Fireside Chat with Tara Christie and Ronald-Peter Stöferle

0:00 Will say good morning, good afternoon or good evening, depending on where in the world you're signing in from and what time zone you're in. There's quite a large number of folks coming in from different time zones today. So I really appreciate everybody's time. I am very lucky to be joined today by Ronald Peter Stofferley, Fund Manager at Incrementum, also in Gold We Trust and also General Gold and Metals Expert. I appreciate his time. And Tara Christie, President and CEO of Banyan Gold. How are you guys doing today?

0:31 Awesome. Oh, you're on mute there, Tara. Tara, you're on mute. Oh, it's doing very well, Romeo. Thanks for that. And certainly, it's a very dynamic market out there. So I'm super looking forward to hearing what Ronnie has to say. Yeah, things are changing day to day, so I'm glad we got some experts on to talk about it. I'm gonna do some really quick housekeeping, but then we'll get into the meat and potatoes. So this is an open forum. Feel free to use the chat button at the bottom of the screen. We got a lot of material to go through today, so it's possible I won't get to every question you guys put in, but if you have specific questions for Ronnie or Tara, I'll make sure that their teams get those questions afterwards and they'll be able to get back to you separately. We do have a quick hour today, so it will be over before the end of the hour, so the earlier you get your questions in, the more chance I'll have to get to it. Ronnie's going to walk us through a quick presentation and lighten us on what's going on with these crazy markets, and then I've got some questions for both the speakers today.

1:26 This is also a recorded event, so it's going to be available to you on the same link, but also on our YouTube channel. Towards the end of the day Eastern time, probably 3 or 4, we get them up pretty fast. So please do feel free to share it around once you get it. And I think that's about it from me. I'm going to throw it to Ronnie for a presentation. We can get started. Thank you very much, Romeo.

1:49 Trying to share my screen. Works? Looks great. Looks good. So Tara, thanks for saying this is a dynamic market. I love it. It's been pretty rough. It was actually, we had fall break, so I took the family to Rome. It wasn't the best idea to do that in one of the most volatile weeks. So it's been interesting, it's been dynamic, it's been volatile, but it's also been super exciting. And actually, I would really like to briefly talk about some of the triggers and some of the thoughts that I'm currently having and that I'm thinking about. So the name of this little slide deck, and I think Romeo will make sure to send it to everyone afterwards.

2:45 It's back to the monetary future, which was the name of our In Gold We Trust report 2026. So my main question always is for investors, do you think that this is a normal gold cycle Or is it a remonetization cycle? And from my point of view, there's quite a lot of reasons to think actually that gold is slowly but surely regaining monetary significance. And I think that If you have the mainstream view on gold, then you probably would say, well, you know, gold had its time. Gold was in a bubble in January and now we're in a bear market. But if you have the view based on kind of the Austrian school of economics perhaps.

3:35 If you have read monetary history, then I think chances are pretty high that you will say, well, actually, there is something wrong with our monetary system. And then probably chances are much higher than you think. Well, perhaps in the next monetary system, whatever it will be, gold will play an important role. And I think there's a big difference when it comes to that view for Americans or Canadians compared to Europeans. Because my grandparents, for example, they lived through 5 different currency regimes. So I think gold is now a monetary DNA. Well, if you're based in the US, well, you say, well, we always had the dollar and we will always have the dollar.

4:25 Although 1 could also say that the dollar and the backing of the dollar changed dramatically over the last couple of decades. However, I think there's a number of reasons to believe that gold is regaining monetary relevance. And this is also basically the leitmotif of the new keynote that I'm preparing for my upcoming speeches at Precious Metal Summit in Zurich. Now, the next topic that I would like to briefly touch is just performance. I think people tend to forget that gold had a fantastic 2025. Gold was up 64.4% in dollar terms. In Canadian dollar terms, it was 56%.

5:11 So I think it's, I'm a runner. I enjoy running marathons. I do lots of practice in the mountains. So if you're running up a hill at some point, you know, you have to slow down a little bit, perhaps stop walking and just catch your breath. And I think that gold is after this big run up 64% in 1 year I think that that is exactly what the price of gold is doing this year so I think we shouldn't be too greedy if I would have told you 2 years ago that's gold is trading at 4000 everybody's bearish and everybody's really nervous you would probably have said well it's not gonna happen so So don't expect too much from 2026, but I think that 2027 could be another good year for us.

6:05 Now, talking about the correction, well, we all remember the all-time high early 2026. From those levels, we have now, and we are now flirting with the 4000 again, roughly corrected 25% from the all-time highs. Which would still be kind of okay, I would say. However, we cannot rule out that gold will go lower, so 3,800 would be the next massive support zone. What is interesting is the fact that actually the mining stocks have done pretty okayish. So basically, they have corrected less than gold here to date. So gold is down 10.18% while the GDX is down 10.12% and GDXJ which includes the smaller ones is down 16%.

7:05 So I think this is some sort of a sign of strength. Usually in such a weak year we would have expected the mining stocks to do much, much worse. And also on a shorter time frame, gold is down for the last 3 months 5%. GDX is even up slightly obviously because August was a tremendous month. But I think this is kind of telling us, well, there is demand for gold mining stocks. And usually, I think, at the beginning of a big bear market, you would see massive underperformance by the mining stocks compared to gold. Now this is the reason why we are managing our fund the way that we are actually managing it. Because offense wins games but defense wins championships.

8:00 The volatility of the mining space is obviously enormous and you can see that, you know, fun times, great bull markets, but also really, really rough bear markets with drawdowns of 80%, 70% and so on. So we created what we call the Incrementum Active Aurum Signal. And since March of this year, it moved to defensive. It moved to neutral actually already last year. So what we are doing now is we are running like

8:33 very, I would say, concentrated allocation in the mining space. But we're doing our homework. So we've got a full list of names that we want to buy once the signal switches. We're having some put options for the downside hedges, but we're also buying some call options in names that we like that are massively oversold. But at the moment, we've got lots of dry powder in the fund and we feel comfortable about that. You know the $1 trillion question is obviously in the bond market. We have seen that US yields were coming down recently.

9:18 But then on the other hand, I think the direction is the same all over the globe. That's France, which is a big, big mess within the Eurozone, but also Germany, Italy and the United States. So At some point, and this will probably be the point in time when gold really takes off again, there will be a bazooka from Scott Bass and Kevin Walsh and also probably the ECB. So something will be happening. I don't know if it's gonna be some sort of a quantitative easing but some sort of yield curve control is Clearly on the horizon. I think that's that's that's pretty obvious and this will be the point when gold really Skyrockets This just to show you that gold definitely is not in a bubble.

10:05 2.7%

10:08 privately held gold. That's, I would say, pretty insignificant compared to the rest of the pie. So from my point of view, we should go at least to 4 or 5% within this bull market. Here just some considerations regarding the valuation. If you say that, well, we have to value gold like money, then you would say actually it's very cheap because this so-called shadow gold price is telling us that gold is now roughly 23% of the monetary base. 3% of the monetary base. We had more than 100% backing in the 1940s and at the beginning of the 1980s, which coincided with big issues in our currency, in our monetary system.

11:00 So I think that if you have this monetary viewpoint, then you will say, well, actually gold is still very, very inexpensive. Based on our model, we forecast 8,900 in the inflationary scenario until 2030. And the base case is 4,800.

11:21 We made that forecast already in our Gold Retrust Report 2020. So we're somewhere in the middle of this base case scenario and the inflationary scenario. And you know, now just what is this shakeout all about? I think it's very much driven by liquidity. So due to the tech sell-off and margin calls, there is some disinflationary

11:47 pressure in the system, in the monetary system, in capital markets at the moment. So hedge funds have sold for 9 weeks straight. ETF holdings are still looking kind of okayish. But I think what we really should watch next is the two-year yield. So the market always leads the Federal Reserve, not the reverse. There is some sort of a deflation scare, but we know that within our monetary system deflation cannot be accepted so at some point again the Federal Reserve will have to step in and I think we could be really really close to that to that moment especially given the fact that we're that the Federal Reserve is usually very inactive before the midterm elections.

12:40 And yeah, so that's my very, very quick wrap up. I look forward to the discussion. And yeah, over to you, Romeo. I appreciate it very much, Ronnie. I always love hearing your perspective on stuff. I got a couple of questions for you and then Tara, I promise I'll get you into the conversation right away. But I just want to beat up Ronnie a bit from a presentation just went through. So I really love the long thesis and appreciate that commentary. I wanna talk about last week really specifically because it was a bit tough obviously. Headline CPI, 2.7%, Brent has been above 110 since Hormuz attacks and gold answered by closing Friday at that 1 year low. So to me the inflation hedge is going down while inflation goes up. So you just spoke to it a little bit, but what is gold actually trading on right now? What are the fundamentals of making it move?

13:31 Well I think it's, gold isn't really trading on inflation right now, it's trading on the Fed's

13:39 reaction to inflation. So that's basically it. So you know, the real driver is probably rates, not the CPI. And we have seen basically since the whole Hormuz crisis started, energy prices up means gold down. Why? Because it means that rate expectations are going up. I don't really know if higher interest rates will solve an energy crisis. And I think That's also one of the main reasons why the leeway for the Federal Reserve is a completely or let's say that the setup for the Federal Reserve is a completely different one.

14:27 Because 2008, 2009 and also in 2020, inflation wasn't an issue at all. So the Federal Reserve was able to lower rates aggressively and to come up with with quantitative easing Now inflation is basically the main concern.

14:45 So what kind of rabbit will they be able to pull out of the hat? I don't know yet. But I think there will be a rabbit, a pretty big rabbit. But that's kind of the setup that differentiates the

15:05 current market dynamics from previous crises. I appreciate that perspective. I know that last month you told the Northern Miner that Incrementum's Active Gold strategy turned defensive earlier this year and you're sitting on 40% cash, I think, if I'm not mistaken. So obviously to me, you are still a gold bull, but you're holding cash through a correction. What does your signal need to be before the cash goes back to work? Well actually, we've got roughly 60% cash. So we feel like little kids in a candy store at the moment because there's just, you know, great opportunities. And I think that that has always been the major issue that I had with long only mining funds. I said, well, it's,

15:52 you know, mining stocks are an extremely challenging asset class. And that's what makes it so exciting. Because it's very much bottom up. And I think Tara can talk about this later on, because it's so complex to manage a mining process. There's so much that can actually go wrong. But It's not only the bottom-up view that you have to have, but it's also the top-down view. You have to get the cycle right. You can have the best mining project in a brutal bear market, you will still struggle. So that's actually why we said, okay, let's come up with the signal. And, you know, let's face it, we won't be selling at the top and we won't be buying at the bottom, but we want to really avoid big drawdowns, those 70-80%, and we want to have the meaty part of the trend.

16:50 So

16:51 our signal consists of 2 sub signals. One of them is a counter cyclical cycle signal and the other one is a fundamental signal. And I think for the cycle signal, we could pretty soon see a switch. So actually green lights and also for the fundamental one, it could switch in a couple of weeks. So it helped us. Many people criticized us in March when we said, well, we're not hitting the brakes but we're taking our foot off the gas pedal. We're becoming more defensive. I always make stupid sports analogies and I say, well, it really depends if you're a soccer coach or we say football,

17:45 if you're the coach, it just depends who you're playing against. Yeah. If, if, if you're playing against Liechtenstein, you can play with 5 strikers, but if you're playing against Spain, you probably want to be a little bit more defensive. And I think, the last couple of, of, of, of month told us, you know, having a more defensive stance, actually paid off quite well. Great. Hey, appreciate it. And Tara, I'm very eager to get you into the conversation. I want to go from macro to the ground if we can. I know late last month, a receiver announced

18:15 that the Mongolian Mining Group agreed to take over the Eagle Gold mine, 40 kilometers away from Wormack, right in your neighborhood, with plans for more than 1 billion and a half dollars of remediation, restart and operations. For 2 years, that mine was really the first thing people talked about when they thought of Yukon. What does a funded restart right next door change to you in this market? Well, I think it shows that a company is willing to make a $1.5 billion investment in this jurisdiction and in gold projects. And, you know, is that their cornerstone into the district? And now we hear, you know, Snowline, Banyan, Sitka, it shows that this jurisdiction is starting to get a lot of attention. And I love your prices for 2030 and where my project's sitting in terms of where we are in the cycle and how we're able to advance it and de-risk it.

19:04 And that's one of the reasons why we chose to raise money right now, because this volatility that we have long-term, I'm following Ronnie and I believe we're going to see that share price appreciation, even the base case is a great price of gold when you're sitting with a large gold asset in this kind of a market. And these are still pretty great gold prices. While it's a low, you know, for our major producers, they're still making a lot of money at these gold prices, even though it's a 1 year low. I remember 18 months ago pretty clearly, 2 years ago, we would have been really happy with today's Gold price. I remember sitting on a panel, I think 2 years ago, and somebody said Gold price might go to $2400 and people gasped.

19:46 It was funny. People have a short memory sometimes. I do want to get both of you on this one in the same kind of vein, because with Peru stepping in at Eagle, Franco-Nevada obviously writing quite a large check in Banyan, Newmont pricing Red Chris in BC up to $4.8Bn. Serious capital is choosing Canada in a month when gold got kind of hammered. So I'm curious, Ronny, from your perspective and then Tara, obviously from an insider view, do you think Canada or Yukon particularly, but Canada generally is seen as a safe harbour for mining investment money right now? Yeah, well, I think it has definitely improved. First of all, I think that was the big trend last year when I attended the Precious Metal Summit and the Denver Gold Show. Everybody was super excited, saying that, well, we were approached by US mining agencies and they offered us financing and offtake agreements and strategic investments and so on. And I think, you know, that put an enormous amount of pressure on Canada. And we saw what what Mark Carney announced.

20:57 We saw actually also now in B.C., I think, a change for the better. So I think it's, we can discuss about Donald Trump for ages, but I think when it comes to mining, it was definitely a wake-up call that mining isn't something bad, something dirty, but just the foundation

21:23 for many of our industries. So I think that was a really positive development from a political point of view. This perception of mining has clearly changed. And I think that's really a long-term trend. I think the next thing that I would love to see, and probably Terra as well, is also more of a... Because that's also a concern that many companies share, the lack of talent. It's really hard to get young people into mining and I think everybody in this industry has to step up and make a positive case for mining. You can make actually really good money in mining. But I think it's what's termed probably employer branding is something that's really going to be important going forward.

22:13 Sure. Tara, I'll get you in on the same topic. Do you think that investors are looking at Canada as one of the safer spots right now? Oh, absolutely. We saw that in our financing. We've seen it with the interest in the Yukon and the conversations that we're having. A lot of my meetings going to the precious metals in Zurich are actually new groups and new funds. I'm seeing interest and names in our share registry that have not been in our registry before, some of which are our generalists. So I think we're seeing a change and people are starting to understand mining and to your point about branding yourselves as the desired employer, that's something Banyan is doing well. And it's also something when you have a strong treasury, you've got a clear pathway where you're going to go, multi-year pathway, actually, then you're able to attract top talent because that's really key for us. At this phase we're at right now, we need to build the team to get us through this next phase and towards this development phase. And you continually change the team and build it.

23:11 And I'm actually really surprised with some of the young people that have come around. Yes, I know there was a lack of talent, but we've managed to recruit some really talented young people that are engaged. And we really make use of our advisors to come to our site and work really closely with those, so that we've got the young people that don't quite have the experience, but we're combining it with the people that have done it and seen it before. So I think that's gonna be a big key is getting some of that transfer of knowledge to your young teams as you're continuing to build a team. But it's for us, I think we timed our financing perfectly to be able to raise money and get through this correction. And I'm really glad you've got a strong treasury, Ronnie, and you're going to go shopping like in a candy store because, you know, all kinds of shares are off, including Banyan right now in this market. And it's nice to have that treasury to weather this storm because it is a little, it has been a little brutal.

24:06 Somebody threw in the chat actually while you were speaking, thank God you made the last financing when you did. So timing does help. That's nice. I got a couple of questions directly for you, Tara, just based on recent news. So Ronnie, you can take a beat for 1 2nd. I do want to talk about last week's most recent release. Hole 921 went into the gap between Airstrip and Powerline. A spot your resource model treated as unmineralized. And it came back with 4 stacked zones, including 1.34 grams over 20 meters and 1.18 over 27.5.

24:36 I know there's hundreds of folks in the room, a lot of them are retail. Love if you could just break it down for us. When the model says empty, but the drill says gold, What happens to the pit? What goes on next? Well, obviously for the pits that we currently have for the mineral resource, it increases the strip ratio

24:54 and reduces the number of ounces, reduces the grade. You know, that 921 was following up on the previous hole where we announced where we had 13 gram material over 14 meters. And what you need to dig into the sections to see is that we're being able to project and we're seeing these high-grade zones are actually consistent, which is as important as the grade and finding that you've got not just 1 hit wonders of high grade that you can find these zones where you can project these higher grades. And that's what we think we have between the gap, roughly 400 meters by a kilometer and a half almost that we have, it's big. So this gap isn't a small, you know, 3 holes are gonna fill it. It's more like 25,000 meters are what we need to actually fill the gap. And we are drilling some of it through this fall.

25:41 And we were able to pick away at some of it, but the majority of the drilling of the gap is going to be January, February, March. And that's why we've, you know, we're now scaled up. We've got our drills organized to start early. We'll have 7, maybe even 8 drills, January, February, March, and then we'll be able to close the gap because that area is quite swampy. We never drilled it partly because we thought it was obvious that the 2 pits probably connected. It was difficult drilling and a little bit more expensive drilling.

26:12 We left it and now that we understand that these high-grade zones are projecting into there And it will meaningfully come into the first 10 years, which all of our drill program this year has been focused on, including both the grade and the production profile of those first 10 years that we're seeing come out of the work that we're doing towards the PEA. In the same release, there's something else I wanted to tackle. You flagged visible gold in quartz veins and the quartzite underneath Airstrip. In that footwall, which is stratigraphically below the deposit, that's a different style of mineralization from the scarn replacement that carries most of your ounces. Is that a new domain or is it more of a curiosity?

26:56 It definitely shows that we've got lots of exploration upside at Ormec. We never really continued drilling beyond the Cal 1 and the foot wall there because we didn't really think it was mineralised, but we also hadn't tested it. There was also another hole about a month ago which drilled into that, which was also mineralised. So yes, It's interesting. It's more exploration upside in potential. Our previous model, we really didn't understand that there was potential below it. It is changing our thinking, but we have so many targets. We've got the gap, we've got that high-grade at depth. Remember, we drilled 15 grams at 350 meters. We've got edges, we're seeing the southwest of powerline, we're continuing to and we haven't even started to go east or west on on airstrips. So it's a little bit of which to follow up on first.

27:45 It's interesting, we're going to have tons of drill results from what we've drilled this year, you know, over 198 holes already, right? So we've only reported 47. So lots of lots more results to come. Awesome. I got one last one for you. And then Ronnie, I'll get you back in. But I know, Tara, you've got 198 holes and 56,000 meters this year. So really a sterling drill program. I think 47 reported so far, if I'm not mistaken, or somewhere thereabouts. What's the map of the 150 or so still in the lab? Where were they drilled and what are they meant to prove?

28:17 So we've got a few around the edges of the gap in between Airstrip and Powerline, as we already talked about, quite a bit of Western Powerline and then Oryx Hill, some of the zones there, both infill following up on some of these high grade zones, but also going deeper. Cause remember, you know, we drilled this mostly out at 15, $1,800 gold, and that wasn't that long ago. So most of it nominally, that was the rule of thumb was you don't drill deeper than 200 meters. So as we're drilling off to indicated, we're selectively taking holes deeper, even to 350,400 meters, checking for grade and showing that it's deeper. So we will even have a deep hole down to like 850 meters following up on some of those higher grades. So then airstrip as well, we know there's that higher grade that's scar mineralization testing and extending that Cal 1 and Cal 2 zones where we see that higher grade that really drove the pit deeper. And then don't forget about our regional exploration. We put 20 holes into those 11 targets that we had. And those were just our first 11 targets. We have more targets for next year, some of which are some of our consultants like John Robbins and Henry Marston's favorite targets, which we'll drill next year. But in the first 2 of those 20 holes, we already made some new discoveries. So I think those, and that's about 7,500 meters in total still to come from there. So we're getting close to 60,000 meters drilled today, still targeting our 70,000 total meterage that we'll drill into December. We're actually gonna keep our camp open through the

29:47 winter and start up again in early January. So lots of drill results at ORMAC. Really highly prioritized again those first 10 years, because I think that's really where you're going to see the most improvement in the economics towards our next study because none of the 2026 drilling is going to be in our upcoming PEA or was in that mineral resource. Great. I appreciate it. Thanks for letting me grill you on recent news. Ronnie, I want to get you back in because we're talking about prices that mining companies are using in their decks. I know Banyan's resource pitch runs

30:22 at $3,500 Gold, which is below spot even after this correction. Most developers are publishing studies between $3,000 and $3,600. I've even seen some still at $2,700, $2,800. Ronny, I know you run gold models out to 2030. If a developer asked you what number belongs in a study published in 2026, what would you tell them? Where's gold going to end up around the end of this year?

30:46 Well, I mean, our gold model is for allocating capital in our funds, not for engineering a pit, but I would say that in general, build the mine on a conservative number and then let the market pay you for the optimism. So I think if you use like 3,500,

31:08 I think that's a fair number. I think that, you know, there's also lesson to be learned from the previous cycle where, you know, everybody was just extrapolating reserve prices and we saw all those

31:25 ridiculous M&A deals, runaway cap backs. I think that now the sector still seems to be on a much more conservative note. I think, you know, compared to the previous cycle, we're seeing net cash, we're seeing pretty little hedging, we're seeing very conservative reserve prices. So I think that's definitely something positive that we're seeing compared to the previous cycle, which doesn't mean that

31:52 miners won't go crazy at the end of this cycle, that we'll see like a ridiculous M&A again. But so far, I think most companies are really playing it very conservatively. So my advice to a developer would probably be the base case at a rather modest price, roughly where the shell sits, and then at a sensitivity table with spot consensus and a bull case so that investors can actually do their own math. And I think that we also have to be consistent when it comes to costs because all in sustaining cash costs are compounded at about 8% a year since 1990.

32:40 And also very much tracks the price of gold. So we shouldn't only talk about the gold price of tomorrow, but also the cost side of tomorrow. Sure. And we don't still know where diesel prices are going to be in a year. So it's hard to say. But Tara, with your timeline for ORMAC, What are you thinking about the gold price right now and what it will be when you guys are under production? Well, we of course all are optimistic and I love Ronnie's long-term price and certainly 8,900 is high for the top end of our sensitivity of what, you know, we could probably convince the engineers to put in our, in our high end case in our study. It's, I think it's really important, you know, as you were saying, Ronnie, you know, 3500 is pretty reasonable as a price.

33:32 Being comparative to other projects, I think is also important because, you know, our infrastructure will only shine through if we're using kind of similar numbers for things as our other companies that have similar stage projects. So it's more than just the gold price in your PEA. It's how are you accounting for your costs, your roads, you know, the fact that we've got power lines already across the property, all of that needs to come out in the PEA. So We aren't laser focused on the gold price. Of course, where our resource was done, 3,500. So that is a kind of a benchmark that the resource was done at and which lots of comparable companies are working on right now. So having a low end case though, and a high end case, it's all part of showing the resilience of your project. And when you have a big deposit,

34:24 your higher gold prices are going to be really interesting in terms of what your upside case is. Great. I appreciate that. I got one more for you. Do you want to get more into the Franco Nevada set up with you guys? Because they took 10 million shares in that, those timber financing. Royalty companies usually, in my experience, show up wanting a royalty, not common stock. What does it tell the market when Franco's taking equity in you guys instead?

34:51 Well, I think it tells the market that they think our project's real and are willing to put their money behind it. And so the conversation there was, you know, I think I can save a year towards the timeline of this project if I can accelerate now, sign my drill contracts now. And so that was the reason why the conversation around putting money in came about. And if you don't secure it early, there's going to be lots of competition for drills. And thank goodness we did, because now we're able to weather this storm and still know that we have a solid plan into 2028 that's funded. And so puts us in a really unique position, because now we can even spend our money more efficiently. We're planning ahead, we're able to tell our crews that they've got to start date again, all of those little details which ultimately save you costs on how you execute. And so, you know, that I think is a pretty big signal to the market that we've got

35:45 their backing, They're there to help us try to advance this as fast as we can, because ultimately that goes right to your NPD. And that's how shareholders are going to make money is for us to continue to de-risk this and advance this project as fast as we can in this gold market. Great. And the last thing I wanted to ask you before we kind of zoom out again, I want to talk about indexes because I know the GDXJ added Banyan in September. Then the October surprise for mining happened and junior ETFs

36:13 started selling pretty aggressively. Having lived both sides of it in 6 weeks, what do you think index inclusion does to Banyan and its trading? I still think it's very positive. If you look, I don't actually think we've had that much selling related to be included in the GDI. We had a lot of buying related, but if you look at our volumes, while we sold off, they've actually been pretty low, you know, compared to many of our peers. And I think it's, a lot of it is completely unrelated to us. People have margin calls. There's, they've been hit in other places and gold is the first thing And Banyan's actually been pretty liquid. So it's something that they could sell. What I'm more interested in is the people that are going shopping now and buying those shares. Because, you know, while we've had some selling and not as much as we could have had in this gold decline.

37:05 We've had some strong hands picking up the shares. Right, no, appreciate it. Just thought it was interesting to hear your perspective. I want to zoom out again, and Ronnie, I want to get you back in on the Fed. Because 2 governors voted to hike. The market has December priced at roughly 80% for another hike. I know you've written for years

37:24 about a bear market and trust and the Fed is obviously on that list. If Warsh actually succeeds in making the Fed credible again, it's a big if, Is that bad news for gold? Where do you think that goes for you? I think that's a very, very bad big if.

37:44 So If Walsh succeeds, I'll sell my gold and buy him a beer. But I think that credibility isn't something that a central bank can hike its way into when the treasurer is actually holding the bill. We're currently writing an article about that. And it's interesting to see and there's lots of transparency regarding that. You can actually look up the meeting schedule

38:16 of Scott Bass and also of Kevin Warsh. So Warsh and Scott Bass met quite often. They seem to have a pretty good relationship, it seems. I think what's really interesting to see is that Scott Besant hired

38:36 2 very, very interesting people. One of them is Dave Cervos, who was an advisor, a strategist at Jefferies. And the other one is Dr. Julie Shelton. We did 2 interviews with her. She's a sound money advocate and she proposed gold-backed treasury bonds. She calls them treasury trust bonds. And I think that there must be a reason why Scott Beston is actually hiring those 2 very much out of the box thinkers. So we called it a Bretton Beach agreement at the upcoming G20 meeting in December in Florida. So from my point of view, gold will play a major role in that, whatever comes, yeah. And I think that has been, if I would have said that 2 years ago, I think it would have been much of a non-mainstream view. But now I think more and more people realize that

39:46 gold will have an important role in that solution. And that there's, you know, all this big, big puzzle, this 3D puzzle is now it's kind of developing and everything makes a little bit more sense again. So, you know, coming back to your question, you know, Paul Fokker hiked to 20% interest rates with debt to GDP at 32%.

40:11 Kevin Walsh starts at 125% plus. So, you know, Fokker had a bazooka, Walsh only has like a little water pistol. So I think we will see more financial repression. We will see some sort of a yield curve control. We will see very, let's put it, let's say creative ways of getting rid of the debt situation. And of course, I mean, everybody knows how high interest costs now are. So I think short term, yes, the hawkishness hurts, but I think that Kevin Walsh, he's playing a role and of course he doesn't want to be perceived as Trump's guy and the dove. So I think it makes sense that he's playing a more hawkish role at the beginning. But again, I think if you have a look at all the MAC 7 stocks, all the AI projects, if you have a look at CDS, If you have a look at CDS, if you have a look at capital markets in general,

41:24 I think it's clearly signaling that the Federal Reserve is way too hawkish. And I think they will have to make a U-turn pretty, pretty soon. Great. I appreciate that. One of the questions I had, I know in Colorado Springs, the Denver Forum, you said miners are in a sweet spot. And you've said something similar today because management teams are showing restraint on acquisitions and new builds, probably because they got burned in the last cycle a little bit. Restraint obviously is good for major shareholders, but let's say you're a developer sitting on, for example, 8.6 million plus ounces in a safe jurisdiction.

41:58 Is a discipline major a buyer right now or a bystander and when does that change?

42:07 I think M&A will be the new exploration. We all know that exploration budgets for the majors are down significantly. We all know the production profile of the large producers. We have seen

42:28 some interesting deals that were also received very well by the market recently. But mostly I would say in the mid-tier space. We haven't seen any big, big, what was it, Colorado Springs, was it Goldfields with this Australian company? So that was like one of the bigger ones recently. But I think that what we're seeing with the large caps they have become more conservative and they really want as much de-risking as possible so the majors have taken like minority stakes in many companies I think it's it's also to get more of the feeling of the team and the project and their acquiring at the latest stage, it seems. But also, again, over the cycle that can and will probably change.

43:32 Great. Appreciate that. Tara, I got a couple for you from the chat. Alan from Rocks and Socks. Thanks for joining us, Alan. It says, do you find it hard to find comparables? He says he's looking for systems that have the potential to grow to more than 10 million ounces that can be open pit mines. He sees you in a unique position. So I'm just wondering where you see your peers in the industry right now. Well, there's the scale of deposit and then there's other metrics like how many mineable ounces there are, of which I think we'll also be in a pretty rare territory, but that's what makes us globally rare is there aren't very many, particularly ones like we have with existing infrastructure, safe jurisdictions beside 2 other mines. All of that continues to make you rare. But you have to find peers to talk to the market about and whether it's a peer that's just built, whether they use stage development.

44:30 But what happened 2 years ago or 3 years ago isn't exactly a peer either, right? So then you have other peers for market cap, but yeah, I kind of think we're standing out there as a pretty rare deposit in a great jurisdiction that has other great big deposits. So, in terms of cost, too, some places where they're far more remote, it's harder to directly link our project to that. That's partly why we're doing a PA, to stand out and for people to say, here's the economics for our project. I'm certainly looking forward to that myself. Ola from the chat wants to know how much of this year's drilling is exploration and how much is infill? He says it seems like the market rewards better categories.

45:17 Exploration has been a big focus. All of the nitro drilling is, of course, pure greenfield exploration. It's hard to put a number on it because, you know, our exploration, we're drilling to indicate it and going deeper and deeper parts exploration. And the top is infill, Same with like the silver. Some of our holes, we're modifying the holes so that we're hitting some of the silver veins, but it's also infill and we're taking some of those holes deeper. So it's not like X number of holes because this is a big complex system and we're really trying to maximize it. So I'll throw a number on it and I'll say 30 to 35%

45:55 is pure adding ounces exploration testing some of these high grade domains. Great. Appreciate that. Ronnie, someone from the chat wants to know, they said they see many commentators talking about the gold high from earlier this year. Obviously, that's on some people's mind. They want to know how much of that surge do you think was due to leveraged positioning? Well, I mean, I think it was obvious, especially in hindsight, that there was quite a lot of speculation. I remember at V-Rig, January, everybody was super excited. And, You know, if you said like, gold will go to 10,000, you were kind of on the bearish side. So, I think it's,

46:39 there was, you know, lots of momentum traders, probably lots of managed futures, CTAs. And I think 1 really good confirmation for that sentiment is the way that analysts actually change their forecasts. So usually they are very, very pro-cyclical. Every time the gold price rises, they start hiking their price forecast and when the gold price falls, they lower their views. And I think it's – I also worked as an analyst in a bank, so it's mainly career risk. And I think that kind of tells you that we were in a different stage of the cycle over the last couple of months, which is the so-called Dow theory, it's called the public participation phase, which means that, you know, gold wasn't a contrarian asset anymore.

47:39 Everybody kind of liked gold and you had like, you know, names like Ray Dalio, but Jeff Gundlach,

47:48 all those really big macro guys being more vocal about gold. You had like private banks and like more of the Wall Street banks becoming more positive on gold. So I think that was just a confirmation that we are within this public participation phase but we're not yet in the so-called distribution phase. Again 2.7%

48:17 average gold allocation I think that's not the sign or the percentage that we usually would see at the end of a big cycle. What we also would usually see at the very end of every cycle is ridiculous M&A. We haven't seen that either. And also the gold-silver ratio trading significantly lowers somewhere between 10 and 15. That's usually where we see tops in the gold market. So we haven't seen that yet. And I think that over the next 3 to 4 years and probably, you know, people tend to forget that now this starting point, yeah, if we say this rate hike cycle will end at some point, I think the starting point is a very, very interesting one. And we all know that going down in this interest rate cycle usually is much, much more fun than, you know, on the way up. So I think that the fact that if we zoom out again, we went into the year 2026 with the expectation of 1 or 2 rate cuts and now we've seen 1 rate hike and we will probably see one more in December and another one early 2027.

49:34 So we've seen a complete U-turn of interest rate expectations. And I think people tend to forget that. So I think given this massive headwinds, I think gold did okayish. And I think that as soon as the Fed hits the panic button, I think that's going to be the time, the point in time when gold really picks up momentum again. Sure. I appreciate that. Can I ask you a question? Go for it, please. So, 2.7% allocation, when are we going to start seeing that increase? Like we've seen lots of the banks recommend that people should have a bigger allocation. And what's that going to mean for gold mining stocks, both majors, mid-tiers and developers? What's your thought

50:18 around that? Well, Tara, I think that every year at Denver Gold Show and Colorado Springs I hear like, yeah, the generalists are coming. It's, yeah, perhaps some new names, like I think this year there was lots of private equity,

50:37 family offices, but not really like the large insurance companies, pension funds and so on. I haven't really seen them yet. And I think that's also some people in the mining industry hate me for that because I said that during a fireside chat with John Hathaway, I think that the mining industry is really doing a poor job making the case for mining and making a case for their projects, talking to generalists. Because it's so complicated and if I'm a generalist, I couldn't care less about all the geological details and drill intercepts and so on. They just don't get it. And I know that the attention span of the average investor nowadays is like 2 milliseconds.

51:25 So I think you really, the industry, and I think Terra is doing that very, very well. If you really want to attract capital from outside, from generalists, you have to create a different narrative, really simplify the story and then obviously also deliver. So I think that's important. And the second thing regarding average gold allocation, I think that's a process.

51:53 Last year we saw that more and more of the mainstream names started allocating capital into gold, advising higher percentages, but then still the average allocation of family offices, which should have a really long-term mandate at the moment is 2%.

52:12 72% of all family offices do not hold any gold. So I think, you know, where is the future potential for hard assets, for sound money assets, for commodities, for mining stocks going to come from? It's from fixed income. I think, you know, this loss of trust that we're seeing in bond markets. I don't think that's really going to be the big fiscal turnaround. I think it's really hard. It can happen. We've seen that in Greece in the Eurozone, but it was really harsh times for people in Greece. And I don't really see that happening in France, for example. So I think, you know, for the generalist investors to come into mining stocks, simplify the story.

53:02 And for higher gold allocations, I think that this loss of trust that we're seeing, not only in the bond market, but many other areas, I think should do the job. Great. Hey, thank you. And I know you got to go on a busy day, so I'm going to end with just one last question for Tara. I have a guess what the answer might be, but what are you most excited about for Banyan for the rest of this year?

53:27 I'm excited about the PEA, but I'm even more excited about what we're going to drill next year. And the fact that we've got this, our best planning, you know, the geological model, how that's all coming together. And the fact that I've got a fabulous team that's firing on all cylinders. So, you know, that gets me up in the morning because that's what's really exciting is actually getting out and drilling. So

53:51 yeah, I think that what we've got planned for shareholders for 2027 is what I'm most excited about. Awesome. Appreciate it. Ronnie, thank you so much for sharing your insights. I know there are tons of people in the room, so thank you for all of your patience. I know there are a couple of questions I didn't get to, but I will make sure they get to the respective teams. Tara and Ronny, thank you so much. This was a really fun conversation. I hope you guys had fun too. Thanks. Thank you. Cheers, everyone. Have a good one. Bye-bye.