We have a great discussion today planned. Here's how it's going to work. Ronnie's going to walk us through a couple of slides, going through the In Gold We Trust perspective on the current metals environment, just as a lead-in. We're going to do some planned questions. We will have time to take questions from the live audience. That chat button at the bottom of your screen, you can use it at any point during today's event. Please do ask questions. There is a chance I won't be able to get to them because we do have a lot of content planned for today, especially really specific questions about Contango. We may pass on to their team afterwards rather than answer them today. It really depends on how much time that we have left.
I'll also say before we get into the action, today's event is being recorded and will be available for replay, probably midday Eastern Time. It'll pop right in your inbox. It'll also be available on this same link and also on SIX's YouTube channel. Let's get into the protein. Ronnie, I'm pretty excited to walk through your slides. I'll have you share your screen. Just lead us off today.
Let's get into the protein. Never heard this term. I think I kind of know what you mean. Does it work?
My intro is empty carbs. This is the good stuff.
Can you see my slides?
We can, yes.
Good evening from Vienna, from Austria. Today's no World Cup games, so we all have time to think about gold. Thanks for having me, Romeo. It's a great pleasure to do this webinar together with Rick. I will give you a very quick view from our point of view, from the In Gold We Trust team, what's going on, where we see the market at the moment. Let's talk about markets and about Contango. Quick overview of what we actually do. Now it works. What we do, we publish the In Gold We Trust report for 19 years now. This year's edition, "Back to the Monetary Future," was the 20th edition. I don't know if it's the best, but it's at least the longest report on gold.
This year, we wrote again 450 pages. It's not about gold, actually. It's about everything. It's about interest rates. It's about macro. It's about inflation. It's about geopolitics, about de-dollarization. Every year, we try to write a little bit less, and we end up with a new all-time high. I think this year's publication is a pretty interesting one. Again, it's called, "Back to the Monetary Future." We aren't just gold pundits because everybody can say, "Ah, gold will go to 10,000," whatever. Primarily, we are asset managers. We are making our money from managing investment funds. I'm managing two funds. One of them is an active gold product. Actually, we publish daily NAVs, and I think that really differentiates us from people just writing newsletters about gold. We actually manage capital. We're still a boutique. We manage CHF 580 million.
I think that's always important to emphasize. What happened in the gold market? Let's briefly talk about this big U-turn that we saw in interest rate expectations. Let's not forget we went into 2026 with the expectation that we would see one, probably two rate cuts, and this has completely reversed. At the moment, the market is seeing at least one rate hike this year and two additional ones next year. I think this, in combination with a couple of other drivers, is really the driving factor for gold at the moment. The correlations have changed. The story has changed a little bit, at least the story that the media is talking about. I think that interest rate expectations were really crucial.
Where I'm pretty confident that the market is wrong regarding interest rate is the fact that inflation expectations, so inflation break-evens, for example, collapsed over the last couple of weeks. Actually, we are seeing the lowest inflation expectations actually since the inauguration of Donald Trump. This could, with a big if, the situation in Iran doesn't escalate again, this could be a driver for actually rate cuts, and we've got midterm elections coming up. We know that Donald Trump is quite vocal when it comes to lowering interest rates, and then that there will be enormous amount of pressure on Kevin Warsh. Of course, he's the new guy. He wants to show some strength. From my point of view, we'll rather see rate cuts than rate hikes.
Another driver or another reason why the market is taking a breather is let's not forget, ladies and gentlemen, that gold was up 64% last year in dollar terms. That's a really spectacular performance in one year, and year to date, we're down 5.5%. I always compare it to you cannot run up the Mount Everest. You have to take your time, you have to get used to the altitude, settle down for a couple of days, and then start the next part of the expedition. We're now taking a big breather when it comes to gold, but I think after this spectacular performance last year, I think that's just normal.
If we do the inverse, if we said that it's not the price of gold that is actually rising, but rather the purchasing power of money that is falling. I think that's exactly the same numbers, the same data, but just inverted. We're changing the perspective. I think that's always pretty interesting to see that actually since the year 2000, the U.S. dollar has devalued 93% versus gold.
The euro has devalued 92% versus gold. Last year it was down 39%, so a loss of purchasing power of 39%, and this year the dollar has gained slightly, 5.8%. I think it's really interesting to have that perspective. Where are the limits? We've seen this spectacular all-time high in January, and now we're basically exactly at the 25% correction level.
We saw gold dipping below $4,000 very quickly, we also saw the Chinese were buying hand over fist below $4,000. Today, there's pressure on gold again, I think that below $4,000 there is an enormous amount of buying power. I don't really see a significant correction below those levels because gold is already very oversold. Have a look at this chart. That's the drawdown and gold price as a percentage of the 200-day moving average. Extremely oversold. If you have a look at this level, the daily sentiment index, extremely oversold. We should at least see a bigger bounce over the next couple of weeks. This is a very interesting slide by SentimenTrader.
It reminded me of Jim Grant saying, "The only permanent truth in finance is that people will get bullish at the top and bearish at the bottom." SentimenTrader analyzed the data, they said that the last eight times sentiment got this washed out since 2008, gold was higher one month later, every one of them. A year out, the same story. This enormous amount of bearishness is from a contrarian point of view, is actually a gift. Our signal that we're using in one of our funds that I'm managing, the Incrementum Active Aurum Signal, it showed us actually already in March that we shouldn't hit the brakes, but take the foot off the gas pedal and become a little bit more conservative.
We're running 65%, almost 70% cash, which is a great opportunity for us because we can go shopping at bargain prices. A little bit like Warren Buffett once said from the 1970s, he felt like a little kid in a candy store. We're seeing an enormous amount of value in the mining sector. The good thing is for us that we hold big cash levels while most other investors, actually, they're long only, they're always fully allocated. We can allocate capital now, which makes me very happy and confident. We can also see that central banks were the major drivers of this bull market in gold, obviously. Last year only, we saw that gold ETFs started piling in, and they got pretty negative recently.
We saw some bigger outflows from the gold ETFs, which is telling me investors, Western financial investors, they're still acting on a tactical basis, not on a strategic basis, while central banks continue to buy significant amounts of gold. First quarter of this year, again, more than 250 tons of gold. We don't see any major inflows from the gold ETFs at the moment. Is gold already expensive? Well, it's not the extreme contrarian buy that it was three or four years ago. However, if we measure it in equities, for example, actually you can see that we're not really super overvalued. We are now basically still above the long-term median measures in the Dow-gold ratio. Every big bull market in gold obviously ends with extremes, with lows at extreme levels, and we're still far away from that.
My message has always been over the last couple of months, we're in a bull market, this bull market is taking a breather, we haven't seen the top of this bull market yet. In monetary terms, gold is still, I would say, fairly cheap at the moment. This is the so-called shadow gold price, which shows the gold price that is required to back the monetary base. We saw in the 1930s, 1940s, and also in 1980, that actually more than 100% of the monetary base was backed by gold. At the moment, it's less than 25%. I would say from a monetary point of view, gold is still very cheap. Can we go back to 100% backing of the monetary base? I don't see it for the time being, but as you see here, it happens every couple of decades.
Would I rule it out? No, definitely not. In monetary terms, gold is still pretty cheap. We wrote about the six vectors of the gold re-monetization in this year's In Gold We Trust report. If there's one chapter from this year's report that I really encourage you to definitely read it's this one, because it shows you the big picture. As investors, we tend to look at the short-term view, today's a weekday, actually we have to zoom out. I think it's really important to really connect the dots, this is what we're doing in this chapter. There's six different vectors that are leading to this gold remonetization, they're independent from each other, actually they stimulate themselves. From my point of view, this is not a structural story.
It is really a story of a gold remonetization that we are expecting for the next couple of years. Is gold already expensive? I already tried to talk about that very quickly, I think if we compare it to the 1980s, for example, we can see that the gold allocation by private investors at the moment, 2.7%. In the 1980s, it was 8.3%, actually. Central bank gold reserves in the 1980s, 62%. Now it's 26%. I think this is a bull market, this is not the irrational exuberance that we usually see at the end of a secular bull market. We haven't really seen the mania yet. January was obviously a little bit frothy, I think that for the end of a big bull market, you will see a completely different levels of euphoria.
One reason for that is actually that usually at the end of every cycle, you're seeing crazy M&A. What we're seeing at the moment is I think that most of the deals also Dolly with Contango, I think those deals totally made sense. What we're seeing now is that the sector is producing a record amount of free cash flow. Have a look at the earnings per share. Have a look at the growth of earnings per share, +350% since 2023. Have a look at the PE of the GDX. It's coming down, actually. Have a look at the profitability of the sector. From my point of view, at the end of this cycle, we will see crazy M&A. We'll see ridiculous premiums being paid, we haven't seen that yet. That already leads me to my conclusion.
I think we're right on track for our long-term price target, which is $8,900 by the end of this golden decade. We published this report called "The Dawning of a Golden Decade" in 2020, and we said $4,800 is our base case scenario, and $8,900 is our forecast if the 2020s should become an inflationary decade. Clearly, inflation is one of the primary drivers in this decade. $8,900 is still very much realistic from our point of view, based on our models, based on our views. Therefore, I think we should all embrace this correction within the secular bull market. I think I won't go through all the bullet points. Romeo said that we can make the slides available. That was a very quick view on the market that we're seeing, and now I look forward into gold. We're seeing de-dollarization continuing.
On the other hand, we're seeing still extremely low allocations when it comes to gold. There was a UBS study, for example, quite recently. Family offices, those family offices, actually, they should have a very long-term perspective.
Sure.
Their allocation on average is below 3% in gold. I would say that's not really a hedge. That makes me pretty relaxed, I have to say. Of course, bull markets are more fun than bear markets, but we all know that actually you make the big money over the course of the bear market because that's the time when you should really allocate your capital.
Sure. This is just when we get to have the fun conversations as gold bull. Rick, I'll get you in here on the same questions. What do you think gold needs to get moving?
I think Ronnie's right. It's the interest rates and all eyes on the Fed sort of a thing. I think just a couple of other things to put it in perspective. Central banks were net sellers of gold before the world financial crisis.
Sure.
They've been net buyers ever since, and they've gone from buying 400 tons a year to buying 400 tons to 1,000 tons a year.
Sure.
They've stepped it up, and they've stepped it up because the gas pedal on printing money is probably down at the floorboards by now. To put it in perspective, when they're buying gold at that rate, that's almost a third of the annual production of gold that the industry produces. We've been producing for the last 10 years between 3,500 and 3,600 tons of gold a year, which is 115 million ounces, 120 million ounces, troy ounces of gold. When you're buying 25%, 30%, a specialized group are buyers, that has an impact, the price of gold has to go up. It's certainly been a sea change from before the world financial crisis.
Sure
After the world financial crisis, in terms of creating money. They haven't been sustained buyers since Bretton Woods. Go back to that 1970s, 1980s timeframe when Nixon closed the gold window, took us off the gold standard. Gold went from $35, peaked out at $800. We had a real strong Fed in Paul Volcker, who strangled us with double-digit interest rates, but did cool things down. Is this latest cycle of central bank buying a wash, rinse, repeat story? I don't think so. It's not exactly the same, for sure.
Some things are different from the 1980s, certainly the U.S. dollar's lost a lot of value back then, and we're seeing it lose a lot of value now. Circumstances are different, once again, we find ourselves back involved in the Middle East, specifically in Iran and oil. That was the story back in the 1970s leading up to the peak of gold in 1980. How does that saying go? The more things change, the more they stay the same?
Yes. There's also history rhymes, for sure. There's some elements of that. Rick, I want to stick on you because I know there's some Contango-specific news, speaking of this pullback. You guys had that big fun, sexy news on July 6th that your hedge book is gone. Pause here for applause from the crowd. You converted the final 15,000 oz, which were struck at $1,935, into some debt, knocked the interest rate down to 7.4%, and picked up some put protection, too. You swapped a ceiling on gold for a manageable debt schedule. I'd love if you could walk us through the logic, the strategy behind that trade, why this recent pullback that we're going through is the moment to pull that trigger, and what unhedged, unplugged Contango looks like heading into that big 2027 production year.
Yeah. Look, at the beginning of the year, we said we wanted to get rid of the bank-imposed hedges as soon as possible. Here we are mid-year, and we've done that. We're hedge-free. We want to give our shareholders and investors 100% exposure to the gold price. We think it's going up, and gold investors invest in gold because they think it's going up, not because they think it's going down. If they think it's going down, they probably shouldn't be investing in gold. We accomplished this in two main steps. First, we delivered into the 2026 hedges all the gold that we were producing. We just said, "Let's just keep delivering into this so we can get rid of these as soon as possible." Staying ahead of the curve, if you will.
Then we made arrangements with our bankers to replace the hedges with debt. We kept seeing the gold price go down to $4,000, and then it would go up, and then it would get smacked back down to $4,000. It was on again, off again, as you pointed out earlier. Oh, there's peace in the Middle East. Oh, gold price goes up. Oh, there's war in the Middle East. We're shooting rockets again. Gold price goes down. Like you say, it is a bit somewhat counterintuitive, but I think Ronnie gives a good explanation of when you see that much gold being sold because people have to buy stuff, oil and other things related to it. Anyways, we saw that as a level that gold didn't seem to want to go down below.
We worked out with our bankers to a bunch of paperwork to get done and approvals from committees and blah, blah. You got to plan this out in advance. Okay, the next time the gold goes down to $4,000, we're going to pull the trigger. That's what we did. We replaced it with that. Again, we think investors want to have maximum leverage to gold, and our job is to give them that by producing as much gold as we can, but also giving them optionality on future gold, and in our case, silver production. Specifically from our high-grade DSO model, direct shipping ore model, which results in low capital intensity. We've acquired assets and we're developing assets like Lucky Shot, Johnson Tract, and Kitsault, all high grade and all fit that DSO model.
Again, our job, produce as much gold as we can and provide that future optionality on future production. Why now? As I said, you guys have already been talking about the gold kind of peaked out there at $5,500 six months ago. We're down 25%. It's a nice healthy correction. We see Central Bank buying at this $4,000 level. I think they collectively no longer believe in the dollar. It's that de-dollarization story. In fact, it's not just the dollar, though. They don't believe in any currencies.
Yeah.
The yen, euro, won, I mean, you name it. They're all kind of in the toilet. Their central banks are diversifying away from paper promises and into gold. Perhaps we're heading back in towards a de facto gold standard, but not like Bretton Woods, but something new, something global, and something mostly driven by China, frankly.
Yeah. I'll say as somebody paid in Canadian pesos, it's certainly not the American dollar that's doing badly, just for anybody curious. Ronnie, I do want to talk about rate cuts, because I know it's on the minds of some people in the chat. Some people wrote it in advance. Markets came into 2026 obviously pricing in rate cuts because Donald Trump is not shy about what he wants, and he was not shy immediately upon appointing Warsh about what he wanted. Instead we got a Fed where the minutes show the committee split nine to eight on whether the next move is a hike. I know you've discussed this already, but I want to get into what gold actually needs from monetary policy to resume the uptrend. Does it need cuts or hikes coming off the table? Would that be enough to do it?
I think it's hikes coming off the table. What I really like, we are always pretty quick to criticize the Federal Reserve and central bankers in general. I think that what I saw from Kevin Warsh, he's a really, how do you say, a straight shooter. He's not an academic. If you compared it to the wording and the language of Janet Yellen and Ben Bernanke, it's a completely different animal. He's very much clear and I think a good communicator. Then, of course, there is a saying, it's called, "Central banking is a religion, and central bankers are the high priests of that religion." We all remember Alan Greenspan, the maestro, and everybody thought that he can really move markets and that he can decide where not only the U.S. economy, but the world economy is going to.
I think that's a pretty naive view because the world is so much globalized. Yeah. Interest rates are important, then on the other hand, I think there's too much emphasis on the power of central bankers. Of course, I think the market looked for a narrative to get gold down. Everybody was kind of looking for an excuse to sell gold, and I think that was the primary excuse. From my point of view, we are at the end of a hiking cycle, not the start of one. He was pretty clear that he prefers the so-called trimmed PCE, which I had a look at it and it didn't really forecast the last couple of inflation episodes. Let's just emphasize that the Fed has missed the 2% mark for 63 consecutive months.
The market thinks that Kevin Warsh is the new Paul Volcker, but he doesn't hold a bazooka. He's holding a water pistol at max. Yeah. Because the debt levels, they are there, and there's no way that he can solve those problems. There will be much, much more pressure coming from Donald Trump. Let's not forget, Jay Powell was Trump's guy at the beginning. Then they had a little bit more of a complicated relationship. We'll see, I think we shouldn't really over-emphasize the power of the Federal Reserve. I think if we zoom out, there is no way that Kevin Warsh can solve all those issues that the U.S. has.
I appreciate that very much. Let's move on quickly from gold into silver. Rick, I know the Contango team calls silver the drama queen, and I think it can sometimes act a bit like that. I know in March you formally changed the company's name after the merger with Dolly Varden to Contango Silver & Gold. Silver since then has had a wild ride coming off that record $120 that happened in January conference season, down to, I think right now it sits at the high $50s. Planting a flag on silver through that kind of volatility, to me reads as a real conviction call. What is it about the silver setup and about Kitsault project that made you want silver front and center in the company's identity?
Well, yeah, as we've said, the drama queen, it results from being both precious and industrial. It's poor man's gold, but it's heavily used in everything electronic. It is now also officially a critical metal, in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Europe, and most importantly China. I always look to the end use, besides jewelry. Jewelry was there, but besides jewelry, solar panels, electronics, military applications, data centers, solid state batteries is a new big growth area for silver use. All that's going to just likely result in sucking up a lot of silver over the next decade. Obviously, substitution will become an issue at some point. Is it $100 silver where you just see substitution? Is it $200? I think it'll be closer to $200.
Meanwhile, there's a huge amount of R&D going on, some using more silver, some using less silver, some trying to replace the use of silver. I always point out, keep in mind that gold's also part of this equation, since gold's also used in lots of electronics. All those connections that absolutely need to happen. Best example I always give is the airbag deployment in your car. For insurance reasons, that has to deploy, and that's a gold switch that makes that happen. Gold's the ultimate noble metal because it doesn't oxidize or corrode. Silver does. Copper does. That R&D will be really important to watch over the next decade. I think both gold and silver are truly critical in that space. I think all these new electronic applications are going to put gold and silver in a good place for quite a while.
As for Kitsault Valley, well, I thought that was obvious, how we have a dominant land position in a hugely rich part of the Golden Triangle. Silver grades average over 300 g per ton. That's 10 oz per ton. If you use silver at $50, just gets an easy number to do math with in your head. 10-ounce rock is worth $500 a ton. That's really high-grade material. The veins at Kitsault, they're not only high grade, but they're fat, they're thick. They're 3 to 10 plus meters wide. Easily mineable widths using low-cost bulk long hole stoping methods. I think we'll be able to produce silver for about $25 an ounce. That's a $25 margin if you have $50 silver. If we can produce 5 million ounces of silver at startup, that results in $125 million of free cash flow.
We'll have our MRE coming out later this month. We're targeting end of the month. It's not just dependent on us, it's dependent on the QP, and they're busy folks this time of year. We're shooting to have it done by the end of the month. I think we'll be close to 100 million ounces of silver, plus 1 million ounces of gold when that MRE comes out.
I envision a mine at startup that can produce 5 million ounces of silver annually, but then can grow to 10 million ounces of silver. We're now drilling about 40,000 m this summer season, which we'll continue to do more infill work and expand the high-grade resources. By this time next year, what I want to have is a preliminary mine plan for developing the Kitsault district. That's what shareholders can look forward to between now and 2027.
Awesome. Appreciate that. Ronnie, I'm going to get you in on silver too, because, like Rick alluded to, the structural deficit story hasn't really gone anywhere. Industrial demand is still there. The metal did lose half its value in about six months. My question to you is, how much of that move up to 120 was real, and how much was just the kind of frothy exuberance that you talked about with relation to gold in your presentation? I also want to know with the gold-silver ratio, it's back to around 70 after all the drama. Where do you think is fair? Where do you think is the actual real resting point of that ratio?
Well, I think that the last $20 in January, they were rented, they were not owned, yeah? We all kind of knew that this unfortunately cannot go on forever. I think that the physics didn't change. We're seeing six consecutive years, so the cumulative six-year deficit in silver is 762 million ounces. That's nearly a full year of global mine production. We know that 75% of silver is a byproduct, and we know that there was a huge, huge lack of exploration and development in the sector, and we shouldn't expect too much growth in silver production over the next couple of years. I think that now a bottom is always a process, and I think the process is now happening. I think that around the $60, we're seeing quite a lot of interest in silver again.
I think that silver will never really be able to completely decouple from gold. I said previously a couple of reasons why I don't think that we've seen the top of this gold bull market yet, and one of them was that we haven't seen any crazy M&A yet. The second one is that usually at the end of a secular gold bull market, you're seeing the gold-silver ratio dramatically lower, so between 15 and 20. I think in January, the lows of the gold-silver ratio were somewhere in the high 50s. That's another reason why I think, okay, well, we're taking a breather in this secular bull market, but we haven't seen the top. I always said that if we see $8,900 for gold by 2030, and we see a gold-silver ratio of 10, 15, you can do the math. That's significantly higher.
I don't say that we will reach those levels, but I think that we can easily go in a blow-up phase of the gold bull market. Why shouldn't silver go to $300 or $400? I can easily see that. We haven't seen institutional money coming in. We saw it a little bit. There was some nice ETF inflows in December and January, but not really the big money piling in. It's the same with everybody's always waiting for the generalist investors coming in, and we're hearing those stories every year at PDAC and Beaver Creek Precious Metals Summit and Denver Gold. So far, we haven't really seen it. I think it will be happening, and this will be the future driver of demand, really generalist money coming in.
Awesome. No, appreciate that very much. I got one more actually for you, Ronnie. I just saw a stat that feels interesting to me, and I just want to talk about Chinese buying specifically. The ECB now estimates gold makes up 27% of global official reserves, which is above U.S. Treasuries, sits at 22%. The Bank of China posted its 20th straight month of buying and its largest monthly purchase since 2023 in this worst quarterly decline for gold in 13 years. Is this the reserve regime change that you've been writing about for years finally showing up in the official data, or is this something else that we just don't understand yet?
Well, in 2024, we wrote about the new gold playbook, and I think that what is really dear to my heart is I think gold has a really bad reputation in the traditional investment space. People think that if you buy gold, you're basically hoping for the world to end. You're hoping for hyperinflation, civil war, like really worst-case scenarios. There's a positive case for gold, I think that we should emphasize that much more. This positive case is that more than 50% of the gold demand is nowadays coming just from China and India. If you add countries like Turkey, the whole Arabic region, other Asian countries, then you can say that two-thirds of the physical gold demand are coming from emerging markets. From my point of view, gold is an emerging markets growth story.
If you're confident that emerging markets will continue to do well, I think this will also give you a pretty positive view on gold. This is not only for private investors in emerging markets, this is also for institutional players in emerging markets and also for central banks in emerging markets. Compared to industrialized nations, their gold allocations for emerging market central banks are significantly lower, I think they just want to show strength and confidence, they want to be taken seriously, this is the reason why those central banks are buying gold. Just go to Dubai. Now it's perhaps a little bit dangerous, but when everything is over again, travel to Dubai, go to China, travel to India, and just feel and smell the gold affinity of those countries. How important gold is for people there.
If you ask 10 people on the street in India where's the gold price, I think that nine out of 10 will probably know pretty well where it's trading. If you do the same in New York, I think that probably one out of 10 will know where the gold price roughly is at the moment.
I think it's possible there's some people in the audience who own more gold than the Canadian government, just for reference.
Yeah.
It certainly depends. Rick, I want to get you in on Johnson Tract. I know we talked a lot about Kitsault, and we'll get to your producing mine in a second. Johnson Tract went onto the FAST-41 permitting dashboard in January. I know you're building the road from camp to the portal site this summer, and the plan is to start the underground exploration tunnel next year. You've been permitting projects in the U.S. for quite some time. How different does the process feel under the current critical minerals push, and is the FAST-41 timeline holding, or is it just window dressing to you on the ground?
Yeah, no, it's real. The administration and even Congress now recognize the importance of critical metals and the fact that we're 30 years plus behind China. Things like copper, zinc, silver. It's great to see that support finally from the federal government. FAST-41 was actually established under the Obama administration, not the Trump administration. A lot of people just assume it was Trump, but it wasn't. It was Obama. It's working really well. It's an online, transparent way of permitting federal projects. You're permitting a federal project when you trigger NEPA, and NEPA is the National Environmental Policy Act. So basically, anytime you need a federal permit to do something, which in Alaska is almost everything if it's related to mining. Anytime you want to build something in wetlands, you need a 404 permit.
Alaska has lots of wetlands, you pretty much can't build a road without a 404 permit. Air quality, water quality, fish passage, anything interacting with endangered species. Anything, anytime you're taking an action, it requires a federal permit for that. The FAST-41 process lists all the permits required, then you work out with the agencies all the studies and the process that all the agencies are going to want you to go through, and all the studies they want the applicant to do, to go through and demonstrate how you're going to build, in our case, a road and a barge landing facility, and minimize and mitigate the impacts to wetlands, ensure that fish can pass from one side of the road to the other, and avoid any impacts to endangered species. All that is sort of bundled in the dashboard.
They call it the dashboard. All the permits are listed there, the process by which you're going to go convince the agencies that you can build your road and your barge landing facility without any significant environmental impacts. The FAST-41 process lines up in a transparent way that the public can follow along. There are specific times when public can provide comments, when documents are complete. That's all part of NEPA. The key point is the timeline to get the work done. Under FAST-41, everyone agrees to a schedule up front. So long as we can provide the information and the studies in a timely manner, the agencies hold to their schedule to review the work, and the same with regards to the public comment periods. There's also a coordination with the state agencies, this is state specific. All the states work differently.
Alaska has signed an MOU with the federal government to coordinate the state permitting as well, everything stays on track. This is actually what permitting should look like. It's not really rocket science. Just agree on the timelines and stick to them. We have to stick to them, too. Obviously, if we don't get our work done in a timely manner, that will throw off the schedule. For our Johnson Tract project, I'd say everything is working really well. We have a great group of people working hard to stay on schedule. We expect to submit our formal application in early 2027 and receive our major construction permits by mid-2028. Congress needs to just make FAST-41 the law. That's what I would recommend. Just stick to the timelines. Agree on a schedule and stick to it.
That sounds like good infrastructure planning to me. There's one question I want to get you both in on. It's just this very odd disconnect. Rick, I'll start with you because you live it day to day. Even $4,000 gold, after this pullback, producers are generating some of the fattest margins in the history of the industry. Yet gold equities got hammered with the pullback with some senior producers down 25%, some intermediate producers down 50% in just a month or two. Rick, what does that disconnect look like and feel like from inside a producer? Do you just want to shake the market by the lapel?
Yeah, look, in gold and silver, the valuations are certainly lagging metal prices. Majors are sitting on a huge amount of cash, and they continue to generate more, which will probably lead to what Ronnie was referring to earlier is with when you have that much money burning a hole in your pocket, you want to do something with it. Right now, investors want you to buy back your own shares or pay a dividend. That's what the focus is. At some point, that's going to change to growth. What's really different now is margins are approaching $2,000 an ounce. For historic context, when I started in the gold mining business in the 1980s, before the 1980s, we never even paid attention to gold.
Yeah.
It was like a by-product metal.
Yeah.
We looked for copper and zinc, we looked for porphyries, we looked for VMS deposits. We didn't go look for gold deposits. $800 gold changed all that. For historic context, when the gold price in the 1980s bounced around $400 level, margins were $50-$100 an ounce.
Yeah.
We're $2,000 an ounce now. At Manh Choh next year, our margins are going to be around $2,500 if gold price is $4,000. If it's higher, obviously we're going to make more money. Next year, we're planning to produce between 75,000 oz and 80,000 oz of gold. That's going to result in about $200 million of free cash flow. We're valued like, I don't know what we're valued at. We don't get value for a lot of our assets, but our approach is unique in the way we are looking at this. This is what we want to make sure investors realize. Most juniors have to dilute to get anything into production.
Sure.
We're not that story. We've only got 33.5 million shares outstanding. Most of our peer group of junior producers who are producing around the same level we are, have 300 million or 400 million shares outstanding. They get 10 times the number of shares. One thing I always point out is on a per share basis, we have much better leverage.
Sure.
We have more gold and silver per share than our peer group. That's one reason I think you should take a look at Contango. We're not the operator of Manh Choh, Kinross is the operator. It's a high-grade DSO, direct shipping ore. We mine the ore, and it's transferred to Fort Knox by truck and processed there. We're more like a royalty company. Kinross does all the work. They do all the heavy lifting. While we take that cash flow and advance our early-stage or our exploration-stage assets like Lucky Shot, Johnson Tract, and Kitsault. We're using that cash flow to advance our projects without dilution to shareholders. The DSO model itself, focusing on high-grade deposits that can be processed at a central mill, it's a capital light solution to growing production.
Again, that's another way that we avoid excessive dilution, contrary to most junior companies who are going to develop a project on their own. Our business plan is to grow production from our current average of 60,000 oz of gold for the year from Manh Choh to 200,000 oz by adding Lucky Shot, Johnson Tract, and Kitsault over the next four or five years, and produce about 200,000 oz of gold and 5 million ounces of silver from Kitsault, obviously. We think that's a unique approach in the exploration space. That's our business strategy.
Great. Thank you. Ronnie, I know you've long made the case for miners as performance gold. Does this recent sell-off break that thesis, or is this the setup that you've kind of been waiting for and that you want to see?
I think that's just my view on the sector, I'm following it for 20 years now, I think it's just a tough sector. There is probably no other pocket of the market that is that complex because you've got actually the top-down risks, which is you've got the gold price risks. You've got all those macro drivers for gold and for silver. You've got all those bottom-up risks. You've got geological risks, you've got interest rate risk, management risk, ESG, infrastructure, energy, you name it. It's a really tough asset class. From my point of view, you can make ridiculous amounts of money in this space, but you also have to live with drawdowns 70%, 80%, up to 90%. That makes it so interesting and fascinating, I think.
Our view is that we will not be the ones that actually sell at the top, we won't be buying at the bottom, but we really want to catch the largest part of a bull market and avoid those major drawdowns. This is why we came up with this Incrementum Aurum signal, which works pretty well. As I've said, it moved to defensive in March, now it seems that it's slowly but surely going back to a more positive view. I think that, who was it? I think that Charlie Munger once said that, "If you can't handle a 50% drawdown, then you deserve a mediocre result." Fact is, the large cap producers they produce record amounts of free cash flow. They're net cash now. They got rid of all their debt. They're buying back shares.
There will be a massive consolidation in this space. There will be crazy M&A, as I've said before. I think it's our job as Rick, as a manager of the company and our job as a fund manager to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Sure
do our homework. Yeah. To deliver results for our investors and for our shareholders.
Yeah. There you go. One question that I've just been thinking about, because I think that it's a pretty interesting finding in the mid-year data that gold's pullbacks all seem to happen during U.S. trading hours, and the rebounds have come during Asian trading hours. Price discovery seems to be migrating east. What does that shift mean structurally if I'm accurate? What should Western investors take from the fact that the marginal buyer of gold seems to not really care that much about what the Fed does or doesn't do?
Well, I would say this trading pattern has also changed a bit. We went back recently to the normal trading pattern that we saw previously, but there were like, last year it completely reversed. We saw that Asian markets are actually driving the price. Now at the moment, we went from a massive premium in Shanghai to actually a little discount.
It seems that Chinese demand has also cooled off a bit. Indian demand is still pretty solid, I would say. Again, I think we all have to get used to those new price levels. Let's not forget that if we compare current prices to last year prices, we're still up. This was a tremendous run, and now we have to, again, if you do an expedition on a high mountain, we have to get used to the new levels that we're in. I think that's a process that we're currently in.
I appreciate that. Rick, I'll get you in on this. What do you think about, generally, the West no longer dictating the price of gold necessarily?
I think it's painfully obvious that the emerging markets that Ronnie was referring to are tired of us diluting our paper. That shift has been going on for a while, and it'll just continue. As Ronnie says, everything needs a breather every once in a while. This 25% correction from $5,500-$4,000 is pretty healthy. Again, it seems to be a floor, and once again, you see China back in there buying. It's interesting, in India, they're trying to put up roadblocks to buying gold, but it doesn't seem to ever work.
I got-
I think it's cultural.
Yeah. No, that's true. I got two rapid-fire questions for you, Ronnie, and then I'm going to get you guys to do price targets, everybody's favorite part of the event, the part they clip on YouTube and Twitter. There's two rapid-fire ones. Ellis asked, "Is there a crisis with the value of the Japanese yen and their interest rates, and will that affect the price of gold?" Just as a rapid-fire question.
It's tough to answer that. I think it's no easy reply. If you have a look at the price of gold in Japanese yen terms, it's been an excellent hedge. Of course, if Japanese should repatriate capital a big way, at some point we will see an enormous amount of strength in the Japanese yen. I would have expected it a little bit earlier to happen, actually, because there's just so much capital outside of Japan, and it will be repatriated at some point. That would, of course, completely change traditional patterns in capital markets. I think that following the yen is a very sensible idea.
I appreciate that. One last rapid-fire one. How do you assess the potential impact of a military conflict between the EU and Russia on mining companies and metals prices?
Well-
We're throwing tough ones at you today, Ronnie.
I can tell you that it seems that in the EU, everybody wants to go to war with Russia. It gives me sleepless nights. It's also some sort of distraction. We know that it's also big business. To create some growth, let's order more tanks and planes and whatever. Yeah. Again, it's something that definitely keeps me up at night, and that is if we follow history. If we connect the dots, it's worrisome. Yeah. Is there a direct impact on precious metals? I don't know. Yeah.
Hard to say. We'll get into price targets because I want to close off with getting specific if we can. The big banks, who cares what they say, they've got some year-end gold targets ranging from $4,800 all the way to $6,300. They remain bullish from today's numbers. Everybody's got a story for why. Ronnie, I'll start with you. Give us your number for gold and silver at year-end. I know we've got your number for the end of 2030. For the end of 2026, if possible, one catalyst you're watching most closely between now and the end of the year.
I would say around $4,500 by the end of the year, and again, I think it's going to be another reversal in interest rate expectations, so I think we will see actually the Federal Reserve cutting interest rates.
Perfect. Rick, I'll throw the same question to you, but I'll also add, which of your catalysts Contango Silver & Gold do you think the market is sleeping on the most right now?
Obviously, we think $4,000's a floor. We're bullish. I think that a $4,500 level, that'd be a nice level for me. I'd sleep well at night. As far as our catalysts, look, we're drilling a lot this year. We're going to drill over 60,000 m, 20,000 m at Lucky Shot and 40,000 m at Kitsault. We're only a third of the way through the program at Kitsault, and they're already at 25,000 m. I suspect we may end up with more than 40,000 m at Kitsault. We'll put out that MRE. That'll be a significant milestone for the company and specifically for recognizing the silver component of the company. We're targeting 100 million ounces. We'll add the 40,000 m of drilling, every time Kitsault was putting out drill results, they were always among the top 10 results of the week or the month or whatever.
We're going to remind people of that when we start putting those drill results out, probably in early August. We combine that with the MRE. By this time next year, we'll have basically reminding the market that this is a major silver district, and located in a Tier 1 jurisdiction. I think the market isn't paying close enough attention to that progression. There aren't a lot of high-quality silver projects out there, will we be scooped up in part of the M&A craze that will happen? We can be both hunter and hunted. We are going to execute our strategy, we'll have a lot of cash flow next year, we could be looking at acquiring other opportunistic assets that fit the DSO approach. We have this major silver district that another silver producer might covet.
I don't see that's totally out of the picture. I think in terms of what isn't the market paying close attention to, it's Lucky Shot. When we drill 20,000 m and we outline 400,000 oz-500,000 oz of resources on a project that can get quickly into production for another $50 million-$60 million of capital investment to get it back into production where we can produce 40,000 oz-50,000 ounces of gold a year by mining 400-500 tons of rock. That's not a lot of rock. That's not a lot of work. That can generate, if we got $2,000 all-in sustaining costs and you have $4,000 gold, you're generating another $80 million-$100 million of free cash flow. It's a great business, I don't think the market appreciates.
There's one point here, it's that, like you said, in the 1980s, you had a margin of $50-$100 an ounce, now we have, as a business, as an industry, we have $2,000 margins. If gold goes higher, obviously that margin grows. It's a great business.
It's a great business. I am inclined to agree. For everybody in the audience, thank you so much for joining us. In other words, a few hundred of you, really appreciate all your time. Ronnie and Rick, thanks so much for the conversation. For folks in the crowd, please do encourage you to subscribe to Ronnie's newsletter. It's right there in the chat. For folks looking to meet with Contango, there's a meeting request button at the bottom of the screen. Feel free to click it. It'll be there after the room closes. Ronnie, Rick, thank you so much. I think this was a really fun discussion. Looking forward to seeing what comes the rest of the year.
Thank you very much. Greatly enjoyed.
Thanks, guys.
All the best.
Cheers.
Have a good summer.
Cheers.
Thanks. Bye-bye.