People will come, Ray. You’re broke, Ray. You sell now or you lose everything. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been silver. America has ruled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But silver has marked the time. It reminds us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh, people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come. And, you know, we’re in a world today where coal mining companies are trading at 1 times earnings, whereas some of these tech companies are trading at 300 times earnings.

So we’re. I think we’re in a great opportunity where if you go against what the mainstream is telling you, there’s a phenomenal opportunity. That’s. That’s what value investing is all about. Hey, guys, Raf here from the Endgame Investor. And I’ve got the CEO of Dolly Varden Silver with me on the show today, the End Game Investor. This is Sean Kunku, he’s in Vancouver. And I, as you know, I’m in Israel. We’re nine hours apart and we’re communicating anyway. That’s what, you know, globalism is. So, Sean, the first question I want to ask you is actually where does your last name come from? What does it mean? That is a great question.

So my family is from India and it’s. It’s interesting to ask about the. The last name because I’ve heard different sort of definitions on. So if you take. There’s. It’s. It’s a. There’s four. Four English letters that repeat twice. K Kun K H N K, H N. And if we take it. So if we just take the issue end. Some say it. It’s a word for blood. And others say depending on what side of the river you’re from, others say it’s translates to murder. So, so blood blood or murder murder. Well, those are both awesome. Okay, we go either one.

I, I prefer to go to blood blood because I think I can take a lot of positive spins on. On blood. You know, the lifeline of our being. You know, the, you know, the, you know, everything that is positive about that. So that’s the one I like to focus on. Okay, well. And you could like mix it up. You could be like blood murder or murder blood. You could do that. And yeah, so I listen, I come from a long line of farmers. If I go back to my great grandfather, actually, so grandfather on my mom’s side, great grandfather on my father’s side, both served in the military.

And this would have been actually technically for the British military. And grandfather on the father’s side was actually on both sides, you know, quite well respected and rose through the ranks. And so my, my great grandfather was gifted a lot of land in actually what is today Pakistan, because after the Second World War, there’s some borders that were drawn up and, and so my father actually made a. A pilgrimage, you know, made a move from what is today Pakistan and walked into. To what is today India. And so the, There was a. Basically a land swap.

So the big. This parcel of land in Pakistan was then turned into a parcel of land into what is today Punjab, India, sort of area of Punjabi Sikhs who, you know, make up some big populations in places like London, England, or in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. And essentially, what’s very interesting for me is that I grew up around the idea of farming, but also the idea of gold and, you know, having gold being passed down and gifted through generations and being a store of value and a store of wealth. Right. The, the tradition for gold in India is especially strong even now.

And today in India, that tradition, because you’ve got this growing middle class and because of the price of golden rupees, you know, for, for many, particularly, you know, people that are my age, people in their 40s, they’re turning to silver from an affordability standpoint. And so, you know, I think it was in Q1 of 2024, where a third of demand for silver came out of India and, and solar. But getting back to my story a little bit here, you know, I always talk about the fact that I grew up in Canada, was educated here, born and raised here, and I was not taught anything through our, our systems about educational systems about gold, what gold is historically no Austrian economics and no know gold’s role over the last 5,000 years.

And I actually thought my parents were crazy. I was actually with Eric Sprott last week, and I was sharing a story with Eric when my father on my 13th birthday bought me a gold ring. And I, I felt guilty because I, I saw my father, he would go out and sacrifice his time and energy at a job, and then he came back, he turned that time and energy into what I thought was jewelry. And I didn’t understand, you know, the, the wealth storage principles of what he was really doing. But, you know, through getting into this industry and through being educated by people like Eric Sprott and Rick Rule and even people like yourself, understanding silver and gold’s role in history has made me appreciate where I came from and it makes.

I’ve got a lot of passion today. For the industry, for my roots. And it’s kind of nice how I can marry the two together. Well, speaking of passion, I was thinking about what questions to ask you in this back and forth and as luck would have it, one of my favorite, actually my, my favorite, my favorite gold and silver analyst, monetary analysts, very Austrian school heavy educated, genius guy in terms of analytical thinking and monetary analysis. Daniel Oliver of Myrmican Capital, he wrote a piece today actually about the gold mining industry. So I want to share screen here and I’m going to read the first two paragraphs and I just want to get your feeling on, like, just reflect off of it.

And also where does, where does your company in that mix that he’s describing, the position that it’s in, the difficulties in the industry? You’ll see what I’m seeing, what I mean in a second. I’m just going to share screen and show you his, his essay that came out today. These are very rare. They come out like once every two months or so. So in the first two paragraphs here, he says the title is Liquidity Reversing. He says junior gold mining companies are a special case. Their assets are rarely world class. Management can be suboptimal, you know, present company excluded.

Access to capital is often tenuous and expensive. When money comes rushing suddenly into the sector, there are no ETFs funneling money into their stocks, making them lag sharp moves. It’s a tough sector to navigate, but they do excel at one thing, leverage. Not financial leverage, for they rarely carry debt, but operational leverage. When the gold price increases, the net present values of their projects rise the fastest. And in bull markets, the tiny multiples applied to their cash flows and NPVs converge towards the majors, meaning the major miners, the valuation multiples of which also increase substantially, applying multiple leverage on top of operational leverage.

They generally move last and then the most. And I’m just going to read this final sentence here, two sentences. This is the reason why 2020 was such a frustrating year for the juniors. All of them, right? The macroeconomics evolved as we anticipated. High interest rates led to higher gold prices, not lower, as bank analysts predicted. And commodities fell in terms of gold to a new 212 year low, which should lead to higher real margins for gold mining over time. So I guess my overarching question is it’s been so bad for the miners, especially the junior miners and especially the junior silver miners.

When does this change and what do you think of Oliver’s analysis here and what are you seeing and where does Dolly Varden fit in. I know that’s all general but take it where you will. Sure. No, I appreciate the piece and I think he’s, he said the nail on the head the way I see the industry and you know I go back to what I’ve experienced. You know I got started in 2004 and from. So I missed the first couple of early endings in the, the last major run up when gold went from call it 200 to 2000 give or take during the, the decade of the the 2000s.

So if you go back and study and analyze when money flowed into gold mining equities there was a lot of frustration when gold went through $500 an ounce for the first time since 1980 in and around 2006. Q1 of 2006 there was a lot of frustration in the industry and I was new and I didn’t really appreciate because I hadn’t suffered decades of bear markets. So there was a lot of frustration and I often see a lot of similarities and look at the parallels between the 06 market and where we are today. And so it wasn’t until gold got up to about 730 an ounce in May of 2006 where you started to see some generalists and some capital flows into the sector.

Now one of the challenges that we had back then is we had other sectors that were performing really well into the top of 2007. And similarly there’s, I think there’s a lot of other asset classes, almost every asset class as we’re in this sort of everything bubble environment where investors don’t have to be here. So despite the fact that some central banks have gone long some gold and we’ve seen the price show up, it’s only really been the top class gold mining equities that have benefited. Last week I was at the mining hall of Fame induction ceremony where Sean Boyd of Agnico Eagle was inducted.

So Sean runs a company that is a 55 billion dollar Canadian success story. It is trading at a 52 week high. It is trading at 120 a share. So that’s an example of a gold mining equity best in class that is reacting and responding to positive gold price for all these other companies. And I can, you know, you know, I can’t address the 10,000 companies that are out there. Some high cost marginal producers, some developers that need billions of dollars to develop their project and, and have $1,000 in a bank account. I can’t speak to those companies or inferior management teams.

But what I like to try to focus on is we, we operate in an industry where there’s one handful of successful entrepreneurs, Pierre Lassonde, Frank Justra, you know, Lundin. There’s a handful of people that you can follow as an investor that are serial successes where 80% of the success in the industry is executed by 20% of these management teams and these investors. So look, I think if you’re, if you’re new to the industry, you know, it’s, it’s a very expensive prospect depending upon how wealthy you are. You know, I really think gold has really priced itself for kings and for sovereigns, whereas I still see a tremendous opportunity in physical silver.

But if you’re looking to speculate. Right, if you’re looking to speculate, you know, I think there is a tremendous opportunity for those who are willing to have the patience and the challenge with this industry, Rafi, is it’s a capital intensive industry. So the longer it takes, the more you’re diluted and the less your returns are going to be. So look, I think all the evidence of, I’ll give you one example. So last year Silver was up 20%. You know, what more do you ask for? You know, if we could have silver up 20 this year or gold up 20, I’d be very, very happy.

I’m very, very happy with these types of, you know, returns. However, because of the leverage that the author talked about, what you should have had happen is the silver equity should have been up 60%, but they underperformed, they were only up 6%. And if you go back and study markets, what it tells me is we are in the early innings of the bull. You know, the price of gold has led. The gold miners, the best in class are starting to react like Agnico Eagle. But it takes time for that money to come down into the mid tier producers, then into the developers and then into the advanced exploration companies.

And then it goes down to the silver coast, the silver producers, and then it goes down to the silver explorers. So I just think it’s, it’s, it’s a, it’s a sign that we’re early in this market. And really that’s the opportunity, you know, that’s the big opportunity. And let’s take something like silver and, and for me, like I’ve been around gold mining investing for 21 years. I focused the last five years on silver. It, it’s, it’s been marginally economic and profitable to be a silver miner. It really 20, 24 was the first year it became economic to be a silver miner, you know, and that’s why? There are only 11 silver producers that are listed in North America, and that’s a small group.

And do you mean. When you say that, do you mean 11 silver producers that specifically are mining for silver, or do you mean 11 companies that, that produce silver at all? Like, maybe they’re gold miners or maybe they’re mining, I don’t know, iron or whatever, and then they have silver as a byproduct. What, What. Exactly. So these are companies that try to portray themselves as silver companies. Okay, okay. But the reality in that only one of the 11 is a real silver miner. The rest mine other metals. And, you know, the best case scenario is, is you might have, you might find a name in the list that maybe 50% of their product silver.

But some of those companies that are silver miners, you know, maybe only a third or 25% of their production comes from silver. So even that list of 11, they’re truly most of them, the majority of them. Silver is a byproduct metal. Okay. And that’s just the way silver is distributed. And because of the price of silver and the way economics are, you know, we only get, you know, 28% of silver from pure silver deposits. So my point to you is if you’re an investor, you have an opportunity to buy physical silver. Now in Canada here, you’ve got to pay absurd premiums, and I probably won’t secure metal, you know, in any size for, you know, it’ll be in the 40s, 40 to $50 an ounce Canadian.

And. And so I still think there’s a great opportunity in that, though, because of the growing industrial demand for silver. You know, 100 years ago, only 10% of the demand for silver was industry. Today it’s over 50%. And we’re seeing, we’re seeing shortages and we’re seeing difficulty accessing silver in places like Bolivia, Mexico, Peru, Argentina. So I think that, you know, the, the, the bull case for silver is there, and I’m, I’m really bullish silver. And I’ve already watched their silver price double in the last couple of years, and I think it’s set to double again.

So going back to. How do you play it if you’re an investor? Well, There’s a, there’s 11 companies you could buy, and then there’s five companies, Rafi, that are the superior silver development advanced Danger Coast. So these are five companies. So if we had this interview a few months ago, I would have said there’s 13 Silver Coasts. Today there’s 11. Because we’ve had two takeovers in the space now, there’s only five of these, plus $200 million developers. My company, Dolly Varden is one of them. So what’s going to happen in my assessment is these five will be absorbed by the 11 big boys if they don’t build themselves or develop and then mature into that space themselves.

So I think there’s a tremendous opportunity. I think the disparity between commodity price and equity price has never been wider. And I think therein lies the opportunity for the investor. But you really have to be a special, you have to know yourself. You know, can you be a contrarian? Can you be patient? Can you buy more if it goes lower? Right? Like these are, these are difficult. Like you really have to go, you really have to approach stock buying and silver investing as you approach buying anything else. You know, you want to celebrate when they’re on sale, right? And you don’t want to buy them when they’re priced for perfection.

And you know, we’re in a world today where coal mining companies are trading at one times earnings, whereas some of these tech companies are trading at 300 times earnings. So we’re, I think we’re in a great opportunity where if you go against what the mainstream is telling you to stay away from coal companies and stay away from mining companies, and you look at the fact that you can buy some of these names for 2 times earnings, 3 times earnings, there’s a phenomenal opportunity. That’s, that’s what value investing is all about. But I don’t think we start to see the big flows of capital until you see some of these other asset classes to start to lose momentum.

We need to see that rotation from tech and from other asset classes into value. And I think, you know, could 2025 be the year of real things, of hard assets? I don’t know. But you know, this, this other trade of the everything bubble is getting a little long in the tooth. And I like the prospects of buying. I like the, you know, there’s a, there’s a crocodile behind me, right. I like that approach of investing where you’re patient and you wait for your food to walk across your table and you’re not running around like a rabbit and chasing everything.

And you snap when you see it when you’re in. And that’s the other story about that, is you don’t need the metal to go. There was a, a company called Crocodile Gold in Australia that had the Fosterville deposit that led to billions of dollars of wealth creation through discovery, through having a profitable mind. So there’s two ways to make money in our business. Number one is having your timing right of the metal price going higher. And we’ve, we’re seeing that with record high gold prices with silver doubling. The other part of that is trying to identify opportunities where there’s value creation through the management team and through the project.

Okay, so on that topic where we’re talking about tech and all this money flowing into, you know, frankly a bunch of garbage. I’m not calling all tech garbage, but there’s a lot of garbage that’ll that true that hundreds of millions, billions of dollars are flowing into to show you that the absurdity of where we are right? And when. And when these flows reverse, right, when all this worthless stuff, all this money flows out of the worthless stuff, they’re going to have to try to find, you know, projects that are worthwhile and necessary to invest in. And the reason that I am invested in miners and Dolly Varden is one of them.

I do own shares is that when this drunken party is over, I think that gold and silver miners, especially silver miners, are going to be bid up in a frenzy. I don’t know exactly when or exactly how far, but that’s why I own them. And I also own them because if the, if something does happen to the dollar and it no longer works as a money, then, you know, I want to own companies that actually produce money. So here’s what, here’s what he says and this is actually. It’s funny and it’s sad, right? So he says here for.

He’s talking about the magnificent seven meaning Meta, Google, Nvidia, those, those ones, you know, the, the ones that everybody knows that, that have gone up like crazy. So it says here for, for those investors not satisfied with the S P500, the magnificent seven Bitcoin sailors extraordinary feats. Michael Saylor, right, of microstrategy sailors extraordinary feats of leverage on bitcoin or buying microstrategy and margin. There also was Fartcoin which increased2031 in 2024. Whereas Sailor and other proponents pass extravagant claims of bitcoins being money perfected fart coins. $840 million valuation offers holders absolutely no economic value other than being able to boast sponsorship of a scatological joke.

And he says later that why would anyone try to invest in a mine, right, which is capital intensive, dangerous people can get killed. Where these securities and these companies have been so low. I mean, I’m talking about the stock price. It’s not the company. The stock price has been so low. For so long, why would you even think about investing in it? But that’s the problem point, right? Because this is when you want to. And that, I think that’s the point that you were making. But when, when, when the, when the extra hundreds of millions or billions of dollars starts to leave these crazy fart coin assets and other similar things, when, at that point, what happens to gold and silver miners? Where do you see them going in in a world where sanity has at least returned to a degree.

Great question. I want to start by saying that it’s my understanding that the Magnificent Seven did not exist decades ago. Like the, the biggest companies that command the headlines and the highest weightings in the big indexes today, they’re fairly new companies or they’ve, they’ve come up from very, very small value to big value today. What I feel a lot of comfort in and what I’m trying to do with my company, Dolly Varden, is, you know, we’re, we’re owned by a company called Hecla Mining. Hecla’s been around for over 130 years. It’s one of the longest listed companies on the New York Stock Exchange.

What I have an opportunity to build and what miners have an opportunity to do is to build something today that will be here 100 years from now. And that idea, you know, because I, I’m looking around at some of the art that you have around you. You know, having children and creating legacy and having purpose in our work that goes beyond, you know, I talked about my grandfather and I talked about that land in India. You know, having something that will be here beyond my time here means something to me. That’s, that’s more than money. And, and that’s what I have an opportunity to build.

And I don’t know, you know, what is going to be the technology that, you know, reigns the day and, you know, captivates the world tomorrow. Right. But I feel very confident that the silver or the gold or even for that matter, the copper that is being secured will be relevant decades from now, maybe even centuries from now. And so that’s my approach. So, you know, look, we can look at, to answer your question, we could look at the historical weighting to precious metals, and we could look at where we are on a relative basis. And one could make the argument that, you know, some of these companies could go up 100 or 200 times.

But the easier way to do it is this. If you look at bull markets, often companies will trade at 10% of the value of the spot price of the metal. So just to make this clear, at the case of Dolly Varden, we’ve identified about 140 million silver equivalent ounces. So that’s silver and gold, so roughly 140 million. So we should be trading in a, in a, in a, in a market in the future, we should be trading at 10% of the value of the spot price of silver. So today, you know, the way to do that math is, you know, if you look at the price of silver today at say $30, well, 10% of that is $3 an ounce in the ground.

And you multiply that by the number of ounces we have. Right. So that’s, you know, three times. Call it, we’ll round it up to 150. To keep it simple. That’s about a 450 million dollar valuation. And that’s where Dolly Varden was trading in October. So that’s a very accurate representation. Now we’re a little bit lower today, but give or take, that’s where these things should trade. Now if you believe that silver is going higher, then you know, you can start increasing that percentage if silver goes to $50 or $60 or $70. Well, the other thing that the company can do though is when I came in and started running Dolly a few years ago, there was only 40 million ounces in the ground.

So the reason, so it was a $20 million company at 16 silver with the 40 million ounces in the ground. Today, it’s roughly trading at a 300 million dollar valuation with 140 million ounces silver in the ground. So my point to you is the way I can create value for my shareholders is by growing our mineral inventory through discovery, through acquisition. And we will get, we will benefit from rising prices. What is it, what is the relationship between Dolly Varden and Hecla? Just to iron it out. So there’s a, there’s a long history there. So Hecla has been supporting Dolly Var and as an investor for a number of years.

There was a moment a few years back where under some previous management for both companies, there was a hostile takeover attempt where Hecla tried to buy Dolly. They were being very opportunistic at the time. And what we’ve basically had over the last few years since I’ve been running the company is a very supportive relationship where Hecla has increased its ownership in the company, has invested tens of millions of dollars supporting exploration efforts. Hecla is a company that’s focused on growing silver resources and mining silver. They’re America’s number one Silver producer. And they’re soon to be Canada’s number one silver producer.

So they’re really keen on growing silver production in Canada and the U.S. and there’s very few projects. Like if I, I’ll give you some numbers here. You know, I talk about the 140 million ounces of silver equivalent. Well, in North America, there’s only 33 projects, silver projects that have over 25 million ounces of silver. So to grow that development pipeline for the Heclas, for the Coors, for the Pan American silvers, if you’re trying to do that in Canada or U.S. it’s very, very challenging. And that’s why most of the silver companies are operating in places like Mexico or in Argentina or Peru or Bolivia.

I just haven’t had the appetite to go there for Dolly Varden. And the reason for that is I think we’ve got some of the best geology in the world. And the area that we’re in, Rafi, it was a remote area, it was an area in the northern part of the country near the Alaska border that didn’t have roads, that didn’t have power, that didn’t have a deep water seaport. And our government did something. And you don’t often hear this in the, in the western world where governments are doing good things, but our government invested billions of dollars.

Like, you know, there’s an old Kevin Costner movie, Field of Dreams. And the idea in the movie is if you build it, they will come. People will come, Ray. People will most definitely come. Yep. And that’s what the b, that’s what the B.C. government did, you know, and, and there were entrepreneurs, guys like Bob Quartermain from Silver Standard who then became Pretium, who, you know, championed initiatives of saying, you know, Bob said, look, I’ll bring, I’ll invest $100 million bringing power into the region. What will you do? BC government. And they plowed some roads and you know, they, they also did some, some work.

And there’s been some great benefits to indigenous communities in the area, to local communities, to companies, to. And, and Bob’s company went from an idea and it, it was, it was acquired for about $3 billion by a miner called Newcrest that then was acquired by Newmont. So now Newmont is the operator of the two big mines in the, in my backyard. And what Dolly Varden’s trying to do is we’re trying to leverage and benefit from all of that infrastructure that’s gone up there and has lowered our costs of exploration and development. And we’ve got a Strong history.

Like, we’ve got mines that used to be the richest in the British Empire, that used to be Canada’s third largest silver mine. And what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to take a step back and understand is there an opportunity to grow resources around those old mines? You know, I was told 20 years ago the best place to look for silver or gold is next to a silver or gold mine. So we went into these rich areas and we applied modern exploration, we applied capital. We were benefiting from glaciers receding, and we’ve added 100 million ounces of silver equivalent to the bottom line.

And we’re hoping to add a lot more. All right, great. So if you’re interested in Dolly Varden, the symbol is D O L L F on the OTC in the US And DV on the Canadian exchanges. Can you just tell us, what does Dolly Varden mean? Why is that the name? And what is your, what are your big projects now? So I, I just want to also say we are also listed and trade on Frankfurt. So for any European investor, German investor. So We’ve got the three listings. Canada, U.S. germany. Right. Frankfurt, DVQ1. Right. Yes. And, and so the name.

So there was the famous author, Dickens had a novel called Barnaby Rudge, and in the novel there was a character named Dolly Varden. So Dolly Varden was, you know, a fictional character who wore these elaborate dresses and created this fashion trend in that era. And so when the fish, when a fish was discovered, it was named after the Dickens character. So my minds are named after the fish. And it’s a beautiful fish. And so that’s where the name comes from. And I kept it. People said, sean, you got to change this name. And, you know, I like the history and I like, you know, you know, I think what had happened was an old prospector back in 1904, you know, was, you know, with, with donkeys and, you know, you know, plowing up a mountain and over ice with no roads and no helicopters, and, and, and found this sparkly, shiny was outcropping and it reminded him of the fish.

And I think for, for me to take that name away, takes away from the origin story and the, and the great history and the, and the sign of, you know, to be a mining investor, you need to be tenacious, you need to be relentless, you need to be patient. You need to go where no one else will go, to boldly go where no one has gone before when you need to do it. And, and you may not be rewarded Right. And, and that’s what. Those are the types of investors that we’ve attracted. We’ve attracted people that are patient and understand that it is capital intensive, but understand that the biggest challenges that the injury industry has are also what makes the industry so profitable for those who are willing to take on those challenges.

And when I look at 2025, the word that comes to mind is focus. We have $33 million in the treasury and for a small explorer code that has no debt and has a pristine balance sheet, no hedges, we can leverage that cash to find more silver. We’ve got drill results that we’ve had that we celebrate. We’ve got more to come out with showing growth. We’ve also done accretive M and A transactions. So some of our biggest growth has come from being opportunistic, being patient up mines around us and deposits. And so what does this year look like it? We’ve grown from 20 million to a peak of 450 million.

We’ve pulled back to 300 million. We’re on sale. So what this year looks like is going out to conferences and getting on the road and doing some media interviews, sharing the value proposition, sharing our history, our experience, our board of directors, our shareholders, and leveraging our cash for growth. It’s all about growth. It’s all about building that mineral inventory. Success will be our share price appreciating on the back of organic growth in the field. And you know, if, if the right M and A opportunities present themselves, we will, we will take action on those. All right, Sean, thanks so much for coming on.

This has been Sean Kunkun, AKA Sean Murder. Murder, or Sean Bloodblood, even for Sean Blood. Blood. But we go either way. I hope to have you on again and I wish you and myself luck because I do own part of the company and I have, I have good feelings about, about silver miners particularly. And if you have capital that you can risk on it, I don’t recommend anything, but Dolly Varden is available and the links will be in the description below. And good luck to everyone and we hope the dollar falls soon. Do not sell this farm, Ray.

You got to keep this farm. Mark, you’ve had a very rough day. Why don’t you go inside and get something cold to drink?
[tr:tra].

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