Interview #109 : Matt Geiger (MJG Capital)
Investing in natural resource equities
For this issue we have the pleasure of interviewing Matt Geiger from MJG Capital.
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Hi Matt, thanks so much for taking the time out to do this interview.
My pleasure, Jon. I appreciate the opportunity to share a bit about myself and MJG Capital.
Can you please tell readers about your background, and how you got involved in investing?
Funny enough, I purchased my first stock while in the fourth grade at the encouragement of my teacher at the time. I can’t quite explain why – as there are no professional investors in my family – but I was immediately captivated by financial markets and have been investing ever since.
I attended the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania as an undergraduate. Perhaps in part due to my upbringing in Silicon Valley, I am entrepreneurial by nature and launched two separate ventures during my sophomore year in 2011.
The first was a tech company that has since raised over $200 million in venture capital and continues to this day. I served as the company’s co-founder and president through early 2018.
While the business and industry could not be any more different from what we invest in at MJG Capital, this experience as a founder – both in terms of operating a business and raising the necessary capital – informs my interactions with management teams in my capacity as an investor.
The second was the MJG Capital partnership, which is now going on fourteen years since inception. MJG Capital is an open-ended investment fund focused exclusively on natural resource equities, with a heavy skew to the junior end of the market.
Investments include explorers, developers, producers, and royalty companies with exposure to precious metals, energy metals, industrial metals, agricultural minerals, and carbon credits.
We hold a concentrated portfolio of only seventeen positions currently, with investments initiated either via private placement or on the open market.
Why did you decide to launch MJG Capital? And what attracted you to solely focus on natural resource stocks?
I’ll answer those in reverse, as I get the “why natural resource stocks” question often. It’s understandably confusing why a millennial who grew up in the heart of Silicon Valley would be focused on this specific niche of the market. There are a few disparate factors that led me here.
The first is that my formative investing years occurred during the Chinese-driven commodity supercycle in the early 2000s and, frankly, bull markets are great fun.
There are few industries more cyclical than natural resources, due to the extremely capital-intensive nature of the business and the lengthy lead times to bring new supply online. And when the going is good, it’s really good – with fortunes made in relatively compressed time periods. The inverse is of course also true if one does not get their timing right.