We're going to get straight into Q&A, Sheldon.
Thank you.
Thank you. Thanks again, Sheldon. Let's get straight into it, as I said. As we near the end of Q3, can you provide us an update on some of the things that you're most proud of this year, 2026?
Yeah. Thanks, Ralph. 2026 has been a fantastic year for us. I'll separate between developments in the portfolio, which has been fantastic, and then what we've managed to deploy into new assets as well. On the portfolio side, we started off by getting just great news flow out of Northparkes. I won't go into detail here, but we're looking at E22 getting approved, the E48 Sublevel Cave progressing, and then probably most importantly, we're seeing an expansion study being undertaken. I think that Northparkes is going to get bigger, and as a streamer, we just benefit from that. We also had an initial reserve announced by AngloGold Ashanti at the Arthur project. That project is coming into much closer view now and is clearly going to be a Tier 1 mine located in Nevada, and a very exciting development for Triple Flag shareholders.
We had Agnico Eagle announce a construction decision at Hope Bay. A fantastic asset there at Hope Bay. Very nice to see that construction decision, and I think we're just getting started there. We just had a first gold pour at Koné. I'll stop there on the portfolio side, but it's been a lot of positive catalysts. On the deployment side, we actually managed to deploy $550 million into new deals, all of that in Australia and the United States, and that was headlined by our acquisition of the Ravenswood Gold stream. So producing mine located in Australia, exactly the sort of deal flow that our shareholders are looking for.
Yeah. I'd like to delve a little bit into more detail on some of the announcements and some of the assets that you talked about. Let's start off with Hope Bay. I have the pleasure of covering Agnico Eagle. Can you tell me a little bit about post that decision in May when they sanctioned the project? How does your thinking go on what your expectations are for that, and does your portfolio of work start to think about exploration potential, reserve conversion, and what the future could look like from that asset?
Yeah. Hope Bay's really nice. It's the sort of asset every geologist that I've spoken to that's been there is very excited about the potential there. It really is a district scale. It's 80 km of strike. What Agnico's gone forward with is really the Doris and the Patch 7. It's just part of the coverage. It doesn't even include the Boston deposit to the south, and I just heard Ammar this morning talk about 17 g a ton intercepts on Boston. What Agnico's gone public with is calling for a construction decision, production starting in 2030, and between 400,000 and 450,000 ounces a year for 11 years, and that's a good start. But everyone involved in this project and has looked at it really sees it as being multi-decade.
I think you're going to see a lot of exploration potential, and you're going to see a lot of growth in that mine over time. But Agnico is fantastic. They're the best positioned to build a mine up in Nunavut in the far north. They have a lot of experience, and I really look forward to seeing the deal flow and, sorry, the news flow on this asset over time.
Yes. Good point. Let's go back to one of the other assets you mentioned, which is Northparkes, a large portion of that net asset value within the Triple Flag story. Can you talk a little bit about some of the specific news flow that's happened over the course of the year and some of the developments that you think are going to catapult this into an even bigger proportion of those GEOs?
Yeah. Thanks, Ralph. It's interesting. Northparkes is Triple Flag's biggest asset. It's also our biggest growth asset. Given the size and scale, it really moves the needle for us. There's actually four separate developments there that all are positive. The first is the E48 Sublevel Cave is coming online. We're getting ore from that now. That has higher gold grades than what we've experienced in the past, so that's a real positive for us, and that's benefiting us right now, and that'll continue to benefit us as we go into 2027 and beyond that. Second, they made a construction decision for the E22 Block Cave. It has actually really nice gold grades associated with it. Block caves have a pretty long timeline, about a four-year timeline before production, so getting that work going and started is fantastic. Triple Flag shareholders are really going to benefit from that.
Kind of unrelated is the E44 deposit. Northparkes is a copper mine, and we have a gold stream with gold as a byproduct. Evolution actually identified a separate deposit about 20 km away from the main mine site right now, and it's actually a gold-only deposit. That's very exciting. There's some really nice grades there. We actually reached a deal with Evolution where we're going to get minimum deliveries over the course of 2031 through 2037, actually a total of 45,000 ounces. So that's really attractive for us and that's covered by our stream. We've a deal with them where we get a little bit lower percentage on that, but on very attractive terms for Triple Flag, but also for Evolution. Then the last is right now Northparkes has a 7.6 million tons per annum capacity, and Evolution is studying expanding that.
It makes a lot of sense. There's a massive resource there, and exploiting that resource more quickly makes a lot of sense, particularly in today's copper price environment, maybe up to 15. I'm really looking forward to hearing the results of that study, and directionally, it's going to be only up from the current seven point six. That, of course, benefits Triple Flag as a gold streamer.
Yeah. Maybe one of the new and introductory assets, Ravenswood, right? Just delivered its first stream ounces, right? Just a few months ago.
That's right.
And just wondering how you think of that ramp-up profile, right, over the next several years. How do you think about delivery cadence for it to reach its targets?
Yeah. We're really pleased with that Ravenswood investment and it's producing gold, it's in Australia, that ticks all the boxes for us. We've contracted with target deliveries for the first 24 months as it goes through that ramp-up period. What that does, it really de-risks for us the delivery of ounces over that ramp-up period. Ultimately, we see this moving up to a 200,000 ounce a year producer. Right now it's a little lower than that. There's tremendous potential with this asset. One of the things we always try to do is maximize our area of interest, our land coverage. We have a 1,600 sq km area of interest on this stream, and I think there's great potential for expansion. Right now, they're in a ramp-up phase. They're going to get to steady state.
We're going to benefit from this for decades, and I think it's going to go on really longer.
Oh, great. No conversation with royalty and streaming companies would be complete without a talk about capital allocation, the deal market. Let's get into that a little bit. $265 million so far returned to shareholders. Can you talk a little bit about how you think about dividends, how you think about capital allocation strategy, and how you think about the priorities therein?
Yeah. Thanks, Ralph. It's actually quite simple. We start off with, we pay a dividend, and we've increased our dividend every year since we've gone public, and we're going to continue doing that. There's plenty of cash flow in the portfolio, and there's a lot of embedded growth in the portfolio, so that's not an issue at all. Our run rate is about $400 million a year of cash flow right now. The dividend consumes about 10% of that. Then it's really about how do we add further shareholder value with that remaining cash. We're always looking for good opportunities to deploy. I think we've done $900 million since January 1, 2025. There's always competitive pressures, but I think that there's a really robust environment for deploying capital right now. There's been high profile streams being done in our sector.
I think that's opened some people's eyes to some of the possibilities. I think it's fair to say that there's probably more demand for the sort of capital that Triple Flag and our peer group companies provide now than there ever has been in the past. Then the other piece of the puzzle, of course, is share buybacks. We love taking shares off the denominator and buying back shares. We have become a little more active this year. Partly that's just the growth prospects and the positive developments in the portfolio and just looking for opportunities to take some shares out of the share cap table.
You mentioned the competitive environment. I'd just like to expand on that a little bit and how new transactions are being more competitive, less competitive, and how you're balancing higher metal prices with the producer's ability to self-fund versus their ability to come to the streaming of the market for capital, right? How do we balance those, and how has that changed over the last two years?
So I'd say in broad strokes, the competitive environment hasn't really changed since Triple Flag came on the scene. We were founded in 2016. Primarily, we compete with Franco-Nevada, Wheaton Precious Metals, Royal Gold, and Osisko Gold Royalties. That's generally our competition set. There's a number of other players, but we don't tend to come across them quite as often. We're always looking for good opportunities there. More recently in the metal prices, I mean, the metal prices go up, it affects the deck, but everyone's trying to be reasonable. I'd say right now, prices have come off the highs. It probably is a little tougher in Q1. I would have trouble underwriting a $5,500 gold price, and I'm very happy to say we did not underwrite a single dollar of deployment at that sort of gold price.
I think people are comfortable with the long-term direction of gold, so generally we price off the consensus prices.
Got you. When you think about the current portfolio and the optionality therein, where do you think are some of the opportunities where you can sort of bring some of that to light to the market?
Yeah. I won't dwell on Northparkes because I've already touched on that, but that is probably the biggest unrecognized value, really. It's really moving up that capacity. If you go from 7.6 million tons per annum to 10 million or 11 million, you just drive a lot of value. The other one is our royalty on the Koné project, and then Hope Bay, and I've touched on those already as well. Little more below the radar screen assets. I'll talk about our Tamarack royalty. Tamarack's a project. It's located in Minnesota. It's run by Talon Metals. Unbelievable grades there. It's a nickel- copper project. The development work, the exploration work they've done there is quite stunning, and it looks like a really big one. We have a 1.7% royalty on that, and that company's now part of the Lundin group.
I think that's probably something that doesn't get the profile it maybe deserves in our portfolio. The other one that I'll cite is Polo Sur. Polo Sur is a copper deposit. It's located in Chile. It's held by Antofagasta. It's near the Centinela operation. We bought that a number of years ago for a very de minimis price, and I think that that's now going to come into the mine plan a little bit more sooner than maybe we expected. So that might be a little nice boost for our shareholders.
Yeah. Sheldon, in the new opportunity set of organic growth that you look at, how do you discern the different returns between streams versus royalties and, in some cases, hybrids?
Yeah. When we're looking at deploying, I wouldn't say that we have a different return profile for a stream versus a royalty. Also in good jurisdictions on good geology. We spend a whole lot of time thinking about what's the prospectivity, how good is the geology, how's the mining engineering, how's the social license, how skilled is the operator, how much confidence do we have, what are the downside risks? We spend a lot of time looking at that and establishing our base case, and then the returns flow out of that. If something's higher risk, we either say, "You know what? This is too high risk for us." We're not in the super high-risk business. Maybe we adjust a little bit with return. But basically, it's getting comfortable with the base case and then finding a pathway to get more.
We are looking for that exploration potential, having a large area of interest, and that is what really drives a lot of value over time. Between a stream and royalty, fairly agnostic.
Got you. The last several years have brought fundamental changes in the definition of critical minerals, right?
Yeah.
Do you think there is room for critical minerals, streams, and royalties inside a precious metal streaming and royalty company? Is that something that you look at? Could we see that in the future? What are your thoughts on them, on being exposed to that type of metal stream?
Yeah. I think the model definitely can translate to things other than gold and silver. I cannot see anyone arguing the contrary case there. Triple Flag is a precious metals investment vehicle, so I am not going to take Triple Flag away from being a 90% gold and silver, and probably a pretty strong preference for gold over silver within that. Now, opportunistically, when we see really good opportunities, we will look at a copper exposure, we will look at copper or nickel or in one case we did a really nice investment on a lithium project and we have realized really, really good returns there. But it really is opportunistic, where we see something kind of extraordinary on the value side or the potential side, and it will be fairly small dollars being deployed so that the bulk of the exposure is always gold and silver.
Yeah. Got you. You mentioned Franco-Nevada and Wheaton Precious Metals as sort of your main competitors. Let's include Royal Gold in that. Do you think that is going to, in the case of room for consolidation in the streaming and royalty space over the next several years? A lot of smaller players in that bucket that is sort of below $500 million in market cap, then there is that big gap towards the major players like yourself. Just how do you see consolidation in the streaming and royalties place playing out?
Yeah. We are maybe not unique, but we are one of the few that has actually done some consolidation on the streaming and royalty side. We acquired Maverix Metals a few years ago. It is really important when you are buying a streaming royalty company to just go down through your purchase price allocation and put a value beside the assets on the portfolio and not be stretching. I am really, really pleased how Maverix Metals turned out. Hope Bay came out of Maverix Metals, Eskay Creek came out of Maverix Metals, so did Koné. There has been a number of real successes there. Kensington and Beta Hunt were other ones. I think we did a good job there and we found value. When we are looking, it is really that exercise. What you cannot do is you cannot stretch and pay too much.
There really are not the sort of operating synergies you can get with an operating company. It really is buying a collection of assets in bulk as opposed to one at a time. As for consolidation on the larger companies, it really depends on people coming to a view on value. It is a little harder in practice than it is in theory.
Got you.
I do not see any coming right now, but maybe there is. I mean, obviously Royal did their big deal with Sandstorm last year.
Yeah. Sheldon, right now we are sitting on that 2030 target, which is 150,000-160,000 gold equivalent ounces. Of course, there is going to be a portfolio of assets that are just sitting on the cusp of being brought into that guidance.
Yeah.
Tell me how that is going to evolve when we roll over that guidance over the next several years. What assets do you think can start to come into that?
Yeah. No, thanks, Ralph. What is really nice is we have that 2030 long-term guidance out, and that was a five-year guidance. We released that in February. We increased that midyear as we added some assets to the portfolio. It is not a cliff effect, right? We actually kind of go up sequentially. There is a whole number of assets driving that. One of those is Koné, which I already mentioned.
Yep.
That's already had their first gold pour a little earlier than predicted. We're going to see sequentially higher GEOs out of Triple Flag over the course of the next five years. That five year number, it doesn't peak in 2030. We did not include Hope Bay in our 2030 number. Agnico's since come out and said they're going to have Hope Bay in production in 2030, so that's nice. We also are going to get those guaranteed minimum ounces out of E44 in 2031. If you're a shareholder, you can kind of look forward to when we put out our guidance in February of each year for a number of years, we're set up where we're going to be sequentially higher for the next year guidance. Also that five year number is going to roll over at a higher level as well.
It's actually a really nice setup from a management team standpoint. That's before we put out another dollar of deployment. In the meantime, we're going to be looking to add good value to our portfolio as well.
Great. Sheldon, there's about three minutes left. I just want to open up to the floor before I get onto some final questions. Please, if there's anyone, please raise your hand and we can get a mic to you ASAP. Sheldon, just one last one for me before we close it off. What do you think investors should look most forward to in 2027 and the differentiated aspect of why do you buy Triple Flag versus the peers, versus an ETF, or versus a gold miner?
Yeah, no, thanks, Ralph. We're really well set up for 2027. I gave you the one highlight where we're kind of set up with this growing profile of production. Production translates directly into cash flow in the streaming and royalty model. You have those 90% margins and you're just not exposed to CapEx or OpEx, even in the high inflation environment. It's the developments on these assets in our portfolio. We're going to see Koné contributing. We're going to have a full year of Ravenswood in 2027. I'm looking forward to continued news flow on the Arthur deposit and on Eskay Creek and on Hope Bay. Even over time, I think we've driven fantastic returns. I think we have peer-leading returns on our invested capital. We've had good returns since our IPO in 2021. We have a really great jurisdiction mix.
We actually have the highest concentration in Australia of any of our peer groups. We really pay a lot of attention to doing strong underwriting, strong technical due diligence, and then making value-accretive investments for our shareholders.
It's a great point you made about jurisdiction. Just wondering, within that portfolio, do you think you're underrepresented in any certain jurisdiction where you would love to, if the opportunity came up, to get just a little bit more weighting?
The way we look at jurisdiction is the opportunities come at us and it's not like you say, "Okay, I'm targeting investment in this jurisdiction or that jurisdiction," but it's the filter gets a lot harder as the jurisdiction gets riskier. It's not an accident that we have such a high proportion in Australia. I love Australia as a mining jurisdiction. Also love Canada, U.S., Chile, Peru, those sorts of investments. It's not that we're targeting a certain area that we don't have representation, but there's obviously a number of jurisdictions that you're not interested in investing. I won't name them, but.
Yeah.
You probably get a lot of agreement in this room.
Yeah.
On that list.
Well, Sheldon, we wish you continued success, and I'd like the audience to please join me in thanking Sheldon for his great presentation and for having a chat with us.
Thank you, Ralph.
All right. Thank you.
Thank you.