A few observations my intrepid though infrequent readers! :-)
Bought a small position in Macy's yesterday at $16.13, with a 9% dividend that I feel is secure with Macy's enormous real estate portfolio even if the store seems lifeless.
Continue to buy Sibanye-Stillwater, by now my biggest position, on the view that this is a supremely well managed company by the caring, visionary, disciplined Neal Froneman, a miner that is the most significant Platinum Group Metal (PGM) producer on the planet, along with Nornickel in Russia. This is a vehicle for owning PGMs, the rarest and most critically needed elements on the planet, at a huge discount.
It really is interesting to me how the market goes for sometimes decades not paying attention to fundamentals, and then, all of a sudden, has a "revelation" and the perspective changes. There will be a time when the market understands that the only place where there is a huge supply of PGMs is in the universe, out there in space, on asteroids, which someday, yes, will be mined, but not in the immediate future!!!
That leaves us here on earth, equivocating whether platinum is cheap. If you read my blogs and twitter posts (@platinumric) you know that I think the 8 million ounces of platinum that is produced and recycled each year, worth $7 billion at todays $895, is stupidly cheap. The world needs this stuff, and there just isnt much of it, in the ground, in miner inventories, in government inventory as a strategic asset, in corporate inventory as an industrial metal, in ETFs.
I mean I think investors have forgotten their contacts or glasses. Yes, they are myopic. What does the market need to know? Rhodium is already trading at $5900 on its way to $10,000 and I think to $20,000. Palladium is $1725, working its way to $5000. Iridium is $1490. Not much of that! And yet Platinum is languishing under $900, and Ruthenium is only $255. Each of the PGMs have unique properties that make them irreplaceable for most existing and new, yet undiscovered uses.
Of course, I am bullish on gold as well, not as a crisis play, but on the theme that gold is the one asset that has maintained its purchasing power for thousands of years which I think is particularly relevant in this era of the inevitably eroding fiat currencies. Most in the market do not truly focus on the annual supply, which is in fact about $250 billion including recycling. Is that a lot? Actually not at all given that the total value of world currency, taking the broadest calc, is $90 trillion!!
Full disclosure: In addition to high quality US stocks, mostly with big dividends, I have platinum futures and stored physical platinum, gold, palladium, silver and ruthenium. My biggest position is SBGL. I also own Kirkland Lake and a number of other small exploratory miners.
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