Okay. Thanks for joining us.
Yeah. Did you get me down?
I'm Andrew Breichmanis from Stifel. I'm happy to have an excellent panel, some of whom have already presented today. I think the goal of this session is really to sort of discuss further some of the things that we heard earlier today and talk a little bit about some of the themes that we heard from the company presentations. I'd like to introduce Lord Ashburn, Charlie Gibson, Director of Content at Edison, Garrett Goggin from the Golden Portfolio, and Alasdair Macleod, Head of Research at Goldmoney. Maybe we'll start with Alasdair. The quote that I wrote down from your presentation earlier this morning was, "Gold is money. Everything else is credit." That seemed to be the sort of overriding theme of the presentation.
Maybe just for those that maybe didn't catch it, could you give, like, a quick summary of your discussion and what you see going forward?
Yeah. Well, I put forward sort of three questions at the opening. You know, why is gold rising? Why are bond yields rising? And how should that affect one's investment strategy? I mean, gold is rising because it appears to be rising. Actually, what's happening is the value of credit, hence the bit, you know, gold is money and all else is credit, it is credit going down, not gold rising. And I think when you grasp that concept, you begin to understand seriously what is actually happening. And the reason it's happening is, amazingly, because bond yields are rising. Bond yields are rising. Why? They're rising because the U.S. government is in a debt trap. And the way I could summarize that is that, rising interest rates are just gonna make the situation worse.
At the moment, the gross value of the debt, or the gross debt outstanding, is something like $34.6 trillion. In the last 90 days, they added $1 trillion. It is quite likely, going at that rate, there'll be another $4 trillion by the end of this year. Given that this is an election year, given that the economy is in recession and don't believe the growth thing, that's all pumped up by government money being pushed into the economy incidentally. This is not productive money. It's money which will undermine the purchasing power of the dollar. Basically, Main Street, small and medium-sized businesses in America, like in Europe, are dying on their feet. They are over-indebted in many senses, in many cases. Private equity business, you know, leverage businesses to the hilt, and of course, rising interest rates kill that. You've seen the commercial real estate business falling apart.
The banking system is in crisis. From central banks who've got huge, great, unreported losses on their balance sheets downwards into commercial banks who are trying to reduce their bank balance sheet leverage, which, again, means basically restricting the availability of credit for overdrafts, driving up the cost of borrowing, interest rates, of course. In fact, Jamie Dimon came out with something on that, overnight, I see, more or less confirming what I was saying but in slightly more polite language. You're gonna see interest rates rise. I wouldn't be surprised if we have the value, you know, the total government debt at the end of this calendar year at close to $40 trillion. I mean, this is a very serious situation. This is a debt trap. It's spiraling out of control. Chinese and the Russians see this.
They're gonna protect themselves if they don't take aggressive action. They will take action to protect themselves. I would not be surprised to see Russia, in particular, on a gold standard by the end of this year. They can do it. They know how to do it. Same with China 'cause they'd be forced to go that way, perhaps against their will. So how does this affect one's investment strategy? Well, the answer, quite simply, is you're gonna lose our bundle investing in industrial stocks, FANGs, whatever, bonds. I mean, they're all gonna go down the tubes. So what an investment manager does is he switches. He switches into something else. And the only thing that's gonna be rising, partly because the US dollar is falling, will be commodities.
But the other reason that commodities will be rising is if you look at the longer-term outlook for Asia, they are rapidly industrializing thanks to the combined partnership of Russia and China. This is the industrialization we're trying to stop, by the way. The effect of that is that there will be demand for commodities over and above the increase in their value due to the erosion of our purchasing powers. So that, I think, is where a lot of the future investment profits are gonna make. That's where investment managers are going to swing their portfolio emphasis. So actually, the timing of this conference, I think, in that sense, is very, very interesting. And I would really like to see people begin to think seriously about the entire resource sector, not just precious metals, energy, other metals, base metals, raw materials.
There're gonna be food shortages as well. So this is going to be a time of huge, huge, great change. There's gonna be a big wealth transfer from the West to the East. We know that there's been transfer of gold bullion from the West to the East, but wealth will go with it. Why? Gold is money. The rest is credit. It's credit that's going down the tubes. And that is why gold appears to be rising. Brief summary.
Excellent. Thank you. And earlier this morning, I know you didn't have time for questions at the end of your presentation, so I'll make sure that there's a little time at the end here. So anybody who has questions, we'll be able to get to them. I guess consensus seems to be, well, I guess expectations for interest rates were that at the start of the year, we're maybe six cuts throughout the year, and it seems to have been dialed back to two to three. It seems to be kind of changing on a daily basis, which seems at odds to what you're talking about. Is that a matter of time scale, or?
No. It's a matter of idiocy. Basically, the investing investment establishment has a vested interest in always being bullish. They think in inflation, inverted commas, is, is licked. It's not. If you actually look at the month-over-month increase in the CPI, it's been increasing every month since last October. Don't look at the annual trailing number. Just, just look at that. But it's worse than that. It's not actually the inflation thing which, to my mind, is driving all this. It is the debt crisis. And that is what's gonna push up interest rates. Anybody knows that when there's a shortage of credit because banks will be drawing in their horns, as I said, the price, the interest rate, if you like, of credit goes up. I mean, you know, it's a no-brainer. Yet everybody seems to be ignoring this very basic fact.
The Chinese are now, I mean, you know, the second time in 12 months, Janet Yellen's gone to China to talk to Chinese. Treasury teams have been over there. Why do they go there? Forget the headlines. They're talking to the Chinese about trying to persuade them to buy U.S. Treasury debt or at least stop selling it. I don't think they necessarily get anywhere because, you know, the official story is they're lecturing the Chinese about how to behave with their industrial investment. You know, wow. Isn't that gonna get them on side? Certainly not. Japan is the other major buyer. So the major, you know, buyer's on the margin that set the price. Japan has got its own problems. It's tried to suppress interest rates at the zero bound. It's still got them at the zero bound having been slightly negative.
And it's definitely desperately defending the yen at the 151 and a bit, 152 level. And it's got to sell dollars in order to do that. And it sells dollars, sells U.S. Treasuries in order to do that. So you've got both, Japan and China, for different reasons, sellers of U.S. Treasury debt. And this heightens the crisis. What's gonna happen to the yield? I mean, the only thing that the, Treasury has been able to do is been able to fund itself out of short-term, out of the T-bill market. It's absorbed pretty much all the liquidity that was available in the market in the process. At some stage, it's gonna have to go out along the yield curve a bit. And then you're going to see auction failures. And that will drive up bond yields big time.
Already, the relationship between bond yields and equities is very, very stretched. I mean, you don't have an equity market with the S&P at these current levels. You don't have that with bond yields at these current levels. I mean, they have risen very, very sharply. Admittedly, they're consolidating a bit. So there's a lot of hope in the market. That's gonna change. That's gonna change very rapidly. Probably overnight, you'll suddenly wake up and think, "Oh, my God. I wish I'd sold." It really is one of those situations. I've seen it so many times.
So maybe I can bring in Charlie for a bit of perspective. The gold price, I checked just before coming up, was $2,355 earlier today. Consensus estimates for 2024 were $2,055. For 2025, were $2,050. This is averages. And for 2026 is $1,888. And the range of those estimates was from $1,500-$2,280. So as a fellow analyst, do you think that just reflects a lag between people catching up to, you know, the realities that we're seeing in the market, or, you know, a lack of conviction in what we're seeing with the current price?
I think the answer is probably all of the above. You know who was at Yogi Berra? I think it said that, you know, forecasts were very difficult to make, especially when they're about the future. And I think that's true. And I think, you know, you could go back you know, if I were to pick up on what Alasdair was saying, you know, I think we're in a situation which is very akin to the late 1970s. And one of the features of that period was there was incredible volatility in a lot of things. You know, two of the things that there were there's a lot of volatility in were inflation and, surprisingly enough, U.S. interest rates. And I don't mean, you know, bond yields or anything like that.
I actually mean the Fed funds rate, which is not something you would normally expect to see volatility in. But there was a huge amount of volatility in that period as, you know, all the commentators look at these, you know, these conflicting signals to some extent, and they try and make sense of them. And then you have another group of people who are, and that allows you, if you want to be, if you wanna take that parallel and say, "Okay. We're like the late 1970s," and you're a gold analyst, then you can see 19 January 1980 in front of you, and you can be very bullish.
But then you also have people who sort of, you know, started their careers and I think some of us might fall into that category in the late 1990s, and they think, "My times were miserable, absolutely miserable for gold then." And they have a natural tendency to always be conservative. And so whatever the consensus appears to be, wherever the price is now, they tend to knock 20% off of it and say, "There's your number." So I think that partly explains why the range is so huge. You know, I look at that range and those figures, and I think, you know, it's very difficult because gold can be a very volatile thing, and it certainly was in the late 1970s.
You know, the time it took to go from $500 an ounce to $800 an ounce was, you know, it was nothing at all. And then back down to sort of $500 an ounce in not very much more time. So, you know, I think one of the things we have to expect is we do have to expect volatility. From an investment perspective, it's gonna be. I always think mining is hard enough anyway, and I think gold is hard enough anyway. It's gonna be harder. There are going to be, you know, huge opportunities out there. I'm afraid, sorry, that quote from Callaghan has just come to mind about the gnomes of Zurich. So when all of this volatility is going on and when this transfer of wealth is happening, you might find yourself being blamed. And, yeah. My apologies for that.
But you know, isn't that the way the modern-day world works? You know, it's gonna be the first person with the scapegoat, and I would've thought that'll be a, you know, a Jerome Powell sort of person will be saying, "Oh, it's, you know, it's in Zurich." I mean, maybe it won't be. Maybe he'll blame China or Shanghai or Hong Kong or something like that. But you know, I think the watchword going forward is volatility. I think there are great opportunities there. I think there are great opportunities there in gold. You know, dust will settle sometime, in the same way that it did in the late 1970s, early 1980s. Now, it took a pretty miserable recession in the early 1980s for the dust to settle. I'm gonna plug this shamelessly. Alasdair was fortunate enough.
He did present this morning. I'm presenting tomorrow morning, so I'll have some slides to go up around this. But, you know, the thing I look at is real interest rates. And that's where I expect the volatility to occur, or I certainly expect you to see that volatility in that. I think, but there will be opportunity. You know, as regards the transfer from West to East, I think the equivalent thing that happened in the '70s was a huge transfer of wealth from the U.S. and U.K. to Japan and Germany, from the sort of the old industrialized nations to the newly reindustrializing nations after the war. And if you looked at the Deutsche Mark, the Deutsche Mark in 2000 was pretty close to the Deutsche Mark in 1980.
But the Deutsche Mark in 1980 bore no resemblance, whatever, to the Deutsche Mark in 1970. There had been a huge shift in exchange rates. And just to give you an idea of what that shift in wealth means, I was talking to a graduate named Gont Cambridge. And he'd been at Cambridge in 1947. And I was sitting next to him on a plane. And I was saying to him, "That must be a pretty, pretty miserable time." And he said, "You know, it was a pretty miserable time." But he said, he said, "But one of the things I remember is, as an undergraduate, if as an undergraduate, if you bought wine for your table at Cambridge, you got Château d'Yquem" That's how wealthy they were in 1947, paying with pound sterling at, you know, I don't know, $4.80 or $4.40 per, per pound.
That's what they could afford. And I think, you know, the crisis that happened in the 1970s, I think, was created because of the intransigencies and the constraints set up in that 1947 sort of that Bretton Woods era. I think now we're seeing the same sort of crisis happen 30 years on from the constraints that were put in place in response to that 1970s crisis. So, yeah. Volatility and opportunity is my feeling.
Okay. Great. And, Garrett, we haven't forgotten about you, Darren.
Yeah. Still here.
I, I wanted to get you to sort of recap your presentation as well. But before you do that, and we shift the focus to the equities, just maybe some thoughts on, on what we've just heard in terms.
Yeah.
How are your thoughts on sort of the gold price and how to position?
Yep. Yep. People talk a lot about demand from China, and it's happening. You know, one of the charts that I look at on Bloomberg, it's Shanghai gold. You know, the price of gold in Shanghai, what it's trading at. It's been trading at a big premium, like a $50-$60 premium to the COMEX gold. It's almost like, you know, COMEX is low. COMEX in London are losing their pricing power to China. That premium has come down with the gold price explosion over here in the United States the past couple weeks. But that's one indicator that was really very interesting, that foretold, you know, the demand and that it's gonna eventually drive the price higher. And you can see that in Shanghai silver as well. Shanghai silver was trading for like a $4-$5 premium to silver trading in London and COMEX.
That gap has narrowed, also to basically $1 now. It's a little bit more even. But that demand, you know, it's continuing. It's not gonna stop anytime soon. One thing that's interesting is one of the charts that I look at, that I like is that 10-year minus 2-year, that yield curve spread. That shows whether the Fed is easing the monetary policy or tightening the monetary policy. In my chart, I overlaid it with the gold price. What you can see is that every time the yield curve started, moved negative and then started increasing back out of there, the gold price doubled. It happened in 2000. It happened in 2000 what, no 2006, in 2019.
Right now, it's beginning to go positive, and it's ready to, you know, go for a ride right here, suggesting gold is gonna double here as well. But one thing to note regarding all these times that the yield curve went negative and crossed back to positive, there was a massive financial disruption. You know, 2000 was the huge tech bubble that blew up. 2008, we all remember 2008. 2019, there was, you know, there were some bankruptcies, I believe, in the banking sector in the U.S. And then, like, we're seeing that in the U.S. Just people, you know, you look at the stock market, you think everything's great and wonderful. But the stock market's not the economy. And one of the articles I just wrote, like, I like Twitter.
I use Twitter as a pretty interesting tool 'cause you can create your own news feed of people that you like and that, you respect. And one of the things that kept popping up was, this commercial real estate broker talking about commercial real estate deals. This one got one in New York got sold at a 50% discount so since the last sale. This one in California sold at a 75% discount. One in Boston, they gave it away, for $0, because, you know, the shift from, people, being able to work from anywhere, a lot the office buildings aren't being used as much. And I live in Florida, and Florida's just, you know, jammed. There's so many people that have come down there in the past few years. But bottom line is that this commercial real estate, I believe, is under the radar. It's these smaller banks.
There's Huntington Bancs hares, and a couple other New York banks that specialize in these loans. And I wouldn't be surprised to see this manifest over the next weeks, month into some sort of crisis where more banks have to be bailed out. The Fed doesn't wanna start lowering interest rates, but they're gonna be forced to. And that's what I think the is gonna happen. The economy is gonna force the Fed's hand. Couple other things. The real interest rates is interesting because I've tracked that a lot as well. And gold has always tracked real interest rates really well, right, up until what, like three years ago?
Yeah.
Yeah. And then it's real interest rates have gone straight down, and gold's gone straight up. Like, I don't have any like, what do you think? What's going on with that?
Well, there was the COVID effect. You know, one of the big differences between now and the 1970s was that there was a COVID, you know, crisis, and it did crop up about, what, four years ago.
Okay.
So I think that's, you know, that's one of the complicating factors.
Okay.
You know, I think then, you know, but we were also coming out of, you know, QE1, QE2.
Yeah.
QE3, and then we were trying to taper.
Yeah.
And then the Fed said something, "Oh, no strains in the repo market." Do you remember that one in 2019?
Oh, that was it.
We're gonna stop.
That was it.
We're gonna stop the tapering. And then gold popped up then. And then we got to 2020, and something, you know, they reduced interest rates to.
Yep. Yep. And,
Zero.
Like I said, every time, you know, there's a major disruption, the stock market gets wrecked. I, like, I think we're setting up for something like that. And then the Fed comes back in, lowers rates, starts quantitative easing or some sort of QE again, and then gold just goes ballistic, so.
So maybe staying with Garrett, your presentation sort of focused on the Golden Portfolio and sort of your investment philosophy and how you looked at investing in companies. Can you maybe summarize that really quickly, and then we can maybe talk a little bit about some of the companies that we saw present today or some of the themes that we saw from the presentations today?
Mm-hmm. Who, who do you want, Garrett? Or maybe.
Oh, sorry. I was talking to Garrett.
You want me to start?
Yeah. Can you.
I did you what? And describe my investment philosophy?
Yeah. About the Golden Portfolio.
The Golden Portfolio?
Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. So, I'm an MBA, CFA. You know, I like numbers. I like proof. Theories are fun. Everyone has their opinion. But at the end of the day, you know, the only thing that drives share prices is, you know, cash in the bank, profits, free cash flow. So I evaluate that extremely closely. And then, you know, people look at charts, and they say, "It's gonna be different this time." You know, the majors are gonna go for a ride. But, you know, it's been the same history for 50 years where, you know, the majors have basically underperformed the market. And then I do a lot of quantitative research where I build model portfolios, and I backtest them. And just quite simply, you know, I built a portfolio of royalties back since 2007.
The returns were, like, 17,000%, like 32% a year CAGR, better than Buffett. And in my presentation, I explain why. For there's many, many reasons. They're structured to get lucky. So that's one of my products that, I'm focused upon. And then the other product was I believe that a lot of the value, that is generated in mining, it's generated from the drill bit. And a lot of this is very successful, investors and, gold investors, they know this. You know, even the majors can, you know, have a great drill hole, like at Kirkland at Fosterville. And it could, you know, propel the stock, you know, a tremendous amount higher. And then you really see the torque and the leverage, in the junior, space, the ones that have a lower capitalization. But, you know, you gotta be honest. You know, it's hard.
You're betting on, like, which tree's gonna get hit by lightning. You know lightning's gonna be hit, but you don't know which tree. But that's why you need a larger portfolio because, you three or four are gonna do well. The rest might not do so well. But the gains from those three or four are gonna power your portfolio, for a while. And one thing also, regarding managing your own portfolio, don't sell your winners. A lot of people average down their losers. They take the gains. Don't do that. Your winners, those are the ones that compound. Those are the ones that keep going. The losers are the ones you want to throw away.
So, Charlie, maybe we can talk a little bit about some of the presentations that we hosted today and whether there's any themes that you could extract from them. For me, I introduced a number of royalty companies, and they seem to have become kind of a core part of the capital structure for the sector. And their pipelines seem pretty robust. So that was certainly one thing that I took away. And the other thing, I guess, from the producers was they seem to be in maybe the best position that they've been in the last 15 years, and seem very focused on per-share accretion in terms of reserves and production and cash flow. So, that all seems very positive from an investor standpoint. But I was just wondering what your takeaways were.
Yeah. I think, you know, there are lots of opportunities there. And I think you're absolutely right about the royalty companies. It's one of my favorite business plans. And, you know, one of the reasons for that is what they can do with their costs as opposed to, you know, and when I say royalty, I mean the streamers as well. And in particular, they can keep their costs or the majority of their costs much more constant than, you know, because it's all prearranged via an agreement they have with the producing company. And so it's one of the business plans that I like most. So I would say in constructing your portfolio now, listen, I'm guessing we're all here because we all like gold, and we all see the opportunities there. So I would start with gold.
It's outperformed the Dow Jones since, you know, 1960-something. You know, possibly not if you take it, income into account as well. But certainly, in capital terms, it has. Now, when I started in the gold market late 1990s, you know, it was a miserable time for 20 years, very nearly 20 years. Gold had gone down. And there seemed no prospect of it turning up. Andy Smith, do you remember Andy Smith, the analyst at UBS, permanently bearish on gold, saying, "Well, why would you hold gold when you can hold U.S. Treasuries and down gold would go?" So, you know, start with gold. I think there are opportunities there. Then build your portfolio out from that. Some of the majors, they're more exposed, I think, to inflation than they would like to admit, possibly.
You have to be a bit careful. But, you know, there's always a case for having a smattering of majors. One of the most interesting pieces of research I ever did was on juniors. And my forerunner, Edison, had profiled 10 juniors that were going to go from explorer to producer 'cause he said that's where the money was to be made. And I agreed with him. But he profiled these 10. And I was able to come in 5 years later and say, "Let's see how they did. And this is how they did." So of your 10 stocks, 7 had lost almost all their value. 7 had gone from, you know, had basically lost more than 80% of their value in U.S. dollars. One had stayed where it was. One was up 3 times, and one was up 5 times.
This is the difficulty that Garrett was talking about. You know, you're having to predict where lightning is going to strike. You have to be very, very fast when you're looking at the juniors. You also need quite a diversified portfolio because in that portfolio, if you held all 10 in equal amounts by which an unweighted index, so just that you had equal money in each, you would've come out five years later with roughly the same money that you put in. You couldn't afford not to have the five-bagger or the three-bagger there because if you lost them, then you lost all your performance. Excuse me. That's one of the difficulties, I think, with the juniors. You have to think how to play those very carefully.
What I would observe, if you take an index of junior mining stocks, it's when they really perform is when the gold price runs but is not really expected to. And that's when you get the real performance in the juniors as a group, as otherwise, you have to focus on, you know, the nitty-gritty of their drilling results and, you know, what they're getting from those. So and then actually, one of the areas I thought I like the medium-sized ones. The medium-sized producers, I think they will be the winners. I think the majors might be too exposed to inflation around the world and currencies and debt and credit and all of those sorts of things that they are naturally exposed to.
I think the medium-sized producers who can you know, who are able to operate in a particular geographical area that they know well, I think they're the ones who are best able to control inflation. Juniors, they're not a whole different ballgame. But you've got to decide how you want to play them and try and, you know, play in that space. But diversification is something you can't avoid. And then the royalties and streamers, I always say, "Look, if you know nothing else but you want geared exposure to metals prices, and you don't want cost risk, don't want CapEx risk, and all of the but you do want Greenfield's upside, then it's the royalty and streaming companies." That's your if you just want one stock that'll do all those things for you, that's where I would go.
Now, you're gonna pay a little bit more. Then you're gonna pay for the, you know, certainly, the major miners. But it will absolutely do the job that you want to do. So that's, you know, the philosophy that I would bring.
Excellent. Let's leave some time for questions and make sure we get to everything that the audience might be interested in. So, if there's any questions, please raise your hand and let a microphone make its way towards you. Anything?
I can't. Can you see into those lights? I can't. I couldn't see if there were any questions.
I think there's one right there.
Don't be shy.
The metal.
Here we are.
Thank you very much for your remarks. Rather obvious question, but what do you all think when the Fed starts cutting rates? Thank you very much.
Sorry. I didn't hear that. What are your thoughts when the Fed starts cutting rates?
Well, yeah. I think they'd love to cut rates. But I, I think they're gonna really, really manage to do it. I mean, they might they might get one cut through or something like that. But I really can't, can't see any justification for it. The problem, I think, that there's a huge, great tension between the Fed and the government. We're in an election year, obviously. I think the Biden administration does not want anything upsetting at all. The Biden administration would like to see rates cut, happy campers in the electorate. And anything that Powell does to stand in the way of that will not be popular with them. So that's the tension. And, you know, from what I've seen, this is actually common with a lot of central banks.
You know, at the moment, they're beginning to see the dynamics that I've just put forward at this meeting. Yet when they talk to the political class, the politicians, they're just getting a blank. They really are. And the political class are not prepared to do anything on the fiscal side at all to help out. This is a major, major problem. And I think this issue is gonna become more contentious in the coming months. And I actually think that what Powell is doing by saying, you know, "We'll just delay, delay a little bit more," is he realizes that the last thing he should do is actually raise interest rates. So he's not saying, "We're not gonna raise interest rates." He's saying, "We're just delaying it." And the market is sitting there hoping. He's saying, "Well, we will cut.
And not only will we cut, but when we cut, we'll probably cut quite big." I mean, there's a huge, great delusion in markets about this current situation. I cannot emphasize that enough.
I think the risk here is sort of unexpected inflation, which no one's forecast because kind of no one is, everyone's forecasting inflation to come down. And then they're saying, "Well, interest rates are a function of inflation. So if inflation keeps going down, then we can lower interest rates." So I think they will cut this year because of the political investment that, you know, the Fed also has in the U.S. economy and in the U.S. political system and, you know, the influence that the administration has as well. So I think they will cut. And what I think you'll get then is you will probably get unexpected inflation. And everyone's gonna, "Oh, my gosh. You know, inflation. Didn't see that one coming." And no one's gonna quite know how to react.
Probably, to begin with, I suspect what's gonna happen is that the Fed will say, "Oh, it's transient. It'll go. So we don't need to, you know we don't need to move interest rates. We'll just wait for it to come back down again. And it's a bit embarrassing. But don't worry." Then what you might see is you might see inflation go up again. And that's where I think you're gonna get the volatility from. Now, I'm gonna sort of preempt your question a bit. You know, what do I think is going to happen? You know, if, when they cut, I think you know, the numbers that I look at, you know, and this comes with a few disclaimers. But I think it's possible gold could hit $3,000 in the way that gold hit $850 in January 1980.
Now, I think there's an outside chance that it could go much higher than that. $4,500 is the figure I have, you know. I say it in my head. It's not in my head. It comes out of some numbers from some of the models I look at. Those are the sort of numbers I think it could go. Now, if it does hit $3,000, to be honest, you know, I'd have to say, "You, you've gotta take profits." If it hit $4,500, I think you've gotta sell everything. But those are the numbers, the sorts of numbers that I do think it could go to. I do think it could be short-term. But, you know, I think your investments this is an investment environment where you're surfing a wave.
You know, you want to get as much of the upside as you can and, you know, try and get out from the downside. Well, there's always that story in 1980 about someone going to a Swiss bank and saying, you know, "Would they take his gold watch?" And they said, "No, no, no. They wouldn't take a watch." So he, you know, they handed it back to him. And he smashed it up. And said, "Well, there you go. Give me the value of the gold." But, you know, that's the environment that I think we, we could be moving into. You know, that's the sort of thing that might, might happen with $3,000 gold, I think. Does that answer your question?
My thoughts, the Fed only cuts when their hand is forced. Like, if you look back at the times they've cut, the only times they've cut, there's been an absolute economic disaster. And they were forced to cut rates because the economy was in a crisis mode. Therefore, they weren't worried about inflation more than they cut. And I think there's some unforeseen something out there, that, who knows, might occur. And if it does, that's when the Fed will cut. However, I could also see this market continuing, you know, along and higher, steadily along and higher, as it has been without any rate cuts 'cause that's what it's been doing for a year or so already.
Thanks. Any other questions? If not, thank you, everyone, for joining us. I believe there's a cocktail reception outside. We look forward to seeing you tomorrow for more presentations and meetings. Thank you.
Thank you.