Royalty stocks: Elemental's Emergence

Well positioned for more growth or a quick buyout

Hot business models usually evolve in the following way: First, the original players in the field attract a lot of new capital, raising their valuation dramatically. Then new companies start forming to cash in on this sudden notoriety and are bid way up by the “generalist” investors who flood in to chase the trend.

Then it starts to dawn on the new players and their investors that in their rush to gain a foothold, they may have overpaid and are unlikely to do as well as they’d hoped. At which point one of two things happens. Either the whole sector enters a correction and the weakest players fail (as in the dot-com boom/bust of the early 2000s) or the bigger players, still flush from their success, step in and buy up the suddenly vulnerable newcomers.

This second scenario is now playing out in the royalty/streaming space, with most of the companies that formed in the past decade being snapped up by majors or merged with other newcomers. Here’s a partial list of junior royalty companies that have disappeared recently: