Michael Gentile Sees a Major Opportunity in Canadian Mining

0:17Trevor Hall: All right, and as previously mentioned, Trevor Hall here with Mining Stock Daily reporting from London and kicking off a number of interviews throughout the week. We will be doing some from the London Metals Exchange Week in the coming days. But my first stop, literally first stop of just getting off the airplane this morning is over to the Gentile Mining Investor Forum. And Michael Gentile sitting here with me to my left. Mike, thanks so much for having me. I kind of want to talk about this event because in the program you had written like, Well, last year you started bringing some of these companies you're involved with around to London, but you thought it needed something more.

0:59Trevor Hall: It needed something official, a center location to bring everybody in and then have an actual conference. Can you talk about that epiphany of evolving from just running companies around from office to office to actually creating an event with your name on it? Yeah, so a lot of my companies, as you probably know, come to Europe to do marketing roadshows. They'll spend$10 ,000 a day for a service provider to get them a group lunch for 10 or 12 investors. And I try to be more thoughtful with my company and say, how can I leverage real value and get scale and synergies in my portfolio? So last year, I told six of my favorite companies, I said, why don't we all go to Europe together?

1:33Instead of getting 12 people for lunch, we can get 50 to 100 people per city. I'll do a keynote presentation and we can do 10-minute hits, each of you, in front of a group of 50 to 100 people. So the idea was born last year. It was a huge success. London was by far the most robust market for us. We had about 100 investors show up for the six companies last year. My corporates loved it. They felt there was a great audience, a lot of interaction with investors. So this year I said, well, London's a big market. There's a lot of conferences in London that focus on the micro-cap, small-cap resource market.

2:00So why don't I bring my vast majority of my portfolio to London? So this year I did was bring 24 of my top 35 investments in my portfolio to London, make it more of a conference, allow them to have group meetings, one-on-ones, and presentation rooms. We didn't know what the reception was going to be, but quite honestly it's been quite impressive. of 175 investors showed up today. All my companies have full dance cards and there's a great buzz, great energy in the room. So again, they can come to London on their own and see 12 investors or 20 investors. Today they have access to 175 investors and they have a common thematic, which are my portfolio companies, which share certain traits and attributes that are attractive to investors wanting to know more about the junior resource market.

2:35Trevor Hall: Do you notice anything different as far as the investors approach and how is it different here in the London or UK market compared to, most of what we see in the Canadian-US side? I think I like the European market quite a bit because they've been gold investors for longer. They've lived through many of the major currency devaluations, and the value of hard assets is not lost on them at all. There's also more of a culture of owning junior mining shares here, especially versus the US. So there's a big appetite of investors. We're going to see 500 investors in the next five days, in the next five cities that we're going to do.

3:06A lot of them are serious investors in the space, have researched the space. So there's less of a wall of education you have to go through to engage with these investors. And they tend to be a little stickier, a little long-term focused. Europeans have a bit of a longer mindset than North Americans. So also as I build my companies, I like sticky long-term patient capital because the duration of a junior mining opportunity tends to be three to 10 years for a full success story. So I like the historical background. I like their openness to gold equities and I like the patience of their capital. So it's definitely a market I like to spend a lot of time in.

3:34Trevor Hall: You and I had a long-form discussion, I think it was about two months ago or something like that, if I remember correctly. And, you know, we talked about your activist role, taking large positions in these companies and being patient with your own capital. With that activist investor type of position, you know, you take on a lot more responsibility individually. That's just what you do. And so I think that's reflected in this type of event, you know, bringing these companies to a larger group of investors. You talk about, you know, do you find it as a duty? Is it a duty of you as an investor taking these large positions to say, well, obviously, I need to help these companies find new pockets of capital, find liquidity and find new markets?

4:20I think nobody cares about a company more than its owners. And so when I come in as a 10, 15, 20 percent shareholder, typically by default, I'm the largest owner and shareholder of the company. So by default, I should care the most. And by default, I work really hard at making sure they're successful. During my breakfast keynote today at the conference, I spoke a lot about what you do after the check. So there's things you can't change in mining, which is the geology. You can't change the scale, the grade, no matter how much you want to. You can't change the location. You can't change the infrastructure.

4:45You can't change the tax code of the country unless you really want to do that as well. But what you can change is after your check, what are the things that that company needs to do to get better, to improve their chances of success? So who do you raise money from? When do you raise money? What's your corporate strategy? When do you spend money on economic studies? When do you spend money on drilling? What's your M &A? What's your exit strategy? What are all those things you're doing to unlock value over a curve? So I spent a lot of time after my check. You call me an activist, more of a partner.

5:09Activist implies you have a hostile issue between me. But I consider myself a business partner for the corporates that I get involved in. So when I get involved, I often will lay out a two or three page email on, here's the direction I think the company should go. Based on me giving you money, I'm not saying I have all the answers, but here are the steps that I'd like to see the company hit over the next two or three, four years. Here are the value creation milestones or hurdles we've got to get through to get to that next level, get to that exit, get to that producing mind status. and I want to get some kind of agreement with the company.

5:37And then I roll up my sleeves and do everything I can to help the company succeed. I'm not a geologist. You don't want me spotting drill holes. You don't want me planning the economic studies to build the mine. But everything around strategy, finance, marketing, lowering their cost of capital, attracting high-quality investors that will be there for the long term, not the short term, that's all stuff I can help a lot with. And my best relationship is the one that's been most successful, where it's a true partnership between myself and management in building value. And when you're an owner, you care.

6:00The junior mining space are lacking more serious owners. You have a lot of retail investors, a lot of short-term minded investors who are there for two or three months. We don't give a hoot about the long-term corporate strategy. They care about how's the stock going to do next week or next month, what's the next piece of news. And so companies end up being very short-term in nature to satisfy that constituency when the long-term decisions are really how you create significant value. So like I said earlier, you want to match the duration of capital to the duration of the opportunity. And that's really the gist of what I'm trying to do.

6:29Trevor Hall: I guess you could say the last few months, the junior mining market has really been in correction mode for the most part. Very similar to the gold price kind of hovering in there. But I think maybe gold stabilizing around$4 ,100 is probably outperforming the junior mining market. It doesn't seem like people really want to hold the equities. There's a lot of risk out there in the world right now. Where would you say the sweet spot is here? We're talking, you know, mid-October within this market. Well, the first thing, as I mentioned during breakfast presentation today as well, is that sometimes perspective is a good thing.

7:01So I was here October 6th, 2025. It's October 19th today, 2026. Literally the day I was here, gold is just passing through$4 ,000 an ounce for the first time, making record highs. And there was excitement. There was euphoria. There was, can you believe gold is$4 ,000 an ounce? You nailed it. You know, today the sentiment gold is$4 ,100,$4 ,200 an ounce. It's actually up 5 % year over year. But all the interview questions I get are, how are you dealing with the massive crash on the gold price? How are you preparing for all the pain that's coming in the gold market? I'm like, guys, gold price is up 5 % year over year.

7:30And by the way, last year, you couldn't believe the gold was$4 ,000. They spent the whole year above$4 ,000 an ounce. A full 12 months of record margins, record cash flow, deleveraging of balance sheets, buybacks. So perspective is a good thing to look at. So that's really one of the messages I want to bring today is that the industry has never been healthier. Margins are record highs. The junior market should be extremely vibrant, but we get so caught up in the fact that it went to$5 ,500 and then came back down that we lose track that it spent the whole year above$4 ,000 an ounce and the gold price is up year over year.

7:57Right, right.

7:58Trevor Hall: But it seems like the sentiment's carrying more weight than the actual price has. That's always the case, right? Sentiment tends to outright fundamentals. And then I also walked through this morning, has anything changed on the macro thesis, right? And if anything, it's accelerated in terms of the deficits, the debt spending, the interest rates being at 5 % is a terrible death blow to the US dollar and the US fiscal situation. And it's$2 trillion a year of interest expense in real time, refinance at 5 % rates, up from$860 billion in 2025. We more than doubled our real-time interest expense on the debt in the last 12 months.

8:30That is a very precarious situation for the US government to be in, and very, very positive for gold prices in the medium to long term. So I like to take a step back and avoid the noise, because I have a 3-10 year horizon. I don't sweat the volatility so much day to day. But the trend is your friend. The market macro outlook means very positive. And by the way, we're up over the last 12 months on gold. Yeah.

8:49Trevor Hall: Well, let's talk about even worse, worse sentiment. The negativity in silver right now is, is quite funny. I think I posted something on Twitter, like, you know, everybody hates bonds right now, but then silver's over in the corner asking you to hold its beer type of type of thing, because it's just absolutely hated. Nobody's talking about it. But that has to be if you're real contrarian, that has to be an opportunity. That's you got to see this opportunity in front of your face. Is that where we're at right now? I think silver, I always say is the best indicator of retail speculative fervor for the junior resource market.

9:21So the fact that silver is dramatically underperforming gold, the fact that people are so negative on it right now and depressed about it tells you that we're pretty close to a bottom in sentiment for the overall precious metals market. So I always use silver as my sentiment indicator for where we are. That's a very positive sign. Central banks are hoovering up gold. They're not buying silver. So silver is more exposed to just the retail sentiment. So yeah, I'm quite constructive on silver. I made a couple of silver investments in the last 12, 24 months. A little harder to find the kind of deep value I look for in a silver name versus a gold name.

9:49But when I do find it, I'm very aggressive to pounce on those kind of opportunities.

9:53Trevor Hall: What areas of the market are you kind of sharpening your pencils right now? Are you looking for new ideas or certain areas that you could maybe start allocating new capital to? I think since we last spoke, I mean, there's been a major script change in Canada. So my thesis this week at the conference was buy Canada now. That's my big call right now. Canada, you know, all the reasons have been if it's a very favorable jurisdiction to do mining in, workforce, tax advantages. But Mark Carney, our Prime Minister in Canada, put out two changes in the last month that are transformational for our business.

10:21The first one is 100 % depreciation of a mining asset in the first year you spend the money. So what that means is you say you spend a billion dollars on a 20-year mine life, typically you'd be able to depreciate$50 million a year for 20 years. 50 times 20 is a billion dollars. And you get back 30 % of that in your taxes. So$15 million a year, which is 30 % of 50. Mark Carney said if you spend a billion dollars building a mine next year in Canada you can fully expense the full billion dollars and get 300 million back on your taxes year one. So that is a huge change I haven't seen the market talk enough about this change but basically it's given mine companies in Canada that have profits in Canada a 20 to 30 percent off discount on their capital.

10:59So Canada's become now the most efficient place on a tax basis for capital investment in the world for mining. Huge change. Second one is I've been railing for years against the federal government's decision about 10 years ago when Justin Trudeau became Prime Minister to create a federal permit permitting agency on top of a provincial agency. So in the past you had a provincial permitting, two three years, you get your permit, you go into production. 12 years ago the federal government said I'm gonna add a federal agency on top of the provincial agency. That took permits from three years to like seven to ten years.

11:26If you're trying to do a discounted cash flow model on a mine scheme production in ten years instead of three years, the impact of those seven extra years has a huge negative value of your net present value. So Mark Carney said one path, one project, one permit and so what that means is he wants to consolidate all these agencies to one concierge, one decision maker that'll shorten timelines hopefully from 10 years down to 24 months. So tax incentives plus faster permitting in Canada plus already one of the most favorable restrictions in the world to do mining they're gonna see a huge wave of M &A in Canada in the next you know two to five years and I position my portfolio accordingly about 70 to 80 percent of my portfolio right now is in Canadian domiciled assets.

12:02I already liked Canada before now I'm really enthusiastic with the changes I'm seeing I haven't seen enough people talking about this in the space. It's new, proposed legislation. They'll get it passed. They have majority government. There's no opposition to that government right now in Canada. And so we should see some real benefit in 27 and 28 in the Canadian mining business on that back of that.

12:19Trevor Hall: I was going to say, it sounds like a very blanket optimism there throughout Canada. So it's not just, you know, staying in Toronto or staying in Quebec where things are favorable. The provinces, I mean, I always say politicians only do the right thing when they're desperate. And so what's happened in Canada with the trade war in the US, the realization that our economy has been stagnant for the last 10 or 12 years. I've always said the ace in the hole for the Canadian government is resource development. We have the highest resource endowment per capita in the world, the wide-member citizens we have in our country.

12:48And so I think Mark Carney's realized if you want to attract hundreds of billions of net foreign direct investment into Canada, it's not going to come from AI, it's not going to come from other sectors. But the resource sector is really where people want to invest in Canada, but they had been held back by some of the bad legislation, the bad government policies that we had in our country. you flip that on its head in the last 24, 30 days in terms of real transformational changes.

13:10Trevor Hall: Does the effect change anything with the territories as opposed to the provinces? Do you know? So each province has their own path to permit mines, but typically the provinces are much quicker. So the idea that the federal government's not going to get out of the way, but more coordinate with the provinces and be less obstructionist or less difficult to get permits through, is going to be very helpful. And I say even Eastern Canada, like places like New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Labrador, they've been very, very pro-mining in terms of they realize as well there are small populations with suffering economies.

13:40I think a lot of Canadian provinces and political leaders are seeing resource development as the way that Canada can reassert itself and drive real economic growth in the country. So I've never seen this kind of political will behind mining in my career. And for people older than me, decades, I've never seen this kind of support. And CEO of Agnico Ekel has been saying the same thing. So it bodes very, very well for future valuation of resource companies and also for the support they're going to receive from the governments on that behalf.

14:06Trevor Hall: Well, you definitely didn't feel that under the Trudeau administration. Yeah, complete opposite. I'm going to ask you about, if I may, there's a few companies that are here that obviously you're involved in. And I wonder if you could just give me kind of a quick synopsis of where we're at and how that story continues to play out. The first one I really wanted to talk with you about is Cascadia Minerals drilling in Yukon. Absolutely knocking it out of the park. Graham has just been doing a phenomenal job up there expanding that. Is this something that you anticipated or is this just more icing on the cake?

14:42So Cascadia, obviously the Yukon is a hot area. What attracted me to Cascadia was the Yukon is a hot area for a reason. The geology is very exciting. The negative of the Yukon is there's not a lot of infrastructure. So it depends where you are. So I really like Cascadia because they're in the shadows of a former producing mine, Selkirk Copper's Minto mine, which is going back into production. So they already have roads. They already have power. There's an airport relatively close by. They've got mining towns, infrastructure. So in terms of the hurdles to build a mine, already much lower. They started life with a resource about 700 million pounds of copper, 300 ,000 ounces of gold.

15:13I did the work on it. I said we're really, really close to an economic mine here. All they need is a little bit more exploration success that could really move the needle from maybe I should build this thing to, darn, I got to build this thing really, really quick. And, you know, better to be lucky than good, better to be both. But Cascadia told me when they made that investment, they acquired that company, that there was a lot of untapped geological potential because the previous owner was cash constrained, essentially insolvent for much of the last three to four or five years. So they had two deposits, the 2000S deposit and the 140 deposit.

15:42And unbelievably so, it had never been drilled between the two deposits. And they had a PEA they did several years ago that had drifts going from the 2000 deposit all the way to the 140 deposit, assuming there was nothing in between the two deposits. So the obvious thing to do is go, if we're going to be drifting through anyway, why don't we stick a few holes in and see what's there? As you mentioned earlier, they end up hitting some of the highest grade, longest intervals in the history of the project in that white space between the two deposits. And I always say in mining, what you drill is important, but where you drill it is equally, if not more important.

16:13So now you're having banger grades, banger widths in areas where you already have mining drifts going through. What that does to your economics of a project is absolutely fantastic. Because there's zero additional capital required to go get these kind of grades. And they've already defined a strike link that's equal to the 2000S deposit in terms of strike link at surface. And seemingly better grades with much higher gold value. So couldn't ask for a better result out of the gates. And these results, in my opinion, are quickly transforming Cascadia from a maybe I should build it to I should build this thing really, really quickly.

16:41Because the economics are not out yet. But doing napkin economics and napkin math should look really, really terrific on those new intercepts they're hitting.

16:49Trevor Hall: Well, it just goes to show you exploration can be an absolute game changer. One drill hole. Another one I want to talk to you, friends of mine, partners of Mining Stock Daily, Radisson Mining, in the middle of a huge drill program, continue to hit deeper gold, planning on even going deeper, two and a half kilometers is what Matt just said in his presentation. O 'Brien Mining keeps delivering, but the question in there is like, well, who's the natural acquirer? Is that going to be Agnico now that they've come in as a strategic shareholder? or could somebody else potentially come in and create a little bit of tension?

17:20So Radisson is one of the first investors I made in the junior mining space and the progress we've made there is absolutely transformational. Matt Manson has done a terrific job. The board is one of the best boards I work with in the business. They're all lined up in the same direction, rowing very hard, supporting the company. What attracted me to Radisson I made my investment is there's four mills within 75 kilometers of Radisson's O 'Brien asset. So there's many logical buyers in the camp. The two most logical buyers, I'm not making anything up here, is IAM Gold and Agnico. They're the two proximal mines.

17:49We did our PEA with IAM Gold under an MOU. We sent some radiological work and some sample ore to them to see what works. So we know our ore works through IAM Gold's mill, but we also have Agnico, which is three kilometers away. I think IAM Gold's about 20 kilometers away from us. Agnico has a three and a half kilometer shaft that literally goes straight down about three kilometers away underground, driftable to our deposit. So Agnico clearly has the most synergies and that mine is mining at three and a half kilometers deep. The O 'Brien Aura runs from surface down to about 1 ,800 meters today.

18:19Why are we drilling 2 ,500 meters? If you didn't have a 3.5 kilometer shaft next to you, that'd be a pretty foolish economic decision because by the time you stake a shaft and ramps to get down there, you're talking years. Since the infrastructure is already in place, anything we find below 2 ,000 meters is actually probably easier to access than the surface work. And so there's a lot of synergies in this camp. I'm not saying anything out of turn. Agnico bought 10 % of our company with a half warrant to go to 15 % of our company. They do terrific amount of due diligence. I mean, they're one of the best mining companies in the world for a reason.

18:48Even though they're making a 10 % investment, they do all the work required to de-risk the asset like they're building it themselves. And so couldn't be more impressed with Agneco. But to answer your question, if Agneco's not interested longer term, which I doubt that's the case, but if they say they were not interested, there are plenty of other mills in the area that could use 2 to 3 million ounces of 5 to 6 gram ore within trucking distance of their mills. So we've always said, Matt and I, that it's highly unlikely that Radisson is going to build our own mill. The project could support their own mill, but you already have 400 mills around you, the most likely outcome longer term is it's going to go to someone else's mill.

19:20And Agnico's investment was a further validation that that's likely the case over time.

19:25Trevor Hall: The last one I wanted to talk to you about actually is Valkia Resources. This is interesting. A new management came in about six months ago, I think it was when the news came. Obviously, the rocks haven't changed, but maybe talk about your recommendations, what you want to see through that business model and new management. Does that story change at all? So Valkia is a little bit outside my typical swing zone. So I have 95 % of my portfolio in resource stage assets or higher, stuff I can really sink my teeth into and define whether it's going to be a mine or not. But I reserve about 5-10 % of my portfolio for more earlier stage exploration stories when it ticks all the boxes of could there be a mine here.

20:05But most importantly, so is the geology likely to deliver economic grades? More importantly are the people in place to drive economic discovery. So the company always had a really attractive land package in Finland, recently validated by Agniko's purchase of Rupert Resources for$3 billion. It's a very prospective area. But with Thomas Credlin coming in and a lot of the co-founders or the early stage people in Rupert Resources coming into Valkia, now you have the right rocks. They have the right financial capacity now and the right people to drive discovery at a relatively modest market cap. And so that's really got me excited.

20:38When you see people that had serial success before, that know a geography really well, that have handpicked a land package they think has potential, that increases your batting average. All I'm trying to do when I invest is increase my odds. From a dartboard monkey throwing darts at a dartboard to a much higher percentage through hard work and following smart people and smart money. And so in this case, I'm really betting on the people, the rocks, and the support these guys will have in the future to do the exploration they need to make a discovery. Perfect.

21:02Trevor Hall: Okay, let's fast forward. October 19th, 2027. Are we going to see another company or two new company or two within the portfolio that are talking to investors here? So I've been really fortunate. So I don't sell very long term, but I've been fortunate last 12 months to have three takeovers in my portfolio. So it's really validating my process. The major mining companies agree with me that these are buildable assets in my portfolio. So I typically do five to seven new deals a year. I'll look at 500. So I do like 1 % of the stuff that I look at. So I expect five to six new companies in the portfolio and hopefully two or three takeovers and I can recycle that cash back into new names but I'm very selective that's why when I do find something I like I try to buy as big a stake as possible to maintain a big and a large enough ownership over time that's meaningful to me on an exit so yeah I would definitely be very surprised if there weren't more companies my portfolio but I'm quite select that I have 35 companies my portfolio now try to stay between 35 and 40 with some natural churn and some M &A and that's that's my master that's my process thanks so much for your time thanks for the invitation for me to come and kind of look around, shake some hands, meet some people, but also sit down and interview you once again.

22:10Trevor Hall: And hopefully maybe we'll do this once again in the next couple of months, Mike. Safe travels for the rest of the week. Best of luck. And really looking forward to seeing what the next news is with your name on it. Great to have you here. Thanks, Trevor. The information presented should not be considered investment advice. Mining Stock Daily and its affiliates are not responsible for any loss arising from any investment decision in connection with the material presented herein. Please do your own research or speak with a licensed financial representative before making any investment decisions.