Mispriced Risk in Mining and Energy with Massif Capital’s Will Thomson
Massif Capital Managing Partner Will Thomson joins Jim Paterson and Brien Lundin for the first in-studio episode of Forward Looking Statements. His firm invests in liquid real assets across materials, energy, industrials and infrastructure, and it is built on one idea: the market misprices risk.
Will came to resources by way of investment banking, a year in Afghanistan analyzing project economics and corruption, and a political risk insurance book serving commodity traders. He started Massif after hedge fund after hedge fund told him nobody makes money in mining. He explains why copper is still early in its cycle, why he backs management teams before commodity prices, and why the market is undervaluing gold miners’ free cash flow and European oil producers.
His closing advice: look where other investors won’t even visit, because many of those geopolitical discounts aren’t deserved.
FLS ep 2 v2: Hi everyone, I'm Brian London of Gold Newsletter and the New Orleans Investment Conference, but more importantly here Forward Looking Statements, the the new podcast that I am doing with my partner here, Jim Paterson. Jim, how are you? I'm doing very well, Brian. Very excited for today's interview. Yeah, this is our first edition of Forward Looking Statements, in studio or in virtual studio as it were. We've We did one episode as it were in Beaver Creek, out in the sunshine and mountain air, and here we are constrained to our virtual studio here. So it's a learning process, but what we intend to do with this podcast is to bring you the movers, the shakers, the ideas behind the metals and mining markets, as you'll see in our or have seen in our intro. Jim is a company builder, a company builder with a tremendous track record of success and some successes coming up as well. And I analyze the companies for my newsletter and for my conferences and other things I do as an investor. So we have broad networks of really smart people in the sector, and we realize that our networks overlap a good bit, but they also importantly don't overlap. in a lot of areas and we can bring a lot of value and smart people to you, our viewers. So please subscribe to our podcast. join us on this journey as we go along. And in today's journey or this journey is beginning today with our first guest is someone I'm very happy to to r get introduced to. Jim, you know you know Will already and Will Thompson is the CEO and founder of Massive Capital. it is a firm that invests in basic materials, energy, industrial businesses. it overlaps again. There's a lot of overlap with what Jim and I do, but there are some important areas where it doesn't overlap. So I think we're going to have a really interesting discussion here. Will welcome to the show. Glad to have you aboard. Well, thanks for having me. It's especially the second episode, I guess, or first inaugural in in studio episode. So I appreciate it. Thank you. Well we wanted to start off on a good foot here and and it's an interesting one I think because Will as as I look into your origin story as it were, I was fascinated by how you came to be in this sector and in the sectors that kind of overlap with what we do. It was not a well I I'll let you explain it, but I was surprised from where you came and why you came. So why don't you explain that to our audience? Well I once had a mentor that told me that I always get where I should be, but I never get there the easiest way. It's always the most difficult way possible. I can relate. So well I guess you know, my background it it started off fairly normal, I guess, with investment banking and a little bit of private equity after college. interestingly enough, the the investment banking was all in healthcare. from there, 2009, 2010, I went back to grad school, studied political risk, wrote my master's thesis on the role of trying to integrate political risk into valuations of natural resources projects well in grad school, wrote some papers that got published in some very niche little obscure journals about militaries and and fighting wars. those got read by a general in Afghanistan, guy by the name of General McMasters, who went on to be national security advisor under Trump during his first term. gave me a call when I was in the library one day studying for finals and said, I got a job for you. And so about Four months later I was on a C hundred thirty in Afghanistan. So I spent about a year there in Afghanistan on the ground working for a guy by the name of Rick Waddell, who was a a two-star general at the time. He then went on to be a three-star and served in the White House also, mostly looking at sort of the economics various projects we were undertaking in country. looking at corruption and you know sort of what was causing corruption, what we could sort of try to do to help address corruption, wore a couple of other hats. When you get over there to a place like that, it's you know, there's not a lot, there's no time off, you know, there's nothing to do other than work. And so you end up wearing a lot of different hats. came home from that, finished up my master's thesis. Then got job working for a Lloyd's of London insurance syndicate that was starting up a New York office to write political and credit risk insurance policies. so myself and a guy they sent over from London started that office up. We built it up from about zero, I think there was one policy out of the US at the time, and built it up to about seven hundred and fifty million in notional insurance exposure. That That type of insurance, credit and political risk insurance of that kind, it's all commodity traders, project finance banks. Sometimes it's people insuring assets on the ground in funky countries. so it it's it's mostly energy, materials, industrial companies, some infrastructure as well. we ran a really clean book for four years. The problem with that industry is and some people may have heard me say this before, but the problem with that industry is there's a a nasty asymmetry in the return profile. So I would Glencore was a big client of ours. Glencore would come to me and say, we'd like to prepay for a hundred million dollars worth of copper from some copper mine in Africa. we're gonna get the copper delivered to us in twenty million dollars worth of copper a year for five years. so write us an insurance policy against non-delivery. So we'd write an insurance policy against non-delivery. We could usually, charge a rate of something like two percent to five percent per annum. So you can imagine if the policy goes wrong and we're on the hook for twenty million, but all we took in was two to five percent, right? There's there's some weird asymmetry. So that portfolio of policies, if you will, that that one policy, if you lost it, would wipe out the entire book for the year. so we ran a really clean book though, and I got tired of sort of not participating in any upside. And so I went around to a couple of hedge funds that we had relationships with and sort of explained to them what I did and said, you know, look, why don't you give me give me a sleeve of money, I'll manage it for materials and energy. the risk will be contained and managed and the upside will take care of itself. and I got told the same thing at about four or five different funds, which is no one ever, ever, period, full stop, no one ever makes money in mining. and nobody makes money in oil unless you know the direction of oil. do you know the direction of oil? To which I responded, no. and they said, Well, then you're not going to make money for us. that consistency of response. Prompted me to go into the office shortly thereafter, turn in my resignation and start massive capital. that was fourth quarter of two thousand sixteen or thereabouts. Congratulations. And some of your letters obviously go I'm not sure how many quarters it's been now, but it feels like it's been thirty two quarters of being in business, is it not? yeah, whatever, yeah, something like that. It's quite a few. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. congratulations. Ten years ten years this year, I guess. Our our core strategy we launched in two thousand nineteen. We took a little while to sort of figure out sort of what the strategy was gonna look like, how we were gonna deploy it, things of that nature. So what's the snapshot of the firm right now? So right now we've got about just shy of fifty million under management. it's myself, an analyst, everything else is outsourced. And again, you know, sort of as Brian said, it's materials, industrials, energy, and a little bit of infrastructure, and about a third in materials, a third in energy, and a third in in Industrials and infrastructure. So right now with with what's going on in the world obviously you've got a lot of experience in areas where there's volatility and conflict and that's obviously driving investment themes right now. how is that kind of causing you to allocate capital or or affect the allocation of capital? I would say, and I've said this to a couple of people actually recently. I I think that this year is one of the more stressful years since inception. Certainly i interestingly enough, more stressful than COVID for me. admittedly COVID was a very violent year, but everything was just going in one direction. It was going down, so that was really easy to handle in the grand scheme of things. this year's been extremely volatile for us, in part driven by the energy. but some of the mining stuff also. in terms of how we're sort of allocating capital now, we're doing a lot of sitting on our hands, actually. We've got a number of positions that we we like quite a bit in both energy and materials. They are not yet sort of at the valuations we'd like to sell them at. So we're doing a fair amount of sitting on our hands, but also a fair amount of work looking at the short side because we have expectations that the market should be due for a turn here at some point. I don't know when, but markets always fall eventually. So we're prepping for that. and then a a fair amount of work on sort of niche industrial names. people who are manufacturing weird little pieces of equipment that go into supply chains for everything from, you know, semiconductors to refineries, etcetera. or companies that are manufacturing bespoke materials. so they're taking carbon and turning it into something else or or high grading tungsten or tin into a intermediate product that is used by only a few people manufacturing you know advanced equipment. so that's where we're finding opportunities at the moment. So Will, your your story reminds me of a character in a Clancy novel kind of and and it it gives me a bit of a weird validation that you you you know started off in you know through this interesting beginning to your career and you gravitated toward or largely toward a sector that I'm involved in and that's and and Jim as well, and that's things, you know, real things. in in not a lot of the esoteric investment sectors that we see out here. So I I guess I'm looking for some validation, further validation of our investment thesis from you coming from that that outside view. if you look at the mining cycle, which Jim and I are are intimately involved in, where do you see our us in that cycle right now in this metals bull market generally speaking and and how that's affecting that cycle? And where you see opportunities. Yeah. think it's It's a bit of a difficult question to answer at the sort of the very high sort of like mining sector level. But I think that, you know, if you look at say some individual metals, you know, like well, copper, for example. you know, despite the fact that copper is I mean, are we are we at an all time high? pretty close. Close close to it, yeah. Pretty close. I'm not seeing a lot of really appetizing copper deals crossing my desk. you know, I I've got good relationships as you guys do, you know, into into Canada and into Australia and whatnot. And it's not like I'm seeing, you know, an endless flow of fantastically interesting copper opportunities and people raising capital and putting it to work. Certainly not seeing it in places like nickel. haven't seen much in the form of lithium recently. you know, we s we've seen a rush of capital into very sort of selective US, let's call it, rare earth metals and various different, you know, a couple of different critical metals and things like that. But even there, a lot of it is government money that's not necessarily pulling a lot of private money in. And so I actually find it to be a little odd to see these some of the prices we're at and not not see more interesting deal flow. at the same time, I I'm always reminded of you know Richard Adkins. Who was the CEO of Freeport MacMoran for for many years, I think in 2021 or something, you know, so not that long ago, he told an audience at a conference that he couldn't bring a copper mine on that would make a difference to Freeport MacMoran at $8 copper in a decade. it kind of feels like there might be some truth to that kind of statement. You know, like if if we look in And see, what are the big projects that are that are really gonna get the spades in the ground? you've got a whole bunch of fairly large deposits up in Canada, right? That that have, multi-billion dollar price tags, but a lot of them have mediocre grades, big open pits. They're fine, but you know, they're they're it's gonna be tough to finance them. You've got something like Vacuna, which I I believe quite strongly in, and then you've got Ivanhoe's West Foreland, but I'm not I'm not seeing a lot of of huge projects getting sanctioned. So I still think that, you know, we're at the very early stages of of of this cycle. I I have trouble seeing it any other way because 'cause there's just not the supply being built to address the demand. There's not even necessarily the supply being built to keep us sort of steady at at current demand levels. So I think it's early stages. So how do you play that then, Will? Like w how do you get your deal flow? How do you get your ideas and who's talking to you about like who's pitching you on copper projects and how do you kind of vet the r the good ones? Yeah. I still think that d depending on where depending on where in the life cycle of a mine you're playing, right? So you could play geology, development, producers, let's just keep it simple and call it those three. I don't really play geology, nor does sort of massive capital do a lot of geology. That's just not our that's tough for us to underwrite what's in the ground. So We don't do a lot of that. there's always there's always opportunity there if you feel like you can underwrite that. I think though, from a a the the better opportunities right now are found in some development plays around some of those more tier one assets. And perhaps even more important than the asset though is is the management team associated with the asset and whether they can build the project. Whether they can finance the project, whether they can permit the project. From my perspective, you know, the a mine is is is a is a project that's always going to run into challenges, it's always going to run into problems, it's never going to go smooth. The base case assumption should be that there's going to be issues. If there are base cases, there's going to be issues, then the most important thing is a management team that is capable. Of seeing it through to the end and overcoming those challenges, many of which, you know, we we've sort of seen before, but all of which are always slightly new. And so for me at least, a lot of it is betting on management teams first, project and project quality second. and then you know, the commodity price itself is a third or fourth tailwind that I hope to have. but it is by no means necessary for an investment, at least not at the start. that that's interesting, Will, because you're describing one of the the the characteristics or most compelling factors behind this kind of super commodity cycle or commodity super cycle. And and copper's the the best example of it in that you've got demand, really strong demand growth, but you've got severe supply constraints that cannot easily be addressed when you have 15, 20 years from discovery to actual production from a project, that supply response can't come. So you would have an an oversized price response to that. And copper is a great example, but we find that in a number of metals and commodities across the board these days, after a lot of malinvestment and and inadequate investment over decades. Do you have is copper an example of one of the ideas or things you're looking for? Or do you have other ideas or things in among the commodities that you're focused on right now? in light of demand and and inelastic supply response? At the moment, I I think copper's a great example of that. but I I think that some of the more interesting places where we've found opportunities in the mining space is critical metals other than rare earths. So focusing on you know, we started focusing on tungsten about two and a half years ago. That's played out really well. but there's others, germanium, gallium, there's tin, antimony. There's a whole mess. If you an interesting exercise to go through and one that we went through again about two years ago was we pulled one of these critical metals lists from Europe and we pulled one from the United States, we merged them together, then we crossed off the big names, right? Like coppers on the all of them, nickels on all of them. There's a couple of other big ones like lithium and rare earths. And then what you're left with is this really interesting odd list. of metals that most people have never heard of. And, you know, problematically are usually byproducts. They're not usually an individual mine that that's mining germanium, for example. It's usually a byproduct. But you can find mines where the primary revenue driver is some of the niche or critical metals, even if they are a byproduct. and so that's that's one of the areas we've been focusing on when it comes to metals and mining. what I'd also say is I I continue to think that there are interesting special situations in mining that pop up quite frequently, a lot of them around politics. And so, you know, there's opportunities to get in to Different types of investments. We have an investment in a company called Global Atomic, for example, which is a uranium miner, political situation in Africa, in Niger, where they building their mine that resulted in it becoming, you know, in some regards a forgotten stock. the combination of a political vent on the front end caused it to fall from I think five to, you know, eventually fifty cents. now a political event on the the back end over here where the government has the US government has given them a four hundred and forty million dollar loan to finish building what'll be Africa's highest grade uranium mine. Right. So there are these interesting special situations that keep coming up as governments across the world sort of get themselves ever more involved in industrial supply chains. Let me jump in on that one 'cause the work that you do obviously you have a nose for value, you understand arbitrage and political risks. Maybe talk a little bit about on the energy side, some different valuation metrics between North American oil and gas producers and European ones. Yeah, well, and Jim Jim knows that I'm a a fan of of European EMPs, which everyone's always like rolling their eyes at when I say that because they're like, geez, anyone do they produce oil in in Europe? and and the answer of course is yes, they do. I I've thought for a couple of years now that the Norwegian continental shelf, so companies like Equinor, VARA some other players out of the UK harbor energy were particularly interesting ways to get exposure to oil and natural gas. The companies themselves stood on their own. They have great balance sheets, double digit dividend yields, and and great growth potential, as well as this interesting sort of geopolitical dynamic where they're the only source of domestic power for Europe outside of renewables and coal from Poland. so you know, i in a situation like right now with Iran, Norwegian gas is like the most important thing coming into Europe for the winter. but they also trade it as fairly steep discount to US names and have you know better free cash flow, stronger balance sheets, and I mean the EV to EBITs or EBITDACs, depending on what you want to look at. they tend to be, twenty-five, thirty percent below below US names in terms of those certain ratios. so they they're they trade at a discount and in many regards they could just be considered stronger. That that's interesting, Will, because it feeds right into you know something we found on your website, directly from your website. The foundation of a successful investment is capitalizing on the markets. mispricing of risk or incorrect discounting of future value. So you've just identified, I guess, one thing that you think is mispriced. What other opportunities do you see out there where where things are being mispriced and you can find really value because good value is is something that the market isn't valuing correctly. Yeah. Fortunately, at the moment, they mostly seem to be mispricing things to the high side. not necessarily in our world, but in the world of AI and SpaceX perhaps. so geopolitical risk and political risk are always misvalued. the only challenge with some of those things is that sometimes that misvaluation never sort of reverses itself. So for example, there's always an Africa discount. when will an Africa discount disappear? Probably never. so some of these discounts, you know, you just sort of have to live with. but I would say that writ large for a lot of mining firms, the free cash flows right now are misvalued. you look at some of the free cash flows out of gold miners and silver miners, and silver is is not my thing, but I I've been pointed at at some data recently looking at what the free cash flow from silver miners looks like over the last you know sort of you know couple of quarters. and it it makes the rest of of the free cash flow on a per quarter basis going back 10 years, look like a like a flat line, and then all of a sudden there's a, there's a giant spike. so a lot of these free cash flows are being you know, terribly misvalued. look at a company like Equinox Gold, which is a long term holding of ours, and the the stock is is off thirty percent or so this year. meanwhile they've paid down all their debt. they're gonna their free cash flow is terrific. Their free cash flow next year is gonna be even better because they're gonna produce about twice as much gold as they produce this year. or you look at a tin miner in Africa like Alpha Man, they are gonna do six hundred or so million dollars in free cash flow this year on a one point nine billion dollar market cap. what is there to complain about? but you know, it gets an Africa discount. So I think the free cash flows are are for a lot of mining firms are misvalued. political risk is poorly understood and always misvalued. quality balance sheets are definitely not properly valued. these days, that might that probably applies writ large to every sector, but I think a quality balance sheet in the types of industries we're talking about here where you're building a massive asset and things go wrong when you build stuff in the physical world and you need that balance sheet to rely on, I think they're always misvalued too. So So let's talk about the the tail you're talking about that was so flat and then just massive jump in cash flow. Do you think that if it's unrecognized that cash flow and that strong treasury is unrecognized in the share price, does that cause and A activity to really accelerate with those war chests? Is that what you see? That's a good question. I I've I've wondered that myself a lot recently because, you look back at the last, commodity supercycle. And and I I don't, by the way, think we're in a commodity supercycle or anything. but i if you look at the last commodity supercycle, you know, everything sort of went wrong when everyone took their war chests and started engaging in MA. when the fracking firms in the United States did that, also things went wrong and shareholders punished them and everyone sort of management teams appeared at least to get religion, and now have been quite diligent about returning cash to shareholders and improving balance sheets and not engaging in, you know, excessive growth and excessive MA. I I wonder if this time around mining firms don't look at at what they did last time, look at what the frackers did more more recently and are you know more cautious than than they were last time. So I I'm not convinced that it necessarily leads to a lot of MA. I it's gotta lead to either MA or a lot more shareholder return. I think it's gonna lead to more shareholder return this time around. That's not to say that there won't be MA. but I I think there's a lot more room for mining firms to to return capital to shareholders, ideally in the form of dividends. I don't think share buybacks work as well, because a share buyback will continuously concentrate you in a wasting asset. And that's that's not really what we want to do. So I I think though this time around you know, we'll we'll see more capital return, or at least I hope we will. So Will, if you look at the amount of money that the miners are producing, the earnings that they're producing right now, and and I focus a lot in the gold and and the silver miners as well, it just seems like they're they're producing so much cash flow, free cash flow, that they really can't feasibly return that to shareholders in the form of well, buybacks or or dividends. in that at some point they are going to be forced to start building up their pipeline and and forced into MA. do you think I mean do you do you really think that they can pay enough dividends? I mean I think they're still gonna s be building up such tremendous cash balances, even if they start delivering ridiculous and maybe they have to deliver ridiculous levels of dividends to get Wall Street's attention from AI. Deliver ridiculous. I I think double digits is is what they need to do. so if you can return ten percent, you know, something like that, I I think that's that'll get people's attention. but i I I do I do see your point. and you know, look Some MA is is absolutely going to occur. I would hope that we see more of sort of like the cuna London BHP type of tie-ups as opposed to say some of the more expensive MA we saw during the last super cycle, like well what, I mean like Freeport MacMoran, well Freeport bought MacMoran, right? Like an o a copper company bought an oil company. Barrack bought I don't even remember what they bought, but they bought a couple of things that really didn't work out well, right? So you know, as long as as long as the MA is thoughtful, there's not a problem. I some of the MA I've seen recently that I thought was was better than than a lot of what we've seen in the past is some of the you know zero premium MA, where you saw two gold companies merging because scale was required. And the combination of the balance sheets enabled them to build the assets. If the MA is about building, I can see, I can see a good route there. but we've seen a lot of discussion, I think, about MA that isn't per se about, you know, building. It's about reshuffling the deck chairs. and that's the type of and A that that really concerns me. so, you know, what are we it's always like Glencore Rio Tinto, right? Like Glencore Rio Tinto, I don't think that that combination doesn't make a lot of sense, does it? I mean What what world does that really make sense? Just a bigger guy getting bigger? mid-tiers combining to make lar large caps, that's a different story. That that can work out a little more nicely because they have projects in their pipeline and need to build. Or again, BHP Londine, you know, pursuing a project that the Londines, you know, at sixteen billion dollar cost probably couldn't pursue on their own without Putting the entire London mining at risk. So as long as the MA is about building, then you know, I'm all for it. I do hope they they focus first on on some capital return though. So, but that that could just be a personal sort of me talking my book. Yeah, and one strategy that is is broadcast in some of the mining companies that are generating a lot of cash right now is they have a strategy to invest in junior companies or take large strategic positions. So that's going to help the smaller expiration companies a lot, much needed capital. you know, obviously the industry's changed a lot over the last ten to fifteen years where you would have stockbrokers that would know the business and support the business and be champions. And those people are becoming rarer and rarer as passive funds infiltrate the investor milieu. But with the strategic investment from the very knowledgeable well capitalized mining companies that is gives a lifeline and accelerates things and lots of the companies in Discovery Group are obviously getting a big boost right now because they're capitalized, they're well capitalized, which accelerates their expiration program, brings down their cap cost of capital. it's just good for the industry if it's the right project. If it's a good project it merits the dough. Yeah. No for sure. And it it's sort of interesting of all the industries that are are ill ill structured for passive in my mind. Mining is one of them, right? Like passive, you want you want a very low dispersion of outcomes, right? You want you want to be invested in, you know, industries where everybody's doing well. of course in mining, the dispersion of outcomes is huge. You have big successes and big losers. that's a stock pickers environment. So it's it's a it's a bit of a shame to see the some of the growth in passive in mining because it's just not it's not an industry set up well to capitalize on it via passive. At least not in my opinion. Well Will you're not I I guess you're not a typical generalist investor or firm, but you you kind of have a foot in that door. You you have a broad view and scope of investments you're involved in. One of the things that those of us who are so focused in metals and mining have been waiting for is all this generalist money or the attention from Wall Street and and the institutions toward the sector that's making so much money right now. Do you see that turning at any point in the the future? Is AI just still sucking out, you know, all the oxygen in the room? Well so I I I can't really speak to the generalist, but I I can speak a little bit to what institutions are doing and what family offices are doing. Those are our primary focus. And what I have seen is and again, as you you sort of said, I I have a little more diversity in my portfolio, right? A third in energy, a third in metals and mining, a third in industrials and infrastructure, but sort of writ large liquid real assets, what we call it. I have seen a change in the tone. from institutional allocators and family offices. A couple of years ago, our results were good enough that we didn't have any trouble getting in the door to speak to anyone. But once we got in the door, the conversation was mostly about what are you doing? Get us up to speed, and then we're gonna follow. Now the conversations are get us up to speed, we're interested in allocating to this space because we've done a review and found that, we either have no exposure whatsoever to to the world of energy and materials, or we have some private equity exposure to US oil and natural gas and we own a gold miner. and it's Barrack or, you know, something like that. and and so there's been a r a shift in tone. they're not pulling out their checkbooks and writing massive checks yet. but the institutions and the family offices are all recognizing that they have no exposure and or limited exposure and that these remain industries that are critical to the economy, even if at the same time they're intensely focused on AI and some of the other stuff that's going on in does that pull the consumer in? I don't know. but to be perfectly frank at this point I think institutions and family offices and whatnot represent bigger money. Yeah, l there's lots of capital returning to the mining space right now, I think. I've been through several cycles when there was just nothing available and that's not the case right now. And I think it's pretty smart money. And speaking of smart money and really good people, I I just wanted to kind of recognize the work that you do, Will, on your website, massive cap dot com. You've got some really good cool stuff to educate people and I just wanted to encourage people to go there. You've got the real asset handbook and then you've got your your your quarterly updates, an incredible amount of knowledge and obviously you do very hard work and you're looking you're you're looking very hard for opportunities, those asymmetric returns you were talking about, mispriced assets, and I wanted to congratulate you on that. No, thanks. I appreciate that. yeah, we I I find that writing writing is a really a big part of my process sort of helps me put all the ideas together and and find find the flaws in in what we're thinking about. Well, Will, as we as we get to as we're running out of time here, can you highlight for our audience what some particular areas you see that are are mispriced or areas of opportunity or that you might have been writing about recently? Yeah. So I think that you know again i if if you're in it for the long haul, I still think copper is particularly interesting and I would steer more towards your sort of a a bit a barbell in that maybe you put your Londines and your Ivanhoes in the portfolio on one end and then you've gotta find a one, maybe two really good developers of big projects on the other. so I I still think that's a great place to be for the next, you know, four or five years. Gold remains interesting in part because the free cash flows are so significant. our our only gold position at this point actually, we had several last year, but we we've exited a lot of them, remains Equinox. I think Equinox remains one of the most mispriced gold names in the market. so that's that's quite interesting. Those geopolitical situations, again, anytime you can go someplace and invest in a country that other people are just not even willing to visit, you're gonna find discounts right now. and a lot of those discounts are not necessarily well deserved. oil and natural gas is a little difficult right now, I think, but I would say you definitely want to be prepared for a tweet or something, declaring peace. and it perhaps being a somewhat sticky piece of some kind, because oil will really take it on the chin, as will all the oil companies, and your ability to move fast at that point and get in there quickly, will yield significant returns. because you know, I i at some point they'll they'll Come to some sort of agreement of some kind, I don't know what kind, between Iran and the United States. And oil will fall out of bed hard, you know, 70, $60, $70, and the oil companies will follow it down. but that, and we wrote about this recently, there's really sort of good reason to think that the new floor for oil is probably more like 70. So it'll dip below that temporarily. but then it'll come back. and at seventy to eighty, seventy to ninety dollars a barrel, a lot of oil companies will just throw off a ton of free cash flow. And so if you buy it right, there's gonna be real opportunity. So I would say be be very prepared for that moment by doing some work and finding some names you want to own now. and then again, you know, industrials right now. there's a lot of interesting things happening in places like Japan, mid-caps in the United States and Europe, in machinery and manufacturing. There's a lot of interesting things going on that are a confluence of you know reshoring efforts and technology that are well worth looking at. Very impressive. Good. Well, so tell our viewers where they can find you, how they can contact you, hopefully get in touch with you and do some business with you. Yeah, well, you can find us at our website, massivecap dot com, that's A S S I F C A P dot com and We have a we have a blog and a sub stack associated with that, that you can all find through the website and you can reach me that way. I I technically have a Twitter, but I I find Twitter to be less than useless, so I don't really use it very often. But if you reached out via Twitter I'd probably pick it up eventually. So that that's how you can get in touch with us. Awesome. Brian, any final comments? No, I I think it's been great. Will you you You've given us a good perspective. I think for me a a very valuable, beneficial perspective from someone who comes from a slightly different world than I am. I get in in embroiled in the midst of this mining stock market and it's good to get it somebody who comes from it, not from where I come from it, which is starting off with a kind of a sound money ideal, gold and silver, and then getting into the the the metals and the miners from there. So it's really some really wonderful points there and and I agree with you that a lot of what's going on now in the markets is temporary. I think the the Iran war, people don't recognize that it is temporary. Gonna reach an end one way or the other and that's gonna create some shockwaves throughout the markets itself. so thank you so much for your valuable insights today. I think it's a great way to to keep start and keep this podcast going, Jim. Everybody's got to support forward looking statements and we're we're blessed to have Will as our inaugural in studio interviewee and we hope to have more conversations with Will and other great guests in the future. Thanks for having me, guys.