My 30 Years Attending The Denver Gold Forum.

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September 17, 2024 at 12:50 PM (MDT)|Broadmoor Hotel & Resort

Dan McConvey

Managing Member, Rossport Investments LLC

─ 35 years of experience in the mining sector, including visits to over 200 mines and projects
─ Named “Best on the Street” for Precious Metals stock picking by the Wall Street Journal in 1995 and 1999
─ Joined Goldman Sachs as a Senior Precious Metals Equity Research Analyst from 1997 until 2002
─ Before that, I worked at Lehman Brothers as a Gold Mining Analyst from 1994 to 1997
─ Joined Barrick Gold Corp. as Assistant Controller in 1987 and left as Operations Controller in 1994
─ From 1982-87, worked at KPMG, Toronto, in Audit, leaving as manager

This is an automatically generated transcript. Denver Gold Group cannot accept responsibility for mistakes, errors, omissions, or any action taken in reliance thereon. Use of this transcript is governed by Denver Gold Group’s Terms of Use.

Introduction:

  • Managing member of Rossport Investments. ​

  • Former member of the financial team at Barrick (1987-1994). ​

  • Reflection on colleagues who have passed away. ​

  • Thanks to the Denver Gold Group.

Historical Context:

  • Snapshot of 1994 Denver Gold Show (first attendance).

  • Review of the gold market from 1933 to 1986.

  • Discussion on the perfect storm for gold (1994-2002). ​

  • Disappointment with the Bre-X scandal and its consequences.

Gold Industry Overview:

  • Newmont and Barrick's activities and challenges in 1994.

  • Placer Dome's projects and acquisitions.

  • Impact of central bank gold sales and hedging on gold prices. ​

Market Dynamics:

  • Gold price trends and factors influencing them. ​

  • The Washington Agreement(s) (1999) and their impact on the gold market. ​

  • Enron's bankruptcy and its effect on derivatives and hedging. ​

Valuations and Performance:

  • Historical valuations of gold companies.

  • Comparison of gold stocks' performance compared with the S&P 500.

  • Current attractive valuations in the gold industry.

ESG and Sustainability:

  • Importance of ESG to the mining industry.

  • Positive contributions of mining companies to local communities. ​

  • Need for better environmental practices and smaller mine footprints. ​

Industry Impressions and Recommendations:

  • Impressions of the current monetary world and its impact on gold.

  • Recommendations to investors:

    • Look for experienced management teams. ​

    • Understand analysts' biases.

    •  

      Be cautious when working on large mining projects in countries with limited experience with mining. ​

    • Consider the long-term sustainability of mining companies. ​

Notable Companies:

Conclusion:

  • Appreciation for the industry and its potential for future success. ​

 

TRANSCRIPT

My name is Daniel McConvey. I'm managing member of Rossport Investments, which has been, for most of the last 18 years, a family office fund. We've gotten some things right. Our performance has exceeded the S & P during that period.

Before I start, I want to talk about my colleagues from Barrack and, and some of the, some of the in the research industry. I was a member of the financial team at Barrick from 87 to 94. And unfortunately, a couple passed away. They were younger than me, Greg Wilkin, who hired me, and Randall Oliphant last year. And you know, you think about them a lot and there's others too that you don't know. So and then the, the person who preceded me at Lehman Brothers when I, where I started in 1994 John Fac also passed away a couple of years ago. So in the, in their memory, they're in my memory as I give this talk.

I want to thank thank the Denver Gold Group, including Tim and his team for giving me this opportunity to talk a couple of months ago, when I was in Canada. I was getting sentimental. It's been 30 years since I started on the street and attended the Gold Forum. I thought maybe it would be good to say something. I remember - like yesterday - Michele Ashby giving a talk at the opening reception of the 1994 Denver Gold show telling us of all the things that she had accomplished and talking about her feat of running at 70 miles. So we all left that reception in awe of Michel. She ran the show strictly and the standards were high and they, they've been kept high all the way through too, to Tim and his team and it's always a first class conference and all the people are always great and so keep it up and thank you.

Let's talk, look at what we're gonna talk about. If I can find, remember how to change the slide here. Here we are. OK. And we'll speed through some of these. Okay, snapshot of 1994. What it was like at the Denver Gold Show. We'll do a quick review of a very quick review of the bull market 1983 to 1986. A couple of slides there. We'll spend time in slide 11 on a perfect storm for Gold from 1994 through 2002, which is really 1996 to 2002 was the worst years. We talk about before 1994 and then my bearish Goldman research launch in 1997, which is three years after we launched, at Lehman Brothers. One speech I was proud of. We'll talk about quickly the, the gold bull market. and the one a performance the goal produces since 94 valuations, esg thoughts. And then we'll talk about our conclusions, given our impressions of the industry and some recommendations to new investors. OK. So let's look at the world events of 1994 at the Denver Gold Show, South Africa had its its elections. Nelson Mandela became president. There was a euphoria people were happy with the peaceful transition of power that year. That was the good news. There was trouble in, in, in the former Yugoslavia. We had the genocide, Rwanda in, in the US, we host the US hosted the World Cup and no one seemed to care but Brazil won in the Middle East is kind of the opposite. Today, we had the promise of peace. It seemed and, and y Yasser fa was one of the ones who won the Nobel Prize. Gold was at 390. Let me just catch up here in the gold mining industry US US Congress almost passed mining law reform and that would involve a 3% gross royalty and might have made it easier in some cases to launch litigation. My first month at on Wall Street, I was on Washington visiting with staffers in the US Congress trying to support the mining industry. So that was, there would have been some positives in that. But it didn't go through and I'm kind of surprised 30 years later, nothing has changed. So the US, the good news is still a very low taxed low royalty jurisdiction for for mining in terms of the gold company situation in 1994 Newmont CEO was, was Ron Camry joined from Freeport Wayne Murdy was, was CFO gold production was 1.6 million on its way up. Soros and Goldsmith were major shareholders and new one had occurred a lot of debt as a result of the corporate raider T Boone Pickens came after them in 1987 forced them into a poison pill and forced them to speed up their development of, of, of of the Carlin area and spin off all their non gold assets, Yano Coha, which is a Newmont Buena Inure project started in 1993 and in 1994 the production outlook was was not high, but it was promising that turned to be a turned to be a a barn burner mine for them as everyone knows and bad heo was in the development not development stage in the planning stage, looking for financing that was gonna be a 1 $billion billion project and was and was started built in 1987 at the time, it was the most expensive project ever. So, in terms of Barack who was led by Ceo Peter Monk and no nonsense President Bob Smith, who I worked with. They were at the time of the gold Show in 1994 they were buying lack minerals which had a, a few assets. That acquisition didn't really pan out for them. The highlight was Pasco Llama. The cost of the acquisition was 1.6 billion and they spent a lot of years and a lot of money trying to develop Pascal Llama. It is still undeveloped years later and it, it kind of shows you the difficulty in trying to repeat acts at the time, Barrick's annual production was 2.3 million ounces. It was on its way to 3.1. The gold strike mine was humming, which was the Betsy Post mine and they were developing the, the Miko mine which was gonna help raise their production. They mined that fast. The grades were good in hindsight over nice. If, if the production, the high grade from from gold strike lasted a few years longer. So it hit a better goal price in terms of plaster dome which got bought by Barack in in the mid two thousands. John Wilson was the CEO it was producing 1.7 million ounces a year. The company had been formed in 1987 with the merger of a couple of other companies at the Denver Gold form. I can remember the three products that they had on their slides. The last Cinna product in Venezuela, it was a big one. It was kind of the, it ended up being kind of the Pasco Lama for plaster because they spent a lot of money and effort on it and it never got developed and still has not been developed to this day. Muscle White is a good mine in northern Ontario. They started a couple of years later, the Latos because the gold price fell, they, they divested of it. Not a good move. Alamos picked it up and it became a cornerstone mine for Alamos and is still going strong. Zaldivar was copper mine. They were developing in Chile at a rocky start, but it's been a great mine for Plaster and Barack ever since and they had the Cortez pipeline project in the feasibility stage. Homesick was around, it had been around for 100 years. I'll, I'll, I'll skip that in the interest of time as well as a mass gold. So this was our first report, a launch report ago at Lehman Brothers and it was a whole new world. Ok? Because of the fall of communism and the the dissolution of the, of the Soviet Union and the Cold war basically stopped and wasn't only in, in the Soviet Union, former Soviet Union, it was all around the world that you could go look at things., for the first time. There's a map of that,,, the next space. So, despite the things getting more rocky, I think that was right. I think it's, we've opened up the world and we're, we're mining in a lot of different parts of it. It's tougher now. But it's, it's a lot of a lot of opportunities in different places. The valuation was high. We had a valuation, Lehman Brothers valuation ratio which took into account, Capex and recovery, et cetera and is at 1.63 uncounted and the price to earnings ratio on the bottom, there was 33 so very, very high. There was a billion dollars of write offs in the early nineties when the gold price fell. And in the report, we said that the companies were smarter than that wouldn't happen again. Well, it didn't happen for a while but it did happen again around 2010, 2011 with high gold prices. So we are wrong in that. We are also wrong in the report saying that negative real interest rates were unlikely to happen in the future. And we had a massive dose of it after the after the global financial crisis until just recently, this is the the world in 1989 investible in 1994 as you can see was a multiple. That's the thing we just talked about. this is the Gold Bullion from 33 to 1986. setting up for when we joined bar in 1987 and I'll let you read through that. It's a good refresher for people that are new to the sector. But in the, in the sake of time, for the sake of time, we are going to move on. This is the a graph showing the gold price hedging and central bank sales from 1997 to 1994. OK. And again, it doesn't really show well here, but the gold price went down E 89 through 9293. Because of central bank, the first central bank gold sale in Europe came from Belgium in 1989. That was big and hedging became very attractive in, in Australia. It you could get AAA 10% plus Contango back in 8889. And so with less than a $400 Aussie spot goal price, you could realize $1000.05 years out. So that really motivated forward selling if that ever happens again. You, you could see more hedging, but not necessarily likely this is the perfect storm which was really 96 to 2002, 1990, 1994, 1995 years as well. But I spent a fair bit of time on this going through this and, and we just go through some of the, the highlights I I should say first I put on here, March 1987 Bre-X. I was exposed, I in, in terms of things I got right and wrong. That's the biggest thing I got wrong. It's a very painful time for me. It's very painful time for investors, but I was one of the analysts who covered Bre-X, I will report on it and it became a scam. So that was a tough time and it was a tough time for a lot of junior mining companies that were on the that were devastated by that and it got worse because the gold price went down. Let's talk about the, the gold price here. It started dipping in the fourth quarter of 96. The Swiss National Bank Representative said some negative things about gold at a conference worth worthless relic, et cetera that started, that started things going down and the Swiss made more noise about gold sales and they eventually did pass a constitutional change that allowed them to sell the gold. And that obviously that had a big impact. There was also a big confidence in, in in currency. The US was about to balance their budget. The euro was coming into existence. It was a consolidation of central banks and excessive reserves, less need for holding all these things and all these things took place. And, and there was a lot of hedging as a result of this. And in fact, at the bottom of the market, Newmont was never really hedged, hedged because of trying to protect against the, the worst things happening. And all these factors came in central bank selling, et cetera. So anyway, that changed in September 1999 the Washington Agreement with the Central Banks of Europe came out and said they're gonna limit gold sales to 500 tons per year and limit hedging. And that made a lot of sense. And, and it caused a spike in the gold price, but that spike in the gold price caused major difficulty for companies with a big hedge book. Two cases in point where Ashanti and, and Cambior. both of them had a, had to, had to a long road out of this. Cambor ended up being acquired by Im Gold and Ashanti later by, by Anglo gold. But it, it worked through most of those issues, but it caused a major upset in the mining industry and, and Bors had less appetite to hedge after that period of time. And there was another event that actually hurt that more. In addition to that, Enron went bankrupt in 2001, the troubles first hit in 2000. Enron was a rock star and it it used derivatives a lot in what they did. A lot of trading. At least one CEO in the industry liked to emulate Enron. So after that disaster, derivatives were even more out of favor. And so it was harder to get hedging through your, your boardroom. In my view, another thing Enron did and on our level, it forced the, the research companies in, in the US to have as many underperforms as, as outperforms. I think that was very healthy and there was more independence from banking, etcetera that happened in the US. It didn't happen so much in Canada where the ratings are are a lot more positive as you know, this was barracks share price in, in 87 to 94 very briefly, they acquired the gold strike property in in 87. Allen Hill, Bob Smith, Brian Miko were big on getting that property that had lots of potential and it did. And one of the beliefs was that we shouldn't be scared of soft light. So we know how to treat them. And among other things, they hired Ken Thomas, he's still a friend to, to find a way to develop the or to treat the, the sulfide ores which was autoclaving initially. And they got that humming things went pretty much close to plan and it was a great story and produced a lot of gold and very profitable. Unfortunately, they mined it, you know, fairly fast. It would have been nice to have seen a higher gold price, but the rest of the stocks didn't do much gold stock basics launch at, at Goldman Sachs 1997. and Steve Einhorn was the my director of research and he took an interest in this and, and looked at this industry and, and convinced me it was a tough one and it was really tough look at the Xau, which I'm using the Xau index because it goes back further than,, but the Xau is 102 today. It's only 160. And,, so it hasn't done much since then, but,, the gold price was 340. But even at 350 things were expensive and look at the N PV S using 3 5400, they were 3.7 and 2.7 respectively. I mean, how, you know, it, it seemed a bit bizarre then., but,, you know, it seems more bizarre now. So that's one of the hurdles and one of the reasons why,, things have underperformed so they barely cost, they barely covered their costs in the industry. So it was, it was tough., let's go on to one. I was proud of,, give the speech in, in Lima in 2000. And, I put my heart up thinking about gold. It probably wasn't positive enough, but it, I thought it was very balanced. The, the head of the World Gold Council. Well, Gold Council was there and she listened to it and, and said to somebody afterwards, that guy should not be allowed to give speeches on goal anymore. And that was a proud moment for me because I think I had a right and this is one quote I'm very proud of which is positive rightly or wrongly, the world is growing more confident with fiat currency, whether next year or 100 years from now. Now something major will happen that will shake that confidence at that time, we would not be shocked to see central banks become net buyers of gold as they were in the early 19 eighties. And I think we ended up being right after the financial crisis. It's been a gold bull market since 2003 with a big dip though in around 2013, fall up in ETF S but hedge books eliminated central banks start buying ETF has been a big part of this. It's been a tremendous product. It hasn't hurt, helped the equities but certainly helped the gold price and the global financial crisis is big. And then of course, we had COVID and the March on the capital in 2001 and something that Andy Smith who's an analyst, I have a lot of time for and called the market of the, of that 96 to 2002 period very well. brought up, it's, there's an erosion of trust in institutions and maybe that should be something we monitor what the polls are on institutions because that is hurting. It's not a good outlook for our kids, but it's certainly helping gold price right now. Stocks have not been good performers. The gold stocks, the gold producers have not and those are in the bottom of the graph. I think the, that's the the Xau is the purple one at 131. So we've hardly moved through those. It's tough business, really tough business. The one outperforming here is the new version of Franco Nevada. I couldn't get the old one easily in here, but it would even look better from the start there. But it, until recently it was outperforming the S and P. You can see gold and white is performed well. Freeport which is copper. Gold is performed decently. It hurt itself big time 10 years ago by A for oil and gas when it lost a lot of value. but it's done well, but those are the, the outliers. And again, it's tough when you started off in 1994 with the valuations we talked about OK, evaluations which we're talking about. And the first comment there, we, we just talked about the two times N PV, I think hurt the industry it made wrong, the industry made wrong decisions because they didn't want analysts knocking value up. So they kind of hung on to assets or at least try to develop them longer than they should have. And, and I think that the new, the new valuation levels mitigate that risk of happening. The 5% in priced NNEV is something that we were one of the ones starting back in the 19 nineties still rightly or wrongly, it's still a good monitor. But those valuations according to BMO a couple of weeks ago, for the majors selected majors, it was 0.8 times nev and for mid-sized companies 0.5 at spot, you know, that's a big reduction by, you know, it's a third, a half to a third of what it was. So at these, at these valuations, things are more interesting even with the, even with the rise of the equities in the past bit. So margins now are $1000 per ounce by using this calculation gold price minus all the saving cost and maybe royalties will go up. So even less than that, but these are the most attractive that I can remember. So it makes it pretty exciting to be in the, in the gold business right now. In my view, let's talk about ESG thoughts. A lot of good work's been done. Of course, it came out after the tailings disasters in, in Brazil in the last 10 years and I'd made the comment that a lot of NGO si don't have time for. we don't have time for, but some of them are good and the church of England is one of them. I attended one of their meetings back before COVID and another one remotely and their hearts in the right place. They're trying to do the right things given what happened with those disasters. And, and I think we as an industry do need some push some extra push though., and I think this is one of them. In hindsight. I wish the Church of England scrutiny would have gone on to heap lease facilities as well. It wouldn't have hurt carbon emissions. Not everyone, not all of you are gonna agree with me on this one, but I'm a II, I think we have to do better in that. I think like a lot of you, I'm a believer in climate change., gold is not a critical metal. And so bringing big footprints, people have to ask the question. Should we do this? We should be asking the question, what is this site gonna look like in 100 years? That's what the environmentalist and me ask. And I think that,, if we don't make these,, changes and strive for smaller footprints, maybe more underground mining,, we'll be forced to do it anyway. I think the Australians are ahead of this. I'm impressed that in Australia, even the grid, they're, they're trying extra hard to, I know we're doing it in other places, but they are, they've been on the forefront and trying to, in my mind and trying to mitigate carbon emissions in terms of, in terms of the grid, in other ways. in terms of Tailings Dams, we were visited brow brow mine back in 15 years ago and we looked at the Tailings Dam that they were thinking of building and they did build, and where it, looking over the dam was beautiful, the Congo, but it might as well have been Switzerland. It was gorgeous and, and it worried me and, and we asked if we could talk to the consultants. They did, and they were worried as well. And so we pushed the company for two or three years as best we could to make sure that they were giving the right resources to the tailing ST and that the contractor was happy because they were,, they were on a limited budget. So that's always been deep to our hearts. And we, we contacted the Canadian securities administrators about trying to get them to sign off on, or have, have it disclosed that a third party has signed off on tailing stamp every year. So anyway, that's some of the stuff that we have done. But I want to leave it on this. We are doing a lot of great work in ESG in the world, in the communities that we're making a big difference, especially in the developing world. And I'm involved in in doing some charity work in Ghana. And you can see there that, you know, where the mines are, the, the, how much better people's lives are in a lot of ways, Kali which, which Barack and Mark Bristow and team built over the last 10 or 15 years of Anglo gold being a partner. I haven't been there since the mine was built, but I know it's a very tough area. So to bring livelihood in an area like that where things are so bleak is just, is this great work. So let's keep it up and, and let's keep on making a difference in people's lives conclusion. Let's talk about my impression, suggestions and wonders and in companies, I think that his DNA has impressed me., in general, we're in a very different monetary world than we were 25 years ago. So that perfect storm for gold in from, from 96 to 2002 is reversed now, instead of union, you're all coming together, this risk of it falling apart and that's happening all around the Cold War is back. Ok. That's a big thing I didn't mention before we had Cold War War where now it's back. So political unions are, are, are, are, are threatened and trust in institutions is falling. The deflationary shocks are behind this. Things are going the other way. I, I'll skip the ETF point. We could see more mine production if these prices stay, we're gonna incentivize it. That's something you have to think about. I think the, the Aussie miners have impressed me since going to Australia in 1994. The year of my first Denver gold show and seeing no underground lines basically in Western Australia and what they've done in terms of ramping up underground lines without building shafts, the productivity that they have and what they've done. It's been pretty amazing and, and what they've done at Katy and Ridgeway and other places is, is to me, they've shown a lot of leadership and it's, it's, it's impressive. The number of Australian based contractors that have, that have made a huge dent into the mining world. So kudos on them. the Chinese, I don't know them as well, but this, I do know what they've done in nickel has been phenomenal. And so I would expect some good things from them. China is graduating more engineers apparently than the Western world and India combined. And the thing is starting to show in a lot of different ways as they, they make leaps ahead and to take you know, go from nickel pig iron now to, to nickel H Pal, which has been a huge failure for by Western companies from Ninco to Falcon Bridge to valet and others. And, and to get that right is pretty impressive. So it'll be interesting to see where they go, going forward, come with an immigration will skip. We have to wonder what the right size of a mining company is going forward. It just, it is so difficult to replace reserves when you're a big mining company. It's anyway, it's a question, what is the right size? Some extra things we're looking for in mining companies, we're looking for. These are extra things a long term view and, you know, it tends to happen with companies that have founders involved that are like this as we'll talk about the focus on sustainability versus size. Again, I just, I just wonder gold strike a high grade Betsy Post if we might do that too fast. It's just a wonder focus on what the footprint will look like in 100 years. Again, that's my, the environmental to me, avoid falling to pressure from investors when you know the right course. And sometimes that's impossible because activist investors can change it. But we like ones you stick up and, and, and, and and lead and speaking positively about competitors. I don't see that a lot in North America. I saw it as you'll, you'll hear about in Australia but it's something that that's bothered me conclusions. Let's talk about some suggestions for investors. OK. These are just some of the ones that come to mind. Look for management teams that have done it before. The story of Harry Michael. Harry Michael was a project manager for GA. we visited G in, in Tanzania. It was a, a project around the same time. Bar was building bull in H in 2001 2002, he was building on a shoestring budget. Ashanti and Angle Gold were the joint were joint venture partners. Ashanti was in a lot of trouble as a result of their hedge book. So we had a lot of pressure on him. He had us investors and analysts on that trip marching in single file. Yeah. And I'm thinking if he's doing that to us, what is he doing to the contractors? Well, no big surprise. He got that built pretty much on time and on budget. About 567 years later, I was invested in a company called Equinox Minerals. Equinox had a a copper property in Zambia. They bought from Cypress A Max and they were, they're gonna buy the rest of that property out and, and build it and they're gonna try to do it by themselves. They, they were considered a joint venture and then all of a sudden I see the press release that hired Harry Michael. I knew right then that they were gonna build that, that project and then they hired someone else. I knew Mark Arnason, also, former,, former,, Ashanti. And they built that mine,, financing it all themselves. Some of the help of Canadian markets got, got in, in country financing., pretty incredible. And that was the biggest win I've ever had. I bought shares as low as 38 cents and Barack ended up buying the last shares I had, I think over $10. So it was a great success. So look for guys who've done it before, follow them, you find out who they are. they have to have a good project too. But that is something that I would do and I can think of some other names if you want to talk to me that I would follow, know the bias of an analyst. If I, if I come from Barack, I'm unlikely to be too negative on them. I don't want to hurt a lot of people. I probably wasn't too positive either because I didn't wanna be seen as, as bias. But if for analysts who have been beaten up on a stock and they've had, let's say they've had a buy rating, they got, they got really hurt and, and something went wrong, it makes it very difficult for them to call their, their, their, their clients and, and say, you should buy this again. So they're, they're unlikely to raise the, the rating. So that's something to think about. And you can get that flavor of that just by looking at the, at Bloomberg and look at the, the target prices and the, and the ratings they've had over the years. So that's something you should know. And they'll tell you as well, be wary of investing in a big mining project in a country with little mining experience, a small GDP in our sensitive environment. This is especially true if the mine footprint is large. OK. Ot is is is one that's caused me a lot of grief in Mongolia. If, if, if a politician to get elected has to attack the mining project. it's gonna make it very difficult and it, it's and you're speaking to someone who suffered it with that, be careful of us, permitting stories outside Nevada. They can take a long time and getting the EIS is final. EIS is not the end of the story because of the litigation in the US, copper and gold, copper and gold porphyry tend to be longer life and, and be better through the cycle. Read the history of a company and, and look at previous owners or properties for indications and problems and finally bump up your sustaining Capex in outer years in your model companies are very good next year, maybe the year after, but they don't think enough about the outlying years and maybe they'll, they, they don't want to think about them in some cases, but the Capex almost always ends up being higher. There are some exceptions to that. Finally, I wanna talk about companies with that whose DNA has impressed me and it's not a, it's not a full list., and I'm probably forgetting some,,, and these are ones over 30 years. Ok. But I'll give honorable mention to Saracen and Northern Star who have not been around 30 years. But when I talk with people badmouth each other. These are, these are exceptions. They're,, they're the leaders., Raleigh and Bill are mates, I think from the Kalgoorlie School of Mines., but whenever they had talked about each other's company over the last 10 years, they talked positively and, and,, and then they, they merged, consolidated the Kalgoorlie gold fields for the first time ever and took turns in leadership. I mean, how good is that? And, they created a lot of value through the years for, for shareholders and hopefully they, they can, they can draw on their way to doing it again. Ok. So the ones have been around for 30 years,, be A and B two Clive Johnson, hurt initially with the Refu Q project in 9495 and then decided to build his own lines with his own people and he's been doing it ever since successfully. maybe hurting a little now at Back River. But what they've done in different parts of the world is extremely impressive and created a lot of value for everybody and the way he treats,, his people and his communities, it has to be, it's a hats off situation., Lande mining,, third generation. I, I knew Lucas., and you can see in his, he, unfortunately he passed away in the last couple of years., but you can see in his kids that DNA and they're trying to live up to, to those standards, They think long term, they try to do the right thing and so they can wait, wait out the bear markets and, and it, it,, it certainly helps in evaluation the people they brought into the industry, and who lead their companies are, are first class the Jac family most recently. Now with G mining services and G mining that they go, we got, we've known Louie going back to Barack days in the late eighties and Barack had a 50% interest in the mine. That can be your head but just no nonsense, straightforward, no attitude. And,, and of course they, they suffered during the, the financial, sorry, the Washington agreement aftermath, but went on to, to contracting and, and now g mining has had great success and, and the kids, you know, and Children including who are grown up adults including Lou Pierre just have the same straightforward attitude, so great DNA. And hopefully they go on to great things and then finally, Agnico Eagle kind of a family., and DNA goes back to taking care of employees, goes back to Paul Pennant Sean has done a great job in, in, in maximizing that DNA. And it's going on now, it's just a company that people want to work for generation after generation and they've made fewer wrong turns than anyone else. And it's still, they still feel kind of the, the, the, the feeling of the founders so to speak and very impressive with that. I'd like to thank everybody, my friends out there, my, my competitors who became friends and a lot of good analysts out there and it's a great industry and I hope we can really enjoy what's happening now with gold and, and, and wishing all these companies, all you companies great success. Thank you.


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The Gold Forum and the information and materials presented at the Gold Forum do not, and shall not be construed as, making any recommendation or providing any investment or other advice with respect to the purchase, sale or other disposition of any regulated gold related products or any other regulated products, securities or investments, including, without limitation, any advice to the effect that any gold related transaction is appropriate or suitable for any investment objective or financial situation of a prospective investor. A decision to invest in any regulated gold related products or any other regulated products, securities or investments should not be made in reliance on any of the information or materials presented or obtained during the Gold Forum. Before making any investment decision, prospective investors should seek advice from their financial, legal, tax and accounting advisers, take into account their individual financial needs and circumstances and carefully consider the risks associated with such investment decision.