Gold, Silver, Platinum Trends & Quarter‑End Review

Craig Hemke: Welcome back from Sprott Money and Sprott Money News. We've reached the end of June—holy cow, half the year is over! So it's not only the month end, it's the quarter end. There's a lot to discuss after an eventful first half of the year. So this is your monthly wrap-up. I'm your host, Craig Hemke. Joining me to discuss all these things is my old friend Joe Mazumdar, who runs Exploration Insights, which you can find at explorationinsights.com. If you're looking for someone to help you navigate the minefield—see what I did there, Joe—of precious metals mining shares, I don't know anybody better than Joe. Joe, thank you so much for taking some time to visit.

Joe Mazumdar: Thanks, Craig. Thanks for the invite.

Craig Hemke: Hey, we're getting here at the end of the month. I encourage you—whatever platform you watch on—go to sprottmoney.com and you'll find the discussion I posted about a week ago with Eric. So if you missed that one, it's there. You'll find it on YouTube or whatever platform you follow. And don't forget, one of the big sales of Sprott Money every year is the Canada Day Sale, which is running now through the 1st of July, Canada Day. So, when you're finished watching this, click over to sprottmoney.com. You'll find all kinds of great deals there, and thank them for putting out all this content.

Okay Joe, so with that big long run-up, as we record this here on Friday the 27th, we are one day away from the end of the quarter, the end of the month, all those charts being painted. It's been a heck of a first half of the year for really all metals—not just gold and silver. Copper's doing great, platinum is just going gangbusters, palladium's starting to move higher. How do you feel about all this as we start the second half of the year? More of this ahead?

Joe Mazumdar: Yeah. You know, the year to date—what I like is that the GDXJ, which I follow as a proxy in terms of precious metals equity, has outperformed the gold and silver price. So that leverage, which is what everybody wants, has been presented in the first half of the year. Up till the end of last week, it was like almost 55–60% on the GDXJ versus gold and silver at like 23 to 28%. So you're getting a bit of leverage.

But as you pointed out, the best-performing metal that I follow was actually platinum. And that's crept up partly because people are seeing these cumulative deficits build up. And even though I think overall the demand for cars has been reduced, it's now being a function of: where are we going to get this from? And that’s brought on palladium as well. So platinum's up about 38% up to last week, which is pretty good, and that has beaten gold and silver.

And I think part of that also is that platinum price versus gold price—platinum is also used for jewelry. Some Asian countries like platinum as jewelry, and there might have been more demand for that as jewelry with the increase in the gold price.

Like you said, base metals were okay, but it was a bit of a mixed bag. And part of that mixed bag is the imposition, potentially, of these global tariffs and the impact on global growth, especially on the biggest consumer of these industrial metals, which would be China. So how does that impact China? That's the most important part.

So you had a mix. Copper was up, but if you see it reflected in the base metal equity ETF that I follow—the XBM—it was basically flat to slightly down. So it had not been outperforming. But nonetheless, we've been seeing M&A. So the two things that I watch in terms of sentiment, which have been evident in the first half, are financings, which are up, and M&A, which has been prevalent for probably the last 18 months or so.

Craig Hemke: You know, I obviously know anybody that's a trader watches all these short-term charts—the hourly chart, the daily chart, and all that kind of stuff. Sometimes, even personally, after all these years, I can't see the forest for the trees. You know, I get so close to it on a daily basis. It seems, though, and as you mentioned in some of these industrial metals, these long-term charts—the monthly and the quarterly—are starting to look pretty compelling. Do you see more upside ahead in things like copper and platinum?

Dope With A MacBook (04:38)
You know, I obviously, know, anybody that's a trader watches all these short-term charts, you know, the hourly chart, the daily chart and all that kind of stuff. Sometimes, even personally, after all these years, I can't see the forest from the trees. You know, I get so close to it on a daily basis. It seems though, and as you mentioned in these, some of these industrial metals, these long-term charts, you know, the monthly and the quarterly.

We're starting to look pretty compelling. Do you see more upside ahead in things like copper and platinum?

Joe Mazumdar (05:09)
Yeah, so for copper especially, I follow that one pretty close. And the big deal is the long term, the medium to long term, knowing that on average, from discovery, let's say, to production, commercial production, is about 20 years. So if we don't know the project right now, and we want to fill this gap that's forecast for like 10 years from now,

It's not like another project's gonna fall into that and be able to be into production in that timeframe for a copper project. The problem right now in copper, as I see it, is the incentive price to build projects is much higher than the copper price right now, because people have seen the capital requirements for projects like, you know, Quebrada Blanca 2, that tech is building, and how...

much they've spent ⁓ on building that copper project. I admit that even though they call it a brownfield and some people call it brownfield, it's not really a brownfield project because you're going from one form of processing, which is solvent extractor or electro witting, where you're just crushing the ore, but you're not milling it and you're not forming a concentrate, which is what they're doing now. And so that involves more power, more water access, a lot of other things that

generates more capital intensity. So that is probably putting the fear of God into a lot of companies that are looking at building new projects. And so a lot of the &A is more for projects or companies that are already producing with assets that don't have to do the permitting and the capital escalation risk is behind them. And we've been seeing that in gold as well. Most of what we've been seeing being acquired has been more about production.

and a bit into near-term development. So what we should be looking for now is that do we see that coming upstream to seeing people taking out companies that they think the projects can get permitted and things like that in jurisdictions they want to be in. And they might be in that Lausanne curve orphan period. And so the valuation's there. But you have to take a risk on the capital.

Speaking of risk with your capital, are you sensing, ⁓ let's call it jurisdictional risk increasing? It's been here and there for years and you worry about this country and that country, but like with Covary, Panama and everything that was happening, it still is going on there. And do you have any thoughts on this Mexico thing from earlier this week? I've read other analysis, I can't seem to make whether it's bad or good or indifferent.

Yeah, well, it's definitely not good. ⁓ You know, I would also add, you know, what's happened in Mali with Barrick, ⁓ basically, because they stopped shipments and now they basically want to take the mine over. So that's that's another area. So as gold prices look on the top line going up, people want, you know, the creeping nationalism picks up. You know, that wasn't the case. What was happening in Cobra, Panama, there was something other political thing going on there that

Joe Mazumdar (08:28)
that put First Quantum off. But saying that, the copper price and what we've seen in the market, First Quantum now is trading at 52 week highs. So they've managed to get a lot of that Cobra Panama stuff behind them as they focused on Zambia and some of their other assets. With respect to Mexico, this has been an ongoing risk since the time of AMLO over his six year presidency.

that he was very much against, Amlo being Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, that he was very against mining. Against mining for environmental impact, against mining because there was a lot of these rich Mexican billionaires that were doing it or foreigners that were doing it. ⁓ They thought that they weren't paying their share of taxes. They thought the environmental impact wasn't worth the value that Mexico got out of it.

And there was a, not an official, but maybe a whispered ban on open pits. And now the Claudia Scheinbaum has come in, the heir apparent to basically AMLO, same party, like mandate, 70%, voted for them or whatever. They could basically do whatever they want. They're changing the Supreme Court such that you vote for them now.

And so if you're getting 70 % voting and you convince your people to vote for these guys, then you're gonna get the judges you want. And they're gonna not be independent anymore. And so that's another issue. And so some of these higher level things that they wanna pass will be much easier because now the courts won't be independent. But the ban on open pit mining may never happen officially because they would include.

like quarry mines, which they may need. They might include salt mines, which they might want, and also lithium, which they're making, you know, like a, and they're nationalizing, so they don't want to ban an open pit there if they have to. So, but they're being strategic about it by making permitting harder for mining projects, even renewing permits on tailings and stuff. That's their real focus is the impact of tailings and waste.

Joe Mazumdar (10:51)
And their issue about open pits is they make bigger waste piles and have bigger tailings. So that's their big issue. But the thing about concessions and granting new concessions, that's been around ⁓ for a few years now at the time of AMLO. And that's why you saw a lot of the exploration companies pulling out. So what you see now is we've seen over the last, probably, I don't know, maybe a year.

We've seen companies that are embedded in Mexico purchasing other producing assets in Mexico. You don't see people from outside coming in with no Mexican exposure and getting it. You see people with Mexican exposure and adding to it, like ⁓ Silvercrest being acquired, Meg Silver being acquired, Gattosilver being acquired by all companies that already have footprints in Mexico. But what's interesting is I travel

Joe Mazumdar (11:49)
you know, and to South America and, you know, other places in the States. I see a lot of the Mexican companies looking outside of Mexico for ⁓ &A and expiration in that ⁓ because they can't do it. They're not ⁓ comfortable with the risk profile of Mexico. Yeah. So,

Dope With A MacBook (12:07)
Isn't that interesting? does it, does all of that change your, your model portfolio, the way you are allocating assets at this point? Yeah. Okay.

Joe Mazumdar (12:15)
Yeah, I've done that a couple of years ago. I've been out in Mexico.

I haven't done anything in Mexico. so, you know, the big thing is like, you know, people are promoting, you know, and rightfully so potentially, you know, the silver gold, the gold silver ratio, and then silver should have a big leg up. And then that leg up is probably supported by the fact that it'll be harder to do projects in Mexico. ⁓ You know,

Joe Mazumdar (12:40)
I'm not gonna debate whether this Mexican underground permit's gonna happen or not, but it's just gonna be a lot slower and &A will be tougher from people coming out in. And we might always trade at a discount to somebody else. So I've been looking at silver projects, but I'm looking outside. Peru, they're starting to get over their permitting and so that's better, but the problem like you're pointing out, jurisdictional risk,

Joe Mazumdar (13:07)
The big risk right now for my time recently in Peru has been illegal mining there. That's come up in terms of over the last decade being a serious issue for companies. And while I was down there at a conference called ⁓ Explomin, ⁓ there was, I believe, 18 miners that were killed, murdered ⁓ at a mine called Polarosa in north central Peru.

Joe Mazumdar (13:33)
And these

were illegal miners battling with these people. They kidnapped them and they basically murdered them. And so this illegal mining thing is becoming a bigger and bigger deal because the government doesn't seem to be able to control it. There's going to be new elections coming up in Peru and it doesn't take much to try and control it. People just need a little bit of a stronger hand there to control it. That's become a bigger issue now.

Dope With A MacBook (14:01)
And I'm thinking, Joe, for people that don't even invest in the mining shares and they're thinking, what does this have to do with me? Would Mexico and Peru account for 60 %? What is the percentage of global mining?

Joe Mazumdar (14:09)
Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, it's

a big chunk of the two biggest silver producers. mean, silver is a byproduct. And so a lot of the silver comes from base metal mines, like maybe a big base metal mine in Poland or whatever. in terms of people want silver dominant mines, which are rare and tend to get a premium, those tend to be in Mexico. Those tend to be in Peru.

Joe Mazumdar (14:36)
But you know, I have looked for projects like that, but I'm finding them, you know, in Argentina. I'm finding them in Southern Chile. But it's harder to find.

You sound like Eric. Eric talks about these, told me that a million times. It's very hard to find primary silver miners. ⁓

Joe Mazumdar (14:51)
Yeah. Yeah, and when we say primary, we're just getting to 40%. Maybe 50, maybe 50 if we're lucky.

Dope With A MacBook (14:58)
Which is again, well, again, in a metal that has run a supply deficit now of however you want to measure it over the last three or four years and demand, sir, seems to be increasing. Any other obstructions to getting it out of the ground certainly changes the physics.

Joe Mazumdar (15:16)
It's good for the price. It's good for the price and good for those ones that aren't impacted by the things that are constraining supply.

Dope With A MacBook (15:24)
Yeah. Let's, Joe, in our final minutes, you've explained to me before something I hadn't really thought of. You follow this so closely, so it doesn't surprise me that you know more about this than I do. We're now, we've wrapped up first quarter earnings for all these mining companies. they all, know, some of had these great margins, you know, and they're just printing cash. ⁓ We're now on the doorstep of second quarter earnings. As we record this on Friday the 27th,

I mean, gold's down one and half, 2%, but some of the big miners are just getting hammered. The very first thought, you know, someone who's not kind of scraping the surface of this stuff like me is like, well, gee, are they worried that, you know, gold's going back to 2,800, so it better get out now. The same thing, well, why wouldn't you be getting in? Because, you know, the second quarter, the average price, you know, is at least the same as it was in the first quarter. Now, you've mentioned before this idea that

Sometimes first quarter numbers fall off because they jam so much production into the fourth quarter. Can you just kind of elaborate on all this big picture stuff for people that are trying to figure out whether they should buy the dip, whether they should wait for a more seasonally opportune time to get into the shares? What are your thoughts on that? little producing share.

Joe Mazumdar (16:29)
Yeah.

Okay, so sort of on a macro level, ⁓ you know, what we're seeing is ⁓ people, investors are looking at not the current US federal chairman, but potentially the next one that will come in May. And the one that Trump will put in probably the new year, the US administration is somebody that is in favor of rate cuts. And so people are pricing in rate cuts now and not even listening to what the current chairman is saying, you know.

Dope With A MacBook (16:44)
Yeah.

Joe Mazumdar (17:09)
And so that's having a negative impact on gold as we're looking at, ⁓ where do I put my money? I mean, it should have a positive impact in the end because the real rates should be going down, which they have year to date. And that would mean the opportunity costs is lower and gold should be going up. And it might be people just taking...

money off the table because nothing else has worked for them in the first half of the year. And when you have that and you got that leverage off of major gold equities that are traded on the GDX, GDXJ, that might be what you're selling. And Agnico has been an out performer for the last 18 months. I mean, they've done really well. But let's say on the micro or industrial scale style, we were talking about Q4 versus Q1.

Dope With A MacBook (17:45)
Yeah.

Joe Mazumdar (18:03)
So in the Q4 production, we used to do this at Newmont as well. You're trying to make guidance, right? So you're gonna squeeze every pull, every knob you can to get that guidance because you want to be held to that number and you wanna get that number. You wanna fall somewhere in there. And so you will squeeze production out of everything and you will take the chance of increasing costs to get the production number. It's like a balloon. If you squeeze one thing, it'll pop out another end. And so what we've seen is,

Dope With A MacBook (18:30)
analogy.

Joe Mazumdar (18:31)
probably a bigger difference in the Q1 number versus the Q4 number then is normal. ⁓ There is always a drop, but the drop seems to be a little bit more significant. And that had also come with a slight increase in all in sustaining costs. And some of that is due to the per ounce metric saying I'm producing less ounces, so my costs are gonna go up. So.

Dope With A MacBook (18:51)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Mazumdar (18:58)
That's one thing. so that might impact margins. so Q2 people are probably wondering, well, is that trend going to continue? I know the oil price was a concern, but apparently there's a bit of a glut in the market. so that's not the Iran ⁓ issue is not impacting oil prices as much as some people had projected that it go spike up to a hundred bucks. That's not happening. But labor costs,

Dope With A MacBook (19:05)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Joe Mazumdar (19:28)
the impact of tariffs on steel, aluminum and all this when you're building and when you're doing sustaining capital might impact. And I'm wondering, know, out loud as people are doing their feasibility studies and all their technical studies on the new development projects, are they actually bringing in any potential impact from tariffs? And I can tell you from the people I've talked to, they haven't. They haven't included any potential tariffs because

It's hard to put in something that you don't know what that number is gonna be. If it changes next week, why am I gonna put this into this report that's going to maybe have a shelf life of two to three years, and in that time, that number might have changed 500 times. So I can't commit to it. So that risk is not embedded in some of these numbers either.

Dope With A MacBook (19:59)
Right, right, right.

And I think you make a great point. mean, if you're a generalist, you know, a home office, a hedge fund or whatever, and you've ridden the ride for the first six months of this year, you could meet, why wouldn't you say, oh, you know what, I think I'm going to cash some of this out and maybe look someplace else in the back half of the year.

Joe Mazumdar (20:36)
Yeah, especially

if you're looking at a, you know, Saran Israel crisis, does the US get bigger into it? Does that have an impact on this other stuff? You know, do we go, I mean, because I believe the revised GDP numbers for the US in the first quarter were actually negative, slightly negative, you know, ⁓ and that probably concerns people. Do we get another negative quarter in June as well? You know, all the tariffs haven't been in

Dope With A MacBook (20:55)
Yes. Yep.

Joe Mazumdar (21:06)
impacted the economy yet because they haven't all been implemented by any means and they're constantly negotiating what they're doing with China which is one of the big ones. But you know the car thing with Canada is a big deal as well. So all that uncertainty is probably saying hey you know I made a lot of money off of this I'm gonna you know take some money I'll hold some cash during the summer because I'm going on vacation you know and then I'll you know I'll come back later. There might be a bit of that.

Dope With A MacBook (21:33)
Yeah.

One last question that I want to double back to, like in my conversation with Eric or other people that are major investors in the sector, they talk about ounces in the ground and the cost of getting those out and that sort of thing. when we were at $2,000 gold,

I kept hearing the idea that, at $3,000 gold, all this becomes economical and boy, all this M &A is going to come in. Well, heck, Joe, we're 10 % past that. like you said, most of the M &A has been companies buying, you know, others that are already producing. They're not yet going out and saying, we're going to plan ahead. So at what point does that, in your mind, and then just generally, does that begin to trip?

Joe Mazumdar (22:22)
Well, I mean, we had a recent transaction and we go back to Mexico and no more new mining concessions. So here you have a company that's a single asset producer in Mexico, which is Torex Gold. They didn't acquire any silver assets or anything else, but because it's hard to get mining concessions, what they do is for little bits of cash, because they got a great balance sheet, they bought Reina Silver.

Dope With A MacBook (22:31)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Mazumdar (22:52)
in shares because they have an expiration package. You know, they got ground in Nevada and that, they're also in Mexico. So they're thinking that I'm not going to be able to get new ground myself. You know, so I'm going to have to buy other people that already have ground. So you can see that being pushed in Mexico because of the issues in Mexico, but that might not be happening, let's say in Nevada, but we're also seeing, like I believe in Ontario,

Westone picked up a company that was near them because they think that their deposit might ⁓ trend onto their ground. And so you might see a lot more of those sort of acquisitions near the head frame sort of thing. Hey, we need more feed. Where are we going to get it from? ⁓ you're right next door and I don't have that land and I think our stuff goes onto your ground.

Dope With A MacBook (23:36)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Right, right.

Joe Mazumdar (23:47)
And you might be trading at a discount. You've got financing risks. this is a good time for me to take you out, you know, with shares because my shares are, you know, as the same as money. So we should see that, you know, going forward. But now what we want to see is more &A. Like the last few &A that I saw were gold companies like Dundee Precious Metals and Harmony Gold buying companies that were in production.

but are mostly base metal. So they're buying copper assets and calling it gold equivalent. One bought ⁓ Mack copper, which has the cobar mine in Eastern Australia. And then you had, that was Harmony, and then you had Dundee by ⁓ Adriatic, which is also ASX listed in...

Dope With A MacBook (24:23)
Hmm. Interesting trend.

Joe Mazumdar (24:43)
both Matt Copper and Adriatic are both ACX listed. And then that one's in Bosnia and Dundee has a big presence in that part of Europe, in Serbia, Bulgaria and that. it sort of makes sense to like ⁓ solidify your comparative advantage of where you are. So we might see more of that because you're running out of probably those producing assets to buy. And as we consolidate more and more,

Dope With A MacBook (24:59)
Sure, sure.

Yeah. Yeah, Cheap.

Joe Mazumdar (25:12)
there's less companies to be potential suitors as well.

Dope With A MacBook (25:15)
Yeah, that's good point too. ⁓ Joe, you kind of led me right into our summary here. You took over ⁓ Exploration Insights now, years ago, five years, six years.

Joe Mazumdar (25:25)
⁓ yeah, we

know, no, we've been, I've been writing it longer in Brent has.

Dope With A MacBook (25:29)
Longer. Yeah. Isn't that crazy from

Brent Cook, who was just an old friend, you know, I was kind of considered him a legend and you've been at it now. So anyway, tell everybody just as we wrap up a little bit about what you do, where they can find your services.

Joe Mazumdar (25:36)
Yes, yes.

Okay, as you pointed out, explorationinsights.com is the website. It's a weekly publication on the mining sector, what I'm buying and selling. ⁓ I follow the news on them. And the other big advantage is I get up to the field a lot and see a lot of projects and that's really where the letter adds a lot of value. And then it also takes our multi-decade experience here between exploration,

working at big companies, working globally from Canada, Australia, South America and the States, ⁓ and sticking that into the letter and not only on the exploration side, market analysis, working as an equity analyst for six years as well. So there's a lot of different things that work in our favor with respect to what we do.

Dope With A MacBook (26:35)
For sure. I people at TF metals report have heard me say this I've said it on this platform countless times man There's leverage that you can pick up in the mining shares And you just buy an ETF if you want I guess but then you're saddled You know 20 % of it in some you know large cap that's not doing anything If you are gonna do this if you're gonna try to figure out ounces in the ground and everything else that goes with it You need some help

And you need to find somebody that you can trust that can help guide you through it. And man, I, trust Joe. How's that? I think Joe does a great job. So, ⁓ you get my personal endorsement. The endorsements here are not necessarily reflective of the views of management. You know, I got to add all that kind of stuff, but, ⁓ please, by all means, if you're in this sector, if you want to be involved in this stuff, rather than just a rising tide lifts all boats, you can really benefit by, you know, emphasizing winners over than, you know, just a basket. So Joe, please keep up the good work.

Joe Mazumdar (27:14)
You

Dope With A MacBook (27:32)
Again, explorationinsights.com is where you can find his newsletter. I really appreciate your time, my friend.

Joe Mazumdar (27:38)
Great, thank you very much. I appreciate the invite.

Dope With A MacBook (27:41)
From all of us here at Sprout Money, hey, look, happy Canada Day. We're ready for the second half of the year. Make sure you hit like or subscribe, because there's a whole bunch more stuff coming for you in July. For now, though, thanks for watching, and we'll have more information from you from this channel. We're too long at all.