Royal Gold, Inc. (RGLD) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Great. Thanks, everyone, for joining us at the 29th Annual CIBC Western Institutional Investor Conference or known as the Whistler Conference. And so today, we have a very interesting panel, the royalty panel. My name is Cosmos Chiu. I'm a precious metals analyst here at CIBC. So I don't know if you know, but if you try to put the Whistler Conference into your AI on your phone, Gemini AI or -- I use Gemini, what it says is that given the prestige and the timing of the Whistler Conference, we do set the tone for the year. So with that said, we will try to set the tone for this upcoming year. Of course, if it's a negative tone, then I might ask you to exit stage right. But beyond that, we'll do that. And I've asked each CEO to do a 5-minute presentation before we get started at our fireside chat. We've decided to go alphabetical order. At times, I've asked potentially to go with market cap, but each and every day, I'm not sure which one is bigger, OR Royalties or Triple Flag. You can tell me which one is bigger today. But -- so today, to make things simple, we'll go with alphabetical order. So first off, we have Jason Attew, President and CEO of OR Royalties.

Thank you, Cosmos. Thank you for the opportunity. And it's hard to believe 29 years here in Whistler. This is a very, very special conference for our company. So thank you very much for the opportunity to present OR Royalties. I will be making some forward-looking statements for which actual results may differ. And just to answer your question, Cosmos, OR Royalties is slightly larger than Triple Flag right now. However, what I'd like to point out is we're obviously in a market right now where -- I mean, it's obviously -- we've had an incredible appreciation of the commodities. We're now talking about $5,000 gold and $100 silver. I can also tell you, Cosmos, that each one of our companies this morning did hit all-time highs. So I really do appreciate the advocacy, the support of CIBC, the mining group, the traders, the whole institution that has got behind not only the royalty and streaming sector, but the mining sector as a whole. OR royalties. I think most people do know our company. So I'm not going to spend that much time just on, again, our senior quality portfolio, except for the fact that our company is 11 years old, just over 11 years old now. So it's fairly new entrant into the royalty and streaming space. And the reason that they became a royalty and streaming, it was as a result of a hostile takeover defense around our cornerstone asset, Canadian Malartic, an exceptional mine, one of the most profitable mines in the world near Val-d'Or in the Abitibi region in Quebec. And so again, that's going to continue to be our cornerstone assets. Agnico Eagle is the operator. I think most people know, it is -- they're an exceptional group to be a partner with. They have a vision of taking the Canadian Malartic complex to over 1 million ounce per annum over the next 5 to 6 years with a 5% -- roughly 5% NSR. I think everyone can equate to what that means for ourselves and our shareholder. With respect to 2025, we did hit our guidance this past year, and you can see by some of the metrics that market cap is slightly old now. We're over USD 8 billion. Our cash flow per share, that's a 2024 number. We'll be sharing our 2025 number in the coming weeks when we put out our full financials. Real quickly on the differentiators for OR Royalties. First and foremost, and I know we're going to talk about this in our fireside chat, but we really do think we differentiate ourselves with respect to the geographical background or the asset geographies of our main assets. 80% of our NAV, 80% of our cash flow comes from the 3 jurisdictions what we define as Tier 1, that being Canada, Australia and the U.S. As you can see, that's tier leading. I think as we move into this environment where obviously, the commodities have exploded or appreciated over the last 24 months, there's a lot more talk about nationalism. There's a lot more talk about mining stability and let's just say, some of the countries that are outside of those -- the Tier 1, there's some talk about expropriation. And so having a portfolio that's got sleep at night countries, I think we're well insulated and well positioned to effectively move forward into this market, which could be somewhat volatile in some of the countries that are looking for essentially the more taxes, more royalties or that sort of thing. The second key differentiator is our cash margin. Because we're very royalty-centric because of the Canadian Malartic, we actually got a 97% cash margin, and that will continue as Malartic continues to contribute to our portfolio go forward. And that means in a rising gold and silver environment, obviously, that benefits our shareholders, and we have more leverage more so than our peers. The third differentiating factor is just our growth profile. So we have approximately 40% growth from now over the next 5 years with a whole host of assets that do fit within that Tier 1 jurisdiction. And so we're very excited. We'll be putting out our 5-year outlook, our new 5-year outlook in our February results in just a few weeks, and then we'll obviously be updating that for folks. But this 40% growth, just so I'm very clear, there's no contingent capital associated with it. It's all bought and paid for, and it's really high-quality assets. We're very, very pleased, again, to deliver that growth to our shareholders. And the last differentiating factor, and it's being called on this stage and other stages as the best gold royalty in the business is Canadian Malartic. Again, I think everybody knows what Canadian Malartic can deliver now that they're in the process of moving from a bulk tonnage open pit to an underground. It's just that deposit there on the underground basis, it's getting to close to 15 million, 16 million ounces in all categories. It is a monster. We're very pleased to be associated with it, and we're very pleased to get the updates from Agnico as they do so go forward. What I thought I'd spend just a bit of time doing just on a few stats as it relates to the market as a whole because it has been a very interesting market in 2025. And by market, I'm talking about royalty streaming acquisitions as well as corporate acquisitions. As you can see on this slide, in 2025, it was an all-time record in terms of corporate acquisitions and M&A acquisitions as well as acquisitions of royalties and streams, almost 3x from 2023 to 2024 at over $9 billion. Again, complete record. What OR Royalties has done over the course of 2023 and '24, as you can see, we participate in roughly 10% of the aggregate deal volume of about $3 billion, $2.6 billion and $3.5 billion in '23, '24. In 2025, we were only $25 million of that $9.3 billion. And so again, what I know we're going to talk about in the fireside, but I'll tell you the reason for that. It's not that we didn't have a desire to do deals. It was just -- and we were in every single one of those processes around the $9.3 billion. We either didn't see eye to eye on the valuation. It didn't meet our certain filters. As you can see on the right-hand side, 55% of the deals were done outside of what we classify as the Tier 1 jurisdictions. So a lot of jurisdictions that we weren't necessarily comfortable with as well as -- and I think this is an important note as well as 26% or $1.3 billion of the transactions were unsecured last year. That is a red line for our royalties. We do need security in any of our instruments go forward. And so we got very close on a number of transactions for which some of our peers just decided to relax the covenants as it relates to security, specifically on streams. So I think that demonstrates from our company's perspective, we have a strong desire to deploy capital. We're debt-free now. We're growing cash. We did a buyback program because we thought that was the best use to get exposure for our shareholders. We bought back close to CAD 50 million or around CAD 50 million last year in our normal course issuer bid. But we do want to deploy capital on acquisitions, but they have to be, in our mind, effectively accretive to our shareholders. And that means positive IRRs, not negative IRRs based on consensus and/or spot as well as, again, the jurisdiction is important to us. It's one of our main filters. But as well, as I mentioned, we will not do -- we're not in the habit of doing unsecured deals, and that was certainly a trend that we saw in 2025, where, again, roughly or just over 1/4 of the deals were unsecured deals. So just a few stats for you from 2025, and it demonstrates in our mind that OR Royalties will continue to be disciplined around capital allocation, especially in an environment where we've obviously got a very much an appreciating commodity price and an environment where arguably operators and the counterparties are asking for a lot of concessions in the deals. We'll just remain disciplined. We've got our red lines. And with that, I'd like to then hand it over to Bill, and he'll talk about his company. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Jason.

So next up, we have Bill Heissenbuttel, President and CEO of Royal Gold.

Good morning, everybody. Thanks to CIBC for the opportunity to speak this morning and participate on the panel. I always like this conference because it's so well timed. It gives us a chance to look back at the past year, the successes, the challenges, and then we get to set the stage for the new year. And so as I look back to 2025, it was really a year of substantial change and growth for our company, and I just want to provide you with a few highlights. So in March, we invested an additional $50 million in Xavantina, that's Ero Copper's gold asset in Brazil. I think that investment is a reflection of the positive working relationship that we establish with our operators, and it also helps support reinvestment in a growing asset. And by the end of the year, Ero issued a technical report with a mine plan from 2026 to 2032. And I just -- when we made our first investment in 2021, the last year of the mine plan was 2026. And I think that's evidence of our ability to identify assets with good upside potential. In May, we structured an investment with Solaris Resources on Warintza and it really incorporated a couple of new protections for investors in longer-term projects like us. These protections gave us some control in terms of the length of time our capital might be invested without a return. And it also gave us protection in terms of understanding the ultimate owner and development -- a developer of a project of this size. So we subsequently saw the company issue a positive pre-feasibility study. They disclosed an initial reserve and a higher resource. In July, we announced the acquisition of Sandstorm and Horizon Copper. It was a $3.5 billion transaction, and it really improved the diversification of our portfolio, the growth prospects for the company and the duration of our portfolio. And we put together our very strong operating asset portfolio with very good development projects at Sandstorm and Horizon like Platreef, MARA and Hod Maden. In August, we closed a $1 billion gold stream investment on Kansanshi with First Quantum. It's the largest single asset transaction that we've ever done. And I think what it does is it combines our ability to have both sound credit structuring, but also use our imagination, our creativity to identify unique structures for operators. In September, we saw the release of the Mount Milligan life of mine extension. The hard work of Centerra and the cost support agreement that we negotiated in 2024, extended -- helped to extend the mine life to 2045. And the plan actually involves the construction of a tailings storage facility that will accommodate material much beyond that date. And at the same time, in September, Barrick released a PEA on Fourmile. The results really showed the potential for a project, a unique combination of grade and scale. And one that might support 600,000 to 750,000 ounces of production over a greater than 25-year mine life. So those were the highlights. And look, I didn't even cover some of the other positive things that happened, advancements at Granite Creek and Ruby Hill by i-80, where we have royalty interest, the designation of Red Chris by Ottawa's major projects office as a project to be fast tracked, a path to production for Glencore's MARA and the 25th straight year of us increasing our annual dividend. So what do we look forward to in 2026? First, when we closed Sandstorm and Horizon, we had about $1.2 billion of debt on the balance sheet. Since October, we have reduced that by $400 million, and I think we should expect to see that debt come down over the coming year. We've made very good progress on our efforts to rationalize the noncore investments in the Sandstorm portfolio. We were able to dispose a large illiquid equity investment in Versamet Royalties, pay down debt with the proceeds. And we recently supported Highlander Silver's proposed acquisition of Bear Creek. And what this does is it turns a number of debt investments into a larger royalty position, but it also takes a large equity investment down to something that is much more manageable. And I hope to see further noncore disposal or rationalization transactions this year. Within the portfolio, we expect to see the results of expansion studies at Khoemacau and Fruta del Norte. Ramp-ups at Platreef, Goose and Greenstone. Feasibility study at Cactus and the development of the AEX decline at Great Bear. And finally, we have seen some good improvement in our trading multiples in the last couple of months. I still believe we're undervalued, and we really hope to demonstrate the cash flow generation capability of this new combined company later this year. Certainly appreciate your time and look forward to the panel discussion.

Thanks, Bill. And we'll certainly touch on some of those topics in our Q&A as well. And next up, we have Sheldon Vanderkooy, President and CEO of Triple Flag Precious Metals.

Thanks, Cos. Good morning, everyone. My name is Sheldon Vanderkooy. I'm the CEO of Triple Flag Precious Metals. I'll be making some forward-looking statements and the customary cautions apply. We formed Triple Flag in 2016. Unlike other companies, we actually didn't start with a founding royalty. We didn't have an existing portfolio. We were really attracted to the risk and return characteristics of the royalty and streaming model, which has been proven and demonstrated to provide significant -- generate significant shareholder value over extended periods of time. We purchased every asset in this portfolio, and we did so with a view to value. Right now, our market cap, the slide says $7.2 billion. It's a little dated. I think we were at $8 billion this morning. If you look at our financial statements, there's actually been $1.8 billion of shareholder capital invested in Triple Flag. So we're more than 4x the money, which is actually fantastic. It's a great track record. In terms of annual GEO production, our guidance for 2025 was 105,000 to 115,000 ounces. Last week, we announced that we achieved a little over 113,000 ounces for 2025, near the top end of our range. That's the second consecutive year, we come in near the top end of our range. So we're really pleased with that. What we like is there's embedded growth in the portfolio. In 2029, we see this being about 135,000 to 145,000 ounces. Significant growth that's not new investments we're going to make. That's the existing portfolio, and that has to do with a mix of development projects and also expansion projects at existing producing mines. 239 assets, only 33 of those are cash flowing. The remainder actually represent great potential upside for our shareholders. And we pay a dividend. We've increased our dividend every year since we've gone public, and we are debt-free, and we have available capacity to deploy into new assets. I'm going to spend just a couple of minutes on gold because gold is central to Triple Flag. You can't invest in Triple Flag without having a view on gold or wanting exposure to gold. This morning, I was really pleased to read that Trump is not going to invade Greenland. That's fantastic. Now tomorrow may be something different. But this actually isn't like just about Greenland or Ukraine. This is actually a longer story. The U.S. came off the gold standard back in '71, $35 an ounce was the gold price for a long time prior to that. When gold crossed $3,500, which seems like a long time ago, that actually represents a 99% deterioration of the U.S. dollar relative to gold. There are a lot of underlying factors. One of them, I believe, is just the debt levels. In 2025, the U.S. debt balance grew by $2 trillion. That's a stunning amount of money. I don't know what's going to turn that around. Governments can print money. When they issue debt, that is essentially printing money. They can't print gold. And that adds a real tailwind to anyone with a gold thesis. So how much gold does Triple Flag produce? What you see on the screen is our track record of gold production since we started the company. Our most recent year was 113,000 ounces. I touched on the embedded growth. We've actually increased our production every year since we've gone public and actually every year since we started the company. We're really proud of this track record. We look to see this continue going forward into the future. What really matters is financial metrics. It's not production metrics. And on those as well, we screen very, very, very well. You can see here, in 2021, we went public. 2022 was our first full year as a public company. You can see a really nice growth in operating cash flow. That's obviously due to the gold and silver price, but it also represents the benefit of that increasing production we saw on the prior slide. But absolute figures aren't as important as the per share figures. We're firmly focused on per share value. Cash flow per share also shows that same pattern and then NAV per share also increases very nicely. I'll note that NAV per share, we're using a long-term consensus in that. So like really, that's valuing the longer-dated gold ounces at about $3,000 an ounce right now. And of course, the gold price is significantly higher than that. So if the consensus price tracks up towards the spot price, that's going to see some very significant increase as well. A few aspects of our portfolio, very well diversified. We have one cornerstone asset, Northparkes. It's a copper gold asset. It's located in Australia. It's run by Evolution Mining, a very well-respected Australian operator. It's exactly the sort of asset you'd like as your cornerstone streaming and royalty asset. Commodity mix, we are a precious metals company. We are predominantly gold and silver. There's a little bit of copper there as well, but we never want to stray from that gold and silver focus. Primary commodities is a new lens that we put on this. 44% of our production comes from primary gold mines. About 1/3 of our production actually comes from copper mines, and that's predominantly the gold byproduct coming off of a copper mine. So the world needs more copper. That's not a short-term trend. That's a long-term trend. And us as a streamer will benefit from that. And then with respect to geography and jurisdiction, extremely important. These are long-life assets, and you want to be there to share the benefits of these metal prices increases over the longer term. Our single highest country concentration is in Australia, a fantastic jurisdiction for mining investment. And then other than that, predominantly North America and the Latin American mining jurisdictions. I'm going to close with the investment case. When you look at Triple Flag, the starting point is the strength of the portfolio we've assembled, long life, good cash flows, good exploration upside and a good development pipeline. And those cash flows, we're going to do a few things with. One, we pay a dividend. We increase our dividend every year. We also reinvest those cash flows into further investments. There's embedded growth in the portfolio right now that you're going to benefit from the shareholders. And then we're also going to redeploy our cash flows into further investments to build on that further. What we're looking to do is drive compound growth for our shareholders that's sustainable over time. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Sheldon. So maybe we'll kick it off, and I'll ask Bill for you to start here. Maybe we'll talk about the elephant in the room or the elephant not in the room. As we talked about, very robust gold and silver prices to kick off 2026 after what happened in 2025. So I would have expected the room to be more full. It's not. Although I know your one-on-one schedules, and so I know the one-on-ones have really increased in numbers. So maybe there's just a lot of secret admirers of royalty and streaming companies, just not as cool to talk about that in public. So in terms of some numbers, the royalty streaming companies did underperform last year. Royal Gold was up 67%, OR Royalties, almost slipped, almost called you by your old name. OR Royalties was up 71%. Triple Flag was up 98%, which is all very good. But in comparison, the gold index was up 141%. So again, don't shoot the messenger, but investors often criticize the royalty and streaming companies in such a bullish market to not provide enough leverage, to not have enough optionality. So Bill, as you mentioned, you've seen it kind of do better so far in 2026. What does that need to continue? What's a rebuttal to investors that say that in a very robust and bullish commodity price environment that you should not invest in royalty and streaming companies?

Yes. I guess what I would say is if you're looking for gold torque, go buy the highest cost operator. It's not what we sell. What we sell is a high-margin business, a consistent dividend and we sell cost free upside. And I think that's where the torque comes in because as we get to the end of 2025, what reserve prices are going to be used? What might that mean for the size of the reserves and resources in all of our portfolios, what exploration assets are now being advanced within our portfolios that we're not even talking about. So I would just say when you make an investment solely for the torque to the gold price, you're taking on risk, you understand the risk. We still think we sort of sit on the risk profile between the physical metal, no dividend, an ounce is always an ounce and the operators and the explorers. So we're not trying to sell something we're not.

What do you think, Sheldon, what are you trying to sell?

I actually haven't had any negative feedback from any shareholders. And I love seeing the operating companies do good. The strength of our business is strong operators running good projects, and you're seeing a lot of properties really thrive. The cash flows that the operators are making often benefit us maybe as a second derivative where people are incented to put money in exploration programs, they can look at expansion projects. And when you talk about torque, the short-term torque is leveraged to the gold price and operating cost and margin. And it's kind of to Bill's point where we have higher margins and therefore, less torque on like a 1-year, 2-year lens, but we actually get more torque on the back end. So if you take a mine and you expand it and you extend its life and you put capital into that, that capital is being put in by the operator, whereas that extension hasn't generally been priced at all by the streaming and royalty companies. You're actually getting 100% margin on that. And the value uplift on that is very, very significant. So I love seeing the operators thrive, and I think we're thriving as well and no complaints.

Jason, how about hard numbers? The numbers I quoted, even though I forget sometimes, they were real numbers. Royalty and streaming companies did underperform last year compared to the group. And so what do you think? 2026? Are we going to outperform as a group? And what do we need to do to kind of educate investors in terms of why it's being so misunderstood in terms of this higher-margin business and why not?

Great question, Cosmos. Well, let's face it, gold and silver, both, silver, in particular, in 2025, they had monster runs. And typically, when you see -- I've been in the business for 30 years being part of operating. Typically, when you see the commodities go parabolic like they did in the second half of 2025, you'll get overperformance by the leverage goes. I would say what you do need to do in my mind, and I ran some statistics as well just on the overall performance of the royalty cos, if you take a 2-year lens and for OR Royalties, we're exactly where the GDX is. So from a performance perspective, if you take a 2-year lens, if you take a longer-term lens and Sheldon with Triple Flag and ourselves have only been around for 11 -- 10, 11 years, Royal has obviously got a much longer track record. If you actually take a look and you look at the annualized return, they far outperform the operators. So again, the operating companies or the companies -- when the commodities go parabolic, they run like Usain Bolt. We're marathon runners here. You can relate to that. You're a marathon runner. And so over the long term, I would say that our sector, given the uniqueness of the sector, given the fact that we really, really are insulated from both operational risk, geopolitical risk, we've got diverse portfolios. We should outperform over a longer-term period. And that's what we want, at least from an ore royalty, we want long-term shareholders that stick through the cycles. From a 2026 perspective, look, I think the commodities are going to continue to run. I think a lot of it is obviously driven by a very ostentatious, very -- has got a lot of ambitions. The Orange Man down in the executive, the 47th President, obviously, that's going to create a lot of, obviously, volatility. That's going to create opportunities for the operating cos. And look, I think that's fantastic for the operating cos because for so many years, -- the mining sector, in particular, the gold miners, the copper miners, they're ugly duckling of the sector. And now it's actually important around this whole critical minerals theme, around themes of supply chain, themes of -- prior to, again, a lot of the -- from Washington anyway, mining was seen as essentially environmental liabilities. Now they're seen as strategic assets. That is fantastic, I think, for our sector as a whole. So look, in 2026, I expect more volatility. I expect that that's going to have an appreciation. We're going to continue to see the strength, the confluence of macro factors around gold. It could be the fact that the operators do outperform the royalty and streaming cos. However, again, over the long term, if you take the long-term view and you look at the long-term returns of all our companies, we certainly do outperform the operators.

Thanks, all 3. And it sounds like you want to go run a marathon. Was that a suggestion?

After I get my knee fixed.

Okay. As you mentioned, there isn't a long sort of history for you and Sheldon. And who knows how much longer? We had 4 chairs here last year. Now we have 3 chairs. And so but somehow it is still very tight up here. But maybe I'll start off with you, again, Bill, you made the biggest splash last year with the acquisition of Sandstorm Gold, as you mentioned, for $3.5 billion. You kind of touched on it, but maybe could you provide us with some of the key highlights for the combined company and kind of what the key benefits might be for investors? And if you want to have a rebuttal to what Jason talked about, he talked about unsecured. I think you talked about red line, he talked about things like that, maybe if you want to address that as well. And Sheldon, you're next. So you might want to think about those things as well.

Yes. As I mentioned in my comments, if we sat here a year ago and people were to level criticism of Royal Gold, it would have been around asset concentration. It would have been around growth. At the time, our largest asset, Mount Milligan had a mine life that was 10 years out. And Sandstorm -- it was just -- it was a unique situation. We really like the portfolio. We really like the development assets, and it really helped us answer the question, asset diversification. We only have -- on a NAV basis, we only have one asset that's above 10%. That makes me sleep more easily at night. And then you put MARA, you put Platreef, you put Hod Maden on top of Great Bear and Red Chris. And we now have a slide in our presentation that goes through a series of growth assets. And I just -- those were the things. And the other thing, again, duration. The assets that I talked about, I mean, Hod Maden, I think the last feasibility study we had between 10 and 20 years, but MARA, Platreef multi-decades, Kansanshi multi-decades. And then Milligan with the life of mine extension is now 2 decades. So I think there has been an improvement in the portfolio, the portfolio quality, the portfolio duration, and that was really what attracted us to Sandstorm. As for security, unsecured, secured, I just -- my background is in project financing. I did it in the mining industry for a couple of decades. And we don't approach things with -- we never do -- we'll never do it without security. We look at the credit risk and we say, do we need -- if you need security, you need security. But if you don't need security and you're comfortable making an investment on an unsecured basis, you should be willing to do that. Rainy River is a great example. We made that investment over 10 years ago on an unsecured basis because the bonds outstanding at the time did not allow for a lien to be placed on the asset. And that was fine. It was an acceptable credit risk to take. So that's just how we approach it.

And Sheldon, you were no slough last year. You made an acquisition of Orogen Royalties in part getting the Arthur Gold Project. Could you maybe talk about the highlights of that transaction? And as I know, you are also a lawyer, an accountant, a CEO, so you might be the smartest man on this panel here. So maybe you can touch on security, red line, also Bill's fan. I don't know why I brought that up, but -- Sheldon.

Yes. Okay. I think everyone understands I'm not the smartest person in this room, and that's okay. Orogen, yes, so we acquired Orogen Royalties last year. Really pleased to get that. Really, we acquired a 1% royalty on the Arthur project. It's located in Nevada. It's being operated by AngloGold Ashanti. And we just got really excited the more we looked at that project. We see that as being a Tier 1 mine. It's in the right jurisdiction. It's in Nevada. It's in the hands of a very senior operator with the financial and technical ability to bring that into production. I'm very much looking forward to seeing what they release in February. They're going to put out a PFS. And it really just ticks the boxes as jurisdiction, it has the scope already, I think, to be very large and the scope to be even larger. And when you get Tier 1 discoveries in the right jurisdiction, they attract future capital and future capital is really what drives royalty value over time. It was a multipart question.

Yes, in terms of what that does to investors and what not.

It's upside. I mean it's like the -- nice thing about the royalty model is if it's done right, your first check is your last check. And we deployed about $250 million to get that royalty. Subsequently, Franco came in and acquired essentially the same royalty, slight differences, but essentially the same for a very similar price to us. So that's -- is it validating? I don't know if it's validating, but it shows that they saw probably the same value that we saw. As they bring that into production and as it grows, our shareholders are going to benefit. But it's the sort of mine, we think, and the sort of geology that's likely to continuously get bigger over time. So this is not a story that's going to be completely unveiled just in February, but going forward. Our thesis was we did that deal. We really did that deal in Q1 of last year. And the news flow that AngloGold Ashanti has put out since then has really validated what our technical team saw there. So I feel like our technical team has been certainly validated in what they put forward and looking very forward to what comes forward in the future. You touched on a whole bunch of like things about structuring deals. I think I'm probably closer to Bill's view. It's kind of -- you look at each investment and you say, how can our shareholders make money? How can we -- how can we make sure that we get what we bargain for. Usually, that means security. I think everything we did last year was a royalty or secured financing. So that kind of fit the bill there. But we also made a lot of money when we did our investment in Cerro Lindo. And we looked at the credit profile there. We looked at the protections we got. It was unsecured. We've gotten more than our money back on that one. It's producing lots of cash flow right now, and we have like 8 or 10 years of mine life ahead of us on that asset. So I won't just rule things out. We'll take a look. We'll structure it appropriately, and we'll safeguard shareholders' interest.

And Jason, it seems like it's 2 on one at this point in time. However, you've been patiently waiting, you waited in 2025. So maybe talk about your thought process. You kind of touched on it, but I guess my question is, are we waiting for something big to happen in 2026?

Look, again, as I said, we have a strong desire to redeploy capital. We've got over $1 billion of liquidity right now, given that we did focus on paying all our debt down in 2025. We are debt-free. We're accumulating a lot of cash, especially at these commodity prices. But we do -- in our mind, we do need to remain disciplined. And so 2025, as I said, we were -- we essentially if you look at the $9 billion and the $25 million that we deployed, it wasn't very significant, obviously. But if you look at a longer term, and I put the stats up around kind of 2023, '24, we were deploying about 10% of the aggregate deal flow. And two of those transactions that we did do being CSA, I think it's validated, again, we identified value early. We got in with an entrepreneurial group, and I think people know this is an asset in Australia and Harmony has now bought Metals Acquisitions Corp. So a larger, more diversified multi-asset company has come in and validated, again, us helping an entrepreneurial group. The same thing happened at Cascabel, where we made an investment in 2024, big asset. We did a syndicated deal with Franco in Ecuador and Jiangxi Copper has now come in and bought SOL. Much, much better just from a financial and operational perspective, a risk perspective, really derisked that investment. And the last one is another asset in Australia called Dalgaranga for which we picked up a royalty and Ramelius Resources has come in, and that's going to actually be our 23rd operating asset over the course of 2026. So I think the point is we have a strong desire. We do have, obviously, as I said, red lines, we have our investment thesis of return metrics. We will not do deals that essentially don't deliver a return and so bet on commodity price. We do strongly believe that if we're going to deploy our shareholders' capital and look, we're risk managers, as I say, risk managers on behalf of our shareholders' capital, that if something does happen just around the security and the structure of something because mining is such a tough business. Things do blow up that you absolutely need a seat at the table when either the company blows up or an asset blows up effectively to get some of your investment back. And that's our philosophy. Others can take different philosophies, but that's something that's sacrosanct to us and that will continue to be part of our DNA or our mindset go forward as we look to deploy capital and do deals.

Of course. Any questions coming from the audience? Rob?

With the gold prices exploding it's going to kick in the cash that you're building in your balance sheet is cash. Investors are buying your stocks because they're trying to get away from cash. Have you thought about owning gold bullion instead as a placeholder for that value appreciating and you can actually even do lending with it too. Is that something you would consider?

So to repeat the questions for the audience online, the question asked is with all this cash coming in, is there a possibility to hold bullion for optionality for lending? And since Rob directed that question to Jason first, maybe, Jason, do you want to take a crack at?

Look, it's an excellent question, Rob. And -- and so what we've done over the course of the last year is, as I said, we had to pay our debt down first and foremost. From a capital allocation perspective, we've increased our dividend twice since I became CEO. We will look to increase the dividend again this year, especially because we have such confidence in the consistency and predictability of our cash flows at these...

[indiscernible] I was going to say instead of paying dividends.

So would you keep bullion instead of paying dividends?

So we would continue to pay dividends, but that doesn't mean, again, as we accumulate cash on our balance sheet, we are certainly open to holding bullion on our balance sheet. In fact, we've talked to the Board about holding bullion and they're supportive of it. But what I would say at this point, it's got to be rightsized. We're not going to essentially convert all our cash and put it in bullion because, obviously, we're in the business of deploying that cash. So there's a small percentage for sure, we would look at. We can always sell it, but there's some friction associated with that as well. And then you obviously take the price risk around the commodity. But yes, we're certainly open to it, Rob, and we certainly do appreciate investors like yourselves bringing that concept because I will tell you, I've been in the business and very few companies do this. And so if we're going to believe in, as we all did, the strength of the commodity and the tailwinds that we're seeing with respect to the commodity price, we should be really assessing whether or not we put bullion on the balance sheet.

What do you think, Sheldon, would you do it?

I think if the corporate development pipeline wasn't there, I think it's something you could maybe look at. But I see a good potential to deploy on shareholder attractive returns. And when you look at the business model, you take -- you basically get bullion from our portfolios. We sell that for cash, and then we redeploy that into gold exposure, but it's longer dated and it's at a discount. So you're basically like just even the PV gets that gold at a discount, whereas the bullion doesn't have that same sort of value add through doing the technical diligence and taking that time value and pulling it forward. So I would rather do what we're doing right now, which is taking that cash flow, deploying that cash flow back into gold assets, which our shareholders are comfortable with and generating that. That said, it's gold exposure. It's not like you're going off piece into a crypto or something exotic like that. There's nothing -- I think our investors are looking for gold exposure. So it's another way of gold exposure, but I'd say it's a less desirable gold exposure than reinvesting into streams and royalties that our shareholders are looking for.

And what do you think, Bill? Bill, how much of your streams and royalties do you actually take in kind? And how much can you actually keep in terms of bullion? What's your perspective on it?

All of our streams, we have physical get delivered. So you could hang on to it. And Rob, I know we had -- we met last month and talked about this topic, and I know you've studied it. I'll sort of give you the same response that I gave you a month ago, which is I just don't know that shareholders buy shares in Royal Gold to have us hold bullion. You could buy the bullion, the physical separately, buy our shares separately. I do agree with Sheldon. I think the best use of our capital is to redeploy it because if we do it right, the ounces that you see on day 1 are not the only ounces you're going to see. Hopefully, you're going to see 2, 3, 4x that initial ounce profile that you've got there. You buy an ounce of gold, it's always an ounce of gold.

Clarifying my question, I would say hold gold and don't do the acquisitions. But hold gold and when it's time to do the acquisition then you [indiscernible] rather than cash as it's not being used.

Yes. It's been a very rare situation for us at least, where we've had capital on the balance sheet, and we weren't paying down debt. We couldn't find a new investment. We get the question all the time. We get the question about stock buybacks and special dividends, like we -- there are always investments out there that are attractive. And so we're rarely sitting on capital that I would call excess. Now if we do find ourselves in that situation, maybe physical is an answer, but I don't think it is right now.

Other companies do not pay dividends...

We've been paying for 25 years.

[indiscernible].

We'll take a survey later on. So -- but maybe we've talked about a lot of -- each of these companies here have very strong pipelines. But Dean, did you have a question? Or was that...

[indiscernible] I came late here, but holding gold, isn't that NAV dilutive. Just like all the stocks trade at premiums [indiscernible].

So there's a debate here holding gold. Is it NAV dilutive? And so we'll chat offline. George?

Can I get your thoughts on Tether. We've seen them [indiscernible].

Yes. Sheldon, do you want to kick it off? I'm not saying that we're the bottom end. We are at the top end, but -- so maybe it doesn't affect us. But what about Tether? That is a good question.

I appreciate you putting me at the bottom end, that's appreciated. Tether. Yes, first of all, I didn't see that coming, and it was like kind of the talk of the streaming sector for, I think, starting really with the Denver Gold shortly before that. It's really interesting, right? I don't really see them as a competitor. Obviously, they have a big interest in a number of the smaller companies. I think when we're -- we talk about competition, we're really talking about competition for new assets. It's usually the same 5 players. It's Bill, it's Jason and then it's Franco and Wheaton and that's who we find ourselves in competition with when we're looking to deploy our capital on attractive terms. Tether is interesting, right? They came in a big way in the gold space. It caused a lot of attention drawn to it. I like the attention that they've drawn to it. And when I hear what they're saying about their thesis on gold and the value represented by gold, I really don't disagree with any of it. And I think a lot of people in the gold space agree with it. What's nice is they're actually bringing a constituency of investors, I think, that haven't traditionally been in the gold space. So do I like that extra attention on gold? Yes, I do because like I'm in the gold business.

What do you think, Bill? You hang up with them. You sold lot of...

We sold the... [indiscernible].

To Tether, so what do you think? Are they a friend, foe or...

I would watch them closely. They have a lot of capital. They have a very low cost of capital. They don't have smart analysts like Cosmos telling them that their investment returns 2% at consensus prices. So I do worry about them a little bit. And I would hope that if they decide to get out of physical or owning equity and they want to get into actually making streaming investments that they could be a partner as opposed to a competitor because I don't think they have the experience of structuring these things. But we watch them pretty closely.

What do you think, Jason? And you talked quite a few times on this panel here about long term, longer-term outlook. Do you think they're long term in the gold space? Like how do we look at them?

So again, I think most people probably had some exposure or talk to the Tether Group, stablecoins as a whole. And they're certainly not an elephant hiding in a mouse hole right now. They are quite loud. They are -- they do have at least strategic for what I understand, they have the desire to roll up what we call the Tier 3 royalty and streaming cos. And so you ask friend or foe. Right now, I agree with Sheldon in that certainly bringing a lot more eyeballs to the royalty and streaming sector. Didn't see this coming at all, the source of capital that didn't see it coming. But I think most importantly is they're a source of liquidity. And so source of liquidity in our sector is very, very positive. And it's just if you know how to dance with that source of liquidity. That's the big question mark because there's obviously some questions around their origins, around their business model, around some of their governance aspects. And so I think it's interesting. I think any source of liquidity that comes to our niche sector is a positive thing, and we'll see where they go.

Sounds good. Maybe I'll kick off the next question with Sheldon here. You've met Larry, my associate talking about darting eyeballs, his eyeballs are going all over the place right now, as I was imagined, given the large portfolio. So for purposes of my note, I'm being selfish here. Sheldon, what do you think in terms of what are the hidden gems in terms of your portfolio? What 3 or 4 assets do investors need to talk about that they don't talk about enough. Clearly, we know about Northparkes. We know about Mount Milligan. We know about Canadian Malartic. But what is -- you've touched on the other ones as well, but what are the 3 or 4 that investors need to talk about that I should put into my notes?

I'm really glad you gave me 4. That's fantastic. I'm going to start with the Arthur royalty. We've already touched on that, but I think a Tier 1 asset in the United States, and we're going to see some -- we're going to see a PFS coming out in February from AngloGold Ashanti, and so people should be looking at that. The second is the Kone project. We have a really nice royalty on the Kone project. Montage Gold is developing that. It's in Côte d'Ivoire. They're actually -- usually the expression is on time, on budget is what you shoot for. They're actually on budget and they're ahead of time. They put out a statement earlier this week saying they're looking at first production actually coming in, in 2026, tail end of '26 instead of '27. So we'll start to really benefit from that, I think, in 2027. The third one is Hope Bay. We have a royalty on Hope Bay operated by Agnico, a Tier 1 operator. I think they're -- I don't think anyone would disagree that they're probably the best positioned to operate a mine in the Canadian far north. They've made public statements about that being 400,000 ounces a year for decades. And it's an extremely large land package. It's district sale potential. So we're looking forward to Agnico putting out some information on that going forward. And then another one, which I think has gotten very little attention is Kemess. So Centerra this week put out a new study on the Kemess project. It's located in BC. It's basically a copper gold, and there's a silver byproduct there. And we have a stream on that where we can fund $45 million and we get 100% of the silver off of that. And I had our team kind of run some numbers. And the NAV, if you take consensus silver prices of $37, $38 an ounce, it's $90 million. So that's pretty good value for that $45 million. If you look at $90 silver, that turns into hundreds of millions of dollars. So that's actually a real nice uplift. And I don't really think anyone has an eye on that right now. I think it's really a sign of like the higher gold price and the higher copper price, taking a project that used to be not of interest for a company to develop and now they're looking at pursuing that more seriously.

How about you, Bill? What do you think?

Well, the hidden gem, I'd say this one needs a little polish and has a few legal challenges ahead of it. But if there was ever a market for KSM, if you can't develop that project with these prices, I don't know if you'll ever see it, but we have an option to buy a 2% royalty for CAD 160 million. And if you look at the last study that was done at like $1,700 an ounce gold, $21 silver and you put today's prices in there, the option exercise price might get paid in a year. So it's got a long way to go. But again, this is the price environment for a project like that. We've been sitting on that one for about that option for 14 years. So we'll see where that goes. I think the other one that everybody knows about Fourmile, but it is so interesting. We get questions, do you have an interest in Fourmile? Do you? Yes. It's 1.6% royalty on Fourmile. And it's just our Cortez holdings are complex. There are probably about 8 or 9 different royalties. We try to reduce it to something that is understandable, but it just -- it still escapes folks that we now have -- with the acquisitions we did 3 years ago, we now have coverage on everything that is currently known as Cortez. And I just -- we have to do a better job of making sure -- people understand it because with Sandstorm, we got a 2% royalty on Robertson. We only had a 0.4% royalty. People really understand how that whole package comes together for us. So those are two I'd offer.

Okay. But counting it, I guess, there were no hidden gyms in the Sandstorm portfolio or...

We're still working through the whole portfolio. I mean, it's 200 properties. The one interesting thing that we have found is you look at where we might have a royalty asset and where Sandstorm had an asset and you put them together and all of a sudden, you think, well, there's sort of a jurisdictional play, whether it's the Golden Triangle or it's in Brazil, and you've got properties that are sort of now adjacent to each other, I think, oh, what could we do there? And we're going to have an Investor Day in a couple of months, and that's one of the things I think we're going to start talking about is where might we have jurisdictional coverage.

Jason, I'm sure you got 4 for me.

I'll speak to 3. At least 3 -- we've got 5 minutes left. So these 3 completely set out of our guidance right now. The first one being Cariboo, it's financed. It's got its permit. It's a very high-quality asset in British Columbia, and we have a 5% NSR. So a big, big chunky NSR. Again, the CEO's plan is to get it up and going at 200,000 ounces per year, but then expand it to 400,000. So you can imagine the optionality, the tailwind that we have associated for our shareholders on Cariboo. The second one is also permitted. It's in the United States. The thematic here is every asset that I'm talking about is Canada, the U.S., and that's Spring Valley. And so people might be aware that Wheaton Precious Metals put $675 million plus a small facility around $800 million in the Spring Valley asset to fully finance it. We have a royalty there. And so we actually paid $21 million for that royalty 4 years ago. The read-through based on what Wheaton did would put the NAV around a couple of hundred million. So I would encourage Larry, yourself to relook at Spring Valley because it is permitted, it's now well funded and it's essentially going to be breaking ground very, very soon here. So that quite likely will come into our next 5-year guidance that we put out in February. The last one is, again, we don't really seem to get a lot of value from it is Upper Beaver. So again, Agnico, the best gold operator in my mind on the planet. I don't know if you were up at the site visit when they did a site visit in Kirkland, but I think everybody's eyes were opened around how advanced that exploration shaft and how advanced that project effectively is going. And given Agnico's track record, they're guiding to '29, '30. Very likely, it's going to be accelerated. But again, we'll leave that to the operator to Agnico to define the time lines. But those are 3 very chunky, again, Tier 1-based assets that are sit completely outside of our internal guidance right now that we do believe, especially in this commodity environment, that will actually have a very positive impact over the next 5, 10, 25 years for our portfolio for shareholders.

Thanks, Jason. And Larry, you heard Jason, so you should look at it. And then maybe lastly, and a shameless plug here, we were the first big bank to update our silver prices last week. So anyone who wants to note, just e-mail me. And -- but Grant got -- was a bit upset with me for not including all royalties in that silver note. So in this case, maybe Jason, you can talk about -- reiterate to us your exposure to silver. And then from that perspective, what's your outlook for silver in 2026? Is it going to be a Vancouver Canuck and Maple Leaf for Colorado Avalanche? By that, I mean, what's the price that we're expecting next year? To remind you, right now, Avalanche has 76 points. Toronto has 58 points and Canuck -- sorry -- is that 37 points. Is that a typo? So you can add it up, too. You can say it's a Maple Leaf and whatever. But how -- number one, what's your exposure to silver? And what hockey team are we talking about?

So based on the consensus pricing of gold-to-silver ratio for 2026, we have about 30% exposure. So that's pretty significant. I mean our main asset CSA in Australia, Mantos Blancos in Chile and Gibraltar and BC are the main assets driving our silver exposure. Obviously, if silver continues and hovers 90 to 100, those cash flows will be significantly more from a revenue perspective. With respect to where I see silver going in 2026, I'm going to pick my team, the Toronto Maple Leafs. Because silver, in my mind is the Roger Dangerfield of all commodities. It just never seems to get any respect until it does. And I think we're in an environment where it's actually getting some respect. So I'm going to make a bold prediction that Toronto Maple Leafs will actually finish the year with 104 points. That will be the same prices that were over $100 per year. And there's an analog between the Leafs and silver because anyone as a Leafs fan knows that they have such high potential. They're highly volatile. They're so expensive to watch, and they actually break your heart. They have a habit of breaking your heart when you actually think they're finally going to break out and do something. So that would be my analogy around silver.

What do you think Sheldon. What's your prediction? I know you're Bill's fan, but in terms of hockey teams, like how does it look? What's your exposure to silver? And what do you think it's going to be?

Yes. So our revenue exposure to silver last year is actually quite high. It's around 40%. So it's actually pretty good. Going forward, on a NAV basis, it's now closer to a little sub 20%. So a lot of our silver is near dated -- on silver. I mean, it's great to see what silver has done more recently. I kind of trend towards what Jason is saying because I feel like it's been a long time. And to say that it's going to turn around right now, and I just don't see that. It has a way of disappointing people as he puts it, whether that's Leaf's or Bill's. I go higher. 104 sounds fine. I mean it's hard to put a pin in it, but I don't feel like silver is undervalued when you look at the physical market. There's been a lot written about this. A lot of people are trying to track it, but I certainly are not calling it out.

What do you think, Bill? We'll end it off with you. You don't have a lot of silver, so you can talk about the gold price as a multiple of some of these points. So that's a lot of complex math, if you want. But what do you think? Does it even matter?

Is 10% of our revenue. So we do have a lower percentage. It's quiet simple, we're done. I'll just say let's go...

Short and sweet. So all right. Thanks, everyone, for joining us today, and we look forward to the rest of 2026.

Thank you.