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by being under-served.
It would make perfect sense in terms of
issuers – junior mining companies pursu-
ing an investor base – to pursue the larger
US market which is under-served rather
than the small Canadian market which is
over-served.
RW: Are you following mining stocks
targeting energy metals and commodities
such as lithium and cobalt?
RR: We are mostly sector agnostic. We
prefer materials that are out of favour
rather than materials that are in favour. We
are attracted to the cobalt market because
users of cobalt have told us that the cobalt
price could go substantially higher, ironi-
cally, if the supply of cobalt was greater.
What seems to be constraining the cobalt
price is the fact that fabricators aren't
investing in applications or fabrication
technologies because they are afraid of the
inavailability of supply.
You and I have known each other for
many years and I have never seen a mate-
rial where the consumer tells me that they
would be willing to pay more if they could
use more. This is an ironic situation.
Now, with regards to some of the other
battery metals like lithium, the demand for
lithium has grown faster than the process-
ing capability of lithium producers. There
is not a shortage of lithium in the ore stage.
There has been a shortage of the develop-
ment of processing technology which the
industry will take care of in the next two
years. We are not lithium bulls.
That wouldn't detract us from buying
an extraordinarily high quality lithium
deposit that we believe would be in the
best quartile worldwide in terms of capital
efficiency and operating costs.
Our favourite battery metal is, ironi-
cally, probably copper. Our second
favourite battery metal is probably nickel;
two metals that we think will probably do
well irrespective of the future of batteries.
RW: How will Blockchain technologies
affect the stock market in terms of the way
companies raise capital and in the way
investors buy shares?
RR: I think you need to broaden the
question to the distributed ledger. The
RICK RULE INTERVIEW
