Money of Mine caught David Finch of Ixios Asset Management from Dubai after six or seven hot weeks in mining shares. The hosts wanted macro. Finch would not live there. Clients give him money because they are already bullish on the metal in the fund. His job is to spend it. He has been structurally long gold since the gold fund launched about seven years ago. The first years were hard. The last two paid the thesis.
He still splits the bull into stages. Stage one was official buying after the freeze of Russian Treasuries. That bid has not left. Stage two is the debasement trade — always in the background, now back in focus as Treasury yields rip and the Fed tries to manage the long end. Gold, in his framing, is a confidence gauge on the plumbing. Governments are now overt about hitting the gauges. Short oil. Buy yen. Buy votes. The United States, he said, does not want $8,000 gold. China might. He is not sure that fight is live yet. He thinks it is coming.
That is the metal. The shares are the story he actually runs.
Leverage Came Back. The Washout Did Not Wipe Them Out
Gold equities have shown torque again this year. Old rule of thumb, in his memory: about two to two-and-a-half times the metal on the way up, three times on the way down. The slide from late February into early August broke the rule. Stocks held up better than history said they should.
He offered two reasons. Some generalists have started to look at miners as equities, not as a levered gold ticket. Net cash. Buybacks. Dividends. Low earnings multiples versus the rest of the market. And the companies are cleaner than 2011. Then they borrowed to build at the top and ran free-cash-flow negative. This time the activists still circle. The balance sheets do not look like the last peak.
Industry all-in costs, on the chart he has shown before, sit near $2,300. The metal has been above $4,000. Margins are still wide. Wage inflation will show up. Diesel will show up. Agnico’s Detour pit is his high-water mark: energy about 16% of mine costs, the highest gold pit he could find. Across the industry, diesel itself is more like 4% to 5% of operating costs. Two-hundred-dollar diesel is not fun. It is not a thesis killer at today’s margins. If the ounce goes back toward $4,700, he said that shock washes out. Copper miners burn more diesel. The copper price has helped them eat it.
Australia’s risk, in his view, is not only price. It is barrels on the dock. Thin domestic refining. The April–May scare faded. It can return. Put it in the file. Do not make it the whole file.
Barrick Is a Puzzle. M&A Is a Temptation
Ixios has never owned Barrick in the life of the gold fund, even though it sits in the benchmark. Mark Bristow’s exit was an inflection. The problems did not leave with him. Mali. The DRC. Pakistan. A possible split of the emerging-market book. A delayed idea to float a slice of Nevada Gold Mines — about 10% — that Finch called close to a financial null. Everyone wants Nevada. Nobody wants the rest. An activist split. Newmont buying the good bit. Too many scripts, not enough visibility. Cheap on ounces, messy on control. Their choice has been to skip the risk. Braver books can take it in a melt-up.
He does not want an M&A boom. A bid wave is a sugar high. Credibility with generalists was rebuilt by not blowing the cash windfall. Buybacks. Higher dividends. No trophy premiums that only work at a fantasy gold price. Where deals happened, he wants them justified on today’s book. OceanaGold’s Osisko-related purchase was his example of the good kind: a sensible price, more ounces, almost no synergy, small enough that buybacks and the dividend survive, and paid in a way that does not strand the new yield shareholders. Cash-only deals that kill the return of capital lose those holders. Paper keeps the pact.
Producers still have to replace reserves. Not all of them can do it in the pit they already own. More deals will come. Discipline is the test. Loss of discipline is the first thing that keeps him up. The second is tax. Ghana’s royalty grabs. West African contract revisions. Oil-style windfall taxes when the price runs. Host countries see the margin. They want a bigger slice. Rick Rule told Kitco the same thing in different words: after payout, the state takes about half.
Copper’s Cupboard Is Bare. The Tape Is Noisy
The energy-metals book is about half copper, the rest in smaller slices. Mid-cap producers and developers, not only Freeport and First Quantum. After Liberation Day the copper tape ran and money walked down the quality ladder. That was the leverage. Names he will discuss — not a shopping list — include Amerigo-scale and mid-tier books such as Hudbay and Capstone, plus developers such as Faraday and Marimaca. Marimaca had already priced a lot of NPV before the copper spike. Then it lagged. Illiquid. Not the first call when the metal rips. He can argue the oxide is cheap or that the sulphides are not in the price. After nine months of underperformance versus other developers, he called it good value. That is his mark. It is not a ticket.
COMEX, LME, and Shanghai have been a circus. U.S. inventory piled up on tariff games. A Reuters headline about taxes on or off can take 5% off the metal overnight. Finch does not hedge that in a long-only fund. He tries not to live in the headline. 2026 mine supply versus 2025 may be down. Treatment charges are not screaming surplus. Big pits cannot simply turn a higher price into more tonnes. Some are shrinking. That, to him, is a real supply problem.
Minor metals helped the book. Antimony and tungsten exposure was cut when the tape felt frothy, not because the Western supply hole closed. A Trump–Xi metals détente would not, in his view, kill the political decision to build a non-China chain.
A Rapid File, Not a Buy List
Money of Mine ran names. Finch answered as a portfolio manager, not as a tout.
Minera Alamos — the hosts still used the old label after a rename — is a small residual. New control, new book, old bitterness over who got the better of a raise. Low-cost ounces and a simple Mexican heap-leach permit are the bull case. History is the bear case. Westgold is the Australian short-reserve grind: firefighting, extra capex, assets that arrived worse than the model. Cheap, not owned. NovaGold is a giant refractory prize in the middle of nowhere. At $2,000 gold it was a call with no expiry. At current gold it is a project. Capex will be “off the charts.” The only credible builders he named were Newmont or Agnico, ideally in a joint venture. Advisers hired in August to find a funding path may simply tell the board to sell a slice of what they just consolidated. Few buyers means a softer house price.
Pantoro is a blend-and-contractor matrix of small sources. Solvable on a whiteboard. Unowned until the proof shows up. Nickel stays on the radar; Talon is a small copper-leaning exception. Vault-into-Genesis sits in the same hard-yards box as Westgold. AngloGold Ashanti is a modest overweight versus GDX on execution trust. The West African developer they have funded from day one with a promoter named Justin is still a large relative position: cheap resource growth, Perseus as the obvious industrial buyer, Endeavour less so. Allied Gold he called “achingly cheap” after Beijing blocked Zijin Gold’s bid. Sadiola in Mali, in his mark, is worth less than zero and still throwing off cash. Ivory Coast and the Ethiopia build do the work. They have started to nibble despite not being a jurisdiction shop.
FireFly is the name he floated as a plausible takeout inside a year: high grade, lower cost, quicker to production, already de-risked in his book. A large, low-grade Quebec open pit where Agnico already owns about 10% was the other. Higher-grade hits are starting. He would not wait for the last hole before a bid.
What excites him is not a ticker. It is the copper development cupboard after ten quiet years. Drilling was too expensive. Projects sat. Some of those campaigns are back. Most will fail. A few will not.
The Fear Is Success
Since the gold fund launched in May 2019, he said the S&P total return is up about 200%, GDX about 450%, and his fund about 665%. The energy-metals fund, from March 2021: S&P about 113%, the fund about 210%. The old line that mining is only a trading sector is, on those numbers, wrong. The consensus may not have noticed. Success invites two taxes. Sloppy capital. Real taxes. He does not see the first yet. He watches it anyway. It is what caps the multiple.
Conclusion
Finch’s week is not a hot-hole letter. It is a credit letter. Official gold buying is stage one. Debasement is stage two. Miners held up in a $500 washout because they are no longer 2011. Diesel is a line item, not a thesis. Barrick is cheap and foggy. M&A must not murder the buyback. Copper supply is tight even when the tariff headline is loud. West Africa will keep rewriting the royalty. Quebec and a FireFly-type book are how he thinks about the next bid, not how this page tells you to bid.
Discipline is the bull market’s scarce ore. When it runs out, the generalists leave. That is the lesson he is trying not to relearn.
Important information
This article is commentary on a Money of Mine interview with David Finch of Ixios Asset Management. Fund performance figures are the manager’s. Named companies are discussion examples, not recommendations. Past results do not predict future results. Mining shares can fall to zero. Speak with a licensed adviser. The author and publisher accept no liability for actions taken on this article. The original program’s own disclaimer applies to that broadcast.