Title: Mining Stock Monkey Reveals the Best Gold and Royalty Stocks to Buy Now
Show: In it to Win it (host: Steve Barton)
Guest: Jordan Rusche (Mining Stock Monkey)
Date: 2026-06-26
URL: https://youtu.be/Y_yuu5k5P7g
Length: 41:29
Note: Fillers (um/uh/you know/like-as-tic) removed; stutters/false-starts collapsed; wording otherwise verbatim. Auto-transcript names corrected to the intended entities: Warsh (was "Worsh"), Volcker ("Vulkar"), Denison ("Dennis"), Sprott ("SPAT"), Michael Gentile ("Gentilely"). Free/public segment only — the premium energy-company segment is paywalled and not transcribed.

(00:00) Welcome to In It To Win It. This is Steve Barton, and thank you for tuning in. I'm joined once again by Jordan of Mining Stock Monkey. Jordan is the author of my favorite newsletter and a real straight shooter when it comes to fundamental evaluations of natural resource companies. We're going to take the questions you submitted and ask Jordan himself.

(00:19) Jordan, I know you're traveling right now. Thank you for taking time out of your day. Thank you for coming back on the show. >> Happy to be here, Steve. >> Yes. Let's get right into it. We got a lot of questions and there is no way we can get to them all, but we picked out several here. Brian wants to know, so on the topic of gold, what is your thought about the drop of Alamos Gold against the actual damage to their assets? So simply put, if your calculations show the market overreacting to the damage or not, what are your thoughts?

(00:52) Yeah. So their Young Davidson mine in Ontario had some seismic activity and it caused them to lower guidance for the year as they worked through the issues there. But you have a top tier management team at Alamos. Great great company. And the stock is down almost 50% from its highs earlier this year.

(01:18) I think its highs were in March or so and it's down almost 50%. When you have a chance to buy a company that's down almost 50% from the highs and it's a high quality company run by great management, I think it's usually a good opportunity to do so. And in life I try to live by this rule to not make permanent decisions based on temporary problems.

(01:47) And I think this is a temporary problem. This is something that will be worked through. Yes, it lowered guidance this year, but they'll work through it and they'll improve that based on their history of excellent operations and based on their history of doing what they say they're going to do.

(02:10) I don't really see a huge problem. Okay, here's the chart and what you're talking about and just had a massive selloff right here. And as a technician, I can't help but see that line right there. You've got a lot of back support acted as resistance there, resistance, support, and here we are hitting it again.

(02:33) Yeah, at least on the chart, it looks really good to me. I like what you said. Don't make permanent decisions on temporary issues. I think that's a good saying. All right. And John is asking another question about gold. He says, "If I don't wish to buy physical gold, which is preferable, the Sprott physical gold trust or a major royalty company?" If you compare the performance of gold to the performance of the major precious metals royalty companies, I'm talking Franco Nevada, Wheaton Precious Metals, and Royal Gold,

(03:13) those major royalty companies outperform the gold price over time. So because they have a lot of leverage to gold — and it's not so much they have downside leverage too if the gold price goes down, but they have leverage on the upside because when they buy their royalty or their stream, they're basing it on a reasonable rate of return, typically at the spot price at that time.

(03:49) But then over the years the operator — they find more ounces, especially on the really good mines they expand their mill, and over time technology improves. So with those expansions and finding more ounces and extending the mine lives repeatedly, they typically end up getting a lot better returns than what they initially envisioned when they purchased that asset.

(04:21) So for those reasons, the companies in the long run tend to outperform the gold price. So I would go with the major royalty and streaming companies versus physical gold. Now, but actually you're saying you don't want to buy physical gold over a gold trust. But I do think there's value in holding physical metal.

(04:46) It's something that's outside the banking system. If there's a total collapse of the banking system, if there's massive bail-ins, if there's let's say an EMP that takes out all electrical infrastructure, you're going to do very well to have some physical metal with you, something of actual tangible value that you could potentially trade for other goods and services.

(05:21) And I've also heard of horror stories where the government goes after somebody because they don't like their political views and then they freeze their assets and then they don't even have access to funds to hire a lawyer, for example. When the government is out to get them — not necessarily because they did anything wrong, but just because the person in power didn't like their political views, for example.

(05:50) And in that case, you're going to be very well off to have some type of asset with monetary value that's easy to exchange that's not within the banking system. So I do like having at least some physical for various reasons. But yeah, when choosing between a fund or a trust that holds gold versus one of the major royalty companies, I would be looking for the major royalty companies.

(06:24) >> Okay. Yeah. What you're talking about reminds me of when Canada froze the assets of a lot of those truck drivers that refused to go stay in a hotel for two weeks. That did not work out well for them. Having some physical metal on hand I'm sure would have been nice for them.

(06:43) Going back to your point — I just pulled up Franco Nevada here and divided it by gold. So when the Franco Nevada chart is going up, the royalty company is outperforming gold. When it's going down, gold is actually outperforming the royalty company. It looks like we're just starting the next hike up.

(07:01) So this chart is definitely moving up from the bottom left to the top right and looking like we're going to get another move to the upside. So that's the outperformance, or at least a visual representation of the outperformance you're talking about. >> And Franco Nevada isn't as good to look at because the chart doesn't go back as far.

(07:18) >> Okay. Because they were bought by another company and then spun out again. So that broke up their long-term chart into two. But if you wanted to look at a longer term chart, you could look at Royal Gold or Wheaton Precious Metals and that would be a better representation of what's going on there over the long run.

(07:38) There we go. Yeah. Bottom left, top right. That's what you want. That's what you want. Okay. That was John's question. Let's move on to Josh. What's the likelihood in your view about gold price settling down at say the $3500 range for 1 to two years if Kevin Warsh walks the talk relentlessly? So since at his first FOMC meeting he made some major changes and he basically told the market, I'm not going to give forward guidance to keep you happy.

(08:25) And he removed himself from the dot plot and he's historically been an advocate of quantitative tightening. He wants to lower the Fed's balance sheet rather than expanding it through quantitative easing. And he's definitely been more hawkish than other Fed chairmen. But I've seen this movie before.

(08:57) I've seen this movie quite a few times. And the Fed loves to talk the talk. They love to say that they're going to do all these things like shrink the Fed's balance sheet and raise interest rates aggressively and things like that. But then at the first sign of any real trouble, there's immense political and social pressure on them to reverse course.

(09:27) So yeah, I wouldn't doubt that they would try to do that for a little while, but then something's going to break. Then there's going to be some bank that's at risk of going bust, or various banks, or trouble in the housing market, or a massive stock market correction, or something else.

(09:54) Something will happen and then I think at that time they reverse course aggressively and then they go to lower rates and perhaps do more quantitative easing. They'll probably call it something else because they've kind of used that terminology up for a while.

(10:18) But yeah, so if they're wanting to fight inflation — to get any meaningful fight against inflation, I think they're going to have to raise rates aggressively. And I'm not talking a quarter point rate hike a few times a year. I'm talking percentage points, like raising it from 4% to 8% to 12%.

(10:45) I think to fight inflation it's going to require that kind of interest rate hike. And consumers can't afford that. The US government certainly can't afford that. Back when Volcker did that to kill the inflation of the 1970s, he took the interest rate well into double digits.

(11:08) I think it got up to 18% or something. I wasn't around at this time, but he was in a very different environment back then with debt to GDP at about 30%. Now debt to GDP is 120%. And that doesn't include unfunded liabilities, and you have to include unfunded liabilities, otherwise it's just dishonest accounting.

(11:34) And if you include those, your debt to GDP ratio is something like 400%. So when comparing 400% debt to GDP today versus whatever it was — 30% debt to GDP back then in the Volcker era — that's a night and day difference, and I don't think they can raise rates to 10% or something like that that's going to be needed to fight inflation.

(12:04) So he was asking, if he walks the talk and actually does what he says, will that put a lot of pressure on gold? Yeah, it certainly would. And not just gold — all the financial markets, mining stocks, the broader stock market. If they do severe quantitative tightening and shrink the Fed's balance sheet, there goes Wall Street's punch bowl, and I think in that case you're going to see multiples of companies across the broad stock market shrink a lot. So that

(12:48) doesn't even take into account their earnings. Let's just say their earnings stay flat, but their multiple shrinks from 25 to 15. That's a 40% decline in the stock price with earnings staying flat. So I wouldn't be surprised to see declines in multiples in a scenario like that.

(13:13) But then if we're talking gold and you're in a rising interest rate environment, gold, physical gold, doesn't pay interest. So in a higher interest rate environment, gold is less attractive because you can buy bonds that yield a higher rate relative to gold that yields no rate. So as interest rates go higher, the bonds become more attractive relative to gold, which should put downward pressure on the gold price.

(13:48) And then also taking into consideration what's happened with gold over the last couple of years. We've had a historic bull run and it went from $2,000 an ounce to $5,500 an ounce in just a couple of years. Now consolidation or some retracement back to 3500 seems normal to me.

(14:21) That seems like a normal healthy consolidation. So I wouldn't be surprised to see gold spend a couple of years at the $3,500 an ounce mark. That wouldn't surprise me at all. So those are some of my thoughts on that. >> Okay. It sounds like long run what you're saying is — another guy, a semi-frequent guest on the show, he likes to say all roads lead to money printing basically, like QE, whether they call it something else or whatever — that seems to be where it all leads, and

(14:58) sounds like you're in the same boat — maybe in the short term here they can pretend by hiking a few quarter points or something but in the long run that's not going to — Yeah. And I don't think politicians have the ability or willingness to tell voters, hey, sorry, we're cutting your social security benefits by 50%.

(15:31) So I think that gets solved in another way. Each year social security recipients get a cost of living adjustment but that's based on the US government's calculation of inflation, which generally significantly deviates from the actual change in prices that people actually pay. So when the government says, hey, inflation was 4% this year, but real actual inflation was 8% —

(16:06) or let's do 7%. Actual inflation 7%. People get a cost of living adjustment of 4%. The government just took 3% off their liability there that year. And they do that every single year. So I think that's how the unfunded liability problem gets solved — by this dishonest accounting of inflation that compounds annually, to not tell retirees, hey, sorry, we're paying you 50% less, but retirees get paid 3% less this year, 4% less next year, 3 and a

(16:51) half percent less the following year after that. And over time those retirement benefits buy less and less. And people notice this. People certainly notice their retirement check doesn't go as far as it used to. And that's because of that specific mechanism of the government under-reporting inflation, which means the cost of living adjustment isn't as high as inflation is, which makes those unfunded liabilities more tolerable over time.

(17:26) So I think that's how they continue kicking the can down the road. Absolutely agree. I think that's exactly what they're going to do. Okay. Moving on to silver. United America wants to know, would love Jordan's thoughts on Silver Crown Royalties. Michael Gentile is a shareholder and very bullish. What are your thoughts?

(17:49) I really like what I know of this company so far. I'm still researching it. Michael Gentile is very bullish on it and I think he's someone who's worthwhile to follow. He really knows what he's doing. But he spreads his risk around a lot and he takes big positions in a lot of different companies.

(18:22) So he knows there's going to be a lot of failures in his portfolio. But it's also worth noting that it's not that he's so much immediately bullish on Silver Crown — this is a 20-year investment time horizon for him. So he's playing this out to 2046, not to 2027 or 2028. So if someone were to invest following Michael into his investments and you invest in Silver Crown and then a year from now you're down 25% and you're like, this Michael Gentile guy is an idiot,

(19:03) I should never have listened to him — hey, he has 19 more years on his investment time frame and you gave up after a year. So your investment time frame has to match the time frame that the company is going to take to create their value and for their catalyst to play out.

(19:32) Okay. So long term on this one, you have to take a time horizon, what I'm hearing, of decades, not months. Yeah. >> Okay. All right. Let's see. Toby wants to know — he's asking about the fundamentals of silver versus the technicals of silver right now. What do you see? >> What's silver at today? >> Something like that. >> At this moment it's at $58. >> Okay. I recall doing an interview with you after silver had spiked to about $120 and I was preaching extreme caution and talking about how — hey, you have a billion or a billion and a half people in rural Asia who don't have much access to banking and physical silver is their savings account, and how many of these people are going to sell their silver and exchange it for gold? How many people

(20:40) are going to sell their silver to buy more land? Sell their silver to move to the city where there's more opportunity, sell their silver to expand their home, to buy a luxury that they weren't able to afford before, to buy a tractor to make their farming more efficient. And I thought there was going to be a lot of physical silver coming to market because of a historic rise in the silver price.

(21:04) And when you have a billion and a half people, even if they only have one ounce each, or even if they're only selling one ounce each, that's about two years of mine supply of silver coming to market. Now if they're selling three ounces each, that's about six years of mine supply coming to market.

(21:25) So yeah, back then I was saying proceed with extreme extreme caution getting into silver here. Now, at $58, I'm much more comfortable with it because — well, the chart looked like a hockey stick there. And whenever you see a chart like that, it almost always reverses.

(22:00) And when it does, it typically reverses aggressively. So anyway, everybody in the comment section that I saw back when I was saying I'm bearish on silver at 100 or $120, I was being called an idiot a lot. And saying this will age very poorly. Now Rick Rule likes to say that when he sees that in the comment section, about how the whole comment section is against him, that he usually knows he's right.

(22:37) So that's kind of what I had in my head there. But now that it's come back to earth and it's at $58, I would be much more comfortable looking for a silver investment here. Okay, I'll share the technicals here. >> Yeah, and he was asking about the technicals and I have nothing to say on the technicals, so I wanted to ask you about that.

(23:02) >> Okay, here's what I got. This is what I put in my last free newsletter — I was eyeing this $58 line right here simply because of this back here. You see how we have like a week's worth of side action right there on 58 and then we're just off to the races? That's kind of where we're hitting now, like today.

(23:25) And after $58, I like the 54 to $50 range right down here. There's a lot of price action around that level. Give it a little grace down here to maybe 47. But if it breaks 47, I've got to really rethink my thesis. So my floor is pretty close, and my ceiling is essentially — I don't want to say infinite, but when you're talking like a couple hundred bucks an ounce or something, which I think this could completely get to.

(23:51) The real thing that would make me turn bullish on this is this sort of parallel channel here. See how we got the top hit and then we got a bottom and we're just hitting that bottom right now? Now you could also drag this down here to where those wicks go and that could bring you a little bit lower.

(24:07) This is more of an art than a science, but I'm not really going to turn bullish on silver here until we break up here — like we get a weekly close above the top part of this parallel, which is way up at 85, not where we are right now. So that's kind of where I'm looking here for silver.

(24:24) Now, looking on the technicals, if we look here on the RSI of silver, we've got an RSI of 27, but the price is way up here at 63. Now we go down here and we've got an RSI of 27 again, right? But the price is lower. That's good for finding a bottom. If it makes you feel any better, a limit order just hit for me on the Sprott physical silver trust at $18, which is 50 cents lower than it is right now.

(24:53) And also more importantly here on SILJ. And what we can see here is — see how we have a double bottom here in SILJ, but look at the RSI. We have some positive divergence here on the RSI, although the price was basically the same. The RSI here went from 31 up to 37, and it also did with a lot of our other gold and silver mining stocks.

(25:19) So that is a textbook way to be on the good side of variance for finding bottoms — when you have a positive divergence like this in the RSI, and that's exactly what we're seeing right now in gold and silver miners. So, to say I'm excited is a little bit of an understatement. We'll see.

(25:39) We'll see. Time will tell. But that's what I see on the charts. Okay. Royalty companies. We know you're a fan of royalty companies. GP wants to know — he gave a few examples here. He says, best value royalty companies right now. He said Orogen Royalties, Royal Gold, Elemental, Altius, Wheaton Precious Metals.

(26:07) >> Yeah, as you mentioned, I'm a big fan of royalty companies, especially if you can buy them at the right price. Sometimes we go through market cycles where they become way overvalued, but typically you give it five years and they grow into their valuations.

(26:31) So if you're holding for decades — even when you're buying in those times when they're overvalued — you can still typically get pretty good returns on your investment, but you have to have long-term time horizons in that case. I definitely prefer to buy when they're cheaper, though.

(26:50) You mentioned a few different companies. Altius is one that historically has traded at a huge discount to its net asset value, and lately it hasn't been. So I would prefer to wait for a better valuation there. But at the same time I think the company is going to grow by about 15% compounded annually, and my fair value for the stock today is somewhere around $40 per share, talking US dollars, and it growing at 10 or 15% annually for 10 years —

(27:31) I think you're looking at a triple in 10 years if my math is right on that. So a 10-year triple is not bad at all. So even though historically it's traded below its NAV, I would be willing to buy it here because the price is fair. Orogen, from what I've seen, is a pretty good value.

(28:03) I don't have a specific target price on that. Elemental Royalty — this is mostly gold and copper, and they recently announced an acquisition. So they're bringing on a significant silver asset that's hopefully in production five years from now. Their management is saying production by end of 2027, but I don't think that's going to happen. I think that's being very very optimistic.

(28:38) So I foresee production maybe five years from now, maybe seven years from now, but I think Elemental is going to be very happy that they own this asset when it's in production. They also have a lot of other great assets. They have good growth coming.

(28:59) I think if you can buy that for anywhere around $15 per share, you're getting it at a pretty good price. Wheaton Precious Metals is another one he mentioned. Oh, can you pull up the Wheaton chart? Absolutely. >> Let me know what that's at today. But if you can buy Wheaton around $110 today, I think you're getting a pretty good value. I'm not sure where it's trading at right now, but 14 — right on my yellow line. >> Yeah. So I do like Wheaton here. They also have a lot of growth coming, and something about Wheaton is they have very long mine lives. So a lot of the smaller royalty companies, you have to worry about how do they replace their assets that are coming offline and are set to come offline within five or 10 years.

(29:58) But with Wheaton, their big assets have 30-year mine lives, 40-year mine lives, 50-year mine lives. So that's not really a concern with Wheaton because they have streams on very very long life assets. So yeah, I like that. Especially if you can get in around 110, or better yet if you could find it closer to 100.

(30:27) I think they also asked about Royal Gold. Royal Gold — man, I did not think we were going to get this opportunity to see another buying opportunity around $200 a share. And this is an exceptional buying opportunity for Royal Gold. And I continue to buy aggressively, as I think we could see approximately a double in the share price without the gold price moving —

(30:57) just by assets coming online, just by getting valued more like their peers. So yeah, that's a little bit of an overview on my thoughts on the royalty companies. >> Okay. Yeah, what I've noticed about a lot of these stocks like the gold ones and silver too is there's kind of this little pattern over here where you've got a lot of price action going like this.

(31:24) It goes sideways and then goes up. And we can see the same thing for Wheaton Precious Metals. And if you just basically try to buy now around all that price action back there, you're probably going to have a really good time two years from now. Don't get too caught in the weeds.

(31:41) Basically just try to catch all of this back here and I think a couple of years from now you're going to be wondering when you should be taking profits. >> And I think you're even better off with a longer term time horizon than that, because — while I mentioned earlier in the interview that I wouldn't be surprised for the gold price to consolidate for a couple years after this historic bull run, I think eventually — well, I think inflation continues.

(32:16) I think the value of the dollar continues to decrease over the long run. If we look back a hundred years, the dollar has lost something like 97 or 98% of its value — 97 or 98% of its purchasing power, I should say. And I think that continues, and there's — >> that's the M2 chart. >> Yeah.

(32:47) And I don't really think there's any other feasible way out of this — other than the government continues printing money, continues increasing the money supply, continues to do that arbitrage where they create inflation at seven or 8% a year and then they give a cost of living adjustment of 3 or 4% a year, and then essentially they're pocketing the difference.

(33:16) By pocketing the difference, it's basically like their liabilities decrease by that amount. While it's not totally out of the realm of possibilities of them saying to bond holders, hey, sorry, as it turns out, we borrowed too much money and we can't pay you everything we owe you, and we're going to give you 30 cents on the dollar —

(33:41) I think that's in the realm of possibilities, but I don't think it's the most likely scenario. But that is another possibility, and that would also create a huge disruption in financial markets. But yeah, that's kind of what I see there. >> Okay. Wrapping up here, one last question on uranium and then we're going to get into energy with premium subscribers. Derek wants to know — Denison is building Phoenix. He says, "I think in about a year and a half, this is a $20 stock. What is your opinion?" So right now, I think it's about a $3 stock, and that puts the market cap at about 2.5 billion. Maybe you can verify that for me while I'm talking, but a $20 stock going up from $3, I think that would imply about a 20 or $25 billion market cap.

(34:45) And they're building Phoenix. And Phoenix is a great mine if their mining method works. It's in a great jurisdiction. It's one of the highest grade deposits in the world, and it has a really high IRR, internal rate of return, really short payback period, so it's awesome on all those metrics. But you go look at the feasibility study and the after-tax NPV8 is about $1.6 billion.

(35:28) And that's if their mining method works, how they think it's going to work. But this is uncharted territory with that mining method deep underground. So — Yeah. That NPV, I think they use something like 60 or $65 uranium. So uranium is $85 today. So let's add 30% to that NPV to adjust for the higher uranium price, and maybe you're looking at an after-tax NPV of 2.25

(36:08) billion, somewhere in that range, because it's not a mine that has a lot of leverage to a rising uranium price because the costs are so low. So the all-in cost to produce a pound of uranium from Phoenix is only supposed to be something like $15 or $20 a pound. So they already had huge margins at 60 or $65 uranium.

(36:36) So yeah, their margins are bigger at $85, but it's not like a high cost producer where your margins expand a lot as the uranium price goes up. They're a very low-cost producer. So their margins expand approximately in line with the increase in the uranium price. So you adjust for the uranium price by — if there's a 25% increase in the uranium price, maybe you increase the NPV by 30%.

(37:09) So you're looking at — they're building a mine where the NPV is maybe two or two and a half billion. And if you want it to be a $20 stock, you have to get to a 20 or $25 billion market cap. And I don't see that happening. Even if uranium goes to $300, I still don't think it's a $20 stock.

(37:34) Okay. So good prospects, but since their margins are already so high, every few-dollar increase — it's not like it would be a uranium miner whose all-in sustaining cost is $70, so they've got a margin there of 15 bucks or something.

(37:57) So if it goes to 100, they've essentially doubled their margin. If uranium goes to 100, yeah, they make more money, but the amount of money they make increases approximately linearly with the uranium price. It's not like the high cost producer that you were talking about where if the uranium price increases $15, they double their margins. It's not like that at all.

(38:29) But you have more downside protection when you have a low-cost mine, but you also have less upside leverage. >> Yep. Exactly why Rick says that the worst companies often outperform at the end of a bull market. Jordan, this is always a pleasure. You have a special offer for our members — can you let them know what that is? Yeah, if you like the way I think and you like to know what I'm doing with my own money and you'd like to have access to my valuation models and see what I'm buying and selling at any point in time and how I'm viewing the markets, you can click on the link that Steve will put in the description below.

(39:14) And with that link, you'll get 20% off your first year subscription. But that's only valid for the first 24 hours after this video goes live. That link is getting cut off after 24 hours. So if that interests you, if you like the way I think, maybe you can go sign up for that. >> Awesome.

(39:35) Well, I love your newsletter, and I've got to say I'm a paid subscriber of probably half a dozen newsletters and yours is my favorite. So keep up the good work. I love the work that you do. I'm so technically focused — to have a guy that's in the balance sheets, in the books, really makes up for what I lack.

(39:54) And I appreciate your work, and thank you, and keep it up. >> I appreciate that, Steve. And interestingly, even though I'm totally basing my investments on the fundamentals and you're basing yours largely on the technicals, I'm often shocked at how often our views align and when we see buying opportunities at the same time.

(40:20) They line up pretty often. Yeah, I've noticed that too. And I think it's just that — well, I don't know what it is. I guess I'm just good at charts and you're good at spreadsheets and balance sheets, and the two of us together, it just works. Jordan, thank you very much for coming back on the show.

(40:42) Thanks for having me, Steve. >> Thank you for being here. Next up in the premium segment, Jordan and I dig into an energy company that's already in the premium portfolio. And right now, it's lining up as both a strong fundamental and technical buy. We talk about debt, cash flow, buybacks, dividends, and major cost savings after a recent merger.

(41:02) I also pull up the technical chart to show why the setup looks so good right here. How much upside could there be if both the fundamentals and the technicals are pointing in the same direction? Join us in the premium episode to find out. The link is down below. Thank you so much for your support. Have a wonderful rest of your day and happy trading.

(41:21) For more content like this, check out these videos right here.