Erik Wetterling, Founder and Editor of The Hedgeless Horseman website, joins me for a longer-format more candid ‘fire-side chat’ type of discussion, where we review the different trends in price performance, sentiment, and momentum across various stages of gold, silver, and copper stocks.

We start off contrasting the pricing reactions in the gold producers and higher quality developers to the moves higher in gold to record all-time highs.  Erik points out economic studies have had difficulty even keeping up with the rising metals prices over the last year, and how while of the quality gold stocks tracked the moves higher in gold, very few of the gold juniors had the type of outperformance and leverage that one would have anticipated in such a bullish backdrop in the underlying metals price environment.

Next we discussed how those same dynamics in compared to how the silver producers reacted to the rising silver price over the last year, and how the upside torque, and also the outsized moves down during silver corrections also filtered down more into the related silver junior stocks.  Erik points out that the narratives and trading psychology and sentiment around silver equities tends to be more extreme, but that the extremes in volatility is not really suited for most investors.

Then the discussion switched over the strange behavior so far this year in the copper equities — where they seemed to be shrugging off both explosive moves up to new all-time highs as well as the extreme corrective moves with regards to the underlying copper pricing.    Over the last few years we have seen the copper producers get the bid first, and move more in synch with underlying metals pricing trends and sentiment. Erik outlines that copper juniors have acted more similar to gold juniors between 2020 and 2024 where gold kept making a run up towards $2,000 over and over and getting rejected back lower.  We’ve seen that play out the last few years with copper approaching and briefly eclipsing the $5 per lb level a few times, where the stocks quit believing that level would stick and build a higher pricing base. In a similar pattern the copper juniors have not participated as much until much higher copper prices finally got them moving.

Since we’ve seen the producers fair better overall thus far in the multi-year rallies in gold, silver, and copper sectors, compared to overall trends in wide swath of juniors, the question is posed to Erik regarding if people should even invest in junior resource stocks. Erik goes on to highlight some nuances around cheap and undervalued subsectors within resource juniors versus seniors, and why he remains constructive on how things will unfold moving forward in these evolving bull markets in the metals.

Click here to follow Erik’s analysis over at The Hedgeless Horseman website