When I interviewed Lobo in late 2022 about his highest conviction trade for 2023 he mentioned uranium. He was right.
When I interviewed Lobo in late 2023 about his highest conviction trade for 2024 he mentioned gold. He was right.
In this interview we discussed his outlook for gold, silver, uranium, copper, and platinum group metals. His highest conviction trade for 2025 might surprise you.
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Other articles with Lobo:
- Outlook for Gold miners, Platinum, Rare Earths and mining in Mexico – with Lobo
- 2024 outlook for Uranium, Gold, Silver with Lobo
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Transcript of “Investing in Gold, Uranium, Copper, Silver, PGMs in 2025 with Lobo Tiggre”
LADISLAS MAURICE: Hello, everyone. Today, I am with Lobo, and we shall be discussing the outlook for gold, silver, and uranium, as well as a few other commodities for 2025. Lobo, how are you?
LOBO: Pretty good as we come to the end of the year, a peak tax loss season for all investors, it’s an interesting time, and it’s fun to be in tax haven Puerto Rico. Maybe that’s more along the lines of what your audience likes to think about. And it’s really striking to not have to think about long-term gains or short-term gains, or whether I take it this year next year, to have all of that off the table and just make my decision based on what makes sense for my portfolio, it’s kind of fun.
Review of 2024 precious metals outlook
LADISLAS MAURICE: I completely agree with you, that’s how I’ve been living my life, and I’m happy I don’t have these concerns that a lot of people have. First, let’s recap some of your views for 2024, when we talked last year, and your main call was that gold would do well, and that gold would be the commodity to invest in, in 2024. And yeah, that was a really, really good call. It had been a while since gold bugs or gold investors has had such a year. With regards to uranium, you were also bullish, versus the beginning of the year 2024 and now, essentially, uranium hasn’t done much, but there’s been a lot of volatility along the way. People could have exited in February, March with some really good results.
And then silver, you weren’t particularly bullish. You said, whatever silver does, it’ll be inferior to whatever it is that gold does. And then you were right with that call as well. And then you didn’t want to get too involved in oil, copper, all the other commodities and all the industrials, and good call as well. So Lobo, what are your thoughts for going into 2025? What are the commodities that you find more interesting than others? The floor is yours.
LOBO: Okey-doke. Well, before I get to 2025, let me just add a little bit. My highest confidence trade for ’23 was uranium, and uranium doubled in ’23. And I’m not just saying that to pat myself on the back, I’m saying because it doubled in 2023. So for 2024, it was hard to see it doubling again, more likely it would correct after pulling a hockey stick. And I got a lot of rotten tomatoes for saying that but, lo and behold, that’s exactly what happened. There’s a takeaway there, like, don’t fall in love with any of these investment ideas, nothing is forever in the markets, and when something goes vertical, the law of gravity is not suspended just because you like something.
Gold outlook for 2025
LADISLAS MAURICE: So does this apply to gold in 2025?
LOBO: [laughs] It’s an interesting question, because we have nominal all-time highs. We had a whole series of records. On the bright side, it has corrected a bit already. It hasn’t really, from $2,800 on the futures down to $2,600 is a significant move, not quite an official correction, and it has shown some strength since then. I like that it may have shaken out some weak hands, the momentum chasers that were just jumping on because it kept posting new all-time highs. And I really like that it didn’t just, like, crash down to $2,500 or much lower, which some people were saying. There were a lot of technical guys out there saying, on their charts, it said it’s not stopping until it hits $2,500 or lower. And that didn’t happen either, which shows a really robust appetite for gold.
But it wasn’t on the order of hockey stick that uranium did, so I wouldn’t say that it’s comparable there. If it hadn’t corrected already, I would be saying that some correction at some point would be probable. Now I’m indeterminate on that, because we’ve had some correction. But the point was there was an obvious supply and demand imbalance, there was an obvious case for uranium in ’23. It delivered, and so for ’24, I needed to shift my focus. There was an obvious case for gold in ’24. I would say it’s actually only starting to deliver. What gave us the hockey stick earlier this year, this is also to answer your question, was really governments around the world, central banks ramping up their buying of gold.
And that was striking in and of itself, but it means that the reasons why I was bullish on gold last year, you congratulate me for being right, but in fact, the reasons why I was bullish, they haven’t really happened yet, or they’ve started to happen since last summer, when the labor market in the US started to show signs of weakness, which has accelerated and opened since then, the consumer has also shown signs of weakness in the US. This is the pillar of American exceptionalism. The rest of the world is pretty clearly, if not officially, in recession. There is weakness in the global economy, but the US has been this exceptional standout based on the strong labor market and the workers still out there shopping and consuming.
Well, that has started to come undone. And, for all of the powers that be talking about how great the American economy is, the Fed wouldn’t be cutting if it was super-heated and just going higher. They’re cutting because they see, whether they admit it or not, I think they see some of the weakness that I do. I mean, it’s in the data, so they should, if they’re not blind. What I’m saying, to answer your question about gold, is that those reasons why I was bullish on gold are coming into play now. I had thought that we would have undeniable recession in the US by now, and we don’t. I’ve been wrong about the undeniable part.
I would say that we’ve had plenty of recession. We’ve had a commodities recession, we’ve had the manufacturing recession ongoing, we’ve had a transportation recession. We’ve had all kinds of things have shown weakness, and now that last pillar is starting to go. So we’re at an interesting moment, Ladislas. We could, in a month, be having a very different conversation, depending on how the next data points turn out in the market reactions. Takeaway, though, is that the reality is out there, the central banks of governments around the world are still buying, and the reasons for the US dollar’s strength right now, in the face of this economic factors I’m talking about, I think, are fading, and that’s bullish for gold.
And sorry, not to go on too long, but people might say, “But Lobo, look at Europe, it’s a basket case. Isn’t that bullish for the dollar if the Euro goes down?” And sure, it’s bullish for the dollar on foreign exchange markets. It doesn’t mean the dollar is actually more valuable, it just means that it’s losing value less quickly than the euro. As you and I speak, we’ve got not quite a coup d’etat, but a failed attempt at martial law in South Korea, another major Western democracy. We’ve got the French government voting on collapse right now, as you and I are speaking, right? And Germany, not only is the economic powerhouse of Europe is now an economic basket case. Its government has fallen apart as well. So there’s lots of turmoil out there, lots of reasons to be bullish on gold, and not a whole lot of downside.
It makes me nervous to say this, Ladislas, when you have an all-time high, at least nominally, the contrarian in me wants to say, okay, the next big move is likely down. But I just don’t see the cause for that in the global marketplace. And the things that would be causes, like the dollar rising on Trump’s victory, normally, that would have been bad for gold, or the Fed pausing its cut and the talks we’ve had about that, the interest rate cut for this month being called into question, normally, that would be bad for gold. So to have gold still trading near all-time highs despite those headwinds tells me to that bottom line answer of your question, there’s very strong appetite out there. I don’t see any imminent major downside, and I see significant upside in the year ahead.
Weaponization of the US dollar
LADISLAS MAURICE: Yeah. And I think people need to remember that trust is breaking down in today’s world. Governments do not trust each other anymore, people do not trust any each other anymore, and gold is essentially a way to play this. We see the impact that sanctions have had on governments across the world. The US dollar is being completely weaponized, everyone has seen it. No one can unsee it. If you are–
LOBO: That’s a key point, Ladislas, no one can unsee it. That’s exactly right. This is what we mean by paradigm shift. It’s a one-way door.
LADISLAS MAURICE: Yeah, it’s a one-way door. And, just even examples, just like the US trying to prosecute the Adani guy in India for whatever corruption he may or may not have done in India. I mean, this is [laughs] it’s literally Americans sitting in America trying to prosecute an Indian for stuff he did in India.
LOBO: Yeah, why didn’t they go through the ICC? Even if I was a deep state minion, I would be telling my boss, “WTF. You’re blowing our cover here. Why didn’t you use your National Criminal Court?” At least hide the iron fist with the silk glove.
LADISLAS MAURICE: Yeah. Now you do this to one of India’s most powerful men, well, guess what, it just sends the message to Indians that already really like gold, and as they become wealthier, they buy more gold. Well, just confirms that they’re entirely right, and that it shouldn’t just be something that people do on an individual basis, but it’s also the government of India that needs to do this, it’s wealthy people in India, etc.
BRICS currency and de-dollarization
LOBO: Yeah, yeah. And even more of a slap in the face is Trump’s new threat on the BRICS countries if they go forward with a BRICS currency of their own. But in the first place, it’s kind of silly, there is no BRICS currency. And there have been rumors that it’s happening for almost 20 years. I mean, and honestly, these countries, they don’t trust each other any more than they trust us. So I’m very skeptical of a BRICS currency. If it does happen, then I do think it would be gold-backed, because they don’t trust each other, and they can verify golden vaults, at least at points in time, right? So I could see that happening, but it’s not the sort of thing that happens quickly.
Even if they are secretly working on that now, I think it would take years to develop, roll out, check the system, make sure it all works. Far more likely they just trade amongst themselves in their own currencies and then settle imbalances in gold, the way that countries used to for hundreds and hundreds of years before Bretton Woods.
LADISLAS MAURICE: Yeah. And that doesn’t mean that the dollar is going to crash either, because people are very quick to say that the dollar is going to crash, the dollar is going to crash.
LOBO: Right, yes. De-dollarization is a real thing, but that’s a multi-decade trend, it doesn’t affect my investment decisions right now. But where I’m going with this, though, is that, Trump can score points with his MAGA supporters, “Yeah, stick it to those foreigners, those BRICS countries for even thinking about de-dollarizing,” or so on. But they’re not even doing it in the first place, I don’t think, like, right now. So it’s an easy thing for him to say. They don’t actually have to change anything if they weren’t doing it anyway. But it’s, to your point with this prosecution of the Indian tycoon, it’s a slap in the face of the sovereignty of these other countries. You don’t do that with your own business, with your own currencies, and I’m going to tell you what to do, and I’m going to threaten you if you don’t do what I think is best for my country, never mind your country or people.
Trade war and tariffs
Nobody likes to be slapped in the face like that, I don’t care what country you’re from. So the backlash, it’s interesting. I don’t think it’s been posted yet, but I did an interview just a of couple days ago where this topic came up, and I said, it’s not just counter tariffs, it’s not just tit-for-tat tariffs. China, for example, controls 90% of the world’s rare earths, so what if they decide to respond with that? And lo and behold, just yesterday, China didn’t ban all rare earths, but they banned certain critical metals which are in high demand in military applications, gallium, germanium, and antimony. I mean, it’s kind of interesting to see. And was that just because of what Trump said? Probably they were thinking about it already, but it was interesting to me that Trump laid down his threat, and China laid down their response right away. And we could see more of this.
And by the way, and I’m not saying that Trump or anybody shouldn’t fight back against the theft of intellectual property or unfair trade practices. I mean, when you have free trade with a counterparty that has government subsidies and unfree trade within its own country, there’s a legitimate problem there, and I recognize that. I’m just saying that, for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. And the world that we’re in right now, Trump, if nothing else, whether you love him or hate him, he is an agent of change, a sower of chaos. And going back to our first questions, who knows how everything will work out, but I do know that in times that are more chaotic, I’m glad that I own gold and silver bullion.
Can you be bullish both USD and Gold?
LADISLAS MAURICE: Yeah, absolutely. I’m not saying I’m buying more gold at these exact levels, but I’m certainly not selling any. But over time, I’ll continue accumulating. And I think what you say is important. It is possible to not be negative the dollar and still be positive gold, right? Like you say, it’s a paradigm shift. Before it was like weak dollar, strong gold, weak gold, strong dollar. It’s possible that strong dollar and stronger gold, [laughs] and then weaker other currencies. So people just need to be open to this.
Conflict and uncertainty support precious metals
LOBO: Sure. One quick point on that is when there is geopolitical uncertainty, you often see that flight to safety move people into both gold and the dollar. And you saw that when Russia invaded Ukraine, you saw that the other time Russia invaded Ukraine, right? You saw that when Hamas went into Israel, right? You see that, and it’s obvious on the spikes, those momentary, like, “Oh my gosh, this is happening.” But as a general principle, that that’s still valid. And we didn’t talk about this before, but we’re in a world where there are still two hot wars, major conflicts, either of which could turn into World War III.
Now there’s talk of peace on both fronts, and certainly, as a human being, I hope there is peace. I’m not anti-peace just because I want gold prices to go up. I’m just saying, peace is easy to talk about and hard to come by. And the Israelis have clearly just had it. I think if they were unrestrained, they would not stop until they wiped out their enemies.
LADISLAS MAURICE: That’s what they’re doing.
LOBO: And Ukraine, it’s interesting to me that Zelensky has softened his line a little bit, but I’m deeply skeptical that even Donald Trump can end that conflict in 24 hours. And I certainly don’t think that the Europeans want it to end. Sorry to be coldblooded about this, but as long as Ukrainians are willing to go off and get themselves killed killing Russians and degrading the military capabilities of Putin’s Russia, I think Europeans are happy to fund that. From their perspective, it’s a great deal. It’s an investment, Ukrainians die, all we gave is money. [laughs] And I’m not laughing because I think it’s funny, I’m laughing because it’s sad but it’s predictable, it’s very human.
I think there’s plenty of incentive for that conflict to continue, not least of which, of course, is Putin’s own ambitions. That guy wants to be czar, he wants to put together the Soviet Union again and more. Who knows what his ambitions limits are. And I also think that if he doesn’t continue, like, the moment he loses his grip on power, I think he’s dead. The people around him are not very nice people. He has control, not because people love him. And so if he loses that grip, I think he knows that he’s headed for a firing squad or something much more ignominious, perhaps.
LADISLAS MAURICE: He’s a moderate compared to what surrounds him.
LOBO: So again, this is the world that we’re in right now. And that’s, sadly, you might say, but whether we like it or not, that is supportive of safe haven assets like gold and silver.
Silver outlook for 2025
LADISLAS MAURICE: What about silver? Would you rather own gold or silver right now for 2025?
LOBO: Well, even the most ardent silver bulls will tell you that silver, typically, underperforms gold at first and then more than catches up in the end. And all but one of the major gold and silver bull markets, since 1971 when Tricky Dick Nixon freed gold to trade against the United States dollar, in all but one of those, silver has outperformed gold on a percentage gain basis at the end. The disturbing fact is that the one exception is the most recent one [laughs] in 2020. Silver never caught up with gold. It still has yet to hit even a nominal all-time high, where gold has posted numerous of those this year. So clearly, the silver market is different, in my view.
It’s not rocket science to see that the industrial side of silver is used in solar panels, and electronics, medicine. It actually has many uses, it’s kind of a wonder metal. But that means that its price action is more heavily influenced by those industrial, non-monetary aspects. So the way I’ve been putting this is I have higher confidence of higher gold in 2025 than I do silver, but whenever silver gets going, I see I, the odds are 9 times out of 10 tells me that silver will actually go up more than gold. So when you say, which one do I like better? It depends. Which one will I have more confidence in the year ahead? Well, that would be gold. Which one do I think will go higher? Well, that would be silver, but when, I’m not entirely sure.
Silver supply deficit
LADISLAS MAURICE: Isn’t there a deficit?
LOBO: There are two things about that, when you talk about a supply deficit, that’s been true for a very long time, but it doesn’t really take into account the massive amounts of secondary supply out there. And we see this when gold and silver go up, people are much more likely to sell grandma’s silverware or old tea set or something than they are to take a wedding ring or something like that, a gold ring down to the pawn shop to get some money. So there is only so much secondary supply in the world, but it’s a lot for silver. I mean, it is a lot. There’s a lot of silver out there.
And I think this is one reason, when we’ve seen silver spike up to around, it’s gone to 50 bucks twice now, and it’s been a very short spike, and then it’s come down immediately. Because it just seems like the immediate response from, not silver bulls or silver bugs, but all the other people out there that have silver is, “Oh my gosh, it’s just gone up. It’s double, tripled, or whatever. I’ve got some silver, and I don’t care about silver, so I’m going to go to the pawn shop and sell my silver and buy cigarettes, or vodka, or whatever.”
Uranium outlook for 2025
LADISLAS MAURICE: What about uranium?
LOBO: Uranium is, I was saying earlier, it doubled last year, 2023. It was a clear candidate for correction. That happened this year. An important point is that the correction wasn’t just free fall, it fell until it bumped into the long-term contract price trend, and that long-term contract price trend remains upwards. The bottom that we’ve been carving out in uranium has been pretty durable at the plus or minus $80 level. So I do think actually the next big move is up. It’s just hard to see it absent some big game changer in the market, it’s hard to see it doubling from here, whereas you could see that more in some of the other metals that are supply-constrained the way uranium is.
And there’s also, particular in uranium right now, there’s an issue in that even at plus or minus 80 bucks, that’s a pretty good price. It’s not like uranium crashed and that it’s below the cost of production, or something terrible like that. It’s actually well above the cost of production, it’s at the incentive level that is causing people with mothballed uranium mines to bring them back online and people to build new mines, that’s happening now. So it’s reasonable for the market to say, “Well, let’s see how this balances out. Let’s see if the low-hanging fruit can supply the market.” We’ve looked at that. We have a free uranium report, you can put a link on it, if you like, Ladislas. We have a free uranium report, and we’ve looked at it, and we don’t think that that low-hanging fruit will be enough. But it’s reasonable for the market to ask that question.
So I think this shakes out, and I think long-term prices keep going up, and I think that will drag the spot price up, and I think that will reignite interest in the uranium stocks. It is certainly not a problem with demand. I mean, I used to say every week we got good news. It seems like every day now we’ve got good news.
Nuclear energy demand and uranium
LOBO: Just today, there was a report I saw that China’s official plans, or the rate of expansion of 10 reactors per year calls for 100 new reactors just in the next decade. And this isn’t small modular reactors or the ones that recycle uranium, these would be regular reactors that need new uranium mined out of the ground. That is a huge amount of demand. And you’ve got Eastern Europe wants to build them as fast as they can. You know about that. It’s amazing to see how the demand pick up.
And if you needed nothing else to your audience, I understand that your audience is not mining guys, that all they think about is rocks, like me, all day long, but you must have seen the news that they wanted to bring that reactor back online at Three Mile Island to power Microsoft data centers. Like, what more of a wakeup call do you need than that to realize this is an idea whose time has come again?
LADISLAS MAURICE: Yeah. And like you say, there is not a week without some reactor extension or without supply issues, [laughs] like, there’s a lot of the mines that are supposed to come online or that are coming online, and it’s just delay after delay, production issue after production issue.
LOBO: Yeah, that’s a good point. Like, these people that are worried about high prices curing high prices, they should look at what you just said. Like, everybody, even the world’s biggest and lowest cost producer, biggest in the world, can’t ramp up production to what it once promised.
LADISLAS MAURICE: Yeah. No, uranium is fascinating. Cool. So you mentioned that you were bullish some other commodities with supply deficits. Are you referring to PGMs?
LOBO: No, actually, I’m not. The supply deficits there are, A, political, and, B, potential. Like, people keep saying, “Oh, well, we get most of our platinum from South Africa. And if South Africa goes up in flames, and there goes the platinum. And it’s way cheap. It’s cheaper than gold, and it shouldn’t be, so platinum has got to go through the roof.” Problem with that is I’ve been hearing that for 20 years, and South Africa, for all of its troubles, is still mining, is still turning out the platinum. The political argument with the palladium coming out of Russia is, in a way, more credible. I mean, that’s a problem. But palladium, it’s precious, it’s an expensive metal. It can be flown anywhere on their own. These are globally fungible commodities.
So, okay, US bans Russian palladium. Well, they just sell it to the Chinese. And people who would have sold to the Chinese sell to the US. So I don’t think these political shenanigans are a real threat to supply at all, especially for such a highly concentrated value as palladium. If we were talking coal, and all the world’s coal was in Russia, and Russia banned coal from going to United States, that would be a big problem. That is very expensive to transport coal across the world and to get it from Australia instead, that would be a big problem. Not palladium, not platinum.
And I’m still in the view that we’ve got a global recession going on. People don’t buy cars in recessions, whether they’re electric or not. If you hate electric cars, it doesn’t matter, if you’ve got a global recession, you’re going to sell fewer cars. And even if the powers that be throw money at that, and people kind of start shopping again, the first thing you go out and buy isn’t a car. That’s a big expense. After a house, the car is usually most families’ biggest expense. So I’m not near-term bullish on the auto market and, therefore, the arguments that platinum and palladium are cheap and they should go up, at some point, they will. I just don’t see any reason to think that they will soon or even throughout 2025. So that’s something to watch.
Copper outlook for 2025
LOBO: But to answer your question, my highest conviction trade for 2025, drum roll, is not gold, or silver, or uranium, it’s copper. And the other thing that tempted me was actually oil, because like copper, Dr. Copper is that essential industrial metal, and oil, it’s the energy that makes the world go round. The difference, though, is that as we come out of this recession, and I think the powers that be in the US and around the world just throw money at it, and that’s inflationary. So it may sound contradictory for me to be in Team Hard Landing and say I expect industrial minerals to go up, but it’s because bad news is good news, right? It’s because the trouble causes the governments to unleash the money helicopters again. And I think that happens in 2025. It may even be happening on a stealth level already.
But the difference between oil and copper is that you’ve got OPEC in voluntary supply constraints, right? OPEC+ are voluntarily producing less oil so they don’t produce a glut. That is not the case in copper. It’s close right now, but the market is in deficit, and there have been some projections that like this year or next it might have a bit of a surplus, but it’s like we talked about with those uranium mines, those projections are based on everybody doing what they say they’re going to do, and they don’t. We’ve got mine nationalizations, we’ve got roadblocks, we’ve got sinkholes, we’ve got all kinds of problems with production not being where it should.
I mean, just for example, Peru is one of the world’s big copper producers, and they just made a big announcement, “Woohoo, we are now back to pre-pandemic levels of production.” Well, wow, it took them five years to get there. That tells you how difficult it is to ramp up copper supply. So of the two sort of no-brainer minerals, the essential minerals, copper and oil, copper gets my money for going ahead in this year. Well, what about lithium? Isn’t lithium the new copper or lithium the new oil? Well, but that’s for use in cars. And if we’re looking at cars not selling well, let alone electric cars, and the problems we’ve had with electric car adoption rates going down, lithium is not one I want to bet on until I see that market in a sustained growth mode. I’m not going to try to bottom tick that or time that at all. I want to see sustained growth in lithium before I consider going there.
So in my mind, it’s quite simple, copper, the demand is there, supply is threatened, the money helicopters are flying. It’s absolutely essential, it cannot be replaced. I mean, yes, some applications you can use some aluminum, but not really. So I really like it. And it’s relatively cheap. Like, we just talked about, can uranium double from here? Well, that’d be a tall order. Can oil double from here? That’d be a tall order. Can copper double from here? Well, 4 bucks to 8 bucks, that could happen. Could it go up 50%? Well, we’ve seen that before, that would be easy. It would be easy to see copper going back to 6 bucks in 2025 if I’m right about the supply constraints and the money helicopters flying.
The double maybe not easy, but it could happen. The 50%, and what that would do to the stocks. I’m a stock picker, not just a rock kicker. I am like Santa, both I’m putting my shopping list together now and I’m checking it twice, and I’m eager, I’m not quite ready yet, because there’s still, I think, some economic pain to go through first, but I’m getting ready to deploy bigtime into copper in 2025.
Affiliate link to free newsletter
LADISLAS MAURICE: Fascinating. Look, if you’re interested in finding out more about Lobo’s thinking, he has a really good free newsletter that I’ve subscribed to for many years. Once a week, you send an in-depth analysis of the markets. There’s an affiliate link below. And you also have a paid newsletter, which I’ve subscribed to for a number of years, which has helped me avoid making expensive mistakes, [laughs] that’s how I’ll put it. And there’s also my affiliate link below.
Lobo, thank you very much for your time today. We really appreciate it.
LOBO: Thank you, Ladislas. Happy holidays to you, and to your audience, and family, everybody, and I hope we all have a terrific 2025.
