Get “Lab Gold Is Coming (This Is the Real Trap)” research report for free

The companion research report to Felix Prehn’s video, prepared by Goat Academy Research. Enter your email address and the report opens immediately.

An 8-page research report on the claim that a company can turn mercury into gold by nuclear fusion, and why the arithmetic says it cannot matter. The physics is real: nuclear transmutation has been done since Rutherford in 1919. The economics are not. Enriched mercury-198 costs about $15,000 per milligram while a milligram of gold is worth about 14 cents, so the raw material costs more than 100,000 times the value of the gold it could produce; no commercial fusion reactor exists anywhere on Earth; the company's own best case is 2 to 5 tonnes a year against 3,500 to 4,000 tonnes mined, a tenth of one percent; and the output would be radioactive and unsellable for 14 to 18 years. The report then dismantles the diamond comparison: De Beers controlled around 85% of rough supply and manufactured its scarcity with a 1947 advertising campaign, so when lab-grown diamonds arrived wholesale prices fell 90 to 95% and the parent company wrote down close to $7bn, whereas gold's scarcity is geology, not a boardroom decision. It looks at who is actually buying (central banks, at a record pace, the institutions that print the money), measures inflation in hours worked rather than currency, reads the current pullback in gold, silver and the miners against the 1970s and 2008, and describes the heartbeat pattern in the large producers and royalty companies versus the silver and rare earth names that are still falling. It closes with three rules in plain English. It is an educational explanation of a mechanism, not a recommendation to buy or sell anything.

Goat Academy is an online financial education institution founded by economist and former investment banker Felix Prehn.