OK then, don't hold back on your opinions
I wonder if lithium and nickel mining will attract better talent now that it is seen as a growth play?
Yes it has. And I just thought of something else. Investing in commodity stocks that are related to the EV industry is a risk concentration if you hold a lot of TSLA. If TSLA falters, the mining companies will falter even bigger. The returns are going to be bigger if you invest in mining juniors (just look at PLL, LAC and SGMLF), but there is a lot of risk there too.
I was a member of, and for a while headed, what Wall St. calls one of the Analyst “splinter groups”. Analysts - both Buy side (think ARK and their folks), and the Sell side - think Adam Jonas, Gordon Johnson and such - aren’t just some amorphous group of CFAs, but there are sector specialists. I belonged to the Metals group, even though I covered far more segments of the investment world.
We met once a month and every meeting featured one - never two - companies. I cannot think of a time, ever, that it was someone other than the CEO who gave the presentation, although he or she* often had also the CFO and, if a mining or expl’n company, perhaps a technical EVP, along to assist. I got to know a
lot of these people. Paul O’Neil of Alcoa, George Munroe, “Bull” Durham and Doug Yearley at Phelps Dodge and Peter Munk of the Barrick group...and that’s about it...are the only company heads I would give an “A” to; as far as juniors go, yes: a number of them had what it takes to be dynamic explorers but it was unfailingly painful to listen to them trying to act as a head of a corporation.
*in hundred of meetings, we did hear
once from a woman: Peggy ___???___, head of a Canadian gold expl’n company called Royal Oak. Last name may have been Witte.
Two items of importance are first, this was before changes induced primarily by Dodd-Frank limited what companies could share with us at these meetings. It is not to say that we ever learned inside information, but the nuances and expansions of what companies gave in publicly released documents absolutely gave both the Buy and Sell sides of the professional investment community a real edge over the ‘public’ - whoever they are. It is important to bear in mind that it
used to be the case that all but a vanishingly small fraction of one percent of trading occurred under that aegis - the individual investor was a true anomaly.
Second, this was in the era where the prestige baton was being passed from the Sell side to the Buy side. Prestige....buckaroonie$ AND caliber. Think of Cathie Wood and her coterie, and the quality of their work, versus those of the investment banks. I’ll stop here.
