Orbital Waste | Gold’s Swoon, Recovery

Featured, The Calandra Report / By
​Outer space​ might be safer than investment markets this week​.

​I’m dizzy. How about you?

The decline of gold, silver, most metals, and along with them (until the week’s close and a vibrant recovery), ​tremendous fluctuations in Fortune 1000 equities and bond prices​, and an ever-strong USD, are taking their toll on all of us.

The recovery Friday rescued gold, silver, copper, and naturally, non-mining blue chips (FORTUNE 1000). Just about the only loser: the U.S. Dollar as it flirts with but has not yet attained multi-year strength (since a 113 DXY high October 2022).

[Trading note below:** I purchased more Alamos Gold AGI  as metals compacted earlier in the week. Our metals portfolios here at home rebounded FRIDAY yet are down approx. 12% in two weeks. Updated FRI DEC 20 2024]

Real-time quotations below.

A couple of views I r-e-s-p-e-c-t:

Brien Lundin of Gold Newsletter:

“… valuations of equities and other assets are getting stretched to the point where a very significant correction, if not a full-blown crash, seems both inevitable and imminent. When that happens, we need to understand that gold will get hit hard along with everything else. As you know by now, the only things that rose out of the ashes of yesterday’s risk-asset sell off were the U.S. dollar and Treasury yields. And they soared. — Brien Lundin

This from Avi Gilburt, who has waxed brilliantly in his short-term and long-term examinations of markets, in particular gold:

“Just watching to confirm some of the bottoming signals I am seeing.  And, even if we get another similar type of rally we just saw, we may still come down one more time. Really convoluted structure.  But, expecting much bigger (gold) rally next year.” — Avi Gilburt runs Elliott Wave Trader and deserves a banner for his comments.

Avi also sends this 1988 study on the impact (lack of) that econ and markets news has on investors’ choices: STUDY here.

Back to outer space, where investment markets have less gravity.

I asked our Casper, Wyoming, frostbitten investor, subscriber, crypto aficionado and, during COVID, waste manager for the landfill there, to give us his take on outer-space garbage.

Trading report, mining philanthropy at close of this report.
Mark James Mullins — I have known him since 2015 via The Calandra Report — is a futures thinker. He was early with cryptos.*
Mark was one of several who sent “ideas for the future” in answer to this report.
“The lessons learned from dealing with automatic equipment handling tons of garbage a day , sometimes handling spills from the same  with a shovel in my hand, conducting public traffic to the dump zones and so much more have fully changed my outlook on rubbish.”

MJM’s brainstorm: “Working this, I had pause to consider the ever-growing mass of SPACE JUNK and how best to mitigate it.”

Space junk travels at incredibly high speeds — up to 17,500 miles per hour. Even small pieces of junk can total, say, the International Space Station.

Mark started his space junk thinking during COVID as he worked in Casper for the Casper Landfill.

 

“It’s truly regional with a reach from Baggs, near the CO line in Carbon County, to Kaycee in Johnson County and as far east as where I live today, near Douglas in Converse County. It was through a temp service and happened during the time my money was way more tight and I had just invested in a new cryptocurrency — which so far has made me independently wealthy.”

 

Mark continues, “Working this gave me pause to consider the ever-growing mass of SPACE JUNK and how best to mitigate it. We’ve been learning that SpaceX has almost made Boeing obsolete in proving private industry over government efficiencies. Donald Trump also inaugurated the Space Force during his first term. There’s already significant tracking of thousands of pieces of junk  orbiting our blue sphere. Some of these are rather small from long-forgotten spacewalks and debris of targeted satellites.”

 

India, China, Russia and the United States have destroyed many satellites. Littering Earth’s portion of outer space also are massive rocket booster stages. Elon Musk has already begun proofing a solution to the latter, “yet metallic pollution of our lower earth orbits is getting to be more of a challenge, even Starlink.”
“I would entertain the idea of a space janitorial service, using robotics and AI, including some material touches to either capture or divert such junk to Earth’s atmosphere where it burns up. There could be improvements to ionic engine technology going forth. The greatest challenges would be safety for the largest diversions where such junk can survive re-entry, although I believe it’s possible to calculate trajectory over unpopulated zones as is currently done.” — Mark James Mullins, investor
“Most of the work in space would be unmanned, yet I can foresee instances where only a manned operation could achieve such. Also a huge question comes to mind of how such a project becomes feasible and profitable. Would nations with satellites chip in funds … to an ongoing tunnel of money, much like the U.S. Social Security system?”
Xtra-Gold Resources geologists and drill-rig operators examine core from a new zone at Kibi in Ghana. More below.

* As for crypto-currencies?

Says Mark, “I’m awaiting ETH Ethereum to finally awaken from a 4k USD sideways slumber. Much like Mr. Gold, the late Jim Sinclair once stated, “It’s the sitting on (IT) that’s the hardest.”‘

He says 2025 looks to become “a banner year” for alt.coins (and Bitcoin).
“My parting shot over the bow? Community is a critical point to keep in mind. Barely over 11 years ago, I took a dive into a brand new coin called DOGE. Although I still don’t yet have a business, I became the first to offer accepting payments in it — on 12/9/2013. I still stand by that promise going forward.”

“Bitcoin still has gains to enjoy, having broken through the 105k psych barrier, but in my opinion Ethereum has greater potential — what with ETF Grayscale‘s heavy dumping of ETHE. HEX is primarily backed with Ethereum, essentially a leveraged play on the same.”

“Dogecoin, the first memecoin, developed in part with Litecoin code, was meant as a joke, but I found it so novel then and remain almost stunned it has held on for so long, Elon Musk having such ongoing affection for it.”

— Your frostbitten TCR aficionado near the tip of the Front Range.

 

Thank you, Mark James Mullins.

 

**Trading note: Gold, copper, silver, platinum and their attendant miners and explorers this week were hit hard by tax-selling of metals equities, by a rising U.S. dollar (vs. DXY Index) — amidst investors’ ennui.

 

Nearly nothing on my screen was green. Until Friday’s rebound.

I placed an order to sell 1,635 shares of Xtra-Gold Resources XTGRF XTG. The self-financing Ghana miner’s shares are at a multi-year high. All told, we hold approx. 109,000 XTGRF shares — some of them held since 2009. Most of the shares are ‘in the money.’

[Update — the 1,635 shares sold at $1.31 USD earlier this week.]

Xtra-Gold CEO James Longshore  is just back from Ghana.

“Currently, all three of our drill rigs are operating on a new gold zone,  which is adjacent to our current 1.2 million ounce resource. We know that this zone measures  approximately 4.5 kilometers in strike length,” Jim says.

The CEO and country manager says says if assays show economic gold grades, “our company (could) exceed a goal of proving up a multi-million ounce discovery.”

We’ll see. Assays for the core that you see in the image above likely won’t come to the public until January 2025.

I’ll sit tight with the 109,000 shares we own.

TCRs, please do not ‘chase’ shares of Xtra-Gold or any other sub-$100 million miner without definitive assays or other releases sanctioned by the companies. Sometimes, even “economic” grades of a metal discovery can fail to boost an explorer’s shares.

Alamos Gold: As noted again, I purchased yet more shares of Alamos Gold AGI this week. It is our third largest resources stake, after Ivanhoe Mines and Xtra-Gold.

As for Ivanhoe Mines, also in Africa, the copper miner’s shares have given up ground this month of December. We own about 81,000 shares of IVPAF; I sold 700 shares Friday December 20 2024 in a family trust account.

Mining and philanthropy: Yale University graduate and mining investor Sun Valley Investments’  managing partner, Vikram Sodhi, funded a psychiatry research fellowship at the school. The position supports research on psychedelic drugs and cultural contexts such as music to treat post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. See: https://forhumanity.yale.edu/news/searching-new-cures-ancient-medicines

Yale School of Medicine Professor Deepak Cyril D’Souza

— Thom Calandra 

Thom Calandra is a writer and an investor. Research and material are meant as editorial opinion. He is not a professional investment adviser. Please do not consider his reporting as a recommendation to buy or sell securities.