Lithium the New Black Gold
So we have all heard the story of Jed Clampet...
"And then one day he was shootin at some food,
And up through the ground come a bubblin crude."
source: http://www.lyricsondemand.com/tvthemes/beverlyhillbillieslyrics.html
Now fast forward several decades....
"And then one day Ed looked around and saw,
LI-Ion Batteries in every electronic device."
Source: Eddie (not a poet).
Now think about the demand for lithium in all of those electronic devices (i.e., electric cars, mobile phones, laptops, DRONES (for package delivery but that is another story).
There are 4 large lithium mining companies in the world and they are all located outside of the US.
The best investment here is to follow the big money, the Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada, USA was opened in July 2016. There are several smaller lithium miners located within miles of this Gigafactory.
You want to focus on the lithium miners using the brine solution instead of hard rock mining method because the brine solution method is less capital expensive.
There is no doubt that lithium is the "black gold" of the future.
Part two of this story will reveal a few of these miners.
This is an investing idea I have been following for a while. The chart below shows performance of an ETF (Exchange Traded Fund) that tracks Lithium.
Price is consolidating which gives a great platform to consider investing. Choices are to invest directly in the LIT ETF or dig into the components that are invested in mining and cherry pick a likely winner.
http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/LIT:US will help with that. Be aware that several of the companies in this ETF are using Lithium rather than mining - an equally valid investment arena but one requiring more capital.
Walking the talk is my credo. My portfolio has Galaxy Resources (GXY.AX) which has operating hard rock mines in Western Australia and Canada and licences in a brine operation in Bolivia. I am also invested in a number of other Australian companies pursuing gold and lithium resources but still in exploration and early development (also a strong combination given a high gold price) - CMY.AX, KAI.AX, BGS.AX
@carrinm, I didnt even know there was Lithium ETF. Thanks for that.
I am putting together my next post with some images like yours above (new to Steemit so still learning the process).
@carrinm, here are my Lithium plays I am following/invested in
DJIFF - Danjin Resources with mining operations in Nevada close to Tesla.
HMGLF - Pure Energy Metals
SSMLF - Nevada Energy Metals.
These were discovered and provided to me in a newsletter I get.
Thanks. I did a little digging into these companies and also into the constituents of the LIT ETF. The problem with LIT is it also includes investments in companies that process Lithium like FMC Corporation and SAFT in France and Samsung SDI. So it is not a pure play on Lithium mining.
The largest miner in LIT is Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile SA SQM. It mines in Chile and has a market cap of $7 billion. Compared to this the largest in your list is HMGLF with a market cap of $52 million. It is a minnow. My investing approach is to put very little stakes on a bunch of minnows and place the bigger investments where I know the business will survive bad times.
Now I made a chart of one of the minnows (DJIFF) - it is the Orange line. this is a 5 year chart. I then compared it with LIT (Red) and SQM (Blue). What the chart tells me is DJIFF and LIT are pretty much in the same place compared to each other and SQM has lagged. My thesis would be if Lithium is going to be the new Black Gold, SQM is likely to close that gap and do at least as much as any of the minnows - and we know they will stay in business.
This is true if all other things stay the same. Chile has different sovereign risk to mines based in US. Currency risk is different too. To mitigate some of those risks I quite like Galaxy Resources. They have mines in Australia and Canada and a salt brine development being put together in Bolivia. That spreads the sovereign risk and some of the currency risk. It is also 10 times bigger than the largest of the minnows.
My 10 cents worth and my own analysis