Become a Member

Trump’s “Executive Order 0001” Teased by The Casey Report

Republishing a segment from a Friday File -- the Casey Report ad in question has continued to run in slightly different formats, and the stock is still being pitched by several newsletter folks.

By Travis Johnson, Stock Gumshoe, January 16, 2017

Our office is closed for the holiday today, and I’m laid up and trying to finish my late Friday Feel for the Irregulars… so today, for your edutainment, we revisit a pitch that has been circulated and recirculated many times over the last month and a half… the Casey Report’s spiel about a mining company that will be the beneficiary of “Executive Order 0001” and create huge wealth for investors.

What follows is taken from a Friday File that I ran on December 23, it has not been updated or revised. The stock in question is up about 20% since then, so the numbers below will be a little bit off.

–published 12/23/16–

The Casey pitch is about, as you might expect, a “tiny stock” — and it’s very much a “Trump” play. Here’s how the ad gets our juices flowing:

“On his first day as President, Donald Trump will roll back one of Obama’s biggest mistakes… But not the one you expect.

“The result will unlock a $128 billion fortune in a forgotten part of America. And it could send a tiny $1 stock through the roof…

‘Trump’s election could be the best thing to happen to the stock market. And this company could be the best investment of his entire presidency.’ ~ Doug Casey, author of NY Times bestseller, ‘Crisis Investing'”

We’re seeing “Trump stocks” pitched left and right, of course, from the financials who would benefit from rising interest rates to the various construction and energy companies that would benefit from huge increases in infrastructure spending… but this sounds like another thing entirely. What are they talking about? More from the ad:

“Donald Trump can’t repeal Obamacare on his very first day – he needs the Senate’s help for that.

“And it will take some planning before he can start construction of a wall on the Mexican border.

“But on Friday, Jan. 20, President-elect Trump’s first executive order will roll back one of President Obama’s biggest mistakes….

“… the Trump transition team has studied the Presidential rules closely.

“They saw how President Obama issued ‘executive orders’ at an unprecedented rate.

“And the Trump team is planning to use the same strategy to reverse Obama’s massive expansion of red tape and regulatory overreach.

“Trump believes these regulations are what’s keeping American production low – and keeping American workers unemployed….

“… he’s not looking to help big banks or give a major corporation a tax break.

“He’s actually going to introduce a measure that should immediately add 3,000 jobs in a downtrodden, forgotten part of America…. Alaska.”

Ah, so now I think I know where we’re headed with this one. Sounds like Casey is looking at one of those big and as-yet undeveloped Alaska mines that’s trying to get environmental or regulatory approval… and, thankfully, there aren’t so many of those. Which one is the pitch about? More clues:

“Trump’s executive order will wake a sleeping giant – the Alaskan mining industry.

“And there’s one publicly-traded company in particular that could see their share prices soar almost immediately.

“This company’s stock is currently hanging around $1 – but according to the most recent study done in 2013 they’re sitting on a resource mother lode:

“The largest gold deposit in the world.

Are you getting our free Daily Update
"reveal" emails? If not,
just click here...


“They haven’t been able to pull this gold out of the ground – until Trump got elected….

“…underneath the surface of a remote property in Alaska, geologists believe there’s over 107 million ounces of gold.

“At today’s prices, that’s worth $128 billion.”

So that should be clear now, but we’ll grab these last couple clues from the ad just to be sure:

“‘Beneath hills blanketed with a crazy quilt of moss and lichen, lurks a multibillion-dollar fortune… perhaps the greatest lode on the planet,’ The New York Times said about this site.

“Mining.com added, ‘It is arguably the richest prize in mining.’

“The company’s share price is currently just around $1….

“There is the real potential here to make as much as 10 or 20 times your money.”

So yes, what’s being teased here is the proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska, which was left almost for dead a few months ago but has seen the flames of hope fanned a little bit by a recent decision to mediate their court case against the EPA… and fanned further still by Trump’s win in the election because of his professed goal of bringing the EPA’s regulatory impulses to heel.

Does that mean President Trump will sign an Executive Order on his first day that immediately grants the Pebble Mine a mining permit? No, that’s likely beyond his control… but his new EPA may well take a different tack in the lawsuit/mediation with the Pebble project, I have no idea.

The company that owns the Pebble Project is Northern Dynasty Minerals (NDM in Toronto, NAK in NY), and I personally hold some 2021 warrants on the stock. That’s an extremely speculative position for me, and I made it because of the huge upside potential if the mine does advance into permitting and looks like it will really be built someday… so I thought it worth a gamble even though I don’t know whether their chances of actually building a mine are 3% or 50% or some other wild guess of a number.

That’s because of the mammoth size of the deposit — you can read that New York Times article they quote, it’s from 2008 and available here, to give you some idea of the environmental controversy surrounding the project and some idea of the incredible size of the mineral deposit. The Pebble Mine could be, if built, the largest and most productive copper and gold mine in the world, and it would almost certainly be among the top five or ten mines in the world. This is not a small deposit, it’s one of the biggest gold and copper deposits ever identified, which is why there’s probably something better than a zero chance that it will be developed. There would certainly be no debate about this mine if it were a few million ounces of gold at stake — that would be nowhere near big enough for it to be worth building the massive infrastructure projects they’d require to produce gold safely (if such a thing is possible) in this location.

And even if you don’t care about environmental protection at all (most people do, of course, even former governor Palin and president-elect Trump), this is not a “no brainer” development — it would be incredibly expensive to build, and there is real fear that it will put at risk Alaska’s huge salmon fishery if any toxic cyanide or copper runoff makes it into the Bristol Bay. Fish is not a tree-hugger concern in Alaska, it’s not about wealthy Bostonians protecting their trout streams, it’s a major part of the state economy and a fishery and spawning grounds can’t necessarily be fixed if there’s a substantial mining incident and they get “broken.”

So I don’t consider this a “done deal” even under President Trump and his very clearly different strategy with the EPA — but with a strong and aggressive EPA the mine had probably almost a zero chance of being built, and the chances have improved in the last few months. You’ll have to make your own call about how much they’ve improved, and keep in mind that Northern Dynasty would still have to raise billions of dollars to build the mine (they had a big mining partner who was funding much of the permitting and assessment work several years ago, but Anglo American pulled out a couple years back, after the EPA effectively shut down the project).

Can a mine be safely built in this area? I suppose that most things are probably possible if you throw enough money and science at them… but I don’t know what the final determination will be on that, or even whether the size of the mine can match the cost of the environmental protection safeguards that would be required (it is a mega-mine, but that doesn’t mean the whole thing can be mined with whatever the environmental safeguards end up being… and building massive dams is not cheap). I do think that it’s likely the stock will continue to enjoy this reprieve at least until the mediation with the EPA begins to generate news, which I think is supposed to be next year, and perhaps it will be a more dramatic reprieve if Trump strikes down or rewrites the latest executive orders on the Clean Water Act. You can get an idea of some of the major issues and work the EPA has done on the EPA’s page about the Bristol Bay watershed/Pebble project here.

The stock is soaring today again, largely because Northern Dynasty has gone public with the fact that they expect the permitting process to be restarted in the first quarter of next year… and, importantly, that they have met with Trump’s transition team, including Myron Ebell (head of the EPA transition). That has been well-covered (Reuters article here, for example), which has helped the stock to rise… and, of course, the “Executive Order #0001” pitch from the Casey folks probably has helped as well.

And this soaring is not new — Casey has hinted at this pick before, as have others in the newsletter world, and it has been well-covered since their possible regulatory reprieve started to emerge as real back in the Summer — the stock is up 500% since the Summer lows when they were raising money, and up 150% since they announced their positive legal news (that they had funding to proceed through the litigation against the EPA back in September, and that they agreed to mediation with the EPA in October) and a bit later, started to enjoy the “Trump rally” as their hopes for a resumption of permitting have been fueled by Trump’s deregulatory and EPA-related statements.

So this is the very essence of a “story” stock — for the next year or two it will probably be driven by the regulatory hopes, not by the actual economics of the mine, and there’s at least a chance that the mine will advance toward permitting. That could have a huge impact on the share price, of course, particularly if the gold price rises again — the mine could theoretically be feasible at much lower gold prices (depending on what the environmental protections would cost and what parts of the deposit can be mined), given the massive size of the deposit, but rising prices obviously help. That’s why I considered it to be a reasonable speculation, I used long-dated warrants because they provide a touch more leverage but the stock itself is likely to be extremely volatile so you probably don’t need warrants to have a wild ride (either up or down, depending on how things play out with President Trump and the gold price).

The absolutely most leveraged bet is in the short-term warrants — there aren’t as many of those, they have a high strike price pf C$3, and they expire on September 14 next year. They are pricey given that short time period, they last traded at about 50 cents so they won’t be profitable unless NDM rises 40% in the next nine months, and they’re extremely illiquid so it might not even be possible to buy them anyway (at least, not at the price you’d prefer).

But the leverage is real — if you assume that the stock doubles from here in the next nine months, then the gain from buying the stock would be 100%. The gain from buying that Sept. 2017 warrant would be 300% (and the gain from my long-term warrants from here would be about 125%, assuming they continue to trade close to their exercise value with little premium).

Of course, if the stock goes up by only 20% in the next nine months (or falls), those short-term $3 warrants would expire worthless. That’s a very wild bet for most people. The longer-term warrants are well in-the-money so they don’t provide nearly as much leverage — the strike prices are 55 and 65 cents, so with the stock at C$2.50 you’re really only goosing your potential return in a pretty minor way (like in that above example, a 100% gain in the stock would equate to roughly a 125% gain in the B warrants I hold — that’s the most liquid and largest warrant, from their most recent financing). The stock itself may be a reasonable bet compared to those warrants, even though the warrants are trading as if they don’t have any leverage from those four or five years of potential, but I bought most of my long-term warrants a while ago at much lower prices so I’m just holding them now to see how things shake out next year. And yes, the long-term warrants also have downside leverage, as you’d expect — so if the stock falls by 30% the value of the B warrants would be expected to drop roughly 40%.

Northern Dynasty’s various warrants are detailed on their website here with the Canadian ticker symbols. I currently own both the A and B series, NDM.WT.A (C$0.55 strike, 7.9.20 expire) and NDM.WT.B (C$0.65 strike, 6/10/21 expire) in Toronto.

So Northern Dynasty stock is what Casey is apparently still thinking of as one of the best bets for a Trump presidency… and it may work out that way, we’ll have to see what happens, but I’d just reiterate that this is very speculative investing based on regulatory and political events, it’s not really about the mine’s economics just yet and, if the events go against Casey’s expectations (or against Northern Dynasty’s expectations, for that matter), the stock could give up the 500% gains of the past six months very, very quickly. Stories change much faster than fundamentals, and this is all about the story. I’m placing a bet on this horse, and since I used warrants it’s even a more speculative bet than Casey is likely suggesting… but, as with all bets, I’m very aware of the fact that there’s a good chance of losing 80-100% of my investment if things surprise in the other direction… it just seems worthwhile to me to risk that 100% loss for a potential 500-1000% return (or maybe a little more) if things go very well.

I like to do this kind of betting with small amounts of capital from time to time — sometimes it works and I get huge gains, as with some of my leveraged gold bets in the first half of 2016… sometimes it doesn’t work and those losses of capital drag down my overall returns, as has certainly been the case in many years in the past.

I’m absolutely not suggesting that any of you follow my lead on that, by the way — in financial terms, this is like betting on a few numbers in roulette… it’s fun and it leads to huge gains if you’re right (and lucky), but the expectation should absolutely be that it’s much more likely that you’ll be going home with empty pockets after a little adrenalin rush and a few free drinks. Doug Casey has been extremely successful with some of these high-risk junior mining investments in the past, but I’m sure he has also lost his full investment on some of them — maybe this one is a little easier to judge because it’s so dependent on environmental permitting and the incoming president has been clear about his desire to rein in an aggressive EPA, but don’t fool yourself into thinking it’s at all certain.

Lots of other investors are already expecting much better things out of Northern Dynasty as a result of first the small glimmer of light at the end of their tunnel in terms of the EPA litigation, and then the brighter light of deregulation after the Trump election win, so this is no hidden surprise… and that’s why the stock has gone from a market cap of C$100 million a few months ago (and C$50 million last year) to almost C$700 million today. The mine’s big enough that the stock could certainly soar higher, the company had a market cap of almost $2 billion at the height of optimism in 2011, but there’s still a huge amount of uncertainty and it could be that the stock is overreacting to implied promises from President Trump that might not come through as investors expect.

I don’t like to talk about illiquid and highly speculative investments very often, like those warrants, because even our relatively small group of Irregulars is more than large enough to have an impact on an investment that’s this illiquid, so I’ll try to be clear about not profiting from any attention I might drive to these investments in the short term — I will not sell my warrants for at least a month.

guest

12345

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

18 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
chrizcringle
January 16, 2017 12:48 pm

This will be a repeat of what I’ve written in the thread “GOLD AND SILVER AND HARD ASSET INVESTMENTS…FALL 2016” and probably other areas at StockGumShoe.

It’s not only Casey that’s heavily involved in this company, but also Marin Katusa who I believe still owns 10% of the company. Today Stansberry also started promoting this stock so I believe we could see a short-time bounce in the stock-price. The Vancouver Resource Conference with Katusa is also coming up, and NAK will probably be heavily promoted at this event.

“Can a mine be safely built in this area?” Travis asked in this article. Well, the company has spent $150M in research using around aprox. 30 different independent experts in different fields to answer that question. For the first time the EPA is taking a proper look at that data.

Regarding the community they would all benefit greatly since this would increase the level of high paying jobs, lower the price of groceries, infrastructure and decrease the electrical bill.

Add a Topic
210
Add a Topic
443
Add a Topic
753
👍 159
tonybocc
January 16, 2017 2:49 pm
Reply to  chrizcringle

To be honest, I took a small position, when it was at 2.61$. I’m going to ride the hype train until closer to March 31 and sell my positions before.

👍 5
chrizcringle
January 16, 2017 5:11 pm
Reply to  tonybocc

Yes, I could also sell a small position in not too distant future, since my position is starting to be too big since I got in first at around 60 cents. I have taken some profits on the way, though.

When Stansberry is also starting “hyping” this up it could be a very nice gain very soon. From what I have registered it’s now being promoted by Katusa, Frank Curzio (who has a popular podcast and newsletter), Stansberry and Doug Casey. I’m not American, but as far as I know Stansberry Research is the biggest name in the newsletter-world in the US.

Add a Topic
1326
Add a Topic
2756
Add a Topic
753
👍 159
chrisflemings
Member
chrisflemings
January 17, 2017 4:30 pm
Reply to  tonybocc

Is there significance to March 31???

RRR
RRR
January 17, 2017 7:00 pm
Reply to  chrisflemings

Chris…..did you get an answer to the Mar. 31th? I’m curious too, or may I say, I have some mild level invest in NKA, so would appreciate the Mar. 31 statement.

chrizcringle
January 19, 2017 10:12 am
Reply to  RRR

RRR/Chrisflemings: Sorry for the late reply, but I’ve been crazy busy lately and forgot about this thread.

However, I haven’t stated that I will do anything around the 31st; that was tonybocs statement. I might take some profit on the way, but other than this I will sit put.

👍 159
curiousjoe
curiousjoe
January 16, 2017 11:29 pm
Reply to  chrizcringle

As you note below in your reply to “tonybocc”, with Stansberry, Casey, Curzio and Katusa all hyping NAK, it could go higher. In one of the hypes, the price is touted as around $1, in another around $2, probably reflecting the fact that the price has gone up since the first hype.

While care appears to have been taken in updating the price (could also be a case of two different copywriters), it is beyond my credibility how a chart titled “silver-to-gold ratio” in the material coming out of Stansberry over the last several months keeps showing the ratio as below or above 80! Either a case of poor (make that extremely poor) editing, or a disgruntled copywriter “exhibiting reciprocity” for not getting paid enough. 🙂

Add a Topic
753
👍 29
Stephen
Guest
Stephen
January 23, 2017 7:05 pm
Reply to  chrizcringle

Casey is also teasing some Texas oil play. Would love to see a write up.

Add a Topic
753
Add a Topic
359
TL Walker
Member
TL Walker
January 16, 2017 3:34 pm

thanks travis

thinairmony
January 16, 2017 4:09 pm

Hope all is well! I would say that this mine will be minded soon. And the Federal government will have it’s hands all over it. And the reason for it will be to use as much careful mining as can be done to save the fish, and make sure that the drinking water in that area is within Federal guidelines (LAWS) they will put in place. And they will do it the same way they do rail roads and interstate highways going across land owned by residents or companies land . They will give the owners a fair value for it. Sounds crazy but don’t be surprised. I hope I’m wrong because I am going to invest in it now. Here some links you might find knowledgeable http://e360.yale.edu/feature/alaska_pebble_mine_fish_versus_gold/2026/ and this link is from 2008 Sept http://dnr.alaska.gov/mining/largemine/pebble another link http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/PBLEF

Add a Topic
540
Add a Topic
282
Add a Topic
282
👍 -191
WALTER OROURKE
Guest
WALTER OROURKE
January 16, 2017 4:37 pm

I got an email from KITCO that they are giving away over the next few weeks gold coins free for those persons who enter their pick the stocks contest to see if your picks do best each week … it is free at their web site Kitco.Com … FYI and to share

Add a Topic
210
Add a Topic
3102
👍 159
👍 159
goldnugget
goldnugget
January 21, 2017 2:27 pm

As an investor in NAK I’m concerned that this is getting over pumped. Just be careful, as when everyone is betting on the same thing, the opposite tends to happen.

👍 10
backoffice
Irregular
January 21, 2017 9:53 pm

leary of screwing with Pacific Salmon, since Atlantic farmed Salmon is a poor excuse for a fish.

👍 449
omstewart1
omstewart1
January 22, 2017 10:54 pm

Travis: On an adjacent page you have an ad from Daily Trade Alert. I strongly urge you to go to Google, type in “Daily Trade Alert”, and read the blogs from people who have done (or tried to do) business with DTA. Terrible. terrible. fortunately I was not caught up in that company–it certainly is not of the same quality as Stock Gumshoe. –a word to the wise—
omstewart1@yahoo.com

Add a Topic
5971
👍 21649

We use cookies on this site to enhance your user experience. By clicking any link on this page you are giving your consent for us to set cookies.

More Info  
32
0
Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
()
x