In a wide-ranging interview, Bob Moriarty of 321gold.com discusses the state of the gold market for juniors and a company that could possibly break out.
As 321gold's Bob Moriarty discussed the outcome of the BRICS conference in Russia and the state of the gold market with Robert Sinn of Goldfinger Capital, he lamented the need for more young gold bugs to enter the market as the yellow metal enters what he predicted will be a five- to 10-year bull market.
Sinn said at a recent conference, despite recent record gold prices, two-thirds of the seats were empty at gold panels with experts talking about likely windfalls in 2025.
"If you went to a gold conference last year, what was the average age?" Moriarty said during the interview posted last month, guessing 67 "or higher." "We have to get young people into the market, and we have not done that yet. The fact is that nobody's (at) the gold show because they all died of old age."
Moriarty said he expects there will be plenty of those windfalls coming in the bull market. He said there "absolutely has to be" more majors doing acquisitions.
Before the Bre-X scandal of the 1990s, in which fraudulent samples led to the collapse of the CA$6 billion company, most major mining companies had their own exploration departments, which many later cut, Moriarty pointed out.
"Since 2000, all of the exploration has been juniors," he said. "So, there has to be a lot more M&A activity. There has to be."
Gold hit its latest record high on October 30. It slid after the election, but most experts agree it is in a bull market and will continue to be.
"We are still relatively constructive on gold," said Taylor Krystkowiak, investment strategist at Themes ETFs, according to a report by Ian Salisbury for Barron's. "Why does gold go up? It's geopolitical uncertainty, it's deficit spending, and it's inflation. Right now, all those stars are aligned."
Despite pushbacks during its rise, "gold continues to climb," Nick Fulton, managing partner at USA Pawn, told Newsweek. "When we saw US$2,600 an ounce gold, I thought US$2,800 by the end of the year. Now? We could see gold at US$3,000 an ounce happen in a 30-day time span."
Moriarty said the highest recent scores logged by sentiment indices on gold and silver, which are reflected in a scale of 0 to 100, are lower than he would expect at "88 for gold and 88 for silver."
"I would think it would be in the 90s, and it's not," he said. Silver, for instance, when it hit its all-time record high in 1980, had a score of 95, he said.
The juniors should be performing "three or four times higher, and they're not," Moriarty said.
"So, were in an interesting situation," he said. "We're going to have five to 10 years at least of a bull market. And when the dollar changes its value dramatically, it's going to drive gold and silver much higher."
Moriarty said the majors are "trying to go out and pick up copper projects now," which he doesn't think makes sense.
"The majors are always wrong," he said. "They're paying the most for projects at the very top. Projects are being given because they're not interested. But when you have four major projects in one small area in the Yukon (and) those projects are going into production, somebody is going to buy them. But I don't think they're going to buy them for chump change. I think it's going to cost some money."
The two also discussed the recent BRICS meeting Russia. An intergovernmental organization, BRICS is an acronym for founding members Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa. Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates are all full members now and it has also expanded to add 13 new "partner nations."
But one thing it didn't do was settle on a common currency for the countries, which disappointed Moriarty.
"I think the BRICS meeting was really important, and I was hoping for kind of agreement on what the BRICS financial solution is, and they really didn't come up with it," he said. "It was a meet and greet, and they talked about opening commodities exchanges. Who cares?"
This potential currency would allow these nations to "assert their economic independence while competing with the existing international financial system," wrote Melissa Pistilli of Investing News Network. "The current system is dominated by the US dollar, which accounts for about 90 percent of all currency trading."
Russian President Vladimir Putin presented a colorful mockup of a BRICS bank note at the conference, but Moriarty wasn't impressed.
"They need to do something, but they haven't done it yet. "You've got dozens of countries that recognize (that) the stranglehold the United States has on the rest of the world geopolitically is a negative for the rest of the world. And they all agree that that needs to change, but nobody's talked about how to do it."
One company Moriarty and Sinn discussed was Sitka Gold Corp. (SIG:TSXV; SITKF:OTCQB; 1RF:FSE), which recently released high-grade intercepts from its RC Gold Project in the Tombstone Gold Belt of Yukon.
The standout results included one hole that returned 678.1 meters of 1.04 grams per tonne gold (g/t Au) from surface, including 409.5 meters of 1.36 g/t Au, and 93 meters grading 2.57 g/t Au. The intercept also contained a high-grade core of 5.5 meters grading 17.59 g/t Au.
The results extended gold mineralization approximately 200 meters deeper than any previously drilled hole at the Blackjack deposit, signaling the potential for continued high-grade mineralization at depth and showing persistent mineralization throughout the entire 708.7-meter length of the hole.
Moriarty said the company is drilling Clear Creek on the RC property now, "and I think we're going to see a lot. More 400-, 500-, 600-meter intercepts. So, what's going to happen is the majors are going to wake up."
He predicted the company could be another Snowline Gold Corp. (SGD:CSE; SNWGF:OTCQB), which "has somewhere between seven and eight times the market cap" of Sitka. At the time of writing, Snowline had a market cap of CA$883 million to Sitka's CA$129 million.
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