This week’s column: Remote viewing, the CIA’s venture arm, and gold is the new lithium.
Let’s get after it!
“Digging for Value, One Story At A Time.”
Remote Viewing
There are a lot of ways to make money in the stock market. You can day trade, swing trade, buy great companies at good prices, buy awful companies at terrific prices, trade options … you name it, someone’s tried it.
Then there’s this: remote viewing to see future stock prices before they happen.
Let’s back up. According to Wikipedia, “Remote viewing (RV) is the practice of seeking impressions about a distant or unseen subject, purportedly sensing with the mind. There is no scientific evidence that remote viewing exists, and the topic of remote viewing is generally regarded as pseudoscience.”
I trade stocks using classical chart patterns, so we love pseudoscience around here.
Anyways, renowned physicist Hal Puthoff went on Joe Rogan’s podcast and basically said, “Remote viewing is real, and oh by the way, people have used it to make money trading stocks.”
H/t to @TinInvestor for finding the specific clip where Puthoff explains the investing strategy (paraphrasing):
“I’m going to choose two objects that are completely different from each other. One of the objects represents ‘Market Up’ and the other, ‘Market Down.’ And I want you to tell me today, the object I’m going to show you tomorrow, which will depend on what the market does. Don’t try to image it, its a visceral thing. What’s the texture of it? To make a long story short, in 30 days, we made $260,000 for the investor.”
It turns out that Puthoff isn’t the only one running this remote viewing strategy. For example, researchers Targ and Keith Harary used remote viewing to trade silver futures:
“The results for their first experiment were highly successful, earning $120,000 and a front-page article in The Wall Street Journal (Targ 2012, Larson 1984). A replication attempt the following year tinkered with the protocol by, among other things, shortening the time interval between trials, thus confl ating the feedback by having viewers perform a subsequent trial before receiving feedback for the preceding one, and the experiment foundered (Targ 2012, Houck 1986). In 1995, Targ returned to the original protocol and again showed highly signifi cant results for a silver futures target.”
Imagine pitching this investment strategy to a multi-billion-dollar teacher’s pension fund.
Teacher’s Pension Board: “So what makes you unique? How are you different from every other investor?”
Remote Viewing PM: “We put a bunch of CIA dropouts in a room, tell them about two random objects, assign a market direction for each of those objects, and then wait to see which objects they see in their minds. Then we buy or sell based on the objects they see.”
Teacher’s Pension Board: “Security!”
It’s absurd, but it works?
So it got me thinking. What if mining companies used remote viewers to find new ore deposits? I mean, it’s kind of the perfect application for remote viewing.
You get a bunch of remote viewers in a room with a lead geologist. The geologist says, “We’re exploring for copper in remote parts of Kazakhstan, Mongolia, the DRC, and Africa.”
Then he tells them to find deposits by remote viewing into the mountains, jungles, and rock formations and drawing the deposits they see.
I know this also sounds absurd, but that’s how this whole remote viewing thing works, right? The remote viewers scour the locations, draw whatever deposits they find, and report the exact location of where they found the deposit.
There’s a part of me that cannot believe Robert Friedland hasn’t tried this already. Maybe he has, and that’s how he found Kamoa-Kakula.
I can hear the earnings call questions now … “Hey guys, congrats on the quarter. Just curious if Ben from Remote Viewing Team 1 has seen any new deposits lately? And if so, what’s the potential grade and size of the deposit?”
Robert, if you’re reading this column, please try it and let me know how it goes.
The CIA Has A Venture Capital Business
So, the CIA has a venture capital arm called In-Q-Tel, which is something you know if you have ever tried to raise money for a startup and thought, “You know who would be a great strategic investor? The people who brought you coups in Latin America.”
Anyway, In-Q-Tel just co-led a $10 million seed round into Alta Resource Technologies, a Colorado startup that wants to use engineered proteins to extract rare earth minerals from low-grade ore and waste streams.
This is the perfect story for this column. You have:
- A critical minerals supply chain dominated by China, which is a national security problem, because if there’s one thing the CIA hates, it’s being dependent on China for the stuff that makes your missiles and wind turbines spin.
- A startup that says, “What if we solved this with synthetic biology?”-engineering proteins to act like tiny, selective magnets for rare earth elements, which is both very cool and exactly the sort of thing that would have gotten you burned as a witch in the 17th century.
- The White House issuing executive orders about minerals, as if the supply chain for neodymium is now a matter of wartime urgency.
- And the CIA, via its VC arm, investing in the whole thing, because why not?
Alta’s pitch is that their protein-based platform can extract high-purity critical minerals from sources that are currently uneconomic or too dirty to bother with. It is great because the US needs more rare earths, less environmental destruction, and maybe a little less China in the supply chain.
Think high-tech Velcro, but for critical mineral molecules.
According to co-founder Nathan Ratledge, the US needs wartime urgency to secure domestic supply chains:
“Washington is beginning to respond with the kind of wartime urgency this moment demands, and Alta’s technology is uniquely positioned to deliver. Our protein-based platform gives the US a scalable way to tap into unconventional mineral resources right here at home, while slashing both costs and environmental impact.”
It sounds promising, and I see three potential applications:
- Waste rock piles and mine tailings: Old mining sites with leftover low-grade ore or processing debris become new sources, avoiding fresh excavation.
- Industrial waste streams: Think lithium-ion battery recycling or coal ash ponds-places where valuable metals are trapped in toxic sludge.
- End-of-life products: E-waste like discarded smartphones or wind turbines could be “mined” for rare earths instead of landfilled.
What other tech-enabled mining companies should I be reading about?
Gold Is The New Lithium?
So, Evergreen Lithium, a company whose name is Evergreen Lithium, has decided that what it really wants to be is Evergreen Gold. Or at least Evergreen Lithium (and Also Gold, If That’s Where the Money Is). The company announced a “transformational” pivot, acquiring the Leonora Goldfields Project (LGP) in Western Australia’s central gold district.
This is the opposite of last week’s news of Barrick Gold dropping “Gold” from it’s name or when those cocoa farmers switched to gold mining. Evergreen Lithium wants everyone to know that it’s looking for gold now.
Chairman Simon Lill called this “a pivotal moment,” which is finance-speak for “please don’t ask us about lithium prices and our worthless lithium projects.” The plan is to expedite exploration and development, convert prospecting licenses to mining leases, and generally do all the things that gold companies do when they want to look busy for investors.
Evergreen Lithium is everything I hate about the resource sector: tell investors you’re exploring for one thing, realize that that one thing has gone to shit, pivot to the other thing that’s done really well over the past year, and hope investors forget about that other, non-performing metal.
It’s disgusting. But it’s also a great filter for avoiding terrible resource investments: buy the resource stocks that explore, develop, and mine the metals they’ve said they would explore, develop, and mine.
Basically, Evergreen Lithium is the Chamath Palihapitiya of the resource sector.
