Why the Traditional 60/40 Portfolio Is Dead with Argo Chairman Peter Grosskopf

[Music] let's be clear Bitcoin is an international asset we are spending like drunken Sailors Bitcoin is the only economic entity where the supply is unaffected by the demand if you want to preserve your wealth you have to convert that currency into an asset that's scarce desirable portable durable and maintainable all right welcome back to scarce assets scarce assets is a bi-weekly podcast dedicated to exploring the investment landscape shaped by the Paradigm of scarcity as the ultimate driver of value as traditional Investments struggle to provide real returns and fat currencies lose their appeal due to the basement our show provides a forward-looking lens on how investors can preserve and grow their wealth in the 21st century so this week we have the pleasure of being joined by Peter Groff chairman of Argo so Peter you are one of the founding investors and currently serve as the chairman for Argo a precious metals investment platform that en enables secure and digital access to physical gold with over 35 years of experience in the financial services industry Peter served at as the Chief Executive Officer of Sprat for 12 years from 2010 to 2022 during that time he grow he drove the growth of of the fellow Sprout family company from 5 billion to more than 20 billion of assets under management Peter is a CFA Charter holder and earned an honors degree in Business Administration and a master's of Business Administration from the Richard Ivy School of Business at the University of Western Ontario Peter thank you for joining Glenn Tim and I today how are you doing I'm great thanks and thanks for having me on the show thank you we appreciate it so I just shared a little bit about your bio there's obviously a ton that we could unpack there in over 30 years of your career in traditional finance and precious medals but maybe the best place to start would just be um sharing more about your time at Sprat and now leading Argo could you just share about um your background how you transition from traditional finance and ultimately finding gold and precious medals as a uh attractive asset class that you wanted to Anchor your career to sure well it wasn't very well planned when I when I left University I uh joined a bank out of business school I quit that job before I I started and I started in with a friend of mine at a small brokerage firm in Canada and I was handling Futures and options so that was my first exposure to Gold I was quite young uh I was one of the young youngest Traders there I kind of had a math background and and finance background and I was one of the first young guys to be trading uh gold Futures and gold options at the time so I kind of got an early education in Gold I then went back did my MBA and became a banker and spent um many years heading um a couple of different investment Banks and covering the gold sector from a corporate point of view a corporate and a banking Point of View and one of my great clients in those days was Eric Sprout Eric had founded an investment firm of his name and he asked me to come over and be the CEO in 2010 um gold had just had a phenomenal 10-year run Eric had made the call of a lifetime so money had been pouring in and then we went through basically six really tough years when when gold was doing its pullback and the the Chinese super cycle ended and it was it it was tough to build spra in those days and and we started very slowly um but there was nobody else really solely focused on precious metals and over time we won fans both institutionally retail a lot of us investors and it was one of my proudest moments really sticking it through and building spra to be the PowerHouse that it is now so I I left I retired a couple of years ago and I started on a on a few other gold Investments including Argo awesome appreciate that background it's it's fascinating we'll get more into the uh conversation in a bit but I think it's interesting I didn't know that you started on the derivative side and trading gold Futures and options and now the work that you do at Argo be is more focused on the physical uh asset versus the derivatives and I know we'll talk a lot about paper claims on the on the price of gold but just fascinating to hear that journey and and now you're focused on on um you know physical security the asset versus the derivative Market I'd be curious to just dive in a little bit more into you mentioned you you joined Sprout um given the relationship that you had with Eric as a client of yours on the banking side and how did Eric see the uh opportunity and gold you know that that bull market how did he know to position himself and then ultimately what was it like for those couple of years where you joined you mentioned it was just tough working through the bare Market what did you learn from that experience well Eric being based in Canada we we have a natural Affinity to to natural resources and and so we were always you know pretty adapt at investing in the gold sector and Eric was big on Junior Gold companies probably for 15 years before he founded his own investment firm um he made one of the best calls I've ever seen which is um in the year 2000 he put a big banner up for his clients and it said get out of NASDAQ and get into gold and he he timed that perfectly from what I can recall about April of 2000 and his his his premise was NASDAQ and and the money printing had just already gone so far at that time that you needed to take respite in in a hard asset and and gold was very cheap as I recall then probably $400 less than $400 an ounce and he timed it absolutely perfectly so that built Sprout up very quickly after that you know 10 years of incredibly good results and I joined after those 10 years so it was kind of just when when it was going into a period of of a correction what I'd call a correction and um it was a pleasure to to join sprout but because it had Financial capacity it had you know 4 billion of assets at the time so it was no no small firm but to transitioned it into a multi-product company in gold and our our Star product was the Sprat physicals physically backed even in those days we're talking has to be physically backed has to be fully allocated has to be you know able to be audited and at that time that there was a lot of concern about the GLD that the GLD was using contracts that it didn't have all the physical gold that and and that's how we built the sprot fizzes up to be a global competitor yeah no that's that's fascinating so how does that tie in um I think Glenn had some questions but maybe could you get us up to speed Peter just on where the market is today it's a timely interview just because gold is approaching $3,000 per ounce I think the all-time high was last Monday the uh the 10th of February don't know the number off the top of my head maybe you could tell us but what's driving the sergeon gold and and um Glenn I definitely want to get into some of those ideas you had around the paper markets too sure and I do think there's two great reasons for doing the interview now the first of those is the overall gold price performance almost touching 3,000 everybody says isn't it getting expensive hasn't it run too far against real interest rates which the FED has raised um you know isn't it extended against the US dollar and all those things are a little bit true the sentiment is is running very hot for gold um and and it usually has periods of small Corrections um but what's driving it is the debt and the deficits pure and simple people are increasingly nervous about um the US Treasury and US Government that's running a two to three trillion dollar deficit at a time when the econom is doing very well and against that an almost $40 trillion debt pile which um is now running interest as the highest single expense and it just seems to be out of control and I think that those investors that uh have now in a very real way experienced purchasing power declines are saying I need protection and you know gold is no longer this gold buggy inflation kind of buggy thing to buy this is a real Insurance asset that I need for my portfolio and I think that's what's driving the just the Relentless you know gold pric increases and and and ironically the one of the largest components of buying is govern governments themselves so central banks are buying gold and you can't go against the for very long against um the old adage which is don't fight the FED if if don't fight the central bank if central banks are buying it then households are going to be adding it too yeah and so one of the things I've mean reading about in the newspaper a lot I'm not a gold expert so I'm trying to wrap my mind mind around it is uh we're seeing a lot of uh demand uh for physical settlements in the gold markets and I've also seen so I'm based here in London and uh you know the bank of England normally it takes a few days to get delivery of physical gold now they kind of saying 8 to 10 weeks or something like this which always kind of gives one pause for thought you know if you go to the bank and say I want my money and they say well there's a delay there's a pause it doesn't matter if it's a cryptocurrency exchange just a normal bank or a gold vault uh it's like hang on a second what's going on here you know they've got these kind of excuses about truck drivers and the weights of the gold and whatever but I mean that's always the case right so um and also what I'm seeing is that the comix gold the amount of physical they have is spiked up a lot right yeah um and so they seem to be the sort of transatlantic kind of part to this um and then I've also heard stuff about like uh the Shanghai gold market and physical delivery there and kind of how all this ties into sort of geopol politics and kind of concerns about you know I mean we we obviously all know about what happened with uh Russia's seized assets back in 2022 uh things like that so just if you could give us your understanding of kind of what I've painted as you know very broad brush kind of outline there of just Snippets that I've heard here and there could you kind of decipher what what what's actually going on here sure um well gold is a very liquid asset it trades somewhere between depending on how you count it 100 billion to 200 billion a day it makes it the world's third most liquid asset behind US dollars US Treasury bonds and possibly Euros so it's it's in there at three or four um many of the trading contracts for gold are not physically backed or totally physically backed uh there's two major sources of those paper contracts one is the Futures and and options Market on on primarily comex and the second is the London unallocated gold pooled market which are basically commercial Banks trading gold contracts that are conceptually backed by physical but you don't really know how much because you don't know how much uh physical the bank puts behind their commitments to deliver physical so both those markets are levered in one way or another and what you've got in the short term is with the Tariff threat coming in and an increasing divide between nations moving materials between themselves gold investors I think rightfully get concerned that I want my gold closer I want physical closer to where I might need it one day and and so comex which is this massive levered Market on gold paper claimed gold um is is rightfully stalking up in case they need to deliver against those contracts so I think the exact number is moving from 15 to 30 million ounces or something like that and it's uh I think understandably tax the system for gold delivery I mean you you you'd be taxing the fleet of Brinks trucks and 747s in Secure holds that can even move that gold so I guess it's probably not surprising that um the delivery times are widening out but in an Investor's mind I think this strikes to the heart of it why do I want to own an asset that protects me from the financial system by owning it in a levered way through the financial system it just doesn't make any sense it's like you're buying insurance against the insurance company from the insurance company it's you know and so I think investors are are kind of starting to separate church and state and say actually want my physical in my view that's a healthy delevering from the paper gold system and maybe the long-term impact is to put a premium on physical gold that can be duly delivered quickly so and you know maybe paper contracts are going to start trading at a bit of a discount to and that's kind of what's happened with the the Kango and and and the reversal of the normal you know F Futures delivery system where the spot months are are leading the the the the out months yeah because what I so what I've read so I started researching this topic and I mean there doesn't seem to be anything reliable in terms of a sort of a very verified Source but I've read that there could be as as many as a hundred times the paper claims as there's actual physical go right yeah and so you know obviously in a commodity so this whole show is about scarcity right but you kind of you take something that's scarce like gold verifiably scarce right and then you inflate its sort of supply and inverted commas by 100 times right over I don't know over what period those paper uh claims on gold have come into existence but imagine it's decades right and I just wonder I mean that's that's a huge amount of Leverage right like if there was something were to happen where everybody wanted physical at the same time so there was sort of a metaphorical run on the banks or a run on physical gold what do you think would happen because obviously there's not enough to fulfill all these claims so it would be like there would be defaults right yeah I think think that um look it wouldn't take 100 to one I I personally believe the ratio is lower than that I think it might be a 100 to one in the trading markets but if you're actually talking about longer term ownership of gold I I I think there's there's significant leverage but you know it's probably a lesser ratio but let's just say it was 10 to one for arguments even if you had a squeeze on a 10:1 leverage ratio for delivery um you'd have some defaults people that couldn't deliver financial institutions that couldn't deliver the physical and the in the allotted time traders who would hold them accountable investors who would hold them accountable and and you you'd get some breaking of the shorts so it does it mean that the global delivery system for gold which is traditionally been commercial shorts is finally going to get squeezed I do think it's going to get a little squeezed here so you know that that that is what happens when a scarce when a scarce asset is overly shorted and and overly you know portrayed through p through paper claim yeah I have have a question Peter just on what what you just described in the past five minutes or so are those predominantly sovereigns and central banks that are asking for physical gold to be delivered or are there other investors that are doing this now like what what are you seeing I know you said this is partially in response to tariffs um are there other things that are driving this as well well I would say by and large the the whole institutional and investor custody system if if they have clients that have asked for physical gold are are perhaps no longer willing to take you know a paper gold um delivery uh commitment by a bank they they want the physical so I think just in general people want it closer to their to their own Pockets to the clients they've promised it to I don't know if central banks always demand physical I would think that based on the whole us using the Swift system to punish foreign countries for not adhering to its principles I do believe foreign countries probably want the gold in in the nation that they've purchased so they probably want physical um and I just think in general the preference is be to to move to physical now yeah because it it's sort of like it it reminds me of kind of the history of money right because I mean essentially we had like a kind of a classical gold standard until sort of roughly you know early 1900s right depending on and then you know that kind of broke down and then we had the breaded wood system and then in 1971 we had the Nixon shop right and it was it it was an analog of this right because it was essentially we were creating paper claims well the dollars themselves were meant to be back by gold so dollars were paper claims Were Meant To Be paper claims on gold right and then we got into a situation where they were issuing more dollars than there was gold backing at a 35 out of $35 Peg and now it's like okay so now we've got the dollar system system but now we've got the separate gold system but the same thing seems to be happening in the gold market where we've got all these paper claims against gold and you know we've inflated the gold Supply and I'm just wondering what you think that's done to the price of gold because obviously this is about supply and demand right so if you 10x the supply of something and everybody sort of pricing it as if each paper claim is an actual physical amount of gold I mean that M suppressed the price of gold significantly over the years right I mean that the allegation widely you know believed by the gold Community is that um paper paper claims have suppressed the gold market and Commercial shorts have suppressed the gold market especially at certain points in time in fact banks have gone you know have gotten prosecuted for artificially suppressing precious metal prices so um that that's been the long-standing allegation I think what happens is that in the gold market there is a referee and the referee is the investor and if the investor wants physical and doesn't want a a claim on on physical doesn't want a paper claim then they will demand physical delivery and the referee will blow the whistle and you know you'll get a sorting out so I I think some of that has had an impact on gold demand in the last two months but you know it's kind of more of a long-term Trend that um that I think still has to play its way out and I think it it it's um superseded by the bigger issue which is that in the fiat currency Market there is no referee or or I should say the referee on the side of the winning team which is the central bank and he's just constantly allowing the central Bank to to to you know to to incur penalties meaning to penalize in investors because they just keep printing more Fe currency and they think of fancy acronyms to do that and programs and in order to sell it to the population but they're really debasing the currency right and we all see it and we see it every year and all you have to do is look at the gold market which has a referee and the uh fiat currency Market which has a referee that's on the side of the issuing team and you take a look at Gold's performance against Fiat currencies over 20 25 years you could do the bars and in fact incrementum research has done that the world's 10 most significant currencies and Trace them over 25 years so 250 cells on that table gold rarely loses because FIA currencies constantly depreciate and I guess the other thing about the referee is he gets to tell you how much they're depreciating by and he's saying we can contain it to 2% and it's actually three but all the rest of us know it's 5 to 10 right but the the referee's biased so he's telling you it's too it's it's it's the biggest lie going at onramp we believe that Bitcoin is is the most important asset of the 21st century the hard part is securing it right there are shortcomings with keeping your coins on an exchange but also with setting up your own self- custody Arrangement onramp solves for these concerns our multi-institution custody solution maximizes security and minimizes counterparty risk ensuring that your Bitcoin remains securely in your possession and provides built-in inheritance planning to ensure your family is protected as well onr provides peace of mind for your Bitcoin Journey whether for your whole stack or for part of it as a complement to your existing self- custody setup for more information check us out at onramp bitcoin.com yeah Peter one one thing I wanted to touch on there as well is you mentioned um some investors feel that you know sentiment might be too hot for gold right it it just breached a new all-time high last week approaching $3,000 per ounce but to your point when you compare it to a system that is structurally flawed and you have a referee that is uh playing for the winning team that is that's just human incentives and there's really no reason to believe that that will ever change because we've seen decades and centuries of this uh phenomenon right so I know in the United States there's the department of government efficiency that aims to contain some of the uh deficit spending but in reality I I think it'll kind of fall flat on its face or state objective of doing so just because you pointed out there's there's so many entitlements there's the interest expense it's ballooning and so now um how do you think about where gold is currently valued and uh just looking a year ahead or five years ahead how do investors in your circles think about Gold's valuation and what's to come there well um short term it's run a bit hot and you know due to these delivery concerns and and and could experience some volatility or even a pullback I'd be completely comfortable with that I think that it's clearly point the way to 4,000 um within the within call it the next couple of years um personally I believe that um that will be absolutely stoked the next time the FED has to print and I don't know what they'll call that printing I I don't know if it'll be called uh quantitative easing they'll probably come up with a new name for it but or you know reverse repo facilities whatever is required to keep this incredibly large debt bubble from bursting they will they will do what's required so I personally see that happening when the economy weakens off ironically as a result of the government getting more efficient you know the government's been the largest net employment adder in in this economy they start letting people go I think you could probably see the Eon economy follow behind pretty quickly so if the economy gets soft and they really need to start easing and they may need you know some kind of relief program for people that are um behind on debt payments or what have you um you know then I think gold is really going to start spiking I think we're going to get into more of a hyperbolic type type uh situation more like what we saw with Bitcoin can can you explain something to me and kind of overlay it on what you see going forward because so I work in the runup to and during the great financial crisis and kind of the first couple of years of that like you saw a big run up in the gold price and then like from sort of I don't remember exactly when it was but about 2011 to 2012 we kind of well first of all we had a big pullback in the gold price and then kind of recovered back to where it was before but it I think that took like seven eight years or something like that yeah at a time when interest rates was super low the I mean the money supplyer was you know increasing a lot and so you sort of see something similar going forward or or potentially even more um you know more extreme but it's just like I'm what I'm the question I'm really asking is why did we see that pullback you know during a period when you would have thought that gold would have been performing really well because if we're predicting that going forward how do we know that we're not going to for whatever reason that happen see that again well um at the time from what I recall the Fed was so busy printing um to get us out of the financial crisis that the game was really to play the recovery in other markets real estate um bonds as they were lowering rates stocks nobody saw the need for protection so gold fell because people just didn't care I think in those days and it was still a much smaller much lower participation level type of Market than it is now so um you really had an apathy toward Wards gold during those years and it wasn't the game didn't get going again for gold until people really saw the printing and the printing around covid um and you know asset inflation like everything was just running and you needed some gold to protect yourself um and and and that insurance bet has what's been steadily increasing over time Peter you mentioned the particip rate can you talk a little bit about what that looks like today along with how investors might think about their gold allocation compared to maybe a decade or two ago sure well I'll go all the way back to the 80s it was really only gold bugs you know serious inflation bugs that were buying gold um in the in the 80s hedge funds got involved and in the 90s institutions some institutions got involved with with some core Holdings and you know the whole time gold ownership was a lot higher in Europe than it was in in North America um I don't think gold became a broader institutional asset class until the founding of the ETFs which I believe was 2004 um at that time and we were kind of getting on to it at spra with the physicals we estimated at that time it was kind of 2 to 5% of institutions spot gold and usually it was at a 1% type of waiting so I think that 2% is probably up closer to 20 25 but it's still only at a two three 4% waiting so it's still a quite a low participation rate I mean there's there's less participation in Gold than there would be an apple or Tesla for instance obviously you know we're we're involv in Bitcoin market and it sound you know Rhymes a lot with what we kind of feel um yeah particularly with the ETF La last year and now the institutions coming in and it's kind of even lower percentages in institutional portfolios you know sub 1% yeah the difference is with gold it's taken 200 years and with Bitcoin it's happened in five you know all the adaptation is faster with Bitcoin it seems yeah yeah do you find that like among your client base there's a clear demographic split or do you find that like it's young and old kind of evenly spread across your client base do you mean gold or Bitcoin or the comparison uh gold yeah because I I always kind of think that but I mean this is just sort of you you know my own perception it's not based on any evidence or anything like that but younger folk kind of skew towards Bitcoin and their older folks SK towards Bitcoin I mean absolutely yeah AB absolutely okay I mean um this gets into the Argo business plan a bit but traditionally you've been able to buy gold if you were a bank customer and by the way if you did you got your face absolutely ripped off by the Banks on their storage and trading costs or you had access to ETFs inside a brokerage account and that generally defines the baby boomer generation and older so gold was kind of known as a an old um an old man's market and I think Bitcoin is generally a younger entrepreneurial Market you know 247 trading on your phone that type of thing my GR father cuz when my grandfather passed away so he left like a Family Trust And whatever and I was a investment professional and uh you know was asked to have a look at what was going on there after he passed away no one really understood in and like he had about 60% of the family's trust in Gold um wow yeah and he actually grew up during the Great Depression right so I think that kind of potentially influenced him like what he saw going on there and also this 29 you know the the the stock market crash about then um yeah so it's just it's just fascina how far this goes back and also how it's kind of a generational kind of thing where depending on where in history you were born uh you have a different view of asset classes and things but you know I think we we all learn that from experience and to put my own into context okay I probably have about 40 to 50% of my Assets in gold and precious metals and Mining investments in one way or another uh I've just grown up with it I've been comfortable with it they've done well obviously um it's probably more than the average person would ever feel comfortable I'm a Canadian and our country over the last 20 years from being kind of a part- to par country with the US has been run by a left-wing left-leaning government that has absolutely gutted the productivity of the country I mean it's it's it's a it's criminal what's happened our currency has gone from par to 69 cents okay and I spend when I travel most of my time in the US or or you know us based economies I have been dramatically hurt by having far too many Assets in Canadian dollars okay I should have had more of my money in Gold so in terms of putting it into context all you need and you take a look at those currency charts again all you need is to have sat there in Japanese Yen or Canadian dollars to understand why you're abs absolutely making a huge mistake if you don't have some money in Gold I can and you know it could happen it could happen to the US dollar one day although I think that's probably it it'll never lose or not for a long time lose its status as as the leader but you'll just see it in inflation I mean I can definitely commiserate I mean living here in the UK it's very similar picture um you know even the so-call conservative party are you know very socialist and now we've actually got the labor party in and it's they're spending money like drunken sers that you just don't have and yeah you know and it's getting end up you know a train Rec I mean if you look at the footsie 100 right uh it's gone nowhere in like 15 years and then you price it in gold and you kind of lost half of your money yeah exactly but no no no professional money manager wants to show you that chart that's yeah Peter appreciate you sharing where you sit uh personally said 40 to 50% in Gold precious metals mining related Investments you mentioned that participation in the institutional Community was two to 5% I think you said a few decades ago and maybe now closer to 20% but it's still single but that's then got to be multiplied by their participation which is again two to 5% so it's pretty small yeah so how does that tie in then for call it the next decade then do you see a shift to Gold becoming more of a strategic asset allocation because investors are predominantly more concerned about having assets closer to home geopolitical tensions trade Wars Etc yeah look the kind of risks that we sit with with a deficit that is out of control control okay everybody I think generally accepts the deficits out of control and the debts out of control nobody seems to really think about how that's going to get solved so let's just push that off for another day but they've been happy to be in these other markets like bonds that have offered them negative real returns in the last three years and stocks that are trading at probably their all-time highest valuation multiples and real estate which is starting to get hurt a little bit um wait until you see how the government taxes that going forward and you'll see some real pain but generally people have not felt the need to have gold I think that investors are doing themselves a huge disservice not to have a hard asset kind of scarce asset stockpile of at least 5 to 10% and you can go what are your favorite Assets in that you can go to bitcoin you can go to gold which by the way I'm increasingly seeing as interchangeable assets it's and and and that's why we built Argo is to facilitate the you know the the intertrading between them but um you need 10% of your money in that just as a protection against what's been built up here the imbalances that have been built up for 50 years and are now we're just starting to see the cracks right I'm I'm starting to come around to the combination of Bitcoin and gold I've been very focused on bitcoin but like I've been sort of uh partially convinced now because bitcoin's a lot I mean so much more volatile than gold and if you need a replacement for the fixed income portion of your portfolio in particular actually all of the portions that you mention right um you know particularly for older folks who are drawing an income on their portfolio or drawing down the capital on their portfolio uh you know it's inappropriate to have 100% Bitcoin right uh or you know very high allocation to bitcoin but so I'm I'm starting to think you know and and I totally agree with you there's a asset manager in here here in London called Troy and they have a strategic asset allocation of about 10% in their of gold in their portfolio yeah uh and they um you know uh they they they get very high risk adjusted returns because of the diversifying effect of the gold in their portfolio and then obviously over quite a protracted period in the last five years you've gotten sort of 133% comp well so it has some sort of cost you in terms of performance as well uh so it kind of dampens the portfolio volatility at the same time as giving you kind of like Equity like returns um so yeah I'm definitely starting to come around to the idea of kind of a like you said a hard asset kind of bucket in the portfolio and I I'd be advocating for you know probably a quarter of the portfolio to look at that at the moment at least yeah well um to i' I've sat with so many different capital allocators and portfolio managers talking about this and um I think the old notion that a 60/40 portfolio you know 40% uh bonds 60% stocks can can provide for the retirement and um and succession and you know um to you know to to a family net worth over time I think that's just so old-fashioned now first of all bonds have basically become in my view certificates of confiscation I mean they're promising you in many cases a flat um real yield and and that's that's because I use higher implied inflation rates stocks are are great um but there's such a game being played with indices now and the Magnificent 7 that stocks could be great and you could still wake up one day and they'd be down 30% and nothing would have changed and um and so that 6040 portfolio does not do you justice and so you've got to have a separate portfolio that's kind of the counterbalance and I think um in that portfolio you might have Bitcoin is your risk on gold is your risk off I would use very little cash or treasury um protected inflation you know tips um certificates i' I'd use that in a small proportion maybe you'd have some real estate in there some land um I just think that that's a necessity now to have that counterbalance portfolio yeah yeah totally agree with you there Peter the um the one thing I like to back to I think it was in 2020 uh Hersman Capital put out a report about sovereign debt crisis and 51 out of 52 countries that exceeded I believe it was 130% debt to GDP defaulted in some way whether it was an explicit default or just a monetary debasement so countries like Canada the United States have been on that path of debasement for a while now I think it became quite obvious in 2020 to many investors what's going on here but to your point there's still so much capital locked into Legacy or Antiquated portfolio construction Frameworks with having 40% of that exposure to fixed income so I do think both of our businesses are are positioned well to um welcome investors to allocate more of their Capital to scarce Assets in place of those uh certificates of confiscation you had mentioned um you know in closing before we wrap up here just want to share or get a little bit more context from you on Argo I think what's fascinating is is there's a lot of alignment between Our Brands you focus on physical gold we focus on the physical Bitcoin asset and security first and foremost how did uh you and the Sprat team know in the early mid 2000s to focus on physical and how is that ultimately informed the decisions that you've made with Argo sure well Argo is all about physical gold outside of the financial system direct to Vault and our predecessor company sprot money was in that business um allocated separate bars and storage for investors also sold coins and and and direct physicals Argo is more of a digital representation of that so um efficiency 247 trading easy fills easy access to the Vault our pledge at Argo is to provide expertise um to investors to know how to Best Buy that Vault Storage and where to Best Buy it and I do think uh the big opportunity with Argo is gold is being tokenized will uh have as its next big uh Evolution a a tokenization event and um uh you know I'm familiar with the work of the world go Council and the lbma on this there's no reason that you can't have a a global custodian of physic phally verified and approved gold in multiple vaults that should be able to be locked on the blockchain and traded amongst investors and no more need to move 747s across the planet um it just eliminates so many inefficiencies in the gold market and it puts it much more on par with Bitcoin and then for Argo what we promised was to get smart about how you could take investors in between those two so in between Bitcoin and gold so that you could stay out of Fiat as much as possible and and that's kind of the the vision that we have at Argo love it how do uh investors that work with you think about their jurisdiction exposure you mentioned investors want assets closer to home you also mentioned that there's multiple vaults that investors could choose to park uh their physical with do you help as part of your expertise do you help your clients navigate those decisions and think about their exposures yes we will and uh again it's our pledge uh We've started with an um an excellent deal with the Royal Canadian Mint I mean we we trust our Sovereign mint in Canada for storage that's the premise on which the Sprout physicals were also built I would say about half the investors in the US are comfortable with that and in fact prefer it um out of the reach of the hands of Uncle Sam so to speak um but half of them don't prefer it half of them would rather see Brink storage in New York or or or Salt Lake um unfortunately right now that costs a bit more than our solution in Canada so we will get there um but we want to have purchasing power we want to strike a good deal for vaulting in the US we also want to strike deals in the UK K and Zurich and probably Singapore um so we want to have this kind of expertise to to tell investors um you should consider this you should consider this token you know the tokens will probably have different jurisdictions for their gold or you'll have a collocation token so you'll you'll take a a global token and you'll swap it for a buck for taking your storage out of Canada and into the UK for instance so the system will be set up to be efficient and we we've just pledged to be at the Forefront of it excellent and what type of investors are you working with predominantly both retail and institutional so institutional can negotiate a better deal with us for fully allocated physical storage retail we're starting with a fractional uh physically backed product um and we are creating a a user base of retail customers now we're launching in the US that's that's live on on the Argo website awesome anything else uh that we didn't cover today that you think folks should be aware of uh no but I I think that people need to spend more time in this area and and and figure it out and I think they need to have uh trading accounts and investment accounts outside of the financial system so they can have this kind of exposure awesome and Peter where should people get in touch with you to learn more uh on the Argo website please awesome yeah thanks so much for the time really appreciate you coming on okay thanks for having me thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show if you found the information valuable please share the episode with a friend or leave a rating on your favorite podcast app all the links we discussed in today's show will be in the show notes inside your podcast app before we finish a quick reminder that onr media is for informational and entertainment purposes only and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice regardless of where you are on your Bitcoin Journey we'd love to hear from you visit onramp bitcoin.com cont to schedule a consultation with one of our Private Client advisers