| Ticker | Name | Research | View | What he said | At |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GDX | VanEck Gold Miners ETF | SA · STK | Positive | A core "hub" holding and the vehicle he recommends generalists start with. "GDX, we called a bottom on it at 70 bucks. We were pretty darn close. And now it's at 97 or 98 as we record this" — up over 150% in 2025. His argument for the ETF over single names: "if you just own Newmont versus Barrick, you're going to have two different experiences. But if you own GDX, you own a number of companies, dozens of them, and you're playing a directional move in gold miners." Down ~40% March 1 to August 1 alongside the HUI, which is what he was buying into. | 8:53 |
| GDXJ | VanEck Junior Gold Miners ETF | SA · STK | Positive | The other half of the ETF hub, named alongside GDX and silver as "our top holdings" — "we have a huge position in GDX and GDXJ. Those are our hub." Up over 150% in 2025 with GDX. It is also how he holds First Majestic rather than owning the stock outright. | 20:56 |
| NEM | Newmont Corporation | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Owned, and the "harvesting" side of the show's opening comparison — a record $2.2bn of free cash flow in the quarter against $438m of sustaining capital. "Newmont has been consistently a leader over the years in my opinion along with Agnico, AEM, and so we own those two and they're I think the first and second largest holdings in GDX right now." He also names it as one of the value stocks money rotates into as the AI trade unwinds. | 8:12 |
| AEM | Agnico Eagle Mines | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | The other large-cap producer he owns outright, paired with Newmont as the consistent operators of the group: "Newmont has been consistently a leader over the years in my opinion along with Agnico, AEM, and so we own those two." Together they are the first and second largest weights in GDX. | 8:12 |
| DNRSF | Denarius Metals (OTCQX: DNRSF · Canada: DME) | QT · SA | Positive | An over-2% position, disclosed, and his first example of an unhedged company "going for it". Chairman Serafino Iacono "has been doing this 40 years. He has very wealthy friends like Frank Giustra, Robert Friedland surrounding him" — and the company has been aggressively acquisitive, bidding for Emerita first at a 13–15% premium while that stock was distressed and then coming back at 73%, and "they just took out 15% of a copper giant here in the hottest copper market of all time." His point: buy on future revenues, not current ones. | 11:30 |
| GO | Gold Group (post GoldMining / Gold Resource merger; NYSE American: GO) | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Also an over-2% position, and his worked example of buying an artificial dislocation. The merged GoldMining/Gold Resource entity was added to the Russell 2000 on June 30th and removed again on July 16–17 because of the merger: "the stock got absolutely smoked… I've never seen anything like that in my entire career where the Russell 2000, a large index, made a mistake like that and basically cratered the stock over 50% in a matter of two weeks." He brought CEO Reyes onto his show to explain it, and bought the dip. $3.60 at the time of recording. | 12:19 |
| PGEZF | Stillwater Critical Minerals (OTCQB: PGEZF · TSXV: PGE) | QT · SA | Positive | Owned for a couple of years, and the example he gives of holding through a drawdown because the catalyst is intact. He cold-called CEO Mike after noticing the Montana link to another of his holdings, and the company "just came out with their MRE… Jeremy, lights out. These guys have more rhodium in the US than any stock that I can find in the junior US market" — plus platinum, palladium, copper and nickel in a polymetallic deposit attached to a major. 29 cents at the time of recording; the MRE took it to 37 cents in two days before the Iran headlines pushed it back. | 22:44 |
| PNPNF | Power Metallic Mines (OTC: PNPNF · TSXV: PNPN) | QT · SA | Positive | Named outright as his hottest copper play. CEO Terry Lynch is "very high conviction", the deposit is polymetallic with copper as the forward metal at an all-time-high price, and the drill results stand out: "when you see 10%, 12%, 14% copper hits — show me another junior that's putting these kind of numbers up." An MRE has been announced and he expects it to be outstanding. The share-structure test passes on a technicality he likes: 250 million shares out, but "they have 17 billionaires in the cap structure… half of these shares are tied up in hands that will never sell this at this price." | 24:06 |
| GMTL | Guardian Metal Resources (NYSE: GMTL, formerly OTC GMTLF) | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | His near-term production story in tungsten and, on his own account, "one of the biggest home runs of my career" — held since 2023. It uplisted from OTC (GMTLF) to GMTL on the New York Stock Exchange as he expected, "an indication that they're going to see a lot more institutional interest." Two Nevada mines, a PFS published June 30th with "outstanding numbers, payback in less than a year" — "if it was a gold or silver stock, people would be buying it hand over fist. But tungsten is one of those things that people don't really understand." | 26:20 |
| KAZR | Skyline Builders Group (Nasdaq: KAZR) — 70% owner of Cass Resources (tungsten) | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | His development story, and "one could become a producer faster than people think". The operating asset is Cass Resources, ~70% owned by a Nasdaq-listed shell, Skyline Builders Group, that trades as KAZR; he had just spoken to the chairman for the first time (five years at George Soros, Cambridge, CFA, a chemical engineer by trade). The economics are the pitch: cash cost of $100–150 a ton against tungsten over $2,800 a ton, a 50-year mine life, and $1.6bn committed by US EXIM Bank and the DRC against expected capex of $1.1bn — "show me a gold stock that has $1.6 billion lined up right now." Named with WSRIF as the way to own tungsten at all. | 27:17 |
| WSRIF | Western Star Resources (OTC: WSRIF · Canada: WSR) | QT · SA | Positive | The explorer leg of his three-name request, and a new name for him. CEO Blake is "super hard charging, just like Terry Lynch at Power Metallic… attending conferences, putting out news like every week." Projects in Nevada and New Mexico, "two states I really like", and early sample results — not deep drill holes — of over 4% tungsten at the new Nevada project, Roland, against a global average nearer 3%. A drill rig is moving to New Mexico. Named alongside KAZR as the equities you must buy because tungsten has no ETF and no futures market. | 28:59 |
| TIGCF | Triumph Gold Corp. (OTC: TIGCF · TSXV: TIG) | QT · SA | Positive | The silver junior he is "most interested in right now" — explicitly framed as a speculative bet with a floor under it. Two million ounces of gold in Canada with tungsten and antimony "literally at surface", plus a Utah silver project bought "for a song" last year that starts drilling this fall, 60–70 miles from an established camp. "It's a spec bet at this point on their silver, but they have very established critical minerals and gold. So, we like investing in companies like that that have multiple ways to win." | 31:28 |
| B | Barrick Mining (NYSE: B, formerly GOLD) | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Not owned, and the "building" half of the show's comparison: $1.19bn of capital spend, $654m of it into projects rather than maintaining existing mines, against $515m of free cash flow (only $141m attributable). Asked whether that is a strategy difference or worse execution, he is direct: "I think Barrick is executing worse. We don't own a position in Barrick." He still allows it is "cheap on the longer term chart, no question" and later names it with Newmont as a value stock the coming rotation flows into — he owns it only through GDX, where it is the third weight. | 7:45 |
| AG | First Majestic Silver | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Cited as one of the rare near-pure silver plays in a market where "global production… is usually a byproduct" and most so-called silver miners are 20–30% silver. He has known CEO Keith Neumeyer since 2008 and rates him — "he's done a great job" — but does not own the stock directly: "I own Keith's stock through GDX and GDXJ. I don't own it outright right now just because of the valuation versus other things that I'm seeing." | 30:58 |
| ANV | Allied Nevada Gold (delisted; predecessor of Hycroft Mining) | — · FA | Negative | The worst mining stock he has ever owned, and the origin of his two-strike rule: "I've tried to block it, Jeremy, but it's Allied — symbol was ANV. And like I told you, I've never owned anything that that CEO ever did again, what the IR person ever did again, what the board ever did again." The asset lives on today as Hycroft, which he has pointedly never bought — "Hycroft's been a whole other story with a nickel-looking chart but I never owned Hycroft because of what I learned in Allied." The lesson he draws is that timing, not just asset quality, decides the outcome. | 25:21 |
"View" is John Feneck's stance in this interview (Positive / Neutral / Negative), not a price rating. He discloses positions throughout — Denarius and Gold Group are each over 2% of the book; silver, GDX and GDXJ are the "hub"; tungsten equities are 17%+ in total. Two names are described but deliberately given no row because he never resolves them into an investable line: Emerita (the Denarius bid target) and the nearby Utah camp near Triumph Gold's project. The HUI (NYSE Arca Gold BUGS Index) is an index, not an investable security. Research: QT Qualtrim · SA Seeking Alpha · STK Stock Analysis (dropped for OTC/venture lines with no clean page).
A jargon-free summary of the thesis behind each argued name — what it actually is and why he holds that view. (Plain-language companion to the table above; renders on each ticker's consolidated page.)
GDX is a basket fund holding the world's biggest gold-mining companies — buy one share and you own dozens of miners in proportion to their size, with Newmont and Agnico Eagle currently the two largest and Barrick third. Feneck treats it as the anchor of his portfolio rather than a stock pick, because it removes the risk that you happen to pick the one big miner that executes badly: "if you just own Newmont versus Barrick, you're going to have two different experiences."
His actual call is on timing. GDX fell about 40% between March 1 and August 1 as the war and a hawkish new Fed chair drove money out of the sector; he called the bottom at $70 and it trades at 97–98 as they record. That is a specific, checkable claim, and it is the reason he was buying every single week through July and August while his cash fell from 12–14% to 8–10%.
The structural argument underneath: only about 0.1% of the world's investable money sits in this sector. If a rotation out of expensive technology stocks pushes that to 1%, the flow into a small sector is enormous — and the ETF captures it without needing any single company to succeed.
GDXJ is the same idea one rung down the size ladder: a basket of smaller, earlier-stage gold miners. Smaller miners move further than the metal in both directions, so it is the higher-octane half of what Feneck calls his "hub" — the core holdings he sizes large and does not trade around.
He owns it for the same reason as GDX, and it also solves a specific problem for him. He rates First Majestic's CEO highly but thinks the stock is expensive relative to alternatives, so rather than skip the exposure he takes it indirectly: "I own Keith's stock through GDX and GDXJ."
Both ETFs rose over 150% in 2025 and then gave a large part of it back in the March–August drawdown — which is the pattern he is asking investors to expect and to buy into, not to be surprised by.
Newmont is the largest gold producer in the world, and in this interview it is the example of a miner "harvesting" rather than "building" — spending $438m to keep its existing mines running and generating a record $2.2bn of cash left over in a single quarter. Free cash flow is simply the money left after paying for everything needed to keep operating; it is what funds dividends, buybacks and debt repayment.
Feneck owns it, and his reason is unglamorous: consistency. Over the years he sees Newmont and Agnico Eagle as the two large producers that reliably do what they say, which is why they are his direct holdings while Barrick is not.
The second reason is where he expects money to go next. He is calling a rotation between now and March out of AI and momentum stocks and into value — and he names Newmont as exactly the kind of cheap, cash-generating business that receives that money.
Agnico Eagle is a large Canadian gold producer, and the second of only two big miners Feneck holds directly. He groups it with Newmont as the operators that have been "consistently a leader over the years" — the pair that make up the first and second largest weights inside the GDX index fund.
There is no separate thesis for it here beyond that judgement of execution quality, which for him is the whole point: in a sector where the metal price is the same for everyone, the difference between miners is management doing what they said they would do with the money.
Barrick is the other giant gold miner, and the show opens by contrasting it with Newmont over the same three months in the same gold market. Barrick spent $1.19bn of capital, $654m of it on building new projects rather than sustaining the mines it already runs, and produced $515m of free cash flow — of which only $141m actually belongs to Barrick's shareholders, because it owns some mines jointly with partners.
Asked whether that gap is just a different strategy — building for the future rather than harvesting today — Feneck does not take the diplomatic option: "I think Barrick is executing worse. We don't own a position in Barrick."
He is careful not to turn that into a short. He allows the stock is "cheap on the longer term chart, no question", he owns it indirectly as the third-largest weight in GDX, and he names it alongside Newmont as a value stock that benefits when money rotates out of technology. So: no position, a real criticism of management execution, and an acknowledgement that the price already reflects a lot of it.
Denarius Metals is a small Latin-America-focused miner listed in Canada (DME) and traded in the US as DNRSF. Feneck holds more than 2% of his portfolio in it — a large position for a company this size — and discloses that on air.
The reason is the people and their behaviour. Chairman Serafino Iacono has run mining companies for 40 years and is backed by well-known financiers Frank Giustra and Robert Friedland. More importantly, the company is on the offensive while everyone else is defensive: it bid for Emerita at a 13–15% premium while that stock was distressed, was refused, came back with a 73% premium, and separately took a 15% stake in a large copper business at the top of the copper market.
It is also his example of an "unhedged" company. Hedging means locking in a fixed selling price for future production; it protects you if the metal falls, but it caps what you make if the metal rises. Feneck wants companies that keep the upside — because his whole framework depends on miners moving two to three times as much as the metal does. The way to value a company like this, he argues, is not today's revenue but what the revenue becomes after the deals close.
GO is the ticker for the company created by merging GoldMining with Gold Resource. It is his other disclosed 2%-plus position, and he owns it because of a mechanical accident rather than a change in the business.
Here is what happened. The Russell 2000 is a widely tracked index of smaller US companies; when a stock is added, index funds must buy it, and when it is removed they must sell it — regardless of what the business is worth. The stock was added on June 30th and then removed on July 16–17 because of the merger, and the forced selling cratered it by more than 50% in two weeks. Feneck brought the CEO onto his own show to explain what had happened, and says he has never seen an index make a mistake like it in his career.
That is what he means by an "artificial" dislocation: the price fell for a reason that has nothing to do with the ounces in the ground. In a market he believes is in a bull framework, his rule is simply to buy those. The shares were $3.60 when they recorded.
Stillwater Critical Minerals is a tiny exploration company in Montana — 29 cents a share when they recorded — sitting next to one of the few American mining complexes that produces platinum-group metals. Feneck has owned it for a couple of years, and he uses it as his worked example of when not to sell a position that is down.
The deposit is "polymetallic", meaning several valuable metals occur together in the same rock: platinum, palladium, copper, nickel and — unusually — rhodium, which is scarce enough that Kitco quotes its price on its homepage. His claim is that they now have more rhodium than any other junior he can find in the United States.
The event that proved it was the MRE, a mineral resource estimate — the first formal, independently-reported count of how much metal a deposit actually contains, and the milestone that turns a geological story into a number. It landed "lights out", the stock went from 29 to 37 cents in two days, and then gave it all back on Iran headlines. His argument is that the price move reversed while the underlying fact did not; the relationship with the CEO, which began with a cold call, is why he is comfortable holding through that.
Asked outright for his hottest copper play, Feneck names Power Metallic — "by far". It is a Canadian junior run by Terry Lynch, with a polymetallic deposit where copper is the lead metal at a time when copper is at an all-time high.
The geological case is grade. Most copper mines work rock containing well under 1% copper; he cites drill results of 10%, 12% and 14%, and challenges anyone to name another junior producing numbers like that. Its own MRE — the formal resource count — has been announced as coming, and he expects it to be outstanding.
The more interesting argument is about the share register. Roughly 250 million shares outstanding looks like a lot for a company this size, and a big share count is normally a warning that early holders will dump stock into any rally. His check is to ask where those shares actually sit — and here "they have 17 billionaires in the cap structure. It's insane. None of those people are selling on a bad MRE." Roughly half the shares are in hands that will not sell at this price, which turns a red flag into a supportive one.
Guardian Metal Resources is a Nevada tungsten developer and, on his own account, "one of the biggest home runs of my career" — held since 2023. Tungsten is an extremely hard, extremely dense metal used in armour, munitions, cutting tools and electronics; China dominates its supply, and there is no way for an ordinary investor to buy the metal itself.
Two things happened since his last appearance. First, the shares moved from the US over-the-counter market (GMTLF) up to a full New York Stock Exchange listing (GMTL). That "uplisting" matters because many institutional funds are not permitted to buy over-the-counter stocks at all, so it widens the pool of possible buyers.
Second, on June 30th the company published a PFS — a pre-feasibility study, the engineering and economic assessment that estimates what it costs to build a mine and what it earns once running. The numbers showed payback in under a year, meaning the mine would repay its entire construction cost within twelve months of starting. His frustration is that nobody cares: "if it was a gold or silver stock, people would be buying it hand over fist. But tungsten is one of those things that people don't really understand."
This one needs unpicking, because the tradeable share and the mining asset are not the same company. The tungsten project is Cass Resources; it is about 70% owned by Skyline Builders Group, a Nasdaq-listed shell company whose ticker is KAZR. Buying KAZR is how you get exposure to the mine.
Feneck had just spoken to the chairman for the first time — a chemical engineer by training with five years at George Soros' firm, a Cambridge degree and a CFA — and puts this in the "development story" bucket: not producing yet, but potentially producing sooner than the market expects.
The economics are the pitch. It costs them $100–150 to produce a ton of tungsten; tungsten currently sells for over $2,800 a ton, and the price is not giving that gain back. The mine life is around 50 years. And unlike almost any junior mining company, funding is not the risk: US EXIM Bank and the Democratic Republic of Congo have between them committed $1.6bn against expected construction costs of $1.1bn — so the company has more money than it needs. That inversion is his whole critical-minerals argument in one line: "show me a gold stock that has $1.6 billion lined up right now."
Western Star is the earliest-stage of his three tungsten names — an explorer, meaning it is still looking for the deposit rather than proving up or building a mine. It is also a new position for him.
What he likes first is behaviour: CEO Blake is "super hard charging", at conferences and putting out news almost weekly — the same energy he credits Terry Lynch with at Power Metallic. In a market where nobody is paying attention, showing up is a real variable.
What he likes second is grade. At the new Nevada project, called Roland, surface sample results came back at over 4% tungsten against a global average nearer 3%. He is careful to flag the limitation himself — these are samples taken at surface, not deep drill holes, which is much weaker evidence — but a drill rig is moving to their New Mexico ground now. Together with KAZR, this is one of the two names he cites when explaining that owning the equities is the only way to own tungsten at all.
Triumph Gold is the silver-focused junior he is most interested in right now — but he is explicit that the silver part is a gamble, and equally explicit about why that gamble is acceptable.
The company already owns two million ounces of gold in Canada, with tungsten and antimony sitting literally at surface (surface mineralisation is cheap to test and cheap to mine relative to a deposit hundreds of metres down). That existing asset base is the floor. On top of it, they bought a Utah silver project "for a song" last year and start drilling it this fall, 60–70 miles from an established mining camp — so the open question is whether the same geological trend runs through their ground.
"It's a spec bet at this point on their silver, but they have very established critical minerals and gold. So, we like investing in companies like that that have multiple ways to win." That structure — a free option on a new discovery attached to assets that already have value — is the shape he is describing more generally.
First Majestic matters in this conversation because of a fact most silver investors get wrong: almost nobody actually mines silver. Roughly speaking, silver comes out of the ground as a by-product of mining copper, lead and zinc, so when the silver price rises there is no group of companies that can simply produce more of it. Most so-called silver miners are only 20–30% silver by revenue; First Majestic is one of the few genuinely silver-weighted producers.
Feneck rates the management — he has known CEO Keith Neumeyer since 2008 and says "he's done a great job" — but he does not own the shares directly, and he says why plainly: "just because of the valuation versus other things that I'm seeing." He holds it indirectly through GDX and GDXJ instead.
So this is a positive view of the company inside a neutral view of the stock at today's price — worth reading alongside his silver position generally, where he trimmed 20% between $100 and $120 and has a stated re-entry at $50–55.
Allied Nevada Gold is no longer investable — it failed, and its Nevada asset lives on today inside Hycroft Mining. It appears here because Feneck names it as the worst mining stock he has ever owned and, more usefully, because it is where his single hardest rule comes from.
The rule is people, not geology. After Allied Nevada he never again bought anything associated with that CEO, that investor-relations person or that board — and he generalises it into a two-strike policy: lie to him twice and he will never touch any company you are involved with again. That is why "management first, project second" tops his junior checklist, an ordering he admits is unusual.
The subtler lesson is about timing rather than assets. The same ground later became Hycroft, which has had its own dramatic stock-price history — and he never owned that either, because of what the first experience taught him. A good deposit does not rescue you from the wrong people at the wrong moment.
Compiled from the public YouTube video for personal study. Stances are John Feneck's own as stated on Kitco NEWS on 2026-09-02; he discloses positions in several of the names discussed (Denarius and Gold Group each over 2% of the book; silver, GDX and GDXJ as core holdings; tungsten equities 17%+ in aggregate). Not investment advice.