Greetings Gambler Contrarian,

This is The Next Big Rush, your daily drop of mining/energy investing news. Where we come together and realise we're all wrong, until we're all right.

Here are the smarty points:

🤓 PI and Echelon Merge

🤓 EU To Produce 10% Of Critical Minerals

🤓 PDAC Wrap-Up

🫶🏼 PI and Echelon Merge

Echelon Wealth Partners Inc. and PI Financial Corp. - two well-known full-service brokerage houses in Canada - plan to merge, creating one of Canada's largest independent wealth managers.

The deal comes after record-breaking years at the Vancouver-based PI. The merger will result in an investment advisory, wealth management, and capital markets company that manages over $12 billion in client assets and has a greater national reach with offices across Canada.

The combined company will have about 550 employees, including 210 investment advisers and more than 80 capital markets staff. The companies expect to become the country's second-largest capital markets franchise not owned by a major bank, after Canaccord Genuity Group Inc.

The companies will have common ownership as of April 1, pending regulatory approvals. They will be run independently until a plan to amalgamate their operations is complete in early 2024.

The new company will have a new name that has not yet been announced. Financial terms of the transaction are secret, which means everyone will hear through the grapevine soon.

😎 EU To Produce At Least 10% of Critical Minerals

The European Union plans to establish a central agency to purchase critical materials such as lithium and rare earths, and will compel member states to accelerate the permitting process for new mines and processing plants, according to draft legislation.

The Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) aims to guarantee the EU's access to materials necessary to achieve the bloc's target of becoming net-zero in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

The CRMA will establish a new agency, the European Critical Raw Materials Board, to coordinate action, with the goal of producing and processing at least 10% and 40% respectively of strategic materials by 2030.

The EU hopes to reduce its dependence on China, which supplies approximately 95% of the bloc's rare earths. The CRMA also aims to streamline permitting and access to financing for certain strategic projects, and could result in the creation of potential strategic stockpiles. Sellers of critical minerals in the bloc will be required to display an environmental footprint.

The draft CRMA is due to be publicly released on March 14, but there are leaky leaks (which we could not verify so take it with a pinch of salt, lime and tequila):

🫠 PDAC Wrap-Up

23,819 attendees later, here we are, PDAC wrapping up with a great big party, because that’s always the case... and what an intriguing but overall successful year.

Through the weather complaints from folks who couldn’t fly into Toronto due to the snowstorm and wishing for the jolly 2022 edition that took place in the summer, there was a sense that work is getting done.

Highlights:

-> Lots of news have been centered around government changes (it’s become a strong trend here on TNBR for the last week). The theme is clear: critical minerals /metals and lithium.

-> Busy enough in the south building, but talks had very little participation everywhere.

-> Country-specific talks attended mostly by folks from said country also noted.

-> Perhaps the strongest point of agreement is that virtually everyone who was there was part of the industry - it was essentially a B2B event with low retail turnout.

-> We did get a sense that there were generalist deep pockets interested in getting into the biz. Hopefully we’ll have more to report soon.

Final verdict: not absolute depth of despair, nor frothy. Good value to be found.

Meme of The Day

Happy Speculating,

The Editor

DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.