Breakout Underway In Gold & Silver. How High Will They Go? | Jonathan Wellum

**Adam Taggart** (0:01)
And we should be live. Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Thoughtful Money founder and host, Adam Taggart. Welcoming you here for a special Wednesday live stream with Jonathan Wellum, head of one of the financial advisors that Thoughtful Money endorses. Jonathan runs ROCKLINC Partners up in Canada. So they are, ROCKLINC is Thoughtful Money's endorsed Canadian advisor. Jonathan is also a very experienced investor in general, very much from a Warren Buffett style, but very much experienced in investing in the precious metals. And on the day we're talking, we seem to be right in the thick, Jonathan, of a breakout in gold and silver. So it's actually a very exciting time. Folks, it's early my day. That's why you're getting the slick back shower hair. Hopefully it'll dry as we talk here. But anyways, Jonathan, great to see you.

**Jonathan Wellum** (0:54)
Great to be on the program again and see you and talk with the listeners. That's wonderful.

**Adam Taggart** (0:59)
All right. Well, look, Jonathan, why don't we just get right to the meat of it here? So for the long time precious metals investors that are watching, they've got to be feeling pretty chipper today. Gold is, it's been on a string of breakouts over the recent past trading days. But last check, it was well above $3,600 an ounce. It actually surprises me to have that word come out of my mouth. That gold has moved very far over the past two years. And so that's an all time high for gold. By the way, this is gold futures, the gold futures price I'm mentioning here. The silver futures broke above $40 an ounce, I think, two trading days ago, and are now pushing their way towards $42 an ounce at the moment. And I know, from past conversations with you, Jonathan, we talked about silver really trying to bust through $35 an ounce. And then once it did, we didn't really have a lot of resistance above it until it got up near around $50 or so an ounce. And I think we're maybe sort of seeing evidence of that in real time here. So anyways, I will take a beat. But as someone who's been investing in this space for a long time, who I think has been positioning his client capital for a moment like this, give me a sense of how you're reading the tape right now.

**Jonathan Wellum** (2:17)
Yes. Back when I set up ROCKLINC after being in the mutual fund industry for almost 20 years, I set up ROCKLINC and we took basically a 15% position or so in precious metals securities, a lot of them the royalty companies. We like the Frankos, the Wheatons, the Royal Gold, Sandstorm, etc. And so we built positions there and then we did very well. Of course, as you know, in 2011, things jumped up and then they went back down again. And then in 2016, we got a bit of a run and then back down again, and then COVID and so forth. But our view again, we're value investors, is we're looking at the macro economic environment and we're seeing everything that your, the different folks that you have on the program are speaking about in terms of the debt issues, debt, potential debt deflation. You've got, again, government is just running out of control in terms of deficits. All of those factors, fiat currency under pressure, I mean, the numbers are horrific in terms of loss of purchasing power over the last number of decades, not just the last couple of years. And so our view is you have to be there and you try to buy the best companies, companies that are well run, know how to invest in the sector, know how to reinvest and so forth. And so that's what we've done. And yeah, we're very happy now with some of the positions. We've seen significant expansion in terms of the price appreciation. And we're happy to see that. But our view is that we're not going to get out of our monetary and fiscal situations in an easy manner. It's going to be painful. And therefore, you need to be in these spaces and you want to own some of the best companies. And for some people, they can dabble and maybe do a little bit of speculation, because when things start to run, as you know, they can really take off.
But again, you want to be wise and you want to be prudent and careful so that you don't throw money down the toilet, so to speak, and you make sure you're buying companies with good managers, with good assets and reasonable countries.

**Adam Taggart** (4:13)
All right. Well, look, I'm going to talk about any and all of that today, Jonathan. And then we'll also, folks, we will halfway through, I'll do my best to open this up to Q&A from the live audience, so you can ask questions there in the live stream and I'll start pulling them in.