| Ticker | Name | Research | View | What he said | At |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AUXX | Gold X2 Mining (Moss Gold, Ontario) | QT · SA · STK | Positive | First pro pick. District-scale Ontario gold (off-highway, hydro power, rail) backed by Brian Paes-Braga + SAF Group + Michael Hess, with AngloGold Ashanti a 9.9% strategic holder. Just closed a ~$100M financing, US-uplist + TSX-mainboard guided 2026. ~$1.43; was adding last week. A takeout candidate working toward a 10M-oz resource — modeled at $3,100 gold. | 38:46 |
| TCW | Trican Well Service | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Second pro pick. Canada's market-leading pressure pumper — an oil-field-services proxy on the energy trade that "screens very well" vs US peers. A direct LNG-Canada derivative; as completion work ramps, OFS becomes "the price maker not the price taker" and pricing power drops straight to the bottom line. | 43:29 |
| NILI | Surge Battery Metals (→ Lithium X2) | QT · SA · STK | Positive | Third pro pick, most speculative. A "Brian special" — same Paes-Braga + Michael Hess group just put in $35–36M, fully funding the high-grade Nevada North US lithium project to a construction decision, with a planned rename to Lithium X2 + NASDAQ uplist. "A textbook halo, scarce, strategic, slow to build." | 45:26 |
| CNQ | Canadian Natural Resources | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | "You never bet against Murray Edwards — you ride his coattails." Long-life, low-decline assets, a relentless operator compounding barrels in the ground, an incredible dividend. Down 12% from its March peak. "This is a forget-about story of compounding… you just own it." | 29:45 |
| COPX | Global X Copper Miners ETF | QT · SA · STK | Positive | "Copper is the metal everything runs through — you can't print it or substitute it. I'm all in on copper." Owns COPX as the "own the whole trade" leg — long the producers, "be long and forget about it," so a single mine collapse or bad jurisdiction can't sink him. | 26:45 |
| KCP | King Copper Discovery (Peru) | QT · SA · STK | Positive | The high-leverage copper "lottery ticket" — a ~$280M small cap in Peru, "no permitting, no drilling, all air… so far from being anything real," but the assets look great and "if it works it's going to work big." A small personal allocation paid for with realized gains. | 27:24 |
| HURA | Global X Uranium Index ETF (Canada) | QT · SA · FA | Positive | "I own HURA" — his uranium sector play / broad exposure, part of the AI-infrastructure theme. "You could lump uranium in there." | 33:54 |
| ATH | Athabasca Oil | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | The long-reserve-life energy "halo" name — the sector trades these on low-single-digit cash-flow multiples, but Athabasca has a reserve-life index of ~90. "Anytime I can pay six or seven times something for 90 years' worth of action, it just seems like a good trade." | 35:16 |
| NA | National Bank of Canada | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | "My favorite bank by far — the hedge fund of banks." Once the smallest of the large with a "too exposed to Canada" knock; Laurent Ferreira is "an incredible CEO" and it's all about that at-home execution. The only objection is price (16× forward) — but "price is what you pay, value is what you get." | 25:29 |
| MDA | MDA Space | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | "Infrastructure in orbit — a Canadian hard-asset story hiding in plain sight," big backlog and pipeline. "I like it. I don't own it." Sold down as SpaceX became available, but he thinks it will look really interesting. | 23:52 |
| LIT | Global X Lithium & Battery Tech ETF | QT · SA · STK | Positive | The broad lithium-battery play to own alongside the speculative single name — "own the lit ETF" as the safe leg, with Surge Battery Metals as the lottery ticket on top. | 47:06 |
| SOXX | iShares Semiconductor ETF | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | "Semis are the muscle of the AI trade — I prefer to own the skeleton underneath." Owns the index, not picking a winner, and trimming. Warns the SOXX has become "a gambler's paradise" of 2–4× levered derivatives — "weapons of mass destruction" — and sees more relative value in the energy "halo." | 20:28 |
| CCJ | Cameco | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | "I do own Cameco. Yes, it's expensive… this is getting crazy, a function of multiples of book." Likes the Westinghouse optionality, but it's the one he looks at and thinks valuation has run. | 34:18 |
| NXE | NexGen Energy | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | "It's really tough when you look at the market cap for pre-revenue." On their numbers, Rook One could be almost 20% of global supply — an irreplaceable scarce asset (the halo) that "at some point" should carry a richer multiple, but the pre-revenue valuation gives him pause. | 34:50 |
| STCK | Stack Capital Group | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | A SpaceX proxy — turned an $8M stake into ~30% of its book — that "got crushed off NAV" when SpaceX became directly available post-IPO. "The interesting one to watch" but a study in the gap between how investors want to see themselves and the real thing. | 24:13 |
| TRI | Thomson Reuters | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | "The anti-Adobe — the incumbent where AI is the tailwind, not the threat," yet the market keeps bidding it down. "I'm not active in that name" — leaves single-name software to the specialists. | 21:43 |
| LMT | Lockheed Martin | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | "I've owned it, I do own it, and I own the defense sector ETFs." Long 10–20-yr backlogs survive a 60-day peace, and defense spending is going up — "but at what price." The easy money got made; rotational/fast money is leaving (same setup as CNQ), so he's cautious and would tap a specialist defense manager rather than just buy an ETF. | 31:04 |
| AU | AngloGold Ashanti | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Cited as the validation behind Gold X2: the $47B gold major took a 9.9% strategic stake — "they don't write checks for any kind of reason," which underwrites the takeout thesis. Mentioned as context, not as a pick. | 42:43 |
| ADBE | Adobe | QT · SA · STK · FA | Negative | "The test case of whether AI is going to be a wrecking ball for incumbent software… the risk has never been more real" (Claude could disrupt the model). "It's just not somewhere I want to be trading." | 22:35 |
| CPB | Campbell Soup | QT · SA · STK · FA | Negative | "A classic value trap — the opposite of a halo." A brand business "getting designed out by weekly injection" (GLP-1); a 7% yield, 10× earnings and a heavy debt load "would lure me in, but I'm not going to do it this time." Staples/healthcare no longer bid even in a safety trade. | 36:28 |
| SpaceX | SpaceX (private) | — | Neutral | The IPO that "didn't break the markets" — a wave of new issuance / liquidity. He wasn't an early investor; the successful listing crushed its public proxies (Stack Capital) as money chose "the real thing." | 23:12 |
| Anthropic | Anthropic (private) | — | Neutral | Named with OpenAI as the next IPOs that "are going to need dollars to be found elsewhere" — part of the equity-supply wall the melt-up market must absorb after a 20-year shrinking-float era. | 7:40 |
| OpenAI | OpenAI (private) | — | Neutral | Cited alongside Anthropic as additional equity that "needs to be sapped up" — capital has to come from somewhere, a risk the melt-up may "bulldoze right over" until it can't. | 7:40 |
| Lithium X | Lithium X Energy (private, former) | — | Neutral | Brian Paes-Braga's former company (he was CEO; monetized it years ago) — context for why Larson backs "Brian specials": "when Brian gets involved in things, magic has tended to happen." | 40:26 |
"View" is Chad Larson's stance in this conversation (Positive / Neutral / Negative), not a price rating. Research links: QT Qualtrim · SA Seeking Alpha · STK Stock Analysis (omitted where no clean page exists). Private companies (SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, Lithium X) have no ticker. Several names are Canadian listings: AUXX/KCP/NILI trade on the TSX Venture; TCW/NA/MDA/STCK/ATH/HURA on the TSX.
A jargon-free summary of the thesis behind each pick — what it actually is and why he holds that view. (Plain-language companion to the table above; renders on each ticker's consolidated page.)
Gold X2 is an early-stage gold company developing the Moss Gold deposit in Ontario — a "district-scale" find (big enough to host a whole mining district), sitting right off the Trans-Canada Highway with hydro power and a rail line nearby, so it's a real, buildable project rather than "a story on a map" in some hard-to-reach country.
The reason Larson owns it is the backers. Brian Paes-Braga (who built and sold Lithium X) is the lead, alongside SAF Group (a big Canadian private-credit firm) and Michael Hess — and crucially AngloGold Ashanti, a $47B gold major, bought a 9.9% strategic stake. A giant like that "doesn't write checks for any kind of reason," so its presence both de-risks the story and makes Gold X2 a likely takeover target. The company just raised ~$100M, is drilling toward a 10-million-ounce resource, and plans to list in the US and on the TSX main board in 2026. He calls it speculative — it pulled back from ~$2 to $1.43 and he was adding on that dip — but with multiple ways to win (keep growing the resource, or get bought).
Trican is Canada's biggest "pressure pumper" — the company that pumps high-pressure fluid into oil and gas wells to crack the rock and get production flowing (the "completion" work after a well is drilled). It's an oil-field-services (OFS) business, which is a leveraged way to bet on the energy cycle: when drilling booms, "no one makes more money than oil-field services," but when it busts it can be brutal — Larson notes the same business has minted fortunes and caused bankruptcies.
His angle: as Canada's LNG-Canada export terminal ramps up, demand for completion work rises, and because the pumpers are running near full capacity ("utilization"), they finally get to "raise prices" — becoming the "price maker, not the price taker." Extra pricing flows almost entirely to profit. He sees Trican screening cheaper than its larger US peers.
Surge Battery Metals is developing the Nevada North lithium project — a high-grade, US-based deposit (lithium powers EV and grid batteries). It's the most speculative of his three picks. The bull case is again about the people: the same Brian Paes-Braga / Michael Hess group just put in $35–36M, which fully funds the project to a "construction decision" (the point where you decide to actually build the mine), and the company plans to rename to Lithium X2 and uplist to NASDAQ. Larson calls this kind of deal "a Brian special" and says in a resource market he wants to own them.
He frames it as "a textbook halo" — scarce, strategic, and slow to build, so hard to replace. The validation he points to: major car companies have been taking direct stakes in lithium projects like this. The "large-scale PEA" he mentions is a Preliminary Economic Assessment — an early study estimating whether the deposit can be mined profitably. As with his other speculative names, you own the broad lithium ETF (LIT) as the safe core and treat Surge as the "lottery ticket" on top.
CNQ is one of Canada's largest oil & gas producers, run by billionaire Murray Edwards. Larson's whole thesis is "you never bet against Murray Edwards — you ride his coattails." The company owns "long-life, low-decline" assets — reserves that keep producing for decades without falling off quickly — and the operator quietly keeps growing the barrels and reserves in the ground while paying a big dividend.
The stock is down 12% from its March peak because fast money rotated out of energy after the war scare faded, but Larson treats that as a chance to own a compounding machine: "he's compounding barrels in the ground, and long-term barrels are going to be more valuable." It's the "forget-about-it" core energy holding, not the exciting trade.
COPX is a basket of copper-mining stocks. Larson is "all in on copper" because it's "the metal everything runs through — you can't print it or substitute it," and AI data centers, electrification and the grid all need huge amounts of it. By owning the whole-sector ETF, he gets the copper bet without single-company risk: he doesn't have to worry that one mine collapses or one foreign government turns hostile. "Just own the trade, be long, and forget about it" — this is his safe leg of the copper barbell.
King Copper is the opposite end of his copper barbell: a tiny (~$280M) exploration company drilling a copper project in Peru. He's blunt that it's early and risky — "no permitting, no drilling, all air… so far from being anything real." But the geology looks great, and "if it works it's going to work big." It's a deliberate "lottery ticket" — a small position that can deliver outsized gains, paid for with profits he's already booked elsewhere — sitting alongside the safe COPX ETF.
HURA is a Canadian-listed ETF holding the whole uranium sector — miners and the fuel itself. Larson owns it as a clean way to get uranium exposure as part of his "physical backbone of AI" theme: data centers need enormous, reliable power, and nuclear is increasingly the answer, so uranium demand should rise. By owning the index rather than a single miner, he gets the theme without betting on which company wins.
Athabasca is a Canadian oil producer whose appeal is its "reserve-life index" of about 90 — meaning at current production rates it has roughly 90 years of oil in the ground. The market values most energy producers at just a few times their annual cash flow, treating the reserves as if they'll run out soon. Larson's point: "anytime I can pay six or seven times something for 90 years' worth of action, it just seems like a good trade." It's a "halo" asset — heavy, hard to replace, and priced as if its decades of future production barely count.
National Bank is Larson's favorite bank — "the hedge fund of banks." Historically it was the smallest of Canada's big banks, and the knock was that it was "too exposed to Canada" (less diversified internationally). Larson flips that into a strength: its tight, "at-home execution" under CEO Laurent Ferreira has been excellent, and being smaller means it can still move and grow rather than being "stuck in your chair" like the giants. The only real objection is price — about 16× forward earnings — which he waves off with Buffett's line: "price is what you pay, value is what you get."
MDA Space is a Canadian space-technology company — Larson calls it "infrastructure in orbit," a hard-asset space story "hiding in plain sight" with a big order backlog and pipeline. He likes the business but is candid that he doesn't own it. The stock sold off when SpaceX became directly investable (money rotated to the bigger name), but he thinks MDA "will look really interesting" from here.
LIT is a broad ETF covering lithium miners and battery-technology companies. It's the "safe leg" Larson pairs with his speculative lithium pick (Surge Battery Metals): own the diversified ETF for the overall electrification/EV theme, then add a small high-risk single name on top as the lottery ticket. The ETF spreads the bet so no single company failure sinks the position.
SOXX is the main semiconductor-stocks ETF. Larson owns it but is trimming, and his framing is memorable: "semis are the muscle of the AI trade — I prefer to own the skeleton underneath," meaning the power, copper and cooling that chips literally can't run without. He also warns that SOXX has become "a gambler's paradise": traders pile into 2x–4x leveraged versions of it (funds that move two-to-four times as much as the index, up or down), which he calls "weapons of mass destruction." He'd rather rotate that money into cheaper, harder-to-replace energy and metals assets — the "halo."
Cameco is the big Western uranium producer, and Larson owns it — but with reservations. He likes the optionality from its Westinghouse nuclear-services stake, but flags that the valuation "is getting crazy" on a price-to-book basis (the stock is expensive relative to the accounting value of its assets). So it's a hold-with-caution rather than a fresh buy; he gets cleaner, cheaper exposure through the HURA ETF.
NexGen is a uranium developer whose flagship Rook One project, by the company's own numbers, could eventually supply almost 20% of the world's uranium. That scarcity is exactly the "halo" Larson loves — an irreplaceable asset that he argues should one day command a richer valuation than the low single-digit cash-flow multiples the sector trades at. The catch keeping him neutral: it's pre-revenue (the mine isn't producing yet), so paying a large market value today for future, not-yet-real output gives him pause.
Stack Capital is a Canadian-listed company that holds stakes in private firms — most famously SpaceX, which grew to roughly 30% of its portfolio after an initial $8M investment turned into a big number. That made it a popular "proxy" for owning SpaceX before SpaceX itself was public. Once SpaceX listed, the stock "got crushed off NAV" — it fell to a steep discount to the net asset value of its holdings, because investors who'd bought it to get SpaceX exposure could now just buy the real thing. Larson uses it as a cautionary tale (the gap between "your ideal self and your actual self") and calls it interesting to watch rather than a buy. ("Off NAV" = trading well below the underlying value of what it owns.)
Thomson Reuters sells professional data and software (legal, tax, news). Larson calls it "the anti-Adobe" — an incumbent for which AI should be a tailwind (it makes their data products more useful) rather than a threat. Yet the market keeps marking it down as if AI will hurt it. He thinks that's wrong, but he's "not active in that name" — as an allocator he leaves individual software stock-picking to specialists, so it's a view he holds without a position.
Lockheed is the defense giant, and Larson owns it plus defense-sector ETFs. His logic: defense spending is structurally rising, and the huge 10–20-year order backlogs don't disappear just because there's a 60-day peace framework. The hesitation is all about price — "at what price" he keeps repeating. After the war, the easy money was made, and "fast money leaves quick," so rotational capital is draining out of defense (the same pattern as CNQ). Because so few stocks are outperforming, he'd rather hire a specialist defense manager and tilt toward cheaper "value" names than just buy the whole sector here.
Adobe makes creative and document software (Photoshop, PDF, etc.). Larson treats it as the market's live experiment — "the test case of whether AI is going to be a wrecking ball for incumbent software." The worry is real: AI tools (he name-checks Claude) could replicate or undercut what Adobe sells, so the risk to its business model "has never been more real." It's not that he's actively betting against it — he just says "it's not somewhere I want to be trading," and as an allocator he avoids the name entirely.
Campbell Soup is the classic packaged-food staple, and on paper it's tempting — a 7% dividend yield, 10× earnings, the kind of cheap "safety" stock that would normally lure Larson in. He's passing this time because he sees it as "a value trap" (cheap for a bad reason, with the price likely to keep falling). His two arguments: it's "getting designed out by weekly injection" — GLP-1 weight-loss drugs are changing how people eat, shrinking demand for processed food — and its products are "easily replicated and moved across supply chains," so it keeps losing market share. He calls it "the opposite of a halo": nobody cares which tomato soup they buy, so there's no scarcity or pricing power to protect it. More broadly, staples and healthcare no longer act as safe havens even in a scare.
Captured from the public YouTube video (transcript in transcript.txt) for personal study. "View" reflects Chad Larson's stance in this conversation, not a price rating. Not investment advice. © In the Money with Amber Kanwar for source material.