For Tech Startups, The Party Is Over
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    HOUSE MEDIAN ASKING PRICES AND WEEKLY CHANGE     Sydney $1,677,085 (-0.93%)       Melbourne $1,028,394 (+0.20%)       Brisbane $1,078,151 (+0.22%)       Adelaide $982,804 (+0.73%)       Perth $947,007 (+0.76%)       Hobart $769,694 (+0.31%)       Darwin $778,577 (+0.74%)       Canberra $976,606 (-1.97%)       National $1,098,248 (-0.36%)                UNIT MEDIAN ASKING PRICES AND WEEKLY CHANGE     Sydney $770,018 (+0.09%)       Melbourne $498,343 (+0.14%)       Brisbane $674,039 (+1.49%)       Adelaide $497,663 (-0.64%)       Perth $533,094 (+0.17%)       Hobart $533,129 (-0.01%)       Darwin $387,696 (+0.22%)       Canberra $494,947 (+1.38%)       National $571,202 (+0.42%)                HOUSES FOR SALE AND WEEKLY CHANGE     Sydney 12,026 (-343)       Melbourne 13,686 (-445)       Brisbane 8,305 (-28)       Adelaide 2,909 (-44)       Perth 7,828 (-177)       Hobart 1,264 (-5)       Darwin 160 (-2)       Canberra 1,151 (-20)       National 47,329 (-1,064)                UNITS FOR SALE AND WEEKLY CHANGE     Sydney 9,357 (-106)       Melbourne 7,800 (-121)       Brisbane 1,675 (-19)       Adelaide 458 (+11)       Perth 1,675 (+20)       Hobart 227 (-16)       Darwin 303 (+3)       Canberra 1,194 (+9)       National 22,689 (-219)                HOUSE MEDIAN ASKING RENTS AND WEEKLY CHANGE     Sydney $800 ($0)       Melbourne $590 ($0)       Brisbane $650 ($0)       Adelaide $630 (-$10)       Perth $700 ($0)       Hobart $585 (+$5)       Darwin $700 (-$30)       Canberra $700 ($0)       National $676 (-$5)                UNIT MEDIAN ASKING RENTS AND WEEKLY CHANGE     Sydney $750 ($0)       Melbourne $590 (-$5)       Brisbane $645 (-$5)       Adelaide $540 (+$20)       Perth $650 ($0)       Hobart $500 ($0)       Darwin $595 (-$20)       Canberra $575 (-$5)       National $614 (-$2)                HOUSES FOR RENT AND WEEKLY CHANGE     Sydney 5,747 (+44)       Melbourne 7,595 (-48)       Brisbane 3,812 (-42)       Adelaide 1,418 (+23)       Perth 2,254 (+18)       Hobart 203 (-5)       Darwin 83 (+6)       Canberra 481 (-21)       National 21,593 (-25)                UNITS FOR RENT AND WEEKLY CHANGE     Sydney 7,827 (+22)       Melbourne 5,470 (+50)       Brisbane 1,798 (-46)       Adelaide 388 (+11)       Perth 738 (-5)       Hobart 101 (+13)       Darwin 101 (-9)       Canberra 561 (-1)       National 16,984 (+35)                HOUSE ANNUAL GROSS YIELDS AND TREND       Sydney 2.48% (↑)        Melbourne 2.98% (↓)       Brisbane 3.13% (↓)       Adelaide 3.33% (↓)       Perth 3.84% (↓)     Hobart 3.95% (↑)        Darwin 4.68% (↓)     Canberra 3.73% (↑)        National 3.20% (↓)            UNIT ANNUAL GROSS YIELDS AND TREND         Sydney 5.06% (↓)       Melbourne 6.16% (↓)       Brisbane 4.98% (↓)     Adelaide 5.64% (↑)        Perth 6.34% (↓)     Hobart 4.88% (↑)        Darwin 7.98% (↓)       Canberra 6.04% (↓)       National 5.59% (↓)            HOUSE RENTAL VACANCY RATES AND TREND       Sydney 2.0% (↑)      Melbourne 1.9% (↑)      Brisbane 1.4% (↑)      Adelaide 1.3% (↑)      Perth 1.2% (↑)      Hobart 1.0% (↑)      Darwin 1.6% (↑)      Canberra 2.7% (↑)      National 1.7% (↑)             UNIT RENTAL VACANCY RATES AND TREND       Sydney 2.4% (↑)      Melbourne 3.8% (↑)      Brisbane 2.0% (↑)      Adelaide 1.1% (↑)      Perth 0.9% (↑)      Hobart 1.4% (↑)      Darwin 2.8% (↑)      Canberra 2.9% (↑)      National 2.2% (↑)             AVERAGE DAYS TO SELL HOUSES AND TREND       Sydney 29.8 (↑)      Melbourne 29.2 (↑)        Brisbane 33.4 (↓)     Adelaide 28.1 (↑)      Perth 38.7 (↑)      Hobart 31.9 (↑)      Darwin 28.8 (↑)        Canberra 30.7 (↓)     National 31.3 (↑)             AVERAGE DAYS TO SELL UNITS AND TREND       Sydney 28.5 (↑)      Melbourne 29.8 (↑)        Brisbane 31.8 (↓)       Adelaide 25.9 (↓)       Perth 39.2 (↓)     Hobart 42.5 (↑)      Darwin 43.9 (↑)      Canberra 38.8 (↑)      National 35.0 (↑)            
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For Tech Startups, The Party Is Over

Funding is suddenly scarce as venture capital firms grow stingy, forcing young companies to get frugal and focus on breaking even

By Heather Somervile
Wed, May 18, 2022 10:58amGrey Clock 7 min

A dizzying turn in technology-startup investing is undoing the fortunes of founders and investors riding a 13-year bull run.

Highflying startups have been grounded, swiftly, by the new climate: layoffs, sceptical investors, an exodus of funds and the prospect of a valuation haircut.

Last year, e-commerce startup Thrasio LLC was expected to be valued at US$10 billion or more in a funding deal that would have led to the four-year-old company going public. The deal didn’t happen, and Thrasio, which buys and aggregates retailers that sell on Amazon.com Inc., continues to burn through the more than US$3.4 billion of debt and equity it had raised.

In recent weeks Thrasio has cut close to 20% of its workforce, announced a new CEO, tapped the brakes on acquisitions and scaled back engineering projects, according to former employees and an internal company memo reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Thrasio’s trajectory—and the stratospheric rise of many startups—benefited from years of low interest rates and a decline in the number of public-company stocks, which helped drive investors into venture capital. The trend accelerated in 2020 when stimulus and other pandemic-relief moves created a flood of cheap capital, which some investors parked in startups as pandemic restrictions made digital apps and services a hotter asset class.

The reversal mirrors a turn in the broader tech industry, where stocks are being hammered and companies from Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. to Twitter Inc. and Uber Technologies Inc. are moving to cut costs.

Many big money managers have fled startups. Venture capitalists are steering clear of high valuations and demanding that companies spend less and improve their margins—an about-face after years of profitability taking a backseat to growth. The pressure, combined with uncertainty over where the next investor check will come from, has prompted startups that seemed to be soaring just months ago to fire staff members, cut marketing spending, cancel projects and do whatever they can to make their money last.

“This is clearly not a speed bump,” said Mike Volpi, a venture capitalist with Index Ventures. “This is a proper correction. The end of a cycle.”

In March, startup CEO Doug Ludlow cautioned his fellow founders on Twitter: “If you haven’t already started on a path to break-even, start immediately. In 2022, VC’s are going to pull back massively.”

Mr. Ludlow has confronted that himself. Plans for a fundraising round with new investors fell through after the market turned sour and there was disagreement with investors over price, according to a person familiar with the matter. He reverted to plan B: a much smaller funding round with his existing investors, known as an insider round.

Mr. Ludlow said he has developed a plan for his three-year-old financial-services firm, MainStreet Work Inc., to break even in six months to a year. It entails laying off 45 people, about a third of the workforce.

“Every dollar you’ve got to treat as if that’s the last dollar you may have,” he said.

Matt Schulman, CEO of software startup Pave, said his investors are scrutinizing gross margins in a way they hadn’t before. Pave, which helps employers develop compensation plans and discuss them with employees, has repositioned itself from a service to help firms with hiring to one that helps companies retain employees, he said. There have been too many hiring freezes for the previous strategy to make sense.

Mr. Schulman recently made a list of 15 potential ways to cut spending. One was to do more hiring in cheaper regions such as Latin America.

The venture-capital pullback is a correction from extraordinary heights. Investors poured US$1.3 trillion into startups over a decade, producing hundreds of companies annually that attained billion-dollar-plus valuations, attracting interest from foreign governments and top-tier hedge funds.

Venture-capital funds raised $132 billion to invest in startups in 2021, nearly double the amount from 2019 and six times the total raised a decade ago, when the number of funds was about a third of what it is today. In last year’s fourth quarter, venture capital investments reached a record $95 billion, according to PitchBook Data Inc.

That was too much money to deploy effectively or wisely, some investors say. The valuation multiple that was deemed acceptable for software startups reached 100 times annual recurring revenue, roughly 10 times the historical norm for companies in that industry, according to data from venture-capital firms.

“If you keep marking everything up, you’re eventually going to believe that those marks are accurate,” said Gil Dibner, a London-based venture capitalist.

Startups that raised big sums at high valuations faced pressure to grow, which they did by rapidly adding staff and making acquisitions. At some companies, the quality of work deteriorated, acquisitions weren’t thought out, leadership got distracted and cash burn soared, said some investors and startup founders.

“It was a scrum,” said Mr. Dibner. “When you shove that much money at pretty much anything, you change the way people make decisions.”

Now, the public tech companies that powered the pandemic-era stock-market rally are suffering some of the market’s biggest losses. Shares of Facebook parent Meta and Amazon.com are down more than 30% this year, Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc. have all dropped around 20% and Netflix Inc. has fallen 69%. The S&P 500 is down 16% since the start of the year, and the Nasdaq Composite Index is off by more than a quarter from its high in November.

Private tech companies quickly looked overpriced. With interest rates rising to fight 8%-plus inflation, startups whose profits were years in the future had less appeal.

Particularly important to startups seeking big sums of capital are crossover funds, large money managers that invest in both stocks and private companies. Those managers accounted for around 70% of the dollars startups raised last year. Some, including Coatue Management LLC and D1 Capital Partners, quickly backed off from startup investing when the stock-market decline hammered their investments in public companies. In the first three months of 2022, crossover funds’ venture capital investments sank to the lowest level in six quarters, according to PitchBook.

SoftBank Group Corp., which operates two startup investment pools as part of its Vision Fund unit, reported a $26.2 billion loss Thursday on its big portfolio of technology companies for the first three months of the year. SoftBank said it would cut the number of startup investments through next March by half or three-quarters from last year’s pace.

Hedge fund Tiger Global, one of the heaviest startup investors during the pandemic, is staying in venture capital investing despite being on track to have its worst year, with its main fund down 45% year to date. But Tiger is shifting to early-stage companies that have lots of room to grow and remain years away from going public.

In all, venture capital investments fell 26% in this year’s first three months from the fourth quarter, according to data from PitchBook. Some investors say they are looking at about a third to half the number of prospective deals they were last year. From the end of last year through the first quarter, valuations for one cohort of high-growth startups fell 42% on average, according to data provided by Carta Inc.

The vacuum in funding has turned sentiment in Silicon Valley “the most negative since the dot-com crash” two decades ago, said venture capitalist David Sacks.

Thrasio, which has more than 300 retail brands selling items ranging from insect traps to mops, is valued as a tech company (at more than $5.5 billion, in its last private financing) despite having limited tech, people familiar with the matter said. The startup made its first $100 million or so in revenue without an engineering team and was using Google spreadsheets, one of the people said.

Its discussions last year with a special-purpose acquisition company to go public were scuttled by complications with Thrasio’s accounting and investors souring on SPAC deals, which have traded poorly in the public markets, according to people familiar with the plan.

Thrasio now faces not only the venture-capital retreat but also rising costs for goods and advertising, and larger Amazon fees for sellers. The cost predicament is squeezing many others, too, and has contributed to the more than 8,200 layoffs at U.S. venture-backed startups since March, according to a survey of layoff announcements and tracking website Layoffs.fyi.

Reef Technology Inc., which builds kitchens for food delivery services on parking lots, has been struggling to raise a round of funding. It initially was seeking as much as US$1 billion.

As the market tightened and capital became harder to secure, Reef cut hundreds of staff, closed kitchens and delayed paying bills. The company recently struck a deal for over US$250 million in funding, people familiar with the matter said.

A Reef spokesman said the company recently secured new funding from investors, and it expects to add additional investors in the future.

Rapid-delivery startup Gopuff said in a company filing in December it was seeking to raise up to $1.5 billion in a loan that would convert to equity. The full funding hasn’t materialized, according to a person familiar with the matter. Gopuff now is working to secure a $1 billion loan. It has laid off around 450 people, or 3% of its staff, according to a company memo.

There are structural reasons to believe the funding turmoil isn’t headed to a bust. The digital transformation of industries that the pandemic has helped spur is permanent, say investors. Many startups remain flush with cash and just need to keep a lid on spending.

Past pullbacks that proved brief show the tech industry’s resilience. Among these were one in 2016, when investors cooled on software-as-a-service companies, and another in 2019, when investors punished newly public tech companies for their heavy losses. Each time, startup investment rebounded quickly and rose to a higher level.

“It’s not a 2001, in my opinion, or a 2008 scenario,” said former Cisco Systems Inc. CEO John Chambers, who is now a venture capitalist. “Marginal startups just will not get funded, but I actually think that’s a healthy phenomenon.”

For venture capitalists who no longer have to jockey with multibillion-dollar hedge funds, the slowdown comes as a relief. Mr. Sacks said his firm, Craft Ventures, has been able to invest in two late-stage companies without facing the competition from big money managers that, six months ago, would have driven the price much higher.

Meanwhile, venture capitalists are clawing back some of the power they ceded to company founders when the market was hot. More deals now include protections such as so-called full ratchets, which ensure that investors can recoup the value of their investment in case a startup’s valuation declines in a future funding round or a public offering. Some investors are providing a startup with capital but not assigning a valuation until they can assess its revenue and losses at the end of the year.

Startups should be prepared for things to get worse before they get better, according to J Zac Stein, president of human resources software startup Lattice.

“Many people join startups to embrace the struggle,” he said. “They may just get that opportunity.”

Reprinted by permission of The Wall Street Journal, Copyright 2021 Dow Jones & Company. Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Original date of publication: May 18, 2022.

 



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Gold Is Beating Everything. How to Get a Piece of the Action

Gold is outshining stocks, bonds and crypto. Here’s what’s driving the surge—and how to get in.

By JACK HOUGH
Thu, Apr 24, 2025 8 min

Give gold bugs their due. The yellow metal has been a light in the investing darkness. At a recent $3,406 per troy ounce, it’s up 30% this year, to the envy of stock, bond, and Bitcoin holders. Cash-flow purists will call this a flash in the pan, but they should look again. Over the past 20 years, SPDR Gold Shares , an exchange-traded fund, has surged 630%—85 points more than SPDR S&P 500 , which tracks shares of the biggest U.S. companies.

That isn’t supposed to happen. If businesses couldn’t be expected to outperform an unthinking metal over decades, shareholders would demand that they cease operations and hoard bullion instead. So, what’s going on? If this were gasoline or Nike shoes or Nvidia chips, we would look to supply versus demand. With immutable gold, nearly every ounce that has ever been found is still around somewhere, so price action is mostly about demand. That has been ravenous and broad since 2022.

That year, the U.S. and dozens of allies placed sweeping sanctions on Russia, including its largest banks, and China went on a bullion spree. Its buying has since cooled, but other central banks have stepped in. Perhaps this is unsurprising, in light of a decades-long diversification by finance ministers away from the U.S. dollar, which is down to 57% of foreign reserves from over 70% in 2000. But the recent uptick in gold stockpiling looks to JPMorgan Chase , the world’s largest bullion dealer, like a debasement trade. Investors are nervous about President Donald Trump’s tariffs, his browbeating of the Federal Reserve Chairman over interest rates, and blowout U.S. deficits.

Surging Demand

It isn’t just bankers. Demand among individuals for gold bars and coins has been surging, with some dealers experiencing sporadic shortages. Gold ETFs were bucking the trend, but flows there have turned solidly positive since last summer, including recently in China. All told, there is now an estimated $4 trillion worth of gold held by central banks, and $5 trillion by private investors. Calculated against $260 trillion for all financial assets, including stocks, bonds, cash, and alternatives, that works out to a global gold portfolio allocation of 3.5%, a record.

What’s next? BofA Securities says that central banks have room for much more gold buying, and that China’s insurance companies are likely to dabble, too. RBC Capital Markets analyst Chris Louney says ETFs could drive demand growth from here, especially if angst reigns. “Gold is that asset of last resort…the part of the investing universe that investors really look for when they have a lot of questions elsewhere,” he says.

Russ Koesterich, a portfolio manager for BlackRock , a major player in ETFs including the iShares Gold Trust , says that gold has proven itself as a store of value, and deserves a 2% to 4% weighting for most investors. “I think it’s a tough call to say, ‘Would you chase it here?’ ” he says. “There have been some pullbacks. Those might represent a good opportunity, particularly for people who don’t have any exposure.”

Daniel Major, who covers materials stocks for UBS , points out that gold miners mostly haven’t wrapped themselves in glory in recent years with their dealmaking and asset management. As a result, a major index for the group is trading 30% below pre-Covid levels relative to earnings. UBS increased its 2026 gold price target by 23%, to $3,500 per troy ounce, before gold’s latest lurch higher. Many miners are producing at a cost of $1,200 to $2,000. Major has bumped up earnings estimates across his coverage. “I think we’re gonna see further upward revisions to consensus earnings,” he says. “This is what’s attractive about the gold space right now.”

Major’s favorite gold stocks are Barrick Gold , Newmont , and Endeavour Mining . More on those in a moment. We also have thoughts on how not to buy gold—and what not to expect it to do: Don’t count on it to keep beating stocks long term, or to provide precise short-term protection from inflation spikes and stock swoons. But first, a little history, chemistry, and rules of the yellow brick road.

Flesh of the Gods

The first gold coins of reliable weight and purity featured a lion and bull stamped on the face, and were minted at the order of King Croesus of Lydia, in modern-day Turkey, around 550 B.C. But by then, gold had been used as a show of riches for thousands of years. Ancient Egyptians called gold the flesh of the gods, and laid the boy King Tutankhamen to rest in a gold coffin weighing 243 pounds. The Old Testament says that under King Solomon, gold in Jerusalem was as common as stone. Allow for literary license; silicon, an element in most stones, is 28.2% of the Earth’s crust, whereas gold is 0.0000004%.

Marco Polo described palace walls in China covered with gold. Mansa Musa I of Mali in West Africa, on a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, is said to have splashed so much gold around Cairo on the way that he crashed the local price by 20%, and it took 12 years to recover. To Montezuma, the Aztec king whose gold lured Cortés from Spain, the metal was called, as it still is by some in Central Mexico, teocuitlatl —literally, god excrement. Golden eras, gold medals, the Golden Rule, and golden calf—so deep is the historical association between gold and wealth, excellence, and vice that it seems to have a mystical hold on humanity. In fact, it’s more a matter of chemical inevitability.

Trade and savings are easier with money. Pick one for the job from the 118 known elements. Years ago on National Public Radio, Columbia University chemist Sanat Kumar used a process of elimination. Best to avoid elements that are cumbersome gases or liquids at room temperature. Stay away from the highly reactive columns I and II on the periodic table—we can’t have lithium ducats bursting into flame. Money should be rare, unlike zinc, which pennies are made from, but not too rare, unlike iridium, used for aircraft spark plugs. It shouldn’t be poisonous like arsenic or radioactive like radium—that rules out more elements than you might think. Of the handful that are left, eliminate any that weren’t discovered until recent centuries, or whose melting points were too high for early furnaces.

That leaves silver and gold. Silver tarnishes, but rarer, noble gold holds its luster. It is malleable enough to pound into sheets so thin that light will shine through. And, despite the best efforts of Isaac Newton and other would-be alchemists, it cannot be artificially created—profitably, anyhow. Technically, there is something called nuclear transmutation. If you can free a proton from mercury’s nucleus or insert one into platinum’s, you’ll end up with a nucleus with 79 protons, and that’s gold. Scientists did just that more than 80 years ago using mercury and a particle accelerator. But what little gold they produced was radioactive. If you think you can do better, you’ll likely need a nuclear reactor to prove it, but a large gold mine is one-fifth the cost, and we have to believe the permitting is easier.

We passed over copper due to commonness, but it has become too valuable to use for pennies. The 95% copper content of a pre-1982 penny is worth about three cents today. The equivalent amount of silver goes for $3.10, and gold, more than $320. But the three trade in different units. A pound of copper is up 17% this year, at $4.72. Silver and gold are typically quoted per troy ounce, a measure of hazy origin and clear tediousness, which is 9.7% heavier than a regular ounce. A troy ounce of silver is $32.70, up 13% this year.

Some Finer Points

Confused? This won’t help: The purity of investment gold, called its fineness, is measured in either parts per thousand or on a 24-point karat scale. A karat is different from a carat, the gemstone weight, but our friends in the U.K.—who adopted troy ounces in the 15th century—often spell both words with a “c.” Gold bricks like the ones central banks swap are called Good Delivery bars, and weigh 400 troy ounces, give or take, worth more than $1.3 million. If you buy a few, lift with your legs; each weighs a little over 27 regular pounds (as opposed to troy pounds, which, it pains us to note, are 12 troy ounces, not 16).

There are many options for smaller players, like Canadian Maple Leaf coins, which are 24-karat gold; South African Krugerrands, at 22 karats, and alloyed with copper for durability; and Gold American Eagles, 22 karats, with some silver and copper. Proof coins cost extra for their high polish, artistry, and limited runs, and may or may not become collectibles. Humbler-looking bullion coins are bought for their metal value. Prefer the latter if you aren’t a coin hobbyist. Avoid infomercials and stick with high-volume dealers. Even so, markups of 2% to 4% are common. Costco Wholesale , which sells gold in single troy ounce Swiss bars, charges 2%, but often runs out, and limits purchases to two bars per member a day. Factor in the cost of storage and insurance, too.

ETFs are more economical. For example, iShares Gold Trust costs 0.25%, not counting commissions. For long-term holders, as opposed to traders, there is a smaller fund called iShares Gold Trust Micro , which costs 0.09%.

Resist fleeing stocks for gold. The surprisingly long outperformance of gold is mostly a function of its recent run-up. From 1975 through last year, gold turned $1 invested into about $16, versus $348 for U.S. stocks. That starting point has a legal basis. President Franklin Roosevelt largely outlawed private gold ownership in 1933; President Richard Nixon delinked the dollar from gold in 1971; and President Gerald Ford made private ownership legal again at the end of 1974.

Gold has been a so-so inflation hedge over the past half-century, and at times a disappointing one. In 2022, when U.S. inflation peaked at a 40-year high of over 9%, the gold price went nowhere. The problem is that high inflation can prompt a sharp increase in interest rates. “If people can clip a 5% coupon on a T-bill, often they’d prefer to do that than have either a lump of metal or an ETF that doesn’t produce cash flow,” says BlackRock’s Koesterich.

Likewise, while gold has generally offset stock declines this year, it hasn’t always done so in the heat of the moment. Recall tariff “liberation day” early this month, which sent U.S. stocks down close to 11% in three days and pulled gold down nearly 5%. “This isn’t an uncommon scenario,” says RBC’s Louney. “When investors were losing elsewhere in their portfolio, gold was sold as well to cover those losses.”

Our top tip on how gold behaves is this: It doesn’t. People do the behaving, and they are appallingly unreliable. Use bonds as a stock market hedge. If they don’t work, fall back to patience. For inflation protection, think of assets that are a better match than gold for the goods and services that you buy every week. A diversified commodities fund has precious metals but also industrial ones, along with energy and grains. Treasury inflation-protected securities are explicitly linked to the consumer price index, which measures inflation for a theoretical individual whose buying patterns differ from your own, but are close enough.

Own a house. Stick with a workaday, reliable car. Yes, cars deteriorate. But so does nearly everything on a long enough timeline. Rely mostly on stocks, which represent businesses, which wouldn’t endure if they couldn’t turn raw inputs like commodities into something more profitable. There’s even a miner, Newmont, in the S&P 500.

The Case for Mining Stocks

Speaking of which, UBS’ Major recently upgraded both Canada’s Barrick and Denver-based Newmont from Neutral to Buy. “Both very much fall into that category of having a challenging recent track record,” he says. Newmont has lost 20% over the past three years while gold has gained 76%, which Major blames on difficult acquisitions and earnings shortfalls. Barrick, down 8%, has been in a dispute with Mali since 2023, when its government instituted a new mining code that gives it a greater share of profits. In recent days, authorities have shut the company’s offices in the capital city of Bamako over alleged nonpayment of taxes.

These are the sort of headaches that Krugerrands in a safe don’t produce. But Major calls expectations “adequately reset,” free cash flow attractive, and guidance achievable. Newmont, at 13 times next year’s earnings consensus, is selling assets, and Barrick, at 10 times, has healthy production growth.

Major also likes London-based, Toronto-listed Endeavour Mining , up 40% over the past three years and trading at nine times earnings, although he says it has “higher jurisdictional risk.” It is focused on West Africa, especially Burkina Faso, which had a coup d’état in 2022. You’d think the stock would be doing worse amid such political upheaval. Then again, Burkina Faso since 1966 has had eight coups, five coup attempts, and one street ousting of a president who tried to change the constitution to remain in power. That works out to an uprising every four years, on average.

Montezuma’s scatological name for gold might have been prescient, considering the sometimes-odious consequences for small countries that find it.

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