Richard Mills's Contributions

The opportunities in the junior resource sector are significant. But the junior population is quite large and there are literally thousands of stocks to choose from that want your dollars. There is a steep learning curve and there are serious risks – great rewards come hand in hand with great risk.

Our future energy course is being charted today because of the ramifications of peak oil, because cars pollute too much, because of climate change and because we wish to end our dependence on foreign supplied energy.

While working for Shell Oil during the 1940's Dr. M. King Hubbert noticed the production of crude oil from individual oil fields plotted a normal bell shaped curve. Roughly half of the oil from a field has been exhausted when the bell curve peaks. Carrying that insight further he surmised that oil production from a group of oil fields would follow a similar bell shaped pattern.

The rare earths are a group of 17 elements comprising Scandium, Yttrium, and the Lanthanides. The heavy rare earth elements, HREE. Light REE's are made up of the first seven elements of the lanthanide series - Lanthanum (La, atomic number 57), Cerium (Ce, atomic number 58), Praseodymium (Pr, atomic number 59), Neodymium (Nd, atomic number 60) Promethium (Pm, atomic number 61) and Samarium (Sm, atomic number 62).

Socio-economic turmoil - lawlessness, poverty, lack of adequate medical facilities and attention, low to no employment, low wages, disease, no clean drinking water or water for irrigation and shortages of food or unaffordable food can all cause socio-economic pressure to build in many countries that were once stable environments for investment.

Copper’s talking up a storm, are you listening?

There is a very real and increasing trend for Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) in one of the few bright spots available for investors, resources - whether it’s mining or agricultural.

A "perfect storm" of circumstances is setting the stage for possible massive food price increases, food riots, supply chain disruptions, country versus country water disputes and increasing numbers of hungry people.

The Chinese government, in an effort to maximize exports and minimize US imports prints their yuan to buy dollars. This prevents their currency from rising and the dollar from falling. Then it loans those same dollars back to America by buying US debt.

When looking for an investment the approach I take involves looking at the global - big picture - conditions. I study trends, read the news, basically watch and listen to what’s going on in the world. Then I study the different sectors in order to select the one that I think is going to match up well with, what I think is, the soon to be overriding theme. This is top down investing.

It presently would be very hard to mount an argument against gold being clearly the winning major investment of this decade. But what happens to our gold investments when “deflation” turns to inflation?

Central banks money printing is out of control. The constant printing of all the world’s currencies is just another way for countries to default on their debt – the repayment of a creditor occurs using a currency whose purchasing power has been reduced. Gold’s price will continue, has to continue, too rise in value against all depreciating paper currencies.