Gold is hitting all-time highs again this week, so we’re going to focus on something a little new and different in the gold market for your Friday File.

That doesn’t mean we should all be loading up on gold right now, of course, there’s always risk in buying what is most popular… but I’ve allocated some of my portfolio to gold for more than 20 years, and over time it has helped to smooth out some of the rough spots without hurting my overall returns (and sometimes, like 2011-2012, it has kept me sane). There’s a reason why gold has been valued by human beings for thousands of years, and is still seen as “money” by much of the world.

This recent enthusiasm for the yellow metal seems to come from a combination of “the world is ending” fear and “the Fed will cut rates even more” excitement, and we obviously don’t know what the future brings — but I do think it always makes sense to own some gold. Given the surge in gold prices, today my portfolio is about 10% allocated to gold — roughly 7% in physical gold, and the rest in gold equities, mostly gold royalty companies.

So it probably won’t surprise you to know that the stock which caught my eye this week was, yes, another gold royalty company. But it’s one I don’t think I’ve ever written about before.

If you don’t know what I mean by “gold royalty,” it’s fairly simple — there are a handful of gold mining companies in the public markets which don’t actually mine gold. They’re really financiers, not diggers — they buy or otherwise acquire a piece of the top-line production of a gold mine, and therefore earn a percentage of everything that mine produces from that particular plot of land, usually in perpetuity.

The advantage of financing over mining is pretty obvious — because they have exposure only to the top line production, with usually no share of the costs of a mine, they don’t have to worry about how much the mine costs to build, or what the price of diesel might be, or what labor might cost. Royalty companies have very few employees, and very low costs — they hire a few dozen people to oversee the portfolio, look for new royalties to acquire, and then just sit back and collect their share ...