Metal Monday #15 with Zaner Precious Metals

May 18th, 2020: This week, Nick and Brett talk to Peter Thomas, Peter Grant, and Thomas Garland of Zaner Precious Metals. We are excited to roll out a three part series highlighting the tornado trading app.

Transcription

welcome everybody we’re here with a special metal Monday the guy is from Zehner metals we got Pete Peter Thomas Peter grant and Tommy and Tommy what’s your last name Garland nice to have you guys on how y’all doing very well thank you we’re just watching the the copper explode today it’s been a wild one well it’s been a wild one all morning with everything yeah but you always seem to be the guys Thomas that is give us some info give us kind of what your what’s your scene on your end on what you think these things going well I’ll tell you what I mean copper is always kind of a wild marketed it kind of lonely to sleep in all said they do do some and and today we had a situation where the Central Committee the Chinese Comedy Central Committee came out and said oh by the way you know we’ve been talking about how we’re not going to be doing any building we’re gonna try to stimulate the economy in a different way well we’re going back to the old way and we’re gonna build like thousands of units and we’re

gonna be consuming massive amounts of copper what money coming from where the US does you just printed it oh yeah you know and and so every you got inflation and we’re gonna be buying commodities oh hey and so everything took off and it’s been a wild warning with with that little bit of news on top of which two hours later Elon Musk comes out and goes yeah we decided we’re getting out of California we’re gonna build trucks in Texas and they’re driven wait a minute you’re building in America we thought you were setting up this giant plant Singapore you’ve been talking about it for a while well that’s gonna be four we’re gonna build all our trucks in America well that could be anything from a hundred twenty pounds to four hundred pounds of copper per truck and everybody went well in America outstanding so that’s just some of the things that drive a market in today that we try to get along to your people and on a regular basis because that’s big news and had 700 points later coppers still going you know and hopefully we see this got all of that

come to food and and continue to seep into our markets and he’s seeped into single strand wire and stuff like that peas what do you see for I mean we touched on copper yeah a little bit later we’re going to touch on the ability for small medium sized companies to hedge and dirt I don’t know where your guys’s forte is but kind of give us a little background because not only is copper running pretty hard today but so is palladium platinum rhodium I don’t know if auto cats have been I don’t know if you know I’m sure you guys have noticed because you move them but Watto cats have been been really hot all of a sudden not we’ve been seeing a lot of movement in there and there was four weeks ago they talked about the new catalytic compound that they were going to use which was gonna reduce consumption platon fillet diem in autocad and then about three weeks ago they went and we probably won’t be able to create that that new product for about another year and everybody went what you just announced you’re coming out with it so I

think what happened was that all of these new mystical conversions disappeared and people went we still need the same stuff to start buying it and and I think it was a very interesting turn of events so we seen some very good support across the board with car sales at all-time record lows I mean we’re at great depression lows and people are saying you know what it’s gonna get better and I’m not going to be the guy caught out here without enough material to run product down the line and I think that’s what’s going on my friend right you Peter grant what’s what’s your opinion on this yeah yeah I know I watched you guys’s podcast and and your guys is a good do one of one every week as well and yeah you kind of strike me as the goal you definitely have a pretty good pretty good beat on that market and in what sphere what’s your two cents and you know I mean I know I’m not asking you to rub your crystal ball on time of the future but what’s your opinion as far as which direction you kind of

see this thing going and or or or anything else you want to have ya know the the precious metals in general had a great week last week and then as you guys have already mentioned some upside extension in Asia here on Monday and the from a technical perspective everything looks really good I mean gold is setting near 8-year highs we’ve seen a nice technical break out of a range in in silver I look in the precious metals complex I love when silver leads weed so we’ve seen the gold silver ratio come down pretty significantly over the last couple of weeks as well platinum and palladium the the upside extension above 800 bucks in platinum I think is really encouraging we mentioned on on our show that the the 850 level looked really attractive if we could extend beyond Friday’s highs and we’re seeing that today so that looks really good palladium we meant mentioned a little double bottom on the short-term chart on palladium and for all the fundamental reasons that Peters already mentioned it’s it’s also being supported on the on the technical side of the picture as well so a

nice rebound in palladium as well one question I have for you why do you for why do you like to see that silver gold ratio why do you why do you like to see silver lead it’s just a much smaller more thinly traded market so higher beta and so I I get a better indication when when silver is leading I almost always know gold is gonna follow conversely and we’ve seen this recently when gold is rallying silver doesn’t necessarily follow because it drives a great amount of its demand from from industry and so while we we see hey if a safe-haven demand in gold we that doesn’t necessarily translate into safe-haven demand and silver particularly in a kind of a demand destruction environment like we like the the kovat crisis has has fostered and so silver can be consolidated while gold rallies and we actually saw up the the gold silver ratio go as high as 129 that that’s a brand new record high in the in the ratio now we’re trading down probably in the I didn’t look at it this morning but but we were 104 handle on Friday and

my guess is that were significantly lower today we are yeah and I think to to go to Peter’s point is that it’s an industrial metal it has tremendous usage as far as all sorts of conductive usage and and I think that spills into copper as well the two of them are both have the ability to be in demand from any type of industrial usage so we love to see that metal run go ahead and lead us into the hedging side so yeah before call we discussed the edge hedging app the tornado app you guys have developed you guys kind of ran me through it on and if Peter grant if you want to share that kind of run as how that worked for our customers and and we had talked about breaking this into a three part series because there’s a lot to cutter let’s do a nice quick intro to what you guys when did you start this first of all Tommy you want to talk down there yeah absolutely we started it back in 2004 Pete and I partnered up started a metals desk and one of the things that I noticed

immediately was we didn’t have the technology that I was used to I have a foreign exchange background I used to trade Deutsche marks on the trading floor and I used to be a market maker for a lot of the large trading institutions here in Chicago and so I was used to this kind of technology to be able to hedge things and um hedge things all the time and we didn’t have the technology available so we created it it’s as simple as that took a little bit of while a little technology we made it simple as simple as possible because we’re basically simple guys and but the real reason we made it simple because back then Pete and I were on the phone doing the majority of our deals so we’d be on the phone and we’d have to put a hedge on or take a hedge off we did the deal and we didn’t need to be thinking about all kinds of different bells and whistles and figuring things out now of course today in our business things have changed most of it the deals that we do are online straight through processing auto

hedge things of that nature but we still have the manual hedge out there with a lot of our clients used because not only and you see it right in front of you on your computer it’s also available on your tablets and it’s also available on your iPhones and Android devices and a lot of guys are in there trucks a lot of guys are going to bolts they can metal up and they’re being able to put on hedges no matter where they are and they’re just point and click and the hedge gets done it’s very it’s really that simple it’s very self-explanatory gold silver palladium platinum all done in ounces copper on the other hand is done in pounds but you can trade down to a single pound you can trade down to a single ounce these are not contracts like you’ll find at the exchanges where you’re stuck into a contract of let’s say five thousand ounces or a hundred ounces or was it 25,000 pounds Pete that’s correct right five thousand pounds in the copper I mean it if you if your dude stuck into those contracts the problem always is

give you the jelly side up or jelly side down you either have too much of a hedge or not enough of that and it never seems to turn out right this way you can do it to your exact deal and post a reference number so you know exactly what deal and what hedge matches and there and so forth I’m looking forward to it I’m looking forward to your guys’s Ceri video series and just walking it through you know how is it just a small scrap the small scrap company you know that ships a couple of the copper a month and can protect their margin you know if their margins you know they always say the scribe business your margins made on your by you know and so if your margins made on your by your profits made on your by by either being the right location or having great customer service or whatever that is whatever drives your business if you make it your margin on the by the best way to distill it is to potentially hedge that volume hedge those pounds ounces whether you’re buying converters or buying wire all right edge

those ounces edge those pounds take your money and move on to the next deal and and it should enable you to grow your business I’m looking forward to hearing the hearing what you guys have to say looking forward to the video series and kind of working working through it with you and I always appreciate the commentary you guys provide a lot of value I mean that’s why we keep doing it is hopefully you know we provide some value to you and you guys definitely like value to our audience so you know thank you again well you know you really hit it on a head and and and the last thing that we we want to point out to is your banker really loves it and your bar we got acid bath loans all the time to buy or sell product and we put a portal in your bankers office and he pulls up really oh he’s completely heads that he needs four hundred thousand dollars to do this filled done Oh your proof because he knows you’re not rolling the dice anymore yeah no it’s all locked in so let’s not forget that you

to your point you can expand your business now because you have the trust and reliability of a brokerage firm behind you showing where your profit and losses are already locked in your bankers just love this stuff and it flows straight through to your bookkeeper so you’re always live and you always know what you’re worth down to the minute which some days is good guys just let it be word yeah I hear you brother so appreciate you keep our audience updated when the video series comes out we’re looking for you know once a month whenever we can get you on we appreciate you and appreciate the inside that all three of you guys are providing to us well you know it’s our pleasure and and the thing is that if we could save one company or we can help somebody become a little more profitable you know no matter what that number is everybody works hard if they get and you know you know the old saying guys work smarter not harder and that’s what we want to do is give you guys that tool appreciate you guys thanks guys well Steve Minich oh it’s

a pleasure guts take care now thank you