Bizarro World Podcast,
with Nick and Gerardo
June 7, 2022
What path did we take to financial freedom? What would we do differently? How are we playing this ongoing bear market in stocks? What about the crypto collapse? We answer all those listener questions and more in this week's episode of Bizarro World.
5:27 The Path to Financial Freedom
17:24 Bear Market Guidance: Time to Buy Tech?
25:14 Crypto: Has the Bubble Popped?
28:18 Contrarian Plays for the Current Environment
37:14 Ask Nick (and Brien Lundin) Anything
Gerardo Del Real: Gold's back now, crypto's boring. The peak of the lithium price spike, we'll get into that a little bit. We're going to get into some practical, common sense strategy for the markets between Mr. Hodge and I. I am Gerardo Del Real, along with Mr. Nick Hodge. This is episode 172 of our weekly therapy session, otherwise known as Bizarro World. How are you Nick?
Nick Hodge: The weeks are flying by, Gerardo. I know last week was a tough one, I hope that issue resonated with some folks. The hot summer that we predicted, unfortunately, continues to unfold. Lots of things to talk about in the market, which we didn't get to last week. And it's my daughter's sixth birthday, so happy birthday to Ms. Story Rose. You'll recall that one of the first times we met, certainly the first times our family got together, was when she was born in Austin, Texas six years ago. So those years have flown by. And I'd be remiss if I didn't say some projects that we're involved in were just entering the permitting process back in 2016, and they're still in the permitting process. So, a good frame of reference as far as how long things take in the junior mining world, right?
Gerardo Del Real: Congratulations to Ms. Story Rose, I can't believe it's been six years. For those of you that don't know the backstory, Mr. Hodge, myself, his wife, and my wife were at a place called Esther's Follies, which is Austin's version of Saturday Night Live. There's one part sketch, and acting, and music, and some magic thrown in. It's an amazing staple of Austin's late night comedy scene. And about halfway through, we noticed that Mrs. Hodge was a bit uncomfortable there, and next thing you know, headed to the hospital, and having a baby. So Story is one of the more apt names for a kid that I have ever seen, I think.
Nick Hodge: Yeah. She was cleared to travel, and that was a premature birth. We didn't expect her to come. But she was healthy then, and she's even healthier now. And I guess credit Esther's Follies for being so funny that they induced labor.
Gerardo Del Real: Well, listen, let's get right into it. There's a lot going on. Everything from Goldman Sachs calling for the peak in the lithium price, and maybe we'll get into that, but what I definitely want to get into is the markets. Last week, of course, was tough. It's back to the regularly scheduled program in America. We've had 20 mass shootings since Uvalde. That's 20 mass shootings since Uvalde. And so I was looking on Twitter here, and there was a newscaster that said a few days ago there was one in Tulsa, and there was one in Pittsburgh simultaneously. And then they had one in their local town, and they said they didn't know which one to break away from. And this is just kind of how it is. And so I want to applaud the politicians on both sides that are sitting down and at least finally having a conversation about what they can agree on. At least it's a start.
I hate that it's taken this long, but there does appear to be at least some bipartisan support. To at least have a conversation about owning guns smarter. Nobody's going to take them away, this is America folks. But at least they're having the conversation. I say all that to say, I want to talk markets, and I want to start with gold. And then I want to talk about just some thoughts, and some questions for you, Nick. You've been at this now for how long, this speculating in the markets? How long have you dabbled now? I don't want to date you.
Nick Hodge: So I've been writing checks into private placements for seven years. I've been covering speculative markets for a dozen years. And so, that's over a decade. I wouldn't say I've seen multiple cycles, but I've started to see some things that make me think I'm getting better at identifying what works. I don't always get them right. But I've been talking to other folks about how they can get into that side of the game. Wondering how I did it, and wanting to spend some time on that because having a 401k, or an IRA, is great. And getting the macro direction of things right is great, but it's not going to make you rich. At least in the short-term timeframe. So you have to add that speculative part into it. And I guess what I've noticed is that these questions have come my way as crypto markets have, like you said, become boring. So what I've sort of sensed is these soldiers are furthering their training. Because some of these people that have hit me up are wondering how they can leverage the speculative portion of their portfolio. Seems like they might have been in bitcoin, or cryptocurrencies. And now looking to other parts of the speculative market, hint, hint, precious metals. That could generate those returns for their portfolio. Who would have thunk that that would've happened?
The Path to Financial Freedom
Gerardo Del Real: Imagine that. Listen, let's get right into it. We'll talk gold in a second, we'll talk lithium in a second. Financial freedom, whether or not you place that at the top of your things that are important to yourself list, it's that. It really is freedom. Freedom to focus more on your health, freedom to be able to travel, freedom to do whatever it is that you're really passionate about. And that can be making money, but it can also be gardening. It can be whatever it is. And so, let's have a conversation about that, Nick. If you had to start all over, you've been at this now for 12, 13 years, what would be your first step back to financial freedom?
Nick Hodge: There's a couple things I thought about when I got this question. I think the first thing is getting a mentor sooner. Finding someone who knows what they're talking about in the space that has done it before, and maybe I'm that person to other people at this point. I'm not sure. But really finding someone who can help navigate the speculative portion of the markets, whatever market that is for you. If that's crypto, great. If that's precious metals, great. If it's biotech, I can't help you, but that's great too.
And the other thing I would say is making more concentrated bets. I've had some good returns, obviously I've had some big winners over the years. I've written articles about ImmunoPrecise. Being in that stock from 25 cents to over $25, but I would've done even better if I had a more concentrated bet on that company. And obviously, if you don't have a lot of wealth, or you're just starting out, it can be scary. But I would say diversification is awesome for the broad market stuff. Different sectors of the S&P, allocating across those sectors in different risk levels. But when it comes to your speculations, and you said it actually pretty well recently, is that when you're right... We were doing a video, you and I recently, for lifetime members of Junior Resource Monthly. And you said, "When you're right, you want to be rewarded for being right.” And that means having enough shares, having enough capital allocated to those speculations you think are going to do well… so that it really moves the needle for you.
And I guess instead of having $5,000 in 10 companies, you could have $25,000 in two companies. That might require some more due diligence, and that sort of speaks to the first part of the answer I gave is finding someone in the speculative space who knows what they're talking about. Because if you have smaller wins, that's great, but that's not necessarily what the speculative side of things are for. And maybe, unfortunately, if people had concentrated bets in crypto, they got wiped out harder recently. So I don't want to say, "Take that advice with a grain of salt," but when you have conviction about something on the speculative side of things, make sure you own enough that it really moves the needle for you. Otherwise, you're going to be wishing you bought more. And I've had that experience recently with a company you told me to invest in, Patriot Battery Metals. When something goes from 40 cents to four bucks, of course you wish you owned more.
So those are my two key pieces of advice. And then the third, I think I would say is it doesn't happen overnight. Even if you get that 25 cent to $25 run, that was over the course of 3, 4, 5 years. And if you take a step back and put five years into the context of an 80, or 90 year life, that's not that long to transform your financial position. Do we want it to happen in two months? Three months? A year? Obviously everyone does. But I started with very little, and now I'm fairly comfortable, and it's been a 10 to 12 year process. If you can do that, that's pretty good. If you can use someone who knows what they're talking about to reduce that to five to seven years, I mean, that's get rich quick to me. Five to seven years is a quick time frame in the scheme of a life.
Gerardo Del Real: Well said. I would add to that, it's important to have someone that you can talk with about either buying, and selling. And when I tend to win, I tend to make bigger bets. I do like making concentrated bets. We say all the time that we eat our own cooking. I'm a big fan of eating my own cooking, and that cuts both ways. And so, it's good for me to have people like yourself, people like Jeff Phillips. Other people whose advice I respect to give the other side of things. I'll use Patriot Battery Metals as an example. I got in initially at 16 cents, and have ridden it all the way to... I think it's at $4.15 today. I've sold tiny amounts just to cover things like IRS bills, and other emergency expenses that came up here recently.
But outside of that, the bulk of my position is locked up for a year voluntarily, and we did that in the subsequent financings. But it does help me to have someone as a mentor, or a friend, that can play devil's advocate and say, "Well, what if this goes wrong? What if the metallurgy goes wrong? What if this? What if that?" And my counter to that would be, "Well, sure. It can go back to 75 cents. It would take a lot for that to happen, but again, I think this stock is $10.00 by the end of the summer if the drill bit keeps delivering. And so at this point in the game, me selling at $4.00, or me selling at $10.00, we're playing with house money. It's just, how much of that win are you willing to bet?
And for me, it's consequential enough to where it's a good chunk of my net worth now if it continues in that trajectory. And so, would it hurt me if it pulls back 50%? No, not really. It would still be a spectacular win. It doubling from this point, that would be consequential to the upside for me. And so, again, that risk tolerance is something that I encourage everybody to really define. And you mentioned five to seven years for getting rich. That is pretty quick. I come from a family where they've worked hard for generations on end. And if you would've told them five to seven years, they would've said, "What do we have to do?" They'd have done it. It could have been digging ditches, or flying planes. Whatever it is, they would be there. It's a hardworking family. It's a family that is very close knit.
And so five to seven years is, one, phenomenal if you can find people that can guide that. People that can help you sell when it's time to sell, but people also that can tell you the upside potential, and the why. And again, I'm going to be very specific with Patriot just because it is my largest position right now. When I say, "What's the upside? I think I can go to $10 by the end of the summer." You should be asking me how I quantify that. It's not just because it's a pretty chart, and it's going in one direction. It's because the company has a market cap right around $350 million, and I think they're onto about 150 million tonnes at 1% lithium, just within a two kilometer trend.
So if I'm right about that 150 million tonnes... I look at Frontier Lithium, and Frontier Lithium has a market cap twice Patriot's market cap. And I think combined resources within the multiple deposits there, I think it's somewhere in the order of 35 million tonnes at grades at about 1.5% lithium. And so if we're comparing apples to apples, Frontier Lithium is in Canada. It's in Quebec, it's nearby. It's a similar type of deposit. The peer comp support a $10 share price if I'm right about that 150 million tons. And if I'm right about 150 million tons, I could justify a $20 share price. And I know for a lot of people that are in at 16 cents, it's crazy talk. We were fortunate enough to have subscribers and friends get into that 16 cent financing when the company didn't know if it was going to stay afloat.
And that was the riskiest time to help finance it because we didn't know if the company was going to continue. It did a three for one consolidation. It was fighting to keep the Corvette property within its portfolio, it had a big payment coming up. And so, kudos to Blair Way and the team at Patriot because they did a phenomenal job with consolidating the land package, keeping the company alive, having really good long-term supportive shareholders that were willing to lock up their stock for a year because they had no interest in selling. That's proved to be very prudent. But that's how you ask someone like myself, or like a Nick Hodge that's giving advice on these stocks… that's how you ask them to quantify, or ask us to quantify evaluation. It's not based on just the fact that it goes up almost every single day.
Well, the reason it's doing that is because it's playing catch up to its peers. And so, one of two things has to happen for that to pull back. I have to be very wrong about potentially what's there, and the math is pretty easy on a pegmatite body. It's just a blob of rock. It's width, it's depth, it's grade. And you do the math, and you can get to 10 million tonnes pretty quickly. But again, if I'm wrong, if it's half that. Well, if I use the Frontier example, I could still justify a $10 share price today if all they come up with is 50 or 60 million tonnes. And I think we're way ahead of that. So quantify why you're holding something. And if you can't quantify why you think it can go up, or what that catalyst is going to be, it's just a hope. And hope is not a strategy.
I hope it hits $10. I hope it hits $20, but I actually see a path for that. And I know the things that have to go right in order for that to happen, and obviously I know that there can be hiccups along the way that can take that valuation backwards. So we'll see. We'll talk in a year, we'll revisit. Much like we did earlier in the year when we had a video for paying subscribers about our two biggest personal holdings, and luckily those have worked out pretty well. But just know when to sell, know that you can sell a little bit. Know that you can tap all of it if it's consequential to your life. $5,000 used to mean a hell of a lot to me way back in the day, and I was just trying to figure out how to borrow money off my credit cards to go buy junior resource stocks.
That's a real story folks. I used to do that, and then dabbled with options on margin. I didn't have that much money, and I wanted it to count. And so if I wanted it to be right, I had to make big bets, and I had to use as much leverage as possible. Please don't ever do that. I don't encourage anyone to do that. My risk tolerance is a little bit higher than most people. But yeah, no one to hold them, no one to fold them. That's, I think, as important as anything else out there.
Nick Hodge: Yeah. The selling advice is important, and something I probably should have mentioned. Selling a little bit is okay. If you look at my speculative portfolio over the years, and the advice I've given people, we sell little pieces. 10% here, 10% there. And if you can get a negative cost basis on some of those equities, like you say, "You're playing with house money." If I could scroll down the list of the 20, or 30 companies that I invested in via private placements that I still hold, I probably only have a positive cost basis in four, or five of them. The rest they paid me to own the shares, and that's a good place to be in as well.
Bear Market Guidance: Time to Buy Tech?
Gerardo Del Real: So question number two that I would have, Nick, with stocks looking bearish, would you invest into your favorite tech stock, or dollar cost average into the S&P to play the long game? I mean, what's your approach given the volatility in the markets right now? What are you doing? What do you like?
Nick Hodge: No, don't buy your favorite tech stock. Dollar cost averaging, not now in the broader market. So this is a good question, and one I'm maybe even a bit more comfortable with right now because I think I see the macro markets a bit clearer. I think the Nasdaq can go down a lot further. You had Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT)out warning recently — surprise, surprise — that Q2 earnings, their Q4 fiscal year, aren't going to be good. They blamed currency valuations, and stuff like that. But the fact of the matter is I've been telling you for a couple of months, growth is contracting. Both at the GDP level, and at the corporate earnings level. And today, you've got one of the biggest tech companies in the world coming out and telling you as much. They're not going to be the last one, folks.
Q2 earnings aren't going to be good for reasons that I pounded the table on for weeks now. They're being compared against 2021, which was fantastic numbers. And so, even the Atlanta Fed now is coming down on their nowcasts for GDP, and you're very much facing a recession. So the answer to that question, and I'll take it back to financial advisors, is you don't have to stay in the market. You don't have to keep buying stocks. One of the best places to have been in, at least in the macro markets, is cash for the past five, or six months now. And so I think timing the turns, and the cycles of the market is important. And there's no point in dollar cost averaging all the way down. You don't know how low these stocks are going to go.
Nasdaq, specifically, is only back to around average PE valuations. They could still fall much further to get back to the period they were around 2010. And as far as the S&P, it is also in bear market territory. A lot of those sectors look very bad, including financials and healthcare and others. So you need to be in the markets when they're going up, and you need to wait for cycles to turn to do that. So for now, I think avoiding the market for a large part is the smartest thing you can do, and then identifying the sectors that are going up. If you were to take a look at Foundational Profits, for example, where it's more of a macro long-term cycle sector letter. We're not in a lot of the S&P sectors. If there's 11 S&P sectors, we're only in maybe three of them — a REIT, a utility, and some materials stocks. There's not a lot that is going up, and so you just need to avoid — it sounds easy, righ? — sectors are going down, and try to own equities, funds in the S&P sectors that are going up. And for now, until you get the GDP slowing and recession out of the way, I think you should be waiting and seeing as it relates to the macro equities.
Gerardo Del Real: Yeah. And I'm going to talk my own book now, which is the resource space. The only time I really dabble outside of the resource space is when Nick sends something my way that he finds appealing because he's got a pretty good track record of making those work out. Look, I think, why buy a tech company when I can buy the company that's going to mine, or produce, or discover the stuff that those tech companies need to make their product? The bottom line is if a Microsoft, or a Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) is going to continue higher, and is going to become all of a sudden a good stock to own again, they're going to need a lot of materials for that to happen. And so for me, being a simple guy as I always say, it seems like common sense to go invest in the companies that have the stuff that these companies are going to need to be successful.
Because if not, they're not going to win anyway. Either Tesla's going to increase production and improve margins, or it's a failing stock. And if it's going to increase production, and if it's going to increase margins, it's going to need a lot of copper. It's going to need a lot of lithium. It's going to need a lot of rare earths. And so, to me, I just say bypass the risk of owning something in the tech space that's bigger and more liquid, and go straight to some of these great juniors that already have robust assets. You don't have to take the Patriot route, which was very speculative early on. You can find established companies that already have production profiles, and cashflow, and earnings, and a track record of hitting their dividends. And so, those are out there, folks. To me, that seems like a common sense way to hedge against the slow down in the major indices.
Nick Hodge: I'll give you a real life story. And it's exactly what you said, but just via dialogue. So we have a cleaning lady, and her name is Jackie, and she's awesome. We talk with her about all sorts of stuff. She knows details of our life, we know details of her life. Her family, and things like that. And a couple of months ago, I happened to be there when she came. And she knows what I do, and she was asking me about Rivian (NASDAQ: RIVN). That's an electric car company, and it was doing well at the time. The Nasdaq wasn't down 25% yet from its highs last November, and electric car companies were still being talked about. And she was saying, "I got this buddy who's been putting money into Rivian, it's been doing pretty good. Do you think I should invest in Rivian?"
And I told her, because I don't get personal advice, "If it were me, I wouldn't be buying Rivian shares. I would be buying something that all the Rivians of the world need." And that's just how I think about markets. I wouldn't be picking a Rivian, or a Tesla, or an individual electric car company. I would be trying to find sort of what you said, a natural resource company. Specifically, a lithium company that all those electric car companies are going to need. And not that when someone asks me my thoughts on the market, I nail it 100% of the time, but that was the exact correct advice at the time. If you look at a chart since she's asked me about Rivian, it has in fact gone down, and I hope her buddy didn't lose too much money.
And lithium shares have held up quite nicely. I mean, you and I have been talking about small lithium companies for the past several episodes, and other ones are holding up well as well. The Allkems of the world. They're doing okay, they're holding in there. So that was the right call, and that was what you just said, but in a real world example. And I think that's how a lot of people who aren't investing day to day in the market get caught up in that, what I call the noise. Because it was probably CNBC, or whoever, that was having Rivian on the screen every day, and they're not talking about Lithium Americas, or Cypress, or whatever your flavor of lithium is.
And I think that, I'll slap my own wrist for a second… We don't think like a common retail investor anymore. And I need to do better at thinking about that, and educating. I should have been writing that article, 'Why You Should Be Avoiding Rivian and Buying Lithium Miners Instead.' And so I need to try to do better at that. But that's a perfect contrarian example of how to think about the market. No, I'm not buying an electric vehicle company. I'm buying the shit that they all got to buy. I'm Levi Strauss, motherfucker.
Crypto: Has the Bubble Popped?
Gerardo Del Real: I love it. I love it. Look, and speaking of being a contrarian, I have to ask. The crypto space, was that the bubble popping? Are we due for a rebound? And again, I'm not the crypto expert. You know more than I do, and we have a gentleman that works with us who is an expert in this. But where do you think we are with that? Is there an opportunity there? Has it changed? Obviously, Luna's not an opportunity anymore. Luna went to money heaven, but are there-
Nick Hodge: Twice.
Gerardo Del Real: Twice.
Nick Hodge: They rebooted it. They rebooted it, and it crashed again.
Gerardo Del Real: Oh God, you can't make this stuff up. So obviously I'll preface the question by saying, if you're dabbling in the crypto space, just know that you're gambling. That's the bottom line, I don't care what it is. That's the way that I see it, but there is an educated way to gamble. And so, is there still opportunity in that space, or do you think it's a wrap for crypto, Nick?
Nick Hodge: Yeah. So I was writing a lot about altcoins and stablecoins. Even back five years ago, I was saying that if they're not backed by anything, then they're not backed by anything. They're the antithesis of stablecoins. And yes, I think you just saw the bubble popping, but I think the air is still coming out of it. So I think there's a lot of other projects that are going to go to “money heaven.” I don't want to put a percentage on it. Who knows how many projects are going to go to zero. But I've always maintained that for my personal portfolio it's Bitcoin and Ether for me. And increasingly gravitating towards more bitcoin. I queued up the screen the other day, and was going to transfer all my ether into bitcoin. I didn't pull the trigger.
But going back to the answer to the first question, making concentrated bets. I'm ready to get more concentrated in bitcoins. So is it the bottom? No, it's not the bottom yet because crypto's been correlating so closely with the stock market, and if the stock market is still in a bear market, then it's going to be tough for crypto to go up. You had a little excitement at the end of May. Bitcoin went back to $31,000. The school of thought there is that's painting of the books for the end of the month. People selling their losing positions, and buying back lower that ticked the market up at the end of May.
Crypto's an okay place to allocate money to. Just be sure you know where you are in the cycle. And right now it's still a bottoming process. So I said a bunch of times that, for me, Bitcoin is a buy below $25,000. And it dipped there recently, but it's still in that range. It's not made the turn, and broken out into a bullish cycle yet. So you have time to accumulate. Then, if you do accumulate, it would be in the highest quality projects. If you've got to navigate outside of Bitcoin, I would point you to Ether or Solana would be the last one. And outside of that, especially for the time being, it's a super high risk place to be. What percentage of the projects will hit zero? I'm not sure, and I'm not worried about it because I don't own any shit coins.
Contrarian Plays for the Current Environment
Gerardo: Well said, Nick. So I don't want to get into the Goldman Sachs lithium call. I know I mentioned it up top, but I'm going to just stay away from it because I think it's Goldman doing what Goldman does. They're probably short-
Nick Hodge: They want to get it cheaper, right?
Gerardo Del Real: Absolutely. Absolutely. There's zero doubt about it. I don't think it's a coincidence that the lithium stocks all took a hit for a day, and they're all back 10%, 15%, 20% today with a vengeance. But with that being said, what are some good contrarian plays out there that people can get in at pretty attractive entry points right now? In anywhere. I think gold looks strong, if we want to talk gold real briefly. It's holding up at $1,870, wants to get back to $1,900. I think if it goes above $1,879, $1880, there's a good chance to run into the $1,920, $1,930 range. And then it starts getting interesting once again, but what's a good contrarian space right now that you're looking at to allocate capital, Nick? I know you had quite a healthy, and robust cash position there for a bit. And I can't imagine that you've parted completely with that cash position.
Nick Hodge: No, no. Continuing still to winnow the portfolio down. Still holding a significant portion of cash. Something like a third on the retirement side of things. On lithium, for one second, you could almost point to lithium as a contrarian play. If you've got Goldman saying that the prices are peaking. I would point to another article that was out in the last week of May. I believe it was out on Bloomberg called, The Trouble With Lithium. And to boil it down, the trouble with lithium is that we can't get enough of it fast enough, and that's the trouble with lithium. And they even touched on recycling in that article, which you know I've been talking about lately. And they were saying how recycling can't come close to meeting the needs, and there's no current process of recycling lithium that's going to be viable for another 10 years.
And even once it is, the maximum it could contribute to our lithium supply is some 5% to 15% of the market. And so lithium, I think, is in a bull market for some time to come. I just related the story to you about Rivian, and the lithium miners. So that's a place that I'm still in strong. Not just Patriot Battery Metals, but others. And have warrants that I'm looking to exercise. And so pullbacks in the lithium space are a place to buy. Uranium has ticked up over the past week. The uranium ETFs are back looking okay again, and some of the equities in that sector are cheap. And then I would say what you say, gold. So I gave a talk the other day about the macro bear. We've talked about that a couple times, and how it was a golden lollipop with a uranium center.
And I had someone say to me via comment about that talk, "Bearish, bearish, bearish. You're talking about all these bearish things, slowing earnings, slowing growth. And then you say, 'Go and buy gold stocks, or buy uranium stocks.'" Well, that's not quite what I said. What I said was, "Gold is the gold itself. The metal, not the equities, is going to hold up quite well." And then on the backside of any earnings contraction, or slowing growth, you see a really robust bull market for the equities. So gold first — the metal — GLD, or coins, however you choose to play that, a physical trust, whatever that might be. But then, sure, picking away at the equities, not looking for that you return in a month, or two. But there's cheap equities out there. If I look at a basket of junior gold stocks, it seems like... I won't say all of them, but when I look at the market caps it's $50 million, $60 million, $50 million, $60 million.
It's like they all have $50 or $60 million market caps. And if you can take those and say, "Okay..." Sort of like you were saying about Patriot, "What am I getting for that $50 million, or $60 million?" Some $60 million gold companies are not even at the resource stage yet. They just had a couple of nice drill holes, and they're getting that sort ofvaluation. Some companies have 5,000,000 ounces of gold in the ground in safe jurisdictions, and they're on their way to feasibility studies, and have past producing ADR planes. And you can buy that for $42 million with $10 million in the bank. So-
Gerardo Del Real: That's Revival Gold (TSX-V: RVG)(OTC: RVLGF), people. That's your freebie for this episode. You get your money's worth, and then I have one for you.
And so if you can parse that out, and not be buying companies who have those attractive valuations... I'll name drop for a second. I was talking to Rick Rule at that conference, and we were talking about private placements. And he was saying, "I don't see a lot that's attractive out there from a private placement standpoint." Rick, of course, has different liquidity needs than you, or I, or most other people. He was saying, “When I look at these stocks, and I see a $50 million valuation, I can't justify in many cases what I'm getting for that $50 million.” And if you can find a gold equity, a junior equity that you can justify what you're getting for that low market cap, those would be places that I would be allocating capital to.
I'll give you another free name folks because I think this one is going to be a doozy of a year for this particular stock. It's a Nevada Sunrise Gold (TSX-V: NEV)(OTC: NVSGF), and let me be absolutely clear folks, I am talking my own book the way that I always do. My two largest personal holdings in terms of shares, and in dollar value. My two largest positions are Patriot Battery Metals, and Nevada Sunrise Gold. Nevada Sunrise Gold may be undergoing a name change, if I am to be heard. I think it should be Nevada Sunrise Lithium, or Nevada Sunrise Resources. And the reason I say that is I think that the company is on to potentially a pretty significant lithium discovery in Nevada. They have a water right that's very strategic. I know the company announced recently it's adding to its land package.
We're waiting for more results. Now it's very early, and this is where... On something like Patriot, recognizing the pegmatites that were lithium bearing, that had these great grades, and large scale. They're all over the place. That was something that, for me, anchored my willingness to bet bigger than I normally would on a speculative early stage play like Patriot was when its market cap was $10 - $20 million, and I first started talking about it publicly. Fast forward to Nevada Sunrise Gold now, and its market cap is right at that $20 million mark. It's two holes in, but if this lithium discovery ends up becoming something that's significant, with it being in Nevada, with them having water rights… This can get very Patriot-like very, very, very quickly. And look, we talk about gold exposure, they still own 20% of a project I absolutely love, the Kinsley Mountain Project, that CopAur Minerals now owns 80% of, and will be managing. And kudos to that team. They have a very, very intelligent technical team that went out and did some great geophysics work. And I think the second half of the year is going to see some drilling over at new targets for Kinsley. So you have gold exposure there, you have the lithium exposure, and there's other lithium projects in the portfolio that Nevada Sunrise has. It also has a copper project I really like in the Coronado VMS Project, a past-producing copper mine. And if you know anything about VMS deposits, you know they tend to happen in clusters. The past producing mine is there, they've never found another deposit. And it's likely that there's one nearby.
So you get some copper exposure, you get some lithium exposure, you get some gold exposure all for a $20 million market cap. Seems pretty damn reasonable to speculate aggressively on that as long as you have a high risk, high reward kind of temperament, and you understand it's just that. It's a speculation on a couple of drill holes. We'll get some geophysics soon. I'm excited to see what those turn up because the geophysics were critical in outlining where to drill those first two holes, which were very successful. And so, curious to see what that has in store for us. But free podcast, you're getting your money's worth today, and Nevada Sunrise Gold is a heck of a speculation at current levels.
Nick Hodge: Yeah, well said. I don't have a lot to add to that. I have warrants I'm looking forward to exercising. And at that valuation, it's half of some of those gold companies I just mentioned — $40 to $60 million. So, could certainly have legs because there's not even metrics being tied to it yet.
Gerardo Del Real: Nick, you have a little girl that wants you home for her birthday. You have parents in town. Is there anything else that you want to add before I let you get on out of here?
Ask Nick (and Brien Lundin) Anything
Nick Hodge: No, I think that was pretty good. Next week, I'll be doing an AMA, I guess the cool kids call it, an ‘Ask Me Anything.’ I'll be doing it with Mr. Brien Lundin of Gold Newsletter fame. It'll be next Wednesday, June 8th. And we'll put a link up to sign up for free to do that, it'll be a Zoom webinar. And he and I are going to take questions for an hour from whoever signs up. So I'm looking forward to that. Looking forward to seeing what the questions are. And that's sort of a teaser to the New Orleans Investment Conference, which we attend every year, and that Brien runs. So if you have some free time next Wednesday afternoon, by all means sign up for that, and we'd like to see you there.
Gerardo Del Real: Excited for that. I'll be at PDAC here in a couple of weeks. If any of you are around, please reach out. Send a message, say hello. I would love to catch up. I'll be there on the 13th, and the 14th for the bulk of the day on the 14th. And so I’ll share a personal story, and then I'll let you get out of here, Nick. I was looking to book a hotel, and everything was sold out. And somehow I managed to find a place on the 13th floor. Fingers crossed I make it back, and they don't keep me. But it should be a fun time, I'm looking forward to seeing a lot of you. That's all I have. I am Gerardo Del Real, along with Mr. Nick Hodge. This was episode 172 of Bizarro World. Happy birthday, Story. Nick, say something nice to the people.
Nick Hodge: See you everybody, have a good week.