Ted Oakley — a generational bear market ahead, and gold in "the early innings"

Gold spent three months bouncing off $4,000 while nearly everyone writing about it said the same thing: one more drop to $3,500–3,600 before the bottom. Oakley reads that unanimity as the tell. The speculative "hot money" that piles into a rising commodity had already been forced out between February and roughly six weeks before this interview, so when gold poked down to about $3,950 there was nobody left to sell — and that is where Oxbow bought heavily.

He is careful about what he is claiming. Not a forecast — "I don't know if it's going to go $200, $300 more down or not, I just know it's cheap now." His actual view is bigger than the level: "you're in the early innings on gold and silver, but particularly the gold miners." And the reason he owns gold at all isn't a price target; it's insurance against a currency he expects to keep losing value "the rest of your life." In client accounts that means one or two gold exchange-traded funds — shares that simply hold bullion in a vault — rather than physical bars.

Agnico Eagle is one of the world's largest gold miners, with most of its mines in politically stable places like Canada, Finland and Australia. Oakley owns a deliberately wide spread of miners rather than one favourite, and Agnico sits at the top of that ladder: "the biggest one we like is Agnico Eagle."

Why the size matters: a big, established miner gives you leverage to a rising gold price without the single-mine risk that can sink a small producer. It was bought back over the six weeks before this interview along with the rest of the precious-metals book, after those shares had corrected hard — and he thinks the recovery off the lows has further to run.

Equinox is a much smaller gold producer, and it occupies the opposite end of Oakley's ladder: "the smallest one we like is Equinox." A small miner moves further than a big one when gold rises — and further down when it falls — so he holds it as the high-octane end of a diversified group, not as a standalone bet.

The reason it earns a place at all is arithmetic: he flagged it in his previous appearance at roughly five and a half times its expected 2027 profits, a fraction of what the broad market costs.

Alamos is a mid-sized gold producer that sits between the giants and the juniors on his ladder. His comment is simply a quality judgment — "another good company, another good gold miner" — rather than a valuation argument.

The important context is the group call around it: every one of these miners has "already done well off the lows here and I think they'll continue to do that." He's not picking a winner; he's owning the whole rung structure and letting a rising gold price do the work.

Royal Gold is a royalty company: instead of digging mines, it hands a miner cash up front in exchange for a permanent slice of whatever that mine produces. It carries none of the day-to-day risk of running a mine — labour, diesel, cost blowouts — while still capturing the upside if gold rises.

That is exactly why Oakley wants royalties in the book alongside the operating miners. When he lists what Oxbow owns in gold, "most of the big royalty companies" comes right after the miner ladder, with Royal Gold named first.

Wheaton is a "streamer" — a close cousin of a royalty company. It pays a miner up front for the right to buy a fixed share of the mine's future gold or silver at a set, very low price, then sells that metal at whatever the market pays. The gap between the two is the profit, and it widens automatically as metal prices rise.

Oakley names it in the same breath as Royal Gold and Franco-Nevada: "we have Wheaton. Wheaton is in there." It's the low-operational-risk way of owning both metals at once, which suits a book where the silver exposure is deliberately smaller than the gold.

Franco-Nevada is the largest of the gold royalty companies — it owns rights to production across scores of mines it doesn't operate. In his previous appearance it was the vehicle he used to re-enter gold first, precisely because a royalty holder is the least fragile way back into a sector that had just fallen 35–40%.

Here it simply remains in place, the third of the royalty trio he names. Together the three give him diversified exposure to gold's price without owning any single mine's problems.

Hecla is the largest silver producer in the United States, and it is the only silver miner Oxbow owns — "we own the biggest silver company is Hecla." Everything else on the silver side is the metal itself.

The reason to hold a miner as well as bullion is leverage: a silver miner's costs are largely fixed, so a rise in the silver price flows disproportionately into its profits. Oakley has already run this position once as a full round trip — bought near $9, sold above $30, repurchased around $14.50–15 — which is a good illustration that his stance here is a position, not a permanent conviction.

Silver went above $100 in late 2025 and Oxbow sold every ounce — and took real criticism for it, because the metal had risen 212% that year. His justification is a rule rather than a forecast: when a commodity moves that far that fast, the size of the move itself obliges you to take the money. Silver later collapsed back and sits around $64 at the time of this interview, which vindicated the exit.

Now he's back in, with only "three or four bucks, maybe five" of profit so far, and added more the day before recording. It is a deliberately smaller position than gold — silver is more volatile and more industrial — but he expects it to follow gold: "the same thing that applies to silver applies to gold."

Asked which single commodity could deliver the largest returns, Oakley reaches for a supply-and-demand gap you can state in one line: the United States burns roughly 50 million pounds of uranium a year in its reactors and produces only two and a half to three million of it domestically. Everything else is imported — increasingly from countries that are, in his framing, hoarding their own resources.

He owns "some uranium" without naming the vehicles. The wider point is that uranium is only the clearest example of a pattern: "there's numerous things like that… a lot of the critical minerals are like that." The screen he is really describing is any material where domestic demand is a large multiple of domestic supply.

Chevron is one of the world's biggest integrated oil companies — it drills, ships, refines and sells. It anchors the large-cap producer end of an energy book Oakley deliberately spreads across every link in the chain rather than betting on one segment.

The argument in this conversation is about profitability at a lower oil price than the headlines suggest is necessary. He expects crude to settle between $65 and $85, and insists "the energy companies can make a lot of money at $75. A lot of money… they don't need a $100 oil to do that." Because many investors assume the opposite — that a fall from $105 to the low $80s ends the story — the shares just get cheaper while the cash keeps coming.

Exxon is the other supermajor in the same slot, named directly alongside Chevron: "we own Chevron, we own Exxon." The two together form the stable, dividend-paying base of the energy allocation.

The thesis is identical and worth restating plainly: the market prices these companies as if oil is on its way back to $50, while Oakley's own work says the settling range is $65–85 — a level at which a supermajor's profits are large and durable. The mismatch between that price expectation and the actual cash generation is the whole opportunity.

Matador is a mid-sized US shale producer, mostly in the Permian Basin. On Oakley's ladder it is the "midsize" rung — bigger and better-capitalised than a small driller, more responsive to the oil price than a supermajor.

Consistent with his earlier appearance, he doesn't own it as a leveraged bet on crude. He owns it because he believes he can forecast its earnings for the next six to eight quarters, and that visible stream of profits is priced at single-digit multiples while the broad market trades near 25 times.

Northern Oil and Gas doesn't operate wells itself — it buys non-operated minority stakes in wells other companies drill, which keeps its cost base light and lets it spread capital across many projects. Oakley calls it a "great company" and bought it roughly seven or eight weeks before this interview at about $18.

The number that made it attractive is the dividend: it yielded around 10% at his purchase price. The shares have since risen enough that the yield is down to about 7.5% — which is simply the arithmetic of a rising share price on a steady payout, and is his way of showing the position is already working. For an investor being paid 7–10% in cash while waiting, the oil price doesn't have to do anything dramatic.

APA — the company formerly known as Apache — is the natural-gas half of the producer book, held unchanged from his previous appearance: "we own natural gas. We own the old Apache company, which is APA."

Gas matters separately from oil in his framework because it is the one critical energy resource the US genuinely has in abundance, and because gas demand has a growth story attached to it (power generation) that oil does not. Like the rest of the energy book, it sits at single-digit earnings multiples against a 42 CAPE for the index.

Antero is a large Appalachian natural-gas producer, and it draws the most emphatic valuation comment in the whole interview: "God, what a cheap stock. Seven or eight times earnings."

Seven or eight times earnings means the company's annual profit is roughly an eighth of what you pay for the shares — an implied return in the low teens before any growth at all, at a moment when the S&P 500 costs around 25 times earnings. That gap, not a forecast about gas prices, is the position.

Enterprise runs pipelines, storage and processing facilities — the "midstream" of the energy business. It is essentially a toll booth: it charges fees on volumes moving through its network, so its income depends far more on how much oil and gas flows than on what a barrel sells for that day.

That is precisely why Oakley wants it in a portfolio built for a volatile commodity decade. He names it first among "the pipelines" and pairs it with MPLX and Energy Transfer, filling in the link between the producers he owns upstream and the service companies he owns at the drill bit.

MPLX is the pipeline and logistics partnership spun out of refiner Marathon Petroleum, gathering and moving crude, refined products and natural gas liquids. Like Enterprise, it earns fees on throughput rather than betting on the commodity price, and it distributes most of its cash to holders.

It is one of the three midstream names Oakley lists as he walks "up and down the way" through the energy chain — a reminder that his energy stance is structural coverage of the whole industry, not a single high-conviction pick.

Energy Transfer operates one of the largest pipeline networks in North America, moving natural gas, natural gas liquids, crude and refined products across the country. Same economics as its peers: fee-based income tied to volumes, with a large cash distribution to holders.

Its role in the book is the same as EPD's and MPLX's — the steady, income-producing middle of an energy allocation whose ends (producers and service companies) are far more sensitive to the oil price.

Schlumberger is the world's largest oilfield services company — it doesn't own oil, it sells the drilling, measurement and completion work that producers buy. Its revenue therefore tracks how much drilling activity is happening, which makes it more cyclical than a producer.

Oakley deliberately keeps the whole services leg small — "a little bit on the service side" — but insists on having it, because a full-spectrum energy allocation without the service companies is missing a link that outperforms sharply when activity picks up.

Noble owns and operates offshore drilling rigs, which it leases to oil companies on multi-year contracts. It appears in this archive for the first time here, as "a little bit of Noble drilling" inside the small services sleeve.

Offshore drilling is the most cyclical corner of energy: rig day-rates collapse when producers stop spending and soar when they resume. Sizing it small is the point — it's exposure to a potential upswing that can't hurt the portfolio if the recession risk he flags actually arrives.

Transocean is the other offshore driller in the book, alongside Noble, and operates the same way: it owns rigs and rents them out under contract. Deepwater projects are long-lived, so a signed contract can lock in revenue for years.

Like Noble it is a deliberately small position — the most volatile link in a chain Oakley wants to own end to end, rather than a conviction bet on offshore drilling by itself.

Booking Holdings runs Booking.com, Priceline and Kayak — an online travel marketplace that takes a commission on hotel and flight reservations without owning any hotels or planes. It is capital-light and throws off a lot of cash.

Oakley names it as a recent addition to the roughly forty diversified, fundamentally-grounded stocks that sit outside his hard-asset and energy sleeves. The common thread with Visa and Mastercard, added at the same time, is a business that collects a percentage of other people's transactions — which keeps working, and even benefits, if the price level drifts higher the way his stagflation view expects.

Mastercard doesn't lend money or take credit risk — it operates the network that authorises and settles card payments, and takes a small fee on each one. Its revenue therefore scales with the total dollar value of spending, not with the number of things bought.

That is what makes it a quiet inflation hedge inside an equity portfolio: if prices rise, the same basket of goods generates a larger fee. Having flagged it in his previous appearance as "starting to look great again," Oakley confirms here that Oxbow has actually bought it.

Visa is the other half of the card-network duopoly, with the same economics as Mastercard: a toll on the value of payments moving across its rails, with none of the credit risk that sits on the banks' balance sheets.

It was bought alongside Mastercard and Booking in the recent-additions batch. In a book that is 45–50% short-term Treasuries and heavy in metals and energy, these are the names that provide equity exposure without buying into the crowded mega-cap technology trade he is actively selling.

Berkshire had been a net seller of shares for fourteen straight quarters, piling up a record ~$397 billion of cash — widely read as Buffett saying stocks were too expensive. In the second quarter under new CEO Greg Abel it bought $23.5 billion and sold only $3.7 billion, ending the streak. The host asks whether that changes the valuation message.

Oakley's answer is to do the division: $23 billion is "only about 5%, a little over 5% of their cash… I don't think they're crazy bullish or anything. If they were, they'd spend a lot more." In other words, judge a signal by its size relative to the capacity behind it, not by the headline number. He adds a reminder that the last time Buffett was written off for not owning the boom — 1999 — the following years showed exactly why you held Berkshire.

Freeport is one of the world's largest copper miners and the name most investors reach for when they want copper exposure. Oakley owns it — but this is a hold, not a buy, and the distinction is the whole point.

His discipline is symmetrical: he bought gold and silver aggressively because they had fallen and the speculative money was gone; copper did the opposite, staying at its highs and then making new ones. "We haven't added much to that because copper's at a high… supply demand wise, we'll keep them." Long-term he likes the copper story; he simply won't pay up for it today.

Southern Copper mines copper in Peru and Mexico and is, in Oakley's view, the better business of the pair: "a lot of people always talk about Freeport, but Southern Copper is really good company." The copper position is split roughly between the two.

The stance is the same as Freeport's — owned, not sold, not being added while the metal sits at record levels. It is worth noting what this reveals about his process: quality alone doesn't earn fresh capital, price does.

This isn't a view on Cisco today; it's the historical template Oakley uses to judge the AI build-out. In 1999–2000 the market decided the internet would require limitless routers and fibre, Cisco's shares priced in that future, and enormous capacity was laid in the ground. By 2002 it was obvious the capacity had overshot actual demand — even though the internet itself turned out to be every bit as important as promised.

His argument is that AI data centres are in the same position: the technology will matter, possibly more than the internet did, "but it ended up in different ways, not what everybody thought it was in '98 and '99." That gap between a correct thesis and a wrong set of winners is why he refuses to own the trade at all.

Oxbow has held Microsoft for close to fifteen years across many client accounts and is now selling it outright. That's a significant act for a firm whose default holding period is three to ten years, and Oakley is explicit that it isn't a judgment on the company: it's arithmetic. Run the valuation forward, ask whether the multiple can hold, and "for us it looks like the valuation doesn't hold the price. That's why we sell it."

Two details matter for anyone copying the method. First, the selling is staged, not a single exit — "we've sold Microsoft really all the way up two or three or four times, just little bits at a time," and only now "decided to sell it all." Second, tax is a real constraint, not an excuse: some accounts bought so low that the capital-gains bill prevents a complete exit, so those positions are worked down over time rather than dumped.

SMH is a fund holding the major semiconductor stocks in one basket, so Oakley uses it as a diagnostic rather than a position. His test is simple and repeatable: pull up every constituent's chart. If essentially all of them are at new highs simultaneously and the basket itself is up 20%, the move is no longer about individual companies — it's a flow into a theme.

"Usually that's a sign that you probably don't have a lot more to go." Combined with his forty-six years of watching semiconductors "live by the sword and die by the sword," this is where he thinks the next Zoom-style round trip is most likely to happen.

AMD designs processors and AI accelerators and is the first name he gives when pressed for specifics. His objection isn't to the company's products; it is that "all the new money went the last six months" into this group, pushing prices "much higher than they have been."

The pattern he's describing is a crowded trade: when a sector absorbs the marginal buyer's cash, there is nobody left to push it higher and the same flow reverses violently. "These semiconductors can really correct on you in a big big way."

Intel is in the same vulnerable trio, and Oakley flags something specific about it: "really Intel hadn't gone up much at all until this last run." A stock that has been going nowhere and then joins a sector-wide melt-up is, in his reading, being carried by the flow rather than by its own improvement — which makes it more exposed, not less.

It is also his personal cautionary tale, and he tells it against himself. He sold Intel in spring 1999 after a 400% four-year run; it doubled again before peaking in 2000, and it then took twenty-six years to get back to that level. The lesson he draws is not "never sell early" — it is that the pain of selling early is small compared with the twenty-six-year cost of not selling at all.

Nvidia designs the chips at the centre of the AI build-out and is the third name in his run-up list: "all of those have that same characteristic." The stance follows directly from his hyperscaler argument — if the companies buying these chips have overshot on capacity, the demand that justifies today's price doesn't hold twenty-four months out.

The exchange around it is instructive on sizing rather than timing. The host confesses she sold hers at four times her money and watched it keep running; Oakley refuses to treat that as a mistake — "I wouldn't be too hard on myself if I had a 4x." Taking a large gain and being early is, in his framework, a good outcome, not a failure.