Rick Rule's Favorite Uranium Stocks

now if you still have the minute or maybe 15 or 20 minutes here rick i'd like to go over some of your rankings and some of these uranium stocks is that okay uh it is although depending on what my current intention is with them uh i might not want to encourage competition so i might politely refuse to answer if it gets in the way of my own strategies no worries absolutely whatever you can give me away every second and every opinion counts for me so um i'll also be selfish and i'll just start with the companies that i'm either owning or having on my watch list i'll see which i don't which i do in which i don't own i'll start with the smaller names on here um with the more speculative ones i guess i've recently become very fond of a small explorer um higher up in the basin in the athletic basin baseload what is your what's your great on that one baseload is what i'm looking at my suspicion is the base load is going to do a financing the next 18 months i don't own it i would anticipate participating exploration is very much out of favor right now and i expect that if they raise the money that they need to carry their exploration program forward over the next two years uh that they might need to offer the terms and conditions that would attract me hmm okay that's an interesting note to make i guess the same roughly the same opinion that you can have for their neighbor 92 energy 92 energy i haven't studied enough to have an opinion mm-hmm yeah i don't know a couple nice roles a couple nice drills and some nice resumes i don't know them well enough uh i haven't done enough work on their exploration program uh to risk misleading your listeners i recently spoke to one of baseload's even more recent neighbors which was a lot of people don't know that but it's corey bellick from kanalaska they staked some ground up and up up next to baseload as well and i know that you and your money really helped them make one of their discoveries around chemicals properties deeper in the basin last year that's one of my holdings so what do you what is your what is your grade there kettle alaska gave me a 400 gain uh and i'm gone from conalaska okay can alaska seems to be much more willing now to do soul risk exploration uh and i owned count alaska because i saw them as sort of the basin's premier prospect generator ken alaska also has a very very very high exploration spend relative to their capital base and i suspect that they too will have to return to market i've known uh these people this management team for two decades and my door will certainly be open to them uh depending on the terms that they propose in any private placement that they might entertain cory told me it shouldn't be soon that they're going into the market because they had still some money left uh so but it'd be interesting to watch too bad i can't participate in those yet one of my other personal holdings um has been a very frustrating and disappointing stock to hold but i'm not frustrated with the company maybe a little bit it's standard uranium did you have an opinion there yeah i you know i think standard uranium is one that will do well well in the market uh i know the people i know how they operate in bulma markets they're very clever people what i don't see there is something that looks to me like it's going to be a two and a half billion dollar in-situ reserve and resource i have a huge prejudice against small mines that's one of the reasons why i don't own the us isr producers or explorers much i'm really not fond of small minds uh in a bull market speculators are much less discriminatory than i am and everything goes up together so for the reasons uh that i see their strategy involving you know more of a hub and spoke and more sort of scabbing together a series of small deposits i'm not a player there but i think the stock will do well it might have been you just said it something like small minds only make small money something minus nice did you say that i think something my mantra i've learned it sadly uh personally is that both small minds big minds have risks big risks but only big minds can make you big money so the idea that i would take big risks for small money just doesn't make any sense to me i was gonna ask about somebody who shares a name with you with more experience that being rick mazur from uh one forum metals i've picked up shares recently so what's the opinion here i've i've known rick for a very long time uh and again uh i'm no fan of soul risk exploration which rick exists to do he has been involved in the athabasca basin since he was a youngster you know he's done one thing or effectively one thing for a very long time he's done things outside the basin but he's very experienced up there and i think he's a very good geo that is not one i own i i'm not a fan of soul risk exploration until somebody gives me a drill hole when somebody gives me a drill hole in context when i can understand the third dimension particularly when i can understand the third dimension and the stock says cheap something like iso then i'm hugely interested uh in the current circumstance i either need to get better confirmation or he needs to give me more generous terms hmm i was going to ask you about some of the bigger uh explorers maybe soon to be developers like nextgen iso fission and i know that you like those but they're rather high up in the market cap that's what 300 500 and over a billion dollars the two i don't know next-gen is an expensive stock uh it's a it's a highly priced stock i don't know if it's an expensive one though it has a very full market cap it has the best undeveloped uranium asset in the world outside kazakhstan uh it will get bill and uh the nature of what they have and where it is means that they have de-emphasized exploration for the last five years so in addition to the fact that it's the best undeveloped deposit in the world outside of kazakhstan uh it also has substantial exploration upside that i can see uh i like all that uh they have done i think a very good job of de-risking it within their means which is to say that they've done a good job on engineering a good job on processing a good job on indigenous relationships all the background stuff that doesn't get anybody excited except for a potential acquirer who sees a management team having reduced the timelines that they themselves would uh face if they acquire it uh it's easy to have some criticisms about next-gen uh they pay themselves and they're independent directors obscenely i was gonna say extravagantly but that's not sufficient obscenely and the consequence of that is that a lot of wealth over the last five years that i believe that should rightly have gone to shareholders and i've said this to the company by the way this is me talking behind their backs has in fact gone to them and i would love to see a moderation of the general and administrative expense because that's to listen uh but you know i don't see a next-gen a ten beggar but i don't need a 10 bagger if you take away most of my downside you can have some of my upside i'm fine with that trade i see a deposit that will get built and it will make a boatload of money just a boatload of money uh i i also see a deposit that i think uh in the next three to five years uh we'll have a much bigger company's symbol around it i think lee courier would disagree with you about the management spin because i've asked him about it i interviewed him and he wasn't he wasn't too happy about the questions it was the same questions that you normally ask because i stole your questions obviously but it's true i mean listen i happen to i like him i respect him you can imagine the extent of my concern as to whether or not he likes a question about his compensation um yeah i can yeah rick before we move on to a little bit lower in the map into the u.s that you've told me a little bit about what's the highest ranking canadian uranium company or a company with canadian assets on your list right now uh last week i upgraded camacho to three wow okay uh not that i think it's the finest company in the world that's because adam prom but i think the generalist money will come into the uranium space sometime in the next two years generalist money is what i call tourists and when tourists come into a resource name particularly institutional tourists they're concerned about career risk they don't want to take political risk they want to take as few risks as is possible and the name that ticks those boxes is kamiko kamiko has substantial substantial underused capacity uh which they thus far have been disciplined about not returning to production until the structure of the market improves and what i think a lot of people don't understand about camaco is that certainly it's 60 yellow cake if they have term structured market uh that their uh free cash flow easily has the ability to triple or quadruple which is an interesting story they have been very steadily very cleverly beavering away at exploration which a lot of people don't know they have much fewer permitting challenges than many of their younger competitors have because they're already permitted they have tailings capacity they have milling capacity and importantly uh they're a reasonable player uh in non-russian enrichment and re-enrichment uh which i think for the next two or three years is a business that can grow i think people around the world are looking at supply chains and i i think that the world would look for look with favor at uh increasing non-russian enrichment and re-enrichment capacity and i think that canada has proven to canadian society and the canadian government that they deserve the ability to increase their productive capabilities with minimal permitting interference in that business i was a little surprised to hear that you still think because adam promised the best uranium company out there especially after the q2 chemical numbers which were very good the financials i mean this just show that showed us what kind of potential the company really has so that's uh i think that's true if what you're looking for is leverage you go to chemical if what you're looking for is de-risk participation you go to kazadam it's true that if your median cost of production is thirty dollars a pound versus fifteen dollars a pound uh a movement in the uranium price to sixty gives you a better earnings response as an inefficient producer than it does to an efficient producer uh both kamiko and kazadam prom benefit from being fairly conservative in their resource and reserve calculations both of them have material available to them that isn't on the books that if a junior held would be the focus of their attention uh both because adam prom and kamiko have enviable grades uh and enviable uh intellectual capital around uranium but because adam prom has a scary development exploration pipeline they have the ability to return pounds to production some of them by the way a joint venture with kamako uh atinkai that would be uh among the lowest cost pounds in the world and importantly these pounds uh are in situ leech pounds which means that you return them to production by drilling water in effect water wells uh and running a solution basically bicarbonate of soda i mean it's like a it's like an oil and gas water flood you can return this stuff to production in nine or ten months as opposed to three three or four years uh with a hot stopped uh underground conventional mine i was thinking of going for lower on the map as i said into the us but you just told me about the us that you're not really happy with which i'm guessing are companies like western uranium and vanadium from whom we never hear anything by which is kind of frustrating um but but is that like do you have any higher rankings in the in the us i don't uh i think the stocks will perform well because i think american investors are ethnocentric and i think that american investors believe that high-cost american production is better than low-cost kazakh production they're wrong but there's more of them than there are me and more people doing something propels a price higher than fewer people doing something so in the near term i think that the u.s uranium industry is very very geared to narrative and i think the stocks will trade well i don't buy stock based on whether i think it's going to trade well i buy stock because i think it represents fractional ownership in a business and i want to be able to buy my fraction cheaply so the consequence of that is that i don't trouble myself in the u.s uranium space with the exception of course of owning uec and having no cost basis in it you know having sold enough to have the rest for free and uranium royalty what about the african then because i know that you you you do like africa as it is a cheap side you know it's a lower quartile production spot yep um you know i like the waterfront i like paladin i like lotus i like deep yellow i'm warming up the general atomic uh as that deposit grows in size my criticism of it before was i liked the grade i did not like the country it was in nor the part of the country that it's in um i was nervous about going there myself and if you're concerned for your own safety you shouldn't send somebody to look at a deposit those concerns appear at least in the near term to ameliorate it so i'm looking at global atomic with much fresher eyes than i would have looked at it before i own global atomic and i was sold on to it mainly by stephen roman um the ceo whose dad started denison if i have that correctly his dad was a good friend of mine uh and a spectacular guy and it was in fact dennison and it's worthwhile to note that the roman family still has access to a lot of the denison database so when steve roman went to look for uranium deposits on a global basis he didn't have to do too much generative geology all he had to do was look at his basement which is a durable competitive advantage the same advantage that caused me to fund border shaft in 1998 right these databases are very very valuable as is three decades of experience you know organic experience in uranium there's a lot of folks in the uranium business now that learned how to spell it five years ago uh roman grew up with discussions uh about uranium around the breakfast table and that's something that's very difficult to replicate yeah he definitely grew up with only yellow cakes for his birthday i'm sorry this is a bad joke uh what about the public's favorite didn't hear you mention it uh bannermen i talked to their ceo a lot brandon monroe is a very bright guy he's all over the place in a nuclear energy and i really like him i have huge time for him i'm not yet a shareholder i have been i traded out of it uh my my objection three years ago was scope and scale i didn't see two and a half billion dollars in uh net present value in in situ reserves and resources uh at then published uh resource numbers then then you know then publish prices i'm warming up to bannermen largely uh because i'm a huge fan of the ceo i want to be sold on the name right it's impossible to like him i think he he's kind of like john borcher but i'm a couple of years younger um so that's uh that's the same for me i'm talking to govix soon i haven't spoken to them in a while i was not super sold on their asset the first time or your shareholder i'm not a shareholder of glovex i have been a shareholder of govx uh i've got a lot of time for dan major i i have a love hate relationship with niger from a geological point of view it's an extraordinary good place from a social and political point of view it's very challenged um it's also within the french sphere of influence which means that there may need to be accommodation of french interests to advance a project of course global atomic would face would face the change the same challenge the range of assets they have is frankly pretty appealing they have from time to time played chicken with capital markets which is to say they haven't always raised as much as they could when they could they have as a consequence i think of being a friedland family stock uh had access to capital uh that was i thought too generous at the time which is to say the price that i would have paid for participation was more than i was willing to pay i think we're coming into the period of the market now where if they begin to develop traction uh govind the son of robert friedland for those of your listeners who don't know uh will be able to lean on his dad more and more uh and i think his dad's interest uh increasingly is in a decarbonized world and i think the work that his data has done in battery metals and in ivanhoe electric in copper uh in all things electric will give robert both the incentive to be more aggressive in helping his son but also give his son access to robert's rolodex of investors which is perhaps the best rolodex that exists in the junior sphere definitely that's definitely true what's the highest ranking in in africa right now i'm sorry what's the highest ranking in africa right now on your list four okay okay foreign i think we've discussed this before relative to most commentators uh perhaps because of my age i'm a very strict grader well four is not too bad considering that you give camacho a three so four is pretty close to that who gets it pardon who gets a comment okay fair enough you you can probably figure it out from my earlier you could probably figure it out from my earlier uh discussions of who i was attracted to sure yeah fair game i know you almost got around so we cannot go through every company in in in australia is there a higher ranking in australia than there is in africa no okay fair enough there's there's uh i mean boss is sort of knocking on the door mm-hmm definitely yeah duncan again it's impossible to to dislike him okay so rick i understand you have to run now um i've definitely missed to mention a bunch of companies and people will bite my head off for it in the comments but if anybody wants those rankings on those companies that they or they want them they want you to look into their portfolio how can they to make you do that and what do they have to pay for it any listener who cares what i think about their natural resource portfolio can find out for free with no obligation by going to ruleinvestmentmedia.com list your natural resource stocks please no crypto please no tech stocks please no narcotic stocks or whatever you call those things just natural resource stocks i'll rank them one to ten one being best 10 being worst i'll comment on individual issues where i think my comments might have some value note two that the rankings change on a wholesale basis about every six weeks so the rankings get stale very quickly note that i will upgrade or downgrade companies uh much more quickly to the extent that the the news justifies it all i'm trying to say is that your rankings are a snapshot in time they're not investment advice

Channel: Resource Talks

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Length: 22min 11sec (1331 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 12 2022