Summary
➡ The article discusses the rise and fall of various tech companies, emphasizing that early innovators often don’t survive. It then shifts to the importance of copper in the future of technology, including AI, decarbonization, and military applications. The demand for copper is growing, but supply is limited due to lack of exploration and political instability in copper-rich regions. The author suggests investing in copper as a potentially profitable move, given its increasing importance and scarcity.
➡ Investing in copper can be done through ETFs, options, futures, or directly through copper producers. One such producer, Kalanex Mines, is highlighted for its large copper reserves in Canada, a mining-friendly region. The company is led by a successful team with a track record in the industry, has strong insider ownership, and no debt. The author believes in investing in hard, scarce assets like copper, as they are essential for various industries, including technology and electric vehicles.
Transcript
Now, for those of you who don’t know who I am, my name is Mark Moss. I’ve been in the tech space for over two decades now. I launched my first internet business in 1999 before the dot-com revolution. Now, since then, I’ve been involved in tech. I’ve had a Fortune 500 exit from tech companies. I’ve also been speaking at some of the biggest tech conferences in the world, talking about a 50-year technological revolution cycle and how it changes the world. So let’s dig in. All right, so technological revolutions. What the heck is it? Now, if you’ve been watching me for any period of time or seeing me speaking on stages, of course, you’ve already heard me talking about it.
So I’m going to give you a real quick rundown. Now, this is a chart that I’ve put together that I use often. And what we know is that about every 50 years, there’s a technological revolution. You might have heard of it called the K-wave or conjointing wave. It’s a 40 to 60-year cycle. I call it a 50-year cycle. And so you can see about every 50 years, we have a revolution. So we had the industrial revolution. We had steam engines and railways. We had steel, heavy equipment, electricity. We had oil, automobiles, mass production. 1971, we had microchips, brought telecom, internet, personal computers.
And now here we are right here starting another technological revolution for the next 50 years. Now, the one thing, well, there’s lots of things that are different about technological revolutions, not technologies, but revolutions. Mainly the point that I want to hit on for this is that they drive financial markets. So what drove the financial markets for the last 50 years? Telecom, internet, personal computers, Jeff Bezos. What drove it the 50 years before that? Well, it was Ford, GM, GE. What drove it before that? Oh, it was steel. What drove it before that? Oh, it was railways.
It was oil. And so each one of these technological revolutions, of course, changed the world as we know it because of technology. But they drive financial markets. That’s why it’s important to get in front of this. Now, the technological revolution that we’re in right now, it’s already started. And if I map this out, they happen again about every 50 years. I say we’re right about there. So it’s already gotten started. We’ve been involved in this for a while. I’ve been talking about this for years. But there’s still plenty of time to catch this upside right there.
Okay, so that’s technological revolutions. But specifically, what we want to talk about is as this technology picks up, it requires a lot of energy, specifically energy and what the goal of the globalists and the politicians and all these things is to transition our energy supply, get rid of fossil fuels, oil, gas and move to electricity, and specifically over like solar power and things like that. They want to re electrify everything. Now, if you watch my videos, you know that I think that’s a horrible idea. But this is the case. This is what we’re doing now in places like where I live.
For example, they’re forcing this top down. California is banning gas appliances. You can’t even do gas appliances anymore. Now they want everything to be all electric. So they want to push everything onto the electrical grid, including gas appliances, heaters, stoves, things like that. In California, we can’t even buy gas logs for our gas fireplace. It’s crazy. They want to push everything. They want to electrify everything. They want everyone to drive EVs, electric vehicles. So governments around the world and the United States and California specifically have mandates as to when gas vehicles have to be phased out.
And we have to move to electric vehicles. Of course, those electric vehicles require electric charging stations everywhere for that to happen. And so really, it’s about this energy transition. The entire world is trying to go into and again, love it or hate it. Agree disagree. It doesn’t matter. This is what’s happening. Okay, energy transition. It says here changing as many processes as possible to operate on low carbon electricity to move everything to electricity. Keating of buildings is being electrified heat pumps being electrified to improve the flexibility of electric grids. The installation of energy storage and super grids are vital to enable the use of the variable power.
So super grids, super storage. Okay, so all of these things are changing. And of course, we have the rise of we’ll talk about AI. But then we have the rise of the robots. This time, we are the horses being disrupted. So we have the rise of robots. So you can see everywhere you look, it’s all about electricity. The technological revolution technology is going to require more and more electricity and not the electricity that we’re used to coming from coal and natural gas, but they want to take everything to electricity. We also know that in this technological revolution, and really, since the last revolution, since the internet revolution, we’ve seen the new oil.
What’s the new oil? Well, you probably already know by now, it’s data, right? Data is the new oil, you know that if you don’t pay for the product, like Facebook and Instagram and TikTok, you are the product. Why? Because they harvest your data. And so now we have this massive amount of data. And so we have this growth of data centers. They’re exploding like crazy, and specifically around the new AI boom. So we’re seeing the amount of data being processed at an alarming rate. As a matter of fact, I mentioned the dot com run up in 1999 and 2000.
We had the dot com crash after 2000 in 2001. So the internet had just gotten started had just crashed that year in 2001. More data, more content was created that one year, then all of humanity before that the next year was double that the next year, double that it’s been moving exponentially. And we can see that the data center market is growing like crazy. According to McKinsey, one of the largest consulting companies in the world. It’s expected to be a 10% growth through 2030. 10% every year compounding on top of that. Experts predict even higher.
So McKinsey says that, but experts are like, whoa, whoa, whoa. No, it’s going to be at least 20% annually that this is going to be growing at for the data center, hyperscale market, what they’re calling it. So the amount of data is growing. It’s the amount of data centers that we have to grow. And if we grow the data centers, what does that mean? It means more electricity. It’s going to be needed to power all of this. Now we have the AI servers, which are super, super power hungry. And then of course we have Bitcoin, which I talk about all the time.
And that’s super power hungry as well. As the price of Bitcoin has gone up, we’ve seen the mining power also go up. And so the mining, the computers that pull the Bitcoin transactions and process transactions, use a lot of electricity and you can see how fast that’s grown. So we have power consumption coming from all different levels at a parabolic rate. Okay. So now the question is, who’s going to win in all this? Who wins this race? All right. So in this AI specifically and sort of this new guard that’s happening, we have this, the new guard.
Now, typically what we see with technological revolutions and new technologies is the new guard displaces the old guard. Kodak was there making film for cameras for a hundred years, but then digital cameras came out, they went away. Creative destruction. So the new guard typically comes and disrupts the old guard. Open AI is a brand new company, but the old guard doesn’t want to give up. Now it’s important to understand these technological revolutions and how they play out so you can figure out who’s going to win. We want to know who’s going to win because which jockey are we going to bet on? Which horse do we want to put our money on? Now it’s important to understand the internet.
We can look at that as a parallel. In 1998, which was pre 2000, these companies dominated AOL, Yahoo, Geocities, Netscape, Infoseek, Hotmail, ZDNet. How many of those are still around today? Now you do recognize MSN, Microsoft, and Amazon. So we got a couple of those. AOL obviously gone. Yahoo’s still there, barely. Geocities gone, right? So most of these companies from 1998 didn’t make it. Now fast forward on the other side of the dotcom to 2003. AOL Time Warner, gone. Lycos gone. About gone. Excite gone. All these are gone, basically. A couple of make it.
And the point is, is that the ones that came first aren’t always the one that make it. And so we have this battle over the newcomers and the existing ones. And a lot of the people who were the first movers don’t end up making it. Here’s a good example from the dotcom boom. We had the famous, most famous case, pets.com. They went out of business. It was a great idea buying pets product online. It was just too early. Today we have a company called Chewy with a $14 billion valuation. So Chewy was like pets.com 2.0. We had webvan.com, which went out of business.
Today we use Instacart with a $40 billion valuation. We had e-toys. Today we have Amazon, $1 trillion application. Geocities is gone. Now we have Reddit. Flus. Flus was an online currency, which is gone. But we have Bitcoin. That’s $1.2 trillion. Now for all of you guys that don’t believe in Bitcoin and say, oh, but Bitcoin is like Myspace. It’s going to go away. The next Facebook will come out. No. Flus. Flus was the Myspace. There was at least eight iterations of digital currency. Bitcoin is not the first one. So the question is, when you understand this, it’s really hard to know who to bet on.
Because which ones are going to make it? Which ones are going to survive? We can see just in the AI space right now, the battle’s heating up. Meta, just this week, steps up in the AI battle to battle OpenAI and Google. So Google’s got one. Meta’s got one. OpenAI’s got one. Now Twitter’s got one. X, I should say. Grok, right? And so we have all these people battling. So as an investor who wants to get in on this trend, who wants to make money understanding this is going to drive financial markets for the next 50 years, where do I go? Which one do I bet on? I don’t know.
I know that early movers often don’t make it. Should I bet on the old guard, the new guard, et cetera. But what if? What if we understood the world from a different lens? What if we understood the world from a different lens and we realize that there’s actually not two sides to a coin, but there’s three sides to a coin. There’s certainly heads and tails. But what about the edge? And that’s exactly what I want to talk about. What if there’s a way that we could profit from this AI boom without having to choose a winner? You know, heads I win and tails I win.
Well, that’s exactly what I want to talk about. So let’s take a look at this. So what we know is that there’s a new old metal. Old things are becoming new again. And I’m talking about copper. Now I know before you roll your eyes and yawn, copper is old, right? I get it. But copper is crucial for this to happen. You see, if we really want to decarbonize the world, if we really want to transition the world, if we really want to go down this route to ban fossil fuels and put everything into electricity to decarbonize, we have to have copper.
If we really want to build out these data centers, we need to have copper. For military, going into World War III, guess what, missiles, missile guidance system, guess what, ammunition all requires copper. Now, here’s the problem. We have a massive growing demand for copper. For like I said, electrifying the grid, decarbonization, all these things, massive, massive demand, but we have no new supply. You know, price is always the equilibrium of supply and demand, right? So we have massively growing demand. At the same time, there’s no new supply coming, but it gets even worse because the existing supply that we have is under threat.
It’s under attack. As a matter of fact, we can see here, I don’t want to go into all the ways, but we can see sustainable copper. Copper’s role in a low carbon economy. Wind, we need it. Energy storage, we need copper. Solar, we need copper. We can’t go into this world without copper, but here’s the problem. Oh, just one more. So we can also see copper is used in military applications. What kind? I don’t want to go into all of them, but artillery shells, jackets, et cetera. It’s the second most widely used material.
Did you know that? The second most widely used material by the US Department of Defense, the DOD, wiring, guidance systems, ammunition, naval vessels, all require copper. Now, do you think there’s going to be more military intervention in the future or less? Do you think the demand goes up or does it go down? We can see here, copper futures hit record high as data centers are building up. The demand is skyrocketing as we sit here and talk right now, but here’s the problem. We don’t have enough supply coming.
Part of the reason why we don’t have enough supply coming is that according to BlackRock, they say that it’s going to take a $12,000 price on copper in order to incentivize people to go find more in the ground. So there’s been almost no exploration. So we have this growing demand, but the supply hasn’t expanded. And supply hasn’t expanded because we need $12,000 price. Now, what does that mean? It means that the price of copper has to go up 20% from here. Now, you’ve probably seen in the news, is it at all-time highs already right now? We’ve been talking about this for a while, but it still needs to go up another 20% from here before it even incentivizes people to go get more supply.
So we’re going to be in the supply demand imbalance for a while, but it gets even worse than that. Because let’s say, hypothetically, the price jumps another 20% this year, which I think it will. Probably not hypothetical. But let’s say it does. Great. So then it incentivizes people to go get new supply. But how long does that take? Well, here we have first Stanley Druckenmiller, the greatest investor of all time. I talk about him all the time. Copper will hit new record highs over the next five to six years is what he’s saying.
That’s what Stanley Druckenmiller is saying. He’s a billionaire. But here’s the thing. Strong demand for copper is cool, but supply imbalances are due to the decade plus lead time. What does that mean? From the time they get the money to go get new copper and explore it and find it and get out of the ground, it can take a decade. He says right here, copper is a pretty simple story. Pretty simple. I like that. It takes about 12 years to get new supply into the market. So if we have massive growing demand from military, from electrification, from AI, et cetera, and we have no new supply coming for at least a decade or 12 years per Druckenmiller.
What do you think happens to the price? But again, as I was going to say, it gets even worse than that. What am I talking about? Well, we have a lot of problems with the existing supply. So for example, as I said, it takes about 15 years. But the problem that we have with the existing supply is political instability. You see, about 40% of the global copper today comes from South America. Problem is there’s political instability that’s stopping that production from getting into market. So for example, Chile and Peru, about 40% of global supply.
Over the past couple of years, both countries have seen numerous scenes of civil unrest. And social opposition to mining. Lots of mines are shut down and sitting dormant. In Panama, $10 billion mine is sitting there dormant. They can’t get it out because of the political opposition to mining. They don’t want it anymore. Some of these countries want to nationalize it, all of these things. And so that’s disrupting the supply. So one, increasing supply. Two, we can’t get new supply to the market for a decade. Three, the existing supply we have is dwindling at a rapid rate because of this, which is why you see, like Citi right here says, copper prices climb to a 24 high as Citi calls for the start of the metals second bull market this century.
The second time we’ve seen it this century. It’s a pretty big deal and it’s all about to happen right now. Okay, so at this point, it might be going great, Mark. That’s cool. But like, how do we play this? Well, I talk about commodities all the time. It’s my favorite place to play. I think it’s where the money is. Hard, scarce assets, as I say. So copper is definitely one of those. There’s really three ways that you can play this. First way is you can buy physical copper. Now, I don’t mean like going buying a chunk of copper and put it into your safe, but you can buy physical copper through many ETFs.
Just search copper ETFs. I’m not going to tell you which one to buy here, but you can find lots of ways to get access to the price of copper just through an ETF. That’s number one. Number two, you can certainly trade, you know, options and futures on this. And so you could try to get a little bit more return on your money doing that way. Options and futures a little bit complex. Or third, my favorite way to do this is through copper producers. These are the miners that produce it. So you see me talking a lot about gold producers, uranium producers, the resource producers, because you know, Buffett doesn’t like the metal because it doesn’t do anything.
But these companies are producers. They actually produce a product. We can look at the profit and we know those profits get returned to us as shareholders. And so that’s my favorite way to play. It’s a leveraged play. Now, I have a 10 point checklist on how to find the best resource mining companies. And you can get it for free. I’m going to go ahead and link to it in the show notes down below. And it gives you 10 things that you should look at if you’re evaluating producers that you want to buy for your own portfolio.
Let me show you just a couple of the points that I would look at when I look at producing companies. Now, I’m going to use an actual company here for educational purposes. Okay, so I’m going to break down a real company with three or four of these points that you can go find on your own. I do want to tell you that this is a promotional video. I am not telling you to buy this company. We’re doing this for education purposes. But I want to use a real company so you can see this. And I’m talking about a company called Kalanex mines.
Okay, so we’re going to break this one down. Kalanex mines, you can find them right here. Here’s their ticker symbol. Now you might recognize this name just because I’ve talked about them before. I’ve been working with them for a long time. As a matter of fact, I did a video talking about them right here on July 20th of 2020. It’s been a couple years since I talked about Kalanex. At that time when I talked about it right here, it went up by 530% since I mentioned it right here. So you know, could have had a 500% gain here.
Now it’s come back down and we have another potential entry right here. So just somewhat pretty interesting. The one thing about these resource mining stocks is they’re very volatile. They go up and down. This is a four year period right here. And I’ve talked about lots of them that haven’t gone up by this much. But you don’t have to be right on all of them. You got to be right on one out of 10 and you do pretty good ones like this. Okay, but again, we’re looking at this for educational purpose. So a couple things I talked about there’s no new supply coming because it takes a decade to get.
And more importantly, or more problematically, the existing supply we have is dwindling because of jurisdictional risks. Okay, so we want to try to solve that problem. Problems equal solutions or opportunities. We have Kalanex mines, which has Hopper ready to go in Canada, which is a very friendly jurisdictional area. They’re very friendly to mining. They’re friendly to North America. And for all of the copper that we’re going to need to build up our grids in North America, we probably want copper from home. And so Kalanex mines has it in a friendly jurisdictional region, ready to go.
And as a matter of fact, they have 6 million tons at a five times average grade compared to the rest of the world. So they have better copper than the rest of the world. They have 6 million tons of it. And it’s right here in a friendly jurisdiction in Canada. As I said, like here in Panama, they have a $10 billion copper mine sitting there stagnant. Now, so the first thing I want to look at the company, I want to look at the resources that they have in Canada. I want to look at how much they have.
I want to look at the grade. All right, so we broke that down. The next thing I always want to look at is the team. Typically you hear in investing, bet the jockey, not the horse. So who’s the team? So a couple of things I want to look at with the team is who’s heading this up. And so we know that this company Kalanex has Max Porterfield heading this up. Now he’s been there for 15 years. He was previously with a company called Uranium Energy Corp. Now you might recognize that name because I’ve talked about them as well.
So he’s previously at this company. And the reason why I want to understand this is because typically people that are successful move on to other successful things. And so you like I said, you’ve probably heard me talk about that company. I’ve talked about them actually twice in two different videos in eight in August of 2021. And again, in August of 2022, it went up by 254% from here and it went up 127% from here. So that company has done amazingly well. He was with them and now he’s doing his own company. So I want to bet the jockey in this case.
And what I want to see is does he have skin in the game? Is his money where his mouth is? And we can see that this company has strong insider ownership. About 20% of the ownership is with the insiders. And the CEO is the largest shareholder. You see today in the news, you know, CEOs, these publicly traded companies are dumping their stock left and right. You want to see they have skin in the game. Also, this company has no debt and their tech team, the ones involved in finding it and bringing it out of the ground.
They have been in responsible for three of the last four discoveries in this region. So lots of deep experience in that area. So those are a couple things I want to look at when I’m looking at a resource play like this, like to play copper. Ready to go in a good jurisdiction. They have a good team, strong inside ownership, skin in the game, no debt and things like that. Okay. Now, in summary, I talk about this all the time. I am long, hard, scarce assets, commodities. You can’t just print more copper or more lithium or more cobalt.
You can’t do that or gold, et cetera, right? So I’m long, hard, scarce assets. I also consider Bitcoin to be a hard, scarce asset. I’m long commodities because the world needs more. As we’re building this out, we’re going to need more copper. We’re going to need more lithium. We’re going to need more wheat as a matter of fact. I’m also long technology. So when I can put technology and commodities together, that works out really well from my viewpoint. All right. Now, lastly, what I would say is I think copper is the perfect way to play this because I don’t know, is it going to be open AI or Microsoft or Google or Twitter that wins this? I don’t know.
Which robot company wins? I don’t know. Which EV manufacturer wins? I don’t know. But what I do know is every single one of those depends on having more copper. Okay. So that’s how I look at the market. That’s how I approach my investments. But I’d love to hear what you have to say. Let me know what you think down in the comments down below. Of course, as always, give me a thumbs up on the video if you like it. If you don’t, you can give me a thumbs down. That’s okay. But at least tell me why in the comments down below.
And that’s what I got. All right. To your success, I’m out. [tr:trw].
See more of Mark Moss on their Public Channel and the MPN Mark Moss channel.
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