I’m getting this Friday File out to you a little earlier than usual, because I’m bringing one of my kids to Detroit for the first Lions home playoff game in 30 years (well, I’m trying to bring him, at least… crossing my fingers that the weather allows planes to land in Detroit tomorrow). The city is going bonkers, and the ticket pricing is getting absurd for a fan base that has waited so long for this kind of big event in the Motor City, so I guess I should be grateful that I was only able to drag one of my three children into the lifelong “joy” of Lions fandom.

And that got me thinking, as a longtime fan of this often disappointing team whose last “glory days” were when Barry Sanders was breaking ankles and I was in college (I’m 53), about the nature of belief and fandom… and how that plays into investing.

I believe that the Detroit Lions will win the Super Bowl this year.  And who knows, maybe they actually will, they’re having their best year in a long time, and they’re a ton of fun to watch.

But you wanna know a secret?  I believed the Lions would win the Super Bowl last year, too.  And I’ve had that belief, at least in August, for most of the past 35 years or so.  It doesn’t matter that most of the time that belief has been foolish, that the team often had incompetent ownership or a terrible coach or too many sub-par players. I wanted them to win, so I believed they would.

And I bet that’s how Rudi Fronk feels about gold.  He’s a fan, he’s committed, he’s been running Seabridge Gold (SA) for decades, and that’s a company that was an exciting “huge discovery” story 20-25 years ago but has been a somewhat depressing story of inaction for the past dozen years.  Seabridge is built a little differently than most mining firms, since they seem to have little interest in actually building a mine themselves and they’re just building up their “ounces in the ground” by drilling and acquiring new projects, with presumably the hope that they’ll be acquired by a major miner the next time we have a wild and sustained gold bull market… so, gosh, what a coincidence that Fronk sees an emerging bull market in gold around just about ...