There is a particular species of man you meet at mining conferences, and I want to describe him to you with the care he deserves. He is wearing a branded fleece vest — always a vest, never a full jacket, because the vest says I am an operator, not a banker, but I do own a Patagonia — and he has cornered you near the lukewarm canapés to explain that his 0.3%-grade prospect in a jurisdiction you cannot spell is, and he wants you to really hear this, the next Greenbushes.
It is never the next anything. But God love him, he believes it, and for one beautiful quarter in 2022, so did everyone else.
The anatomy of a supercycle
Here is how it goes, every single time, with the grim reliability of a British weather forecast.
First, a real thing happens. Demand for some metal genuinely inflects — batteries, say — and the price does something violent and upward. This part is true. The geology is real, the chemistry is real, the deficit is, for a moment, real.
Then the theatre begins. The price spike summons, as if by dark magic, a thousand juniors who six months ago were exploring for something completely different and have now, in a development that surprises no one, pivoted. The gold explorer is now a lithium explorer. The cobalt man is now a rare-earths man. The fleece vests multiply. The conference adds a second ballroom.
And the resource estimates — oh, the resource estimates. They arrive with the confident precision of a man describing a fish he caught alone. Inferred, the small print whispers, while the headline shouts a number with a "B" in it.
The intercept is always bonanza. The true width is always in a footnote you need an electron microscope to read.
And then, the morning
The supply that the high price summoned eventually arrives — late, all at once, and far larger than anyone modelled — and the price does the other violent thing, the downward one. The second ballroom is quietly returned to the hotel. The vests thin out. The man with the next Greenbushes is, last I heard, very excited about a helium play.
Was it a swindle? Mostly, no — and this is the part the cynics miss. Underneath the pantomime, a few of those companies were sitting on something genuinely good, and a smaller few of those were run by people who could actually build a mine. The cycle isn't a lie. It's just wearing far too much makeup.
The point, because there is one
We are not telling you the metals don't matter. We spend the rest of this site arguing, in deadly earnest, that they matter enormously. We're telling you that the theatre around the metals is its own permanent feature, that it peaks exactly when the temptation to fund it is highest, and that the single most valuable skill in this business is the ability to love the show while keeping your hand firmly on your wallet.
Enjoy the canapés. Compliment the vest. Read the footnote.