The Commodity Boom Is Here — But Investors Could Get Burned

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**Jonathan Wellum** (1:26)
You do have to be careful when you go into the commodities. You have to know your circle of competence. That's probably a more sane way to go into the space than to try to pick off some junior mining company. That's tough. That's very difficult and highly speculative. Eventually, you have to put the steel toed boots on and go out and see some of these facilities.

**Adam Taggart** (1:51)
Yeah, this is first of all, you just rattle off all the things that keep me up at night. And this is why we talk a lot about, you know, leaning into more actively looking at your portfolio, thinking about different kinds of diversifications, you know, into things that are real and scarce.
Do we need to make a differentiation between precious metals and the role they play, and then some of these critical minerals, some of the issues that President Trump was just talking about, industrial metals? Do you sort of look at mining as a whole, or do you have to start to be a little bit more nuanced about where the opportunities are in this?

**Jonathan Wellum** (2:25)
Yeah, that's a great question. For us, and I think this is going to depend on your knowledge and your expertise, you do have to be careful when you go into the commodities, because, you know, low prices, that solution to the problem of low prices is low prices, and all of a sudden you'll get all sorts of people going in and finding more products, and they are cyclical, so they can go up and down like yoyos, and we've seen that. It's very cyclical. We then, because of that, we've tried to focus on some of the key areas, like copper, which is more predictable, uranium when it comes to energy and nuclear, silver, which is most important in the whole electric vehicles, the data centers, conductivity. And of course, gold is a monetary asset. So we've zeroed in on some of the major ones. We're not going down into a lot of the smaller, and rare earths and things like that, but I think there's opportunities there. There's opportunities there for people who are more knowledgeable and have greater expertise.
We're sticking up a little bit higher up in the value chain as we see it, but that's just what we do because we're a small investment group here, and we also invest in other sectors, so it's just a matter of headspace. But I do think if you really sharpen some of these other areas, there'll be some good opportunities to invest in some of the rare earths for a period of time, but it will be cyclical because there's no shortage of rare earths. It's just that they haven't been developed in the Western world. China has dominated it, and because of ESG and the green agenda and so forth, we've turned up our nose against rare earths and developing them and processing them. But that's quickly changing, and as that quickly changes, I think the prices will become much more moderate, and the opportunities will come and then go, if you will. So that's why we're staying really gold, silver, uranium, copper, some of the main metals and minerals.
And then we get into the agricultural area, potash, and some of the nutrients that go into the farming area. Those are the areas that we're focusing most of our attention on. And of course, a little bit in oil and gas, too.