Disseminated on Behalf of: New Orleans Investment Conference

• The 51st New Orleans Investment Conference, the longest-running, fully paid investment conference in the world, takes place November 2–5, 2025, at the Hilton New Orleans Riverside.
• Its intensive programming will address many major asset classes, with a focus on precious metals and mining, and provide actionable insights delivered by marquee speakers.
• Presenters include Matt Taibbi, Mary Katherine Ham, Rick Rule, Peter Schiff, Brien Lundin, and many more.

A river runs through it

In the 1830s, as towns and ports both down and upriver of New Orleans were booming due to trade, passenger travel, and agricultural sector expansion, navigating the Mississippi’s wild currents, fog, storms, shifting sandbars, and propensity to overflow its banks required an experienced steamboat captain.

Steamboats were hugely expensive investment vehicles, but if capably managed, they could drive high returns transporting both goods and people along the river and its many tributaries. Unfortunately, inexperience in the pilot house could result in a ship being punctured by submerged tree trunks and drifting logs, exploding from a boiler being pushed beyond its limits, running aground and sinking, or being carried miles inland during rapid flooding, where it could be trapped on plantation lands and abandoned as a derelict wreck.

While the “Big Muddy” is not as dangerous as it once was due to extensive modern engineering and flood control infrastructure, navigating today’s turbulent investment waterways has never been riskier and demanding of skilled piloting. The speed and volume of financial information, misleading data, noise and signal confusion, absence of advice, confirmation bias, and a myriad of other dizzying factors can be just as threatening to a portfolio as snags, shallow waters, rocks, floating debris, and collisions were to those steamboats of yesteryear.

That’s why, in its 51st year, the 2025 New Orleans Investment Conference will once again gather the most sought-after market analysts and geopolitical commentators in the world to fulfill its continuing mandate. Namely, to provide attending investors with the kind of market intelligence and insightful recommendations that will enable them to continue to skillfully pilot their investments through the murky, hazardous waters of macroeconomic volatility and constant global change.

Tomorrow’s headlines, sooner or later, have always been revealed at this event. … The next year’s biggest winners are always to be found in our exhibit hall.

—  Brien Lundin, CEO of New Orleans Investment Conference, and President and CEO of Jefferson Financial, Inc.

Legacy of a gold bug

James U. Blanchard III (1943–1999) founded the New Orleans Investment Conference in 1974, mainly to teach U.S. investors how to invest in gold. Since then, it has expanded to become a multidisciplinary gathering of the world’s foremost authorities on investments, economics, and geopolitics, providing delegates with diverse insights and discriminating, actionable advice.

Blanchard was a legendary, maverick businessman and activist whose personal and political battle with the U.S. government to legalize the private ownership of gold was a pivotal factor in President Gerald Ford finally signing the bill that repealed the more than 40-year-old ban (also in 1974), restoring Americans’ rights to ownership of gold coins, bars, and certificates.

Blanchard’s indefatigable commitment to free-market capitalism, liberty, and sound money still resonates today through the conference’s sessions, panels, and workshops.

Brien Lundin, President and CEO of Jefferson Financial, Inc., is the man who bears the weighty responsibility of ensuring that the conference lives up to its founder’s vision of being the world’s greatest investment event.

The company produces the annual conference, as well as the monthly Gold Newsletter (also founded by Blanchard in 1971), which is the oldest precious metals and stock advisory in publication, and arguably the most respected.

Lundin is the publisher and editor of the newsletter and chairs the four-day conference, eponymously named for the vibrant host city he enthusiastically rates as the most exotic location in the continental U.S.

Looking back, Lundin fondly recalls the start of his relationship with Blanchard 40 years ago, when he became a junior copywriter at the businessman’s coin and bullion company.

“I was a new kid on the block, but Jim and I hit it off right away,” said Lundin of his friend, mentor, and eventual colleague.

Over the years, and as Lundin’s experience progressively grew, he came to run Blanchard’s operations from 1990 until his premature passing in 1999, with Lundin subsequently increasing his stake beyond that of a minority shareholder by acquiring the rest of the company from the late businessman’s estate.

“He was one of my best friends in the world and we were very close,” said Lundin. “While his passing was a huge loss for all, his legacy has left a lasting impact on the industry.”

A wealth of knowledge and experience

Over the decades, the conference has expanded to include the analysis of a full spectrum of popular investment opportunities, including stocks, bonds, mutual funds, tangible assets, clean energy, currencies, healthcare, precious metals, oil and gas, real estate, technology, options, and futures.

The speakers at the 2025 conference comprise investment bankers, entrepreneurs, executives, financial writers, money managers, portfolio advisors, analysts, authors, commentators, commodities traders, journalists, regulators, podcasters, and publishers. Past luminary speakers have included the likes of Margaret Thatcher, Milton Friedman, Norman Schwarzkopf, Ayn Rand, and Alan Greenspan, to name a very few.

In recent years, Lundin has focused on building out a deep bench of sector experts and geopolitical commentators, with many of them presenting annually, or every few years, and with others attending even without a spot on the dais, just to be part of the annual reunion of contemporaries. He says the encore appearances uniquely allow attendees the added advantage of hearing an individual’s evolution of thought and theory within their particular discipline as trends, events, and global developments unfold, as opposed to just hearing somebody give a one-off speech.

“We have Matt Taibbi speaking again, and I believe he is the most important journalist of our generation and has been on the leading edge of exposing the assaults on free speech,” said Lundin. Taibbi is the author of four New York Times bestsellers and is also an award-winning columnist for Rolling Stone. His most recent book is entitled Hate, Inc.

“And we have just re-signed Mary Katherine Ham, who has a biting wit that gets right to the heart of any matter,” said Lundin. Ham is an American journalist and a highly sought-after conservative commentator.

Other well-known personalities in this year’s conference lineup include Rick Rule, Danielle DiMartino Booth, Brent Johnson, George Gammon, Peter St. Onge, Viva Frei, Robert Kiyosaki, Peter Boockvar, Jim Bianco, Mike Maloney, Jim Iuorio, and Peter Schiff, to name just a selection of the more than 40 luminary speakers who will be presenting, many of them interacting with attendees offstage as well.

“There are a lot of things happening today, especially economically and fiscally, that have never happened before and are not normal,” said Lundin, referring specifically to interest rates being at 5,000-year lows, the rise in quantitative easing, and U.S. government ownership of equities in companies. Lundin will be speaking at the conference himself.

“When we live in extraordinary times, I find that there are extraordinary people that rise to the fore to explain those times, wave the warning flags, and give sound advice on how people can protect themselves, and those are the kinds of presenters I work to bring in for our event,” he added.

Intellectual energy and camaraderie

On the attendee side, Lundin says his conference delegates are active, high-net-worth, discriminating, intelligent, self-directed, and asset-rich investors.

“I open the conference every year by urging attendees to not only listen to the independent experts from our stage, but also to their fellow delegates because they’ve all been very successful navigating volatile markets and unprecedented events,” said Lundin.

He adds that the intellectual energy of the delegates is one of the real values of the conference and that the attendees have started to trend younger in recent years as well.

“They are up to date on current events, and while they may have traditional investments and managed money in the mainstream, they are also maverick investors with a predilection toward some alternative investments like gold, precious metals, monetary metals, mining stocks, crypto, and the like,” said Lundin. “The delegates anchor the conference’s fun and vibrant atmosphere, they have great camaraderie, and they are all willing to share their ideas and perspectives with one another.”

Lundin also says that the kinds of trends attendees monitor, and his speakers address, are ones that eventually—and the majority of the time—prove that they were on the cutting edge.

“Tomorrow’s headlines, sooner or later, have always been revealed at this event,” said Lundin.

The dense conference programming starts early at 7:00 am and runs until 8:00 pm, featuring a mix of general sessions, panels, workshops, corporate presentations and discussions, multiple one-on-one meetings, social exchanges and receptions, and an expansive exhibition hall for attendees to evaluate market-leading investment opportunities, including those presented by the smartest of the junior mining companies, according to Lundin.

“The next year’s biggest winners are always to be found in our exhibit hall,” he emphasized.

During his early 1970s campaign to reverse the gold ownership ban, James Blanchard III hired a plane to fly over Richard Nixon’s second inauguration, trailing a banner saying, “Legalize Gold,” and also dared the U.S. Treasury Department to throw him in jail for having possession of a two-ounce gold bar smuggled in by a friend from Canada.

He would be proud that his spirit of pushing the envelope, calling out absurdities wherever they present, and embracing free-market capitalism, lives on through his conference to this day.

To learn more, or to register for this event, visit 2025 New Orleans Investment Conference.