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Interview

Why Tech & Big Investors Are Turning to Uranium & Gold

November 7, 2024 | 39 mins 31 secs 

John Ciampaglia, CEO of Sprott, joins James Connor to discuss why gold is increasingly viewed as a safeguard against economic uncertainty and why uranium has become essential to powering big tech's ambitious AI expansion.

John Ciampaglia: We see institutional investors coming back to gold in the last two months after ignoring it for the previous 10 months. That's a very bullish sign. Central banks are increasingly shifting their foreign exchange reserves away from U.S. dollars and other currencies and treasuries to gold. That's a very interesting dynamic that we think will play out for many decades. At the end of the day, you need to buy because fuel is critical and there's no way to substitute your aim for something else like you can with other commodities.

James Connor: Hi, and welcome to Wealthion, I'm James Connor. The days of a 60/40 investment portfolio are over, and now there are so many different asset classes and options available to investors. If you would like to learn more about these asset classes and how they can benefit your portfolio, consider having a discussion with a Wealthion-endorsed financial advisor. You can find out more information at wealthion.com/free. Once again, that's wealthion.com/free. Now, on to the show.

John, thank you very much for joining us today. How are things in Toronto?

John Ciampaglia: Things are great. Great to be back.

James Connor: John, for those who might not be familiar with Sprott and its various investment products, maybe you can tell us a little bit about the company and what products you have for investors.

John Ciampaglia: Sprott has been around for multiple decades, and I think people who know us are familiar with our focus and expertise on all things related to metals and mining. We run multibillion-dollar physical commodity funds that cover everything from gold, silver, platinum, palladium, copper and uranium, which are all unique offerings. We also offer a full range of different equity-oriented ETFs that focus mostly on the mining sector across multiple types of metals in both passive strategies and actively managed strategies.

James Connor: Of all those different metals that you just mentioned, which one has had the best performance this year and maybe the most flows from investors?

John Ciampaglia: It's been a year for precious metals. They were in the doldrums last year and they seemed to wake up late. About 12 months ago, in October 2023, gold hit $1,800 an ounce. We've had a really great rally up to $2,700 and change per ounce.

Gold has been the attention grabber in the last 12 months. Silver technically has outperformed it a little bit. But I think gold has really been part of the conversation because of a number of really interesting developments. One, central banks are increasingly shifting their foreign exchange reserves away from U.S. dollars and other currencies and treasuries to gold. That's a very interesting dynamic that we think will play out for many decades. It's not just China: it's India, Singapore, Turkey and Poland. They're all adding to their gold reserves, and that's provided a lot of durable buying support.

But we also see institutional investors coming back to gold in the last two months after largely ignoring it for the previous 10 months. That's a very bullish sign. Then finally, Chinese retail investors, which provide an enormous amount of collective savings, have been coming back to gold. The reasons for this are their economy is sputtering, their real estate market has clearly been in a bubble for some time and has popped, and their equity market has performed very poorly.

When you have limited options to invest in China, gold is reasserting itself as a tried-and-true asset. We're seeing many retail investors in China start to buy small quantities of gold again. I think all these things are really helping propel gold to new highs of late.

James Connor: You made mention of the fact that central banks and Chinese investors have been buying it. What about North American investors?

John Ciampaglia: I would say North American investors, whether they're more retail-oriented, have largely continued to hold the gold they have. We don't see a ton of new buying interest. We track different metrics related to sales of coins and bars as one proxy for that. But in the last couple of months, we've definitely seen a pickup in the flows into gold ETFs, including our own at Sprott. It's been an interesting dynamic that gold basically went from $1,800 to $2,500 an ounce. Over that period of time, we saw consistent selling of gold out of the ETFs, and it's only been in the last couple of months that the trend has reversed.

But what's interesting to us is that while the trend has reversed, we've gone from a bottom of around 81 million ounces of gold held globally in ETFs. We're only at about 83, 84 million ounces. A year ago, we were closer a little over 90 million ounces of gold. We went from 90 to 81, and now we're back to 83, 84. Hardly a lot of inflows given the price move of gold, which you obviously don't think of as an asset that goes up 30 plus percent in a year.

James Connor: Why do you think there's such little interest, especially with the big outperformance this year in gold?

John Ciampaglia: I just don't think people are paying attention. It's only been in the last couple of months that people are starting to get a little bit more concerned about different emerging risks, whether those are geopolitical risks. Obviously, with Russia, China and the Middle East, people are concerned about election risks in the U.S., obviously. We're starting to see not just in the physical market, but also in the futures market, people are adding insurance in their portfolio through exposure to gold.

We think these elevated risks are helping to shift investor interest back to gold because gold typically is, in these turbulent times, more of a safe haven asset. But institutional investors, I think on the whole, are still not buying into the whole gold story. It's been an interesting almost self-rally, which I think is bullish because if the price of gold can go from $1,800 to almost $2,800 without a lot of Western investors pushing on the price, I think that tells you it has a lot more upside potential if they decide to increase their participation.

James Connor: Why is there a lack of interest from institutional investors? Is it because there are just too many other asset classes that are performing better?

John Ciampaglia: I think there's a lot of fixation still on things that have worked over a long time. Technology stocks and some of the stocks related to AI, specifically, have captured a lot of the headlines and flows. Just generally speaking, institutional investors are still very underweight or zero weight in many natural resource parts of the market and commodities. They just have not really gotten behind them again. We think that's changed in the last 2–3 years in particular. More institutions are realizing the importance of not just gold and silver to be part of your portfolio, but a number of very critical minerals, everything from uranium to copper, some of the battery metals.

These are all going to become much more important elements of our economy as we increase everything from electrification, moving away from fossil fuels, adding wealth to emerging markets, which then leads to an increase in electricity consumption per capita, many reshoring activities going on, everything from semiconductors, defense industries, pharmaceuticals, electric vehicles, processing of critical minerals. There's a huge number of things going on since the Inflation Reduction Act came into law that is really incentivizing new capital formation in many different manufacturing sectors.

Those are all very electricity-intensive. That's why you're starting to hear people talk about low growth. For the first time in 20 years, we're seeing increasing low growth on the U.S. electrical grid. We think a lot of capital needs to go into that sector to make that happen.

James Connor: I want to ask you about some of those other metals associated with electrification. But before I do that, I want to stick with the precious metals. Silver is also having a very good year. It's up around 35% on the year. Maybe you can just speak to the flows you're seeing in those products.

John Ciampaglia: We've seen some inflows into silver products, including our own, over the last three months. It is a much smaller market than gold. Gold is one of the most liquid currencies in the world. Silver is a much smaller market because of its value and just sheer size. But what you're seeing is silver is really benefiting from its dual role as a monetary metal and also as an industrial metal.

Investors typically hold silver as a hedge against risks or an inflation hedge. In many cases, in emerging markets where gold becomes too expensive for them to buy, they sometimes transition to buying silver as a substitute. We see that right now happening in India. More people are buying silver in India than gold because of the price differential.

But silver is also a beneficiary of a growing number of clean energy technologies that are very silver-intensive. The most common is obviously solar panels because silver is so conductive in terms of exciting electrons in those panels. They essentially create a silver paste that they put inside these solar panels to make them more efficient.

As the world is deploying record amounts of solar panels because the cost of them has collapsed over the last few years, more demand for silver is not going for investment purposes or medical uses or whatnot. It's specifically for solar panels. What you find is that at the end of the life of those solar panels, which might be 20 or 25 years, it's very hard to recycle those metals inside there. It generally gets wasted. Unlike other metals, there's a lot of value in them, there's a lot of effort to recycle those metals, we don't think a lot of that silver is going to come back to the market. It's essentially used and consumed forever.

James Connor: Sprott also offers a palladium product. This is a product I'm not too familiar with, but when I was doing my research on it, I was really surprised by the volatility in this. Maybe you can just speak to that and what it's used for and why so much volatility.

John Ciampaglia: Palladium is an interesting metal, and I've been having a lot of investors ask me about it the last few weeks in particular. If people are wondering, what is palladium? Well, it's basically an industrial metal. What does most of the palladium that we produce is used for? It's used in catalytic converters as a catalyst to basically clean the exhaust from gasoline engine catalytic converters. That's its primary use. It has a huge impact on car sales.

The other interesting thing about palladium is that Russia produces 40% of the global supply. Given our deteriorating position and relationship with Russia, this is a metal that is more susceptible to disruption. In September, Putin threatened that they would cut palladium shipments off to countries that have sanctioned Russia.

More recently, the G7 is encouraging memberships to sanction Russian palladium as they have with things like oil and aluminum. If these sanctions were to impact the palladium supply, you could definitely have a bit of a shortage. It's one of the reasons why the palladium price in the last few weeks had a bit of a bounce from $1,000 announced to $1,200. It's come back a little bit. But when the war in Ukraine first broke out, the price of palladium zoomed all the way up to $3,000 an ounce. It was the real star performer as people were concerned about its supply, given all the sanctions being levied against Russia.

When those sanctions did not materialize on palladium itself, the price basically unwound and went all the way back to a thousand. It's been a real roller coaster ride. But it is obviously a precious metal because it is incredibly rare and has incredible value. But its fundamental purpose is clearly industrial.

James Connor: If Russia produces 40%, who produces the other 60%?

John Ciampaglia: It's spread around the world, but the next largest that most people focus on is South Africa. South Africa, historically, has produced high amounts of both platinum and palladium. It is becoming increasingly difficult to produce both of those metals in South Africa for a few reasons. One, the mines are very old there. They're very deep in the Earth's crust, which makes the working conditions very challenging. The electricity reliability in South Africa is notoriously bad. It's hard to run a mine when the electricity is turned off because they have regularly-occurring ground outs.

Platinum and palladium are two metals that are very concentrated in two countries, Russia and South Africa. It's very hard to substitute them for other metals because they are so efficient in acting as catalysts that go into catalytic converters. Most people have no idea that's what we use them for. Obviously, there's a secondary market for platinum with jewelry, but it's much smaller than the primary use, which is for auto use.

James Connor: Let's move on now and discuss uranium. I'm sure you would agree with me when I say no other commodity has such a positive backdrop as uranium does, but this isn't really being reflected in the price or in the equity prices. Why don't we just first start with the spot price? Maybe you can give us some color. How many pounds have traded this year, and how does that compare to last year?

John Ciampaglia: The uranium market has been a bit of a head scratch for this year. Last year, we had a huge breakout in the price where we ended up 2023 at a price of $91 a pound in the spot market, which was up 89% for the calendar year. It really broke out on very strong fundamentals, increased shift back to nuclear energy in many countries, and coupled with supply challenges. A lot of mines that have restarted have had some production hiccups to start, and the world's largest producer in Kazakhstan finally acknowledged in August that it was not going to be able to meet its higher production targets that it had given a year earlier.

We've got a growing demand profile. We have a choppy and somewhat uncertain supply outlook. Yet with that backdrop, the price of uranium has gone from about $91 at the beginning of the year, as I mentioned, to right now we're sitting at about $80. People are questioning: with this very bullish backdrop, why is the price corrected? We think there are a few factors at play. We think that one, it's a natural event to have a bit of a healthy correction as part of an overall bull market.

We see this all the time: commodity prices can go up hundreds of percents over multiple-year bull markets, but along the way, they can have many 30% to 40% corrections, which can shake out investors. So yes, we've had a bit of a correction right now. But we also think that the primary buyers of uranium, utilities, have been distracted by many things this year.

One, the U.S. banned the importation of Russian-enriched uranium. That became law in August, and created a big distraction. There are waivers that are being granted for a period of time where a utility can plead their case for the Department of Energy to say, "Look, I don't have an alternative supplier, so I need to continue to take these deliveries from Russia." Those are just starting to be given out, but only for this year and next, so there's some uncertainty about what happens after that.

Putin has threatened, like palladium, to cut off the West from uranium and retaliation for all of these sanctions. There's been a lot of noise geopolitically and from a regulatory perspective. Utilities, I think, have really stepped the sidelines and have not procured as much uranium this year as you would think they would.

We see the volumes in the spot market come down significantly. The volumes in the term market, while they started to pick up in the last month or so, it's all been China-driven. China continues to accumulate large amounts of uranium because they are building the greatest number of new reactors in the world, and they're very smartly ensuring they've got their security of supply with fuel to meet their future needs.

But we get the sense that Western utilities are sitting on the sidelines with the belief or the hope that prices will come down, and so they don't have to buy immediately. They can wait the market out. It seems as though we have a bit of a stalemate between sellers and buyers.

The sellers have largely sold production forward for a number of years, so they're not in a rush to lower prices or sell more because they've sold a lot of material on forward contracts. It's getting harder and harder to bring new production online. The buyers are clearly of the belief that prices will come down, so be patient. It'll be interesting to see how this goes. I think it's fair to say that you can delay and defer your purchases, but at the end of the day, you need to buy because fuel is absolutely critical, and there's no way to substitute uranium for something else like you can with other commodities.

James Connor: John, I should have asked this at the beginning of our conversation on uranium, but maybe you can just explain to investors what's the difference between the spot market and the term market?

John Ciampaglia: The spot market is a fairly small market relative to the term market. The big difference is people are purchasing and trading uranium for today's price for delivery in a very short period of time, for example, in 30 days. If you're buying uranium in the term market, what you're doing is you're simply signing a contract today that spells out the terms and conditions by which you will take delivery of uranium, sometimes many years in the future, and the deliveries will continue for often many years in the future.

A very simple example would be: I sign a contract today. Four years from now, you will start to deliver me one million pounds of uranium each year for the next eight years. All you have is a paper transaction, and then you need to figure out what is the pricing mechanism? Because remember, I haven't got anything today. I'm going to get it in year four and five and six and so on. Essentially, there is a pricing formula that the parties agree on that says, "On data delivery, we're going to have a mechanism that determines what the price will be." Those prices are subject to caps, meaning maximum prices, and floors, meaning minimum prices that the buyer will pay.

Right now, we're hearing that those prices, the caps and the floors, are somewhere in the neighborhood of $75 on the low end and $135 at the high end, and right now, the spot price is about $80. I could buy at $80 today, or I could sign a contract for future delivery, and I don't know exactly what the price is going to be, but it's somewhere between $75 plus to $135-ish.

That's how utilities typically buy uranium. It's under these long-term arrangements. The spot market is really a market that's more focused on financial players or utilities that need to come in and just buy a little bit to help increase their inventory. In the spot market, typically 5% to 15% of utility needs are fulfilled there, and the bulk of their purchases are done in this current market.

James Connor: Who would be the top three producers of uranium in the world?

John Ciampaglia: The interesting thing about it is that there are really only two big producers in the world. If you think about a critical mineral that produces 20% of U.S. electricity, 10% of global electricity, you've got basically two companies that produce the vast majority of it. One is a state-owned company in Kazakhstan called Kazatomprom and the other one is a Canadian company called Cameco. Those two companies are the largest producers of uranium in the world.

There are a number of producers that are at a much smaller scale that are in the process of restarting old mines that have been closed when the price of uranium was $30 or less per pound. Now that the price of uranium is sending out the right signals and there's improved demand, those owners of those mines are slowly turning them back out online. We've seen a number of mines come back to production this year, and many more that are working on coming back into production. That's why the equities in the uranium sector, have performed really well. If you take a step back and look how they've done over the last four years, they are more volatile because they're smaller cap companies, many of which are just getting back into generating cash flow.

But the stocks have done very well over the last four years on the back of these improving fundamentals and obviously improved uranium prices.

James Connor: The world's largest consumer of uranium is the U.S. They consume approximately £45 to £50 million a year, but they don't produce any. Maybe you can speak to that. Where does the U.S. get its uranium from?

John Ciampaglia: It's an interesting point. I think you could have the same discussion about multiple commodities that the U.S. is a large consumer of but doesn't produce a lot in country anymore. There was a time in the early 1980s that the U.S. produced around 40 million pounds of uranium a year, as you said, in contrast to its annual needs today, which are closer to 50 million pounds per year. But the U.S. hasn't produced much uranium in 10 plus years. Last year, the number was a little over 300,000 pounds.

This year, that number is slowly growing with new mines restarting. But even at the end of the last cycle, the US was still only producing about 4 million pounds a year. So totally Heavily dependent or heavily dependent on other countries. Thankfully, places like Canada have a lot of uranium that is being sold to US. Kazakhstan has been also an exporter of uranium to the US. That hasn't been lost on regulators and politicians that the US wants to become less dependent on countries for some of the key supply chains, uranium I would put in that camp. Things related to battery metals, defense industries, semiconductors, even pharmaceuticals.

This has been a real wake-up call in the last few years between COVID and the invasion of Ukraine, that you need to have resilient supply chains because Russia was a very reliable and the lowest cost provider of enriched uranium to the world for 30 plus years. Now the world, why I should cry myself. The Western world is trying to transition itself off of that supply chain. It's going to take several years to do that because we've been so dependent for decades on Russia.

James Connor: There's been so much big news coming out this year on nuclear energy and by extension, uranium. I guess the most recent news is the emergence of big tech into nuclear energy. Maybe you can speak to that.

John Ciampaglia: In the last few weeks, there's been a lot of exciting news developments and announcements related to big tech, which covers Microsoft, Amazon Cloud, Google, Meta, Apple, and Oracle. They're all following a similar strategy, which is they need to source large quantities of electricity and preferably clean, meaning no greenhouse gasses or low greenhouse gasses, and preferably firm. Firm meaning the electricity source runs all the time or provide electricity all the time versus variable or intermittent energy sources like renewables.

They're doing this because they are all developing a technology, and they're all in a race to be leaders in artificial intelligence. Why this is so linked to electricity is because the data centers that run these essentially supercomputers that do this artificial intelligence, are incredibly electricity-intensive relative to traditional data centers.

Some estimates I've seen are 7–10 times more electricity-intensive than a typical data center that we would use for surfing the web or loading photos up or whatever. It's a race to be a leader here. What these technology companies have figured out that one of the biggest obstacles is not the technology, it's sourcing the electricity. That's because if you look at the U.S. grid, for example, load growth on it for the last 20 years has been almost zero.

We haven't had a lot of energy addition. We've had a lot of changes in energy mix, but overall, the load growth has been largely static. Now you're seeing these big tech companies signaling to their local utilities, "Hey, we need a lot more electricity." I'm just going to put this into context. Let's pick on Microsoft for a minute because they're one of the leaders of AI in the world. They currently have 19 gigawatts of electricity contracted, mostly renewables, to power its AI data centers and has another 10 gigawatts of electricity to be built, mostly with the partnership they signed a few months with Brookfield.

You might say, "Okay, well, what does that equate to?" That's an enormous amount of power, and is the equivalent of powering millions of homes and businesses each year. They have an incredible appetite for more electricity. What they're doing is they're approaching utilities, and they're signing power purchase agreements, which are basically agreements that say, "Look, if you provide me the power, I will be your fixed customer for the next 20 years, and we'll agree on a price." That price that these big tech companies are willing to pay is materially higher than the current price of electricity.

The one that caught everyone's attention a few weeks back was Microsoft signing a deal with Constellation Energy, which is a U.S. utility that operates the largest number of nuclear power stations in the country. They signed one of these 20-year power purchase agreements, and they're going to restart a nuclear power station that's been closed for five years. That has never happened before. A plant closing and five years later saying, "We need this power, we need this clean and firm power, and we're willing to pay for it."

Since that announcement, a whole handful of other tech companies have made similar announcements, not about restarting shuttered power stations, but signaling that they would be financing the construction of a number of small modular reactors, which are smaller scale nuclear power stations, specifically to provide power for their AI data center. This is a new case study or use case for nuclear power in big tech. Why everyone's excited about it is because big tech has big money. They're sitting on massive hordes of cash, and they have the ability to finance these, in some cases, first-of-a-kind technologies that utilities may be reluctant to take the financial risk to build these new technologies.

In the absence of government capital or a centralized government power generation model, it's very important to get outside capital coming in, in some cases with government money and assistance to really start building more capacity. That is not going to impact the demand for uranium today, but in five years from now, 10 years from now, and so on, if this becomes an option that really scales and grows, you could see a new source of uranium demand that even a year ago, nobody really thought about.

James Connor: It reminds me of what Elon Musk did with SpaceX. SpaceX did something that NASA couldn't do. It's just amazing. I almost wonder if big tech is going to do the same thing with nuclear energy and all these other new technologies like SMRs.

John Ciampaglia: It's a great example. If you think about big tech companies, they're incredibly innovative. They're not afraid of first of a kind. It's all about market leadership. The product cycle has moved very quickly. If you think about utilities that produce electricity, it's the polar opposite. Highly conservative, and very slow moving. You can imagine the clash you have, so to speak, with big tech wanting to race at light speed and utilities moving very, very slowly because they haven't had to for 20 years in the absence of low growth.

This is why big tech is saying, "You know what? We're going to solve our own problem here. We are going to sign these big contracts with private companies, and we are going to fund and help bring more capacity." I got to go back to this term, clean and firm, because they have very aggressive net-zero or low carbon targets at these companies. They also need power that's firm so that these data centers are available 24/7.

If you think about powering a data center with an electricity source that runs on average 25% of the time, like solar, that's not the ideal match. You don't want to be dependent on the weather. You want to have something that provides firm base load power, and that's what nuclear energy provides.

James Connor: One of the things I find confounding about this year when it comes to equity valuations is how poorly a lot of these uranium names have done. If you look at the world's largest uranium producer, Kazatomprom, it's down on the year. But when you look at some of these utilities, you mentioned Constellation Energy, it's up over 100% on the year. Vistra, another big nuclear energy producer, it's up over, I think 200% on the year. Why do you think there's so much more outperformance on the utility side versus the production side?

John Ciampaglia: The uranium stocks have performed really well over the last three or four years. We have been told by a number of different industry participants and sell-side analysts and trading shops that some capital has rotated out of the uranium thematic, let's say, and into the downstream part of the trade, which is the nuclear power stations, which were completely off the radar for people a few years ago. I acknowledge we've definitely had some rotation of capital moving into the downstream part of the sector.

Now, the last couple of months, the uranium stocks have performed much better. June, July, and August were really challenging. It tends to be a seasonal pattern that we see in the summer where uranium stocks tend to underperform as well as the uranium price itself.

For whatever reason, we seem to come out of summer and into September and October, and we just start getting more news flow, more catalysts, and the sector tends to respond very quickly. Yes, we had a very tough three-month correction where sentiment was very low. For the last couple of months, they've been amongst the better performers across the resource spectrum. It feels to us like we're coming out of that air pocket and people are getting refocused on the upstream companies again.

James Connor: As we head into year-end, what should investors be looking out for in terms of anything to do with nuclear energy or uranium that might move the price higher?

John Ciampaglia: It's hard to believe we don't have that many weeks to go. Unfortunately, with all of the election to play out and monetary policy by the Fed, there's still going to be some macro noise affecting the price. But from a uranium-specific sector, I think what we're looking for is, one, what do the production numbers look like from the various companies? Are they having growing pains? Are they going to be cutting or increasing production forecast for 2025?

Then what is happening on the buying side, meaning, are utilities coming back to the market to buy uranium? I think it's fair to say that this year anyway, they've signed a very small amount of contracts. Now, remember, this is for not today's use or tomorrow, but multiple years in the future. If you don't buy today, you're basically deferring that purchase to another day. It's going to happen. It's just a matter of when, not if. We're watching those stats very carefully.

It seems as though to us that with the exception of the Chinese utilities, everyone else seems to be dragging their feet with this expectation that there's going to be plenty of uranium for everybody. We know in mining, that is not always the case. There are always little bumps along the road. The geopolitical risks related to uranium are higher relative to other commodities because of the very high concentration of uranium production, essentially outside of the Western countries.

This is something that we're watching for. Public sentiments around nuclear continues to improve. I think these technology companies are really highlighting the value that nuclear power provides. It's raising a lot of awareness amongst generalist investors. We've been incredibly busy. It's brought the last two months talking to, in many cases, institutions for the very first time who are saying, "Okay, what's going on here with Microsoft and Google? How does this all fit into the systems, the electricity systems, and the grids, and how is this going to play out for uranium? What's the knock-on effect." We've been very busy. But I also say there's been a lot of distractions with some of these macro factors that it seems to us that a lot of money is waiting for the U.S. election to pass to get some clarity.

James Connor: John, that was a great discussion. I want to thank you very much for spending time with us today. If someone would like to learn more about Sprott and its various products, where can they go?

John Ciampaglia: Just head over to sprott.com. That's S-P-R-O-T-T.com. We've got a great education section on our website that provides everything from monthly reports on precious metals, critical minerals. We've got a great roster of podcasts that are, in some cases, can be very technical with in-house experts, external guests and experts. We focus a ton of our energy and our time on just investor education. We'd encourage you to take advantage of our efforts there.

James Connor: Once again, John, thank you.

John Ciampaglia: Thank you for having me. Always nice to talk to you.

James Connor: I hope you enjoyed that discussion with John Ciampaglia on alternative investments, including gold. If you would like to learn more about gold and how it can add safety and diversification to your portfolio, visit our sister company, hardassetsalliance.com. Hardassetsalliance is a trusted platform that's being used by over 100,000 institutional and retail clients to buy and store physical gold. Once again, that's hardassetsalliance.com. There's a link below in the show notes. Don't forget to subscribe to the channel, like, and also leave a comment. And if you want to check out more content, watch this video now.

 

 

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Relative to other sectors, precious metals and natural resources investments have higher headline risk and are more sensitive to changes in economic data, political or regulatory events, and underlying commodity price fluctuations.  Risks related to extraction, storage and liquidity should also be considered.

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