Following a brisk start to the year when financings for mining and exploration in the Canadian financial markets hit a year-to-date high of around C$800 million in about 180 deals in...
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Following a brisk start to the year when financings for mining and exploration in the Canadian financial markets hit a year-to-date high of around C$800 million in about 180 deals in...
This recession is painful, but grow up -- it is not nearly as bad as I remember the 1980s being. I went over old term sheets from that period and a deal with someone for $500k was a big deal; $2.5 million was a massive amount of money.
I grew up as a recession baby. I grew up in the mining business with a big crash for my father’s company when I was about 10. The crash was impactful, and I ended up very different because of it. Some of the things I do are classic recession baby stuff, others are irrational, but all of them are impacted by that period of my life.
I would not trade that time for anything. Growing up with these issues taught me how to deal with the world -- six weeks’ delay on something is no problem, market hiccup not a problem. Need to sell stuff...then remember it’s just stuff, not people.
I gave a shout out about copper to an old team at a conference. Back when I worked at D.E. Shaw, I learned the value of a good team. I learned that five people working together could get a multiple of the work of one done. Back then, I had my team in India and I worked from the U.S., but even then it really helped me accomplish stuff. The most important thing I learned was the value of great people around you.
This is off-topic from metals/mining, but the more I look at the issues facing the Western world, the more I see a complete destruction of demand for labor....
Everything we do every day just compounds the problem of technology killing jobs, jobs that are never coming back. The world is changing, and for some things it is great; I would put a plug for copper in here, but let’s focus on what has changed.
We had a real estate bubble, driven by cheap money and easy lending, and we all know how it ended in the US. The solution to get us out of the...
Imagine you are in a world where you are judged on how pretty your partner is, but you are blind and you have no idea what she looks like. She will tell you she is pretty, but you cannot trust her as she might be biased.
To do a good job, you will establish what pretty is, redefine it based on a set of guidelines, and then go look for a partner that meets those guidelines. But you are still blind, so you have to trust someone to guide you.
Sometimes I get figuratively trashed for regularly not liking new technology and all the wonderful metal usage that comes from it. I spent the weekend thinking about LEDs and then I started to think about Nissan Leafs...and my mind wandered into what the government could do by picking the right projects to support, rather than the wrong projects.
I have a medium belief that if the US government took the money it was spending on tax credits for Leafs and put it into LED light bulbs, we could really make an environmental impact and save on energy bills for struggling families.
There are two places where math is not linear in this world: banking and government.
Bankers have the ability to slice and dice and somehow always make money. That is, unless they completely mess it up. But they also seem to add value in our business.
Brokered deals are better than non-brokered deals. If we had to choose as a company to go brokered or non-brokered, we would go brokered every day. That being said, there are a few cases when brokers are not worth paying.
I grew up in this business, literally. I was homeschooled and spent years of my life following my father around as he did business. I grew up walking the streets of Calgary, couriering documents. I grew up in a mineral recession, I know what it means when the world shuts its doors to our industry, and I understand what failure can feel like.
