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The Intrinsic Value Podcast - Episode Summary
Episode Title
MI Rewind: Investing in Commodities w/ David Morgan
Podcast Description This episode features David Morgan, an analyst in the precious metals industry, who discusses the fundamentals of investing in commodities, especially precious metals like silver. The podcast aims to educate listeners on assessing intrinsic value and making informed investment decisions.
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Key Takeaways
What are Commodities?
- Definition: Commodities are essential goods traded in bulk, categorized into:
- Agricultural Commodities: e.g., corn, wheat, soybeans, meats.
- Precious Metals: e.g., gold, silver, platinum, palladium.
- Financials: Government securities and interest rates.
- Soft Commodities: e.g., cotton, coffee, sugar.
- Investment Insight: Unlike stocks, commodities cannot go to zero but can have significant market fluctuations.
How to Invest in Commodities
- ETFs:
- ETFs (Exchange-Traded Funds) are recommended as an accessible way to invest in commodities without needing a specialized commodities account.
- Example: SLV for silver.
- Physical Commodities: Buying physical gold and silver is suggested for a portion of personal savings.
- Equities: Investing in companies involved in commodities, like mining stocks, can offer exposure with less risk.
Timing the Market
- Right Time to Buy:
- Look for prices below production costs. For example, if silver costs $15 to produce but is trading at $12, it may present a buying opportunity.
- Dollar-Cost Averaging: Buying more as prices drop can be a strategy if pre-planned.
Risks in Commodity Investment
- Leverage:
- Using leverage can amplify both gains and losses, making understanding risk vital.
- Futures and options are particularly risky and not recommended for inexperienced investors.
David Morgan’s Preference for Silver
- Value Proposition: Silver is viewed as undervalued compared to gold, partly due to its industrial uses.
- Market Dynamics: There is potential for silver to outperform gold, particularly in a shifting economic landscape.
Overcoming Investment Avoidance
- Education: A lack of understanding is cited as a reason many investors, especially millennials, avoid precious metals.
- Historical Perspective: Historical trends show significant returns on silver investments when timed correctly.
Future of Precious Metals
- Demand Trends: Investment demand for silver has recently outpaced industrial demand, indicating a potential shift in market dynamics.
- Blockchain Integration: David discusses the potential of integrating silver with blockchain technology to appeal to younger investors.
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Recommended Books and Resources
- The Morgan Report: David Morgan's publication for in-depth analysis and insights on precious metals.
- You Can’t Lose Trading Commodities by Robert Weist: A book discussing strategies for trading commodities.
- The Silver Manifesto by David Morgan: Offers insights into building a precious metals portfolio.
Conclusion David Morgan emphasizes the importance of understanding commodity markets, particularly for new investors. By focusing on education and strategic investment principles, individuals can better navigate the complexities of investing in precious metals and commodities.
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For further insights and discussions, consider joining the TIP Mastermind Community or listening to more episodes from The Intrinsic Value Podcast.
*Note: This summary is based on the podcast episode's content and key discussions.*
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00You're listening to TIP. Hey guys, on today's show, we're resharing some of my favorite episodes from the past for a few reasons. First, we get a lot of new listeners each week, so new listeners may never have heard this episode before. Two, even if you've been listening for a while, you may have missed it when it first came out. And three, even if you've heard it before, it can be a great episode to reinforce your learning. If you're not interested in this episode, no worries, you can pick back up with us next week with a brand new episode. Everything going forward is from the original episode, and I hope you guys enjoy this one.
0:31On today's show, I sit down with David Morgan to go through the basics of investing in commodities, particularly precious metals like silver. David is a widely recognized analyst in the precious metals industry and consults for hedge funds, high net worth investors, mining companies, depositories, and bullion dealers. He's also known as the publisher of The Morgan Report. Millennials who are just getting into the investing scene may be more familiar with stocks and ETFs investing in top companies, particularly those in technology, than they are with commodities. And the same goes for me. I'm not super familiar with investing in commodities.
1:09So I'm learning right beside the audience today throughout this entire episode. So let's start learning from commodities expert, David Morgan. You're listening to Millennial Investing by the Investor's Podcast Network, where your host, Robert Leonard, interviews successful entrepreneurs, business leaders, and investors to help educate and inspire the millennial generation.
1:39Hey, everyone. Welcome to this week's episode of the Millennial Investing Podcast. As always, I am your host, Robert Leonard. And with me today, I have David Morgan. Welcome to the show, David. Robert, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Robert Leonard Before we dive into the topic of today's show, tell us a bit about yourself and how you got to where you are today. Robert Leonard It can be long-winded, but basically, I was always interested in money and finance. And I started investing in a stock market at 16 years of age. You have to have a special release from your parents to do that.
2:08My dad signed it. And I started studying money as a subject and realized that there's honest money and what I'll call dishonest money, meaning money that isn't backed by a commodity. You look at history, money's been, whatever we say it is type of thing, it's like salt or cowhides. That's all true. But in thousands of years, it's always boiled down to gold and silver, so that people's choice are. But then there's the legal aspect of money, which is what governments do or the banking cartel. So anyway, I studied all that. So I started to become really interested in the precious metals because precious metals have always been the soundest way to perform economically for the greater good of everyone.
2:48And when we go off of that greater good for everyone onto a, let's say, a slanted system that favors the rich and the banks, then there's usually a big disparity in income. And then there's usually some kind of a problem that manifests and we go into a new monetary system that goes back to a sound money stick. And then it morphs back into an unbacked situation and it goes kind of back and forth. That's a very broad brush stroke, but that's the essence of it. So when I learned that, I started delving more and more into the precious metals as an investment class. And over time, spent most of my research time, what I've written in book form, lectures, everything else that revolved, not just in the precious metals, but in the resource sector at large.
3:33But at this present time, and through most of the last several decades, I've looked primarily at the precious metals. So they could call us gold bugs and could call us silver bugs, whatever they'd like. But the truth of the matter is sound money is sound for a reason. Honest money is for honest people. And when we have this problem that we're now witnessing, where we try to print our ways wealthy and enable the upper echelon to prosper at the expense of everyone else, it has consequences. There's just a price to pay. Robert Leonard I'd say you've clearly had a pretty successful career as an analyst and as a consultant for some of the most advanced money managers in the world.
4:14The audience of this show isn't quite as advanced as that. Generally, the listeners are newer investors just getting started. Let's take a second and talk about and make it easy and understandable to the audience and all the millennials listening. I want to mention that I also fall into this category. I haven't spent a lot of time studying commodities, especially not silver. So I'm going to be learning throughout this conversation as well. So let's start off with a discussion about what a commodity is. What exactly are commodities? Robert Leonard That's a great place to start. So commodities differ from stocks in the fact that they're needed goods.
4:47And the commodities market is divided into several sections. There's what's known as the agricultural commodities. The slang term is the ags. Ags revolve around, I won't name them all, but give you the ideas, It's like the corn market, the wheat market, what we call bean market, which is soybeans. And then there's subsets of that, like soybean meal and soybean oil. Then you've got the meats, which are hogs, pork bellies, which is bacon, and cattle and live cattle. So you've got the foodstuff of any type you could think of in, let's say, the most basic form, like wheat instead of bread. And then you have the precious metals as a class.
5:29It's gold, silver, platinum, palladium. Then you have the financials, which is all this stuff on paper with treasury bills, T-bonds, T-notes, interest rates, and all kinds of things. It just goes on and on and on. Then you have what they call the softs. The softs are like cotton, which obviously cotton's a huge market for clothing. You have others like coffee and cocoa and sugar. So basically, anything you need, anything you consume, anything that's a need, usually falls in the commodity market. And the thing that most commodities investors like to point out is that commodities never go to zero.
6:05A company can fail. Stock, if you have a stock certificate of XYZ company, that company could literally go bankrupt and your stock certificate isn't worth the paper it's printed on. Whereas sugar may go down and hit a 30-year low in price, but it's not going to go to zero. Problem with the commodity market isn't commodities. It's the way it is structured for investment. It's highly, highly leveraged. And this is a place where about 99 % of the amateurs lose their money than the 1 % of the professionals win. So it's not an area to really invest in per se. It's like being a very good football player and then going up against the NFL.
6:45You'd be a lot better off being a very good football player and playing at the high school level. So I teach equities primarily, but there are ways to invest in commodities through the equity market that are a lot less risk and almost as rewarding or sometimes more rewarding. Robert Leonard So let's talk about that a bit. When it comes to these commodities, how does an individual investor like those listening to the show and myself, how do we actually buy and invest in them? Is the best way through an ETF? Robert Leonard These days, I think probably the best is an ETF. Being an honest money advocate, I mean, you can actually buy physical gold and silver coins, which I do advocate, but That's just for a portion of your savings.
7:25But if you're interested in the ags, for example, you'd be far better off doing an ETF. The thing about an ETF that most people don't know is what they were designed to do. The way that the financial markets are structured is that a Section 7 license, a stock broker, a broker is not allowed to sell a commodity. They can only sell a stock. So to get around that rule, they structure these exchange-traded funds that put basically commodities in them, but they sell you a stock certificate for that commodity. So there's an ETF for silver, several actually. The best known and the largest is the SLV.
8:06So it's a way for these stockbrokers basically to participate in the commodities market. So it's something that's relatively new. I mean, I remember when the gold ETF started, and it was, my goodness, a gold ETF. Oh, that's amazing. Will there be a silver ETF? I mean, it sounds ridiculous now looking back whatever it's been 20-something years, but I remember at the time people asking me, do you think there'll be a silver ETF? I'm like, yes, there will be a silver ETF. And then I mentioned there's several now. But ETFs have their place. An ETF is easier to execute. You don't have to have a commodities account.
8:42To get a commodities account, you've got to sign a bunch of forms so you understand the risk. Nobody reads the forms. So highly leveraged. I again, repeating myself, which bears repeating, is if you really want to take a shot in the dark and end up losing your money, get a futures account, get a commodities account and start. You're much better off to start. Learn how to walk before you enter the marathon, right? So you're much better off doing the equity markets and an ETF is a good way to do it. Robert Leonard For those who don't know, you've mentioned it a couple of times, what is leverage?
9:12Robert Leonard Leverage is where you get to put up a part of the money for the total purchase. The best way to explain it probably to the millennials are a mortgage is a leverage investment. So if you buy a house that's$200 ,000 and you put down 20 ,000, you put down 10 % on it, and then you borrow the money and you pay off that mortgage over 15 or 20 or 30 years, That's leverage. So if the$200 ,000 house goes up and doubles in five years to$400 ,000, what you say to yourself is, well, I put up$20 ,000 and that$20 ,000, if I sold this house, would now bring me back$400 ,000 less the$20 ,000 I put up.
9:55So I've got a$180 ,000 gain on a$20 ,000 investment, and that is like a nine bagger. I made nine times on my actual money. The rest of the money that was used was borrowed. So it's the same thing in the futures market. You could control 5 ,000 ounces of silver for the price of maybe 500 ounces, as an example. But once you put out that money and you say silver is going up, if it goes down, Now, every that dollar that got multiplied by nine times gets multiplied by nine times on the other side. So now your broker will call you up and say, hey, you owe us a dollar times nine. You might put up, I'll just make up numbers, but the idea is correct.
10:42You put up 2 ,500 bucks, the market goes against you. You might get a margin call for 5 ,000. Holy start with 2 ,500 bucks. And the market went against you three days in a row and you now owe us 5 ,000 bucks. You've got three days to wire some money or you're out. will sell you out. So you can get sold out and still owe the brokerage house money. So I mean, it's a very tricky game, not for amateurs, not a place to be for most people. Leverage can be a great tool if it's used correctly, but what people forget is that it cuts both ways, right? It can be great when things are going well, but when it's going bad, just like David just explained, it can really go against you.
11:14And that's what you often see in the options market. I'm going to ask David here in a second, what is the futures market? But a lot of people listening are probably familiar with options. We've had Kirk DuBlessis from Option Alpha here on the show. We talked about it, and it's very popular with millennials as options trading. So it's very similar to that. So David, what exactly are futures? David Gardner Futures are just what it says. It's a price of a commodity in the future. So what is the price of gold in December 2020 versus what is it in November 2020? And the answer is in all commodities, it's usually the interest rate spread in the financial market.
11:51So the interest rate is 1 % per year, then you'll see that divided by 12 is the futures price. Not always, but that's generally what happens. The idea being that there's a carrying cost of money. So if you're carrying the cost of cattle or carrying the cost of gold, carrying the cost of soybean meal, you're going to pay more for it in the future than you are right now. That's called cantango. I don't know how involved you want me to be. It's a discussion. So there's a difference between what you would pay now and what you pay in the future. So if you've got a year to December 21st, December 2021, rather than December 2020, or a year out, a year and a month, then that interest rate's going to be basically what the interest rate spread is in the financial market.
12:36And you're going to look it up. It's funny, people have done their Stan futures. I remember a professor was actually teaching a different topic. And he goes, do you see what they expect the lumber to do in six months? It's a financial spread of what's in the market. I didn't laugh at him and I didn't even really say much. It's just that he didn't understand why the price in the future is always higher than a price for the nearer months or the spot month is what's called. The spot month is a month in. So right now we're in November, so this is the spot month. Spot means you walk up and you say, I want to buy lumber right now on the spot.
13:15And what is the price? And that's the price you're going to pay that day to whoever has that ability to give you the lumber that you want or any other commodity. Robert Leonard So you mentioned that you don't necessarily think ETFs are the best way to invest in the commodity. So what is? Well, I think ETFs are the best way. Futures is not the best way. Options, they're not the best way. So for a commodity, probably the ETF is the best way. As far as the metals are concerned, I would say the best way is to buy it physically, because then once it's purchased, you don't have any costs. Whereas if you have an ETF, you've got a management fee and you've got some slippage and you've got some fees that's just kind of compound on each other.
13:58Some are great and some aren't, but still there's an ongoing taking of your cash, let's say, that you're going to have to pay for. Whereas on a physical investment in gold or silver, you might have a storage fee depending on how much you have, but basically once it's paid for, it's a done deal. So there's that. But I'd say again, the other part to do in the commodities, which isn't a direct investment, is to look for underlying equities that feature that. For example, you could go to ADM, Archer, Daniels, Midland, and have an investment in basically all the foodstuffs. It's an equity. It's a solid company.
14:35Is it going to react just like the soybean market? No. It's going to react like the cattle market? No. But it is going to react to the overall trends. So that's what I think personally is better than an ETF. It's just, you know, I'm trying to ask, excuse me, Robert, I'm trying to ask your question as succinctly as I can, because that's not a direct commodity investment. But there's a copper mine. Let's say you wanted to buy copper instead of buying other futures. You could buy a copper mine like Kennecott or there's some others that you could buy that would be reactive to the copper price pretty proportionately to what the commodity itself would do.
15:11Robert Leonard Yeah. When you're talking about the underlying companies, or you can buy companies that invest in the underlying commodity or precious metal. I thought of MicroStrategy, the company that's been investing heavily in Bitcoin lately. So a lot of people don't want to necessarily invest in the cryptocurrency directly, they're investing in MicroStrategy. So they're getting that indirect exposure to Bitcoin that way. I'm assuming it acts the same way with the commodities. Preston Pyshko, Perfectly said, Robert. Yes, that's it. Preston Pyshko, So if we do invest in a commodity through an ETF, what are some of the underlying risks that exist that might not exist if we buy a precious metal physically?
15:47Well, there's all kinds, but most of them are the tail end of the curve, meaning the risk is there, but it's very slight, but it's possible. One would be, well, shut down the stock market. I mean, say, well, David, that's ridiculous, but happened in 9-11. Could be a cyber attack, which people say, come on, David, cyber attack. Cyber attacks are going on all the time, 24-7, all the time. they're mitigated most of the time. And most people don't know about them because you don't hear it on the nightly news. But that doesn't mitigate the fact that it's happening. ETFs do have more costs, I think.
16:21You can make an argument on either side, so I won't dwell on that one. There's some management risk in ETFs sometimes. One of the parts about the ETFs that I don't like depends on which one. I want to be specific, is their boutiques. They're very small. So your spread to get in and out to be very large. Now, that's not necessarily true in a big commodity like copper, but let's say it was a palladium. It might be a buy-sell spread that's astronomically big to get in and out. And so that would be a detriment to that particular ETF. There isn't a perfect investment out there, really. There's risk in everything.
16:56But I would say one of the better ways, I think, personally, and I've studied this for a long time, as you know, Robert, I think if you can get a commodity that's represented by a company that you have at the top tier, like again, Kennecott Copper. I mean, I think you're looking at something as long as their finances are good, they're strong, they got a good balance sheet, they have money in the treasury, on and on and on. Once you've made that determination, now you're making a bet on copper pretty much with less slippage than probably doing an ETF on it. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
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20:06To begin getting smarter about investing, just visit theinvestorspodcast.com slash get started with stocks. That's theinvestorspodcast.com slash get started with stocks. And for a limited time, you can use code stocks15 for a 15 % discount at checkout. All right, back to the show. Here at The Investor's Podcast, we're big into value investing and understanding the underlying value of what we're buying. How does an investor with this type of strategy, who typically follows that type of strategy, how do they approach the valuation of commodities? And how do you know when it's the right time to buy?
20:44Robert Leonard Yeah, it's a very good question. And it hasn't really ever been answered that well. There's a book in my library, not the one behind me, but the bigger one in my basement. And the book is called You Can't Lose Trading Commodities. Now, I just told you that 99 % of the people that try to trade commodities lose. So there's lots of losers in commodities. But this book was built on a premise, I've read it a couple of times. You can't lose trading commodities. So the premise of the book is that if it costs, I'll do silver because I'm most familiar with it, but you could do it with hogs or cotton or any commodity.
21:19If you can buy that commodity for less than the cost of production and start to average down, you have to have a plan. You have to have it planned out extremely well. But if it costs$15 an ounce to get silver out of the ground and silver is trading at 12, You can't lose trading commodities if, according to this book, and there's a lot of good information, you start buying silver at$12. Now, no silver mine in the world can produce silver. I should say there's no. There's very few silver mines that can produce at$12. The average cost of production is$15. So you are now in a silver business, and you're doing a better job of mining silver than most companies are that have put up millions of dollars to get a mine functioning and to get the mill and to get the transportation.
22:04Everything goes into the mining business. And you now put on a hat saying, I'm a silver miner because you just went into the commodities market and bought silver. Because that's what this silver mine does. What does the silver mine do? It mines silver and it sells it in the marketplace. And it cost them$15 to do it. Now it costs you 12. You're doing a great job as a silver miner. I'll call it a silver miner, okay? So the plan is you buy it. You can only buy a commodity when it's under the cost of production. you start there and then you plan for it to go down by like 20 % and then you buy more.
22:38So if it goes from 12 to 20 % is$2.40. So I'll round it to two. So that 10, you're allowed to buy it again and you actually buy more. So you buy one contract at 12, you buy two contracts at 10. Then you're only allowed to buy more if it goes down another 20 % and that 20 % of 10 would be two. So it's eight. Silver got down to eight. You would buy like four contracts and you find this all out ahead of time. You've got to have the cash to do this. But now you're one of the best silver miners out there. I mean, one of the best silver mines in the world can only produce silver at like$750. So you're competing with them now and all these others are going to be going out of business if silver stays at that price for very long.
23:20And normally when a commodity, and it's not just silver, again, it could be soybeans or oats or corn. I'm trying to name other commodities for clarification, then you're basically making a business that there are thousands of people working. I mean, think about how many people are involved in the cattle industry. I mean, just think about all the fast food restaurants that sell hamburgers. I mean, think of how much of a chain there is around beef, for example. So now you are all of a sudden a cattle rancher and you never leave your office. And you've got a cattle ranch product, beef, at a price that most cattle ranchers can't produce it at.
23:58So that's the idea. You Can't Lose Trading Commodities. Fascinating book. I don't know. I doubt it's still published. I'm sure you can probably find a used copy probably for a couple hundred bucks. I'm guessing it might be cheap. I don't know. But I like the idea about it. In fact, it actually influenced my approach to the markets early on because I thought, you know, it makes a lot of common sense. If you can buy, how long are you going to buy buying a car for cost$20 ,000 to make and you can buy it for$16 ,000? I mean, you start buying that all the time and marking it up to the going rate. Eventually, the commodity will come back to the going rate.
24:32And how long do you have to wait? The answer is usually, usually not too long. So these opportunities come up, they don't come up often, but that was the premise of the book. I like that question. I haven't had to think that deep in a while. Robert Leonard Great. And I'll be sure to put a link to that book in the show notes below. So anybody listening that wants to go check that out, you can click the link below and purchased that book there. David, you speak most frequently about silver. Why is that? Why is silver your preferred commodity or just precious metal? David Steinberg Well, part of it's philosophical.
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25:05I mean, when I started looking into the metals pretty hard, as I talked earlier, I was more focused on the gold market. But then in my youth, the Hunt brothers got involved in silver and saw silver outperform gold substantially in December of 1979. I was in futures. I was doing futures and bought silver at about 300 and watched it go to 800 from like December to January. I watched it like triple in like a couple of months and thought I was a genius. I didn't consider myself all that lucky. I consider myself smart. But regardless, silver in a year's time went from $6 to$50. So, it went up 800%.
25:44So, I thought, wow, why does silver do so much better than gold? So I started looking into silver, and then I got into the history of silver and on and on it goes. But silver is a much more fascinating metal to me than gold because silver has so many industrial uses that weren't really known about through most of monetary history. For most of the time, when both silver and gold served the exact same purpose and only one purpose, which was money, then the ratio of the gold-silver ratio is around 16 to 1 or lower. It's only when silver was demonetized and the bankers basically said silver is not money.
26:18It's something else back in 1873 specifically that we saw silver to gold ratio go above 100 a few times. And if silver reestablishes its role as money, which it's actually doing, especially with the blockchain and the cryptocurrencies, you could see the gold silver ratio come back down to what I call the monetary ratio, which is 16 to 1. And right now we're by 80 to 1. So I fully expect, Robert, that silver will outperform gold over the next few years. So fascinating topic. It does everything in a high-tech society. You can't live without it. It's totally indispensable. We couldn't have this Zoom call without silver.
26:54You couldn't have a flat-screen TV without silver or a cell phone or a laptop or a membrane switch, any of these touch switches that you have on your phone where you touch. You have to have silver for that. So it goes on and on and on. And it's usually micrograms that we're talking about. But think of how many cell phones are out there, billions. So it does add up. In fact, I looked at the 5G network and I did a rough back the envelope calculation. And if everyone switched to a 5G phone, that alone is like 88 million ounces of silver. And there's, again, a very small amount in every phone, but we're talking how many billions of phones are there.
27:27So why do you think most investors, especially millennials, my generation, avoid precious metals as an asset class? Undereducation is my view. And of course, I'm biased, but you talked about value investing. I mean, if you go back to Warren Buffett, well-known investor, you've probably talked about him on your show a few times. So when silver was at around$5 in 1999, Warren Buffett bought basically 20 % of the above ground silver supply. And it came off the COMEX, off the commodities exchange. And it was at$5, as I said, or slightly below that. And if you did an inflation adjusted price for silver at that time, it was the lowest price on an inflation adjusted basis it's ever been in all of history.
28:12And Buffett's known as a value investor. So he bought silver as a value investor. He bought at a value that was unheard of. It's never been that low in recorded history. And he bought, again, 20 % of the above ground supply. So that's just gold, but he loves silver. He's done it a couple of times. So when you take that into account, you know, a billionaire bought it, but the millionaires were ignoring it. And then you looked at the annual statement from Berkshire Hathaway, which I studied diligently, and it found out that silver didn't even show up in the report. Wait a minute. You just bought 20 % of the above ground silver supply.
28:51And this caused a real spike in the silver price temporarily. And in your annual report, you don't even mention it. No, because by law, if you own something, it could be another stock in another company or fleet of cars or whatever it is. And it's less than 2 % of the overall holdings of that company. You basically have to acknowledge it, but you don't even have to write down what it was. So in the miscellaneous category was the exact amount of silver he owned in dollar amounts, and it was called miscellaneous. And that was 20 % of the world's silver supply. So that shows you how big Berkshire Hathaway is at that time.
29:28This is back in, when was it? In about the early 1990s. How big Berkshire Hathaway was then, we've gone, what, three decades since then, and it only represented less than 2 % of Berkshire Hathaway. Now, Berkshire Hathaway is a big company. I'm not saying it's some startup, but I'm also trying to equate it to the overall stock market. And you could look at Tesla or look at Amazon or look at IBM or look at some of these other companies and get a perspective to how small the silver market is. But as far as value goes, it's the most undervalued investment, bar none. And it happens to be a commodity.
30:08It happens to be a commodity that won't rot. It won't be eaten by the mice. It's so small that you can store it fairly easily. And it's something that's been of monetary significance to generations for millennia, from 5 ,000 years, roughly. So if the millennials ever woke up to the silver story, I think that there could be a huge influx of new monetary demand in that precious metals. And also, there's, again, this is my take mostly, but you would have to make up your own mind. There is a philosophical component as well, as far as when societies did best, when they were the most fair, when the, let's say, the ability for everybody to have equal opportunity existed.
30:54There's a direct correlation, Robert. This is pretty provable between the soundness of the monetary system and the moral structure of society. The more unsound the principles are about money, the more moral decay there is in the society. So when we've had a strict bimetallic standard where everybody is treated equally on a monetary basis, the moral structure of the society is very high, much more honesty, much less chiseling off of each other. People are people. It's going to happen no matter how sound the monetary system is. But as that degrades, you see more and more of a decay, more and more of a moral decline.
31:32Robert Leonard You mentioned if millennials ever woke up to the undervaluation in Bitcoin, then we might see a significant change in the price of silver. Do you think that's ever going to happen with Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies becoming as popular as they are as other alternative assets, equity crowdfunding, just high-flying tech stocks? Do you think precious metals and specifically silver is ever really going to get the attention of millennials and even younger generations? Robert Leonard I don't know. I wouldn't say I doubt it, but I'll say it's possible. The reason I say that is I'm an ambassador for a project called Load, L-O-D-E.
32:04The URL is AG, which is the atomic symbol for silver, AG.load, L-O-D-E.1.ON-E. And it's the world's first cryptographic silver-backed monetary system. So as these cryptocurrencies become more and more popular, especially with the millennials, some of them, and the more, let me say, certainly don't want to offend anybody, but the more that are grounded into the monetary basis of, is it real or is it not? I mean, there's two basic theories of money. It's a sound thing of value, cowhide, silver, salt, or it's a legal edict. I tell you this is money because I say so and have the authority to command you to have to use it for all your debts, public and private.
32:47In fact, I command you can only pay me the tax owed me by using that that I have in control over you. So there's the legal aspect, and then there's the species aspect. Species is a fancy word for commodity money. So I think as your generation or the millennials, and I have two millennial daughters, by the way, so I have some acquaintance with them, but we do speak quite often, actually. But the point is, there would be, I think, a gap that could be filled by understanding that this particular crypto actually is backed by a commodity that's valuable. And let's say silver does what it did in 2011, and it goes from, you know, the$9 level to the$50 level in a year and a half.
33:30And it goes from, let's say, the$25 level now to the$250 level three years from now. Well, if you have a crypto and that's backed by silver, that may start attracting people. Any market that starts to move rapidly attracts people. But if it's got that double edge to it, where it's not only on your phone, but if you want to, you can not only spend it, and all of a sudden that$16 a gallon gas is really only costing you a dollar because you bought silver at the right time or invested in this cryptocurrency. So you can spend it directly. But you'd also, if you wanted to save it, you could also use your phone and say, send it to me.
34:07I need my 25 ounces. I want 25 of my 50 ounces sent to my address. And that'll happen as well. So I think it is, to me, it's almost imperative that silver get reinstituted as a monetary metal through the blockchain. I don't see it appealing to the millennials without that. I think the people like me, the gray-haired people that go out and go to a coin dealer and buy it at home, those days are gone. I think unless there's a utility value to it where you can go and say, you know what I just did, guys? I just bought this whole round of drinks. And you know what's so funny? The bill came out to 2 ,000 bucks, but you know what?
34:46I was to that crazy David Monaghan and I bought silver was 20 bucks. Now it's 200. That bar tab's really only a couple hundred bucks to me, that type of thing. Robert Leonard Yeah, I agree. I don't think that silver is going to gain any popularity with millennials and Gen Z unless it does something with blockchain, like you were just talking about. I think that's the only way you're going to see any sort of meaningful or material size of populations of millennials get interested in that topic. You mentioned that silver is very undervalued. What's going to make the market realize that undervaluation?
35:17What's going to be the catalyst? Robert Leonard That's the best question. The answer is, I really don't know. There's all these quaint sayings, you know, the cure for low prices is low prices. And, you know, you can say all this stuff. I think one of the things that's interesting is when you go and you study what I do and you look at what the elitists are doing, there was a conference in Davos, which some of your audience are probably familiar with. And in that audience, there was a gentleman named Scott Meadert, and I hope I've said his last name right, the chief financial officer at Guggenheim.
35:49And he was being interviewed by the Bloomberg financial guys. And I said, Scott, what's your number one go-to investment for 2020? And he said, silver. And these guys just rocked back in their chair. They couldn't believe that word came out of his mouth. It shocked him. And it said, silver? Wow. Well, why not gold? And he said, well, gold is actually pretty close to its all-time high, but silver is off 60%. So again, value investor. So interesting, Robert, is this is the first year in a very, very long time where investment demand for silver has exceeded industrial demand. Industrial demand for silver is somewhere between 50 % and 60 % of the whole market.
36:29So more than half of the market's just for industry. And the rest of it's made up for silverware, jewelry, and investment or monetary demand, which usually runs around 10 % of the market. But this year, more than half of the silver purchased was purchased by primarily big guys, or let me say that a different way, big money through the ETFs. And it was about 50 % of the above ground available silver on an annual basis. So that means we're definitely in a structural deficit this year because the amount of silver for industry, 50%, the amount in investment demand 50%, and you used to have around 25 % for jewelry and silverware, and that didn't go away.
37:10There's still jewelry demand, there's still silverware demand. So I think what's going to happen is the idea that it starts to move, momentum investing. When Robinhood sees a certain company start to go, everybody jumps on it, especially now with all the algorithms. Almost all the algorithms are based on momentum. Something's moving, get on board. Something quits moving, get off. And there's really nothing wrong with that. I mean, you can be a value investor and a momentum investor. I mean, there's lots of ways to deal with the market. In fact, there are so many strategies. That's why so many people get confused and don't make any money.
37:45They don't really have a plan. I mean, there's a plan. There's a way to play certain teams, right? I don't know what your sports are, if you even play them. But certain teams you're up against, it's like, well, their weak spot is their outfield. So we're going to hit over second base and third base every time that we can. And our big hitters are going to try to hit it way out there. That's a strategy for that particular team. Same thing in investing. If you're investing in commodities or ETFs or options or certain stocks, big company versus small company, micro cap, foreign stocks, I mean, there's so many things and you got to have a strategy basically for all of them.
38:18It doesn't mean it has to be very complicated. I keep things very simple. But if you just jump in with the same strategy every time and you go up to the next baseball team and they got the best outfielders in the whole league and you try to hit all these high flies, you end up with zero on the scoreboard. So that's a bit of an analogy. I hope it makes sense. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. Hey, it's Sean O'Malley, just popping in with a quick message. If you like this podcast, well, I've got great news for you. We've got a handful of other shows for you to explore, from learning about Bitcoin to embracing a richer, wiser, happier lifestyle.
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41:57That's theinvestorspodcast.com slash TIP-finance. All right, back to the show. Robert Leonard Unfortunately, this year, I am a Boston sports fan. So we had the Red Sox and Patriots struggle a little bit. Celtics had a good run, unfortunately fell just a little bit short, but not a big sports fan here. So I totally understand the analogy and appreciate it. I'm looking at the stock chart for SLV. And for pretty much end of 2014 until March of 2020, silver really didn't do much. It was more or less flat. If you zoom out and you look at it from a high level, it was more or less flat. And then in March, when coronavirus hit, we saw but it tanked, it almost cut in half.
42:36But then as coronavirus has gone on, it's up significantly. It's almost tripled. It's up about 100 % from that low. And that's the highest it's been since early 2013. So in seven years or so, what's causing that? What's causing the spike in silver? Are we seeing a flight to what you call safe money during uneasy times? It's monetary demand primarily. Again, if you go back to this Scott Maynard situation, I should just mention, somebody out there, it's probably him and others are buying silver because they know the best thing on the board. On the board just means if you look, you know, all aspects of investment possibilities.
43:13And again, that was that Bloomberg Financial Others question after basically said, of everything that's out there invested in, what's your favorite one? He said silver. Now, to hear that at Davos shocked me. I don't know, really? Someone had the wherewithal all to say that. He's very bright. In fact, it's funny, listening to him speak, and I hope he's not offended if he ever hears this. It was like me talking, and not that I'm anybody, but he was very articulate about how the financial system has really run itself into the ground, basically, by what they've done in the real estate market and the subprime mortgages and all this other stuff that's gone on on these very, let's call them smart people that have done this financialization of the system based on a lot of higher math that really doesn't work, not in the long run.
44:02So it's monetary demand. Again, you know, melding that monetary demand with the blockchain for your generation, I think, is the only way out as far as getting silver to catch the public's attention. I mean, if silver didn't have the ability to meld to the blockchain that we've just discussed, and it was only, you know, my generation or maybe one below me that were interested in silver market. It'd probably do what it did in 1980, where it goes up on a spider. I'm famous for making a statement that silver will wear you out or scare you. So it'll wear you out in those seven years you outline, who cares?
44:35It's going sideways. I should be in Amazon. I should be in Tesla. Why aren't I in what's the latest robin? And I get that. And certainly I've always advocated, you don't put all your money in the precious metals because you want to be able to invest in the Tesla or a momentum stock or whatever. It's a balanced portfolio. But to have true balance, you actually need a precious metals component, but it doesn't have to be that large. But when silver really starts to move, higher prices begin higher prices. And since it's such a small market, you can see it really, really, really move. So I think there is one more leg up in the precious metals market.
45:13It will be led by gold. Big money goes into gold for wealth protection. Small money goes into silver to become wealthy. Silver, if it does what I expect, could take people into a game-changing wealth situation if you buy enough of it. You really have to buy that much. I mean, if silver does what I expect it to do, we're looking at getting the ratio back down to, let's say, 40 to 1 minimum, which means it's going to outperform gold by double. And if it goes to 20 to 1, it'd be a fourfold increase over gold. So So most of your banks are saying gold's going to$3 ,000 to$4 ,000. I think that's low.
45:47I think it'll go to$5 ,000 or$6 ,000, but let's just say it goes to$4 ,000. That's a double. If silver does four times better than a double, that's eightfold. So eight times 25, you're looking at$200 silver. So you have that on your blockchain account. Is that going to be as good as Bitcoin? Yeah, maybe not, but it's certainly a component of a balanced portfolio on the most undervalued asset class in history. And silver has been money more places, more times, and used more transactions and money than gold ever. The monetary metal of history is silver, not gold. How do you feel about Bitcoin? I'm neutral to positive.
46:25I wrote an article that you can read. It's on the net. Just go to David Morgan, my two bits about Bitcoin. Yeah, I have a pretty interesting background. I don't even want to go into it. I'll give you my general background, but I said that governments hate competition. And if Bitcoin does what some think it's going to do, governments are going to, they're going to quell it in some way. So I'll just go on to the Morgan Report I wrote. This is my private work that's paid for. Which I don't mind talking about. And I said, look, the government is not going to get rid of Bitcoin or Ethereum or Litecoin or any of these things.
46:58But what they are going to do, in my opinion, and you're paying me for my thinking, my intellect, my tribe, my staff. If you want to get a mortgage, you can't use Bitcoin. You got to use FedCoin. So the banks are obviously going to central bank digital currencies. As you well know, and most of your listeners would know, a digital currency is not a cryptocurrency. It can be put on the blockchain, however. So if they mandate that we go to the FedCoin in the United States, you can only get a mortgage with the FedCoin. You can only get utilities set up with FedCoin. You can only get a car loan with FedCoin.
47:30And you can only purchase a school loan with FedCoin. But you can have your Bitcoin. You can pay me in Bitcoin to consult with me or to buy my book or to transact in some other way. So they're not going to do away with it. I think they're just going to kind of move it off to the side where, yes, it's useful for Bitcoin to Bitcoin transactions, but any major purchase, you're going to have to be in their system, which means mortgage, any kind of loan, signature loan, whatever, utilities, any of that stuff that's essential for life on the planet, at least in the Western world, you're going to have to use their system.
48:09You can't use Bitcoin. Now, there will be an arbitrage available. Somebody is going to be able to figure out how to exchange that Bitcoin, take a fee and move it into the Fed coin, maybe. Or someone that's rich in Bitcoin might say, I'll buy you an apartment for Bitcoin. No, no problem. Here it is. Let's do it. But as far as they'll mitigate it, that's what I said in that article. I didn't say it as succinctly in that depth, but I alluded to it way back whenever I wrote that article years ago that if it starts to become too big a competitor, watch, they'll do something. And that's, in my view, what they're doing or going to do.
48:44Robert Leonard In your book, The Silver Manifesto, you wrote about how to build a precious metals portfolio. Walk us through that. A lot of people go broke buying cheap stocks. I mean, the best thing you can do is buy the best. I mean, when anyone ever in the human experience goes to rent a house, you might have the ability to rent a house for$1 ,000 a month, and that's your upper limit. You're going to look for the absolute best deal that you can get for$1 ,000. You get the best value, the cleanest, biggest, most whatever for that$1 ,000. You get the best. And if you buy a car, you're going to get the best car you can for the money.
49:20And if you're going to buy clothing, that's a little sketchy, but most people, they want something durable. You're going to buy a pair of jeans. You might buy those$100 jeans, but they're very thin. I don't think so. I think I'd rather spend 70 bucks and get those suckers that are going to last for eight years. So most people buy the best they can. But when it comes to stocks, people buy the cheapest thing they can find, which is absolutely unbelievable for anyone that uses common sense. What you want to do is what you do with everything else in your life. You want to buy the best value that you can for that dollar invested.
49:53So you want to buy the best of the best. And most people don't teach anything about the stock market correctly. Because the only thing I teach about the stock market is how to make money in the stock market. Another way you make money in the stock market, if you go long or bet stock prices going higher, is to buy stocks that go up. And stocks that don't go up, you shouldn't buy them. If you buy a stock that goes from$5 to$500, how many new highs does that stock make? A hundred? Well, we don't know, but a whole lot of them. And so the biggest and safest way to buy a stock is when it makes a new high.
50:25Think about it. No one teaches this. I'll tell you, it teaches it. William O 'Neill teaches this, the founder of Investors Business Daily. And so when a stock goes from five to six and it's a new high, how many sellers are there? Not many. Not many? Why? They think it's going higher, momentum. They think it's going higher. How high is that? I bought it at five, it's two weeks later, it's now at six. How high is it going to go? I don't know, but I'm not selling yet. Am I good at 10? So now there's very little selling pressure. Stocks, commodities, automobiles, they move on buying pressure and selling pressure.
50:59So if there's no selling pressure because it made a new high, any little bit of buying pressure takes it even higher. So now it's at seven. So now how many people are going to sell? Well, there might be a few. God, I made, you know, two bucks and a$5 investment. I made a huge percentage. It only took me three months. I'm out. I'm going to take my profits. A lot of people say, I don't know how high it's high. I'm going to hold it. In fact, they're going to put a stop at six. In case it drops off, I'll at least make a buck a share on a$5 investment. That's 20%. A couple of months, that's a pretty good deal.
51:29So then the stock goes to 10, and then it goes to 20, and then it goes wherever. So those are exceptions. But you look at Amazon, you look at Tesla, you look at any of these stocks, You're getting the FANG stocks, you know, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix. Look at how many new highs they make. So people are brainwashed. They're going to say, well, God, it's a high. You sell when it's high. Yeah, you sell when it's the ultimate high or close to the ultimate high. But when you buy on a new high, especially if it's an early new high, you are taking a lot less risk. And if you're buying a stock that went from 10 to 5 and it stayed at 5 for three years, Oh, man, I'm buying this stock.
52:10It's cheap. Yeah, it's going to stay at five for another three years. But this is what no one teaches. This is the basic fundamentals of how to make money in stocks. Most people think they want to make money in stocks. Most people are actually speculators. They don't admit it to themselves. But their idea is, as soon as I buy this stock, it should go up. And it doesn't. And it goes down. And then I'll rationalize it and say, well, I'm an investor. I'm going to hold for the long term because this company's got great fundamentals. But their intent wasn't to be an investor when they bought it. They didn't buy it going insane, hey, I'm going to buy this stock and hold it for the rest of my life and watch it go sideways for half my life or whatever.
52:44And I'm exaggerating slightly. But there's another thing that investors do that just destroys me. And that's called a round trip. You buy a stock at five, it goes to 25, you hold it all the way and it goes all the way back down to five. It's called a round trip. It went from five to 25 to five and you held it the whole time because of investors that. You got to treat investment like a business. You got to just be absolutely have some rules that you can't violate. If a stock loses this much, you sell it. Another thing that's basic is add to the winners and sell to losers. Most people, though I'm up on these three stocks, are going to sell them and they'll add to their losers.
53:19Averaging down is usually for losers. Once in a while, it's worth doing, but that's the exception, not the rule. Basically, you never want to average down on a stock. It's going down. You can average up on a stock. When it makes that new high, see about that$5 stock and it's a 10, and that stock does go to 550. And there are stocks that do that. So you could actually double your position at 10. So what? You're buying at a new high. Yep, I am. Because you probably know something about the company. I mean, it helps to know something about the company more than just momentum. But the point I'm making is that most people don't have any clue about that.
53:53They buy these cheap stocks. They buy them low. They hold them the wrong times. They sell the ones that are doing well. They hold the ones that aren't. I mean, there's so many mistakes made by the general investing public, it is absolutely irritating to somebody like me. But it happens all the time. And there's very few people that I think really want to make money in the stock market. They just don't understand what's really going on. And so a lot of people that start in stock market lose will go with a mutual fund or maybe a wealth planner, a stockbroker, whatever. And most stockbrokers really aren't that good.
54:24Some are. I don't want to be too negative here, but there's a lot less to it than most people think. They make it a lot more complicated. And I'll just quote Bill O 'Neill again. He said, if you can't buy six stocks and make money, you don't know what you're doing. And I like that. I don't like long lists. I can't really study more than maybe 10 companies. I have a staff, so we've got maybe 25 stocks. Some are speculations, some are mid-tier companies, and some are top-tier companies. We've got seven, 11, probably have 15 stocks. The point is that you don't need a lot of stocks to do well. In fact, you actually better be more focused than not.
55:03Robert Leonard I forget who it was that said it, but somebody, super investor, it might've been even Buffett, said diversification is when you don't know what you're doing. But I think that's what you talked about was buying stocks that have fallen because they seem cheap is a big mistake that a lot of new value investors specifically make. They think they're trying to catch a falling knife. And And when I first started investing, I'm only 25 now, so I'm not super old, but I started investing about 10 years ago. That was what I did was I would always try and buy companies that look cheap because they had fallen in price.
55:31And I didn't realize at the time that there was probably a pretty good reason for that. And then I started to study the Motley Fool's way of investing. I'm not sure if you've heard of them. David Gardner specifically talks about buying your winners and selling your losers. And that has really made a big impact on how I invest. And I've also added a component of momentum investing to my value investing, so I'm not catching those falling knives. I do want to be a little bit clearer. Now, I've confused some people, but when I talked about commodity investing and buying under the cost of production, that's a commodity.
56:01So, I've been talking about stocks now for the last 10 minutes or so. So, there's two different forms of investing here. So, on the commodity side, I am saying to buy low because we're talking about a need. We're talking about cotton or soybeans or whatever. That's a whole different investment than buying a company, which is buying the stock. So I don't want to confuse people, wait a minute, David said to buy low. Well, I said to buy low when it's a produced commodity. But when you're buying a company, no, companies are supposed to move on earnings. When you're a shareholder, you have the rights to the earnings of that company, and they pay you in dividends or stock appreciation or both.
56:41And now bond investors are different. If there's a corporate bond so that But XYZ hypothetical company issues bonds. Bond investors actually have rights to the assets of the company, not equity investors. Equity only have equity holdings. So they only have rights to the earnings of the company. But if the company goes bankrupt, the bondholders have the ability to collect on the land, the building, the chairs, the computers, the furniture, the automobiles, and everything else that was connected with that company. Robert Leonard So without cashflow, how is investing in commodities not considered speculation?
57:15Robert Leonard I wouldn't say it is anything but speculation. I mean, there's three classes in the commodities market. One is speculation, one is commercials, and then there's large trading funds. So basically, the only non-speculators are the commercials, and the commercials are the ones that produce the commodity. So if you are a cattle rancher in Montana and you run a new 250 ,000 head, you better be able to sell that beef at a profit. So the commodities markets exist, but you're not there to speculate. You're there to make a profit. And so who takes the other side of that trade? And that's a speculator.
57:54So you got the commercial interest and you got the speculator. That's as simple as I can make it. There's other factors in there, but no, it's rank speculation or you're the producer. That's it. I mean, it's more complicated, but not a lot more complicated. I just keep it very simple. Preston Pysh, MD, What I like about that is a lot of strategies that I think people compare to investing in commodities, and I know they're not the same, but things like day trading, people think they're investing, but they're not. They're actually speculating. And so I'm glad that you're at least willing and open to admit that, hey, investing in commodities is often a speculation and not necessarily an investment per se.
58:29And I really like that. David, thanks so much for joining me today. Where can everyone listening go to learn more about you and everything you're working on? My main website is themorganreport.com, T-H-E in front of Morgan Report, themorganreport.com. Got a free newsletter, sign up for that. Then go to the blog. And at the top of the blog, anyone in your generation would know, but there's little icons at the very top in a black strip. They're pretty small, but there's an icon for Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, sitemap. It's all there. So you can get on my YouTube channel, Twitter feed. I don't do much on Facebook.
59:05I do have a fairly big LinkedIn presence. And then all the stuff I do in the blogs are on that easy to find. I write up a summation every week. I do about three podcasts a week or interviews a week. I do a weekly podcast called The Morgan Report Weekly Perspective. I look at the financial news and I usually cite my sources. And then I usually wrap up the weekly perspective of something about the metals market, I usually start with the stock market. And as always, for everyone listening, I'll put links to all of David's contact info, his social media, any way you can connect with him in the show notes that if you're interested in learning more about what he's got going on and maybe reaching out to him, you can do that below in the show notes.
59:45David, thanks so much. Really enjoyed our conversation. David Gardner Thank you, Robert. It was fun for me too. Robert Leonard All right, guys. That's all I had for this week's episode of Millennial Investing. I'll see you again next week. Thank you for listening to TIP. To access our show notes, courses, or forums, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decisions, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by The Investor's Podcast Network. Written permissions must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.
From the publisher
David Morgan goes through the basics of investing in commodities. David is a widely recognized analyst in the precious metals industry and consults for hedge funds, high net worth investors, mining companies, depositories, and bullion dealers. He is also known as the publisher of The Morgan Report.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN
00:00 - Intro
03:37 - What are commodities, and how do you invest in them?
06:33 - How you can invest in commodities through ETFs.
16:59 - When is the "right time to buy"?
25:16 - Why David invests in silver.
29:00 - Why do investors avoid investing in precious metals?
49:50 - How to pick mining stocks.
56:07 - The pros and cons of commodities.
And much, much more!
*Disclaimer: Slight timestamp discrepancies may occur due to podcast platform differences.
BOOKS AND RESOURCES
Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Kyle and the other community members.
Recommended Book: You Can’t Lose Trading Commodities by Robert Weist.
Recommended Book: The Silver Manifesto by David Morgan.
Recommended Book: Second Chance by David Morgan.
Check out The Morgan Report.
Check out the books mentioned in the podcast here.
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