By Dan Ferris in DailyWealth:

If you sat down to dream up the perfect mining investment, it would look like what Pierre Lassonde did with a tiny company called Franco-Nevada...

Lassonde and his partner Seymour Schulich formed Franco-Nevada in the early 1980s. Its sole purpose was to acquire more natural resources royalties than any other company on Earth.

Most people hear "royalty" every now and then in relation to the Beatles or Michael Jackson owning royalties on catalogs of hit pop songs. All royalties share a similar attribute. All royalties get you a share of the revenue without having to own a piece of the business. As a business, holding royalties is a lazy man's dream come true.

A natural resource royalty is acquired by investing money in a potential mining project. In return for putting up cash early in the game, the royalty investor earns a slice of a mine's cash flow when it starts producing. Acquiring royalty interests is one of the all-time great businesses...

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