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, all of us peak in our careers. And I think this possibly might be the peak of mine. I'd also like to give a shout out to Dan Denbow, chairman of the board of the Denver Gold Forum. When he saw me this time last year, I had just finished chemo, been diagnosed with an aggressive cancer. I had no hair. Ah, and I was wondering around, determined to get back to normal. And so Dan in recommending me as a speaker, took a risk on me in more ways than one. And so over the last year, since that point, Gold is up 35% and I'm in remission. So it's been a pretty good year from a number of levels. Thank you. I'm never gonna get that kind of oration again. But thank you very much. So disclaimer. Basically, what this says is that I am not responsible for anything that I've talked to you about today. I'd like to be able to use this disclaimer when I have,, serious discussions with my husband in the future. So, the single biggest challenge that our industry faces is one of reputation or any of those of you that speak to nonparticipants in our sector. You know that we're almost universally loathed politicians do not lose votes if they're negative about the sector. And really the fault lies with us and it lies with the leaders of our industry. We've done an incredibly poor job of promulgating that the products of mining are intimately linked to life as we know, know it today. And my sister who is a cultural anthropologist, I think said it well, she said you can choose to be a vegan, but you can't choose not to be associated with the products of mining. This is a recent example. I'm picking on the UK because it was easy to get this information. But for those of you that are unaware, eight universities covering almost half a million students are not allowing anyone from the extractive university to career recruit at those universities. And this includes the mining industry, it's not just oil and gas. So this is a leading indicator that we continue to do a very, very poor job managing our business reputation. So what can we do about this? First of all, I think it behooves all of us to understand the real impact of our business. And speaking for myself, I think a lot of us have bought into the negative rhetoric about mining. And I think this is a pretty fascinating trial. What this shows is that non ferrous metals including mining represent 0.7% of greenhouse gas emissions. If we compare this to residential buildings at 10.9% we do not have protesters out there demanding that we don't build new houses. So again, there's a lot of misinformation about what the mi mining industry does and a critical role that we play in society. I think there is some very low hanging fruit that we can do often the messaging when we talk about this. Oh, it's too hard to change the hearts and minds. I completely disagree with that. I think this is a pretty interesting chart showing a breakdown by demographics basically by age as to what social media platforms each of us use. Now, these social media platforms are free. the way that different generations communicate with each other is very, very different. I don't mean to pick on the World Gold Council but I am cos they're the leading advocacy organization for our industry. And what this shows is that the average person that's 18 to 13, 9, 39 years old, a core demographic. They are big, big users of tiktok, Instagram and Snapchat Snapchat yet. Well, Gold Council is not using those methods of social media to promulgate a thesis about what gold is and what it means to society. I just did a quick squiz of some of the largest companies in our sector and they too aren't using these platforms. And so I think the solution is quite simple. Hi millennial. They understand how to, how to communicate with their own sector. And let's start being proactive about what it is that we do and the value that we bring to society. So now I had a platform, I used it. So now I'm going to talk about what I'm here to talk about, which is the commodity cycle. I think it's taken me a number of years to accept this. But ultimately, every single commodity is cyclical in nature. And I think the powerful thing to understand is that corporate and investor behavior is quite predictable on average, depending on where you are in that cycle. Now, this comes after almost 27 years of being a go working as an investment banker, working on the buy side, working as a sole site analyst, being in the hot seat as a CEO and working as an independent director. And if you accept this, it decreases your risk of investing in the sector and increases your probability of success, which is of course, what we all want. So I'm going to talk about various leading indicators and behaviors of where on the cycle. But I'm gonna do this in the context of the swag that you get on a site visit. So in a bear market, all you get is a pen. It's pretty de depressing. And I think we all know what a bear market looks like. Collapse in the commodity price bankruptcies, ensue asset sales occur. And in fact, if you have a good balance sheet, this is the absolutely perfect time to acquire assets. It rarely happens. Investors demand conservatism, they demand fiscal discipline. All non core expenditure ceases as the cycle advances, the swag you get improves normally an ill fitting t-shirt and a baseball cap. But this is demonstrated by the stabilization of the commodity price balance sheets start to improve because of fiscal discipline that's being imposed by the investing community, commodity prices start to increase. And this is where the smart resource investors start to dip their toe in the water. They're willing to accept some downside risk. But the pattern and the trend is your friend. And as we know capital inflows dictate price performance, we start to see behavior which is like with like merge and we've seen this recently in the gold sector over the last 3 to 4 years. And by that, I mean, producers, merging with producers, we start to see low risk capital available and that's available for the best in the business. The management teams that have very strong reputations and a good property portfolio and have a history of executing well exploration. The R and D of our business starts to occur as the cycle prog progresses. And I believe that that that that's the early green shoots of a bull market and we can vacillate back and forth between these two quadrants, swag further improves you get a hat that actually protects you from the sun. Ah, you get a jacket, Kelly Hansen in this particular case. And if you're visiting an Australian company, they'll give you a beer cooler because we like to keep our beer cold. So what happens is medium risk capital starts to become available. Prices, increase resource investors that are most familiar with the sector start to enter pretty heavily. Ah, the risk capital that becomes available starts to result in new discoveries. We start to see higher risk M and A and we're already starting to see this and by high risk M and A I mean, acquiring assets that are potentially developers but are higher quality developers. Investors start to stop focusing on capital discipline and start mentioning that dirty word growth and suddenly as the cycle progresses and you get swag like binoculars prices start to talk up online. Commodity price investors demand growth that becomes a key topic of conversation when they're meeting with companies, small company IP OS explode high risk M and A ensues and by high risk, it's it's competition from perhaps more mediocre projects and mediocre companies and also earlier stage companies because there's this incessant demand for growth. It's pretty hard as a company to explore your way out of that. The average lead time from exploration to disco to production discovery to pro production is now in excess of 17 years. The easiest way to increase your resource base is to increase your commodity price assumption and reduce your grade assumption that results in ounces in the book increases your cost profile reduces your margin. And for me, the sign of a bubble when you should be running screaming from the sector, highly leveraged companies, the worst companies in our business start to materially outperform capital raisings peak, a capital raisings peak, we see an increase in volume and dollar amount raised and essentially the sales side doesn't really have to work for a living. Moose pasture is highly valued. So early, early stage exploration companies and generalists are entering en masse. I think a good ana analog to this is if we just refer to the lithium boom, a very contracted parabolic price rise, eight fold price increase in lithium associate commensurate wonderful price performance in the underlying equities. I missed it. I would say probably most geologists did. There's a hell of a lot of lithium in the world. What we didn't appreciate was the investors demand for being exposed to commodities that could be put into the net zero matrix. And of course, this assumption the build out of evs, but we saw exactly this type of behavior. We saw all of those gold companies that hadn't been able to raise a dime in the previous two years only become lithium companies. It's a very, very rational decision. That's the only way you can raise money. That's what you do. And speaking from my perspective, I started getting calls from generalist investors simply because I'd once sat on a lithium company board. Now, I was I an ex expert in the sector. No. Did I know more than the average general investor who had never invested in a mining stock? Yes. And that was the top so cycle is the most important thing. It's pretty hard to have absolute out performance if you're not in an upwards trending cycle. But I think how I look at the sector and it probably parallels with how investors look at the sector is for me, the most important ingredient, it's not project, it's people, you can have a superb management team, create enormous value with a mediocre project and you can have a terrible management team, destroy value in a good project. So what do I look for fit for purpose, border management team and the border management team will change and evolve over the evolution of a company. What's suitable for a junior explore code is not necessarily suitable for a large multinational operation. I look for people that have appropriate expertise if they're in another country that they understand the regulatory environment, ideally have nationals from that country in key decision making roles. One thing I have noticed and I think it's potentially a function of the ideology of identity that's percolated through our institutions and our organizations is many of the larger companies no longer have a core of mining industry, people on their boards. In fact, and I don't just mean technical people, I mean, people with actual mining industry experience, it is a very complex business. It's a very technical business. You have to understand the language. And so if you don't even know the questions to ask, how do you know what the answers are? Second most important project, I think some of us will debate about which is the most important ingredient. And in a project, you could argue, I'm bi biased. But in this particular instance, I'm correct the most important element of any asset. It's the rocks, you cannot change the rocks, you can massage the met mining, you can improve your social relationships. But if you have misjudged your resource and your grade, it's a fundamental fatal flaw. It's why geologists should be wor worshiped. But unfortunately, we're not, I think there is a focus with project on grade over place sometimes and economic hurdle matters, you can have the very high grade deposit. But if that deposit is in a jurisdiction that requires an enormous amount of excess infrastructure, it lowers the economic attractiveness of that project. So place matters. There's also I think AAA bias in our industry from the investing and from the corporate side towards anglophone countries, this perception that Australia, Canada and the States, a lot of risk jurisdictions. I would argue that that's absolutely not the case. Every single country, every single jurisdiction has risk, it manifests manifests itself in different ways. You just have to understand what that risk is. So I am chair of a proper development company with an asset in Chile. And in 2022 you had obviously the election of a left leaning government, there was a huge amount of rhetoric about what an increased risky jurisdiction Chile had become. But in Chile, like in Brazil to ta change the mining fiscal structure, you need a majority of Congress and the Senate in Australia. That's not the case. So for example, in 2022 the Queensland government enacted a very, very, very punitive royalty on coal. They did not consult the industry. There was no voting on this. It just happened kind of ironic given how much coal is a factor in terms of baseload, electricity production in Australia strategy, you have to have one. It's surprising how many companies don't. And that strategy has to make sense in the context of where you are in the cycle cost of capital. This is something that I think juniors through to and including majors don't understand enough. And so almost every company that you will meet as an investor will do their utmost to demonstrate to you how undervalued they are on a per share basis. It's simply impossible. It's a bell curve. And I would argue those companies that are highly valued on an NAV per share basis have done a superb job of extracting excess value from the market. But you have to act on that. If you'd have trade at a premium to your NAV per share. The most accretive things that you, you can do is to issue equity or buy another company with your paper. Some companies have an extra nor extraordinarily low cost of capital and I think the one that we're probably all aware of would be Robert Friedland. Robert Friedland can raise pretty much money. As much as he wants at any time that he wants. And there's a very good reason for this. He has had more tier one discoveries than any other company that is in existence today. And there's a very, very simple reason for this. He understands at the end of the day that geologists provide the IP that provide the discoveries. So he by hires the best geologist that he can, he gives them, ah, a lot of latitude and a lot of capital to investigate their ideas. And guess what if you have a long-term commitment to exploration and you hire the best people and you give them some money. It results in discoveries, catalysts. I think that the only catalyst that will move share prices in a positive direction in any aspect of the, any stage of the cycle are drill results., but in a neutral to positive trending cycle, there are of course other, other catalysts and I think all of us have seen them and that can be something as simple as new management, new board, perhaps a change in your project. Status, positive or negative. Now, promotion, promotion is a dirty word, I think sometimes Canadians and I've, I am a Canadian despite the accent and I've lived in Canada for 23 years. Ah, but there's in excess of 3000 publicly listed resource companies in the world across all the exchanges. They are all competing for a finite source of capital. So, how do you stand out from the crowd? You have to be able to message your business in a way that resonates with the investing public. It doesn't matter how good your project is or how good your team is. If you can't tell that story, well, it's extremely difficult to raise capital. I'm sure we've all seen this the Laan curve, but I just want to spend a little bit of time on this because I don't think investors and companies spend enough time thinking about the, the very predictable nature of this curve. As we know when there's a discovery, when the upside is unknown, the market assumes that it's limitless. There's no reality in the story and this sometimes where technical people who become investors, we can miss things and that's because we look at it and go, that's never going to work because of whatever geological factor that we've honed in on. But 99.9% of the investing public is not technical. So they don't necessarily understand. So when you have parabolic share price performance with a dual discovery, you should raise as much money as possible. Companies generally don't when reality emerges. And the true stick initially in the form of a resource estimate and then followed by those various parameters as an advan as a project advances for its life cycle. Ironically, and I would argue rationally, the assets can become very, very de risks, but they tend to lose their value. And in fact, I would say the only time a development company at the best case scenario is flat towards upwards trending is in a bull market. And as an asset evolves along its development life cycle, certain things become more important when it's an explore, explore code noone really cares about the fiscal regime. They focus on ownership and geology quality, but things that make assets real become more important on the life cycle. And this is just here where I think the company should be raising the most money. This is an example that I think every junior exploration company and investor should study. This is great bear. They had did a near perfect job of executing. They had a fantastic discovery. They raised money at ever increasing prices. It's almost unheard of in our sector and they sold at the top and they were acquired by Kinross and they sold before they had a resource. I think that management team and board viscerally understood the power of excitement when you're in exploration stage and every single one of their shareholders made money if they bought in every single financing. This is another example and I think it's interesting it's Capricorn Emerald Ng mining. Now these are all developers. This is normally the high risk group of our sector yet all of their flagship assets, they did not find them. They bought them, they bought them at times in the market when they had relatively minimal competition and they share some key criteria which I think is very important. All three companies have boards and management teams that have a history of executing. They have built mines on time and on budget. It's not very common in our industry. In fact, it's incredibly rare. All of them have open to open pit deposits, gold focus that are amenable to conventional mining and processing. So what they did was take under apprec appreciated a a assets and they executed and look at their performance. And I think interestingly only one of them ha has a, their flagship asset is in a low risk jurisdiction and that is Capricorn with its assets in Australia. G mining's assets are in Brazil. personally, I love Brazil. It's, I've got a huge soft spot spot for it but it is a, a jurisdiction that you'll get questions from investors. And Emerald has a flagship asset is in Cambodia, not necessarily a jurisdiction that you think is a go to for mining. I want to talk a little bit about messaging. We've seen this trend in our industry where the largest lead, the largest companies and the leaders of our industry are talking less about gold and more about copper. And I think as a gold mining company, if your message is, I want to be a copper company when I grow up, I don't know how you expect to enact new investors into our sector. If you can't speak positively about your flagship commodity and in a way that resonates with not only the resource community but the marginal investor. how do you expect to attract interest into our sector? Now, this is a pretty simplistic way of looking at it. Obviously, share prices move for a whole bunch of reasons. But I thought this is pretty interesting. Agnico focuses the most on gold at 54% year to date newer up 31% and Barack, which is probably messages the most about that. It would like to be a copper company up 17%. And in conclusion where I think we are in this cycle today, I met a high net worth retail investor just recently and I'm gonna steal his phrase but acknowledge him while I do it. He said we're in a stealth bull market and I agree with him. We've had incredible underlying equity performance, but we're yet to see that translate into the equities, gold prices up strongly. And you walk around the conference in an almost $3000 gold price environment. There are a lot of depressed companies out there, particularly in the juniors. So while I don't think we're at the start of a bull market, I think the really easy money has been made. I definitely don't think we're at the top of a bull market. We have medium risk capital available. We're seeing new discoveries, the gold price has increased. You're seeing corporate start to indulge in a slightly higher risk M and A. and you're seeing investors starting to talk about growth. And I think that this means that we're in this really interesting time frame where we have a very, very strong fundamentals of the sector, but we have time to pick and choose as to what we want to be exposed to. And people say this time is different, it's never different. It's the four most dangerous words in the English language. And I have one minute to end before I finish. And I just wanted to highlight something that I've been doing a little bit of work on recently. I'm sure most of you know about Iss and Glass Lewis. These are the two most influential proxy advisors in pretty much any public company, they wield enormous power because they're providing voting recommendations. And as I think about this with an American election this year, no individual who's voting would outsource their vote to someone else. And that's essentially what we're doing as investors in our sector. And we see the promulgation of certain themes with these cuts. And we have to remember that they're owned by pe funds and hedge funds and investors. These are money making entities. And so one acute example, there's such a focus on certain things that I don't necessarily think I help for our business. And I have a good friend. She is a very experienced mining professional. She's the only woman on a board. She chairs the corporate governance committee and she's having recommendation of votes withheld against her because they're not enough women on the board. So I'll leave you with that. Thanks so much. Thank you really appreciate it. Thank you Nikki. Just incredibly insightful and lots of actionable intelligence. And that brings me to say that the webcast will be available for free from Wednesday afternoon. But you can of course buy premium access right now.