needs to get moving? Well, I think, I think Roy's right. It's the interest rates and, and, we all write all eyes on the Fed sort of a thing. I think just a couple of other things to kind of put in perspective. I mean, Central banks were net sellers of gold, you know before the world financial crisis sure, and and then they've been net buyers ever since and and they've they've gone from for buying 400 tons a year to buying 400 tons to 1000 tons a year so I mean they've stepped it up and they've stepped it up because the gas pedal on printing money is probably down at the floorboards by now.

21:30 And just to put it in perspective, so when they're buying gold at that rate, that's almost a third of the annual production of gold that the industry produces. We've been producing for the last 10 years between 3,500 and 3,600 tons of gold a year, which is 115,120 million ounces, troy ounces of gold. So when you're buying a 25, 30%, a specialized group is by our buyers, that has an impact. And so the price of gold has to go up. It's certainly been a sea change from before the world financial crisis and after the world financial crisis in terms of creating money,

22:17 which They haven't been sustained buyers since Bretton Woods. I mean, go back to that 1970s, 1980s time frame when Nixon closed the Gold window, took us off the Gold Standard.

22:31 Gold went from $35, peaked out at $800. We had a real strong Fed in Paul Volcker who strangled us with double digit interest rates, cool thing, but did cool things down. Is this latest cycle of central bank buying a wash, rinse, repeat story? I don't think so, it's not exactly the same for sure. Some things are different from the 80s, but certainly the US dollars lost a lot of value back then and we're seeing it lose a lot of value now. Circumstances are different, but once again, we find ourselves back involved in the Middle East, specifically in Iran and oil. That was the story back

23:18 in the 70s leading up to the peak of gold in 1980. So how does that saying go? More things change, more they stay the same. There's also history rhymes for sure. There's some elements of that. Rick, I want to stick on you because I know there's some Contango specific news. Speaking of this pullback, you guys had the big fun, sexy news in July 6th that your hedge book is gone. Pause here for applause from the crowd. He converted the final 15,000oz which were struck at $19.35

23:51 into some debt, knocked the interest rate down to 7.4% and picked up some put protection too. He swapped the ceiling on Gold for a manageable debt schedule. I'd love if you could walk us through the logic, the strategy behind that trade. Why this recent pullback that we're going through is the moment to pull that trigger? And what unhedged, unplugged Contango looks like heading into that big 2027 production year? Yeah, I mean, look, at the beginning of the year, we said we wanted to get rid of the bank-imposed hedges as soon as possible. And so here we are mid-year and we've done that. We're hedge-free. We want to give our shareholders and investors 100% exposure to the Gold price. So we think it's going up and that's, you know, Gold investors invest in Gold because they think it's going up, not because they think it's going down. If they think it's going down, they probably shouldn't be investing in Gold. So we accomplished this in kind of 2 main steps. First, we delivered into the 2026 hedges All the Gold that we were producing, we just said, let's just keep delivering into it so we can get rid of these as soon as possible.

24:55 Kind of staying ahead of the curve, if you will. And then we made arrangements with our bankers to replace the hedges with debt. We kept seeing the Gold price go down to $4,000 and then it would go up and then it would get smacked back down to $4,000. And it was on again, off again, as you pointed out earlier. There's peace in the Middle East, the Gold price goes up. There's war in the Middle East. We're shooting rockets again. Gold price goes down. And like you say, it is a bit somewhat counterintuitive, but I think Ronnie gives a good explanation of when you see that much gold being sold because people have to buy stuff, oil and other things related to it. So anyways, we saw that as a level that gold didn't seem to want to go down below. And so we thought we worked out with our bankers to do a bunch of paperwork to get done and approvals from committees and blah, blah, blah. So you got to kind of do that, plan this out in advance. So the next time we go down to 4,000, we're going to pull the trigger. And that's what we did.

25:57 We replaced it with that

26:00 because, we think investors want to have maximum leverage to Gold and our job is to give them that by producing as much Gold as we can, but also giving them optionality on future Gold and in our case, Silver production. And specifically from our high-grade DSO model, direct shipping ore model, which results in low capital intensity.

26:24 We've acquired assets and we're developing assets like Lucky Shot, Johnson Track and Kitsalt, all high-grade and all fit that DSO model. So again, our job is to produce as much Gold as we can and provide that future optionality

26:41 on future production. Why now? As I said, you guys have already been talking about the Gold kind of peaked out there at $5,500 6-months ago. We're down 25%. It's a nice, healthy correction. And we see Central Bank buying at this $4,000 level. So I think they collectively no longer believe in the dollar. It's that de-dollarization story. The fact that it's not just the dollar, though, I don't believe in any currencies. Yen, Euro, Yuan, I mean, you name it. They're all kind of in the toilet. And their central banks are diversifying away from paper promises and into gold. So, you know, perhaps we're heading back in towards a de facto gold standard, but not like Bretton Woods, but something new, something global, and something mostly driven by China, frankly.

27:37 I'll say, if somebody paid in Canadian pesos, it's certainly not the American dollar that's doing badly, just for anybody curious. Ronnie, I do want to talk about rate cuts, because I know it's on the minds of people in the chats and people wrote it in advance. Markets came into 2026 obviously pricing in rate cuts because Trump is not shy about what he wants and he was not shy immediately upon appointing Warsh about what he wanted. But instead We got a Fed where the minutes show the committee split 9 to 8 on whether the next move is a hike

28:05 So I know you've discussed already But I want to get into what gold actually needs from monetary policy to resume the uptrend Does it need cuts or hikes coming off the table? Would that be enough to do it? I think it's hikes coming off the table. And I think if you... What I really like, we are always pretty quick to criticize the Federal Reserve and central bankers in general, but I think that What I saw from Kevin Walsh, he's a really, how do you say, a straight shooter. He's not an academic. If you compared it to the wording

28:43 and the language of Janet Yellen and Ben Bernanke, it's a completely different animal. He's very much clear and I think a good communicator. But then of course, there's a saying, it's called central banking is a religion and central bankers are the high priests of that religion. So you know we all remember Alan Greenspan, the maestro, and you know everybody thought that he can really move markets and that he can decide where not only the US economy but the world economy is going to.

29:25 I think that's a pretty naive view because the world is so much globalized here. Central interest rates are important. But then on the other hand, I think there's too much emphasis on the power of central bankers. But of course, I think the market looked for a narrative to get gold down.

29:51 Everybody was kind of looking for an excuse to sell gold and I think that was like the primary excuse. So from my point of view, we are at the end of a hiking cycle, not the start of 1. He was pretty clear that he prefers the so-called trimmed PCE, which I had a look at it and it didn't really forecast the last couple of inflation episodes.

30:24 So let's just emphasize that the Fed has missed the 2% mark for 63 consecutive months. And you know, the market thinks that this is Kevin Walsh is the new Paul Volcker, but he doesn't hold a bazooka. He's holding a water pistol at max. Because you know, the debt levels, they are there. And there's no way that he can solve those problems. There will be much, much more pressure coming from Donald Trump. Let's not forget Jay Powell was Trump's guy at the beginning.

31:07 But then they had a little bit more of a complicated relationship. So we'll see. But I think we shouldn't really overemphasize the power of the Federal Reserve. I think if we zoom out, there is no way that Kevin Walsh can solve all those issues that the US has.

31:30 I appreciate that very much. Let's move on quickly from gold into silver. Rick, I know the Contango team calls silver the drama queen and I think it can sometimes act a bit like that. But I know in March you formally changed the company's name after the merger with Dolly Varden to Contango Silver and Gold. And Silver since then has had a wild ride coming off that record 120 that happened in January conference season, down to I think right now it sits at the high 50s. So planting a flag on Silver through that kind of volatility, to me reads as a real kind of conviction call. What is it about the Silver setup and about the Kilt Salt project that made you want Silver front and centre in the company's identity?

32:10 As we've said, the Drama Queen results from being both precious and industrial. It's poor man's Gold, but it's heavily used in everything electronic. So it is now also officially a critical metal in the US, Canada, Australia, Europe, and most importantly, China.

32:30 So I always look to the end use, besides jewelry. Jewelry is always there, but besides jewelry, solar panels, electronics, military applications, data centers, solid-state batteries is a new big growth area for Silver use. All of that's going to just likely result in sucking up a lot of silver over the next decade.

32:53 Obviously, substitution will become an issue at some point. Is it $100 silver where you see substitution? Is it $200? I think it will be closer to 200. But meanwhile, there's a huge amount of R&D going on, some using more silver, some using less silver, some trying to replace the use of silver. And I always point out, Keep in mind that gold is also part of this equation, since gold is also used in lots of electronics. All those connections that absolutely need to happen. Best example I always give is the airbag deployment in your car. For insurance reasons, that has to deploy. That's a gold switch that makes that happen. Gold is the ultimate noble metal because it doesn't oxidize or corrode. Silver does.

33:42 Copper does.

33:45 R&D will be really important to watch over the next decade, but I think both Gold and Silver are truly critical in that space. I think all these new electronic applications are going to put Gold and Silver in a good place for quite a while. As for Kitsault Valley, I thought that was obvious. We have a dominant land position in a hugely rich part of the Golden Triangle. Silver grades average over 300g per tonne. That's 10oz per tonne. If you use Silver at US$50, it just gets an easy number to do math with in your head. 10oz rock is worth US$500 a tonne. That's really high-grade material.

34:32 The veins at Kitsalt are not only high-grade, but they're fat, they're thick. They're 3 to 10m wide. Easily mineable with using low-cost bulk long-haul stoping methods. I think we'll be able to produce Silver for about $25 an ounce. That's a $25 margin if you have $50 Silver. If we can produce 5Moz of Silver at startup, that results in $125M of free cash flow. We'll have our MRE coming out later this month. We're targeting the end of the month. It's not just dependent on us, it's dependent on the QP and they're busy folks this time of year, but we're shooting to have it done by the end of the month. I think we'll be close to 100Moz of Silver, plus 1Moz of Gold when that MRE comes out.

35:21 I envision a mine at startup that can produce 5Moz of Silver annually, but then can grow to 10Moz of Silver. We're now drilling about 40,000m this summer, this summer season, which will continue to do more infill work and expand the resources, the high-grade resources. So by this time next year, what I want to have is a preliminary mine plan for developing the Kitsault District. So that's what shareholders can look forward to between now and 2027. Awesome. Appreciate that. Ron, I'm going to get you in on Silver too, because like Rick alluded to, the structural deficit story hasn't really gone anywhere. Industrial demand is still there. The metal did lose half its value in about 6 months. My question to you is, how much of that move up to $120k was real? How much was just the kind of frothy exuberance that you talked about with relation to gold in your presentation?

36:15 And I also want to know, with the gold to silver ratio, it's back to around 70 after all the drama. Where do you think is fair? Where do you think is the actual real resting point of that ratio? Well I think that the last $20 in January, They were rented, they were not owned. We all kind of knew that this unfortunately cannot go on forever. But I think that the physics didn't change. We're seeing 6 consecutive years. So the cumulative six-year deficit in silver is 762 million ounces. That's nearly a full year of global mine production. We know that 75% of silver is a byproduct and we know that there was a huge, huge lack of exploration and development in the sector and we shouldn't expect too much growth in silver production over the next couple of years.

37:16 So I think that now we're like, we're in a bottom is always a process. And I think the process is now happening. I think that around the 60 US dollars, we're seeing quite a lot of interest in silver again. I think that silver will never really be able to completely decouple from gold. But I said previously a couple of reasons why I don't think that we've seen the top of this gold bull market yet. And one of them was that we haven't seen any crazy M&A yet. The second one is that usually at the end of a secular gold bull market, you're seeing the gold silver ratio dramatically lower, so between 15 and 20.

38:06 So I think in January, the lows of the gold silver ratio were somewhere in the high 50s. So that's another reason why I think, okay, well, we're taking a breather in this secular bull market, but we haven't seen the top. And I always said that we will see, you know, if we see like 8,900 US dollars for gold by 2030, and we see a gold silver ratio of 10, 15, I mean, you can do the math. That's significantly higher. And I don't say that we will reach those levels. But I think that we can easily go in a in a in a blow up phase of the gold bull market.

38:53 Why shouldn't silver go to 3 or 400 bucks. I can can easily see that because we haven't seen. Institutional money coming in. We saw it a little bit, you know, there was some nice ETF inflows in December and January, but not really the big money piling in. And it's the same with, You know, everybody's always waiting for the generalist investors coming in. And we're hearing those stories every year at PDAG and Beaver Creek, Precious Metal Summit and Denver Gold. But so far, we haven't really seen it. But I think it will be happening. And this will be the future driver of demand, really generalist money coming in. Awesome. I appreciate that very much. I got one more actually for you, Ronny. I just want to start that feels interesting to me and I just want to talk about kind of Chinese buying specifically.

39:48 The ECB now estimates gold makes up 27% of global official reserves, which is above U.S. Treasuries, sits at 22%. And the Bank of China posted its 20th straight month of buying and its largest monthly purchase since 2023 in this worst quarterly decline for gold in 13 years. Is this the reserve regime change that you've been writing about for years finally showing up in the official data or is it something else that we just don't understand yet? Well you know in 2024 we wrote about the new gold playbook. And I think that people, and what is really dear to my heart is, I think gold has a really bad reputation in the traditional investment space.

40:37 People think that if you buy gold, that's really, you're basically hoping for the world to end, you're hoping for hyperinflation, civil war, like really worst case scenarios. But there's a positive case for gold and I think that we should emphasize that much more. And this positive case is that more than 50% of the gold demand is nowadays coming just from China and India. If you add countries like Turkey, the whole Arabic region, other Asian countries, then you can say that 2 thirds of the physical gold demand are coming from emerging markets. So from my point of view, Gold is an emerging markets growth story. So if you're confident that emerging markets will continue to do well, then I think this will also give you a pretty positive view on gold. And this is not only for private investors in emerging markets. This is also for institutional players in emerging markets and also for central banks in emerging markets.

41:40 Because compared to industrialized nations, their gold allocations for emerging markets central banks are significantly lower. And I think they just want to show, you know, strength and confidence and they want to be taken seriously. And this is the reason why those central banks are buying gold. So just go to Dubai. I mean, now it's perhaps a little bit dangerous, but when everything is over again, travel to Dubai, go to China, travel to India and just feel and smell the gold affinity of those countries. How important gold is for people there. And if you ask 10 people on the street in India, where's the gold price? I think that 9 out of 10 will probably know pretty well where it's trading. If you do the same in New York, I think that probably 1 out of 10 will know where the gold price roughly is at the moment.

42:37 I think it's possible there's some people in the audience who own more gold than the Canadian government, just for reference. It certainly depends. Rick, I want to get you in on Johnson Track. I know we talked a lot about Kitsault and we'll get to your producing mine in a second. But Johnson Track went on to the Fast41 permitting dashboard in January. I know you're building the road from camp to the portal site this summer and the plan is to start the underground exploration tunnel next year. You've been permitting projects in the US for quite some time. How different does the process feel under the current critical minerals push? And is the Fast 41 timeline holding or is it just kind of window dressing to you on the ground? Yeah, no, it's real. I mean, the administration and even Congress now recognize the importance of critical metals. And the fact that we're 30 years plus behind China, things like copper, zinc, silver, it's great to see that support finally from the federal government.

43:32 And FAS 41 was actually established under the Obama administration, not the Trump administration. A lot of people just assumed it was Trump, but it wasn't. It was Obama. And it's working really well. It's an online, transparent way of permitting projects, federal projects. And you're permitting a federal project when you trigger NEPA. And NEPA is the National Environmental Policy Act. So basically in time you need a federal permit to do something, which in Alaska is almost everything if it's related to mining. Anytime you want to build something in wetlands, you need a 404 permit. Alaska has lots of wetlands, so you pretty much can't build a road without a 404 permit. But air quality, water quality, fish passage, anything interacting with endangered species. All these require anything, anytime you're taking an action that requires federal permit for that.

44:26 And the FAST-41 process lists all the permits required. And then you work out with the agencies, all the studies and the process that all the agencies are going to want you to go through and all the studies they want you to do, want the applicant to do to go through and demonstrate how you're going to build, in our case, a road and a barge landing facility and minimize and mitigate the impacts to wetlands, ensure that fish can pass from one side of the road to the other and avoid any impacts to endangered species. So all that is sort of bundled in that, in the dashboard, they call the dashboard, all the permits are listed there and the process by which you're gonna go convince the agencies that you can build your road in your port, your bar planning facility without any significant environmental impacts.

45:18 The password and process lines up in a transparent way that the public can follow along. And then there are specific times when public can provide comments when documents are complete. That's all part of NEPA. The key point is the timeline to get the work done. Under FAST-41, everyone agrees to a schedule upfront. And so long as we can provide the information and the studies in a timely manner, the agencies hold to their schedule to review the work and the same with regards to the public comment periods. There's also a coordination with the state agencies, and this is state-specific. All states work differently, but Alaska has signed an MOU with the federal government to coordinate that, the state permitting as well, so that everything stays on track.

46:11 This is actually what permitting should look like. It's not really rocket science. Just agree on the timelines and stick to them. We have to stick to them too. Obviously if we don't get our work done in a timely manner that will throw off the schedule. For Our Johnson Track project, I'd say everything is working really well. We have a great group of people working hard to stay on schedule. We expect to submit our formal application in early 2027 and receive our major construction permits by mid-2028. So yeah, I think it's, Congress needs to just make Fast 41 the law. That's what I would recommend. Just stick to the timelines.

46:58 Stick to it. That sounds like good infrastructure planning to me. There's one question I want to get you both in on. It's just this very odd disconnect. Rick, I'll start with you because you live it day to day. Even 4000 Gold, so after this pullback, producers are generating some of the fattest margins kind of in the history of the industry. And yet Gold equities got hammered with the pullback with some senior producers down 25%, some intermediate producers down 50% in just a month or 2. Rick, what does that disconnect look like and feel like from inside a producer? Do you just want to shake the market by the lapel? Yeah. I mean, look, in Gold and Silver, the valuations are certainly lagging in metal prices. Major is sitting on a huge amount of cash and they're continuing to generate more, which will probably lead to what Ronnie was referring to earlier, is when you have that much money, you're earning a hole in your pocket, you want to do something with it. Right now, investors want you to buy back your own shares or pay a dividend. That's what the focus is. But at some point that's going to change to growth.

48:08 And what's really different now is margins are approaching $2,000 an ounce. And for historic context, when I started in the gold mining business in the 80s. Before the 80s, we never even paid attention to gold. It was like a byproduct metal. We looked for copper and zinc, we looked for porphyry, we looked for VMS deposits, we didn't go look for gold deposits. $800 gold changed all that. But for a historic context, when the gold price in the 80s was you know, bounced around $400 level, margins were $50 to $100 an ounce. We're $2,000 an ounce now. So at Moncho next year, our margins are going to be around $2,500 if Gold price is $4,000. If it's higher, obviously we're going to make more money.

49:01 And so next year we're planning to produce between 75 and 80,000oz of Gold. So that's going to result in about US$200M of free cash flow. And yet we're valued like, you know, I don't know what we're valuing. We don't get value for a lot of our assets, but our approach is unique in the way we are looking at this. And this is what we want to make sure investors realise. Most juniors have to dilute, dilute, dilute to get anything into production. We're not that story. We've only got 35 million shares outstanding, 33.5 million shares outstanding. And most of our peer group of junior producers who are producing around the same level we are, have 300M or 400M shares outstanding.

49:49 So they get 10 times the number of shares. And so one thing I always point out is on a per share basis we have much better leverage. We have more Gold and Silver per share than our peer group. So that's one reason I think you should take a look at Contango. We're not the operator of Moncho. Kinross is the operator. It's a high-grade DSO, direct shipping ore. So we mine the ore and it's transferred to Fort Knox by truck and processed there. We're more like a royalty company. Kinross does all the work. They do all the heavy lifting. And while we take that cash flow and advance our early stage or our exploration stage assets like Lucky Shot, Johnson Track and Kitsol. So we're using that cashflow to advance our projects without dilution to shareholders.

50:42 The DSO model itself, focusing on high-grade deposits that can be processed at a central mill. It's a capital light solution to growing production. So again, that's another way that we avoid excessive dilution contrary to most junior companies who are going to develop a project on their own. Our business plan is to grow production from our current average of 60,000oz of Gold per year from Moncho to 200,000oz by adding Lucky Shot, Johnson Track and Kitsalt over the next 4 or 5 years, and produce about 200,000oz of Gold and 5Moz of Silver from Kitsalt, obviously. And we think that's a unique approach in the exploration space. So that's our business strategy.

51:33 Thank you. And Ronny, I know you've long made the case for miners as performance gold. Does this recent sell-off break that thesis or is this the setup that you've kind of been waiting for and that you want to see? No, I think, you know, that's just my view on the sector and I'm following it for 20 years now. And I think it's just a tough sector. I mean, there is probably No other pocket of the market that is that complex because you've got actually the top down risks, which is you've got the gold price risks, you've got all those macro drivers for gold and for silver. But then you've got all those bottom up risks. You've got geological risks. You've got interest rate risk, management risk, ESG, infrastructure, energy, you name it. So it's a really, really tough asset class. And from my point of view, you can make ridiculous amounts of money in this space, but you also have to live with drawdowns, 70%, 80%, up to 90%.

52:46 And that makes it so interesting and fascinating, I think. And our view is that, you know, we will not be the ones that actually sell at the top and we won't be buying at the bottom. But we really want to catch like the largest part of a bull market and avoid those major drawdowns. So this is why we came up with this incrementum Aurum signal, which works pretty well. And as I've said, it moved to defensive in March. And now it seems that it's slowly but surely going back to a more positive view. And I think that, you know, who was it? I think that Charlie Munger once said that if you can't handle a 50% drawdown, then you deserve a mediocre result.

53:37 So, you know, the fact is the large cap producers, they produce record amounts of free cash flow. They're net cash now. So they got rid of all that debt. They're buying back shares. There will be a massive, massive consolidation in this space. There will be crazy M&A, as I've said before. And I think it's our job as Rick, as a manager of the company and our job as a fund manager to separate the wheat from the chaff, to do our homework and to deliver results for our investors and for our shareholders. There you go. One question that I've been thinking about, because I think that it's a pretty interesting finding in the mid-year data that gold's pullbacks all seem to happen during U.S. Trading hours And the rebounds have come during Asian trading hours.

54:32 So price discovery seems to be migrating east. What does that shift mean structurally, if I'm accurate? And what should Western investors take from the fact that the marginal buyer of gold seems to not really care that much about what the Fed does or doesn't do. Well I would say this trading pattern has also changed a bit. We went back recently to the normal trading pattern that we saw previously but there were like last year it was like it completely reversed. So we saw that Asian markets are actually driving the price. And now at the moment, we went from a massive premium in Shanghai to actually a little discount. So it seems that Chinese demand has also cooled off a bit.

55:22 Indian demand is still pretty solid, I would say. But again, I think we all have to get used to those new price levels. Let's not forget that if we compare current prices to last year prices, we're still up. So this was a tremendous run. And now we have to like, again, if you do an expedition on the high mountain, we have to get used to the new levels that we're in. And I think that's the process that we're currently in. I appreciate that. Rick, I'll get you out on this. What do you think about generally the West no longer dictating the price of gold necessarily? I mean, I think it's painfully obvious that the emerging markets that Ronnie was referring to are tired of us diluting our paper.

56:11 So that's that that shift is has been going on for a while and it'll just continue. So, you know, everything is, as Ronnie says, everything needs a breather every once in a while. So this 25% correction from 5,500 to 4,000 is pretty healthy. And again, it seems to be a floor. And once again, you see China back in there buying. And it's interesting in India, they're trying to put up roadblocks to buying Gold, but it doesn't seem to ever work. I've got something that's cultural. That's true. I got 2 rapid fire questions for you, Ronnie, and then I'm going to get you guys to do price targets, everybody's favorite part of the event, the part they clip on YouTube and Twitter.

57:01 But there's 2 rapid fire ones. Ellis asked, is there a crisis with the value of the Japanese yen and their interest rates? And will that affect the price of gold? Just as a rapid fire question. It's tough to answer that. I think it's no easy reply. If you have a look at the price of gold in Japanese yen terms, I mean, it's been an excellent hedge. But of course, I mean, if Japanese should repatriate capital big way, then at some point we will see an enormous amount of strength in the Japanese Yen. I would have expected it a little bit earlier to happen actually, because there's just so much capital outside of Japan and it will be repatriated at some point.

57:48 So that would of course completely change traditional patterns in capital markets. So I think that following the yen is a very very sensible idea. I appreciate that. One last rapid fire 1. How do you assess the potential impact of a military conflict between the EU and Russia on mining companies and metals prices? We're throwing tough ones at you today, right? I can tell you that it seems that in the EU everybody kind of wants to go to war with Russia and It gives me sleepless nights, but it's also some sort of distraction and we know that it's also a big business.

58:38 So to create some growth, you know, let's order more tanks and planes and whatever. Yeah, it's again, it's something that definitely keeps me up at night. And that is if we follow history and if we connect the dots, it's worrisome. Is there a direct impact on precious metals? I don't know. Yeah. Hard to say. Now we'll get into price targets because I want to close off with getting specific if we can. The big banks, who cares what they say, but they've got some year-end gold targets ranging from $4,800 all the way to $6,300. So they remain bullish from today's numbers. Everybody's got a story for why. Ronny, I'll start with you. Give us your number for gold and silver at your end. I know we've got your number for the end of 2030, but for the end of 2026. And if possible, 1 catalyst you're watching most closely between now and the end of the year? I would say around $4,500 by the end of the year. And again, I think it's going to be another reversal in interest rate expectations. So I think we will see actually the Federal Reserve cutting interest rates.

59:45 Perfect. And Rick, I'll throw the same question to you, but I'll also add, which of your catalysts, Katanga Silver and Gold, do you think the market is sleeping on the most right now? Now, obviously, we think $4,000 a floor. So, you know, we're bullish. I think that, you know, $4,500 level, that'd be a nice level for me. I'd sleep well at night. And as far as our catalysts, look, we're drilling a lot this year. We're going to drill over 60,000m, 20,000 at lucky shot and 40,000m at Kitsalt. We're only a third of the way through the program at Kitsalt and they're already got 25,000m. So I suspect we may end up with more than 40,000m at Kitsalt. So when you, we'll put out that MRE, That'll be a significant milestone for the company and specifically for recognizing the Silver component of the company.

1:00:42 We're targeting 100Moz. We'll add the 40,000m of drilling. Every time Kitsalt was putting out drill results, they were always among the top 10 results of the week or the month or whatever. So we're going to remind people of that when we start putting those drill results out, probably in early August. We combine that with the MRE. By this time next year, we'll have a basically reminding the market that this is a major silver district and in located in a Tier 1 jurisdiction. I think the market isn't paying close enough attention to that progression.

1:01:29 There aren't a lot of high-quality Silver projects out there. Will we be scooped up in part of the M&A craze? It will happen. We can be both hunter and hunted. We are going to execute our strategy and we will have a lot of cash flow next year. So we could be looking at acquiring other opportunistic assets that fit the DSO approach. But we have this major silver district that another silver producer might covet. So I don't see that totally out of the picture. I think in terms of what isn't the market paying close attention to, I think it's lucky shot. I think when we drill 20,000m and we outline 400,000oz to 500,000oz of resources that on a project that can get quickly into production for another 50, 60 million dollars of capital investment to get it back into production where we can produce 40,000 to 50,000 ounces of gold a year by mining 400 to 500 tons of rock. That's not a lot of rock.

1:02:40 That's not a lot of work. And that can generate, if we've got $2,000 all in the sustaining costs and we have $4,000 gold, you're generating another $800 million dollars of free cash flow. It's a great business. And I don't think the market appreciates. There's 1 point here. I think it's that, like you said, in the 80s, you had a margin of $50 to $100 an ounce. And now we have, as a business, as an industry, we have $2,000 margins. And if gold goes higher, obviously that margin grows. So it's a great business. It's a great business. I'm inclined to agree. For everybody in the audience, thank you so much for joining us. In other words, a few hundred of you really, really appreciate all your time. Ronnie and Rick, thanks so much for the conversation. For folks in the crowd, you can, please do encourage you to subscribe to Ronnie's newsletter.

1:03:28 It's right there in the chat. For folks looking to meet with Contango, there's a meeting request button at the bottom of the screen. Feel free to click it. It'll be there after the room closes. But Ronnie, Rick, thank you