Don’t Let Trump Scare You Away From the Investing Opportunity of a Lifetime

By Justin Spittler

Men with machine guns walked the streets. They rode in the backs of trucks. They posted out in front of restaurants and at busy intersections. These men weren’t thugs or criminals. They were federal police officers. They were there to keep the peace and to make you feel safe.

But all they really did was remind you that you were in a country that’s been at war for decades. I saw this firsthand two weeks ago in Mexico City. Apparently, it’s the norm. You might not be surprised by this. After all, everyone knows that Mexico’s been fighting a bloody drug war for years, one that’s claimed more than 80,000 lives since 2006.

Of course, I didn’t write this article to tell you what you already know. I wrote it because Mexico is radically rethinking how it fights its drug war. Eventually, this should save thousands of lives, transform Mexico’s economy and lead to a huge moneymaking opportunity for us. I’ll explain what I mean in a second. But you first have to understand how Mexico got this way.

Drug cartels have been terrorizing Mexico for years.…
No one understands this better than Vicente Fox. Fox was the president of Mexico from 2000 to 2006. He's seen the carnage of Mexico’s drug war firsthand. Because of this, you’d think he would be a huge drug opponent. But he’s actually one of the world’s biggest legal marijuana advocates. According to Fox, drug legalization is the only way to end the violence of Mexican drug cartels. It looks like Fox could finally get his wish, too.

Last month, Mexico’s Congress passed a bill to legalize medical marijuana.…
Reuters reported on April 28:

The measure passed in a general floor vote with 371 in favor, seven against and 11 abstentions, and now classifies the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) as "therapeutic."

The bill is now on President Enrique Peña Nieto’s desk. And there’s a good chance he’ll sign it.
After all, Peña Nieto said last April that drug use should be treated as a “public health problem” rather than a criminal matter.

In other words, Mexico is a signature away from legalizing medical marijuana.…
It could soon even legalize marijuana outright. After all, Peña Nieto proposed a bill last year that would allow Mexicans to carry up to an ounce of marijuana. Not only that, Mexico’s Supreme Court has already granted four people the right to grow marijuana for their own recreational consumption.

This is a big deal. For years, Mexico tried to align its drug policies with those of the United States. But that approach has failed miserably. Mexico now realizes that it cannot win its drug war by fighting fire with fire. If it’s going to defeat the cartels, it’s going to have to beat them at their own game.

Mexico isn’t the only major country rethinking its stance on marijuana, either.…
Canada legalized medical marijuana back in 2001. It’s now in the process of legalizing recreational marijuana nationwide. The new law, which was passed on April 13, will go into effect on July 1, 2018. That’s right. Next summer, you’ll be able to visit a store in Canada and legally buy a joint. Of course, most Casey readers don’t live in Mexico or Canada. They live in the United States, where marijuana is still illegal at the federal level. The U.S. government actually considers marijuana more dangerous than cocaine or methamphetamine. It’s completely absurd.

The good news is that this idiotic stance on marijuana probably won’t stand much longer.…
After all, 29 states along with Washington D.C. have already legalized medical marijuana. Not only that, eight states and D.C. have legalized recreational marijuana. This tells us the perception toward marijuana is changing. Of course, skeptics will tell you that the Trump administration hates marijuana. And they have a point. After all, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is on record saying that marijuana is “only slightly less awful” than heroin.

That has a lot of investors scared to invest in the U.S. marijuana industry. But if you've been reading the Dispatch, you know there’s a huge opportunity here…one that's only going to get bigger. You see, the North American marijuana industry is already a $7 billion market. By 2021, it’s going to be a $20 billion market. Eventually, it could grow into a $200 billion industry. In short, the market is growing like crazy. It’s generating hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue. And it’s already created thousands of new jobs. It would make absolutely no sense for Trump to shut it down.

If you’re bullish on the marijuana industry like I am, here’s what you can do today.…
If you live in Canada (or have access to the Toronto Stock Exchange), consider buying the Horizons Medical Marijuana Life Sciences ETF (HMMJ.TO), Canada’s only pot ETF. This fund invests in 16 marijuana companies. Some of them are “pure breed” pot stocks. Others are companies that serve the industry. Overall, it’s a diversified and relatively safe way to invest in the booming North American pot market.

If you do buy it, just remember that pot stocks are highly volatile. So treat this as a speculation. Only bet money you can afford to lose. You should have a long term perspective. Plan to hold it for a few years. Don’t lose sleep over its day to day moves. Unfortunately, the U.S. doesn't have its own marijuana ETF yet. But that could change soon.

Cambria Investment Management already plans to launch its own marijuana ETF.…
According to ETF.com, the fund will be called the Cambria Marijuana Industry ETF (TOKE). It will be actively managed and hold 20 to 50 of the world’s top marijuana companies. I’ll be sure to let you know when this fund goes live. Until then, use extreme discipline if you decide to buy individual U.S. pot stocks.

Understand that these companies are startups. They’re unproven. Not only that, many are “penny stocks.” This means that they trade over the counter and aren’t subject to the same financial reporting standards as companies that trade on the New York Stock Exchange.

P.S. If you’re thinking about buying pot stocks, I also encourage you to invest alongside an industry expert. That’s where Extraordinary Technology editor Chris Wood comes in. Chris, as regular readers know, has been extensively researching the marijuana industry.

Last month, he recommended what he says is "the one marijuana stock you should buy today.” But this company isn’t your typical pot stock. It’s really a biotech company that serves the marijuana industry.

You can learn all about this company, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange, by signing up for Extraordinary Technology today. Click here to begin your risk-free trial.

The article Don’t Let Trump Scare You Away From the Investing Opportunity of a Lifetime was originally published at caseyresearch.com.

Prove You’re Not a Terrorist

By Jeff Thomas

Recently, France decided to crack down on those people who make cash payments and withdrawals and who hold small bank accounts. The reason given was, not surprisingly, to “fight terrorism,” the handy catchall justification for any new restriction governments wish to impose on their citizens. French Finance Minister Michel Sapin stated at the time, “terrorism feeds on fraud, money laundering, and petty trafficking.”

And so, in future, people in France will not be allowed to make cash payments exceeding €1,000 (down from €3,000). Additionally, cash deposits and withdrawals totaling more than €10,000 per month will be reported to Tracfin—an anti-fraud and money laundering agency. Currency exchange will also be further restricted. Anyone changing over €1,000 to another currency (down from €8,000) will be required to show an identity card.

Do you need to make a deposit on a car? That might be suspect. Did you just deposit a dividend you received? It might be a payment from a terrorist organisation. Planning a holiday and need some cash? You might need to be investigated for terrorism. And France is not alone. In the US, federal law requires banks to file a “suspicious activity report” (SAR) on their customers whenever a customer requests a suspicious transaction. (In 2013, 1.6 million SAR’s were submitted.)

As to what may be deemed “suspicious,” it may be any transaction of $5,000 or more, but it may also mean a series of transactions that, together, exceed $5,000. The reader may be saying to himself, “But that’s just normal, everyday banking business—that means anybody, any time, could be reported.” If so, he would be correct. Essentially, any banking activity the reader conducts could be regarded as suspect.

In Italy, in 2011, Prime Minister Mario Monti began working to end the right of landlords, tradesmen, and small businesses to perform large transactions in cash, which critics say help them evade taxation. In December of that year, his government reduced the maximum allowed cash payment from €2,500 euros to €1,000.

Spain has outlawed cash transactions over €2,500. The justification? “To crack down on the black market and tax evaders.”

In Sweden, the country where the first banknote was created in 1661, the use of cash is being steadily eliminated. Increasingly, expenses are paid and purchases made by cellphone text message, and many banks have stopped handling cash altogether.

Denmark’s central bank, Nationalbanken, has another justification for ending its use of banknotes—producing paper money and coinage is not cost effective.

Israel also seeks to end the use of cash. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s chief of staff has announced a three phase plan to “all but do away with cash transactions in Israel.”

Individuals and businesses would initially continue to be allowed to make small cash transactions, but eventually, all transactions would be converted to electronic forms of payment. The justification being used in Israel is that “cash is bad,” because it encourages an underground economy and enables tax evasion.

Across the Atlantic, banks and governments are on a similar campaign. A 2012 law in Mexico bans large cash transactions, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison.

In August 2014, Uruguay passed the Financial Inclusion Law, which limits cash transactions to US$5,000. In future, all transactions over that amount will be required to be performed electronically. The crying need for such a law? The stated reason was to improve the country’s credit ratings.

The Elimination of Paper Currency

In recent years, in commenting on the inevitability of currency collapse in those countries that are indebted beyond the possibility of repayment, I’ve made the prediction that governments and banks would jointly resort to the elimination of paper currency and replace it with an electronic one.

Some readers have understandably regarded the prediction as “alarmist.” After all, the idea is so farfetched—paper currency may be conceptually flawed, but it’s been around for a long time. But banks and governments seek total control of money, and this can only be achieved if they possess a monopoly on the flow of money.

If a worldwide system can be implemented in which currency transactions can only take place electronically through banking institutions, the banks will then have total power over the ability of a people to function economically. But why would any government allow the banks such dictatorial monetary control? The answer is that governments would then realise a long held, but heretofore impossible dream: to have access to a record of every monetary transaction that takes place for every single individual.

Governments have been both more proactive and bolder than I had anticipated and are simply imposing the restrictions worldwide under the justifications previously stated. As yet, there hasn’t been any backlash, and it may be that people worldwide may simply swallow the pill, not understanding what it means to their economic liberty.

If the public are not treating the new system as serious business, governments most assuredly are. Bankers on both sides of the Atlantic have forcibly become unpaid government spies. If they don’t comply, they can be fined and/or lose their banking charter. Directors can be imprisoned.

The US Justice Department already wants to take this overreach even further. Banks are now being asked to call the authorities whenever something “suspicious” occurs, presumably so that immediate action may be taken. What we are witnessing is the creation of totalitarian control of your finances. The implication that you may have some sort of terrorist involvement is a smokescreen.

As the above information attests, if for any reason you object to any of these measures, you have already been forewarned—you may be suspected of money laundering, tax evasion, or even terrorism. If you use cash for any reason—to pay your rent, to buy a used car, or (soon) to pay for your lunch—you may trigger an investigation. (The onus of proof that you are not guilty good will be on you.)

The take away from this discussion? Totalitarian control of currency is an inevitability, and it will take place sooner rather than later. The only question is whether the reader can retain some control of his wealth. Fortunately, wealth may still be held in land and precious metals, but these are only safe if they’re held outside a country that seeks totalitarian rule over its people. The ability to retain wealth still exists and, as always, internationalisation remains a key element to its continuation.

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Our all star panel of experts, with Doug Casey and Peter Schiff, provide low cost options for international diversification that anyone can implement - including how to safely set up foreign storage for your gold and silver bullion and how to move your savings abroad without triggering invasive reporting requirements. This is a must watch video for any investor and it's completely free.

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The article was originally published at internationalman.com

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Minimum Wage, Maximum Stupidity

By Doug French, Contributing Editor

The minimum wage should be the easiest issue to understand for the economically savvy. If the government arbitrarily sets a floor for wages above that set by the market, jobs will be lost. Even the Congressional Budget Office admits that 500,000 jobs would be lost with a $10.10 federal minimum wage. Who knows how high the real number would be?

Yet here we go again with the “Raise the minimum wage” talk at a time when unemployment is still devastating much of the country. The number of Americans jobless for 27 weeks or more is still 3.37 million. And while that’s only half the 6.8 million that were long term unemployed in 2010, most of the other half didn’t find work. Four fifths of them just gave up.

So, good economics and better sense would say, “make employment cheaper.” More of anything is demanded if the price goes down. That would mean lowering the minimum wage and undoing a number of cumbersome employment regulations that drive up the cost of jobs.

But then as H.L. Mencken reminded us years ago, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” Which means the illogical case made by Republican multimillionaire businessman Ron Unz is being taken seriously.

We Don’t Want No Stinkin’ Entry Level Jobs

 

Unz says the minimum should be $12 and recognizes that 90% of the resistance is that it would kill jobs. So what’s his answer to that silver bullet to his argument? America doesn’t want those low paying jobs anyway. In his words, “Critics of a rise in the minimum wage argue that jobs would be destroyed, and in some cases they are probably correct. But many of those threatened jobs are exactly the ones that should have no place in an affluent, developed society like the United States, which should not attempt to compete with Mexico or India in low wage industries.”

He doesn’t think much of fast food jobs either. But he knows that employment can’t be shipped overseas, so Mr. Unz’s plan for those jobs is as follows:

So long as federal law requires all competing businesses to raise wages in unison, much of this cost could be covered by a small one time rise in prices. Since the working poor would see their annual incomes rise by 30 or 40 percent, they could easily afford to pay an extra dime for a McDonald’s hamburger, while such higher prices would be completely negligible to America’s more affluent elements.

The Number of Jobs Isn’t Fixed

 

He believes that if all jobs pay well enough, legal applicants will apply and take all the jobs. This is where Unz crosses paths with David Brat, the economics professor who recently unseated House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

Brat claims to be a free-market sympathizer and says plenty of good things. However, in his stump speeches and interviews, Brat says early and often, “An open border is both a national security threat and an economic threat that our country cannot ignore. … Adding millions of workers to the labor market will force wages to fall and jobs to be lost.”

That would make sense if there were a fixed number of jobs, but that’s not the case. An economics professor should know that humans have unlimited wants and limited means, which, as Nicholas Freiling explains in The Freeman, “renders the amount of needed labor virtually endless—constrained only by the economy’s productive capacity (which, coincidentally, only grows as the supply of labor increases).”

An influx of illegal immigrants may or may not drive down wages, but even if it does, that’s a good thing. Low wages allow employers to invest in other things. More efficient production lowers costs for everyone, producers and consumers, allowing for capital creation. In the long run, it is capital investment that creates jobs.

Employers Bid for Labor Like Anything Else

 

Mr. Unz claims that low-wage employers are being subsidized by the welfare state. “It’s a classic case of where businesses manage to privatize the benefits of their workers—they get the work—and socialize the costs. They’ve shifted the costs over to the taxpayer and the government,” writes Unz.

It makes one wonder how the businessman made millions in the first place. Wage rates aren’t determined by what the employee’s expenses are. “Labor is a scarce factor of production,” wrote economist Ludwig von Mises. “As such it is sold and bought on the market. The price paid for labor is included in the price allowed for the product or the services if the performer of the work is the seller of the product or the services.”

Mises explained that a general rate of wages does not exist. “Labor is very different in quality,” Mises wrote, “and each kind of labor renders specific services. each is appraised as a complementary factor for turning out definite consumers’ goods and services.”

Not every job contributes $12 an hour in production benefits toward a finished good or service. And many unskilled laborers can’t generate $12 an hour worth of output. The Congress that created the minimum wage knew this and carved out the 14(c) permit provision in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, allowing an exemption from minimum wage requirements for businesses hiring the handicapped.

That Congress included in the act this language:

The Secretary, to the extent necessary to prevent curtailment of opportunities for employment, shall by regulation or order provide for the employment, under special certificates, of individuals ... whose earning or productive capacity is impaired by age, physical or mental deficiency, or injury, at wages which are lower than the minimum wage.

Entrepreneurs must purchase all factors of production at the lowest prices possible. No offense to labor—that’s what customers demand. All cuts in wages pass through to customers. If a business pays more than the market wage rate, the business “would be soon removed from his entrepreneurial position.” Pay less than the market, and employees leave to work somewhere else.

Who Picks Up The Tab?

 

First, Unz says, “American businesses can certainly afford to provide better pay given that corporate profits have reached an all-time high while wages have fallen to their lowest share of national GDP in history.” So, instead of taxpayers supporting the poor, Unz wants business to pay. No, wait: later he writes that consumers will support the poor by paying higher prices.

“McDonald’s and fast food places would probably have to raise their prices by 8 or 9 percent, something like that. Agricultural products that are American-grown would go up by less than 2 percent on the grocery shelves. And those sorts of price increases are so small that they would be almost unnoticed in most cases by the consumer.” Walmart would cover a $12 minimum wage with a one time price increase of 1.1%, he says, with the average Walmart shopper paying just an extra $12.50 a year. So it’s consumers—who are also taxpayers—who get to be their brother’s keeper either which way with Unz’s plan.

Walmart Must Be Offering Enough

 

Fortune magazine writer Stephen Gandel appeared on Morning Joe this week, making the case that Walmart should give its employees a 50% raise (his article in Fortune on the subject appeared last November). According to him, the company is misallocating capital by not paying higher wages. He says investors are not giving the company credit for the lower pay in the stock price, so they should just do the right thing and pay their employees more.

But Walmart does pay more when it has to compete for employees. In oil rich Williston, North Dakota, the retail giant is offering to pay entry level workers as much as $17.40 per hour to attract employees.
Walmart isn’t alone. McDonald’s is paying $300 signing bonuses to attract workers. The night shift at gas stations in Williston pays $14 an hour.

By the way, whatever Walmart is paying, it must be enough, because it has plenty of applicants to choose from. In 2005, 11,000 people in the Bay Area applied for 400 positions at a new Oakland store. Three years later near Chicago, 25,000 people applied for 325 positions at a new store.

Last year a new Walmart opened in the DC area. Again, the response was overwhelming. Debbie Thomas told the Washington Post, “It’s hard to live in this city on $7.45 or $8.25 an hour. I’ve lived here all my life, and I want to stay here. In the end, I’m just glad Walmart’s here. I might get a job.”

Throughout history, people have had to relocate to find work. Today is no different.

In the long run, as the minimum wage increases, capital will be invested to replace labor. We’ve seen it for years. Machines don’t call in sick, sue for harassment, require health insurance, or show up late. Now patrons pour their own drinks. Shoppers scan their own groceries and pump their own gas. Soon we’ll be ordering from electronic tablets at our tables in sit down restaurants to cut down on wait staff, and the cooks will be replaced by automated burger makers.

Unz may well believe what he proposes would be doing good; however, it means kids and the unskilled go unemployed and in the end, are unemployable.

You read an excerpt from the Daily Dispatch, Casey Research’s wildly popular e-letter. Stay in the loop on big-picture trends, precious metals, energy, technology, and more. Sign up Here to receive the Daily Dispatch free of charge in your inbox.

The article Minimum Wage, Maximum Stupidity was originally published at Casey Research

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Why the Resource Supercycle Is Still Intact

By Rick Rule, Chairman and Founder, Sprott Global Resource Investments

Natural resource based industries are very capital intensive, and hence extremely cyclical. It is not unreasonable to say that as a natural resource investor, you are either contrarian or you will be a victim.

These markets are risky and volatile!

Why Cyclicality?

 

Let's talk about cyclicality first. Some of the cyclicality of these industries is a function of their being extraordinarily capital intensive. This lengthens the companies' response times to market cycles.

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Strengthening copper prices, for example, do not immediately result in increased copper production in many market cycles, because the production cycle requires new deposits to be discovered, financed, and constructed......a process that can consume a decade.

Price declines—even declines below the industry's total production costs—do not immediately cause massive production cuts. The "sunk capital" involved in discovery and construction of mining projects and attendant infrastructure (such as smelters, railways, and ports) causes the industry to produce down to, and sometimes below, their cash costs of production.

Producers often engage in a "last man standing" contest, to drive others to mothball productive assets, citing the high cost of shutdown and restart. They fail to mention their conflicts of interest as managers, whose compensation is linked to running operational mines.

Interest-rate cycles can raise or lower the cost and availability of capital, and the accompanying business cycles certainly influence demand. Given the "trapped" nature of the industry's productive assets, local political and fiscal cycles can also influence outcomes in natural-resource investments.

Today, I believe that we are still in a resource "supercycle," a long-term period of increasing commodity prices in both nominal and real terms. The market conditions of the past two years have made many observers doubt this assertion. But I believe the current cyclical decline is a normal and healthy part of the ongoing secular bull market.

Has this happened in the past?

 

The most striking analogy to the current situation occurred in the epic gold bull market in the 1970s. Many of you will recall that in that bull market, gold prices advanced from US$35 per ounce to $850 per ounce over the course of a decade. Fewer of you will recall that in the middle of that bull market, in 1975 and 1976, a cyclical decline saw the price of gold decline by 50%, from about $200 per ounce down to about $100 per ounce. It then rebounded over the next six years to $850 per ounce.

Investors who lacked the conviction to maintain their positions missed an 850% move over six short years. The current gold bull market, since its inception in 2000, has experienced eight declines of 10% or greater, and three declines—including the present one—of more than 20%.

This volatility need not threaten the investor who has the intellectual and financial resources to exploit it.

The natural-resources bull market lives…

 

The supercycle is a direct result of several factors. The most important of these is, ironically, the deep resource bear markets which lasted for almost two decades, commencing in 1982.

This period critically constrained investment in a capital-intensive industry where assets are depleted over time.

Productive capacity declined in every category; very little exploration took place; few new mines or oilfields replenished reserves; infrastructure and processing assets deteriorated. Critical human-resource capabilities suffered as well; as workers retired or got laid off, replacements were neither trained nor hired.

National oil companies (NOCs) exacerbated this decline in many nations by milking their oil and gas industries to subsidize domestic spending programs for political gain. This was done at the expense of sustaining capital investments. The worst examples are Mexico, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Indonesia, and Iran. I believe 25% of world export crude capacity may be at risk from failure of NOCs to maintain and expand their productive assets.

Demands for social contributions in the form of taxes, royalties, carried equity interests, social or infrastructure contributions, and the like have increased. Voters are not concerned that producers need real returns to recover from two decades of underinvestment or to fund capital investments to offset depletion. Today this is actively constraining investment, and hence supply.

Poor people getting richer…

 

The supercycle is also driven by globalization and the social and political liberalization of emerging and frontier markets. As people become freer, they tend to become richer.

As poor countries become less poor, their purchases tend to be very commodity centric, especially compared to Western consumers. For the 3.5 billion people at the bottom of the economic pyramid, the goods that provide the most utility are material goods and consumables, rather than the information services or "high value-added" goods.

A poor or very poor household is likely to increase its aggregate calorie consumption—both by eating more food and more energy-dense food like meat. They will likely consume more electrical power and motor fuel and upgrade their home from adobe or thatch to higher-quality building materials. As people's incomes increase in developing and frontier markets, the goods they buy are commodity-intensive, which drives up demand per capita. And we are talking billions of "capitas."

Rising incomes and savings among certain cultures in the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia—places with a strong cultural affinity for bullion—have increased the demand for gold, silver, platinum, and palladium bullion. Bullion has been a store of value in these regions for generations, and rising incomes have generated physical bullion demand that has surprised many Western-centric analysts.

Competitive devaluation

 

The third important driver in this cycle has been the depreciation of currencies and the impact that has had on nominal pricing for resources and precious metals.

Most developed economies have consumed and borrowed at worrying levels. The United States federal government has on-balance-sheet liabilities of over $16 trillion, and off-balance-sheet liabilities estimated at around $70 trillion.

These numbers do not include state and local government liabilities, nor the likely liabilities from underfunded private pensions. Not to mention increased costs associated with more comprehensive health care and an aging population!

Many analysts are even more concerned about the debts and liabilities of other developed economies—Europe and Japan. In both places, debt-to-GDP ratios are greater than in the US. Europe and Japan are financing themselves through a combination of artificially low interest rates and more borrowing and money printing. This drives down the value of their currencies, helping their exports.

But which nations' leaders will stand firm and allow their export industries to wither as their domestic producers suffer from cheap competing foreign goods? If Japan's Abe is successful at increasing his country's exports at the expense of its competitors like Taiwan, Korea, or China, then his policies could lead to competitive devaluation. And how will the European community react, for that matter?

Loss of purchasing power in fiat currencies increases the nominal pricing of commodities and drives demand for bullion as a preferred savings vehicle.

The factors that have driven this resource supercycle have not changed. Demand is increasing. Supplies are constrained. Currencies are weakening. Thus I believe we remain in a secular bull market for natural resources and precious metals.

With that in mind, I would call the current market for bullion and resource equities a sale.

Where to invest?

 

Let's talk about a type of company most of us follow: mineral exploration companies, or "juniors." We often confuse the minerals exploration business with an asset-based business. I would argue that is a mistake.

Entities that explore for minerals are actually more similar to "the research and development" space of the mining industry. They are knowledge based businesses.

When I was in university, I learned that one in 3,000 "mineralized anomalies" (exploration targets) ended up becoming a mine. I doubt those odds have improved much in 40 years. So investors take a 1-in-3,000 chance in order to receive a 10-to-1 return.

These are not good odds. But understanding the industry improves them substantially.

Exploration companies are similar to outsourcing companies. Major mining companies today conduct relatively little exploration. Their competitive advantage lies in scale, financial stability, and engineering and construction expertise. Similar to how big companies in other sectors outsource certain tasks to smaller, more specialized shops, the big miners let the juniors take on exploration risk and reward the successful ones via acquisitions.

Major companies are punished rather than rewarded for exploration activities in the short term. Majors therefore tend to focus on the acquisition of successful juniors as a growth strategy.

Today, the junior model is broken. Many public exploration companies spend a majority of their capital on general and administrative expenses, including fundraising. Overlay a hefty administrative load on an activity with a slim probability of success, and these challenges become even more severe.

One response from the exploration and financial community has been to put less emphasis on exploration success and focus instead on "market success." In this model, rather than "turning rocks into money," the process becomes "turning rocks into paper, and paper into money."

One manifestation of that is the juniors' habit of recycling exploration targets that have failed repeatedly in the past but can be counted on to yield decent confirmation holes, and the tendency to acquire hyper-marginal deposits and promote the value of resources underground without mentioning the cost of actually extracting them.

The industry has been quite successful, during bull markets, at causing "sophisticated" investors to focus on exciting but meaningless criteria.

Being successful in natural resource investing requires you to make choices. If your broker convinces you to buy the sector as a whole, they will have lived up to their moniker—you will become "broker" and "broker."
We have already said that exploration is a knowledge-based business. The truth is that a small number of people involved in the sector generate the overwhelming majority of the successes. This realization is key to improving our odds of success.

"Pareto's law" is the social scientists' term for the so-called "80-20 rule," which holds that 80% of the work is accomplished by 20% of the participants.

A substantial body of evidence exists that it is roughly true across a variety of disciplines. In a large enough sample, this remains true within that top 20%—meaning 20% of the top 20%, or 4% of the population, contributes in excess of 60% of the utility.

The key as investors is to judge management teams by their past success. I believe this is usually much more relevant than their current exploration project.

It is important as well that their past successes are directly relevant to the task at hand. A mining entrepreneur might have past success operating a gold mine in French speaking Quebec. Very impressive, except that this same promoter now proposes to explore for copper, in young volcanic rocks, in Peru!

In my experience, more than half of the management teams you interview will have no history of success that shows that they are apt at executing their current project.

Management must be able to identify the most important unanswered question that can make or break the project. They must be able to say how that question or thesis was identified, explain the process by which the question will be answered, the time required to answer the question, how much money it will take. They also need to know how to recognize when they have answered the question. Many of the management teams you interview will be unable to address this sequence of questions, and therefore will have a very difficult time adding value.

The resource sector is capital intensive and highly cyclical, and we expect that the current pullback is a cyclical decline from an overheated bull market. The fundamental reasons to own natural resource and precious metals have not changed. Warren Buffett says, "Be brave when others are afraid, be afraid when others are brave." We are still "gold bugs." And even "gold bulls."

Rick Rule is the chairman and founder of Sprott Global Resource Investments Ltd., a full-service brokerage firm located in Carlsbad, CA. He has dedicated his entire adult life to different aspects of natural-resource investing and has a worldwide network of contacts in the natural-resource and finance worlds.

Watch Rick and an all-star cast of natural-resource and investment experts—including Frank Giustra, Doug Casey, John Mauldin, and Ross Beaty—in the must-see video "Upturn Millionaires," and discover how to play the turning tides in junior mining stocks, for potentially life changing gains. Click here to watch.

The article Why the Resource Supercycle Is Still Intact was originally published at Casey Research.com.

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