Michael Gentile Sees a Major Opportunity in Canadian Mining

Trevor Hall (0:17)

All right, and as previously mentioned, Trevor Hall here with Mining Stock Daily, reporting from London and kicking off a number of interviews throughout the week.

We will be doing some from the London Metals Exchange Week in the coming days, but my first stop, literally first stop, of just getting off the airplane this morning is over to the Gentile Mining Investor Forum. And Michael Gentile sitting here with me to my left. Mike, thanks so much for having me. I kind of want to talk about this event because in the program, you had written like, well last year you started bringing some of these companies that you were involved with around to London. But you thought it needed something more, it needed something official, a center location to bring everybody in and then have an actual conference. Can you talk about that epiphany of that evolving from just running companies around from office to office to actually creating an event with your name on it?

Michael Gentile (1:15)

Yeah, so a lot of my companies, as you probably know, come to Europe to do marketing road shows. They'll spend $10,000 a day for a service provider to get them a group lunch for 10 or 12 investors. I try to be more thoughtful with my company and say, how can I leverage real value and get scale and synergies in my portfolio? Last year, I told six of my favorite companies, I said, why don't we all go to Europe together?

Instead of getting 12 people for lunch, we can get 50 to 100 people per city. I'll do a keynote presentation and we can do 10 minute hits each of you in front of a group of 50 to 100 people.

The idea was born last year. It was a huge success. London was by far the most robust market for us. We had about 100 investors show up for the six companies last year. My corporates loved it. They felt there was a great audience, a lot of interaction with investors. This year, I said, well, London is a big market. There's not a lot of conferences in London that focus on the microcap, small cap resource market. So why don't I bring my vast majority of my portfolio to London? So this year, the idea was bring 24 of my top 35 investments in my portfolio to London, make it more of a conference, allow them to have group meetings, one-on-ones and presentation rooms. We didn't know what the reception was going to be, but quite honestly, it's been quite impressive. About 175 investors showed up today. All my companies have full dance cards and there's a great buzz, great energy in the room. So again, they can come to London on their own and see 12 investors or 20 investors. Today, they have access to 175 investors and they have a common thematic, which are my portfolio companies, which share certain traits and attributes that are attractive to investors wanting to know more about the junior resource market.

Trevor Hall (2:35)

Do you notice anything different as far as the investors' approach? And how is it different here in the London or UK market compared to most of what we see in the Canadian US side?

Michael Gentile (2:46)

I think I like the European market quite a bit because they've been gold investors for longer. They've lived through many of the major currency devaluations and the value of hard assets is not lost on them at all. There's also more of a culture of owning junior mining shares here than especially versus the US. So there's a big appetite of investors. We're going to see 500 investors in the next five days, in the next five cities that we're going to do. A lot of them are serious investors in the space, have researched the space. So there's less of a wall of education you have to go through to engage with these investors. And they tend to be a little stickier, a little long-term focused. Europeans have a bit of a longer mindset than North Americans.

So, also as I build my companies, I like sticky, long-term patient capital, because the duration of a junior mining opportunity tends to be three to ten years for a full success story. So, I like the historical background, I like their openness to gold equities, and I like the patience of their capital. So, it's definitely a market I like to spend a lot of time in.

Trevor Hall (3:34)

You and I had a long-form discussion, I think it was about two months ago or something like that, if I remember correctly. And we talked about your activist role, taking large positions in these companies and being patient with your own capital.