10x Alchemy: A Tunnel Vision For The Intelligent Investor

Risking 1x to make 10x is asymmetric investing. For the intelligent investor there is a disciplined, hyper-focused process for the discovery of reasonable probability 10x+ plays:1. Unearth desperately undervalued companies with rock solid assets and balance sheets; 2. In burgeoning bull sectors;3. With leverage, preferably in the form of under priced warrants (discussed in Chapter 7).For distractors you can only make 100% by risking 100% with 50/50 odds or some other mathematical derivative of this pre-programed risk-reward result. To them, the Market Is All Knowing and invariably allocates risk dispassionately and precisely. Bullshit. The market can be an irrational and financially abusive bitch keying your car with whole cloth delusions of cheating; or a petulant child overreacting, sometimes spectacularly, on both bipolar extremes – with irrational exuberance in one quarter, and crashing temper tantrums the next. Exaggerated pricing mismanagement by this spawn of human emotions is a norm. With companies in selected emerging bull sectors with available leverage like warrants, this provides the rocket fuel to catapult foolishly mispriced assets with moonshot results. One case study in Chapter 3 is McEwen Mining (MUX), a junior minor led by its namesake – gold industry hall of famer Rob McEwen. A long black cloud of seemly demonic orchestrated misfortune visited his company in 2019 bringing a flood, a fire, a subcontractor bankruptcy, an Argentine government gold miner tax hike, and the coronavirus, temporarily laying waste to their ability to mine their spectacular gold reserves at nowhere near expected production levels for successive quarters. I think Rob’s middle name is Job, but I’m not sure.The gold and silver engorging their tracks weren’t melted away by these disasters, just McEwen’s ability to mine them at expected and acceptable productivity levels for a few quarters. But market minions were having none of it, massacring their stock by 70% and leaving it for dead trading at 59% of its book value. McEwen just months before was trading at its peers’ (the GDJX – the junior miner’s index) average price-to-book value ratio of 144%.The market’s overreaction was sensational. The two other criteria for 10x+ plays were present in spades:2. the smartest minds in the investment world (like resource investor legend Rick Rule, gold industry’s godfather Ross Beaty, and the “Bond King” himself, Jeffrey Gundlach, to name just a few) recognize that gold is enjoying the early stages of a multi-year bull market (discussed in Chapter 3); and 3. leverage was available in the McEwen investment in the form of warrants. In order to raise necessary capital, long planned and in the works, McEwen had to come to the market, hat-in-hand, with their stock in the shit hole and was forced to give unreasonable investor terms including warrant kickers (more about warrants in Chapter 7) at a give-away strike price.The 10x+ stars aligned with McEwen Mining warrants.We bought the five-year expiry warrants for .09¢ on March 25, 2020. The warrants’ Black-Scholes fair market value would be eight times that when McEwen returned just to its industry mean price-to-book value.And this could end up being a 150x on the back of a four year dragon bull market ride in gold. Of course, the McEwen mining returned to normal production – no surprise. The warrants doubled in price in two weeks and were a 10-bagger within 4 months. I live-streamed purchases (see link in Chapter 1), and brought the receipts. You don’t have to invest much in each individual 10x play to achieve out-sized gains. So your losses will not be as painful as conventional investing, while your wins are astronomical.