By Brian Maher
This post “If You’re Not a Contrarian, You’re a Victim” appeared first on Daily Reckoning.
The Daily Reckoning has taken up temporary headquarters in the fair (and humidity-free!) city of Vancouver, Canada…
We’ve alighted upon these blessed climes to cover this week’s annual Sprott Natural Resource Symposium.
It is here where some of the world’s brightest stars in finance and natural resources gather to spot market omens… read tea leaves… and announce the way to riches.
Our own Jim Rickards and David Stockman are keynote speakers this week here in Vancouver.
Jim’s senior geologist, Byron King, also takes the podium.
Your editor enters this week’s proceedings in the role of fly on wall.
We’ll be reporting findings… leaking critical intelligence… and issuing private dispatches from behind closed doors.
We hope you can put the information to good use.
It’s the next best thing to being there yourself, we dare say — without having to purchase an admission ticket that can only be described as expensive.
The Sprott conference tends to attract what you may call “contrarians.”
No surprise, that, given the mantra of Rick Rule, Sprott’s CEO and conference host:
If you’re not a contrarian, you’re a victim.
Many fancy themselves contrarians. Few are in reality.
The embrace of the herd proves too seductive for most — safety, they intuitively sense, lies in numbers.
But there are certainly some contrarian-looking folks on hand.
We observed an eccentric or two yesterday, some with odd crotchets easier witnessed than described.
There was this one fellow who — no — we’d better not say.
But given the price of an admission ticket… these must be wealthy eccentrics.
But to the conference itself…
Several fellows spoke yesterday. These included Rick Rule himself and other CEOs of precious metal companies.
If there was one central nugget to emerge from their briefings, it is this:
Projected mining supplies will struggle to meet rising demand for precious metals in the years ahead.
For example, David Garofalo, CEO of Goldcorp, claimed that the gold sector has seen a one-third decline in its reserves over the past five years.
He further projects that gold production industrywide will decline 15–20% over the next few years.
Heaping Pelion upon Ossa, Garofalo says it takes some 15–20 years to add new capacity.
That is, gold production will decrease, and it could be years and years until new gold reserves come to market.
We thus confront the possibility of “Peak Gold”:
This is exactly the drum senior geologist Byron King of Rickards Gold Speculator has been pounding for quite a while.
Byron noted earlier this year that 2016 was the first year mine production fell since 2008.
And quoting a Thomson Reuters report, Byron notes there are:
Few new projects and expansions expected to begin producing this year, and those in the near-term pipeline are generally fairly modest in scale, hence our view that global mine supply is set to continue a multiyear downtrend in 2017…
Add it all up and you have a recipe for falling production.
Patrick Donnelly, president of First Mining Finance Corp., confirmed yesterday that …read more
Source:: Daily Reckoning feed
The post “If You’re Not a Contrarian, You’re a Victim” appeared first on Junior Mining Analyst.