Is It Too Late to Invest in Gold? with Max Belmont - FEG Insight Bridge
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Welcome to Money for the Rest of Us. This is a personal finance show on money, how it works, how to invest it, and how to live without worrying about it. I'm your host, David Stein, and in this episode, we share a conversation about investing in gold from a portfolio manager,

with one of the biggest asset managers in the gold space. This is part of our monthly podcast series of episodes released by my former institutional investment advisory firm, FEG Investment Advisors.

Their podcast is the FEG Insight Bridge, hosted by Greg Dowling, FEG's Chief Investment Officer and Head of Research. Greg and I worked together for years as part of FEG's Investment Committee. In this episode, Greg interviews Max Belmont, Portfolio Manager and Senior Research Analyst at First Eagle Investments. Belmont has been with First Eagle for over a decade, primarily focusing on gold. The topic is timely as gold recently surpassed resale

$3,000 an ounce, reaching an all-time high.

As an institutional advisor, gold just wasn't something we recommended or invested in. I changed my mind and began buying gold coins in early 2015. Now gold comprises over 5% of my investable assets. If you haven't invested in gold, you might be asking yourself, is it too late? This episode will help answer that question by providing some historical, philosophical, and practical understanding of owning gold.

Topics include where does gold's reputation as a safe haven come from and why does it trade differently than other commodities? How does gold differ from other asset classes, including Bitcoin, which is sometimes referred to as digital gold? And how should we think about gold when including it in our investment portfolio?

Now, before we start with the interview, I wanted to share a few words from this week's sponsor, Asset Camp. Over 10 years ago, I left my former investment advisory firm and began teaching individuals the same asset class driven investing approach I successfully used with clients. There was a problem though. The critical investment data and tools that helped me understand and make successful portfolio decisions were consistently gatekept from individual investors like me and

and you buy exorbitant fees, industry credentials, and complicated interfaces. That's why I created Asset Camp, to give individual investors like you the essential tools and insights to invest smarter, tools that cut through market noise, keep emotions in check, and help you confidently understand and

and navigate the stock and bond markets. AssetCamp is designed to help long-term investors like you navigate markets with clarity and facts, make informed decisions, and build confidence in your portfolio strategy. AssetCamp includes powerful metrics and tools such as stock market valuations and earnings data for 46 stock indexes, covering 99% of the global stock market. That's

that allow you to identify opportunities and risks. Bond market yield, duration, and spread data for 28 bond indexes to assist with making smart fixed income decisions. And expect return models to forecast and stress test stock and bond market outcomes. With AssetCamp, individual investors like us can confidently understand the underlying drivers of our investments. We can look under the hood to answer essential questions about the stock and bond markets, just like professionals and institutions.

You can try AssetCamp for free for seven days and access all the investment tools and benefits it offers. Sign up today at AssetCamp.com. That's A-S-S-E-T-C-A-M-P dot com. Now here's Greg Dowling and Max Belmont on FEG's Insight Bridge.

Max, welcome to the FPG Insight Bridge. Greg, thank you very much for the warm introduction. I'm certainly delighted to be speaking with you today. Yeah, well, we are too. So would you mind introducing yourself and First Eagle? Absolutely.

I am Max Baumont, a portfolio manager and senior research analyst on the gold strategy at First Eagle Investments. I've been with First Eagle for over a decade now, since 2014, primarily focusing on gold. And in case you are wondering where my accent is from, I was raised in Europe and southern Germany, so I'm a little bit of a mutt there.

All right. So Munich, Munich area, where are you from in Germany? No, it's south of Munich. If you're familiar with that area, it's a tri-country area, not a state area. So you have Switzerland in the south, you have Austria to the east, and you have Germany to the north. It's the Lake of Constance. I was raised in Constance at the Lake of Constance. So when I fly home, Greg, I fly into Zurich. That's my home airport. So it's close to a different country again. Very interesting.

First Eagle has a standalone gold fund, but gold is also part of many of their other strategies. What is the linkage between First Eagle and all these gold funds or gold exposures? Let me introduce to you quickly First Eagle as well. So you have that background, who we are today, because then I will tell you about the history that you alluded to. So at First Eagle, we are a privately owned independent asset.

asset management firm with right now around $138 billion across five investment teams under management. Each investment team has its own leadership philosophy and process, but I think the common thread is that as a firm, we believe in active fundamental research that might lead to alpha when you apply it over the long term. I am part of one of these investment teams, the global value team that has exposure to gold and gold-related investments. Now,

answering your question like, how do we get here? Which is super interesting. And it also goes back to Germany, 1864 Germany. So that's when our heritage and our founding fathers started the company. The company then moved to the 1930s US. And so as a result throughout this time, as you can imagine, the company has been through political upheaval, economic cycles,

unification of Germany because that's how it started in 1864 with Otto von Bismarck. So we have adapted a particular mindset that is long-term oriented with the preservation of capital. But the question that you have to ask yourself as an investor, Greg, is if you want to create long-term wealth and you want to create resilient portfolios, what can an investor do to potentially minimize those unforeseenable, unexpected drawdowns?

And simply put, at First Eagle, we use gold for its potential hedge characteristics in our portfolios. That's fascinating. I'm assuming then that the Weimar Republic and the hyperinflation of Germany when they were kind of a younger company has had such a dramatic influence on gold and thoughts about inflation hedging. Is that correct? You nailed it. It's exactly that point. Having the Arnhold family and the Blyker family witnessed that,

And having some of their clients deposits in gold clearly help them withstand those episodes, those very turbulent episodes. So that's where actually gold comes in. That's why we see it as a safe haven, as a potential safe haven and a hedge in our portfolios. All right. So we're going to talk more about gold. There are people on both sides of this. It's pretty interesting, but maybe to build some credibility, how big of an investor is First Eagle in gold? Can you kind of quantify that?

Here's what I can tell you, because my compliance team is always very keen of me saying the right things. Public is stated as July 2024, and here's what we have. We have around 3.3 million physical ounces of gold that we are holding for our clients in a vault. But that's really like in a vault. And think about it like you see it in the movies, those gold bars. And

To add a little bit of clarity, what that means in layman terms, because maybe some of your listeners don't know what 3.3 million ounces of physical gold is. At the end of July, there was close to $8.1 billion in gold bullion and physical gold bullion. You add to this also, we have an allocation to the gold miners. So I think it's fair to assume that our exposure is higher than those 8.1, but that's what we can quantify at this moment. So $8 billion.

at prices end of July that we held in gold. Wow, that's a lot. Now, if I asked you where the vault was and what the combo to the lock was, would you tell me? I may tell you, but I may have to kill you. So that's undisclosed. Understand. It's a very secret vault and system there. So yes. It was worth a shot asking. Said this earlier is that there are different views on gold. So one of the world's more famous economists, John Maynard Keynes,

Once called gold a barbarous relic, basically meaning that it had no true functionality or place in a modern economy. Could you maybe address some of those critics?

Sure. I think if you really take a step back here and think about gold, where does its reputation as a safe haven come from would be the first question. And I think this has to do in part with its relative stability of supply. What does this mean?

If you look on the periodic table, and I'm taking you basically back to your high school or early days there, and you look at the periodic table, you will find that gold, while it is an element on the periodic table, it has two attributes. A, it is dense. It's very dense, so hence it's very heavy. And it's scarce, but it's not too scarce. It doesn't rust or tarnish or otherwise debase. Really, an ounce of gold today will be an ounce of gold today

in a thousand years and was an ounce of gold a thousand years or two thousand years ago. So as a result of this, you have this stability of supply. It also doesn't get consumed. Virtually all the gold that has ever been mined sits in above ground inventory today. Now, how much is there? Which is also a very good follow-up question. And actually, I could ask you this, Greg. Do you know how much gold there is in above ground supplies? If you would put all the gold together in like, say, a cube or what

whatever you want to think about it. How much is there in terms of a volume? A couple of things. I think if I recall from my high school chemistry, gold, the element is AU. Is that right? Absolutely. Yes, it is. And then two, and just because I do prep for these calls, I believe, and I could be wrong, but there's maybe eight Olympic-sized pools of gold. Is that right? It depends on the depth of these. So

So what depth do you assume? The easier way to think about it is, do you play tennis? I don't really play tennis, but I have played tennis. So yeah, I know the size of the court. Exactly. Think about the size of the court from one baseline to another baseline. So it's very easy. That's around the size of a cube of gold. It's a little bit smaller. It comes in at three feet.

So if you build a cube with a side length of 73 feet, then that's all the gold there is in the world that we as humans have ever been mined. And that includes all the jewelry. That includes all the bars that are held by central banks and vaults as public money. This includes all the investment that First Eagle has. So it's a cube and that cube is around 212,000 metric tons to be exact, but that's

That's how much there is. So again, there is this just limited supply of gold in the world that we have as humans ever mind.

It's not as abundant as one may think. Now, the other thing that I would add to this is that also leads to something else because gold is inert. It's chemically inert, Greg, means it's nonproductive. It's nonmoving. And because of this, it doesn't have the sensitivity to the business cycles that other commodities do. So think about iron ore, copper, steel, gold.

the PGMs, the platinum crude metals, platinum palladium and others, those get used in industry. Gold doesn't. Less than 10%, around 7% of annual gold supply gets used in industry. So because of this, gold doesn't trade with the business cycle. Like when the business cycle is booming, you expect those other commodities to do well. However,

However, during recessionary times, you would expect those other commodities to not provide a potential hedge in your portfolios because these are productive commodities. So gold trades a little bit differently here. And to summarize, think about gold's uselessness from an industrial perspective. Make it actually useful from a portfolio construction standpoint when you think about like a financial architecture. It's interesting, right? Because...

I get the scarcity, it's permanence. Those are important things. But you mentioned it has very limited commercial use, no cash flows, it pays no dividends. And on top of that, you actually have to pay to store it.

Why does it maintain its value so much? There are maybe not a lot of other things that are like that, but there are certainly some. Keep pulling on that thread for us. You're absolutely right. It pays no dividends and it shouldn't pay a dividend or cash flow because if you think about it, unlike money that is someone's asset and at the same time someone's liability,

gold is different. Gold is just an asset and no one's liability. Either you own gold or you don't own gold and there is no counterparty risk with gold. And there shouldn't be any cash flows that you receive from gold. And you're right. There's something to be said about that. We dig it out of the dirt and we put it back into a vault as humans, right? And we store it back in the vault. You

You have to really make sure you know where your gold is and it's in a safe location and you may have to pay an amount to store it. I can tell you we have competitive rates at First Eagle when we store those over 3 billion ounces that I mentioned before.

Now, what I try to highlight to you is this relative stability of supply is over the last 125 years, Greg, gold effectively compounded annually the supply. I'm talking about the supply at sub 2% per annum. So here is an asset class that is, as you said, you know, it's an element AU on the periodic table and it doesn't compound.

compound and you cannot increase the supply at will. And over long periods of time, it has maintained its purchasing power. There is a study from 1560 on to 2007 by a former researcher at Berkeley University, and

And he looked at this and he asked himself, how did gold behave over the longer periods of time? And it's one of the longest studies that I am aware of when it comes to gold. And he showed that over 450 years of data since 1560 England, and he has done the same from the 1800s in the US, that gold has maintained its purchasing power in times of need and has provided a safe haven historically during these tumultuous episodes that we have as

as humans witnessed. So again, while this has been called various names all the time, and clearly, we're at First Eagle where the global value team is a value shop. So we track closely the Buffetts and the Mungers, the former Mungers of the world. Also like Buffett and Munger, they were not necessarily in favor of gold. But we think that

It's actually this paradoxically, this non-productive aspect of gold that makes it useful and provides an allure to mankind over like very long periods of time. You mentioned that it has limited capacity to grow. Crypto is designed to be a little bit like that. What about digital gold? What about the Gen Zers who prefer crypto over gold? How would you compare and contrast? Millennials, Gen Z, I think we both agree on that they're tech savvy.

right? They know how to use these tools. And I think it may be fair to say that the Gen Z, they're open to alternative investments, such as Bitcoin and crypto, and potentially also gold as they seek to diversify their portfolios beyond the traditional stock and bond components that has worked the 60-40 for many, many years. They may view potentially crypto as an alternative to gold, free

appreciating, you know, the high returns and the decentralized structure. But I want to explain to you and compare and contrast these two asset classes, because we talk about digital gold in the terms of crypto, but there's also the real gold that has a longer timeframe. And taking a step back, I think you're right to say that

Bitcoin and gold are philosophically similar, Greg. Both need to be Maya. One via servers and one via dump trucks. It's a similar process. One has a finite stock.

Think about the 21 million Bitcoins out there. And as I told you before, over the last 120 years, what we can say is that gold supply has increased less than 2% per annum. So again, it's also a finite supply, a limited supply that you cannot increase at will or double at any moment in time. And you can say with a certainty what the supply of gold may be in the next three, four, five years, because...

The miners can just do so much and produce so much.

And you have seen also, I think, the advent of the ETFs. You have the iShares out there. You have seen tremendous inflows in those. And if you just look at the largest ones for gold and Bitcoin, what you can say is that the Bitcoin ETF sits at almost 40% right now. As of the gold ETF, it has been around for much longer than the iShares Bitcoin ETF. But importantly, I want to highlight is where they differ because that's sometimes that people do not fully understand.

In times of need, gold has acted as a potential hedge in one portfolio. So gold is a risk off. Bitcoin seems to be a risk on asset that trends and fluctuates more like a growth stock.

The best example I can give you for this is just not in the history, like two years ago. In 2022, we've all lived through all that time in 2022, when the broader equity markets had a negative year. The S&P was down almost 20%, the NASDAQ was down 33%, and Bitcoin decreased over 60%. That year, gold bullion provided this ballast, a stabilizing anchor. So

That is not to take away from the fact that 2023 and 2024 have been tremendous years for the stock market than Bitcoin in general, relative to gold, much better performance. But again, you have much wider fluctuations with Bitcoin. And so far, what we have seen is that Bitcoin has not provided that stability in times of need when the stock market is on a broader decline. That makes sense. It provides that same diversification. It has limited supply. Now, I

I did want to ask, is gold a hedge against currencies and inflation? When you take a step back again and look from the outside, I think that gold is often considered an inflation hedge and a hedge against fiat currencies. Think about just like looking at the word, what the word debasement means. So 2,000 years ago,

actually was more silver than gold, there was money, but you would debase by like looking at that coinage and debasing it by making and actually increasing the copper content and the Roman denarius relative to silver. That's actually like something that you think, have to think about. So it's a debase, like it provides stability against debasement. It's non-debt money. It's nature's currency and it's an asset, no liability as I said before.

We discussed it as an asset class that historically has provided investors with a perceived safe haven in times of need. I highlighted a little bit to you the scarcity aspect that is very important for gold, that its supply is coming in at less than 2% per annum over the long term. But it's also a potential hedge against fiat currency devaluation. The way sometimes I think it's easier to think about gold is to think about gold to what the French called a numéreur. That's a fancy word.

to think about a unit of account. Think about an ounce of gold that you hold in your hand. It's a coin. It's a smaller coin, not a very big coin. It's a small coin, but it's an ounce, so it's quite heavy. You and we all do this to an extent. You know, when you read the newspaper, when you look at like the financial media, well, gold went up or gold went down. The

The way to think about it is gold didn't go up or didn't go down because you still have the same amount, the same ounce of gold in your hand. What fluctuated is the currency that you denominated it. And a different way to what I'm trying to explain to you is hypothetically, gold increases from $1,000 to $2,000. It's not that gold went up.

It's at the U.S. dollar depreciated. So think about a currency pair in this case and vice versa. If gold hypothetically goes from $2,000 to $1,000, it's not that gold went down. It's actually that your dollars are more worth. That's unique when it comes to gold. And that's when we talk about yet currency devaluation. But it's also an asset class that is recognized globally. You can denominate gold in every currency, whether you do it in U.S. dollars, Canadian dollars, etc.

as a European than euros and others. But it's not only a potential hedge against currency devaluation, both at stage haven and in times of need. And, you know, think about geopolitical risks, Greg, and many others that we have seen in the recent past where people and governments have looked at gold from a different perspective to just diversify their portfolios. Interesting. That's a great way of kind of picturing it, right, as a cross between currencies and their value.

Is that why gold has gone up so much? Why has it gone up so much? Is there concern about inflation and then therefore the value of currencies, at least in the US? Gold is the inverse of confidence.

That's something that all your listeners should jot down here, that gold is the inverse of confidence. When confidence is high, you'd expect the price of your potential edge to be lower. And when confidence is low, you'd expect the price of your potential edge to be higher. In simple terms, think about when gold did very well. When did it do very well historically? It did very well in the 70s. I'm off uphill. I'm off like uncertainty.

It didn't do well in the 80s and 90s under Reagan and others, the time of systemic belief. It did do well relative to stocks in the 2000s. It started with 9-11 and ended with, like, if you will, with the global financial crisis. Didn't outperform stocks in the 2010s.

So it's almost this barbell between stocks and gold when one or the other do well. But there are a couple of more recent structural drivers that drive the gold price. Maybe it is, as you said, the fears of higher for longer inflation, as the Fed has cut rates recently and not maintaining that 2% inflation target. Clearly, they have said that employment for them is more important.

You may have investors right now looking to diversify away from US denominated assets, given the debt burden that we have in the US. Maybe there are some perceived sanction risks of countries outside the US that are looking at it. There are potentially also, and we have seen this earlier this year, like fears of devaluation of the Chinese renminbi. And we have had like retail demand in China look at gold. And also importantly, you have rising geopolitical tensions. So you have...

A few drivers that are influencing the gold price now, and I think clearly one of the things that weighs on investors is the U.S. debt burden. We're running a very high, large primary deficits at around 7.5% of GDP. That's an unusually high number.

in particular in times of full employment or low single-digit employment. We're looking, as we speak, at almost $36 trillion in debt, and that number is just going up by a trillion every 100 days or so. So I think gold has reacted rationally in the

in the short term, given like these onset of events that have clearly been more disturbing the overall picture. You kind of alluded to it here just a second ago, but was, you know, central banks and you mentioned China and these governments, right? And government's activity in it. Was it a watershed moment for gold when Russia invaded Ukraine and then the U.S. kicked Russia off of SWIFT?

They started to diversify some of their central bank holdings from King Dollar to gold, and a lot of other people have followed suit. So how much of this rising gold has really been driven by central banks buying it? It's hard to say. It's hard to add a number to it, Greg. It's certainly a structural driver. And if you look at the evolution of central bank programs, a

A particular regard in gold, they're influenced by economic, geopolitical, and other monetary factors that you alluded to. Looking at history, what we have witnessed is that in the 90s to 2008, central banks were sellers, net sellers on average of gold. In particular, like in the 2000s, the Swiss, the French, the English central bank sold gold. It came with a change, a paradigm change around the global financial crisis

that put gold into central banks' portfolios and turned them into net buyers. So if you average it out, not particularly in 2009, 2010, but if you average it out over 10 years from say 2011, 12 to 2021, you will find that on average, central banks bought around 500 metric tons, 500 metric tons of gold. In 2022 and 2023, with what you alluded to,

they became buyers of over 1,000 metric tons of gold. So double previous 10-year average, if you will. And you may have to ask yourself what happened. That's exactly what you highlighted, Russia-Ukraine conflict, the sanctions, the reclamation of the dollar that may have moved and

pose this question to a central banker. If I'm a central banker outside the Western world, what do I want to hold in custody? Do I want to hold something in custody that cannot be confiscated and I have all that is an asset and no one's liability? Or do I want to hold something that potentially may be weaponized against me if I have a variant perception?

And I'm just letting it stand for what it's worth, right? So the Western sections clearly drove Russia against Russia, a structural increase in the demand for gold.

How much that is and how that will develop in the future is very hard. Say the jewelry is still out there, we can't comment on that. Related, there's been rumors swirling over the last handful of years that many of the BRICs, like Brazil and Russia, India, China, South Africa, would love to create their own currency backed by gold. And again, it's trying to get away from this king dollar that's used in so many different transactions.

Is there any legitimacy to any of these rumors and what impact would that have on gold? The BRICS summit just ended in Moscow not too long ago. And what I think the takeaway that we have from this BRICS summit is that the BRICS may not be pursuing a common currency. That's very important. Maybe it was a long shot to begin with, Greg, because you have so many nationalities in there with so many different interests and

then maybe it's hard to bring them all under one umbrella. And I can say this as a proud European. Even Europe has very different interests at moments. One of the takeaways from this summit that the focus has turned to using national currencies, but there should be additional instruments.

that they may leverage. One of these instruments is the BRICS Pay. And BRICS Pay is, from my understanding, it seems that it's a very similar system to the SWIFT system that we have in the West. In a way, it's a cross-border transaction architecture that is outside of reach of Western sanctions, right? So what seems to be happening right now is rather than with this latest summit is that the goal has shifted significantly

But there is a nuance in the goal and the goal has shifted to avoiding the dollar rather than replacing it. That is actually like a very subtle change, but it can have implications to gold. We don't know what gold will mean in this architecture if it means anything at all. But I think the tendencies are clearly in this. I read a little bit over the Kazan Declaration that they came out with out of the summit.

And the Article 10 in there is very unique that says, you know, we're deeply concerned about unilateral measures and legal sanctions. So I think there is still the feeling, the mutual feeling across these nations, the BRICS nations, that they want to diversify away from the king dollar, as you said. But I don't think the dollar will go anywhere.

anywhere in the short term. A dollar is a dollar. Dollar is really hard to replace. And even if it goes down a little bit, it's going to be a long, long time before they can replace the dollar.

I did want to ask about gold miners, because that's one thing that you'll do in the gold fund is you'll not only hold kind of physical gold, but you'll at times invest in the gold miners. How do you think about that investment? I often feel like maybe things have changed, but historically, miners dig holes. They haven't always been the most capital efficient miners.

to make. So just kind of your thoughts on gold versus miners and has anything changed? Are they a better value than maybe they were, you know, 20, 30 years ago? Gold mining, like any other industry, Greg, and you know this, has its pros and cons. It's a very high fixed cost business. The mine lines are usually shorter compared to the bulk copper and base metal investments out there and miners out there. But significantly,

Simply put at First Eagle, we seek exposure to inexpensive ounces. Think about it this way. We have the ability to invest in gold bullion on one side, and we recognize that gold bullion has potential advantages. If you're really honest with yourself, you will say that gold in the vault

maybe is as useful as gold in the dirt, gold that you haven't dug up, that you haven't extracted from the earth's crust. So it might be a sensible thing to invest in a miner where you have a margin of safety given the runoff of the miner's reserves, right? If you find a margin of safety in the miner, then it may be sensible to invest in the miner relative to gold bullion.

And we consider mining investments at First Eagle along four themes that I want to just quickly highlight for you so you understand the process behind it. The four pillars are the following. It's valuation, resilience, duration, and optionality. Valuation is done on a mind-by-mind basis at spot current gold price. So we do not forecast the price of gold. We do not

Think about it where it should trade. We just look at the spot price today that the market dictates and we do a sum of the parts at that spot price and that gives us a sense for the margin of safety for the particular miner. Effectively, is it more inexpensive to acquire the ounces via the miners or via the bullion at spot gold prices? Resilience is very important.

As you said, gold mining has its cons and it's a cyclical industry. It's a very cyclical industry. So you want to invest in miners where you have resilience. Think about it as that the miner will survive and will operate effectively during various environments. So whether they're like financial risks that come their way, operational, technical risks.

and governance risk, political risk and others. You want resilient miners. You want low-cost producers. Low-cost producers, no matter what happens to the gold price wall with standard of volatility in the commodity price. You want, though, also duration. You want long mine lives. Good balance sheets. And you want some optionality, which is probably having

having a quality management team with demonstrated exploration success. So you're always balancing these two buckets against each other, the miners, royalty businesses against the gold bullion. Again, it's value investors. That's where you want to actually allocate at any point in time, depending on how that relationship works out. That's great.

It's kind of interesting, yeah, to think about those two and how to get the cost of acquiring an ounce of gold, whether it's in the ground or not. And I know that's been a big part of your strategy over the years. Maybe one just kind of last question before we kind of start to wrap it up a little bit. But any thoughts between physical gold and a financial instrument with gold like GLD? Is there any difference that investors should be aware of? So there are subtle differences, clearly.

Think about if you own physical bullion and you may have acquired it at Costco, which has rolled out and it was in the news this year that they're rolling out gold bullion. The thought that you should have with gold bullion is it's taxed as a collectible. It's not taxed.

not tax that long-term capital gains. That happens also with the GLD. But what is important is if you hold an ounce of gold in your hand, it's what you have to think about that you highlighted before, like where do you store it? Make sure it's in a safe place. If you ever want to monetize it, how are you going to monetize it again? Are you monetizing it via a bullion dealer? How do you sell the gold effectively and to whom?

That's a little bit more streamlined with the GLD that hold gold bullion, but it's more of a financial instrument. It has a grant or trust behind it. So you have some counterparty risk. It's stored in different vaults, in particular in London, where they have disclosed. It's a different instrument, clearly.

Each come with the pros and cons. And then you clearly have then the mutual funds and others like us or like the direct investments in the miners that you can also have as an option if you want to allocate to this asset class. You know, I love Costco. I mean, not only can you get a giant tub of peanut butter, but you can get gold bullion. That is absolutely great. It's pretty special. I agree with you. You know, what do you have in your cart? Well, so if listeners want to learn more about gold,

Are there any books or any other resources that you'd point them to? Two things, Greg, that have helped me. And I think one is, I mentioned this before, is the book that documents the English-American experience from 1560 to 2007. That book is called The Golden Constant, and it was written by Roy Yastram and Adolfo

Again, he examines this long-term value of gold as a stable store of wealth over centuries. And that's, I think, very unique because here you have like a longer-term perspective on it. It's harder to get this book. It may be more expensive than others, but if you can, this is a very good starting point if you're a historian and you want to learn by inquiring the old. A more like feasible book for the listeners may be like a book that came out a few years ago, which is The New Case for Gold.

by James Rickards. He makes it effectively in the book, a case for gold, but it has also like some very colorful and shiny case studies and little like episodes and chapters. Oh, that's great. Yeah, I haven't read that, but we've had him at our forum, our investment forum a handful of years ago. He always has some great analogies, great stories. Those are two great recommendations. So when you're not counting your gold, what are your hobbies? What do you like to do?

How do I respond to this, Greg? This is a very difficult one since I have a selection of them depending on what year you asked me about. A serial hobbyist. Yeah. What are you doing now? What fills your free time? What do you enjoy? I love reading. One of the things I think is, you know, feeding the mind and improving the mind. I just finished...

There's a different book that was not on Gold, which was called Ultra Learning. I don't know if you heard about it. I have, yeah. Scott Young, in this case, makes a case on how to effectively and efficiently learn new skills, knowledge, retain the knowledge. I think it gave me new perspectives. So in the book, I'll tell you this, he gave his case study of learning to draw. So I want to make a 30-day challenge to myself to learn to draw a little bit better.

So I have ordered a book called Drawing on the Right Side Up.

of the brain compared to the left, the analytical. So the right hemisphere is more of the creative one. And there's a beautiful book about that teaches you about perception and how you should view things, which I thought, you know, I like, why not make it a quick challenge on that? So that's one of the things that I'm doing right now. The other thing that I would tell you is while I enjoy very much cooking and dealing with new recipes, I have gone down a little bit the rabbit hole of investing in an espresso machine with a standalone grinder. And

And that's very dangerous. So there's something very satisfying about the process of brewing your perfect shot of espresso. It's almost like, you know, like you're waiting for the perfect wave and you look at it and you're like, oh,

Like, how does this taste? Like, how can you experiment with different beans, techniques, like extraction times, different, very, very different things. So that's another satisfying hobby of mine. And like everybody else, lastly, I would mention to you is something that keeps me anchored, makes me feel energized and stay focused. It's just like some workouts, right? During the pandemic of a few years ago, I invested in something

that I never thought would be such a humbling experience, I invested in a pair of gymnastics rings. I can imagine that is a great workout. Yeah, there's plenty of ways to challenge yourselves. And you know, when you have to challenge your own body,

And lift your own body. It's one of the hardest things that you actually ever have to do or I had to do. You know, I'm never going to do all these, like when you look at the Olympics, when you look, watch the Olympics in Paris, I have a very different respect for those who do, you know, an Ironman or other super, superhuman strength.

Well, Max, maybe what you can do is combine a couple of these. Try 7-Espresso and then hit those rings, and I bet it'll change your workout. Absolutely. Yes, it's a good boost to that espresso. Thank you so much. What a golden opportunity it was to have you on our podcast. We've really enjoyed it. So thank you so much. Thank you for having me, Greg. Truly a pleasure and all the best.

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