Yes, agreed, great trading Marty!

I was in and out of mostly partial positions in Silvercrest about 45 times or so since it was spun out of Silvercrest Mining back in 2015, and cumulatively it has been a nice double digit multi-bagger return for my portfolio as well (but not 34 – more like 11 or 12). However, I sold completely out of my spinout shares during their very early period, and didn’t get back in until they’d started hitting those series of bonanza grades with Las Chispas in 2016, and then it consolidated down through 2018 and I had to average down, so I missed some of that early rerating higher and that period hurt my overall multiples. However, initially I wasn’t impressed with the other 2 projects which they drilled prior to Las Chispas in late 2015 and early 2016, and neither was the rest of the market. It wasn’t until mid-2016 that they really started nailing it over and over again at Las Chispas, and that was what got me back into it.

Still, Silvercrest has been a standout win in my portfolio, a company I rarely had to worry about, and remained one of my heavier weighted stocks (typically at 3%-4% of my portfolio — sometimes less and sometimes more for brief periods of a couple months), over the last 8 years once getting the position reinitiated. Lot’s of good smaller swing-trades and position-trades in it over the years too.

–>> Regardless — That’s really an amazing journey you had though Marty — holding it for the entire journey, and trading around the position along the journey as well. Really well done sir!

Are you going to let your shares, or part of your shares convert over to CDE, or are you going to ring the register on the trade and cash out and redeploy into another stock inside your retirement account?

I feel like CDE gets a hard rap, and they have had some operation challenges the last few years, including a fire at one of the mines that wasn’t really their fault, but it’s still a pretty high-torque mid-tier silver-gold producer.

They have been working on their Rochester Expansion for years now and did a lot of work in late 2022 on improving their crushing of ore, and then in 2023 on the leach pad and Merill Crowe plant, and just launched the new 3-stage circuit this year and got commercial production going for the next phase of operations just in the last couple months. Rochester is going to be a significant mine contributing in their portfolio as well.

With Wharf they’re going to run out of ore at one point, but I believe they’ll eventually take over Dakota Gold and restock mine feed stock for Wharf for many years to come.

If they do end up keeping Silvercrest, without a competing offer coming in from another big-boy producer, then I could see a larger company eventually making a move on Coeur Ming to pick up their portfolio that would then include Las Chispas.

Personally, I’ve done well trading around a core position in Coeur Mining for many many years now, and think it offers quite a bit of torque for a mid-tier PM producer. Now through this acquisition it is beefing up into a much larger mid-tier producer or smaller senior producer.