Gold's Big Comeback: Why the World's Largest Money Managers Are Loading Up Again

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

This is InvestTalk from KPP Financial, helping investors make sense of the markets one day at a time. Here's your host, Luke Guerrero.

Luke Guerrero (0:16)

Good afternoon, fellow investors, and welcome to the Tuesday, September 15th, 2026 edition of InvestTalk. I'm your host, Luke Guerrero, and I will be back with you after battling a bit of a flu last week, which was no joke. So stay healthy out there for sure. All right.

That being said, it's been a while, but now I'm here and I'm ready to talk about today's market performance. I'm ready to talk about our show topics, but before we do all that, why don't we tackle this caller question now?

SPEAKER_3 (0:53)

This is Steve from Denver. And I'm interested in investing in copper and I've been looking at symbols FCX and SCCO.

I prefer SCCO, but I just want to check and see what your opinions were. Thank you.

Luke Guerrero (1:14)

FCX and SCCO are the tickers that were mentioned. You know, we actually own both of these names in various strategies for clients. The reason being, we think that copper plays a paramount role in grid monetization, in data center build outs, and so many things that have driven markets so far these past couple of years. Now SCCO, let's focus on that one because it seems like you care about that one the most, is Southern Copper Corporation. They are an integrated copper producer. In fact, they're one of the world's largest copper miners. They do have the world's largest copper reserves, and most importantly, the number one mine life amongst copper producers. Then they get a bunch of by-products of their copper production, so your zinc, your silver, and they have managed to, amongst their industry peers, really have pretty low cash costs. Now, this name is up 36.07 percent year-to-date, up 79 percent over the past 52 weeks. It's a pretty positive performance ever since the end of the pandemic. Immunos up 42 percent, 8 percent, 63, and now 36 percent that's going back the past four years. Revenue has climbed significantly since 2023, from 9.8 billion to 16.9 billion. In the most recent quarter, their net sales were up 40.6 percent. Their diluted EPS had a pretty solid beat of about one to three percent, came in at two dollars and one cents. That was up from one dollar and 17 cents the previous year. And they upgraded their guidance. It's not formal guidance, but they were talking about their copper production, so they don't really do guidance for revenue and for earnings. But from what they do got, it looked pretty solid. You know, the sentiment from the earnings call was, for the most part, positive. I'm looking at facts and sentiment analysis here. And management was pretty specific and encouraging about their transitions in Peruvian markets, which is a big part of their business.

Again, we like this name. We hold actually, again, Southern Copper and Free Port McClorn, we hold both of those for clients amongst our strategies.

I think that if you want to get exposure to the copper theme, the good place to start is the world largest miner.

Doesn't hurt that they just came off of a record breaking quarter on paper where margins and profits and revenue all surged. Now, yes, a lot of that is commodity price effect layered on top of what has been some flat production volumes. So you should maybe treat the price return here as less evidence of some superior manager performance, as much as it is the overarching secular theme. As with any miner, miners are leverage bets on the underlying commodity. We have to keep that in mind, but copper is critical.

Critical for what we are trying to do within the energy space and within technology. And oh, by the way, it's pretty difficult to bring a new mine online. So supply is likely to be constrained for the foreseeable future. So if you believe, like we do, of the importance of copper as a commodity, we certainly would welcome either of these names within our portfolios. That is SCCO.

SPEAKER_4 (5:00)

Thanks for the call.

Luke Guerrero (5:02)

We had a great show for you yesterday. Justin looked into a story around China's rare earth export halt and how supply chain leverage sometimes becomes a bit of a market weapon. He also answered a listener question on Tigger PGR, which is Progressive Corporation. If you happen to miss it, I encourage you to check it out. And remember, the best way to never miss an episode of Invest Talk is to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. All right, on to today where we are going to be talking about gold and its big comeback, namely why the world's largest money managers are now loading up once again.