Andrew Carnegie was born in Scotland in 1835. He became one of the most famous industrialists in his adopted home, the United States.
Money magazine reported that Carnegie was worth the equivalent of more than $370 billion in today’s dollars.
That’s more than double the richest person in the world today, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Carnegie made his fortune supplying a key raw material for many of the tech megatrends in the U.S. at the time – steel. That put him at the forefront of the automobile… railroad… and construction booms.
I (Chris) am not telling you this because I think you should be investing in steel. I’m telling you because there’s a way to follow in Carnegie’s footsteps by investing in the “steel” of the 21st century.
Like steel, it’s the product of raw materials you dig out of the ground. And without it… tech megatrends such as 5G wireless networks and electric cars and trucks would be impossible.
The Daily Cut is the premium e-letter we created for all paid-up Legacy Research readers.
It’s where you’ll find the latest moneymaking… and wealth-protection… ideas from the Legacy Research team.
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Our goal is to help you really move the needle on your wealth. And we believe the best way to do that is to spot market megatrends early on and ride them to profits over years… even decades.
That’s why, today, I’m putting a new megatrend on your radar. It’s something colleague Dave Forest calls “geo-tech.”
He’s a trained geologist. And over more than two decades, he’s explored countries on all of the world’s populated continents, hunting for deposits of copper, gold, nickel, cobalt, and natural gas.
He helped develop the sixth-largest platinum-producing district in the world. He discovered more than 1 billion pounds of copper in Asia and South America. And he was the first natural-resource explorer the government of Myanmar (formerly Burma) licensed.
He’s also given readers of our International Speculator advisory the chance to make outsized gains on mining stocks.
For instance, one tiny gold exploration company he recommended last November, Azimut Exploration (AZM-V), is up 825% in the model portfolio.
His readers also had the chance to make 514% gains on gold explorer Liberty Gold (LGD-T), which he recommended in January 2019.
(Note that both these stocks are way above Dave’s buy-up-to prices, so now’s not the time to buy them.)
And he has 14 other triple-digit winners out of the 48 open recommendations in the model portfolio.
Dave is also a big fan of tech. As his readers know, he developed a way to find gold from space with a PhD friend of his.
They use NASA’s Terra satellite and cutting-edge “long-wave” optics… combined with a proprietary algorithm… to uncover new deposits.
It’s where geology meets high technology…
Just as steel was crucial to so many trends of the 19th and 20th centuries… certain strategic metals are crucial to the trends of the 21st century.
Only this time, they’re not going into traditional cars… or railroads… or skyscrapers. They’re going into some of the world’s most cutting-edge tech. Dave…
There are a number of high-tech sectors that are reshaping the economy. My colleague Jeff Brown talks about them all the time – think 5G and the electric vehicle revolution. Well, there are strategic metals that power these tech trends.
Take lithium. It’s the soft, silvery-white metal that’s No. 3 on the periodic table and has the chemical symbol Li. It’s at the center of the geo-tech trend. Dave again…
Lithium will be one of the metals underpinning the buildout of 5G wireless networks. You see, 5G towers need more power than 4G towers to get the signal out and to keep the tower running.
The old lead-acid batteries that 4G towers run on don’t work. You need high-powered lithium batteries to keep a 5G tower running.
These are the same batteries needed to power electric vehicles.
Every Tesla that’s made… nearly all the electric vehicles being made around the world… they all have these lithium-ion batteries in them.
This will spark massive demand for this metal and the miners that dig it out of the ground.
And as tech trends such as 5G and electric vehicles (EVs) gather momentum, the world’s going to need a lot more of it. Dave again…
Just take EVs. Last year, the world made about 410,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE). It’s the lithium end-product that goes into EV batteries.
If EVs make up half of all car sales in 15 years – which are the projections – that’s about 58 million EVs on the road. Each one will need about 59 kilograms of LCE. That works out to 3.4 million tonnes – or seven times more than all the LCE the entire world produces today.
Mining analysts estimate there will be a lithium deficit in a couple of years due to increasing demand. This will lead to rising lithium prices and higher margins for lithium miners.
Jeff Bezos, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and Virgin Group founder Richard Branson are jumping into geo-tech projects.
They’re backing the tech fund Breakthrough Energy Ventures. So far, it’s raised $20 million for Lilac Solutions, a mining-tech company focused on transforming lithium production.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is also moving closer to the mining business.
At last year’s Tesla shareholder meeting, he said he’d do whatever he had to do to ensure Tesla could scale up its battery production as fast as possible.
He said once production got to a “very high level,” Tesla would “look further down the supply chain and get into the mining business.”
Dave has discovered a $4 lithium mining stock poised to make a deal with Tesla…
It owns the largest lithium discovery in the U.S. At full production, it could supply Tesla with 46 years’ worth of this geo-tech metal.
Check out this breaking news right now to learn how to pocket a fortune in the months ahead.
The second-best option to gain exposure to this trend is through the Global X Lithium & Battery Tech ETF (LIT).
It’s a convenient, one-stop shopping tool that holds a number of lithium miners and battery producers.
It won’t give you the same potential for returns as the $4 stock Dave has discovered. But as lithium demand grows and supply runs short, it’s a great speculation right now.
Just remember, don’t bet the farm on speculations like this. And never risk more than you can afford to lose.
In tomorrow’s essay, we’ll look at why lithium’s rising popularity poses a national security threat to the U.S.
As Dave told me, there’s only one operational lithium mine in the country.
That leaves Americans dependent on miners in China and elsewhere to keep its 5G towers running and its EVs fueled.
Good investing…
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Chris Lowe
July 1, 2020
Bray, Ireland