The Pick
The “Mini-Buffett” tease in Porter Stansberry’s Royalty Riches leads to a short list of capital-light royalty owners, and the anchor name is Franco-Nevada, ticker FNV. It is the largest precious-metals royalty company in the world, with a market cap near $45.5 billion and a share price around $231.57 as of mid-August 2026.
Franco-Nevada owns royalties and streams across hundreds of mines and projects. It never operates a mine, which is the point. Stansberry’s thesis is that this is the most capital-efficient way to own gold, because the company collects top-line revenue while operators like Barrick Gold carry the cost of digging.
Why It Leads the Pack
The bull case starts with the founding story. In 1983, Pierre Lassonde and Seymour Schulich launched the company, and its first deal, a 4 percent royalty bought for about $2 million, became Barrick’s Goldstrike mine, a stake often cited as a roughly 500x return. The promo leans on claims like millions of ounces of gold locked in far below market prices and a 2000 percent plus return over 19 years.
There is a real business underneath the legend. Royalty owners like Franco-Nevada hold up when commodity prices slip, because their cost base is tiny. They can idle into lower profits rather than collapse the way a high-cost miner can.
What to Watch
The risk is concentration, and it has a name: Cobre Panama. That mine delivered more than 20 percent of revenue before closing in 2023, and its shutdown still weighs on results. The stock also trades near 38 times trailing cash flow, so you pay a premium for the model. See the fuller picture in our Franco-Nevada explainer and our gold royalty stocks comparison.
Ready to see the research? Click here to access Porter Stansberry’s report.
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