Righto, money miners! Tell you what, I would compare the pedigree of the guests we've got coming up to the open pit mining pedigree of MMS. That is about the most distinct parallel I've ever found. So, introducing... So before you just first stop, get MMS to do your open pit mining contract.
Then you're allowed to listen to this. If you're not, turn it off. Go away.
Have a look at this for a freaking CV. He's a geo. Yes. But from the Royal School of Mines 30 years ago, so you'd assume he's learned a shitload in that time. Very true, Matty.
15 years on the sell side. But he did about a decade with BlackRock, who is the world's largest money manager. in the resources space and just large of everything and wasn't just a shit kicker there, portfolio manager. Mate, Kaylee Barker, have you ever been introduced to the world like this?
No, I'm flattered. Matty, you missed the most terrifying thing on his CV and that's that Kaylee's a literal street fighter, a professional one. I don't think there's a form of martial arts he's not trained in, boxing, Muay Thai, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Jeet Kune Do.
I don't even know if I'm saying that right. Anyway, I think you invented your own. Mike Marshall asked at some point.
Mate, you better watch out, mate, after I get a few beers. I'll be like. I don't know, Matty. I saw some videos on YouTube, mate.
I reckon you'd be finished. Bit of shadow boxing. How good is it, mate?
So, boys, take it away. Oh, jeez, I'm excited about this. Thanks very much for having me.
Pleasure to be here. Right, so, yeah, we're talking about mining, eh? I'm super excited to have you here. It's not often that we have the privilege of talking to someone that's sat in as many different seats as you in proximity to the, you know, the industry that we love and care about and want to know more about as well.
And you've had some very interesting seats, Kayleigh. And, like, you know, I think about, like, you know, like your former employer where you would have had, you know, a role where you've got, like, active management responsibilities, you know, you're choosing. mining stocks that you think will outperform over time.
But BlackRock, a huge part of their growth is actually to do with the rise of passive investing in lots of ways. So I'd love to know what your perspective on the growth of passive investing has had on markets and specifically the mining industry. Yeah, well, if I put my active fund manager's hat on, I would say terrible. That's internal competition, right? I mean, everybody's after the cheaper fee.
Cost of living crisis hasn't helped. But the fee compression across the board started way before that. And it's bad enough in a lot of parts of the world.
The US is fiercely competitive. I mean, you can buy a cheap ETF product for almost nothing. It's incredible.
But I think what investors, a lot of investors don't want to worry too much. They just want to part their money for cheap fees and get the exposure to the industry. And I've got a massive amount of sympathy with that.
There's nothing wrong with that. If I want to buy mining and I don't really know anything about it and I don't care too much about how my money's run, then you chuck it in the ETF product. And that's why that part of the world has just grown in phenomenal portions.
Active management, it does everything completely differently. It's a hands-on approach. It's run by real people that don't just push stocks around a benchmark. So they're very, very different beasts.
Obviously, you pay more fees, but they're very, very different beasts. But you can't pull your punches, really. Active management is, I would say, in terminal decline. there's nothing you can do about it.
It's only going to get worse. And the fact that you can put your money in a bank account for 5% interest rate doesn't help at all. Does it, like in some ways, does it have an impact on the financing of new mines in some ways as well?
I mean, you've got a disproportionate amount of capital disappearing from the active space, which typically would have potentially gone towards bringing new mines online via developers. Yeah, that's definitely the case. Obviously, they...
They don't invest in deals like active fund managers do. That's why you've seen the sort of rise of PE groups and metals traders and other sort of quasi-funding facilities and very inventive structures that a lot of people have come up with to try and bring funding back into the industry. But it has created a lot of pressure.
It's meant development of mines that, you know, there's not been the boom times of mine building. that there were and that's just not just... flows, obviously, that's also all the regulations and everything else that's gone into the market, into the industry.
It's just the barriers to entry has just made it far, far more challenging. I'd love to tap into PE. You mentioned there for a moment, Hayley, what do you think of PE more broadly?
I think the common critique we've heard and maybe put forward is that, you know, you can really nail it on your first fund, maybe your second fund. But it's a sort of cycles game and it's very hard. Do you have a sort of different view on that?
Well, yes and no. I mean, yeah, I mean, you've got the three sort of funding avenues, you know, in terms of equity, I guess. You know, the active managers, we've talked about that. The hedges, they play the cycle. You know, they come and leave on that fierce business, come and go.
So they're there when they need to be there, then they lose a lot of money and then go away again. And I've seen that cycle after cycle. And the PE groups have always been there.
They've certainly grown, and they've certainly been far more inventive in their funding structures. I think the challenge they always have is how to invest counter-cyclically, depending in the state of the industry, and also finding the opportunities. They're always swamped with opportunities.
They have thousands of... projects that come across their desks, but finding the ones that, A, meet the quality criteria, have an arbitrage in some shape or form, and indeed the company's willing to listen to them, it puts them under a lot of pressure to find the right opportunity. They only need one or two to win, but one big loss and… it can go the other way.
So the pressure is quite enormous for them to do the right thing. So they're incredibly fussy. So I don't think they're going to make the big difference for the industry because of that, because they have to be fussier.
They can't allocate risk as perhaps as well as the traditional funding community can. Who would you class as the most successful PE groups in the resources space historically? Which are the standout ones?
Well, I mean, you know, I've got a lot of affinity with the likes of RCF because they've been around for so long, although they've changed dramatically. But there's a lot of, some of the newer players, I think, have some very interesting models, the likes of Orion, you know, that can just invest right across the piece, you know. So, like if you're a mining company, what a fabulous opportunity that you can walk into one shop and you can get debt.
equity, quasi-equity, royalty, you name it, in all sorts of shapes or forms. And we've seen a few people, a few companies benefit from that. I think that's the way to go because their constraints of managing public money just isn't there so that they can be far more creative. What about on the London-specific sort of front?
We've also spoken... in the past about London, you know, not to be too blunt, but just being dead for miners. You're from London. Do you sort of stick up for the LSE and, you know, AIM and the various sort of exchanges there as still a place to go if you're a mining company or is that also a trend that, you know, you just don't want to fight? Yeah, no, I mean, you've got to be at least slightly loyal to where you come from, I guess.
But it's certainly, London is certainly not the... boomtown it used to be. I cut my teeth on the sell side in the aim boom in the early 2000s.
I mean, in those days, it was just nuts. You were getting 10 IPOs a week and absolute dross that was there. There was 26 diamond companies at the peak, I think.
I don't think one of them has survived. So it was just an incredible time. Those days, I don't think are ever coming back. I think there's still a lot of smaller companies still stuck on the AIM market. It's a poor cousin for the LSE.
The success stories in those are going to be few and far between. But where I think the real London powerhouse still will remain is if you have a sizable company and you're big diversified, you can tick the boxes for a generalist rather than a resource investor. You know, that's where London has a lot of money to swing at. And, you know, when I talk to a lot of my generalist colleagues in my former shop...
they only ever played in the big stocks. You know, they would sort of tap me on the shoulder every six months and say, pop us up, pop us up. Should I buy Freeport or BHP? What do you think about BHP?
You know, that was as limited a conversation. It was very, very short. What's the, I guess, the lower bound of market cap for the generalists to actually, you know, be interested? Yeah, it's probably that. At least a few billion, and when it's a few billion, it's probably more like the EM houses.
Most of the generalists want even bigger than that, so five to 10 billion would be the absolute minimum for most of them. So they can sort of play in some of the mid-cap space a little bit, but they're really looking more like the seniors. Is that US dollars?
Yeah, yeah, US. On the actual investment process, Kyle, you're a geo. You have technical capability and knowledge and training to judge all bodies and the quality of a deposit, the quality of a mine. But when you're in an institution that invests predominantly in mega caps, which have multiple operations everywhere, how applicable is that or how relevant, how useful is the technical backing?
in allocating to those sorts of companies? Yeah, well, I mean, I would say that, you know, the billions that I talked about would have been my generalist colleagues. When I worked, we would have invested up and down the cap spectrum. So I looked at everything from small caps right up to the big guys.
I mean, there were big funds, so there was a limit to how much you could do on the end, you know, on the small side. And, but... When you're looking at the big diversified, that's sort of irrelevant.
Maybe there might be some particular division or commodity that you do the work on and that might drive your investment decision. So, maybe you want more copper, so you might swing to Rio more than BHP. That would be the way you sort of think about it.
So, it'd be very high level, top-down type investment analysis. The lower down the cap spectrum you get, So when you're looking at small caps, that's pure technical. So just like you would as any good investor probably should, you build models, you look through technical reports, go out and kick the tires, and do all that good hard stuff to do a proper deep dive. And that was where my background came in a lot handy, to go and see what the assets are like. Try and make the really good calls.
Those things, while they might be a smaller part of your portfolio, could often be, you know, we always think about things in active space against your benchmark, and those things are all off benchmark. So they're all in active space. So they can have a big impact on your performance.
And if you can get, you know, a handful of those together, I mean, I was lucky I made probably more successful calls than unsuccessful. And that would drive performance. So, it was a great thing to do.
Not all fund managers do that. There's plenty of ones that don't have technical expertise and are just sort of momentum junkies that just move stocks around the portfolio depending whether they're up or down. But I wasn't like that.
I like to do it from a fundamental basis. Did you have a good bullshit detector on you, being a G.O. on the site visits and when you're getting told the story? Yeah, it's part and parcel for the job, I think. And like I said, when you're doing a few days on site, you know, you can't always call it right.
But my God, I saw some, there's been plenty of stories. I've been where I walked into site and I've been straight on the phone back to the office in London and said. So guys. It's a pile of shit.
And sometimes the other way around too, you know, like those are the real, those are the ones that you go to bed in a cold sweat. But the ones, the other side is also true as well. I've been to sites where I've gone, we've just got to buy the crap out of this. I've never seen geology like this. This is world class.
This is the kind of thing we're looking for, you know, load up. load up, back the truck up. Are there any specific examples that you can disclose of some of the success stories like that where you've just like, this is going to be big? All the cells as well, if you want to share. They're just all of them.
Yeah, there's been a few I can share with. So, well, let's see. Bellevue was one, you know, I knew the guy as well. We did a chance meeting in a BMO conference, in a meeting at the airport, and we tied up a deal with them within weeks. You know, that's not...
a world class, but to find grade, infrastructure, everything that you sort of takes a lot of boxes, you know, that was one that rang out to me. More on the world class side, great bare resources in Canada. And this is one thing that I learned in my time investing is that it doesn't matter if you're late so much. We're always late, particularly to your market.
I mean, your market is just Incredible. Three drill holes and market cap of half a billion. We were always late to the Aussie market, but that's fine.
I was late to Great Bear, got a 30%, 40% return, then Kinross stepped in and bought that, and then we made another good return. So probably doubled our money on it. But that was a great example of just look to the geology.
It didn't have a resource. could just see it was probably 10 million ounces, if not 20 in time. It's going to be a world-class production level.
Those are the sort of great things you'd love to see. Whereas, Filo Mining in the Vukuna district owned by the Lundin group, you just see that whole Vukuna district. I just looked at it and I went, guys, we just need to be it.
This is just going to be the next copper district in the world. We need to be it. So those are great ones.
On the flip side, there are those ones we walked into where I, particularly if they were legacy positions that we had picked up that were quite good for their time, usually historic mines. And I know you've got plenty of those in your outback. But those I always found historic mines just very, very tricky to try and go back into that. People go back into them.
the gold or copper price or something's doubled in the last 10, 20 years. Companies go back into them. And the chance of success is tough.
And it's really tough to get this kind of scale that you need to make money and not be hindered by all the dilution and everything else that you have sort of underground. So there's been plenty of times where we've struggled. Things like Metals X in the old days.
We had the Nifty Mike. We got that. It was just so tough.
And Nevada Copper, you know, and the other same thing as well. It's like really, really tough. Just couldn't make it work. Yeah.
So those ones where I did less and less of those and more and more of the big arm wapers. Tim Taylor's out the front of the bloody cross-boundary energy offices right now, word on the street, waving his arms, attracting the attention of any punter walking past that might be interested in a hybrid power station for their mine site. Like those... wacky wavy incredible inflatable yeah it's like it's like one of them but just with tim taylor's head on it like i've never seen an individual or a company care about saving the world so much with like reducing the carbon footprint of power stations with the bloody stationary storage the wind turbines the solar integrated with the thermal base load just what a low barrier to entry especially considering they build it own it operate it it's like The mining company doesn't even have to do anything.
You can cross that boundary today, Matty. You can. Cross that boundary, be smart miners, and get CBE and Timmy Taylor to put a hybrid power station in for you.
Don't let him stay out there waving his hands forever. No, he doesn't need to. I'd swear.
He doesn't need to. Yeah. What about like your Northern Star and Sandfire? They're probably the best historic boulders in Australia, or some of them.
Sandfire would have been a tough one because it was just obviously that was one of those ones you speak of. Once it hit those drill aisles, it was just five cents to... Yeah, yeah.
So, yeah, we would have been in and out of sand fire because of that reason, getting the timer in. I think by the time when I first looked at it, you know, the degreaser was on the end of life and it was tough and then they did Matza and we struggled. We struggled with that one for the amount they paid.
It was always one that I thought was going to come good in time. But just at the time, it didn't look like a great proposition to us. They probably saw it was...
entirely differently given they went ahead and did that. Northern Star, just a fabulous story. And BlackRock had been long, long-term shareholders there with quite a few, not just them, Northern Star, but the likes of Rangold back in the old days, just backing quality management teams, quality assets, really good track record, not destroying value, not going out raising money willy-nilly. And those, you know, they're not always perfect. You know, they have hiccups along the way.
Sometimes they wobble for a few years. But usually through time, 10 years, 20 years or a cycle, they're just great to be behind and back those kind of companies. Yeah. The theme with the big winners versus the losers was, you know, there was a pretty big distinction in the quality of the ore bodies between like a great bear and a subscale kind of, you know, nifty. The quality of the ore bodies sort of, you know, really dictate the long-term outcomes of these sorts of equities, don't they?
Nifty was good, but it all got mined and then fell in. But, yeah, the original nifty was frigging unbelievable. Yeah.
And that's right. And I think the other thing, it's not just a technical thing, right? It's a market thing now.
I mean, you know, your market in Australia is still very buoyant. But even then, it's been tough. There's been plenty of disaster stories.
And because of that, because of the burnout of investors, particularly in Canada, your average Canadian investor has moved from hunting exploration stocks, went to cannabis, then Bitcoin, now it's AI. They haven't really gone back to the mining exploration stories. And then they get a- If they do want to go back, well, there's like 100 companies which are going to, they found a project, it's a million ounces a gram, it's going to be 100,000 ounce a year type mine, you know, tier three type costs. It's just not that interesting. It's just not that interesting.
So I think those are the ones I just never made much money on. So I would always try and stay clear of those. look for something different, look for something exciting and try and find some quality.
Hayley, I'd love to know the sort of parts of the world, given your, you know, site visits to every corner of the globe, where are the pockets you think are kind of underrated and what are the other sort of parts where you're just not going to go there? Yeah, I mean, you definitely pay up for first world jurisdictions these days. I don't have to tell you that. And there was a massive arbitrage for quite a while.
It probably still is a bit one between Australia and Canada. But I think there's a sort of quality bias there as well. There's probably been less successful development stories in Canada.
But some of the sort of more exciting regions, I mean, Africa, I've got so much sympathy with Africa. Nobody, you know, Africa was traditionally backed by the Canadians. more Australian.
I mean, I cut my teeth in Tanzania back in the 90s, and I built a mine, set up a mine for Resolute, you know, now called Golden Pride. Gator as well, which Angler Gold Bull. And at the time, you know, that was pretty much the first Australians in Africa.
And to put it bluntly, not a clue. Like, going from... Going from, you know, the Western Gulf out to the middle of Africa is just a total different beast.
Social licence, very poor skill sets, no infrastructure. You know, the list goes on and on. I've heard stories from one of the Australian contractors that when they got their first contract in Africa, and I think it might have been Tanzania, and the sea containers would rock up from Australia, but they'd be three quarters empty because they've just been ransacked.
before they actually get to site and they're just like, they had to account for that just happening. It was, yeah, it was unbelievable stories from over there. But those were wild times, you know, those were wild, and particularly because we didn't have any technology, we didn't have mobile phones and GPSs and we would just bomb around. I mean, you just couldn't do the kind of things you could do now.
I've got pictures of me sitting on a drill, standing next to a drill rig with no... No PPE, no head fat, no under my ears are screwed. It was nuts, you know, and yeah, you know, the companies came in and said, oh, you know, can you just give us some of your geos and we need them to log some core. And I'm like.
Got to find them first, then we got to train them, and then they can sit on the cut. You know, it's just, you know, just don't have the skills. So, yeah, it was a very, it was a very different beast. But, you know, the geology there was, and it still is, it's just fantastic.
And, you know, whether it's, whether it's Tanzania or whether it's across West Africa or the Copper Belt, you know, I did a lot of work in the Copper Belt before the GFC. The geology is amazing. It's stunning.
what you have to stomach is the politics and the social licence, you know, and that's key. But if you want a mind delivered on time and on budget, that's the place to do it, you know, it still is. That's the thing.
I think there's like sometimes a lack of nuance in the way that, yeah, a lot of typical kind of capital alligators think about Africa. They just think, oh, I've got to put a line through it, and they don't. want to do the work to understand the nuance and the different jurisdictions there and the different risks.
And you talked about that premium that you have for tier one jurisdictions, and in some ways the premium totally makes sense. But in other ways, the unit costs to produce in the likes of Western Australia are stupidly high compared to Africa. Your margin's way lower. You've got less durability throughout the cycle, which matters the most as a mining company. Maybe the premium should be somewhere else where you have...
longevity through the cycle because you have low unit cost, you're on the cost curve. Well, that's right. And I think it comes back to that point of like a company versus a stock, right?
Because, you know, a company can be doing very well, but risk perception is very different. Everyone's got their own risk lens that they apply to stock. And so, Africa is just sadly never going to trade on the same multiples that it will as Australia for that reason. And even though they could be making a lot more money and have absolutely no geopolitical concerns in some countries, you're just never going to get around that.
And then just back to your question, I think one thing that always excited me as well as an investor was not just playing that, but also trying to look for new frontiers as well. And I think that's always great fun. You know, so, you know, Japan, companies exploring in Japan now, that's the whole sphere sort of opened up. There's lots of opportunity there. It's tricky stuff.
It's scratchy epithermals, but the potential is very large. Places like Ecuador, I was an early investor into Ecuador. You know, again, quite tricky politics, but the geology is just incredible. porphyry after porphyry.
And the next cab off the rank is probably Columbia. That's hardly been tapped at all. And they've still got a political cloak hanging over the top of it.
But those sort of exciting places, we're just going to need them. We're just going to need to go to those places to get the copper to meet all the future demands that we know and talk about in the energy transition and so forth. You had in your time, Kayleigh, unrivaled sort of ability to meet management teams and like you've sort of spoken about from big to kind of small. Are there, you know, specific to mining, are there attributes that really stand out to you?
Do you always want to back people that have kind of done it before or are there other sort of quirks you learnt along the way that might be sort of counterintuitive? Yeah, yeah, that's a... That's a very good question, actually.
And a very privileged position. I don't think everyone appreciates it, but it's a very privileged position to be in, where you can meet all the CEOs of the world. And it opens a lot of doors.
So that's an incredible thing in itself. And in answer to your question, I mean, there's two things I would say. First of all, track record's massively important. because people that have done it before successfully will inevitably do it again in the future. And they might not on number two, right?
I've done that. That's happened many, many a time where you back the management team. They go out and try to do it again.
They completely screw up. But if you've got a good management team and you're used to this with the stables of companies that operate out of Australia, you go on to the next one. And so they'll make you money on the next one. Mining is a tricky business, and it's impossible to get it right every time.
But if you back the right people, they'll go to the next one or the next one until they get it right. And so if you're backing those kind of people that don't give up, you're more often than not going to win out. So that's one thing. So back to traditional management teams that have really good track records. But I had a lot of sympathy with new management teams come in.
We are a stuffy old industry. And we don't need to be seeing the same old, well... No head, middle-aged people running, white males running mining companies. It's exciting to see new people, younger people, fresh ideas. Technology is a massive thing.
So companies that can market their company better. I mean, we've got to remember that the messaging for the industry is still eons behind. It's got better with critical metals and the energy transition and everything, but it's still far, far behind. And we don't do ourselves any favours.
I mean, I don't know if, I mean, you guys probably get this less. You know, you live in a very resource-heavy country in London. Well, I mean, when I graduated from the Royal Scholar of Mines, I can remember going to a pub and an old schoolmate of mine sort of running. Strolling across the middle of the pub saying, what are you doing raping our planet?
You bloody miners. Well, you had the usual spiel about, well, that's a glass you're holding there. How do you think that got into your hand, et cetera, et cetera.
That hasn't changed for 30 years. I've spent 30 years educating people. MMTS have been educating Australia about mining tenements for 21 years. It's not quite 30 years, but it will be 30 years soon. in approximately nine years.
Don't let anyone tell you you can't do math, Matty. Yeah, I am all over this. They've been doing the education.
They're still educating on how bloody good they are at mining title compliance. They've been educating people on the fact that they do it all over Australia, not just WA, all over Australia. And the best piece of education you'll get is about their state of the art.
Look, it's getting technical, but it's quantum. computing driven generation seven artificial intelligence system to find new title application opportunities like the the land monitoring system at mmts is something that you will just never see ever again in the industry so mate 100 speaking of education like what makes a good educator someone that's continually continuously learning you know what i mean and they are continuously learning as the compliance requirements evolve over time. They're the first to learn them and hence they're the best at compliance because they learn fast, they educate, they retain, they comply. You wouldn't want to leave that thing to chance, would you? They're artificially AI-driven humans.
Eva, Helen, Shannon, they're just generation seven. The whole team, the whole team. Oh, mate, get it. Just go to them. They're the only name you need to know in mining title compliance.
Thank you very much. They actually might be AI. On the benefits of mining and the need for mining, now we're into this sort of critical. minerals phase um the messaging's got a lot better but we're still kind of doing it in our own echo chamber i think we're still kind of talking to each other packing each other on the back we need to get out we need to be talking to the the gen z's getting on tiktok um getting the messages better um you know maybe we shouldn't be a mining industry anymore maybe we should be um uh you know critical metals industry we're not that's what we do that's what we produce jeez i was in a yeah my i used to working in investment banking team that changed their name from natural resources to critical minerals and energy. But I kind of embrace the natural resources.
Like it's how much more pure could you get in your description of what it is that we actually care about and invest in? They've had to change the names of everything in the last five, ten years, lollies, bloody everything. Probably a good segue into Australian investing, Kayleigh. You know, there was that massive trend that started and like large institutions like your Black Rocks and that really led the way for that thematic.
Yeah, take us into when that all started and how the whole landscape changed for the big money managers. Yeah, and it was quite, you know, something we've always done. We called it CSR in the old days. But it was always a sort of, it always felt like a bit of a side gig as an investor. Obviously, it was very important to a lot of mining companies.
Most mining companies, in any case. But it was always sort of a bit of a side gig. It was kind of, you know, you might have a few throwaway questions at the end of a meeting about the community relations and government and all that kind of permitting and sort of that sort of thing. You kind of do it as part of your due diligence, but it was kind of seen as less important, I guess.
And then, yes, you know, that sort of... became louder and louder. And certainly, we were big proponents of it.
And we were looked, because it was a natural part of our business, people within the firm looked to us as a sort of guiding light about how we can use it. And I had to do lots of education pieces, just how the trials and tribulations of ESG within an industry like ours and what it meant for getting it right and getting it wrong, which is huge as an investor and a massive reputational risk. If you work for a big firm, reputation is everything for them. They care about that first and foremost. As that whole way, they were definitely on the front charge with that.
Then it just gained more and more momentum. Obviously, we had the disaster in Brazil. and things like that just meant it powered on more and more, then you had voices around the world, the green voices of the world, demanding, you know, ending of coal, ending of oil.
We had protesters gluing themselves to the outside of the building. The whole, like, you know, the way that the industry and capital allocators think about, ESG and the roles that mining companies have has had a pretty big shift, even particularly in the last 24, 18 months. I mean, for the longest time, the way that companies became more ESG appealing was just simply to divest their dirty assets.
And that does literally nothing. Maybe it has a more negative impact net-net because you're divesting these assets into private hands where they'll be run in worse conditions. But it was ultimately like the ways that the ESG kind of checklist was being rattled through with. How much of your portfolio is exposed to future-facing commodities, blah, blah, blah, which resulted in these kind of batshit crazy portfolio decisions, in my opinion.
How do you think about that? Yeah, I mean, there's sort of two parts to that. You're right, as the ESG wave comes in, and don't get me wrong, it's still a journey of discovery, right? The metrics still aren't perfect. It's still not quite light for light.
The sustainability reports are fabulous, but for your average investor, they're just not going to read it. They're not going to read it. They want a comps table, just like you can comp stocks and you can see what their grade is, you can see what their valuations are. They want to see at the end of that table, some ESG metrics.
We had a huge stewardship team. And a lot of big houses do. They have what would have been called corporate governance back in the day. And they have huge stewardship teams.
They use external metrics, but really they use their own. I wouldn't say it's depending on the house. Some houses are very fixed in their mindset. And they do indeed might follow Glass-Lewis or MSCI or whoever. is providing the metrics and just be very black and white.
The place I worked for, it was more of a discussion between that team and the investment team, which would have included me and the company, and it would have been a discussion. And how are you going to meet these goals? What's your plans?
So it's not so black and white. But above that, you have the people that run these companies that are under enormous public pressure and they're getting the public protesters. They feel they need to do something about it and show they're doing something about it.
And that's why you do get those kind of decisions of like, OK, you've got to sell all your thermal coal assets now. And absolutely right. I couldn't agree more. Like who's better to run a thermal coal company, Glencore or some unknown private? Indonesian companies, who's a better custodian for the world on those kind of assets?
Well, it's obviously going to be better with somebody that's a publicly listed under that. a company that's going to have to follow all kinds of rules and regulations. So I sympathise with that. So sometimes it's not always the best investment choice or investment decision. But you have to find that balance between, you know, what is right for the world, what you can do and what you should do, I guess.
You're never going to have a perfect answer. The other two boys probably know the answer to this, but I don't. What was the view on Metcoal? assets right when this ESG investing wave started?
Yeah, that was fine. It was thermal and actually every house has their own different rules. Typically some like thermal coal out. Obviously if you own like a Glencore, you know, it's only a portion of their revenues that are in thermal coal. So to some houses Glencore would have been acceptable.
Met coal was generally fine. But then what I was finding, I was meeting a lot of like budget. the Japanese houses, the big conglomerates, they were under pressure from their investors to just sell any coal because the average generalist can't understand the difference between the two. So I think the met coal is a great part, a great commodity to be in, but not everybody shares that view.
And so again, we've seen sellers for that reason. Because wasn't there some cases where met coal was being used as thermal coal at parts of the market? Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and some, you know, some are inextricably linked within a company and within an asset.
So you can't always, it's not always a clear cut. But the ones, I think on the whole, the big deposits, the big companies have the distinction, are able to distinguish between the two. But there's been quite a few carve outs because of it, even the likes of Tech Resources. They've separated because they just couldn't get the rating as a copper company.
And it sort of confused investors because it was a general, it was sort of like, oh, you're diversified. You're not really diversified. You're sort of semi-diversified.
But you're making lots of money on met coal. In fact, you're making tons of money on met coal, but you're not getting a copper rating. So this is like really confusing.
Can we just separate you out here and make it easy for everyone? What an amazing outcome for Glencore too to pick up that Elk Valley portfolio for like two times EBITDA. We'll reflect on that deal and just be like, well played. Do you kind of sit in the, like, you know, seeing the evolution of ESG investing in the way it's informed returns, do you think like in the...
The companies which were maybe like lent themselves to ESG kind of companies or future facing commodity kind of companies, critical metals companies, they had their run of outperformance, right? They certainly kind of outperformed just from a TSR perspective, kind of call it like 2018 to 2022 or whatnot. But do you think it's the inverse would outperform on a like, you know, measure from today over the next like five years?
Would you suspect that it's a low multiple kind of busted up kind of coal company that has pretty low cost kind of long life coal mines that's trading at an undervalued multiple today but has longevity to its reserves life that could outperform going forward? Yeah, the jury's still out, right? You know, and I don't think that's just not just our industry. Any, you know, sustainable investment versus a traditional investment. There's plenty of ESG funds now.
And the rhetoric has been walked back quite a bit, particularly from the greenwashing pressure, which I think was overdone. There were plenty of companies there that just about green credentials if you squint and don't look too hard. I think there's a lot. I think- Everybody has to do their bit. Everybody has to be shown to be making the world a better place.
And that's right. That's absolutely right. We all need to be doing that. Whether that you get a premium for having a business which is, you know, more ESG, has better ESG creds than another business, I just I'm not sure yet. But you could argue the same about a green metal against a...
a non-green metal or a two-tier market in nickel. You take your pick. There's plenty of examples like that.
We just haven't seen the premiums come through yet. Maybe it will. I, my, my just, you know, if you ask, if you ask my mum, she would say, I want to put my money in a green fund every day of the week.
And I was like, well, that might mean less returns. Fine. I don't think everybody shares that view.
I think most people, most people around the world, and I might be, this is just my humble perception. Most people around the world probably focus more on money, about making money. Yeah.
Right here, mate. Yeah, rather than sort of having a perfect green potential that means less money. I don't know.
So I think the jury's still out in that regard. Let's get into the deals, boys, the stuff that excites us. And, like, we want to just whatever you can say about what goes on behind the curtains for the big M&A deals that, you know, where the large money managers are, you know, 5%, 10% or. or whatever and let's start at the start when the like the deals get announced and you get crossed when's it happen sometimes it doesn't i've been i've been in plenty of times when it when you wake up in the morning you're like oh right we're doing this today yeah so um uh it's it's a real hope i mean we always tried to have a very good conversation with all our investments and even non-investments. And if you're going to do anything, we're happy to talk on a no-names basis.
We've got wards. We've got legal people. We've got capital markets teams. We can do this sensibly. And those were always the most seamless deals that went through, always.
The worst ones. We're always the ones where we just were completely blindsided. And for what it's worth, that would have been the same on any corporate governance issue as well or potential issue.
You know, if a company came to us and said, you know, this is what's going on with our board. There are sort of tenures of this and we're looking at a pay rise for this. There'd be a discussion.
It'd be fine. The worst thing that could happen is like you. You get the AGM documents and they sort of agree just pay rises with no context.
Those are just never going to get through. And so if there's a conversation, and that was part, that's two sides, right? So that was us telling people, you need to please talk to us.
And that was companies also being proactive and coming to us. So in the case of deals, You know, once we were crossed or whatever, there'd be a conversation. It's kind of hard, even as a major shareholder, it's kind of hard to dictate to a company what they should and shouldn't do without just cause.
And I think you have to always bear in mind that investors are generally looking at it in many regards from their own selfish needs as well. You know, they're doing what's best for their clients. And what's best for their clients is the way their portfolio is positioned. So, you know, I'm just going to pick, pluck some names out of the air.
So let's say you're looking at, I don't know, Anglo and Rio, you know, for example. And if you've got more active risk in Anglo and the deal's not attractive enough, you're going to... say no because that's best for your performance.
You're not going to do what's necessarily best for what the company is, what the synergies are, what the companies might be looking at. So you always got to sort of bear that in mind. And always the most satisfying best outcome was when there's a real synergy, there's real logic to the deal and This is not always the case.
And it's it's not only does it look like you're going to make a lot of money, not necessarily not necessarily straight away, but perhaps in the future. But it's also this is the most satisfying bit. It's also really, really good for the industry. You know, to me, like as someone who's, you know, been in this game quite a while, that's always like the best.
It's what the estate agents would call maximizing value. But the house. What do you mean by good for the industry? Well, so this might be, so what's a good example? Okay, so a recent one, perhaps, is sentiment.
Yeah. Sentiment is, you know, world-class asset. Yeah. Just struggled for so many years because it's a one-asset company.
Yeah. London listing, yeah. London listing, you know, the list goes on. It's just tough. It's tough.
It's a tough thing to do. So. You know, that Anglo Gold's taking them out, that is going to be far better for both sides. Like it's a brilliant baseload asset in a major company.
They can spread the risk geographically. They can spread the cash flows, you know, so if it has a bad quarter, maybe one of the assets will pick it up. And then it is probably, and this might be wrong, who knows, time will tell, but it's probably going to be better for the industry in developing the Egyptian mining industry, which is still incredibly far behind, which you shouldn't be.
Like why is there only one commercial Western-owned gold mine in the country? That can't be right. What does that have to do with it? There's plenty of gold in the pyramid. I was about to say there might be some under it too.
Chuck some drill holes in there. I can guarantee it hasn't been explored. You've seen...
You've seen quite a change over your career in how miners approach M&A, sort of the loose times, I guess, before the financial crisis, but then you had China pick up and then you had the doldrums where a lot of these companies really paid the price for bad deals that they've done. And now we're in a sort of cagey period where miners are very specific, very picky because of how their share prices performed. ultimately on the back of the acquisitions that they did.
Is there sort of advice I guess you'd give the miners in how to approach M&A or is there a different perspective you'd put forward given your experience? Yeah, I mean, another great question, J.D., and look, if you'd have asked me 10 years ago, I'd have said, you know, bigger is not better, you know, value over volume. We've heard all those sort of catch. I don't think that's the case so much anymore. And I've got more sympathy with bigger is better.
I think what a lot of companies fail to appreciate is the liquidity constraints within running a fund. And particularly when an industry is not loved, like the lower end of the gold industry, there's just no liquidity in those stocks. at all.
It's just very, very tough to get liquidity. So you can't, you know, if you want to buy 5% or 10% of a company, you can't get out of it. You can't get out of it.
You can't trade it. So liquidity is a massive threshold for all investors. And the more generalist investor you go, the more they need liquidity. So in that regards, you know, when a lot of companies are scratching their heads saying like, I'm so cheap.
I'm so cheap. Why is my stock so cheap? What do I need to do?
That's often the reason. It's just you haven't got a broad enough investor base that can even look at you. You're just outside their investable universe. And the only way, sadly, the only way to get into their investable universe is be better.
It is to be bigger. But that doesn't mean you should just perk. a company in Australia and a company in Canada together and then hope for the best.
And there's been a few examples where it's sort of worked like the Kirkland Lake, where it kind of worked after a few deals. That kind of got done. But for the most part, if there's any kind of vague synergy, I'm sort of hesitant, but slightly, I think that's going to be the better way to go. And the same for scale and scaling up an asset as well, you know, because that's one thing at the end of the day that comes down to even if you've just got one project. But you're thinking, well, I can, you know, I don't we're a small company.
We don't have much money. So maybe we'll start with, you know, 10,000 tons of copper and then we'll ramp up for that. You're just going to get no investment interest at all. It's just not big enough scale. So those sort of things, those sort of attitudes are just very, very tough.
So the long and short answer really is don't be afraid to be brave, I think. Especially in this era where everyone keeps parroting that it's cheaper to... buy then build and even if there maybe aren't like regional synergies there is the synergy that comes from a major's balance sheet being applied to sort of you know a smaller company's kind of growth growth optionality that can be accelerated thanks to that balance sheet yeah and i think we're going to see a lot more of those um you know it's the same up up up the top right you know the big guys are very hesitant as well we're very nervous i mean obviously we've had a few big announcements recently. But on the whole, they're pretty hesitant about doing tons and tons of small little deals that they might have done in the past and not getting any, they're not really moving the needle or not doing much.
But I think ultimately, we are going to see more of those investments because at the junior end, there's no money for them out there. And some of them do have good assets. They're really doing it.
Back to what you said before, just about being blindsided and the votes and everything for these deals. Has there been any cases where, you know, you've been blindsided and it actually affects the decision on the vote? Or does it come back to what you said before?
It's mostly about, right, what is the best thing for our position right now? Yeah, good question. So that challenge. The challenge is, and this is more on, I would say, actually, all markets, all markets. This is that when a company gives us their deal book, their pitch book, to say this is the parameters of the deal, they're very, very limited on what they can actually say.
So in the back of their mind, they've got this grand plan that what they want to do. And I'll give you an example. When Alamos.
that took out island gold, for example. Look at that. They've gone through like three, and they're talking about a fourth expansion phase on that asset.
But when the deal came through, they couldn't say anything. They could just say, well, this is a small mine. It's got great geology.
We see resource potential. Look at these drill holes. Yeah, but how big do you think it will be? Well, I can't really say. How much do you think this could produce?
Well, so it makes an investment decision very, very tough. You have, and the same with royalty companies, often want to raise money for a war chest. And they can't tell you because they're under confidentiality. They can't tell you what the money, they just say, well, just trust us. Well, what?
We're going to give you $100 million on trust. I don't know what they ask. I don't know what you're going to buy. Let me know what you're going to buy.
And sometimes it works. You have... Brilliant custodians of capital.
You have people like Mick McCullum, who's done that. He's had a SPAC and he's got a great track record. So maybe you're giving money because you've seen the same story over and over again.
But that's not always the case. And so it's really hard when you're making a vote if you don't have all the information in front of you. If you've got all the information in front of you, it's seamless. But don't get me wrong, Matthew, there's been plenty of times where we've pushed back on a deal and gone like, you know, we can't tell you how we're going to vote. But let's just say this doesn't look, this doesn't seem right or it doesn't look attractive.
I'm not sure the metrics are right. You know, maybe you need to rethink. And there's been plenty of instances of those.
A polite way of saying, I think you're destroying shareholder capital. And I'm going to vote no. politely um but sometimes you just stare at them mate i wanted to um pick your brain a bit about like you know the ins and outs of um the different types of structures how the big money managers work like you because you see like combination of mutual funds closed-end investment trusts closed-end funds i guess what are some of the key differences and like between those structures does it um change the way the money is invested in a lot of these mining companies yes i mean every fund has their own idiosyncrasies right so and parameters that they can invest and that's largely due to just the way the fund was set up originally and you you can sort of change funds investment parameters as you go but it's just it's such a ball lake that most people don't do it so you do you tend to stick even even sometimes they're out of date um so so every every fund is very different from how they do it. And if you're running an open-ended fund and dealing with inflows and outflows, it is more restrictive. It's just tougher to do things that might be a little bit off-piste or take a little bit more risk. You're under a lot more scrutiny.
If you're running a sort of closed-end fund with a specific mandate, you might have free reign to do a lot more. interesting and creative things. And that's certainly my experience from my old shop.
There might be debt, there might be royalties, private companies, all that sort of thing where you can swing the bat on a much wider spectrum of companies and investment opportunities, which can be far more exciting, a lot more risk though, and a lot more pressure. But at least you're not dealing with the inflows and outflows that, you know, can really sort of crimp your performance and your ability to just sort of do your day job. And what about the investment time horizon? So I assume the closed-end funds, you've got a lot more. You can look at a seven-year.
You know the money's not going out. You can put a punt that might pay off in seven years. Is that where like a long-term bet might be applied or the opposite?
Yeah, yes, yes. I would say it's more like long-only money versus long-short money would be the distinction I would draw. Open and closed, less so. Yes, probably closed you can be a bit more longer term, but not everybody thinks like that. The difference between a long-only fund and a long-short fund is streaks apart, streaks apart.
the turnover on a long-only fund will be a tenth, maybe even less than a tenth of a long-short fund. So, the long-short fund is looking daily and managing their positions daily. In the old days, we used to say three-year for long-only, we used to say three-year investment horizon.
I'm not sure that's the case anymore because we like to think it is and certainly it should be at the very least. And I've taken bigger, you know, if you're looking at an expiration story or a development asset, you're probably definitely looking at three years, if not longer. And like I say, you know, some investments have been in for 10, 20 years.
But the trouble is with all the regulations and a lot of scrutiny, and this could be just internal scrutiny. You know, you get your performance gets reviewed on a, you know, can get reviewed almost on a daily basis. And certainly.
You know, CIOs will look at funds within their managing sphere, you know, at least monthly, if not quarterly. Well, now I've got to give credit to Travi. He gave me a bit of education this morning. So we've got royalties in place already in the room here.
But when the word ETF comes up, usually everyone thought, oh, just something boring that tracks an index or something. But that probably more referred to the passive. ETFs, but the new range of the active ETF products, how are the frameworks established for how these active ETFs work and what's the flexibility for inclusion and getting rid of stocks in that? Yeah, I mean, it's sort of a threat to some, a further threat, I guess, to active management in a lot of regards because it kind of falls under the ETF.
passive money, and I do think it is probably a step better, but a step better in the right direction. And I only mean that from the minute, you know, particularly when you're investing in an industry like ours, you do need a bit of active management because, you know, let's face it, there's plenty of examples of companies with poor safety records. There's plenty of companies weak I just wouldn't invest in. It's like, well, you know.
How many fatalities have you had this year? You know, you can't put money into your company until you sort that out. So, you know, a traditional ETF can't make that decision necessarily.
They are guided. When it comes to voting, they're guided by their internal stewardship corporate governance teams. And they usually won't go against it because they don't know the company. They're like, if the stewardship team says this, OK, we'll probably follow along with it because we've never even met the company.
That's not how ETFs work. Whereas as an active manager, we wouldn't know all the companies inside and out. So I think these active ETFs are...
are an interesting, very interesting product, I think, and they're growing a lot of traction because of that. And they'll probably find that halfway house. It still feels like they're finding their feet in a lot of regards in what they can and cannot do.
But I suspect things like those relative voting rules, not necessarily hugging benchmarks so quickly or, you know. not being like false sellers, false buyers, because there's some random benchmark change. And particularly in our sector, where you do get these kind of weird idiosyncrasies of things that happen, like, you know, takeovers or stock falling in and out of the benchmark for random reasons, having a bit of flexibility as at least slightly active management, I think will help. And what about investing for the big?
The big mobs around the world that aren't, really don't have a shop in Australia but, you know, invest in a lot of Australian mining companies, how does the, you know, prior to positioning or taking big positions in these mines, I know there probably is site visits as well but they're not as frequent as people that live here, how does it all work? What's the DD process? Who's some of the big sounding boards in Australia when you don't have feet on the ground? Yeah, yeah.
And I guess that comes back to my only comment about, you know, there's investors and then there's investors, right? And not all of them. You know, this is the problem with a lot of active management. So all their research budgets and, you know, we've had MIFID in Europe, which has made the whole interaction between the investment community and the broker community very, very stale and very rigid.
A lot of budgets have been cut for doing things like site visits. So there's plenty of fund managers in the world that don't get out. And there's been instances I've invested in companies, many instances I've invested in companies where I've not been able to do as much as I would like. Bless you. And so we rely heavily on people we know and trust.
and I did the same so I would be people I know um it it would be very either if there was a if it was a brand new company or a company management team I hadn't heard of an asset I hadn't heard of I would do a hell of a lot more due diligence let's put it that way um and probably if I you know in an ideal world you you you do all that work you you'd spend a good few weeks look doing hard yards due diligence on a company, you go and visit it before you invest it. It doesn't really happen like that, but just because the timing of the markets. And then also, you would have some kind of I did this in my old shop.
I put an investment process in for the team. So, you would have some kind of investment process you would have to go through before you just had a maverick fund manager buying. buying a suddenly a position appeared on the portfolio with with no due diligence and no investment process behind it um you you at least need some kind of internal committee or even if it's just a few people as a standing board to decide like okay am i being an idiot you know this this looks great to me but but you know you what do you think you're a generalist or what do you think do am i being an idiot and when you say people you know in australia a lot of that a lot of that is that the Australian-based analysts?
Are they the biggest ones the internationals lean on? Yeah, yeah. So yeah, it could be analysts in the broken community.
It could be just other corporates, right? So you might know someone or you don't know someone, you know, so what do you think? It might be, you know, if you're friendly with a corporate and they've got an asset and you're looking at a company which has got an asset next door, you might say, oh, by the way, you know, what's going on with that? with that mine next door.
So how's your weekend been? But look, this is what I want to know. Yeah, yeah, you might warm them up a little bit. So, I mean, again, that comes back to the privilege point, right? You know, when I did site visits, I might see a handful of assets in one go, and that's a great way to find out what's going on, what people think of other mines.
You know, maybe there's things you've missed. And sometimes I've done that before. I've gone to...
site visit and found out that somebody said, oh, I don't know what they're doing next door. And I'm like, shit, I heard an asset next door. I should find out what's going on.
Was there any ones that stand out in history that You didn't pick that went, but you did the DD, and it didn't really seem like a knockout, but ended up having amazing returns? I'm sure there's plenty. And the biggest, yeah, I mean, if there's ever you want to entice a fund manager to look at your company, it's FOMO. There's not an investor in the world that doesn't suffer from FOMO. And there's been plenty of like exploration stuff.
Like I said, I've got in late few things and you're kicking yourself because you're like, wow, I should have. I looked at this. I looked at this twice, you know, and I just didn't do it.
And there's been plenty of instances like that. And also commodities, right? You know, uranium is a good example where I got very close links to Japan. I was watching the energy with a... with a sharp eye, the energy plants there.
Sprott came along, it got a massive run in uranium, and I just thought at the time, I've missed it. I should have just done it. But it didn't seem real to me, and I guess it wasn't in a lot of regards then.
And then once Japan started firing up their reactors again, I was like, okay, this is real now. This is fundamental. Let's get involved.
So I didn't get the first wave. sort of uranium buying but it got the second um and so those were sort of those were quite keen examples and same lithium you know been in and out of lithium got in very early made some money then didn't get out quick enough lost a lot lost money you know those sort of ones where you you know kick yourself sideways um but i i always said somebody told me a wise person told me um a long time long long time ago like if you if you get out if you've If you get out at 80% of the peak, you've done incredibly well. Don't get emotional on it.
That's the hardest thing, isn't it? Yeah. I've got a bit more of a finance-y one for you.
How do you think about the debt equity split on the theme of single asset miners that we were talking about before? You mean in terms of funding a project? Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Getting the project off the ground a year. in the camp of debt's a bit too risky for one of these or a classic sort of 40-60 does the job? How do you think about it?
Yeah, that's a very good question. I mean, I've looked at some on your home turf that wanted to put some very racy debt in. I think there's, again, there's sort of debt and then there's debt.
And, you know, if you're going to pay, now debt is quite cheap. But if you're going to pay, it wasn't that long ago, you might pay 16% all in on your debt costs. It's going to be tough if your asset is slow to ramp up. And so there's no short answer because it was very much commodity company and project specific.
But let's face it like a lithium brine. If you've got 16% interest rate. and a pile of debt to build a lithium brine mine, there's going to be a good chance you're going to be coming. It's not going to be the last slug of capital because they've just taken way, way longer to ramp up than people have expected. But if it's like a very high-grade, proper mine, clean concentrate infrastructure, and they're getting a 6% coupon or something, 6% interest rate on the debt, load up, load up.
Why not? Why not take as much as possible, minimize dilution? So if the risk isn't there, take as much debt as possible. I think in these markets, though, I've got a lot of sympathy with equity.
And a lot of companies are very greedy about equity, and they don't want the dilution. And I've I mean, I've been victim of that as an investor, where you offer someone money and they say, well, you know, I think we want to get along a little bit longer and go. And it's like, you know, if the ducks are quacking, as they say, you know, take the money.
When the money's offered, take it. So a lot of companies try to be too cute about going to them and fussy about money and pricing and all that. It's all, you know, it's.
At the end of the day, if you're going to develop a mind successfully, and you're not going to have recourse to further financing, you're probably going to make a good return. What about the impact of hedging on these companies that have taken all the debt, but then the flow and effect of what they've lost in the long run on out-of-the-money hedges? Yeah, well, Matthew, you're talking to a guy that grew up in the old Ashanti days.
So I hate hedging with a passion. I've grown to be sympathetic with it as an investor because I can see companies that want to just make absolutely sure they're building a mine. So let's take a little bit of hedge on, third of our production, let's say for a year during the ramp up phase. I'm like, oh, that's fine.
Knock yourself out. It's a thing most investors hate. because it comes back to bite them and usually when markets are hot like now like you if you if i want to invest in a gold company now and a company says well actually we only get 80 of the gold price you're like okay next yeah right yeah with the shanti didn't they they like did a giant equity race to pay down that edge book didn't they well it destroyed them in the end you know that's that's why it doesn't exist anymore so angler god stepped in but yeah just for that reason.
In those days, hedging was the norm. It was the norm and people just got carried away with it. It's a tool.
I think it's a tool, not a necessity. But, you know, the more you hedge, the less you push out. Sorry, the more you hedge, the more you push out your average generalist investor that wants commodity exposure. Yeah.
Do you think it ever will become the norm again? not after that. I just don't think it doesn't make any sense. And in fairness to the mining community, I think there's very few people that have felt the need to hedge unless it's absolutely necessary.
Everyone seems to be very good about it. But do you think when the prices are as high as they are now, would you see more of it locking in above $4,000? You always will. Sorry.
Yeah, I think you always will. Yeah, yeah. You can be a bit more cute about it, though, with like the collars strategy, which you've seen lately.
Yeah, that's right, Travis. Yeah, the structures are much better than they used to be. And the sort of rigmarole around the, you know, there's just better financial now, I think, within all aspects, just from the companies and from the banks themselves. The banks have to cover themselves as well.
They don't want to be. They don't want to end up owning a mining asset. There's more now, but, geez, it confuses the fuck out of me, a lot of it. That's the worst thing about it.
It's not convenient for me. Oh, yeah, sorry about that. The whole industry is quite confused. This has been awesome, Kayleigh. Mate, that's frigging off.
I forgot to even write where the ads are going to go because I've just been entrenched. So that was awesome, mate. But as I said, y'all... yourself with the access to the corporates and stuff, but doing what we do to get access to someone like you, it's been an absolute privilege, mate, and we can't thank you enough.
Thanks a head, Kayleigh. Appreciate it. Yeah, no, thanks ever so much, guys.
I must say, look, you guys are doing a fabulous job, you know, and to my point about messaging, I'm all for this. You know, this is just great to get the messaging of the sort of industry out there. Yeah, I just think that at the moment, the opportunity set in the industry has never been so compelling, but the path to get there is so confusing.
So thanks for your efforts as well. Appreciate it, mate. Legend.
Good stuff, boys. Good recruitment there, Ricardinho. Love your work, mate. Thank you, Kayleigh. That was great insight from someone who's had some fascinating seats in our industry.
Yeah, just as I said, a little look behind the hood of what goes on with the big, big, big money managers. Chucking $100 into something is just like me buying a carton of piss. Like it's unbelievable.
When I say $100, it's $100 million. I love the conversations that are, you know, a bit away from the market day to day and in the near term, you know, taking a longer view, understanding how things work a bit better. I think they're so, so valuable.
So that's awesome, Kayleigh. Made time to come on the show, hey? Yeah. Well, you know, MMS take a longer view like BlackRock with, you know, approaching open pit mining contracting. Even longer.
Yeah. Yeah. And they're not like, they'll do black rock, white rock, brown rock, blasted rock, free dig rock, any rock.
Any rock you've got. Yes. And great, buddy. I like the way we're doing this now.
Grounded will put the camps on top of any coloured rock up at site. Cross-boundary energy will power anything to blast the rock. Sandvik ground support will hold the rock together. CRE insurance, well, goes without saying.
Hey, mate. Make sure the rock doesn't cost you money. Risk-free rock. Yeah, yeah.
Greenlands Equipment, they water the fine bits of rock to get rid of the dust and, buddy, you drill through the rock to find water. K-Drill just can absolutely penetrate the rock and find the good rocks. MMTS show the boundaries around all the rocks. Australian Earthworks and Horlidge, holy snap and duck shit, they can move some rock. Mate, unbelievable.
And Spark Charts, mate, that business just rocks. It's fucking unbelievable. Hooteroo, Money of Mine. Hooteroo.
Hooteroo. The information contained in this episode of Money of Mine is of general nature only and does not take into account the objectives, financial situation or needs of any particular person. Before making any investment decision, you should consult with your financial advisor and consider how appropriate the advice is to your objectives, financial situation and needs.