Rob McEwen
Analyst · Jake Sekelsky with Alliance Global Partners
Let me share a story. A number of years ago, I was meeting with an executive coach. And his first question was, how long -- asked me how long I was going to live? And I said, well, ever since I've been about 20, I figured, I'd live to 100. And he said, well, tell me what you think you're going to be like when you're 99? And I said, well, I'd like to have a clear head and be mobile. He said, well, all right, if you like that at 99, you think you're going to die at 100. I said, no. My wife and I have put a lot of money into regenerative medicine and research. And what I've seen there is life expands are going to extend and make. So I said. He said, well, how long are you going to live? And I said 120. And he said, okay, the timeline was 60. He said, if you're going to move to 120, you have your whole life in front of you again. What are you going to do with this? And I said, well, what could I do with that? And he said, well, you could do 10x what you've already done. Like 10x more love, 10x more travel, 10x more philanthropy, 10x more wealth, and he said all of the above. And I said, well, that sounds pretty good. You have -- and I said, you have 240 quarters in front of you. So you can lay out a plan. So I'm in no rush. I think we have in McEwen Copper, the Los Azules property, I believe, has the potential to be much bigger than Goldcorp ever was. It is -- if you look at it and put it on a gold equivalent, it's bigger than a 60 million ounce gold deposit, and on the projected cost to be coming in at just over $600 cash, all-in under $1,000, 27-year life and producing gold equivalent better than 600,000 ounces a year. In my book, that's an extremely big gold deposit. It's almost equal to all the gold that's been produced in the last 100 years out of the Timmins district, the most prolific mining area -- one of the most prolific gold areas in Canada. So I think there's a lot of room. There's -- we've got copper is in large demand. You look at the deficits that are being projected for a number of reasons, the electrification of energy, the extremely high use of electricity by big data farms and servers and then the growth of the world's population and the use of copper in the infrastructure. So there's that, and gold, I think we've got the right mix of assets. Gold is -- to me that's always been that's money. And our governments are good at debasing fee at currency. And so gold is in my mind, heading higher despite this little drop today. When you have $36 trillion in national debt, the service costs on that are high. And America is not alone. I look to Canada, I look to Europe, I look to China, everybody has printed a lot of money, and they've taken on a lot of debt, and at one point, have to pay back the debt. And gold is a one of those hard assets you want to have in your pocket because it doesn't appreciate like be it currency.