Robert Sinn @CEOTechnician on Fear, Greed and a Gold Bull Market

[00:00:02] It's time for your morning briefing of junior mining and mineral exploration news. You are tuned in to Mining Stock Daily. Now reporting from the Clear Creek Digital Studios in Denver, Colorado, here's your host, Trevor Hall.

Trevor Hall [00:00:19] Hello, everybody. This is Trevor Hall once again with Mining Stock Daily from the Association for Mineral Exploration Roundup Conference. Now sitting with a good friend of mine, a good friend of yours, and actually an interview I've definitely been looking forward to for the last couple of weeks when we scheduled it. It's always a pleasure to have Mr. Robertson, CEO technician back in the studios. How are you, buddy?

Mr. Robertson [00:00:39] Great to be here, Trevor, in wet and slightly cold Vancouver, Canada. But this has been a really great week in Vancouver with these conferences and all the activity. Clearly some good attendance at the roundup and the VRIC 2020. Definitely bull market sentiment in the air.

Trevor Hall [00:01:02] Yeah. Let's talk about that bull market. You actually put out an email this morning to your list about a consolidation of the GDX seems to be coming to an end, it appears on the technical status. So give us a little rundown. What what do you seen on those charts?

Mr. Robertson [00:01:17] Well, so the GDX peaked in the first week of September 2019. I call it thirty-one dollars a share and it's had a three-month, four-month digestion process. And I like to use that word digestion, because gold miners went up huge from May through September 2019. A lot of mining shares doubled or tripled or quadrupled. So they needed a digestion process to digest that big move. And that's what they've been doing since September. And actually, if you look at the gold miners daily chart, like a one-year daily chart, either, you know, Huey or the gold miners exchange-traded fund can use either they're very, very close. You can see sort of a rounding bottom pattern since the September pullback started. And now we're about to put to potentially make a new high here in the next few weeks.

Trevor Hall [00:02:23] Do you still feel like there's still a lot of undervalued miners and in general are still undervalued based on the price of gold?

Mr. Robertson [00:02:32] I think they're not expensive. That's for sure. Valuation is a tricky topic.

Trevor Hall [00:02:38] Sure.

Mr. Robertson [00:02:39] A lot of variables involved in valuation. I would say if we take a look at the broader stock market and all the different sectors in the stock market, the mining sector is probably either the best value right now or very close to the best value.

Trevor Hall [00:02:55] In the hole whole market?

Mr. Robertson [00:02:56] In the whole market.

Trevor Hall [00:02:58] So how do we get more eyes on this? I mean, we said we thought that, you know, the higher prices in gold and silver would get a lot more attraction. And I think it's started, but I don't think it's been the big boom that people were expecting.

Mr. Robertson [00:03:11] No, I mean, definitely not. You know, in the U.S., you know, we're both Americans. Maybe one in 10 people has any gold or mining exposure at all. And maybe that's a stretch. It's far more like one in 50, whereas my neighbors all own Tesla.

Trevor Hall [00:03:31] Right.

Mr. Robertson [00:03:31] They all own you know, Apple or Amazon. Right?

Trevor Hall [00:03:35] Right.

Mr. Robertson [00:03:35] If if we started to get that kind of participation in the mining sector we'd really see what a bull market feels like.

Trevor Hall [00:03:42] Yeah. I mean, it's I mean, and the Tesla chart is just Apple, Tesla. I mean, you look at those charts and they just it's an exponential move higher. And we were yet to see the parabolic move in return. Right?

Mr. Robertson [00:03:56] Tesla's absolutely unbelievable the past couple months. I mean, you know, this is not a small company. This is a 60, 70, 80 billion, and now, you know, this morning, one hundred billion dollar market cap company that has more than doubled in the past few months. That's really unheard of. You know, Newmont Mining is the largest gold mining company in the world by market cap, and they're only about 38 billion dollar market cap valuation. And they're, that stock hasn't even been a double yet. So I think that for us to say that we're deeper into the bull market, we need to see some of these big mining stocks actually double and maybe more to say that we're farther along. I still think we're pretty early stages.

Trevor Hall [00:04:41] Let's talk about silver. Do you follow the silver charts at all and those miners? And is that this similar story to a gold's doing?

Mr. Robertson [00:04:48] Silver is very interesting because the silver chart is similar to the gold chart, albeit more volatile. But silver miners have generally been stronger performers since the summer than gold shares. And I think that mainly has to do with the fact that there's fewer to choose from. There's fewer silver minors. There's fewer silver explorers. There's fewer pure plays on silver, and so you have all that money funneling into a smaller pie. And that makes the moves a lot more powerful. So when gold rallies 2 percent, silver will rally 4 percent or more. And when silver rallies 4 or 5 percent, silver mining stocks rally 10 or 20 percent.

Trevor Hall [00:05:41] Let's talk about those PGE plays. I mean, platinum is, excuse me, palladium.

Mr. Robertson [00:05:45] Palladium is just gone. Twenty-three fifty right now.

Trevor Hall [00:05:48] It went up another hundred bucks, I think.

Mr. Robertson [00:05:50] Yeah. And everybody was calling a top yesterday and it went up one hundred and twenty bucks.

Trevor Hall [00:05:55] Yeah, it's great. I mean you actually put something on your Twitter feed a couple days ago which made me chuckle because it was honest that you said the only thing that really out there that could make a pullback and palladium is, is people saying it's gone up too fast.

Mr. Robertson [00:06:12] Too far, too fast.

Trevor Hall [00:06:12] Too far, too fast. But do you still think that way, I mean, do you see a top?

Mr. Robertson [00:06:17] Palladium is just such an incredibly hard market to gage because it's such a small market. It's four times rarer than platinum. And there's just not a lot of it out there in the world.

Trevor Hall [00:06:27] Right.

Mr. Robertson [00:06:27] I think that this is a massive short squeeze and I don't think it'll be over until the last short is covered. You know, it's actually very interesting, because if this metal is having such an explosive move, I mean, literally, it's basically doubled in the last year. It was twelve hundred an ounce a year ago and it's nearly twenty-four hundred an ounce. I wonder if this is going if this is a precursor to what we'll see in other metals like gold and silver. You know, like this is like the lead. And the bigger metals that have larger pools of capital involved in them are going to follow now.

Trevor Hall [00:07:07] Well, does it, do you think palladium has this similar supply-demand factor as gold and silver?

Mr. Robertson [00:07:13] It's a much different dynamic. Much different dynamic. Nobody buys it for investment purposes really.

Trevor Hall [00:07:20] Right.

Mr. Robertson [00:07:21] Whereas gold and silver, that's their main you know, that's the main source of buying, you know? You know, like investment buying.

Trevor Hall [00:07:28] So silver's got, you know, industrial component to its own.

Mr. Robertson [00:07:31] So does gold, too. But the largest part is, you know, for investment purposes, and people that want to hoard coins and bars, you know.

Trevor Hall [00:07:39] Have you been looking at, you know, base metal PG companies leading up to it or is that are you looking at it now because of the price or are you. Are you chasing because of the price?

Mr. Robertson [00:07:52] I'm not chasing. I'm not chasing. I own one. It's a small explorer. I just mentioned to you. Symbol is bull BULL on the CSC. And I don't necessarily recommend people chase these stocks up here. I mean, BULL has more than doubled in the last couple of weeks. Probably wait for it to cool off a little bit if you know, if you're really interested and do your research and go to the company website and such. But everybody's been asking me. I want a Platinum Group, you know, metals play a platinum group metals miner. And I just, well, there's only a few. So take your pick. And they're all at 52-week highs. So are there not only 52-week highs, a lot of them are multi-year highs. Right?

Trevor Hall [00:08:37] Right.

Mr. Robertson [00:08:38] So it's a little dicey to chase that kind of a move, and I wouldn't necessarily recommend it.

Trevor Hall [00:08:44] Well, if Palladium continues to move up, wouldn't you chase now?

Mr. Robertson [00:08:49] That's greed, right? So fear and greed just shows you a little bit. Fear and greed are the two primary emotions that cause losses in financial markets. So if you're chasing a metal that's doubled in the last year, you're acting on greed and that usually doesn't end well.

Trevor Hall [00:09:09] All right. You're telling a story and I'm not active on CEO OCA at all, but you are where you were telling me how you won the 2019 stock pick, little stock-picking contests. I mean, there's what, 900 people, in it, and you were first.

Mr. Robertson [00:09:27] I was first. And it's interesting how much attention that's gotten. Honestly, there is a good bit of luck involved in that. To perform that well with just three picks is pretty unlikely. I don't care how skillful you are. And you know what you know, was there some skill involved in it? Yes, I guess there was because two of my companies went up a lot. One was more than double and one was almost a 10 bagger. And I did own all three companies that I picked. One was a loser, small loser and then the two winners, obviously. But what's funny about that is that the 10 bagger, which is AMX on the venture, I was buying it at like 16 and 17 cents at the end of 2018. Because I was just, it felt like something was happening. And when I talked to the company, I felt like something was happening. Even though I couldn't explain exactly what it was, it's not like they told me, well, we got 10 meters of 40 grams or something, but I could tell that they were excited about something. Right? And I could see it in the trading of the stock. I could see the bids were so persistent. And then the offers just started to get taken out, taken out, taken out. And so that's why I picked it, because I said this company is cheap. It was like a seven or eight million market cap at the time. And I feel like something has happened. There's potential here for this to be a big winner. But what's funny about it is in my actual real trading and real money, I was a buyer at 16 and 17 cents and I was a seller between 40 and 60 cents. And I was completely out of my stock at 60 cents and it went to 160. And that's one of the trickiest things. So in the stock-picking contest, I got the benefits of just holding it because I couldn't sell because it was a stock-picking content.

Trevor Hall [00:11:13] Right.

Mr. Robertson [00:11:14] But in reality, riding winners is probably the most challenging aspect of being an investor or a trader, especially in the junior mining sector, when a lot of people say, well, sell half on a double, so you get your cash out. Some people say, no, you want to, you want to ride for a much bigger winner because you need to have 10 baggers, you know, in order to make up for all the losses, because this is a treacherous sector. There's no magic formula for how to do it.

Trevor Hall [00:11:44] Right. Well, I think, you know, just looking at my own trading is what I'm not good at and didn't need to be improved on is actually being willing to take profits out. I'm not saying lots of profits, but, you know, when companies do go up being OK, taking some money off of the table, you know, and putting it back in the family coffers. Right. And doing something like that. I mean, I guess so what, you know, is a more introspective is subjective on the individual to decide, you know, there's no right or wrong way of taking profits. It's just based on your own risk.

Mr. Robertson [00:12:22] I think there's a couple of ways to look at it. One is from a portfolio vantage point, the overall portfolio. And now how much is this one stock constituting in my overall portfolio? When it gets up to a certain percentage, usually want to sell it back down to about 10 percent. Because I generally don't feel comfortable having more than 10 percent of my overall trading capital in one stock, especially a junior mining company.

Trevor Hall [00:12:47] Sure.

Mr. Robertson [00:12:48] Because they're so volatile. Another way to look at it is technical analysis. So there are clear signs on the chart when something is getting crazy, overbought and really overextended, or it's hitting a level that it's bounced back from multiple times. Probably going to take some off the table there just so you can buy a dip.

Trevor Hall [00:13:07] Right.

Mr. Robertson [00:13:08] And also just there's a psychological aspect as a human aspect, like what's going to help me sleep at night? Like, feel good, you know, overall in my portfolio. And then what's going to make me comfortable to actually buy a dip instead of having all my cash fully invested? I want to have some flexibility to be able to find it to take advantage of a new opportunity or a pullback.

Trevor Hall [00:13:32] Right. Right. Just kind of curious. I want to ask you about sentiment right now. I mean you do have a service and a group of I guess you call subscribers and the trading drivers. And are you seeing a little bit more of a pickup in people coming in and working in the lab? What do you see as an observer here?

Mr. Robertson [00:13:57] As far as my subscribers basically, the numbers have been pretty stable over the last, say, the last six months, which is basically at an all-time high, but not really making new highs. And sentiment overall, I think is pretty it's pretty healthy. A lot of people asking me questions, trying to find new ideas, you know, new investment ideas. You know, what's the next 10 bagger going to be? I don't know how many times I've been asked that question. It's an impossible question to answer. And I can throw out some ideas if I feel I'm talking to a, you know, like a real adult who can make their own choices and also, you know, take responsibility for their choices if it doesn't work out.

Trevor Hall [00:14:38] Right.

Mr. Robertson [00:14:39] But sentiment is very healthy. And I was talking to somebody a couple hours ago to basically said the lifeblood of the sector, especially junior mining, is capital. You know, the ability to raise money, finance so that you can actually do real exploration work. And the signs are very good right now for that. Companies can raise money. They're well-funded to do work programs in 2020. And there doesn't seem to be any shortage of capital. And that's a very strong tailwind for the junior mining sector. Obviously, junior mining sector sort of rises and falls with the gold price. Right now, the gold price is fairly robust. It hasn't pulled back much off its highs. It's trading above a key technical level at 1440. So it all looks good now. We've got a go light right now. Right?

Trevor Hall [00:15:32] Right.

Mr. Robertson [00:15:33] But we don't know what the future holds. Right? If gold dropped back under fifteen hundred or certainly back under fourteen hundred, that could all change.

Trevor Hall [00:15:39] You're right. In that I mean a catalyst like that, I mean you could run the gamut of what to change that up or down. Right? And you know, I was laughing. It's kind of fun to come up to Canada for a week because I literally have no idea what's going on with the United States news and politics. I could not tell you.

Mr. Robertson [00:15:55] Yeah, this whole impeachment thing, I see little blurbs here and there, but I haven't watched a second of it.

Trevor Hall [00:15:58] Right. Right now, I guess people there's like a coronavirus I've heard of.

Mr. Robertson [00:16:03] One of the largest cities in China just got quarantine. They aren't letting people leave the city now.

Trevor Hall [00:16:09] That's terrifying.

Mr. Robertson [00:16:10] Ten million people trapped in their city.

Trevor Hall [00:16:13] Thanks. That's really terrifying. Yeah, I guess I should pick up a newspaper, watch the news because I feel so out of the loop right now. I've been focusing on junior mining and you're in the mining conference world. Yeah, but I mean, you never know any catalysts like that. I mean, look what happened two weeks ago with the Iran situation. Gold jumped up over sixteen hundred dollars and then quickly retreated.

Mr. Robertson [00:16:33] I think that was a really, you know, that move that was a fake move, by all means. Right? But it was significant because it shows you the people are willing to jump in really quickly. And it feels like as we teeter here globally and socially, that we could be one little thing, such as what happened in Iran that could make this move again. But then to stay there, but then stay there. That was a very, that was a very memorable night for me. So that was two weeks ago Tuesday. And with, you know, missiles flying towards U.S. troops in Iraq, the initial reports made it seem like really dire.

Trevor Hall [00:17:16] Right.

Mr. Robertson [00:17:17] Because, you know, that if those missiles had killed some, you know, U.S. troops, the consequences would have been very serious. Trump would not have taken that lightly. And that's so you know, the emotion and fear going back to that fear factor contributed to a 50 dollar surge in the gold price. Right? And, you know, was it a fake? No. I mean, it happened. It was real, but it was unsustainable because gold was pretty overbought, pretty overextended. And then it turned out that Iran probably fired specifically to miss the troops. But make it seem like they were trying to aim to hit.

Trevor Hall [00:17:59] With the consolidation going on here and gold like you say, we're trading around that technical of 1540. We come back down from that overbought situation or we get to a healthier spot.

Mr. Robertson [00:18:10] Much healthier now. I mean, it's worked off all the overbought. It's extremely healthy. And I think that we could make another run at sixteen hundred very soon, you know.

Trevor Hall [00:18:19] But on a healthy move?

Mr. Robertson [00:18:20] A healthy move. Yeah. I mean, you know, in bull markets are characterized by hugging near the highs and not pulling back more than about a third of the prior rally.

Trevor Hall [00:18:33] OK.

Mr. Robertson [00:18:33] So like if gold rallies 200 dollars, a bull market move shouldn't give back more than about 70 dollars an ounce of that move.

Trevor Hall [00:18:41] All right.

Mr. Robertson [00:18:41] And that's what we're seeing. I mean, it hit 1613. Pulled back to 1540. That's exactly 70 dollars an ounce. And here we are today at 1558 in sort of a tight range-bound, you know, range-bound trade. And all the technical oscillators are worked off any overbought, you know, and the sentiment is positive, but it's not near euphoric. And that's just the perfect sweet spot for another rally.

Trevor Hall [00:19:09] Yeah. Are you starting to get questions from people you least expected? You know, people who've never been into mining or precious metals, but are now like seeing interest and or people who have been out of precious metals and mining for the last few years and now decided to dip their toes back in?

Mr. Robertson [00:19:23] Nope, not yet. No. And I have some really good people in my life that are good indicators for that, contrarian indicators. No interest in gold and silver yet. No interest in mining stocks yet. And they were all over bitcoin. They were all over multiple fads in the past few years. I really don't think this is, this move has reached the masses. It's going to take a lot more. I think it's going to take probably two more than sixteen hundred dollars to say.

Trevor Hall [00:19:54] Do you think sixteen hundred dollar gold does anything?

Mr. Robertson [00:19:57] It does. It will get some more participants into the, you know, into the sector, but it won't be a mass adoption sort of thing. It probably took seventeen hundred. And like I said, with Newmont Mining, like, let's see Newmont Mining hit sixty dollars a share, not forty-three dollars a share.

Trevor Hall [00:20:14] Right, right.

Mr. Robertson [00:20:14] And then he will be like, oh, shit. Because then all that trend following traders, all the people that use only technicals, the gold mining charts will go to the top of the trend following bull market list and then the herd starts to come in. And it's a virtuous cycle for a while until it reaches an unsustainable level. And then that's where the top is. But from my vantage point, we're probably a year or more away from that happening, you know? I mean, shit, it could be two or three years, right?

Trevor Hall [00:20:49] Rob, it's always a pleasure to have him. And I always enjoy our conversations. And you're just such a wealth of information. And not only that, you're also a great person. I really appreciate this. So thanks for coming on to Mining Stock Daily.

Mr. Robertson [00:21:01] Thank you, Trevor. And I want to acknowledge you for the contributions that you make to the sector every day. It's tough. Trust me. I know it's turn out content every day. And you do. You put a lot of value-added stuff out there. So thank you for all that you do. And thank you for having me here today.

Trevor Hall [00:21:17] Thank you, Rob. Take care buddy.

Trevor Hall [00:21:22] Mining Stock Daily and its affiliates are not responsible for any loss arising from any investment decision in connection with the material presented here in.