Title: Gianni Kovacevic: How I'm Playing Today's Most Mispriced Opportunity Show: Investing News Network (host Charlotte McLeod) Guest: Gianni Kovacevic (investor, author of "My Electrician Drives a Porsche") Date: 2026-08-27 URL: https://youtu.be/SyVt35P3BYk Length: 31:10 Note: YouTube auto-transcript pasted by Stephen. Fillers (um/uh/you know) and stutters removed; wording otherwise verbatim. Auto-caption name errors left as spoken except where noted in the analysis page (Schlumbumberge = Schlumberger/SLB, Luminina/Lumin Metals = Lumina Metals, Ross Bey = Ross Beaty, Don Cox = Don Coxe, Tuckville = Tocqueville, Spiro Agnu = Spiro Agnew, de Galier = DeGolyer).
00:05 I'm Charlotte McLeod with investingnews.com and here today with me is Gianni Kovacevic, investor and author. Thank you so much for being here. It's always great to be catching up with you. >> Thank you so much, Charlotte. Here we are, end of August. People are back in the saddle in about a week from now. So, it's time to sharpen the pencils and hopefully be current on what's going to happen in the world the next weeks and months.
00:28 >> Absolutely. And we have so much to catch up on today. Our last conversation I believe was all the way back in October of last year. So a lot has changed. You made a couple of quite accurate price calls which we are going to get into. But I want to start with a fun question for you. When you're looking at the market right now, what are you seeing as the most mispriced asset? >> That's a great question and hopefully people watching this, that's something that should captivate their imagination. You can talk about gold,
00:59 silver, copper, AI, Nvidia, all these things that is talked about all day, every day. In my view, the most mispriced opportunity right now is not just lithium, but direct lithium extraction. And I want to focus everyone's attention to the world's largest oil and gas service provider. I'm talking about Schlumberger.
01:22 They now go by SLB. And on their website, they've already announced to the world that in Clayton Valley, Nevada, they're operating a massive facility. And what they've done is they've acquired technologies plural and they are now saying that they can produce lithium commercially from brine sources. I've recently had phone calls with people that are at a very deep level research-wise in lithium.
01:55 And before we even get started, I say, "Well, how familiar are you with SLB's technology and where and who they're working with?" And they're not familiar with it. So, Nicholas Leansky, who runs mining, has done a couple of very good interviews. It's on SLB's website. Why am I really pounding the drum on this one? Because this is the most mispriced opportunity where the results are already in.
02:24 So if you speculate in junior mining, this is where you need to focus right now. So Schlumberger is working with Rio Tinto, TechMet, which is this big, the US government I think gave $1.4 billion, and they're working with Lithium Bank. They are doing the feasibility study for Lithium Bank. Lithium Bank just acquired a suite of infrastructure at surface in Alberta which is going to make their project the most advanced DLE project in the world.
02:52 They also acquired 160 acres of land where the facilities are going to go. Schlumberger is going to complete that feasibility study. It's going to be put to the market early next year. And here's an important point as well. They are going to be operating the facility. It's Schlumberger's personnel, not little Lithium Bank's personnel.
03:13 So I am speculating and I've talked about it before but they are going to close the gap on the peer group and with Lithium Bank having just closed the financing I think that this is something that has disproportionate benefit but the research is not with Lithium Bank, it's with Schlumberger.
03:29 So if you're looking for a 10, maybe a 20 bagger, start with that. It's lithium, but DLE, in Schlumberger's own words, they use 95% less water. They use far less energy. The footprint is 10% of what that is for hard rock mining and you get the lithium instantly. Their technology creates the final holy grail, the gate.
03:58 It's a refined product at site, Charlotte. So, the customer chooses, do they want lithium hydroxide or lithium carbonate at site. There's no longer the shipping the product to China for refinement. It solves all of that. It's in the USA and Canada. And this is something that people are going to see.
04:17 And as Don Coxe famously once said, never invest in the story on page one. That's the efficient market. Invest in the story on page 16 that's headed to page one. I can guarantee you you are going to see headlines: Schlumberger succeeds with Rio Tinto, Schlumberger and TechMet, and Schlumberger and Lithium Bank. ▶ Page 1 ▶ Page 16
04:38 This is all going to happen in real time in the next 3, 6, 12 months. And just like hydraulic fracking for oil and gas, people thought it wasn't going to work. This is working. It's the biggest companies in the world that are embracing this and it's coming to page one soon. And I think we as speculators are going to get rewarded very handsomely. ▶ Page 1
04:59 I was correct on my calls with First Phosphate, some other copper names that have done very well. This is my biggest conviction right now. And I wouldn't even call it speculating anymore. It's all about execution and it's going to be about SLB doing their job and Lithium Bank just happens to hold the assets. >> Well, great look at how you're focusing on the lithium sector, that DLE angle.
05:21 I think that's great to go into. I wonder if we can take a step back. We don't often get a chance to talk here about the lithium sector or battery metals in general on our channel. Can you give me a sense of where we are in the lithium cycle right now? Because I think everybody will remember years ago when prices went really crazy, then the big pullback.
05:42 Where are we at right now? >> Well, lithium is growing at a CAGR growth rate better than 20%. So that's probably going to slow down, but we're still going to see 20% CAGR growth rate probably through 2035 and maybe even beyond. So the rule of 72 will tell you that the overall demand of lithium will double in the next 3 and 1/2, 4 years.
06:06 So another number you can look at, and you could sit here and do a PhD and I can look at all the graphs. It's the overall batteries. We're going to go from 1.8 terawatt hours of battery. You don't even need to know what that number means. And the estimations are something like 5 terawatt hours. So it almost triples. The demand of lithium is insatiable.
06:27 It's growing by 20%. And the only way that the world is going to be able to provide this lithium is through technology, which is exactly that. They keep moving the chains forward. The biggest companies of the world, not the little guys that have these little DLEs that have not worked.
06:44 I'm talking the big guys. And for that reason, it's going to be a big helper. We're still going to need hard rock. Salar is where we can get it. There's a lot of push back. They use a lot of water. It takes a lot of time within the lithium triangle, Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia. This is going to be a major pillar, but the lithium market is going to grow and I don't know if we have to use the word mania like we saw a couple times, but let's call it lithium market very good where it goes from, it was nothing in the
07:15 lithium winter that we saw. John Wayne once said, "How low was it?" He said, "Friend, lower than a snake's belly in a wagon wheel rut." Like it was no bid. Lithium 18 months ago was just taken out behind the barn and shot. Not the case. Meanwhile, the fundamentals keep driving. And sodium ion batteries are not going to disrupt what I'm talking about right now.
07:37 They are going to be part of this. They might be 10% of total batteries. So when we go from 1.8 terawatt hours to 5, they're going to play a role. Density still matters even in battery storage. Okay? It's going to play a role but it does not disrupt what I'm talking about, and how industry, as it becomes more and more commercialized, more and more lithium will be coming from those sources led by the largest companies in the world. So you don't have to lose a lot of sleep. Lithium prices and the market I think are going to be
08:07 very good, which is why it is a 2027, 28, 29 story that is going to have disproportionate benefit. Everything's moved already, your copper development stories there. Is there a 10-bagger left anymore? No, there isn't. In this space, what I'm talking about, in the highest quality names, there is a five and 10-bagger sitting there, but you have to do the work.
08:29 >> All right. Well, 2027, 2028, that is pretty imminent. So, people have time to position right now. And if we're talking about the energy angle, I think we also have to take a look at copper. I always think about you when I'm hearing about copper, and it's really been in the headlines lately.
08:46 The prices are at or near all-time highs. I think there's a lot of tariff concerns that are helping to drive levels up there. When you're looking at copper, what do you see coming for prices? Are these levels sustainable? How do you see it? >> Yes, these prices are sustainable. Like everything else that's priced in the US dollar, the loss of spending power.
09:05 So, we're looking now at copper at all-time highs. How much spending power has been lost in the US dollar? So everything, inflation, we've seen it everywhere from Big Macs to copper to everything you buy, it's not really all-time highs. If we look at an inflation-adjusted all-time high in copper, when you factor in the loss of spending power in the US dollar, there's room to grow still in my opinion.
09:32 So I have been involved in copper for a very long time. You were there when I wrote my book in 2016 and that now is a page one story. We have been rewarded, those that were speculating in copper. Some of the people that might have listened to my talks, you may remember when I did my book, My Electrician Drives a Porsche. I signed 20,000 copies the exact same way. ▶ Page 1
09:52 I would put a graph. It would have a little squiggly line with an arrow and it would say go copper go. And this is when copper was $2 a pound. When copper has matured, we have these high prices. How do you allocate capital to copper? So, I can give you a name.
10:15 So, I have been involved with the recent IPO of Lumina Metals. This is Ross Beaty's new company. It has not taken off out of the gate. It IPOed at 12.50 a share and it's now trading around 10.5, 11 bucks, market cap I don't know, something like a billion dollars. They raised $400 million. That's how dysfunctional this market is right now.
10:36 They've got little spin-offs they can do. And I was speaking with Jordan Pandoff, the CEO. It's the world's largest silver deposit. So, 1.5 billion ounces of silver. And they have the ability to sell a stream, 3 to 5 million ounces, let's say, and that's worth, let's say, the market cap of the whole company.
10:57 So, that's a driver there. Plus, they have a secondary project within the company that could also get spun out, which is a world-class project. This is in Poland and I think that's somewhere that the stock should have done much better I would say from the IPO and that's another sort of story that I think is going to be very current.
11:16 I'll be visiting the site in October 22-23 with a group of investors and analysts and it's a name for people that want something that has not moved: copper with a big silver kicker. So I like the name Lumina Metals. >> Before we move on from copper, I want to ask you a little bit more about the companies. Clearly, copper is a story that's going to be with us for the long term. The future looks bright.
11:40 Does it make sense for investors to focus on the earlier stage stories like you've just been talking about, or does it make sense to also move further up the spectrum into the developers or producers? >> Well, I can't give financial advice, but certainly you want to have less volatility. We're going to see volatility no matter what we have.
12:01 The overhanging problem as everyone knows is these big debt levels. The US now has more than $40 trillion of debt. This has to be addressed eventually. And when volatility comes to the market, Charlotte, and it will come to the market with extreme disruption, you have these thinning order books. You've got extreme volatility which then in turn, you end up with things that have no bid with huge volumes.
12:29 So, you have extreme price swings. So, it would be reasonable for the market to have some kind of a pullback or a correction or something has to give here. We cannot have these debt levels and you're going to see volatility. So no matter what you own, particularly within junior mining or developers or even the senior copper producers, that's something that's always going to be following the market unfortunately.
12:58 So we'll see what happens in the coming weeks and months. But if I give you a graphic here going back just to illustrate a point with debt levels, an economist I am not. So I myself need things that are colorful to describe to people. So let's turn our clocks back to 2000, the year 2000. Interest rates roughly 6%.
13:16 We got two lines. Okay, first one we're going to talk about is interest rates. Interest rates fall. We have the economic crisis in 2008. They fall to near zero and then rates start going up after this COVID problem. Now, what were the total interest payments, on a 12-month rolling average, the United States was paying from 2000 all the way through the 2008 economic crisis all the way through COVID? It was about $200 billion and then it climbed to about 400 billion during COVID. It's now a trillion dollars
13:50 out of nowhere. This is not sustainable. And this is something that you see the interventions now, and again I'm not an economist, but people have seen it on the headlines, intervening with different markets, the Fed and the Treasury. So that is very unstable for the market. So people have to wait and accept this volatility that's coming to us.
14:16 It's not going to be a basket full of kittens. We are going to have volatility and that is going to be impacting all markets. But me as a speculator, I speculate on an outcome. If they're drilling, if the result is there, we're going to get rewarded for that in almost any market. If I'm speculating on the development or this DLE becoming a front page story, I'm speculating on that to occur.
14:39 So, it's a little bit of a buffer because I understand volatility is coming and my portfolio is going to get pushed around a lot. Don't need the capital. I can weather the storm. If you can't weather the storm, you should be always sitting in a good portion of cash and the ultimate safe haven, gold.
14:57 That is where people need to be parking their capital and less so in speculations perhaps. >> I think that makes a lot of sense how you explain it. And we will get over to gold, but before we go there, this is a great path over into the precious metals, but I want to mention silver first.
15:13 That was one of the metals that last year you gave us a great price call on. You were looking for triple-digit silver which we did get at the beginning of the year. Of course, we have seen a pullback now although prices look like they might be starting to go up again. So, where are we for silver? Where do we go from here? How are you looking at that? >> Yes.
15:33 Well, I look at silver following gold as everyone would understand. I think a ratio of 50 to 1 would be reasonable. So, it was not a difficult call because gold already moved. Silver was going to follow it. It was inevitable. But when that happens, the traders and the tourist speculators, they change direction and it was going to be sold off hard.
15:53 Tocqueville had a very famous saying. He says, "The more progress you make, the more dissatisfied you are with the rate of that progress." Imagine, Charlotte, if we went back 2 years and I told you gold is going to go to something like $4,000 or $4,500 an ounce and silver's going to go to $60 to $70 an ounce and stay there for 2 years.
16:19 People would be doing cartwheels down Bay Street. That's what we have. And we just went through a very pessimistic mini bear market in gold and silver. When gold was flirting with going through 4,000 and silver was back at $60, the people were very negative, but because of the things I just talked about, untenable debt levels, there really is nowhere else to go with this continued de-dollarization trend.
16:47 Gold is going to be the single biggest beneficiary. That is going to continue. So for us, this is not a genius call. I think this is almost a consensus trade, but there is nowhere else to go. Maybe Bitcoin or something like that or continuation into the bluest of blue chip shares.
17:06 But to see gold at something like $8,000 or $10,000 an ounce, I think that's very plausible. And on the day you see gold at $8,000 an ounce, what price is silver going to be? Well, it's going to be something like a 50 to 1 ratio, 60 or 50, not 100 to 1. And it probably could even be better at times due to speculators pushing it there.
17:30 But I think that $150 to $200 silver is something that people could be looking for on the horizon. So, what would that do to a company like Lumina Metals or Pan American Silver or even someone drilling for silver, the little companies? And I still will allocate a little bit of my capital to people that are drilling for these metals.
17:52 A new IPO is Silver Pony. They're drilling nine holes now. So far looks interesting. British Columbia, very high grade at surface and historical. So stock's 2 weeks old. That's an interesting speculation also. >> Yeah. That's a very brand new company. All right. So we have some idea of how you're approaching silver right now.
18:13 And I was going to ask you, do we get back to that triple-digit silver level in 2026? It sounds like maybe perhaps not this year. We don't know, but in the future, we can certainly look toward that higher level for silver probably more sustainably than we're seeing it right now. >> Correct. It'd be like a new plateau where now like anything, of course, it had that big blowoff top.
18:34 Who did that? Well, once again, when you have this, people just weren't selling silver, they were speculating. It was a consensus trade long and then the tourists get out of the trade. Once again, the book is very thin. You got lots of volatility and the price is gapping. It's the same no matter, imagine a stock you're buying. If everyone's trying to buy it, people stop selling. They say, "Oh, wow.
18:55 What's going on here? This thing's moving like crazy higher." So, the next pulse higher will be a more sustained, more gradual, and the plateau is going to be much higher, and it will follow gold. Gold is going to something higher. It'll be a sustained higher with probably less volatility because it's more in the zeitgeist right now.
19:21 And with that, to see $100 silver I think is more of a question of when will we see it rather than if we're going to see it, and then we already blasted to like 120, 130. >> Yeah, I think that does seem to be the direction that we're heading to in the future. So you mentioned silver. It tends to follow gold.
19:36 I think investors are familiar with that concept, that pathway. So when we look over at gold, what are you seeing as the main drivers of the metal right now? You mentioned a variety of the underlying factors that are pushing it higher. We have, earlier this year, it felt like a lot of focus was on the Iran war.
19:53 Now it seems like the Fed is coming back more into focus. So what are you seeing as gold's key drivers at the moment? >> Well, if you go back to the late 80s, what was driving the market? What was the most important factor? It wasn't unemployment. It wasn't CPI. It wasn't government debt. It was trade imbalance.
20:13 And it happened at 8:30 New York time, 2:30 in Europe, where they would release it. The trade imbalance, it was always going to be minus 4 billion, 5 billion, 6 billion. But if that ever got over 10 billion, the US dollar would just fall right out of bed. So people don't look at that anymore.
20:33 They're looking at CPI and all these different factors. But I think even all of those things matter less and less because people almost don't care about the headlines anymore. And look, with the Fed and the new guy in charge there. It's going to be the continued de-dollarization trend globally.
20:55 It's just a global situation where people are slowly, slowly, slowly getting out of that trade, and people may not, if you ask them a question at a cocktail party, sort of trivia question, who holds the most US debt? People say, oh, China. No, it's Japan. Japan and Saudi Arabia. All those years ago when the exchange of goods would take place, they would have all these US dollars. A smaller country or a smaller company would just exchange it and then be in their home currency.
21:28 That's not what Saudi Arabia did and that's not what Japan did. They kept the US dollars and they held the US debt. So this is why that's such a problem. If that's changing, you don't have a new person to take that debt on. So all of these things are converging at the same time.
21:47 You've got the untenable debt levels. They're now paying a trillion dollars in interest payments. Interest rates are elevated, being dictated by the market. You have these holders of US debt that are going to be stuck, or let's see how that works out. All roads point to gold, which, there's just no other place to go.
22:08 So, but if you were to ask for it in one word, it's de-dollarization and the wanting to own more gold, and it's through entities, throughout countries, throughout society for people that are familiar. >> Well, that's a good point. So, people that are familiar are going toward gold.
22:28 I know in the west it's less of a familiar concept than it is in the east. Do you see gold ownership rising in the west? How do you think that could play out? >> Well, we have not lived through hyperinflation or let's say very severe inflation. But if you use an example of someone in Peru or someone in Turkey years and years ago, in Turkey with the lira inflation.
22:52 So if someone was lucky enough to be able to sell something for $1 million US 20 years ago, what did they do with that $1 million? Did they keep it in dollars? Did they convert it to lira? If they converted to lira, they got wiped out. If they converted to a basket of currencies, they lost spending power.
23:10 If that individual put half of that money into gold, their spending power has been retained. If they haven't, they've been wiped out. A Turkish citizen that did not do anything about it back then, okay, maybe they renovated a house or something and put it into real estate. Because we in the west, until now, inflation's been, since COVID it's been a thing but not crazy inflation, those that have not learned from that to have diversification, to have some exposure to gold. And this is one of the reasons I was suggesting that
23:41 gold was going to sell off: it was the rebalancing with a classic Swiss portfolio that had 10% weighting in gold, which is what you should have had, 5 to 10%. When gold tripled in value, all of a sudden these portfolios were maybe 30% in gold. So some of that classic Swiss thinking was to sell, believe it or not, some of the gold just to rebalance.
24:02 Not that they're selling their gold, they're rebalancing the portfolio. Well, that rebalancing trade is coming to an end now. And on the other side of it, there's people that have never owned gold. So all of a sudden, this owning 5 or 10% of your portfolio in gold, this is a real thing. And we have it here in Croatia.
24:20 We have people that buy physical gold. We have people that buy and sell physical gold at a larger level for 1%. And they've had a lot of Joe Public, Joe Lunchbox buying 10,000, 20,000, 50,000 worth of gold 2, 3, 4 years ago because they were somewhat informed and I think that's going to continue throughout the world.
24:42 India, China, they were the biggest buyers of gold, but you're going to see that more and more in the West now that people have had their first taste of inflation. Now that people understand that they're losing spending power, now that people see it within mainstream media, the debt levels have now ticked over 40 trillion, it does impact them.
25:05 And how do you hedge your way out of that? Gold is one way. You can also have the highest quality, not junior miners, but developers and miners that have exposure or leverage to gold and silver, with volatility always there. Global markets, we're going to see volatility.
25:23 It's going to push things around. You got to be able to weather the storm. >> Absolutely. So, all roads lead to gold. As you said, silver follows gold. I'm curious about platinum and palladium. I'm starting to hear a little bit more about those metals. Some interest rising there. Is that a play that you're looking at right now? >> I don't follow those as closely as I do the other metals.
25:44 They had a little bit of a connotation a few years ago. Of course, they were more valuable than gold, and now there is a little bit of that catalytic converter story, the recycling, if we're going to be making less and less mufflers. I think that's a nuance metal.
26:03 I don't follow it that closely. I would stick to gold. I think gold and silver are going to give you enough leverage or enough security with all we just talked about, and it's too niche for me right now and I think you have other things to focus on: the copper, the silver, the gold and more importantly the lithium and the electrification of global energy still. >> Okay, I think we can understand where your focus lies right now and we've covered quite a bit of
26:29 ground today so we can start wrapping it up, but before I let you go, I wonder if there are any final thoughts that you would want to leave investors with. We are heading toward the end of 2026. How is it looking for you? >> Well, I remember there's a famous quote. It was said by Spiro Agnew.
26:48 He was the vice president in the 1970s and he called it the nattering nabobs of negativism. And a lot of that is these people that follow particularly what's going on in global energy, they've been so wrong. They were wrong on the uptake of the electric vehicle. We saw what happened in China, now 50% of vehicles are now EVs. They were wrong on the growth we would see in solar farm activity and wind farm activity, and they
27:26 are now a serious pillar of the energy mix in many jurisdictions and with that we're augmenting that with batteries. So you still have these nattering nabobs of negativism that are just not correct, looking at the future of energy. And we've had these hinges of history over the last 150 years where we had the creation of electricity, the light bulb, going to Nikola Tesla's AC induction motor and the ability to transfer electricity over long distances. We had the discovery of oil
28:05 at Spindletop, Texas, the first oil under pressure in 1901. We had the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia in 1938 where the American geologist, namely DeGolyer, came and they said it was the single greatest prize in all history. And then we go to what the oil and gas industry did with George Mitchell north of Dallas, Texas.
28:28 They cracked the fracking code and they merged it together with horizontal drilling with Devon Energy and they started drilling slowly, slowly in 2003, like 50 wells, and by 2010, 2015 the industry in North America had drilled 150,000 horizontal frack wells. What the oil and gas industry is able to do is unbelievable and it's, as I say, millimetrical progress, but in the end, they reinvent the wheel.
28:59 So, Charlotte, there's a new greatest prize, and that is the total disintermediation of the old incumbent energy system where you have a structure with electric trucks, vehicles, a solar panel to capture energy, and a battery that can store the excess energy or use it when you need it. And with that, copper and lithium, they are going to continue to be the pillars of the future of energy.
29:31 And they are the new hinge of history. And these nattering nabobs of negativism, they have been wrong. They are wrong. And so this new one that's coming to the front page, which is they've cracked the DLE commercialization, and it's companies like Schlumberger. So that's why I think that's a story you're going to see on the front page, and Lithium Bank is my absolute top conviction right now for those following junior mining.
30:04 And if you look at that thread over 150 years, I think that's a good way to sort of summarize what we talked about today. >> I think that's a great way to wrap it up. So thank you as always for coming on to share what's on your mind. I think this is really useful for me and of course also for investors. So looking forward to the next time.
30:22 >> Thank you Charlotte. >> Of course. And once again, I'm Charlotte McLeod with investingnews.com and this is Gianni Kovacevic. Thank you for watching. If you like this video, make sure you hit the like button and subscribe to our channel. We'd also love to hear your thoughts, so leave us a comment below.