Top 10 Dominant Drivers of Metals Markets in 2026

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February 10, 2026 | (62 mins 4 secs)

Webcast Overview

Sprott CEO Whitney George and Jacob White, CFA, Director of ETF Product Management, discuss deglobalization, fiscal dominance and the powerful moves across gold, silver, uranium, copper, rare earths and other critical materials. 

This webcast covers:         

• How accelerating deglobalization and geopolitical tension are reshaping markets
• The shift toward the debasement trade and rising momentum in hard assets
• Key fiscal and monetary policy trends across the U.S., EU and Japan
• Gold’s strengthening role as a store of value and silver’s ongoing bull market
• Outlook on uranium’s bull setup, potential copper supply shocks and the strategic rebuild of the rare earths supply chain

Webcast Transcript

Ed Coyne, Slides 1-4, Introduction

Ed Coyne: Thank you all for joining us for today's webcast, "The Top 10 Dominant Drivers of Metals Markets in 2026." I've asked our CEO, Whitney George, and our Director of ETF Product Management, Jacob White, to join us today to dive into this topic and discuss the top 10. We might even throw in a special 11th one to have some fun here today.

For those who aren't familiar with Sprott, Sprott is a global leader in precious metals and critical materials investments. By the end of the third quarter, we managed over $49 billion in assets under management. At Sprott, we are a publicly traded company. We trade on both the New York Stock Exchange and the Toronto Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol SII. And through our firm, we offer a suite of exchange-listed products, managed equities and private strategies. Within our exchange-listed products, our investors have access to the physical markets and the underlying mining stocks for gold, silver, uranium and copper through a suite of precious metals and critical materials ETFs.

Within managed equities, our flagship U.S. gold equity mutual fund, our closed-end value fund, our Sprott critical materials strategy and our concentrated M&A strategy sit. And then last but not least, within our private strategies, we offer a bespoke credit investments to mining and resource companies.

For today's webcast, as I mentioned, I've asked Whitney and Jacob both to join me. I'm going to have Whitney start with talking about "The Dominant Drivers in the Metals Markets." Then Jacob's going to talk about "The Metals in Focus with a Highlight on Silver, Copper, Uranium, and Rare Earths." With that, I'd like to turn it over to Whitney George to talk about the Dominant Drivers. Whitney?

Whitney George, Slides 5-16, The Dominant Drivers in the Metals Markets

Whitney George: Thank you, Ed. This is an overview of the dominant drivers we think will shape the precious metals markets this year. Many of them were in place before this year, which seems to have taken on a new urgency of importance or investor adoption. One very big theme that has been in place since Donald Trump was elected is the shift toward deglobalization. This isn't new; it's been going on for a while. But it's a shift in central banks' preferred reserve assets away from the dollar toward other assets, and, most importantly, in our mind, toward gold.

Deglobalization is also making the world less efficient. It now takes more material to produce the same amount of output that we used to have, just because of the inefficiencies and where that material lies. Clearly, there continues to be some tariff uncertainty, and it is unclear what the unintended consequences of that are. Our bet is that it is inflationary. Tariffs are a tax, and taxes tend to cause inflation.

Fiscal dominance and debasement. The word debasement is being used more. It cropped up in August and September of last year. I'm going to talk a little bit about how one positions themselves for declining currencies, not just dollars, but all sovereign wealth. Quantitative easing is back with different titles, and we'll talk a little about that.

And then, of course, we have geopolitical risk: all the problems that were here three or four years ago persist, and we are finding new problems in places like Venezuela and Greenland that we're trying to solve, which have never been considered much of a political risk. But in any event, those are factors that are pushing the price of precious metals up.

And then finally, I'll talk a little bit about the convergence of the physical and the digital worlds. We've been very excited about living in a digital world for some time, whether in asset ownership or technological advancement. Still, the world is waking up to the fact that physical things are required to achieve all its aspirations.

Performance Returns

First, a quick look at 2025 returns. Many of the metals were very strong, with gold and silver posting their largest single-year gains since 1979. Gold up 64.5%, silver up 147%, and that was before the recent run. Platinum up 127%, palladium 77%, copper rallying 44% and continuing into this year. Lithium turned around last year. Nickel appears to be bottoming after the supply from Indonesia. Uranium was somewhat sleepy for most of the year, but came back to life in the fourth quarter, and that's continued to be an interesting thing to watch so far in 2026. And of course, that compares to 17.88% on the S&P and 7.3% in bonds. It was a good place to invest last year.

But it wasn't just last year. Over the long term, starting at the beginning of this century, gold and silver have outperformed equities relative to the S&P 500 and bonds. In absolute terms, they preserve capital as the dollar declines by just under a tenth of a percent.

Central bank gold purchases have accelerated. Central banks were typically net sellers of precious metals during the 90s, but after the financial crisis and the concerns it created, they returned to the market. And you can see from 2010 through 2015 or so that it was very strongly supported. And then in 2022, they kicked it up another level, and that was because Russia invaded Ukraine, and we froze Russian reserves that were in the dollar system. And that meant if you weren't our very best friend, you probably ought to diversify some of your countries' reserve assets.

You can see a bit of a dip in 2025, but there is a very strong underpinning for gold among central banks worldwide. I think retail interest has come back, and maybe even a new entrant, which we'll talk about a little bit later, in the form of tokenized gold. There’s very strong demand, and the point I make about central bank buying is that it's not price sensitive; it's just a matter of how quickly a country is growing, how profitable they are, and how much they want to hold in their reserves, and the choice they're making on what currencies or what other investments are in those reserves.

De-Dollarization

De-dollarization is not a new phenomenon either. That's been going on since about 2014, when China made it very clear that it didn't want to be so reliant on U.S. Treasuries for its reserves. And that's tracked; the foreign reserve holding has been tracking our share of the global GDP. In part, the rest of the world is growing up, and we are not growing as quickly as we used to, but also, again, getting back to the preferences about where people put their savings. We would expect this to continue, and we think it might be even a purposeful policy decision on the part of the Trump administration, given the level of debt.

Trump is a big fan of gold. He's gold-plating the White House and building a new gold ballroom. And it is unusual for public officials, particularly the President and Secretary of the Treasury, to speak favorably about gold. Of course, Trump had that quote, "Not only will it not be tariffed," but “he who has the gold makes the rules." Gold was considered a negative because it competes with the U.S. dollar, and therefore, it was always talked down by politicians. That has changed.

Something totally unexpected to me occurred last summer when one of the chief strategists of one of the largest brokerage firms came out and recommended a 20-20-60 portfolio, with 20 percent in gold instead of the traditional 60-40 portfolio to preserve purchasing power. Most strategists and institutional investors would have worried about losing their jobs for raising the idea of gold until last year.

Debasement Trade

The debasement trade started to pick up a bit of steam out in Jackson Hole in August, when people became concerned about the weak dollar and wanted to get out not only of treasuries but also of other sovereign debt. It's not just a U.S. problem. Japan has turned over its political leadership and now favors a looser monetary regime. I think France has had three governments in the last two years. Confidence has been shaken. And this chart shows Google mentions for the word "debasement" and shows the pickup that's happened. That concept really was catching hold last fall. But as the calendar flipped, I think it became an investable theme for 2026. And we've certainly seen it in the interest in our products and virtually all hard asset categories. It's not just a dollar issue; it's pretty much the same in any developed country. It’s been going on for quite some time.

Geopolitical Risk

The existing hotspots of global risk remain. We haven't found peace in the Middle East yet. Certainly, Russia doesn't seem to be interested in stopping its conflict in Ukraine. And of course, we had an adventure into Venezuela, and the discussion about purchasing Greenland just won't seem to go away. At least we're not going to take Greenland by force from one of our NATO allies. But it certainly became topical. And I think around the time of Davos, it really set in among many of the world's politicians that these things weren't going to change, that they were going to keep on coming. And that probably provided the fuel for that large final thrust we saw in the gold price up until late January.

Convergence of Physical and Digital Worlds

The last thing I want to talk about is the convergence of the physical and digital worlds. Certainly, we've seen some growth in stablecoins, first backed by U.S. Treasuries, but now some are backed by gold. The concept of digital gold has been around for a long time. Technology is evolving to the point where people are talking about digitizing or tokenizing just about everything, including equity securities. I think it's only a matter of time before the technology is in place and creates a whole new audience, a whole generation or two, for the use of gold, because they prefer the convenience of buying and holding things digitally and being able to transact 24/7 in a very efficient way. That's starting to gain some traction, and that potentially could provide as big a lift to the gold audience as we saw with the creation of the Gold ETFs back in 2004, which was a very important driver of that bull market.

Finally, the surge in demand for critical materials is clearly being driven by the need for electrification and artificial intelligence. It's not only construction that requires these critical materials, but also powering these facilities, which would touch on uranium. And clearly, it takes a lot of copper to generate electricity and transmit it. All these metals or commodities are now part of what are called critical materials, and they are absolutely required if we want to achieve the efficiency gains, growth and dreams people aspire to with AI investments. And with that, I'll turn it back to you, Ed.

Ed Coyne: Thank you, Whitney. And thank you for those comments. Jake, I'd like to go over to turn it over to you now to talk about the metals in focus, specifically silver, copper, uranium, and rare earths, and really touch on what Whitney just mentioned, which is the demand for critical materials across the board. With that, I'd like to turn it over to you now to unpack it for our listeners.

Jacob White, Slides 17-38, Metals in Focus

Meeting Global Energy Demand with Critical Materials

Jacob White: Now that the macro backdrop has been laid out, I want to open with a demand engine that shows up in every metal we're about to cover. The world is becoming more electricity-intensive, and electricity systems are incredibly dependent on critical materials. Global electricity demand is projected to rise materially in the coming decades, and it's a sustained build-out for the systems that generate, transmit and store electricity. There are two real forces behind it. First, demand growth in developing countries is driven by factors such as urbanization, industrialization and rising living standards. And second, demand growth in developed economies, driven by reshoring, electrification, and the build-out of power-hungry digital infrastructure. As we go metal by metal, each may have its own unique applications, but they are all set to benefit from this rising electricity demand that flows through the whole complex.

As countries develop and become wealthier, electricity use tends to rise. Notably, there is no such thing as a low-energy, rich country. As such, we believe demand for critical materials will rise as these countries advance in their electrification. Developing economies are set to increase demand for critical materials and have historically been major drivers of growth. China has had 643% growth in electricity from 2000 to 2024, versus, for example, the U.S. at 15% or the EU at 5%. But there's a new demand layer that's changing this math going forward.

Data centers are projected to drive a meaningful increase in power demand through 2030, and AI is the key reason. A few points matter here. First, global data center power demand is expected to rise by 2.5 times by 2030, which would equal Japan's total power use just for data centers. And second, that's really being driven by AI, whose power use is projected to rise more than four times. What makes this relevant for the metals discussion is that demand is relatively price inelastic for these sectors, and it's charting a new course for electricity demand in developed countries, where we just talked about, China and India, these developing countries were pushing forward with electrification, which is going to continue. But these developed countries now have AI data centers and are reshoring manufacturing, which is compounding the effect and raising the demand across the critical materials landscape.

Silver is a dual bull case. There's monetary relevance and industrial demand, amid a market that's been running deficits for seven consecutive years. Uranium is tightening as nuclear commitments strengthen, and the market refocuses more on the upstream fuel cycle. Copper is increasingly trading like a strategic critical material as supply constraints collide with durable demand drivers. And as a bonus to our top 10, rare earths sit at the center of supply chain concentration and national security priorities, where policy is really influencing market outcomes. And they're a key example of how these metals are responding to factors beyond economics and are being prioritized as a national security concern.

Silver

Silver is one of the most interesting metals because it lives in two worlds at once. It is a monetary metal, but it is also a critical industrial input with wide and hard-to-substitute uses. That industrial side is now the dominant part of the demand picture, accounting for over half or 59% of demand. It's the long-term anchor. It's used across 10,000 applications because of its unique physical properties, most importantly being the most conductive metal in existence, which makes it very important for electronics. However, the point is not a single application; it's that silver demand is broad-based and deeply embedded in modern infrastructure and technology.

Now, we connect that to the framing we started with before, with electrification and technology build out. As the world builds more of this power infrastructure and more advanced electronics, silver is being pulled along with it. Over time, this kind of structural demand has steadily consumed a larger share of the available silver supply.

More recently, the debasement trade has been a clear example of what has helped supercharge silver. As Whitney discussed, debasement was a defining theme of 2025, and we believe it remains an important support for precious metals going forward. This chart is one concrete way to illustrate how that environment can show up in silver. Historically, silver has performed well during easing cycles. When the Fed cuts rates and policy becomes more accommodative, it can support precious metals through multiple channels, and we've seen price increases similar to those of late.

I also want to broaden this beyond debasement. As Whitney also discussed, deglobalization, geopolitical risks and other macro forces can buoy the precious metals complex. This table is useful because it shows that precious metals bull markets have tended to coincide with a range of environments, including inflationary periods, economic recoveries and geopolitical risk. And during those bull-market episodes, silver has historically shown greater upside participation. On average, over the period shown here, silver's rally has been about twice that of gold. That's one reason silver is often viewed as a higher-beta expression of precious metals when conditions are supportive. And given that, for 2026, we see a convergence of multiple of these historical tailwinds, we believe that precious metals and silver are well positioned for the years ahead.

We've had a supply deficit for the past seven consecutive years. In past cycles, investors were often worried, despite this deficit, that there was a large amount of above-ground inventories that may cap this upside. The most relevant point today is that multiple consecutive years of these deficits have reduced that cushion of readily available unencumbered metal, and the physical backdrop has tightened materially. Even after the significant price strength we've seen, we believe silver and precious metals remain well-positioned as we move through 2026 and beyond, supported by a constructive macro backdrop and a market balance that has remained consistently tighter and moved into a supply deficit.

Uranium

Nuclear sits at the center of the uranium thesis because it solves multiple problems at once. It runs consistently, and it provides dependable baseload power to electricity grids. It is a clean energy source for achieving decarbonization targets. It also has a small land footprint relative to the energy it produces. And many investors view it as one of the safest sources of energy when measured on an all-in basis. As energy security we've been talking about comes to the forefront, and as deglobalization and geopolitical risks raise the value of domestic, reliable power, nuclear has taken center stage. We've seen growing commitments to expand nuclear capacity, including a global pledge by 31 countries to triple nuclear capacity by 2050. We've seen a number of European countries make meaningful U-turns on their nuclear policies, revisiting their outright bans or phase-out frameworks. And we've seen an increasing pace of restarts, new builds, life extensions and a lot of positive sentiment about the future of small modular reactors (SMRs).

However, despite the immense investor focus and flows into the broader nuclear theme, attention has increasingly shifted upstream over the past few months. The transmission mechanism is straightforward. All these nuclear commitments ultimately flow through to uranium demand and to the company's position to supply those pounds in the years ahead. We believe that 2026 is particularly well-positioned for uranium because, you know, nuclear saw a lot of this benefit last year from an investor standpoint, but uranium was more on a pause with an 11% rise for 2025, with most of those gains coming at the end of the year.

In 2025, utilities paused uranium procurement amid heightened market uncertainty, particularly within the U.S. government and its administration about what policies it would pursue. But since then, the U.S. stance has turned decisively pro-nuclear. Some announcements included a target to quadruple U.S. nuclear capacity, reforms to reduce regulatory timelines, and an $80 billion deal for new nuclear power plants.

Ultimately, as 2025 was an exceptional year for nuclear, we believe that uranium is now positioned to move into 2026 as attention shifts upstream. And with this greater certainty and all these positive developments, we started to see a shift in the uranium market. And you can see that most clearly in the term contracting cycle.

Utilities have been contracting at a rate below the replacement rate for the last 13 years. That means that these nuclear power plants have been using more uranium per year than they bought for future supply, which is obviously only sustainable if they have larger inventories. In 2023, this was kind of celebrated as achieving the replacement rate, but it was heavily inflated because of a very large one-time purchase by Ukraine. And then in 2024, about half the contracting was done by China, so the Western utilities in Europe and in the U.S. are left with much less. They still have very large uncovered requirements. And it's important because these term contracts are written years in advance. Decisions made now are about coverage for the early 2030s and beyond. And these uncovered requirements have been building, putting pressure on them in 2026 to contract for the years ahead. They can defer and delay their contracting for a period, but they still have to do it.

We've seen some evidence, most recently, where a lot of the 2025 contracting was done in the last quarter. And we've seen some positive sentiment even more recently in 2026, when the term price reached its highest level in this cycle, which is really helping to anchor a higher-incentive framework for future supply. And it signals that utilities are contracting more, at the highest term price they've seen in this recent cycle since 2011. But contracting is only one side of the story. The other side is that the supply-demand fundamentals have only strengthened.

The market is currently in deficit and has become increasingly reliant on inventory to bridge the gap. Inventories are much larger in 2022, 2023, and 2024, and they're fading to near zero in the forecast for 2025 and beyond. Because after multiple years of drawdowns and strategic inventory holding, they're less able to solve the structural supply gap over time. So, we believe that industry needs investment now, not later, and that incentive pricing will become a key concept in the year to come.

Bringing a new uranium supply online takes time. Lead times are long. Supply is concentrated in jurisdictions like Kazakhstan. There was obviously a coup in Niger. There's geopolitical uncertainty. And we've also seen key suppliers, for example, Kazatomprom, the world's largest uranium miner, flat-out saying that the current conditions and uranium pricing do not incentivize an increase in their production. They need stronger economics and better long-term visibility. Ultimately, we see that the supply deficit is forecast to worsen in the years ahead. We have a £1.4 billion deficit in this forecast here. And then if we were to triple global nuclear capacity by 2050, which is what those 31 countries signed earlier that we were talking about, that would result in a nearly £3 billion deficit. Demand visibility needs to improve meaningfully to reflect all the announcements we're discussing, whether it's restarts or new builds. Supply will be slow to respond. And we think uranium is well-positioned to move forward and capture investor attention following the recent developments.

Ed Coyne: Jake, real quick question about supply and demand. What would that look like if a discovery, and this is probably true for any asset we're talking about, whether it's gold, uranium, or copper, what would it look like if a discovery were to happen today? What would that mean for future supply in the short term versus the long term?

Jacob White: One of the key things is that if you were to discover the supply today, it could take, depending on where you are, maybe a decade to get this online. So, you're not talking about the very start of production. Let's say you found it today, and you wanted to get started as soon as possible; it can take many years. You're not going to meet this imminent supply gap. And as you go out, 5 or 10 years from now, the supply gap is increasingly meaningful. It's more likely that we'll still be in a supply deficit. It's not to say that these discoveries won't be an important part of the future supply response to meet these increasing nuclear demands, but it is to say that many uranium mines could still be restarted. There are still some greenfields that have already been discovered and need higher incentive pricing before they are willing to start building them out. And I think at the end of the day, we need that higher pricing to reflect more uranium exploration and more uranium supply.

Copper

Jacob White: I want to start with copper using a simple, long-term framing. Copper demand has historically doubled roughly every 25 years. That's a 12.5-fold increase since 1936. And you can see here that there's consistently been, within our economy, innovations and inventions that, since the age of electricity, have relied more on copper. So, this next phase is often framed as being driven by AI data centers. New energy sources are often highly copper-intensive, as are electricity grids and continued industrialization in developing economies. Copper’s conductivity, durability, and reliability are essential to power systems and infrastructure, and it's difficult to substitute at scale. So, we have a constant-growth framework for copper.

Looking at copper supply, supply disruptions lately have been a major factor in the copper market and have driven much of this action, helping the copper price hit all-time highs. Most notably, in 2025, there were Grasberg and Kamoa-Kuklua. The Grasberg outage alone resulted in lost production greater than the annual output of the world's third-largest copper mine. Just this one mine going offline is essentially a significant chunk of the overall copper supply. Copper supply remains highly varied, with many mines, but it has also pushed the market into a supply deficit today, in addition to Kamoa-Kakula. A lot of market participants were kind of forecasting a supply deficit, maybe next year or the year after, but now that's kind of flipped. In 2025, we're in a copper deficit: demand exceeds supply, and the market is tight.

This copper supply chain has less flexibility than many investors might assume. When large mines have difficulty replacing that supply due to long lead times, it's difficult. For uranium and copper, it takes 17 years from discovery to first production, which is double what it was in the 1990s. Ore grades are a fraction of what they were historically, which means the world was mining its highest-grade copper deposits first. Looking at the competitive landscape, these copper mines are producing less copper. And major new discoveries of copper have become much less common.

These three factors together mean supply grows more slowly, it's harder to scale, and it's more vulnerable to supply shocks, as we've seen of late. Copper is facing disruptions today, but the bigger issue is that the supply response is structurally slow, making deficits harder to resolve once they've emerged, as they have today. And, coupling that with the doubling of demand every 25 years, the forecast is for copper supplies to only escalate in the years to come.

One really important point is that the copper is also in the midst of a regime shift. Copper has long been treated as a barometer of the broader economy, earning it the nickname "Dr. Copper" for moving in tandem with the traditional economic cycle. What's turned out over the past couple of years is that copper has broken away from its historical correlation with oil and iron ore. As shown here, they were very closely related until a couple of years ago, and there's been a market shift: those commodities most exposed to the global economy haven't done very well. But copper has become more entrenched as a critical material, driven by strategic end uses such as defense, AI data centers and the future of energy we were talking about earlier. As a result, we're seeing the marginal demand driver change.

Another thing that people like to talk about a lot is China and construction. You know, construction was, a few years ago, the largest and dominant driver of copper demand growth, and the largest demand driver overall. Now, electrical infrastructure has taken over from that, layered on by things like AI, grid modernization, and all these sorts of things. Copper is trading less like a traditional cyclical commodity and more like a strategic critical material going forward. And we continue to see that for 2026 and beyond.

Rare Earths

Rare earths are a prime example of the most critical elements for national security. They sit inside the supply chain for advanced defense systems and next-generation technologies. They are also essential for electrification, including EV motors, and for robotics and data center infrastructure in some of the world's most important sectors today. What makes the rare earth story especially important right now is that the West and the U.S. have moved from identifying this as a vulnerability to taking decisive action and building domestic capacity. The clearest example of that is with the U.S. government partnership with MP Materials. It took a direct equity stake. The structure is really designed to accelerate the end-to-end U.S. supply chain for rare earths, for mining and processing and permanent magnets. Some of the key factors there were that they implemented a price floor, which is being talked about as a national security investigation called "Section 232" within other critical materials as well, but within this MP Materials deal, they implemented a price floor that was much higher than the current rare earths pricing was at that time when they announced the deal. So, MP Materials will be able to sell it for a lot more than the China oversupply was forcing the market to pay.

They also committed their new facility to purchase 100% of that production. You have the U.S. Department of Defense; this one is not the Department of Energy, as when the U.S. took equity stakes in a copper miner and a lithium miner as a long-term partner in U.S. rare-earth mining. Similarly, you've seen big tech make $500 million with Apple, a multi-year partnership tied to American-made rare earths. So, whether this be in advanced technology or in defense, the policy takeaway is that rare earths are critical and probably some of the most critical materials and a national security priority.

The key timing setup for rare earths is a supply chain concentration and the policy response to it. China dominates the production of multiple critical materials, including rare earths, especially in their processing and refining. China has a 91% share of rare earths. It's also considerably high in graphite, manganese, cobalt and even lithium, with 70% refining. I believe the share of rare earths mining is around 60%, which is still a very significant share of the supply chain, given the ongoing geopolitical risks that have risen over the past couple of years.

What's important is that China has increasingly weaponized its dominance. Last year, there were multiple trade actions, including export controls on rare earths and other critical minerals. And in the past, they have not shied away from doing so either. In 2010, China restricted rare-earth exports and cut off shipments to Japan, causing a 26-fold increase in rare-earth prices. In the past, they have not been shy to do that. Obviously, there's been a lot of negotiation right now, and that remains a key issue as we move forward. The U.S. or the West in general do not want to remain reliant on China for something that is so critical for defense and AI.

For example, the DRC has placed export controls on cobalt. There are many export controls on nickel from Indonesia. There are many trade restrictions. And to the extent that they can, I think there's going to be a continued push for domestic or friend-shoring of critical materials mining in general. I will leave it there and pass it back to you, Ed.

Ed Coyne: Thank you, Jake. And one of the things I wanted to bring up: your general theme in the critical material space seems to rely heavily on supply and demand and on how quickly we can bring additional supply to market. The one question I keep seeing is: Can scrap close the gap? And effectively, whether it's copper, whether it's rare earths, what role does scrap or recycling play in your supply-demand dynamics?

Jacob White: The short answer is "No," it will play an important role and an increasing role. But if you take the copper market, for example, you know we have less than 20%, I think it's around 17%, of the market from scrap or recycled copper. There's a very large copper scrap market. Other industry participants, and we have released an analysis that even if you were to increase that to, let's say, 25% or something, it's much larger. The projected deficits are too large to close the gap. There will be greater incentives for using copper scrap and other recyclable metals, but at the end of the day, there just isn't enough. You also have to wait for that to come to the end of its useful life; you're obviously not going to take out copper from something that's still using it. The math just doesn't support it. And then there are also technical limitations to recycling certain critical materials, which aren't really feasible right now.

Ed Coyne, Slide 40, Precious Metals and Critical Materials Allocation Overview

Ed Coyne: We'd also like to touch on how to think about precious metals and critical materials when you're looking at ways to diversify and build this into a portfolio. So, it always starts with diversification. We examine the correlation among many of these metals, particularly with the physical market. They have a low, and in some cases a negative, correlation with traditional stocks and bonds. I think Whitney even mentioned earlier that the old 60-40 versus the kind of new frontier 60-20-20 with precious metals really fit the bill there. Diversification is something we always start with our investors.

We truly believe in the inflation-hedge aspect, whether it's precious metals or the critical-material side. As you talk to builders and construction in general, that theme of "You may as well spend the money now before the purchasing power becomes less down the road.” That inflation hedge is certainly real.

And then demand growth, which I know you just touched on quite nicely, Jake. We do see the ongoing demand growth happening here. And then, the tangible aspect, the real asset aspect of it. From a diversification standpoint for the investors that work with us, we typically see somewhere between 5% and 10% in gold. When they're looking purely at the monetary metal diversification benefit of precious metals, that seems to be the allocation we see many of our investors making, and one we would also back and recommend.

Silver is becoming more of an industrial metal and is being consumed more. We like the 3% to 5% range in silver, which then bleeds into the overall critical materials, another 3% to 5%. You could make an argument that 20% is really the right number when you think about both precious metals and critical materials within a portfolio, whether you're looking to diversify the portfolio or whether you're looking to be more opportunistic in the portfolio.