Becoming a Capital Markets Insider w. Tommy Humphreys
"What you think about is very powerful. And if your thoughts become obsessions you can make things come to reality that are both positive and negative for you — Be very careful what you think about."
This was a meaningful conversation for me.
THE INSIDER'S GUIDE TO FINANCE EPISODE 162
Becoming an Insider in the Capital Markets w. Tommy Humphreys
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Transistor.fm
I came across Cory Cleveland’s podcast through his great interview with the late Lukas Lundin. A mutual friend suggested we connect for an interview. I’m happy we did.
Cory’s highlights from our episode:
Tommy’s background in web design and how he entered the investment and trading sector.
How he successfully built and (to his surprise) exited CEO.CA.
Tommy’s experience of growing tired as an entrepreneur.
An overview of the media landscape and research coverage in the 2010s.
How he addressed the vacuum in quality content during the economic downturn in the 2010s.
Standout lessons from Tommy’s interviews with key industry figures.
Reckoning with feelings of envy and caring for your mental health.
Unpacking what motivates high earners.
How wealth can reveal who people really are, and the challenges that come with it.
The contents of Tommy’s new newsletter, The Big Score.
Insights on key figures in Howe Street trading culture.
How the Canadian venture capital market has changed over the past few decades.
Tommy’s insights into the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) and how it functions.
A rundown of the books and figures that have inspired Tommy.
Insider’s Guide to Finance on LinkedIn
Transcript
Cory Cleveland (00:00:02):
Welcome to the Insider's Guide to Finance, where we dive into stories from the front lines of financing public and private companies. I host seasoned CEOs, fund managers, bankers, brokers, and business experts who answer your questions about how to properly engage in investors, finance opportunities, and build outstanding success stories.
(00:00:24):
We dig into the educational how-tos and mechanics of structuring good deals. You'll also hear about strokes of luck tense negotiations and the pressures of closing, as well as insights and how to navigate the capital markets. What you'll hear in these interviews may very well change the course of your career, your company, and your life. And before we get started, I'm happy to host this episode with the support of Olympia Trust Company. Olympia is an outstanding provider of transfer agent and corporate trust services and has been supporting the Canadian capital markets for well over 20 years. I can speak from experience that the team strive to deliver on their promise of making it personal. So thanks again to the team at Olympia Trust Company and I encourage you to reach out to them at any time. You can find their contact information in the show notes now on with the show.
Cory Cleveland (00:01:19):
Welcome back to the Insider's Guide to Finance. In today's episode, we're speaking with Tommy Humphreys. Tommy was an outsider in our capital markets who became an insider. He founded ceo.ca, which he built up over about 10 years to a $17 million exit. But along the way, he's also been an early investor in a number of very successful public ventures including Lithium x, fre Gold Hive, blockchain, and a number of others. He's a remarkable interviewer. He's got a great experience in the media space as well as an understanding of our capital markets and the personalities that are in them. So I'm really looking forward to our show and I think we'll also speak to his newest venture, the big score. So Tommy, welcome to the Insiders Guide to Finance.
Tommy Humphreys (00:02:03):
Thank you, Corey. Good to connect with you. Happy to be here.
Cory Cleveland (00:02:06):
Yes, absolutely. I feel like it's been a long time coming considering how closely we are with shared relationships, but I'm really happy that we're actually going to do this and get to know each other in an interview. The best place for us to start though is with an introduction from yourself. So can I hand it over to you?
Tommy Humphreys (00:02:23):
Well, thank you so much. Our connection begins from growing up in the same community in North Shore, and you went to high school with my brother, which is such a small world. You grew up in this wealthy community. My parents were successful, but I always noticed others had more and was very curious about bettering my life as a kid and watched with interest the business stories when I was a young person and was really interested in who was doing what and figuring out how I could become an entrepreneur. After high school, I did web design. Initially I was obsessed with the internet and had this thesis like Baby boomers have all the money and they all need a website. And so that was my sort of breakout, was just putting an ad on Craigslist saying, we'll do your website and taking whatever came my way.
(00:03:18):
And I tried to grow that business over three or four years, but struggled with ankle biters with people like me who would always be willing to do it cheaper, and we grew and our product quality got better, but it was just a tough business to make money. So I went on this journey about trying to find a mentor and find a business model that was more scalable and I had a strong drive to succeed and had been watching this Canadian venture capital market, public market from a far kind of skeptically for my youth and early business career, and it was just booming so much in 2010 when my web design business was really struggling that it sucked me in from the get go. I had a vision about trying to build a website for that community. It just makes sense. I'm a web guy and I remember reading TechCrunch Silicon Valley blog and thinking this came out in 2004, but it's 2010 and there's nothing even remotely interesting in the Canadian small cap media space.
(00:04:27):
There were a few platforms out there, but I had a vision to create a website in the venture stock market as a way to build a business and learn about this sector and hopefully participate because I'd seen so many success stories in our communities and newspapers and I believe that there was something there and something to it. And I used media and building this website as a vehicle to learn and meet people and share, and it was an awesome tool. Media is a wonderful tool to learn and meet people, and I had a vision of different services that we could offer over time. When I started, it was just me with a simple blog aggregating links, and then we bought this, I say it was me bought the ceo.ca domain for a few thousand dollars and then it was like over time, we're going to launch message boards, we're going to do market data.
(00:05:22):
I had all this list of all these things that I wanted to do over time, and sure enough, over six or seven years they all kind of happened and message boards was really the gift for our website. I started it with just making content and publishing interviews with CEOs and stories about the market. And when we opened up and let users post, we created the first Canadian mobile message board and it took off like wildfire in 20 14, 20 15. My new partner at that time, Murat Eer, who is truly a genius web products person. He came on and I always say he took pity on me. He was so talented and he really exploded our community with his technology and our messaging app became sort of viral and we went from getting 30,000 views a month to 30,000 a day to, I don't know if it gets that far every hour, but it was an exponential change that we made a market data and chat product for Canadian stocks and particularly in Canadian venture stocks.
(00:06:30):
So 2000 kind of penny stock listings and it's a great tool and we tried to aggregate data and community and we were approached a few times about selling it. Never really thought we would sell it because it's just a niche product, but a few people reached out and asked. And then in 2021, a guy knew in Toronto had a business that was complimentary and was interested to buy it, and I didn't count my chickens that it would actually happen, and I was sort of detached from the sale process and they're closed and I got to gratefully hand the ownership off to a group that's better capitalized than me. And if you can relate after several years of community management, I mean we were tired, so it was lucky for us to change it. And we were not investing in Marette and myself. We were kind of strategic but lazy in, we didn't have big team, big infrastructure.
(00:07:33):
We weren't picking up every dollar that was available to us. And I think it was a good time for us to sell because we were just gassed. But having sold it a couple of years ago, I'm still a power user and on it all the time. And I love the people that are managing it now. There are many, they did the things that I wanted to do, take more ads, do more media, more publishing. So I like watching it, I like using it, but then there are aspects I miss as well. That's a long answer to your question, but I'm here all day, so
Cory Cleveland (00:08:07):
Amazing. It's interesting you mentioned there's about 10 years that you're building that up and two directions I want to go with this one is the relationships you started to build because the way I see it, I think that ceo.ca perhaps was a catalyst for you to go from being an outsider to being an insider and to starting to work with some of the titans in our industry or in our public venture markets. But along the way, you said you got tired. And how was that? Because you're an entrepreneur, you go through that, what does tired mean to you?
Tommy Humphreys (00:08:41):
Well, I would say that I, I don't want to say manic, but compulsive desire to, I remember as the site was coming together, it was just like it's all in and you're completely committed and can't take your eyes off it. You can't be present with anything you're doing. And I had fortunately a relationship now my wife who is very tolerant of it, but I was completely consumed with getting that vision built out when that vision was exceeded. And to some respects, I don't want to say I ran out of vision, but I was like what I wanted to do we had done and it was very busy and rather than a startup, it needed more process and particularly around the community, community management and moderation and those things, we were inexperienced and I didn't have the best understanding of how to, I was tired of a lot of community management is toxic content and upset people and you ban me, you took this wrong side in this dispute or I've been defamed on the site and you'd get demand letters come into the house saying some piece of content has defamed some person.
(00:10:01):
And so there was just like it went from, I'm so excited about this. Watching this grow to it was was really popular and the things that I had hoped to do with it had realized, but that siege mentality that I was in to build it there was also sort of painful. And I think whenever I say somebody who sold their business versus somebody who doesn't, I feel like until we sold the business, I never expected it would sell. And business is really hard and it's like chewing glass all the time. And after 10 years, I would just say that I wasn't fully tired, I just wasn't as passionate and enjoying it as much as I did at the beginning, but I didn't know any other way of doing it just completely all in. And there were new blood, new energy, somebody who's got more optimism and it was a good thing for us. I had this business experience with the web design business where we ran out of money and was quite shocking. I had a few staff and having to say, look, I'm going to run out of money in four weeks.
Cory Cleveland (00:11:12):
That's a painful experience
Tommy Humphreys (00:11:15):
You can have this month, but I don't have any more money and we don't have any more sales. And I got a cut out of this office lease and stuff. So I was very averse to hiring and managing because I just had that trauma from letting people go and stuff. So I was never very good at delegation. And it was an accident that we got so lucky with growing it and I'm glad that it's useful to a lot of people chaos, but it's a good product,
Cory Cleveland (00:11:44):
Isn't it? All right. Behind the scenes, I'm curious to ask, I watched you did a presentation or a speech at RIC in 2024, and it was surprise Tommy to see how vulnerable you were there and emotional, and it was very compelling. One thing you said there, and I thought was really interesting is if, I think it was Gary Kasparov or something, pardon me if I mispronounce it, but if he's Bobby Fisher, yeah, Bobby Fishers, pardon me. You want to beat Bobby Fisher at a, you want
Tommy Humphreys (00:12:12):
To beat Bobby Fisher playing at anything but chess. Yes.
Cory Cleveland (00:12:15):
Thank you. And when you said that, and then I saw your interest and your desire to make money to make it rich in the capital markets, am I reading that correct, that connecting there and seeing the opportunity for CEO ca was playing a different game within the game that these guys are playing?
Tommy Humphreys (00:12:34):
I think there's a lot of truth to, it was a different game, but just to be really clear at the outset, I wasn't sure that it was going to work.
Cory Cleveland (00:12:42):
Right, okay. But it got you into it got you into the circles. It got you into conversations, which I think from an outsider,
Tommy Humphreys (00:12:52):
There was a big vacuum, and it's structural. It's like analysts and investment bank coverage has declined so much, and those who know the industry well are regulated and have difficulty speaking without tripping up disclosure issues. So there's a vacuum in quality content, and then you have the message boards, which are a lot of noise to little signal. So there was just this vacuum in information, especially in early 2000 tens. It's more popular today with social media and there's more voices than ever in ceo.ca and Twitter, et cetera. But it was a downturn in the market. I was recognizing it was going down, and so I tried to be a positive voice and help people get their story out and just say, Hey, I want to understand what you're doing, write a story about it. And I found an issuer community. The public companies who are building were very willing to have their stories communicated.
(00:13:49):
And so there wasn't a lot like it. And I tried to reach out to the strongest groups I could and learn from and interview people. Obviously I was trying to associate with high credibility people because that was obviously where you'd build the community around, was not around the bottom barrel but the best. And so I had this early dream of getting to the best wealth creators in the market and sharing, interviewing them, learning about them. And that was really my initial vision. It was just like, how do I get to these giants and make a cool story about them? And maybe in the process I'll get a relationship with them and grow my audience and just take it from there,
Cory Cleveland (00:14:34):
Of which I believe you did and you did very well. Yeah,
Tommy Humphreys (00:14:37):
I mean, this is a small industry and I was working very hard in a downturn and I was at all the conferences and I was an active voice with a publication posting, working hard, and I got noticed, and I think anybody that throws themselves into that with commitment would do the same. I think anybody could still meet the giants of the mining space within an 18 month timeframe if they were absolutely determined to show their talent and just bust their butt for it. There's always a room for a new entrant. I believe that it was then probably more. But these issuers have a huge mandate to tell their story, so that helps. But it's all finding the balance between doing something unique and the right bit of critical but positive and adding value to readers and audience. It's the content game and it, it's hard work sweaty, but it's good for branding. Right.
Cory Cleveland (00:15:47):
Yeah. Let's talk about the interviews you've done and one, I really enjoy your writing. I like how you write I, how you structure even down your paragraphs and your sentences. I think it's really interesting. I'd love to hear more about how you've kind of honed that craft, but can we talk about some of the relationships you've developed over the years and through the work you've done, the interviews you've done, because I think we share that in common. Having interviewed a number of people and there's things that really stick out that are fascinating, that are influential on you, what do you recall from or the relationships you developed, what stands out to you of these individuals?
Tommy Humphreys (00:16:22):
I would say the biggest thing that stands out about the giant resource giants and things that I met was that I am not them. I think when I was younger, I was attracted to them thinking, look what they have and their success and gravitas and all that stuff, but getting to know them, they're really extreme personalities and combination of optimism. And one thing that was incredible is so many of them were very healthy physically, which is hard thing for me when I'm in that siege mentality and working all the time, it's very hard to maintain the fitness and serenity and stuff, but they were, I don't want to say machines or something, but they were credible. They had a technical thinking about somebody like Ross Beaty or Lucas Lundy or Robert Friedland. Robert wasn't a geologist, but he knew more about geology than most of the geologists, I think, and he could tell you everything about what was going on.
(00:17:30):
So they're very technically savvy and very optimistic, and they'd taken enormous risks in their early life and survived them. And then there's part of this, they call it survivor's bias, where we focus on the people that took big risks and paid off. And sometimes there are just as credible people that didn't the success that we could learn just as much from, I think there's a lot of that in the mining sector, especially with the randomness of discovery and stuff. It's like we go, I love the line in Fiddlers on the roof. If I were a rich man, do you know that song?
Cory Cleveland (00:18:03):
No, I don't. I
Tommy Humphreys (00:18:04):
Was the rich man. Yeah, but it's very, very cute. But there's a line where the lead character says, if you're rich, they think you really know and they come to ask you questions about things, nothing about, and they think you're really smart. But
Cory Cleveland (00:18:21):
Sometimes I've been perplexed by people that have made a lot of money who I look and I'm like, my God, you don't have your eyes open to the world. I don't know if it was luck or if it was a bulldog mentality, but I'm like, you're not even likable
Tommy Humphreys (00:18:39):
Different people than me. I feel like likability is the one common trait of most of the successful people. I know that's sort of the baseline. If you're a salesman like Ross Beaty or one of these people, in addition to being a company builder, selling your story, your track record is selling for you in so many ways, but they were likable. Obviously there's some people with success that got lucky or cut corners or maybe were just highly technical and didn't have that personality piece. But I think in the capital market, the salesmanship thing is really key.
Cory Cleveland (00:19:14):
Oh, it's huge.
Tommy Humphreys (00:19:14):
Maybe the more successful you came, like Robert Friedland, for example, I bet that he could charm the socks out of anybody he wanted to,
Cory Cleveland (00:19:22):
Right? Really?
Tommy Humphreys (00:19:23):
Oh, yeah, yeah. But now that he is Robert Friedland, I don't think he works as hard at it anymore. I think that I've seen people Robert's incredible track record, but I've seen people achieve success and become less likable. But then I realized that they were kind of working it when they were less successful. They were trying harder. You've probably heard the line of wealth doesn't change you, it reveals you. But I can remember one person who was just so charming and great listener and wonderful people person and made a bunch of money, and that disappeared. But he obviously had the power to do it when he wanted to.
Cory Cleveland (00:20:07):
I honestly think that's a bit of a shame when that happens, when money changes people,
Tommy Humphreys (00:20:12):
Well, it revealed them and it didn't change.
Cory Cleveland (00:20:14):
Well, it reveals 'em. Yes. Yeah, good point.
Tommy Humphreys (00:20:16):
Oftentimes people who want a lot of money are a little bit broken inside, and that's driving them is just wanting to prove themselves or yeah, that's why either it's not no correlation between people who have lots of money and who are super contented and happy. You're just as likely to be continually on that treadmill of this more thing and finding it's easier to make more money than to want what you have probably. And so when you're in the capital market all the time, you are surrounded by people that are trying to get more all the time and being present and savoring the moment kind of gets forgotten sometimes.
Cory Cleveland (00:21:00):
That's been a tough one for me in being in the capital markets in the capacity that I have been in. And it's felt at times like a treadmill trying to keep up. And on occasion you're grinding it out whether you're helping build companies, whether we're creating content, whatever you're doing. And occasionally you see people hit a rocket ship. And for me personally at times, I mean, I don't know if I love wealth, I don't need it. I think I'm very content, but it's hard at times for me to reconcile that I haven't hit that rocket ship as big as I wanted to. Have you had those experiences,
Tommy Humphreys (00:21:45):
Especially if the guy who hit the rocket ship, you think you're smarter than
Cory Cleveland (00:21:50):
Yes, of course. But then that's just my ego,
Tommy Humphreys (00:21:53):
What you hit on. I share, and I think that when you mentioned ego, ego and envy are two character defects that are alive in all of us, and it's dangerous. Ego is not your amigo. I try to say that to myself, but these defects of character, simple, basic envy can drive you so damned if you do or don't. I don't know what the answer is. I feel like sometimes I want a physical solution to the spiritual problem of envy and money obsession, I think particularly in Vancouver, just feels like such a rich town. And there's this Jones' thing and all the range rovers at the mall and stuff. Sometimes I feel like, oh, if I just didn't live here, would we not be so obsessed with this? And I think the reality is with the internet, no, that's between my ears.
Cory Cleveland (00:22:53):
Yeah. I can tell you as a matter of fact that no, if you wouldn't live there, you would still be obsessed with it because I who now live in a small town, British Columbia, I love it for what it is, but I still have the FOMO of what am I missing? Have I made
Tommy Humphreys (00:23:09):
Direct? What small town are you?
Cory Cleveland (00:23:11):
I'm in Vernon, British Columbia.
Tommy Humphreys (00:23:14):
That's a big town. Vernon's fantastic.
Cory Cleveland (00:23:16):
Well, it's funny, I am going off the rail here. My wife's from Mexico City, and so we had down on our list, I was trying to convince her to move to Mexico City, and we were spending time down there months in a row kind of thing, and I loved it. It's a wonderful place, but it's 36 million people in a single city. And so instead of Mexico City, we ended up in Vernon, a town of 40,000.
Tommy Humphreys (00:23:41):
You have beautiful nature and skiing and golf, and
Cory Cleveland (00:23:46):
Yeah, it's a sense of joke that I kind of quasi retired and just by being here, but I still have that twinge of the ego looking and saying, I'm missing out. You're not in the room.
Tommy Humphreys (00:23:59):
Your life would be a lot better if you didn't have it. How do you quiet that voice? I don't know.
Cory Cleveland (00:24:03):
Yeah. Can we go into that? Yeah. Plays into mental health. So what would you say motivates you?
Tommy Humphreys (00:24:11):
Originally it was just to better your life's circumstances. So you want to have a good life, you want to be able to provide for your family. But I think my insecurity always wanted a bit of status too, and it was the status that I didn't think that I had, which is part of the sickness or whatever. But I think that I thought that I was really chubby as a teenager and I didn't get attention to girls, and I probably convinced myself that I needed to be successful to be wanted or whatever. And so I think that the very root of this is like there's some sickness, right? I want to be the man and I want people to like me. And then you realize that that's so flawed because you don't want to actually influence relationships by manipulation like that. You don't want to have fake friendships or something. So it's flawed. But I wanted to be successful because I wanted the things that better material lifestyle and status and so forth. And today I try to balance this scared little kid inside you who still wants those things, want to be useful.
Cory Cleveland (00:25:23):
Thank you. Rick. Rule side note, I got a little story there.
Tommy Humphreys (00:25:27):
Tell the story.
Cory Cleveland (00:25:29):
I really want to come back to that. I'm sorry for interjecting, but I interviewed Rick over a hundred episodes perhaps ago, and right before we started, Rick said to me, and for those who don't know Rick rule, he's just hyper intelligent. And I think perhaps some would think he can come across as being arrogant, but there's just such, in my opinion, such a deep knowledge and a precision in his, how he articulates himself that you could be mistaken for that. But right before we started the interview, he said, I look forward to being useful. And I felt like he was dismissing me. But then an hour later after listening to him and talking, I was like, my God, your whole meaning for life is to be useful. I saw that it's the foundation of him and his growth and wealth has been all about being useful to those around him. I just thought it's such a fascinating word.
Tommy Humphreys (00:26:23):
He's early seventies and has lots of money and he has incredible gifts and communication. When I interviewed him, I noticed I would compare the transcripts with other CEOs and Rick would have five times the words per minute of everybody else. And it was so quotable, a
Cory Cleveland (00:26:41):
Vocabulary,
Tommy Humphreys (00:26:42):
It so quotable. It was like small cap co. And it's boring. And Rick's just dropping the punches and so many words for a minute. And he has the capacity to do a couple podcasts a day and have all of them be kind of unique. It's just amazing. He's obviously in his element. I don't find Rick to be arrogant personally.
Cory Cleveland (00:27:05):
Yeah, frankly, that was mistake. Amazing. Yeah, it was my mistake. And I mean, I
Tommy Humphreys (00:27:10):
Think he could be tough. I don't think he'd probably be the easiest guy to get money from. Nope. Yeah. So you can learn a lot from older successful people about you want to be useful. I feel like I have a faith that you'll get satisfaction from being useful to others. And I know you want to have a good day, do something helpful for somebody else, and you'll feel good and build self-esteem by doing esteemable things. And so today I balanced this insecurity that wants the adrenaline and the excitement of the high risk venture business. And then at the same time, I want to keep the peace of mind. I didn't necessarily have the first run with ceo.ca and be kind and gentler and more useful. So it's like the good wolf and the bad wolf on this insecure ego thing just wants more. And then you're trying to ground yourself on just walk slowly and be humble and be grateful. And I wish at the moment, I want to listen to that.
Cory Cleveland (00:28:15):
It sounds like it's a constant battle for you,
Tommy Humphreys (00:28:17):
Isn't it for you too?
Cory Cleveland (00:28:20):
Yeah. It's interesting how it rears its head more and more at times. And then at times it's a non-issue. But it is a constant battle. And I think especially being in the world you are in more so being around these giants, being around these titans, I think that it can perhaps be triggering to use just an all too common word now.
Tommy Humphreys (00:28:44):
Well, it's great to have wealthy friends, especially the generous ones, but at the same time, you lose perspective of what's enough when it's dangerous, it's wonderful, it's dangerous. And the hierarchy of community, it's not the monetary measure, I don't really believe. But I think at one point in my life I was pretty certain that he who has the most toys wins. And I don't feel like that. Now,
Cory Cleveland (00:29:20):
Has that changed? I mean ceo.ca $17 million, however that was structured is no sum to shake your head at. But as I understand that you've been, you've participated in a lot of other deals and made more than that and been very successful and alongside others. How has that wealth helped you? And not by putting another car in the garage or say anything, but by mentally
Tommy Humphreys (00:29:51):
Well, the CEO deal shared with Murat, and he deserved every penny that he got out of it. And part of the transaction was stock, which has gone down in value. It was 2021 and everything was so rosy at the time. So I have some of the stock now that's 80% down from or 75. I've been blessed with participating in things that were successful and at early stages. And stress and anxiety is just because you have your mortgage covered or your money issues are different. I feel like if you're in anxiety kind of is replaced, it's a vacuum that's filled with something else, so it's good and you don't have context with people who are really struggling. It's good to know that we're not have to worry about where the food on the table is going to come from and people are really struggling. But I think after years of, there's an adjustment that happens pretty quickly actually, where you take for granted what you have and it's like, are you going to get lost in wanting more?
(00:31:08):
Are you going to try to find out what makes a good life? And so I feel very privileged, and I'm very lucky I'm going to go with my dad and brother on a golf trip next week. There's nothing I would rather do than go out play golf with my family or friends once a year or something. So there's some perks that are great, but my mind is always wants a project and it's like you want some new way to see something come together or it's building a house or just that satisfaction of getting something done and useful. And that's why I came back. I mean, ceo.ca was an amazing community and I was good at writing and publishing and creating media and stuff. So I love doing that. And then not having it, I missed it. And I always thought on co.ca, I was like, I should just write about all the history's best deals to remind people what's possible.
(00:32:18):
And I kind of never got around to it. And so in quasi retirement, not that I'm retired, but I had this idea, okay, well now I can go through that, do some of the history stories. And that's what I'm doing@thebigscore.com, is just trying to bring up some of the history and teach a little bit and learn as I go. And it brings me back into the market and the capital market and in touch with people, I can be working on a story about somebody who's long since passed. And then you talk to five incredible people about them. And it's amazing. It brings you closer to everybody, and it's
Cory Cleveland (00:32:59):
Inspiring. I want to take a moment to actually just celebrate that work you're doing. I think it's really, really nice. It's really well done. It's well written and it's so fascinating. I mean, we have such a unique ecosystem within what is how street, if you will.
Tommy Humphreys (00:33:17):
Bay Street is, and Calgary's got its own stories too. Oh,
Cory Cleveland (00:33:21):
Calgary as well. And so I've enjoyed that as well, speaking with people. I think I shared with you with Rick Rule, I don't want to hear about his stock picks in the market. I wanted to hear how he got into the business and talked about how he met Peter Brown, I think serving him Dirty Martinis at a bar. That's the stories that I love hearing that history. So I really like the work you're doing.
Tommy Humphreys (00:33:44):
Peter's really, really a good storyteller. And I don't think he would ever go on a podcast, but man, he would be great on your show.
Cory Cleveland (00:33:53):
Oh boy. Yeah, I've tried to angle in and thought of ways, but yeah, man, he fell
Tommy Humphreys (00:34:00):
Out of love with the media in the eighties. I think Canaccord had some down years and they were chewing him out and he started getting in this combative relationship. So he doesn't have trust.
Cory Cleveland (00:34:12):
Have you tried to interview?
Tommy Humphreys (00:34:13):
I've talked to him about it and I haven't done it yet.
Cory Cleveland (00:34:18):
Okay.
Tommy Humphreys (00:34:18):
So I've talked to him about it since six, seven years ago, and there's nothing to go to show for it. James Qantas, he's a mining newsletter writer, researcher. He wrote a story with Peter. It was a really funny little spiel where Peter's first words to him is like, you got 20 minutes, or What do you want? And one of the lines that Peter said was like 20 years ago, they wanted put me in jail. Now they're giving me awards. Something like that. He He's got this edge.
Cory Cleveland (00:34:50):
Yeah. Yeah. Wow. I want to ask you, I can't believe we're 40 minutes in, man, and I feel like we're just getting started. How street,
Tommy Humphreys (00:34:59):
This is my problem. I can't shut up. I'm sorry.
Cory Cleveland (00:35:01):
Well, I am enjoying it. I Street has a culture and a game of its own and a lot of history as we've just discussed. How would you describe this culture? And I want to maybe weave the question in. Are we nearing the end of an era where we had some greats, we had the Peter Browns, we had the Ned Goodmans, we had the, I mean, even back to Murray Pesos, and we can drop tons of names. Rick Rule would be one of them, on and on. Are we nearing an end of an era or is there new blood coming into it? And what is the culture of how
Tommy Humphreys (00:35:39):
It's going to be? Hard to answer that question briefly, how street. There was a Vancouver stock exchange from 1907 or something like that, but it really grew with Peter Brown and Murray psm in 1972. Windfall was a stock in the sixties that ran on rumored discovery that wasn't there and created this crackdown on the mining industry. And the Toronto Stock Exchange really at one point was trading over half of its volume was penny mining stocks. And they said basically, we don't want this business anymore. So how street is the metaphor for what birthed in its place in Vancouver, which was the Vancouver Stock Exchange was there, it had a process for dealing with venture capital finance and wanted the business. And Peter was a broker with Can Gordon. He wanted, and Ned Goodman supported him. And Murray Psim was a promoter from Toronto. He was a broker as well.
(00:36:41):
His first success was he was a butcher and as a broker stockbroker in Toronto, he placed the 40 cent financing for Steven Romans, Dennis and Mines, which was a uranium discovery I wrote about, the stock went from 8 cents to $87. And so PSM had a piece of this success, and he was just this personality that became a millionaire in the fifties, which was a lot more money than it is now, and then blew it all on some real estate project in Jamaica. And he was just this guy who went broke and got rich and went broke, and he was a deal junkie. And in the seventies and eighties, my understanding, and I don't know this firsthand, but he was really the engine of House Street. He had 60 deals on the go at a time. He would fund all kinds of hair-brained ideas. And let me show you, I've got this, a friend of mine, Brian Kaufman, he gave me this. This was like a Pez Resources watch that his IR used to give out. So he was this kind of, I think he was a complicated character who had conflicts of interest. Imagine having one guy behind 60 deals, I feel like, how could you do two deals well, right. And I read online that old newspaper archives that some of these deals are paying like 25% broker commissions. These were the
Cory Cleveland (00:38:06):
Days where you'd reach into a file cabinet and just throw out some share certs. It was just, you could sign a share cer on the spot.
Tommy Humphreys (00:38:14):
I don't think that there's something about his mental health that I think is really interesting about the story. And I didn't know him and I don't want to say it, but he, I guess, admitted to having a bipolar condition. And so he would lose money on a deal or something. He would go into these despairs and he wouldn't be active in the market, and then he would kind of come out into this high mania and was able to whip up a frenzy into these deals. And a big group of people were sort of latching onto him as the engine and profiting from that mania. And the good things that he did was he got risk capital to Helo and Eske Creek and two incredible goldmine discoveries were the result of his deals. But I think that the other 58 a year were not working out.
(00:39:08):
And it was a joke to the Toronto establishment into the Forbes magazine came and called it the Scam Capital of the world, but Peso was the engine of the business, and I think a 25 or 30% of the daily volume was his deals. And he would come and get everybody going, and if you were close to him and the action you could win. But I think a lot of these were messes. And Ned Goodman, who was a Toronto institutional money manager, has him got into trouble with other investments and had to sell his control position in the helo discovery to Ned. And then Ned sort of set him up with a expiration company called Prime Resources, which would fund other little juniors and that had the Esk Creek find. And so then Ned controlled that and got that as well. And he, PSIM was not somebody I knew or anything, but very interesting character who certainly nobody like him now, but if the eighties, it's a gambling mecca.
(00:40:14):
It's venture, it's venture stocks, it's high risk. High risk is putting it lightly. If somebody's doing 60 deals, it's beyond and paying 25% cost of capital. It's beyond high risk, right? It's a gamble, but it's like at that time, maybe I wasn't here, but at that time, maybe it was the equivalent of these alt coins that people are speculating on now. These at least were asset backed to an extent. There was a project or something, but now people gamble with billions of dollars on alternative cryptocurrencies that are just Ponzi by design, but people love 'em, bid them up. And so I guess before there were Ponzi coins that people to gamble on, more of that money went into the Canadian venture market. The Canadian venture market has moved. I think it's a little bit more institutional than it used to be, but still it's a dumpster fire with occasional exceptional outcomes. Probably not the best place for investment capital, but a gambling, again, in a place, if you're going to have an edge, if you want to get deep and sophisticated, you can win. Well,
Cory Cleveland (00:41:29):
There's certainly some who have and with very reputable means, it seems. When it comes to the culture and the characters of some of the groups who put these deals together, how would you characterize, how would you explain that? And for example, I asked this as it seems that there's only a handful of groups who come together to do some of the biggest deals on our exchange, on the venture on the TSX. How would you describe these groups that put these deals together?
Tommy Humphreys (00:42:03):
I don't know if it's just a handful. I think there are hundreds that try. And I remember a quote from
Cory Cleveland (00:42:10):
Lucas, I'll certainly try. Yeah,
Tommy Humphreys (00:42:12):
Lucas said, it's a very big gate, but you have to let them try. Right at the top of the industry, food chain is the Lundine group who are looking for advanced stage assets with huge scale that they talked about it, Luke talked about it with your podcast. And Lund's, their projects are bigger and they are ambitious and they use the public company method, but they're also qua, they're controlled by the family, backstops them. And so they have huge skin in the game and they make their money when shareholders do long-term to builders and developers. And I think that's where the model is best, that where it best shines. That's the best example of it. And their group today, which the Sun's run, I think is still the best example of what it can be.
(00:43:16):
Other leaders in the market, Ross and Russ Beaty, I'm thinking about, and Richard Wark and Frank Ster, they are not millennials, they're not young, those people. It's a combination of discoveries and developing projects and hopefully getting the timing right. There are so many people who try and bring projects together and state ground or acquire an old project, try to get a company going, and when the commodity's going, there can be perverse incentives, just incentives that the L, they own so much of the company, they're only selling when the company is sold. But in a public venture company, you have this secondary market. So if it means the incentives can be to sell out early, and so a lot of people see it as a means to get something floated and get it funded, and it doesn't have to be sold at the end of the day for the early investors or promoters, whoever, to make money, which is the negative of the business.
(00:44:35):
I don't know how the exchange tries to address that with escrows and disclosure stuff, but it's imperfect. I think the reason why Penny Stock Finance grew is because these resource projects were so capital intensive and they needed a large pool to gather money from. As an investor, I'm Advisory Committee of Meridian Mining, and I thought, this is a real project, and I liked the people and they seemed to be going to the end on the story. And so I overruled my instinct, which was, Hey, the stock just ran from 10 cents to a dollar 25, you could take your profit. And I didn't sell, and it's 40 cents today, but the project keeps getting better, but the market sentiment changes. So because you're dealing with this manic market and you need to stimulate a market as the CEO to get access to new money at reasonable terms, it's kind of crazy.
(00:45:42):
And so the CEOs that do the best are the ones with the most of their own money or the best access to capital. You find people that are just like Robert Friedland for example. He's a multi-billionaire, but he's always in boardrooms pitching investors around the world every day. And it's very tough for everybody else to make one of these venture sustainable. It needs so much money, and it's such a long-term proposition. It's broken, it's backwards in so many ways, but until a better way presents itself, it seems like it's been the model for a hundred plus years. And I don't see a better way to do it. I mean, if projects were just privately funded, certainly the investor class would be smaller. But then you see something like cobol, the AI exploration company backed by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, and it's supposedly got a billion market cap doing exploration around the world, and should all the exploration finance be private? I don't know. This is the way it's done, and I didn't invent it, but I see that when you connect the lending kind of values and access to capital and focus on scale and stuff, the rest of the participants would do well to try to be like that. But there is only one lundine, right? They have the technical people and the balance sheet. And so it's just very hard.
Cory Cleveland (00:47:13):
Yeah, it is messy. It's exciting. I think it's world renowned. We do, our markets bring very, I think, reputable companies from all over the world to access the capital in a form public venture capital. And I also, I like to see the comparison between Silicon Valley as an example, like Andreesen Horowitz or Sequoia Capital as the biggest VC in the world. Some of arguably that's the lundins when it comes to exploration and development. Not so much exploration, but development of these
Tommy Humphreys (00:47:48):
Huge, that's the Freedland and the
Cory Cleveland (00:47:50):
Yeah, yeah, the Freedland, the, I dunno, OGs terrible term.
Tommy Humphreys (00:47:56):
I dunno how old he's, he's 72 or 74. He seems kind of ageless,
Cory Cleveland (00:48:01):
Really,
Tommy Humphreys (00:48:02):
But somebody that drills that many holes. There's only one person that I know of that is young and drilling a lot of holes, and it's Zach Flood and he's the CEO of Kenner Land Minerals. And his father actually worked with Robert Freeland and was around with the Oyo Togo discovery. And I met Zach in high school and he was a very different, very intelligent, soft-spoken kid and became a geologist, worked in the Congo, and he is an explorationist and he wants to make discoveries. He made a discovery, and Quebec looks really good with Sumitomo. His company's kept a royalty. He's drilling everywhere on all these partner funded, these prospect generators. And he's been really good operator with his company, and I am a shareholder of it. But the next Robert Freeland is the guy that drilled the holes for 10 years or 20 years or 30 years everywhere. Ivan Hole mines $25 stock or something like that from 50 cents eight years ago. But in 2016 when it was 50 cents, he'd already been in Africa for 20 years with it. And that Plat Reef, those things started in the nineties. And the endurance is just incredible.
Cory Cleveland (00:49:24):
That dedication, the perseverance and the fact that I think a lot of us look at this and say their overnight successes when in this case, it's not even five years for an overnight success, it's 10 20.
Tommy Humphreys (00:49:37):
No, it's like 30. Yeah, it's like 30.
Cory Cleveland (00:49:40):
What an industry.
Tommy Humphreys (00:49:42):
Yeah. Well, who has the patience for average investors is going to stick around that long. But then again, I went to the Robert's presentations when he had a 60 cent stock and he said, this is my cost base. And he was basically saying, pounding the table. There was a time when you could recently when you could have made life-changing investment on it. And I bought at that time a lot of stock in Ivanhoe under a buck 50 and a buck. And I wish to say I had the patience to hold on because I didn't. Four bucks seemed like a huge win from a dollar. And then it's 25 now, but eight years is an eternity for a young person when so many of the things you're don't work when something does. You have this bias to sell it. And training to let the winner ride is so hard knowing which one to let ride. In Robert's case, he's like, he's the founder of the private company, he's going with the deal. And I am not that I am not strong enough to do what he's done for 50 years. Just raise money, take risks, keep going, never stop moving.
Cory Cleveland (00:50:54):
That's what I keep coming back to. It is these individuals who can do this are, they're like otherworldly in their ability. You make a really good point too about their physical strength and fitness. There's something about their energy, which it's remarkable. Tell we've gone through an hour and I could keep going and I want to ask a few other questions. I
Tommy Humphreys (00:51:19):
Told you there there'll be no way you get me under an hour. Just talk too much then.
Cory Cleveland (00:51:25):
It's very cool. It's a really neat way to get to meet people, as you know. But I want to ask you about the books behind you. What do you have there? What stands out? What have you most enjoyed been most influential on you?
Tommy Humphreys (00:51:37):
There's so many books. This is just a random three books on my pile. Okay, thou Shall Prosper. This book is about why. It's a rabbi describing why members of the Jewish community are good business people. Fascinating. And that was fascinating. This was called Family Fortunes. It's about the guy who founded Agora and writing about how if you want to have a family fortune, you cannot spend the money just like a random interesting read. But I just like reading everything. And then this one obviously is like, it's the famous Lundine book. Oh, wow. Yeah. So I've always read about personal finance and business biographies, the story that inspires me the most. Here's a bunch of just mining books like the tech founder's book, Helo Free Gold, the story of Canadian Mining Gold and Giant Other Helo. And this was the Stephen Roman book, which very politically charged. It's a negative book about Roman, but I still found it super interesting.
Cory Cleveland (00:52:40):
I love that piece. He wrote on the big score about Roman walking into, I forgot the prime Minister office. And he's like, you
Tommy Humphreys (00:52:46):
Son of a bitch, his slow back accent, you son of bitch, what a character. What a character. Yes. But my favorite story of all time is hands down, this man named Jimmy Goldsmith. And I wrote about him once. The story was called How One Man came to own 49% of the world's largest gold miner in 1990. He owned 49% of Newmont. And the Goldsmith story, I originally saw it, he had died in 1997. And when I was a web designer, I was writing about web design and I found Goldsmith's website somehow. And he had a mausoleum website and it was ahead of its time. You'd go to the website. It was like there was a trust that was administering his brand online after his death. So I said, this is a mausoleum website, this is the rich status thing. And it was cool. And so it had his quotes and his success, and they've subsequently updated it.
(00:53:49):
So that was where I first learned about this guy. And then I continued to read or hear about it and finally read one of the books about him. But he, for 15 or so years, maybe even 20 years, has been the most inspiring to me. And it's hard to sum it up, but he was a tall, charming man with blue eyes. And he was a guy that before he had success, he spent like he did, which is kind of a classic kind of promoter trait, but he had the best of everything. He had the belief that he would succeed from a young age. And when he was a child, he was at boarding school and he would trap first for extra money and he caught a pelt and escaped the school. And his parents found him at, I dunno, eight years old at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City.
(00:54:40):
And he was just an irascible gambler and business person. And then something happened and he fell in love with a girl who happened to be the richest tin miner's daughter. And he was famous around the world as one of the world's richest men. And then the father forbade the marriage. They ran away. And when he was 19, he became a media sensation. It was like the runaway love story, and the media were following them, and they got married, they had a child, and the wife died while pregnant and the child survived. And so he was like 20 years old, and he's hated by this wealthy family that he's had the baby with the wealthy family tried to, he says kidnap the kid. There was all these disputes. And so he had to start business to prove himself. And it's such a long story, but there are a hundred things that happened to him after the age of 20 where he ended up one of the tycoons that was part of the private equity movement at the 1980s of buying companies and stripping the assets.
(00:55:46):
And he was an incredible speaker about capitalism. And he had this moment where he went to Congress and spoke about how corporate raiders are good for the system, they're eliminating disease in these companies. And he was just so well-spoken and powerful and forceful, charming. And he did this couple incredible deals in the eighties where he borrowed a billion dollars at 18% interest. It was completely all in to buy a forestry stock that made matches and things. And then so he buys this company and he spins off the assets and pays down the debt, and he's left with the largest timber holding in the us. He did that twice and then he swapped the timber for the 49% block of Newmont. But it was just like this man was so at risk for so long and to care. So a billion dollars in 1982. I don't know. Was this 10 or 15 or 20 at 18% interest when the books, it says it was double or quits,
Cory Cleveland (00:56:50):
Throw around billions back in the eighties would be a millionaire. But that is a ton of money.
Tommy Humphreys (00:56:57):
He became $2 billion guy in the eighties, but he just spoke about capitalism so well, and he lived this crazy story. There were things about him that he said, when you marry your mistress, you create a job vacancy. So he had this life that was Playboy life where he had one family living in Paris and another family in England, and he was a womanizer and carried them all openly. So like I said, I come back, I am not Jimmy Goldsmith. I am not trying to have three families and take this kind of risks, but he was so smart and irascible, and I find myself after 20 years of following him, got another book about him and even more details and learning and just like, I just have this endless well of inspiration from Goldsmith, even though I'm nothing like him. But that's why I like history is just if he was alive today, I'd be trying to interview him because he's just he. So he had what I wanted, which was the ability to speak and status and stuff. And anyway, he was very funny and had a fun life story.
Cory Cleveland (00:58:05):
There's an irony in your statement there that you do have that.
Tommy Humphreys (00:58:08):
I don't have this, I don't have
Cory Cleveland (00:58:12):
This. That's part of the game we're in, but it's, wow. I just wanted to share if they're of interest to you. I read Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, Henry Ford, and then Elon Musk is interesting that over pretty much a 300 year basis from Franklin to Musk, they all shared very, very similar attributes and views on the world. Some of them notably being a disdain for lawyers and bankers. Really a very articulate view of capitalism, of what it is and what it's not. I love Henry Ford's view on capitalism and how it can create so much purpose. And then the other was a warning against the military industrial complex to use a new age term, but a warning against those who profiteer off war. And I saw that in these three biographies, 300 years apart. I just thought it was really interesting.
Tommy Humphreys (00:59:07):
All right. It's interesting that you brought 'em together. I've never read about Ford. The Franklin one I found really impressive. His story was amazing. Going to England and building the printing presses and writing, and his thing is his routine and his drink, not to dullness, eat, not to fullness and all that stuff. I feel like he was character,
Cory Cleveland (00:59:28):
Special,
Tommy Humphreys (00:59:29):
Special guy, but that you link them all together. Yeah, I mean, Elon Musk is a pretty special guy. Some media person who's writing about these people. I feel like Musk gets so much attention. It's like, how do I add to that story?
Cory Cleveland (00:59:42):
I would agree with that. Yeah.
Tommy Humphreys (00:59:44):
Yeah. I was in the room with Musk once. Oh, wow. I didn't talk to him, but the day that he closed the Twitter purchase we were visiting, we got a tour of the star base thing,
(01:00:00):
And afterwards we went to a small restaurant that was playing live music and he was clearly fried. The Twitter deal had happened and he was working all night on building rockets for Christ sake. And he came into this restaurant and sat with his brother, and we were sort of at the next table and I went, it was such a modest restaurant. You ordered your sandwich at the cash till. And I was in line with, he was right in front of me and I saw him in this crazy moment, but he seemed like somebody who had the world on his shoulders and wanted to be left alone a little bit was just sitting and listening, trying to decompress. That's as close as I'll forget.
Cory Cleveland (01:00:43):
And another individual all risk. It's very fascinating. I want to be respectfully your time. Any final thoughts? We've really weaved all over the place. I didn't expect some of the areas, I found others very insightful. Any final thoughts for our audience?
Tommy Humphreys (01:00:59):
Yeah, I would just say what you think about is very powerful, and if your thoughts become obsessions, you can make things come to reality that are both positive and negative for you. And I just leave you with be very careful what you think about.
Cory Cleveland (01:01:21):
So true. Tommy, I'm really happy we finally connected. Thank you so much.
Tommy Humphreys (01:01:25):
Me too, Corey. Thanks for having me, man.
Cory Cleveland (01:01:28):
Thanks for listening to this episode of The Insiders Guide to Finance. If you enjoyed what you heard, please share this with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit as well. You can also subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or the Play Store. Your support there is really appreciated for future episodes. If there's a question, topic or specific person you'd like me to interview, feel free to reach out. You can connect with me on LinkedIn or through my website@creativereturn.ca.