John Rubino – Portfolio Management Strategies For Gold And Silver Stocks
The KE Report w/ Shad Marquitz and Cory Fleck (05-31-2025)
John Rubino, [follow him on Substack linked at the bottom of this article] joins us for a wide-ranging discussion on the macroeconomic factors driving gold and silver, along with strategies for portfolio management in the precious metals stocks.
🔑 Key Insights from John Rubino:
🔹 The higher underlying metals environment, with gold well over $3,000 has allowed for more investor confidence that the gold producers can maintain healthy margins and valuations. This is also attracting more generalist investor capital flows into the quality producers.
Additionally, the gold development projects economics are starting to look more and more attractive.
“My main take on it is that it’s about damn time. This is all happening as it should have, but it’s about 5 years late… but, I’ll take it.”
🔹 John discusses how he is still striking a balance between having exposure to the larger PM producers and royalty companies, but also maintaining some portfolio exposure further down the risk curve into the exploration stocks as “lottery tickets.”
🗣 Quote: “That is the way it normally works, in the beginning of a gold bull market….The gap in terms of every valuation measure you can think of between the big guys and the smaller players starts to widen so much that a lot of generalist money starts flowing downwards through the food chain. Eventually you get to the point where the junior miners start being taken out and then explorers start behaving kinda like dot coms for a while, where anything with gold or silver in the name catches a bid.”
“We’re very early in that process... Some of the explorers have done very well lately, but a lot of them haven’t. So, the money coming into the sector isn’t yet indiscriminate.”
“History says that where we are right now is maybe 3-4 years from the peak in this cycle… so it’s still a good time to buy the big miners because they are reporting really good year over year comparisons. But it is becoming a good time to start looking at buying the high-quality junior producers and then the really good explorers. A couple of years from now it is going to be a great time to be buying those kinds of things, but right now it’s a good time to get into them.”
🔹 We discuss some investors already pulling profits in the larger quality companies and starting to rotate it down the risk curve into the smaller producers and pre-revenue juniors.
This leads into a discussion about some of the developers with large resource bases delineated, like Seabridge Gold, and whether or not they will be acquired or built in this cycle; after sitting available for development since the prior cycle.
🔹 We dig in to whether the reservation from larger producing companies to acquire these projects and build them is due to jurisdiction concerns, high capex requirements, or if it is simply a lack of human capital.
👉 John points out what aspects of companies that he would describe as “high quality,” and the importance of limiting the amount of portfolio positions to the companies one can really do proper due diligence on.
🔹 Wrapping up we circle back to macroeconomic factors that may drive gold prices even higher.
We start off focusing in on the rising sovereign debt levels in countries all over the world
changes in the Basel III demarcation for gold as a Tier 1 reserve asset that more banks will be buying to gain more exposure to and diversify their asset mix.
We talk about BRICS countries continuing to reduce down US dollar exposure and mitigate potential trade wars by increasing their gold holdings.
Lastly we reflect on the increased retailing buying, using the example of new limits on gold purchases from Costco as another tailwind for gold, that may spill over into more sympathetic investment in silver.
➡️Click here to listen to the full interview to hear John’s macro insights, and get his portfolio allocation insights for different segments of the gold and silver stocks
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