James Hickman

James Hickman is an international investor and financial writer who has argued, since he began publishing as "Simon Black" in 2007, that Western debt and currency debasement would push capital toward gold, silver, and other real assets. He founded the research firm Sovereign Man in 2009 and wrote its free daily letter, Notes from the Field, before dropping the pen name in 2023, when Sovereign Man combined with the SchiffGold group to form the research firm Schiff Sovereign, of which he is co-founder. His coverage of monetary trends, central banks, and precious metals gives resource investors a macro framework for why metals and mining stocks move.

A West Point graduate and former US Army intelligence officer, Hickman has spent more than 25 years building and investing in businesses across technology, agriculture, and banking. He warned for years that record government debt and money printing would end in inflation and bank failures; as Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in March 2023, he wrote that "if SVB is insolvent, so is everyone else… including the Fed." His Strategic Assets research service profiled a precious metals mining company in April 2025 that, by the firm's published account, rose tenfold in nine months, and says it advised readers to take profits days before silver's record 40% single-session drop in early 2026. Those performance claims are self-reported rather than independently audited, but the research itself is public.

Hickman's method starts with the fiscal numbers: debt issuance, interest costs, and foreign appetite for US dollars. He argues that de-dollarization — countries settling trade outside the dollar — will keep central banks buying gold and eventually reprice it far higher; in a 2023 essay he calculated that if even 20% of China's roughly $900 billion annual trade surplus went into gold, "we could easily see a $5,000 gold price." His mining research then applies strict value criteria: profitable, often dividend-paying companies with clean balance sheets, bought at deep discounts — the miner above was picked up a second time at "just 4x forward earnings" (the share price against expected next-year profits).

For a resource investor, following Hickman is a study in connecting fiscal policy to metals prices: how deficits feed debasement, why central bank gold buying builds a floor under the price, and where profitable mining equities fit in that chain. His current focus is de-dollarization — falling dollar reserves and the dollar's shrinking share of SWIFT transfers (the bank-messaging network that clears cross-border payments) — and finding overlooked, cash-generating companies in gold, silver, energy, and agriculture. He is also a research publisher — Schiff Sovereign sells subscriptions to the research whose calls it reports — so readers should weigh that when judging published track records.