Episodes

Voiceover: Broadcasting from Baltimore, Maryland, and all around the world, you're listening to the Stansberry Investor Hour. Tune in each Thursday on iTunes for the latest episodes of the Stansberry Investor Hour. Sign up for the free show archive at InvestorHour.com. Here is your host, Dan Ferris.

Dan Ferris: All right, hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Stansberry Investor Hour. I'm your host, Dan Ferris, and I'm also the editor of Extreme Value. That's a value investing service published by Stansberry Research.

We have a really special show lined up for you today, so I'm just going to get right to the rant, and the rant and the interview kind of tie in together today. It's going to be really cool.

OK, so here's the rant. Last week, I told you why it's OK for value investors to own gold, and no matter what Warren Buffett says, it's OK, you can buy gold, and I recommend that you do so.

And I also recommended that you definitely should have some. Right. It wasn't just like saying it's OK to do it. I recommended that you definitely do it.

So this week, I just want to take that another step further by telling you what I believe are the very best ways to take advantage of gold and other metals as investments.

Right, we talked about gold, you know, just holding gold coins or gold bullion. That's like insurance, you know, and one day, who knows, it may be money again that you can spend at the grocery store somehow.

But until then, there's also ways that you can actually invest and compound your money in gold and other mining-related enterprises. OK, I touched on some of this last week, but let's go into just a little bit more detail.

So you might remember I mentioned the prospect generators, the royalty companies, mining-focused asset managers, right? I said they're the best ways to invest in mining.

What you don't want to own, and you'll hear a little bit of this from our interview guest today, what you don't want to do is be in the mining business, you know, the business of digging giant holes in the ground, and pulling out a bunch of rocks and having to own lots of giant, yellow machines, and employ an army of expensive people, and the whole thing is just really highly capital-intensive, right. You have to spend usually a billion, or billions of dollar up front before you earn a penny of revenue, and who knows what can go wrong along the way, because you don't really know what's in the ground.

No matter how much drilling you do, you don't know what's down there until you start mining and digging a big hole in the ground. It's a tough, tough business, right.

So that's why I like the prospect generators, royalty companies, and asset managers, because the primary characteristic of all of those things, aside from not actually being in the mining business, is that they're far less capital-intensive.

They require far less capital, and they're generally for that reason among others, they're generally less risky than owning a producing mine, or a share in a company that owns producing mines.

So let's talk about each one of these things. Let's start with the royalties and streams. Streams are like royalties, but royalties are better. OK, the very best way I know of to invest in mining is to own royalties on producing mines, and you know, the bigger the mine, the better. The longer life of the mine, the better.

So there's a couple things about royalties that cause me to say that, OK? First, is simply that once you bought the royalty, once the – whoever starts the royalty, once you buy it, you don't need any further investment.

OK, when the mine has to expand, or when they need to hire more people or expand the mine, do more capital investment to increase production or something, you know, or if they have a problem, they get a cave-in, they have to fix it, whatever it is, you don't pay for any of that. When the bill comes for more capital investment, you don't pay anything. You get your royalty and that's it.

And by the way, I definitely recommend owning royalties on larger mines over smaller ones. When it comes to an ore deposit, right, a gold deposit, or an iron ore deposit, or a copper deposit, large ones generally provide their owners with good surprises, and small ones tend to generate bad surprises. Remember that. It's very important.

All right, now most royalties will have some taxes, and maybe a few minor expenses deducted, but for the most part, a royalty comes right off the top.

This is another great thing. It's not out of the profits. It's out of the revenue, right off the top. You get paid almost before anyone.

So before the operating expenses are deducted, before the workers are paid and the lights are kept running and all that stuff, you get paid. You get paid before everybody except the government, and usually the person who does the smelting of the metal.

Another great thing about royalty, it's like an interest in a piece of real estate. No matter what happens to the mine's owner, no matter how the ownership is transferred. If there's a bankruptcy or whatever, your interest remains intact.

Royalties are typically structured to kind of – they run with the land, they say. So no matter how the land gets transferred from one owner to another, you always have your royalty.

You always get paid, as long as they keep producing. Now as an interest in the minerals on a given piece of land, like some royalties could come with tons of upside.

So if you own a royalty on a mine, and that mine that the mining company owns, the royalty is usually not just on the mine. It's on the whole piece of land that the mine is in.

So if they expand that mine or dig another one somewhere else on that property, you can wind up with huge upside. All of the sudden you're getting paid twice as much, you know, or you see your royalty grow over time.

We'll talk about some of that with our interview guest today. So that is one of the cool things.

If you do it right, and you buy a royalty on like a big potash mine, they've got hundreds – over a thousand years, some of them – of resources in it, and it can actually increase in value over time, which is amazing for a royalty, because you know royalties on a gold mine, a gold mine is like you know, 10, 12 years and then you're out, and then you know it's a very short-lived thing and the royalty is worth zero at the end of that time.

But you get a big resource like potash, hundreds of years of potash in the ground and you're making money for the rest of your life on this thing. So you know, royalties are generally forever, like as long as that piece of ground produces, the royalty produce.

Now there's these other things called streams which is really an interest in an amount of the stuff produced. Like royalties pay you in cash usually, but streams are usually paid in metal.

If it's a silver stream, you get a certain amount of the silver production and then you can sell it, and you get it for a very, very cheap price, well below the market.

You know, if silver is 15 bucks, maybe your stream lets you buy it for five or some crazy price like that, and then you get that $10 differential. It can be very good, but just not quite as good as royalties.

And streams are really new, right. The first one was done in 2004, which created the company which is known today as Wheaton Precious Metals.

So you know, streams are kind of a work in progress, maybe. I think the – you've seen different kind of deals over time but they're still pretty good.

So yeah, streams and royalties, right, and then you know the big company. You probably already know the big companies: Franco-Nevada, Royal Gold, Wheaton Precious, and we're going to talk about another one which I think is a much better investment than all of those other ones, when we talk to our interview guest today.

All right. So that's royalties. The other way to do this is to invest in mining in a very efficient way is to invest in a company that does prospect generation.

So prospect generation companies take, you know, usually small amounts of money, sometimes $10,000, $20,000, $100,000, just hardly anything, and they stake out these pieces of land, and they use their technical expertise to kind of prove the value of this land, and then they get a partner in who can earn their way into an ownership in the piece of land and the deposit hopefully, if it's there by drilling, by spending money and drilling.

Right, so a good – the company we're going to talk about later on today is for every dollar they've spent on prospect generation, their partners have spent something like $17 or $18, right. So a very, very efficient way to use capital.

All right. Now I keep talking about this company. I'll tell you the name in a little bit but I've recommended a company that does both of these things: prospect generation and royalty creation, and extreme value.

I started covering it 10 years ago. I think it's the best prospect generator in the world. If you talk to other prospect generator companies, they will mention this company as probably being the very best one that operates the prospect generator model.

And you know, most companies say they're prospect generator but they wind up spending too much money on individual prospects. You know, the idea is you spend a little bit of money, you stake out this piece of land, and you say hey, you know, this thing's probably worth more than people think it is.

Then you get a partner to spend a whole bunch of money drilling it to prove that you're right, you know, and you kind of – you do that deal, and then you move on, and you spend another little bit of capital doing another one of those.

And each time you retain a royalty, prospect generation is royalty creation. That's the other cool thing about it and you just keep doing this, and you rinse and repeat, and maybe over time, you wind up with 50 of these, and you know, you only need about 10 of them to work out, or five of them to work out, to make hundreds of millions of dollars on investments of maybe a few million total.

So it's incredible, and I'll tell you a little hint: if a company calls themself a prospect generator, and then they talk about this big flagship project that's their biggest thing, you need to take a pause there, because that's not really the way it's supposed to work.

It's just do the deal – do the prospect, invest a little bit of capital, move on, do another one, rinse and repeat. So that's pretty much the rant for today.

OK. We have a company that does prospect generation royalty creation in the extreme value model portfolio. We have another company, I mentioned asset management, not really going to talk about that, because I don't talk about that company to anybody but paying, extreme value readers.

But we are going to talk about a company called Altius Minerals that I've been writing about for 10 years. It's the 10-year anniversary, and our interview guest today will be Brian Dalton, the Founder and CEO of Altius Minerals.

Can't wait to get to that. He's like one of the smartest, very smartest people in the mining business. If you have one penny in mining stocks, you need to know what this guy has to say.

You need to know about Altius period, period. That's all there is to it. OK. So that's the rant for today. The best way to invest in mining is royalties, streams, prospect generation, and we're going to talk more about this with our interview guest, and right now, it's time to find out what is new in the world.

We got a couple themes today. We have IPO's of money-losing companies and wage inflation, I think are probably our main themes in what's new today.

First thing we want to talk about is the Pinterest IPO. Do you know Pinterest? Pinterest is basically an on-line bulletin board where – my wife uses it. She loves it.

You know, she uses it for various things – mostly, I think for recipes. So she'll go around the Internet looking for recipes and she'll pin them, hence, the name Pinterest, you pin your interests onto your bulletin board in Pinterest, and you know, people love it and people use it.

And they're – but the business model is really an advertising model. Right, you use the – it's free to use the product but they – because they have so many people using the product, they have around 250 million monthly active users.

They've – you know – you have a targeted audience, right. You have people telling you what their passion is, whether it's whatever, you know, cooking or interior decorating, or you know, basket weaving or mining companies [laughter.]

Whatever it is, you know, whatever is on your Pinterest board, that helps them target their advertising, and you know it's a typical situation, right. The revenue grew like 60% last year and it's below $800 million. I think it's around $750 million or so.

They think the IPO is going to put it at about an $11 billion valuation, and that is below the $12 billion valuation of the last private fund raising. That doesn't sound so good to me, and it makes sense though, because all of these things are exorbitantly over-valued. Pinterest is the valuation of $11 billion on what did I say, $750 million in revenue.

What's that, like 15 times revenue, and I want you to go and search for an article that was on the Bloomberg in 2002 with a guy named Scott McNeely from Sun Microsystems, and I think the article is called "A Talk With Scott McNeely".

There's a phenomenal quote in there about investors paying 10 time revenue or more for companies during the dotcom boom and getting absolutely wiped out in the end, and I think that's what you're looking at with Pinterest at 15 times revenue, and still losing money.

And so we'll talk about another one of these now: Lyft. Right, Lyft is a recent IPO. It went public – what, March 29 and the share price, it was like 80 bucks or so. I think $82 or $83 at the open, and it's below $70 as I'm talking to you, and still I think it's north of 10 times sales at this valuation, which is really exorbitant for a company that's like if you look at the financials, like losing more money as they increase their revenue. That's really bad.

That looks bad. I don't like the look of that, and so you know, how is this all going to work out? And Lyft is in the news because you know they're threatening to sue Morgan Stanley. This is a weird, weird situation.

So imagine, you're an early Lyft investor, right, and Lyft is about to go public. So your shares will get this public share price put on them, but you'll get locked up for six months.

You won't be allowed to sell for six months after the IPO, you know, until after the six months lock-up period. Then imagine somebody from Morgan Stanley comes to you and says hey, we got this product.

It's you can lock in the value of your Lyft shares before the – you know, lock-up period is over by basically selling short Lyft shares. Now when you're an early investor, like you sign something that says I will not sell short, I will not sell the stock. I will not engage in any kind of – you know I think this product was a total return swop of some kind of derivative.

And you say explicitly that you will not do any of this, and this shows you how Wall Street works. These guys sit around dreaming up products to get around the rules. That's exactly what they're doing. I mean it's almost Enron-esque in that way, isn't it?

Because what did Enron do? They – I mean they committed fraud but they also did something where like a lot of what they do didn't really break the rules. It just kind of bumped up against the limits of the rules, and that's what you're getting.

That's how I'm interpreting what is being reported on this issue with Morgan Stanley, and Lyft, like they sent Morgan Stanley a letter on April 2.

You know, it was like a couple of days after the IPO. So you know, they knew it was ongoing and if Morgan Stanley did that, they deserve to get sued, man, because that is so slimey, but you know, obviously I'm not an insider in this thing.

I don't know but that's what is sort of being alleged. There's not a bad article about this on – it's a good article, it's not bad, on Bloomberg by a guy named Matt Levine, and it's just a weird, weird, weird situation. Typical – to me, a typical Wall Street situation.

One more news item here. Bank of America says they're going to make – their new minimum wage is going to be $20 an hour. So a few years ago, they raised it to $15. It's $15 now.

Effective, May 1, less than a month away, it's going to be $17 an hour, and they're going to raise it in increments over the next two years. So I guess by early 2019, you're working for Bank of America, you know if you're a teller or whatever, you know one of those customer-facing jobs in the banks there, you're making $20 an hour by then.

And Brian Moynihan, CEO says if you get a job at Bank of America, you'll make $41,000, which I guess is a good wage if you don't have a whole lot of skill or something, and you have a good personality and you can learn how to deal with customers and stuff.

But what I see here and all the like – and you know J.P. Morgan did this too. They're saying that they're going to pay between I think $15 and $18 an hour, depending on where people live.

Right, if you live in New York, you're going to make more than if you live in Peoria, but this is just wage inflation and all these, you know these minimum wages, these $15 minimum wages that you've seen around the country, it's all just wage inflation.

At some point, wages have to rise, and we see inflation in the stock market, don't we? We've seen that. I think GDP is up 30% and the stock market's up like 300% in the same time.

So we see some inflation there but it's starting to trickle down to the wages and it's kind of – you know it's sort of a rule of thumb type of thing, you know, when inflation hits wages, that's – you know it's trickled all the way through the system and you know its' real.

So I mean it doesn't surprise me that we're getting these announcements, and at the same time, gold is pushing back up through $1,300 today, as I read this to you and it's been – it's been above solidly sort of in the high $1,200s, low $1,300s for some time, for some months now, and I take that as a good sign.

Nobody wants to let it go below about – good sign for people investing in gold, that is. Nobody wants to – you know the traders don't want to let it get below about $1,280 an ounce, for some reason.

They tend to start buying pretty aggressively down there and you know I think – I'll tell you, I think if gold hits like $1,400 any time soon, that's when the gold stocks will really start to scream.

You know they've done – they haven't done so bad off the bottom in early 2016 but I think at $1,400 like lots of people mining gold are making money, and the value of as businesses really starts to take off, I think.

So that's the news, you know, interesting stuff about companies making no money, and getting exorbitant valuations and wage inflation. OK. So now it's time for our interview, and I cannot wait for you to hear this. It's going to be great.

All right. So this interview is very special. Our guest today is Brian Dalton, the Founder and CEO of Altius Minerals, and Brian co-founded Altius in 1997, while studying geology at Memorial University of Newfoundland.

He's been the president and the CEO of Altius from its inception, over which time the company has grown from a market cap of less than a million dollars to approximately $550 million today, with projected high-margin royalty revenue this year of around $70 million, coming in from 15 producing mines.

He's a long-time contrarian investor by nature. He relishes the wild, cyclical valuation swings that characterize the mineral exploration and mining industries.

He lives in Newfoundland, Canada, which is anything but a major financial center, but is a great place for fly fishing. Brian Dalton, welcome to the program, sir.

Brian Dalton: Thank you, Dan, pleasure to be here.

Dan Ferris: So Brian, this interview is a momentous occasion because, two things: First of all, I'm kind of going public with my Altius recommendation in a way that I haven't done before, like you know just telling people other than Extreme Value subscribers about it on the podcast, and two, I've been covering Altius for 10 years. 10 years, can you believe it?

Brian Dalton: You're a man of great patience, Dan.

Dan Ferris: [Laughter.] That's right. Apparently, my subscribers are as well.

Brian Dalton: [Laughter.]

Dan Ferris: But no, the thing has done well. We started out with it around seven bucks, Canadian dollars these are folks, and it was worth more than that, just like if you liquidated it at the time, I think.

And of course now it's up around – it's been up around $12, $13 lately, and I can't figure out why it's not 40 or 50% higher, but let's start at the beginning.

I said 1997 in the intro. I thought it was 1996. Did we get the year right there?

Brian Dalton: It went public in '97 and I started it in late '96 as a private, and then it's just a listing process.

Dan Ferris: Oh, I see, and you were still in college at the time, in university?

Brian Dalton: Yeah, it was crazy times. Actually, it was right on the heels of a major mineral deposit discovery in Newfoundland called Voisey's Bay, and it created an opportunity for myself and some of the other students at Memorial to start staking lands around the discovery, and selling them on to junior mining companies.

So it was sort of a sudden surprise lucrative time, and we just sort of looked at ourselves and said "Hey, why not? Let's give it a shot."

So we've got little to lose. We're at this stage of our lives and careers. So let's, instead of going and doing the normal thing, and looking for a job at a big mining company, we said we'd go and start one.

Dan Ferris: That is so cool. It's almost like a kind of a Google story, you know, guys in college and stuff.

Brian Dalton: Part of it is that the market was starting to turn down at the time, and we didn't think we'd be able to get jobs otherwise, so you make one.

Dan Ferris: [Laughter.] That's right. That's true, right? Late '90s is like when everybody hated mining because gold had been in this epic – what, 17-, 18-year bear market or something, and everybody hated mining and then they made this big discovery.

So you guys got a chance to take a shot, and I'd say it kind of worked out pretty well.

Brian Dalton: In hindsight, I think the tough times that we started out in is probably the best thing that ever happened to us. It really forced us to hone a business model that was something that would allow us to endure through these crazy mining cycles.

I should also point out that while we were in the process of our listing, quite literally, there was a major scandal that unfolded when a major gold fraud was uncovered in Indonesia by a company Bre-X.

So this was really a major pin that just popped any enthusiasm that there was in the mining industry out there. So we probably walked into an IPO in the absolute darkest days of the mining industry, maybe in decades.

Dan Ferris: [Laughter.] Not an auspicious beginning but as you say, in hindsight, probably the best way – you know the best time to get into mining, of course, is when everybody hates it, and that was certainly what was going on at that time.

Wow, so let's talk about – you sent me a bunch of really great stuff recently, that was like these case studies of the major royalty investments that you guys have made.

And when I started covering you around April of 2009, also a good time to get into mining, you only had one producing royalty, one paying royalty, and now you have 15.

And there's a great slide in your latest presentation where it shows like the mining cycle goes up and you guys aren't buying anything, and then it goes down, and you just bought a whole bunch of royalties.

But tell me about the first royalty. How did you come to buy a piece of the Voisey's Bay nickel mine royalty?

Brian Dalton: Sure. Actually at the time, the purchase wasn't intended to begin the process of transforming into a royalty house. It was reflective of our business model at the time, which was mineral exploration, followed by farming projects out to senior miners in order to reduce our side of the cost.

But the process of generating the projects was still burning cash, and we were raising money in little bits from a select few shareholders, and there was dilution that was creeping up.

And so the logic and rationale behind buying Voisey's Bay was that it would provide a long-term source of internal cashflow, and take us off the treadmill of continuous equity financings, and then ultimately minimize longer-term dilution.

More specifically, the way the opportunity came about is that I was a friend of one of the discoverers of Voisey's Bay, and so that royalty was ultimately created when those prospectors sold the discovery to Diamond Fields and retained a royalty.

And so several years after the discovery, the mine's still not in production, as these things take time. He was asset rich, but cashflow poor, and was looking to monetize some of the royalty interest – and he basically called me up to see if I could offer up some contacts that he could approach to offer that sale.

And you know from that, basically within a day or so, I called them back and said your first call was the only one you needed to make: Here's an offer.

Dan Ferris: That's cool, yeah. So I guess we should – I mean I just kind of jumped in here with both feet because I've known you for so long, and I've known the company for so long, but maybe for our listeners, I should let you just kind of tell them what Altius is today, and what business are you in, and what do you do, and how do you do it, maybe for a minute or two here?

Brian Dalton: Sure, and the slides you referenced with the cyclical progression, it's sort of the mining cycle overlaying on our history is a good reference point for me.

So we started in that tough time. Capital was unavailable and we were probably on track to go bankrupt real quick, and we landed on the business model of becoming a project generator.

So that meant just picking up land, using our technical skills to I guess improve the sense of value, and then find partners who would do the heavy lifting, in terms of the drilling and all that sort of thing.

We would take back royalties and share positions. So this sort of takes us '97 to 2000-ish, and by 2000, the market started to turn a little bit, and it was going pretty good by 2001, 2002, and suddenly, all these share positions that we've accumulated, started to really increase in value.

So fast forward from there, in the next eight or 10 years would have been what's often referred to now as the mining supercycle and it was just – it was happy times.

Everything was up, metal prices were going up, share prices were going crazy, and lo and behold, we had over $200 million in the bank from sales of these junior equity positions.

So these would have been mineral lands that we'd acquired for tens of thousands of dollars, and then turned into royalties and equities – and then the equities grew, we sold a bunch of them, and had a whole pile of cash.

It caused a bit of a challenge for us because, what do you do with that much money as an exploration business? We didn't want to evolve into a mining company. That's not our skillset, and in fact I think it's a pretty horrible business generally. And in any event, not something that we would have been suited to.

We talked about giving the cash back to shareholders with a big, special dividend. Most of them were not in favor of that. For one, they were doing well on their own positions.

Cash wasn't scarce to anybody at that point, and moreover, they challenged us to find a way to continue the growth that we'd been achieving.

So we landed on the one thing that made sense for us, that we could deploy larger amounts of capital, and generate long-term returns, and the cyclical business was the royalty business.

So obviously, having acquired the Voisey's Bay royalty previously had been a very positive experience. Nickel prices shot up as soon as we bought the royalty. We had payback in almost no time, and it certainly made us positively inclined towards the sector.

So we're up to 2009, 2010, around the time you met us, and we're talking about oh, what we're going to do with the money, which was obviously the most common question we face in investors – what are you going to do with all the cash?

And then we kept saying well, we're going to build a portfolio of royalties, and we said that for several years, because the trouble at the time was that prices were sky-high, and valuations were sky-high, and we just couldn't bring ourselves to pull the trigger on anything.

So we spent several years, probably the hardest thing we've ever done as a company was for several years, to do nothing. All things though come around, particularly in this business, and that heady period, 2010, 2011, all the mining companies were investing loads of capital into building new mines, and expanding mines, and of course all that new production hit the market at the same time, and prices inevitably collapsed.

Those same mining companies also had levered new debt for those developments and expansions, and so now they had a situation where the price is shrunk, there's no margin at the mines, and they've got a whole bunch of debt coming due.

So it created a perfect storm, and all of the sudden, mining companies were looking to sell assets in order to shore up their balance sheets and that created our –

Dan Ferris: And you guys had cash?

Brian Dalton: We had cash. We'd held that cash and there was a situation where companies with very long life, high-quality assets who normally would never sell, you know, permanent-type impairments on them were at the table and they were – there was just nobody available to write a check anywhere.

So it was a really great time and we bought, and we bought, and then we bought some more, and here we are today.

Dan Ferris: Yeah, here we are today. I think when I found you guys, the royalty income was like three, four, five million a year, something like that, depending on nickel prices, and now it's like $70 million.

Brian Dalton: And growing.

Dan Ferris: Huge, huge increase.

Brian Dalton: The point I'll make here as well then is that that growth is not just nominal. It's per share growth. That's what I'm most happy about.

Dan Ferris: Yeah, I mean most companies that are – you know like you said early on, you didn't want to get into the treadmill of issuing shares to do things, and quite the contrary, you've issued a few shares to do deals here and there over the years, but the growth per share and value has been substantial. And I always thought it would be once I got to know you guys, and I'm not disappointed at all. You've made me look kind of smart, I have to say.

Brian Dalton: Well, thank you. Thank you for the great support and encouragement because, you know it's funny, a lot of the shareholders that you introduced to the company are the ones that tend to be active and talk to us a lot, and I feed off that a lot.

There's a lot of encouragement there. When it's tough to do contrarian things, which it always is. It's been really refreshing to have – I don't know what it is about your shareholder base, but you've attracted some smart cookies.

Dan Ferris: Yeah, they're very – especially the people who read my newsletter. I mean to be a value investor and hang in there for the long term, you know, you have to be kind of a special, quirky almost kind of a person. So I'm glad to hear that. It makes good sense.

You recently me a bunch of really cool case studies about where the company has been and how it got to where it is right now, and basically Altius Minerals right now, like you're in the best shape that you've been in as a company in the 10 years that I've been covering you.

Like you've had problems but you've fixed them, right? I mean you're full-steam ahead, organic revenue growth, all kinds of wonderful things happening, and the mining cycle turning up.

So like I can't understand why the share price isn't 40% higher. Do you have any idea why this is the case?

Brian Dalton: [Laughter.]

Dan Ferris: I mean help me out here, I have no idea.

Brian Dalton: I suppose some of it is just maybe it's catch-up. Our growth has been pretty fast. We're compounding revenue right now at about oh, 20% a year for the last five years, and there's lots of reasons to think it's going to keep going.

I don't know. I know the business is growing really well and it is frustrating to not see the share price follow it, but in the long haul, I think things will come right.

In the meantime, we're just going to continue driving growth in the business. It is a very strong company right now and there's so many good things happening, in terms of just price appreciation, volume growth across the mines – mines being invested in for expansion, new mines being built.

And all of those things are happening, and requiring absolutely no capital contribution from us. So you know, the work was done in that period in the downturn when we bought all the assets at the mid-cycle prices, and we selected assets that had very long lives, because we knew those were the ones that would ultimately expand and be invested in, and it's all happening right now.

Dan Ferris: That is so cool.

Brian Dalton: It's not a "this will happen anymore." You can just look at it and watch it unfolding right before your eyes today – very gratifying. I just try not to look at the stock screen too often [laughter].

Dan Ferris: That's right [laughter]. Don't look at the share price and you'll feel a great sense of gratification.

Brian Dalton: I guess the most common --

Dan Ferris: But yeah, I feel the same way.

Brian Dalton: Sorry, sorry to – the most common criticism we get is that after 21 years, there's still only 41 million shares outstanding, and they tend to be fairly tightly-held.

So it's not the most liquid stock in the world, and that's a common complaint I guess I get, or reason that people offer up to explain why, at this point anyway, the share price seems to be lagging the fundamental growth of the business, but we're not going to issue shares to solve that.

Dan Ferris: Right. That's a weird complaint. Certainly we have to acknowledge one of the things about your valuation versus other royalty companies is that people seem to want to capitalize a dollar of precious metals royalty at a much more exorbitant price, but you guys are mostly base metals and potash, and things, and you've purposely gone the other way because the opportunity is so much bigger.

And people do ask me occasionally, well you know, when's that going to change? You know and I think there are some good things about having an overvalued stock. You know, you can use it as currency or whatever but having a stock that's either fair value or somewhat less, in the long run, can be a good thing too.

I mean how do you feel about that? About that difference between gold royalties and base metal royalties?

Brian Dalton: I certainly accept the fact that there's – these assets are valued differently, a dollar royalty revenue from a base metal or an iron ore mine doesn't seem to trade at anywhere near the multiple that the dollar revenue from a gold mine does, and that's just– it is what it is.

Fundamentally, it's flawed though in my opinion because gold mines tend to be built – they're relatively low-capital cost undertakings, as far as the mining industry goes.

Dan Ferris: Mmm-hmm.

Brian Dalton: And they tend to be built with relatively short lives. So to me the biggest feature of royalty investing and the attribute you want to see is the option value, the growth potential.

So when you buy royalties on mines that have ultra-long lives, you know you're basically talking about the base metal and the bulk commodities world when you talk about ultra-long lives.

You get all of this free optionality at the royalty level, and that's because the big mine lives are a clear predictor of operations that will ultimately expand their production levels.

You've got enough resource to support decades and decades of mine life. It's a logical place when the market needs more supply to reinvest, and to shrink the mine life, while increasing the annual production rate.

So it tends to be a big capital undertaking, but it's always lower cost to expand an existing operation, than to build a new one.

So these long lives that we select for are great predictors of expansions, and when you don't have a share of the capital costs to make those expansions happen, that is about the ultimate in option value realization, and it's far more pronounced in the non-precious metal space than it is in the precious metal space.

Dan Ferris: Right.

Brian Dalton: So the market does its thing, but I also will not stop arguing that inherently non-precious metal royalties are ultimately more value.

Dan Ferris: Yeah, I've tried – I've told that story a few times too, and to me, it's extremely exciting and just you know for the listener, like remember the rule of thumb: Big mines with long lives will give you good surprises, and small mines with short lives can give you some unpleasant surprises.

Brian Dalton: They tend to get shorter more quickly, don't they?

Dan Ferris: That's right. So you know, maybe one day... They say the market is a weighing machine in the long term, and a voting machine in the short term.

I know that something at some point is going to make it very clear that you are absolutely correct, that the longer-lived huge resources are more valuable as royalty holdings than the precious metals which, as you say, they have to keep replenishing, right?

I mean they have to keep spending, and when they buy those royalties, you can't buy them cheap.

Brian Dalton: No.

Dan Ferris: Which is one of the great things about your model: You create royalties as well as buying them.

Brian Dalton: Yeah, it's – you know the business there seems to be to buy a royalty at X, and then put it in a royalty company where it trades at one and a half or two times X and that's the marketing, but fundamentally, it's not a match for our business strategy, or even just how we think fundamentally.

As far as what triggers and changes thing, I'm just going to run with the guess that making gobs of money, and having a compound at crazy rates for a long time will ultimately pay off.

Dan Ferris: Man, if that doesn't do it, nothing will. I mean, come on.

Brian Dalton: Yeah [laughter].

Dan Ferris: [Laughter.]

Brian Dalton: Yeah, we'll have to change our business model. There's something flawed there, maybe.

Dan Ferris: And let's see, I noticed – well of course I've known this for a while but it looks like you are going to come into your 16th paying royalty on a producing mine, later this year?

Brian Dalton: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, all signals are the company is called Excelsior, and they're building a mine called Gunnison. It's in Arizona. It was a bit of a long permitting process, but they got through that late last year, and immediately on the heels of that, we were able to put together project finance.

So now we're starting to get updates from the site, you know, showing pictures of construction progress. They're hoping to produce first copper amounts later this year, and it'll ramp up, then over another five or six years. And the fun thing about this is that it's a royalty that was bought for very little at an earlier, riskier time in the project life.

It was actually done by Callinan, one of the companies that merged into Altius. But it's nice to start to see those earlier speculative royalties that we have in our portfolios, to see some of them cross all the milestones, and become paying royalties. Because ultimately the return on investment on those types of bits, as a portion of our portfolio anyway will be the real screamers.

Dan Ferris: Right. That's one thing I love about your business is just the incredibly efficient use of capital. You know, you spend a few hundred thousand, you can wind up with something literally worth hundreds of millions. It's incredible and you've done that, right?

Brian Dalton: We have, and we think we've got a few more in us.

Dan Ferris: Yeah, there are and there's definitely a few more like "on deck" within the next you know like year two, three, whatever. What do you think about – like you have a lot of exposure to Labrador Iron Ore. What is special – tell our listeners, what is special about Labrador Iron Ore?

Brian Dalton: I think what's probably most special about it is the unique product that it produces. Iron ore is used in steelmaking, and steelmaking is a relatively polluting type of process, and that's becoming a major issue, particularly in Asia, or has become a major issue.

So what Labrador produces is ultra-high quality iron ore, so really high relative iron content, and probably more importantly, really low impurities. And the impact there is that when that material goes into a furnace to make steel, there's a lot less pollutants that result.

So there's been an awareness, or I guess a market shift that's happened to – that appreciates that extra value, and so Labrador's products, I guess ultra-high-quality concentrates and pellets are commanding a big premium in the market right now, and that's had a major impact on its overall operating margin.

So that's one element of what's neat there. It's also a neat business in the sense that it has a very long reserve life. So it can go for a long time. It's been running for 60 years, and it's got at least that much ahead of it.

And probably what's most unique about it today – many of your listeners will know that there's been some pretty significant supply issues this year, namely related to a disaster in Brazil, and one of the biggest challenges in building out new capacities to replace lost capacity is that in iron ore mining, a big chunk of the capital cost relates to the infrastructure.

It's much more than the mine. It tends to be the rail and the port, and those sorts of things that are a big part of the cost, and IOC has a lot of extra rail and port capacity sitting there right now. So we think it's quite ripe for future option value realizations of the type that we're so fond of.

Dan Ferris: Yeah, you and me both. Your biggest investment there is your holding in LIF. Is that Labrador Iron Ore Royalty Corporation? That's right, isn't it?

Brian Dalton: Yeah, there's a few that are in that same category in terms of investment scale. So Chipata would be up there, and then the potash portfolio more broadly. But yeah – no. It's a big investment for us. We made that over the last couple of years, in different stages.

A big part of that came when we brought Fairfax Financial onboard as a strategic shareholder. We were a little strapped for cash at the time, having just completed a bunch of acquisitions and so when that money came in, we put it to work pretty hard, with us buying up that Labrador position.

Labrador Iron Ore I should say owns the royalty on the IOC mine, and it acts as a pass-through vehicle for the royalty. So buying the shares were – albeit indirectly – were essentially asset-level royalty buyers of IOC through Lyft.

Dan Ferris: Yeah. So just – for the listener, Brian mentioned Fairfax Financial. That's basically like the Berkshire Hathaway of Canada, and it's run by a guy named Prem Watsa, who is often referred to as the Warren Buffett of Canada, and I mean Prem is basically – like he's a hero of yours, certainly, Brian. That's correct to say that, is it not?

Brian Dalton: Oh, absolutely, yeah. No, he's just a – he's an investing legend and a genuinely nice man.

Dan Ferris: Is Prem as well-known in Canada as Buffett is, elsewhere?

Brian Dalton: I think Buffett would still carry greater weight, even in Canada, than Prem's name would but amongst those who know, there's no doubt Fairfax and Prem Watsa are you know the – they're definitely our value investing champions.

Dan Ferris: Right. I would encourage anybody listening to just learn something about Fairfax – go to their website, you can see their incredible track record, and you can read their letters which are like – their letters are even more dense and detailed than Berkshire Hathaway but if you can get through them, you'll learn a lot.

Brian Dalton: Well, Prem loves to say – told me this in our first meeting. One of his favorite sayings is that the first hundred years are the hardest. So in terms of a long-term business plan of the type that we're executing, I think we've found the right partner.

Dan Ferris: That's funny, the first hundred years are the hardest.

Brian Dalton: Well, we do have assets, some of which will go beyond 1,000 years, Dan. So it's – yeah. It's not a bad match.

Dan Ferris: Yeah, true. There's like the potash mines, the last time I looked at those I thought like there are two of the potash mines that what I saw said it was like 1,700 years of resources in there. Is that right?

Brian Dalton: Yes, it is right.

Dan Ferris: I mean it's incredible.

Brian Dalton: Yeah.

Dan Ferris: And I'll tell you what's incredible to me is that mines are depleting assets, but you can actually have – these royalties on the potash can grow in value because the mines are so gigantic, and they can expand production and you know, you get prices going in the right direction. It's pretty cool.

Brian Dalton: Well, I use the analogy for people, you know I just use – it's a very simple way to explain the difference is that if you buy a royalty today that has a 20-year mine life, in 20 years, it's worth exactly zero.

Dan Ferris: Right.

Brian Dalton: And a royalty on a mine, such as say one of the potash mines we've got here with 1,700-year, what happens is that over time as market demand grows, it gets continuously invested in, and production rates go up.

So you could double the production rate at that 1,700-year mine, and still have more than 800 years of mine life at that point, but in more reasonable time frames, in 20 years' time when you go and look at that, it will have only grown, and still have such a long remaining life that it really wouldn't be captured in normal discounting models.

So while it is a – ultimately a depleting asset, its depletion point is so far out in time, and the number of opportunities for the production rates to increase are such that they're essentially perpetual growth royalties.

Dan Ferris: Right, and we're talking about a lot of potash. Like the mines underlying your royalties, it's like – isn't it like 20 or 30% of global potash demand?

Brian Dalton: It's a third of the world's potash. It's almost --

Dan Ferris: Whoa.

Brian Dalton: It's almost certain today that every one of the listeners here has eaten food that has a component of potash from one of our royalty mines in it.

Dan Ferris: Wow, that's very cool.

Brian Dalton: We're eating our royalties every day.

Dan Ferris: We're eating our royalties every day [laughter.] That's true. Yeah, it's a royalty on food, right? It's a royalty on growing global population.

Brian Dalton: Yeah, population right now is running at about 80 million people a year, and what's amazing about that is that as population grows, the amount of agricultural land also shrinks because it's being used for housing and other industrial purposes, and you just don't make more of it.

So the amount of agricultural land, each and every year, or each unit of agricultural land has to feed more people every year, and the only way you can do that is through nutrient replenishment fertilizers.

So potash, this is a third of the world's potash nutrient supply. The other thing that's cool about potash is that it doesn't recycle. So you produce it, and you put it in the ground, and you turn it into food, and then you've have to do it over and over again, and none of it ever comes back at the market.

So it's just steady growth, and as long as you believe that we're going to keep eating, it should keep growing.

Dan Ferris: Well, I'm planning to keep eating [laughter.]

Brian Dalton: [Laughter.] Yeah – no. We love those royalties. They really are special. I don't think we'll ever come across anything like those again, but I'm glad we have them.

Dan Ferris: Yeah. So we're actually – like we're getting to the end of our time here. I feel like I should have blocked out an hour and a half for you because there's so much to talk about.

But if I could ask you, like if I told you, you know, you've got whatever, 30 seconds or a minute or something to leave our listeners with one thought about Altius Minerals, what would it be?

Brian Dalton: What would it be?

Dan Ferris: Gotcha.

Brian Dalton: It would basically just summarize what we said here. Yeah, you did. There's a lot of things I could say but it's to look at the uniqueness of this portfolio of assets, and to know that they will just continue to grow, and grow and grow.

We don't need to be continuous buyers of assets in order to drive growth. It's set up in such a way now that it's just going to naturally happen, meaning that anything that we do acquire is going to be purely accreted.

So we're entering a new phase for the business. There was a – we made the money in the project generation business. We sat and waited.

That was another phase, and then we got busy through the crisis period and bought a whole bunch of assets, and now we're back on that upswing part of the cycle again here when prices will increase, volumes per mine will increase, mines will get built, and mines will get expanded. So we're into that fun stage here, right now.

Dan Ferris: And during the fun stage, like you know, an announcement or two can generate a huge change. You know, your market cap can just shoot up real quick once the market realizes, say, that some mine is going to get built or some royalty is going to start paying.

So you don't want to wait to buy the thing. You know, you've have to get it while it's cheap and it is cheap right now. So I'll tell you what I – how I would have answered.

Brian Dalton: So much free option value there, Dan.

Dan Ferris: Yeah, huge, huge amounts, and what I would have answered that question, I would have said this is the best royalty deal on the face of the earth right now is Altius Minerals.

You buy this thing and you'll probably pass it onto your grandkids. You'll forget you own it, it'll do great, and you'll pass it onto the grandkids. So thanks for – thanks for coming and being on the podcast, Brian. It's been a while since we spent any time together and I appreciate it.

Brian Dalton: Thank you for the opportunity and the kind words, Dan. Thanks, and for the long-term support, you will be rewarded.

Dan Ferris: Oh, I have no doubt. I have no doubt. All right. Thanks a lot, man. We'll talk to you soon.

Brian Dalton: Thanks, Dan. Cheers, bye.

Dan Ferris: OK. Now it's time for the mailbag. The mailbag is very important to our show, and you know when I don't hear from you guys, it worries me a little. I want this podcast to be a real conversation. So you know, that we need your input.

You can e-mail us with any questions or comments that are civil in tone [laughter] as I've requested before, you know, serious investor stuff, you know.

And e-mail us at [email protected], and I read them all, and I try to respond to as many as possible, but obviously there's so many, I can't quite get to them all.

And I try to pick out some good ones and I think I got some good ones here. So No. 1 in the mailbag today is by Carl T. Carl T says, "In the April 4 issue of Investor Hour you say gold may not have appreciated substantially over the last 100 years but it's maintained its value, unlike the U.S. dollar, which has lost 95% of its value over that time. That doesn't make sense.

"If gold had held its value in dollar terms, it would have had to appreciate 20x over that period. Would you please explain what you mean by holding its value without appreciating? Thanks, Carl T."

So without appreciating I was just – that was a little sloppy of me. What I meant was like it hasn't compounded the way stocks have over that time.

So it hasn't functioned as an investment and when you – really, when you look at the gold price, you know, I'm glad you asked this question because I hadn't really thought about the gold price in a while.

But when you look at the gold price, there's always been an official government gold price. There was an official government gold price until 1971 when President Nixon at the time cut the cord between gold and the U.S. dollar, and you could no longer redeem U.S. dollars for gold – and there's still an official price today of $42.22 but it doesn't really mean a lot.

So the official price of gold was – it started out in 1792 at $19.75 per ounce. They raised it to $20.67 in 1834. It stayed there for 100 years, and went to $35 in 1934.

Then in 1972, they pushed it up to $38 but after 1971, I don't really care, because in 1971 the United States decided the dollar wasn't going to be backed by gold anymore, so it was $35.

That was the official price at that time. So from 1971 to the present, you know, you've seen an 84% decrease in the U.S. dollar and you've seen gold go from $35 to about $1,300 as I speak to you – a 37-fold increase.

And at the top of $1,900 back in 2011, August or September 2011, if I'm not very much mistaken, that was $1,900. That was a 54-fold increase. So it might be a better way to think about it, and if we just look at – you know the U.S. dollar, I said it was – it's lost 95% of its value.

It's actually about 96% decrease, from 1913 when the Federal Reserve took over until 2018 is the latest, you know, full-year inflation data.

So you know, that's kind of a better way to think about it. I'm not really sure how to think about the gold price from – you know, up through 1971 because it was – you know, in dollars in the United States it was – gold was money.

So the price of it is a funky thing. It's just – you know, we have to use inflation data for the dollar, and that gets us to the 96% decrease, and then of course we look at what gold did.

Once you cut it loose from the dollar, shoop, you know, straight up like a rocket. Right, I mean that's why gold took off in the '70s because it was kind of – it was righting itself. It was artificially held down before that. Great question, thank you very much, Carl T.

Number two, mailbag No. 2, "Hi Dan, I'm a lifetime subscriber to Extreme Value, and I enjoy your analysis and podcasts. I was watching a webcast today from the Fidelity conference, that's Fidelity, the big financial company, about technical analysis to learn more about it.

"One of the charts that was displayed was of the S&P 500 that went from decades ago to the present. The presenter referred to the beginning of our current bull market as 2013, not 2009 as I hear from everyone.

"This was because the chart showed a double-bottom in 2009 and 2011. So the change from bear market to bull market did not technically occur until 2013 when it sored past the previous highs of 2008 and 2010. That means that this bull is not as long in the tooth as people have been saying. I'd like your reaction to this. Thanks, Mike S."

I think it is as long in the tooth as we're saying and that this guy is just – he's being very technical about what constitutes these chart patterns, but the simple fact is the S&P 500 hit 666 back in March of 2009 and it's just been higher, every minute since.

So yeah, we got a little correction in 2011. That was not a bear market though because it was less than 20%, and I agree. Twenty percent is arbitrary. You know, the definition of bear markets as being 20% down or more is arbitrary, but that's the one we use. That's the one the world uses. That's why I say 2009 was the start of the bull market, and why everybody says it, I think. Good question though, not a bad question.

Mailbag No. 3 is from Rexford H, and he says, "Unbacked currencies have always imploded historically, and have outright failed or been saved by a new metal backing.

"If this is true, then what causes this failure? Is it in our future?" Then he's got another point here. He says, "Paper money allows for a lethal build-up in debt which can ultimately be paid only by a never-ending increase in money supply.

"Once this process is set in motion, it only ends one way: a loss of faith in said abused currency, and corresponding collapse in value. This process does not happen overnight but can take decades to unfold.

"The big question for us, are we already stuck in this downward spiral? If QE 4, 5, and 6 are in the cards going forward, then yes, if debt is restructured and fiscal discipline restored, then no."

Then he gets to the only question I'm interested in: "Which is more likely in the decades to come? Does our current trajectory instill hope that all will end well for the dollar in the end?"

When you say which is more likely, I'm not sure which – you've got a lot of different things here, but does our current trajectory instill hope that all will end well for the dollar you ask, Rexford H?

No, it doesn't. It's lost 96% of its value. It continues to do so. We're seeing wage inflation now. So we know that the process if continuing and I think this – you know it bodes well for gold. It bodes poorly for the dollar, and ultimately – maybe not even during my lifetime, the dollar ends up where all the fiat currencies end up.

All right. Let's do just one more of these and let me pick. I've got a bunch of good ones here. Let me pick this one. Here, you go. Mailbag No. 4 from Travis P. He says, "What are your thoughts on super cycles relative to commodities?

"For example, oil and gas recently went through an industry recession back in 2015, 2016, and some companies still have not fully recovered.

"At this time, do you think we went through a super cycle low, or are still going through a super cycle low for commodities? Also, what are your thoughts on finding value in the oil and gas industry, even thought he market as a whole is overvalued?"

And he says, "I recently purchased as company during the last market hiccup in December 2018 because I felt it was the right time to buy based on value data, not the market trend as a whole," and then he says the ticker symbol is DRQ for the company that he bought.

So the real question here is about super cycles. I think the super cycle is past, and for me, a "super cycle" is defined as a demand component on top of the supply component.

Right, we get the regular mining cycles and commodity cycles because too much money goes into it, too much capital is attracted to it. Prices are pushed up. That attracts more, and too much capacity, and too much supply comes into existence.

Then what happens when you get too much supply? Crash. Prices go down, capital evaporates, and then you get these cyclical lows. So that's all a supply issue, right.

Super cycle comes along when you get like we had with China just over the past – just call it 20 years, and you get this big new source of demand for commodities.

So that's like a cycle on steroids, super-charged cycle, super cycle, and I think the super cycle might be over, but it's hard to say. Regardless of whether super cycle's over or not, I think the cyclical moment right now is correct.

I think you're right. This is the time, and you made a good call there on oil and gas, with oil pushing back up above $70, and so your basic thoughts, Travis P, in your e-mail here are correct, I think.

You know, the timing is generally right. I'm personally in Extreme Value this week – we are adding a third mining-related company. It's a mining royalty company. So now we'll have two of those, and three mining-related companies.

Probably never recommend another one for the rest of my life but I think the time has come for these, and for commodities in general. So good for you, you got it right.

OK, that's the mailbag, and that's another episode of Stansberry Investor Hour. Thanks for listening. I really appreciate it. We have a really good audience. We're among the top numbers.

You know, the numbers tell us we're in the top podcast, like top 5% of podcasts, so they tell me, which is awesome and thank you. So be sure to check out the website at www.InvestorHour.com.

You can sign up there, put your e-mail in, and you'll get all the updates. You can see transcripts for every show. Now it takes a couple of days to get the transcript up, but you will see a transcript for every show.

So this one might not appear for a couple of days but I promise you it'll be there, and for every other show, you can just scroll down and you'll see a transcript on the bottom of the page for each episode.

All right, folks. Thanks a lot. I will talk to you next week. Can't wait. See you then, bye.

Voiceover: Thank you for listening to the Stansberry Investor Hour. To access today's notes and receive notice of upcoming episodes, go to InvestorHour.com and enter your e-mail.

Have a question for Dan? Send him an e-mail at [email protected]. This broadcast is provided for entertainment purposes only, and should not be considered personalized investment advice.

Trading stocks and all other financial instruments involves risk. You should not make any investment decision based solely on what you hear.

Stansberry Investor Hour is produced by Stansberry Research, and is copyrighted by the Stansberry Radio Network.

[End of Audio.]