The 2026 Rule Symposium on Natural Resource Investing was recently held in Boca Raton, Florida, from July 6 to July 10, 2026. Hosted by legendary resource investor Rick Rule, the premier event brought together industry insiders, executives, and analysts to explore trends in precious metals, uranium, and critical minerals.
The event is a junior/mid-tier mining and resources investment conference with the roster split between actual mine operators/explorers and the financiers, royalty companies, and dealers who service that ecosystem.
Rick Rule’s team interviewed every single exhibitor ahead of this year’s 2026 Natural Resources Investment Symposium:
Seabridge Gold’s Rudi Fronk says his prefeasibility economics on the KSM project show an after-tax NPV “north of $30 billion” against a company trading around $3 billion — “we’re trading at about 10% of our NAV.”
Skeena Gold & Silver’s Walter Coles is rebuilding the legendary Eskay Creek mine into a project with an estimated $7 billion NPV at spot prices against $565 million of upfront capital.
Vizsla Silver’s Craig Parry described drilling “44 meters at 8.2% copper, including 24 meters at 9.22% copper” in Alaska days after burying colleagues killed in Sinaloa.
First Majestic’s Keith Neumeyer, the man who coined “triple-digit silver” back in 2012, is refusing to sell into today’s prices — the company closed 2025 with $938 million in cash and more than 60 million ounces of gold and silver held back in the vault.
Agnico Eagle, Aya Gold & Silver, i-80 Gold, Osisko Development, New Found Gold, Dundee Corp, Sprott Wealth Management, Battle Bank, and dozens more names ahead of Boca Raton.
Deep Dive
The following is a deep dive into Rick Rule’s pre-conference interviews.
Precious Metals Miners & Developers
Neil Woodyer of Aris Mining
Neil Woodyer of Aris Mining has run this build-and-buy playbook before: starting an advisory shop in Vancouver 40 years ago, he later co-founded Endeavour Financial with Frank Giustra, converted it into Endeavour Mining in 2008, and exited a company now worth roughly C$20 billion. Five years ago, he started again with Aris Mining in Colombia, putting together an $85 million financing for Caldas Gold’s Marmato mine that took over management and the board, then rolling in Grand Colombia’s high-grade Segovia operation, which runs “11, 12 gram material.”
Aris now owns 100% of the Soto Norte project after buying out Mubadala’s stake, and expects to expand Segovia from 200,000 to 300,000 ounces a year by year-end while Marmato ramps toward a combined 500,000 ounces across the two mines next year. Reserves stand at “9.3 million ounces of reserves at 6.1 grams,” with a Ghana project (250,000 oz/year, roughly $800 million to build) in prefeasibility.
Woodyer says the company is self-funding, with “about 470 million of cash” and roughly $400 million a year of cash generation, enough to finish construction without external financing en route to a targeted 1 million ounces of annual production.
Scott Berdahl of Snowline Gold
Scott Berdahl of Snowline Gold is a Yukon-born prospector-turned-MIT geologist whose family staked and optioned more than 1% of the Yukon’s surface area during the 2010-2012 rush, then rebuilt Snowline from the data left behind when that capital dried up. The bet paid off with the Valley discovery, now standing at “7.9 million ounces measured and indicated” at 1.2 g/t plus another 0.9 million ounces inferred, anchored by what Berdahl calls “the highest grade, highest strip-adjusted grade of any pit on the planet” — a 2.9-million-ounce, 2.3 g/t starter pit with a strip ratio of just 0.1-to-1.
The company’s PEA, engineered on a $1,950 gold price but modeled at $2,150, produced a $3.4 billion Canadian NPV at a $1.7 billion capex; run at spot prices, Berdahl says that NPV balloons to “about an 11.4 billion” Canadian dollars against a market cap of roughly $2.5 billion — a 4.5-to-1 value-to-market-cap ratio comfortably clearing the 2-to-1 minimum capital-efficiency bar Rule cites from fellow financier Jonathan Goodman.
A prefeasibility study is underway, with further upside from step-out drilling and untested depth extensions on the broader 40-by-60-mile district Snowline still controls.
Paul Huet of Americas Gold and Silver
Paul Huet of Americas Gold and Silver is a 40-year narrow-vein miner with a track record worth noting: he took Klondex up roughly 500% versus the GDXJ before selling to Hecla for $740 million, then turned Rye/Karora’s Australian assets — bought for about $60 million — into a $1.3 billion exit, an 800% relative return. A year ago he took over the Galena Mine district in Idaho’s Coeur d’Alene belt, acquiring Eric Sprott’s 40% stake, and the stock is “up about just over 1300% compared to that index” since.
In twelve months, the team has made eight new discovery zones, including “3.4 meters of 983 grams” at the 34 vein — roughly twice last year’s average mined grade of 470 g/t — while growing measured-and-indicated-plus-inferred resources across the district to “about 220 million ounces,” excluding the newly acquired Crescent Mine, which historically ran at 1 kilogram per tonne.
Huet has personally put 89% of his net worth into the stock and just eliminated $85 million of debt in a single week — converting Sprott’s silver stream into equity and retiring a Royal Gold stream — leaving the company sitting on $100 million in cash as it works toward a targeted 5-10 million ounces of annual silver production.
Keith Neumeyer of First Majestic Silver Corp.
Keith Neumeyer of First Majestic Silver Corp. is the entrepreneur who co-founded First Quantum Minerals in 2004 before pivoting into Mexican silver, buying distressed assets from bankrupt families like Peñoles and Grupo México when “there was no one there” after the 1998-2002 mining bear market. The origin deal was almost comic: told there might be “300 million ounces” of silver at La Parreal, Neumeyer had his partner Ramon phone the owners and wire $3.5 million on the spot, taking the mine from purchase to production within months and producing 25,000 ounces in its first year, 2004.
First Majestic hit a 10-million-ounce annual production goal by 2010 and now produces roughly 31 million ounces a year. Rather than sell all of its silver at what Neumeyer calls depressed prices, the company — whose CEO coined the phrase “triple-digit silver” back in 2012 — is stockpiling metal: it ended 2025 with $938 million in cash and more than 60 million ounces of gold and silver held back in its vaults, a position he said had grown further by the end of Q1 2026.
Neumeyer, now 40 years in the sector, handed the CEO title to longtime executive Manny Alvaji on January 1, 2026 while remaining chairman.
Shane Williams of West Red Lake Gold
Shane Williams of West Red Lake Gold specializes in restarts — he previously bought and turned around Eldorado’s Lamaque project into a cornerstone asset — and applied the same “love hate” contrarian approach to the twice-failed Madsen mine in Ontario’s Red Lake district. West Red Lake and early backer Frank Giustra picked up Madsen from Sprott Resource Lending for roughly C$6.5 million cash plus a 1% NSR and shares (about C$40 million all-in) on an asset that had previously absorbed “over $350 million Canadian dollars” of construction capital plus $170 million in tax losses — north of $500 million in sunk value, complete with permits, a mill, and tailings infrastructure.
The project carries 1.7 million ounces of resources at roughly 7 g/t, and the company’s nearby Rowan project adds another 400,000 ounces at about 8 g/t. Madsen restarted commercial production in January 2026, is tracking toward roughly 40,000 ounces this year, and Williams targets 50,000-60,000 ounces of nameplate capacity by 2027, with a longer-term “hub and spoke” plan to consolidate high-grade satellite deposits around the Madsen mill toward 150,000 ounces within five years.
Despite the asset base, Williams notes the market cap has “come off quite a bit” to around C$320 million, well below where junior gold developers have re-rated.
Javier Reyes of Luca Mining Corp.
Javier Reyes of Luca Mining Corp., 47, has spent 27 years mining in Mexico and named the company after his daughters Luciano and Camila, with his holding company KO as Luca’s largest shareholder. The strategy: buy fully permitted, undercapitalized Mexican assets sidelined by social-license or funding problems and turn them around. Flagship Campo Morado in Guerrero, a VMS deposit abandoned by Nyrstar after a “$2 billion blow up,” was picked up for roughly “$20 million US” alongside over $60 million in assumed liabilities, and now holds close to 3 million gold-equivalent ounces; the second asset, Tahuehueto in Durango, adds roughly another million ounces.
After a five-year turnaround, 2025 was the inflection year — over 10,000 meters drilled, 60,000-plus gold-equivalent ounces produced (roughly 60% gold/silver, the balance copper and zinc), $25 million cash on hand at year-end, and most of the original $60 million in liabilities retired. Q1 2026 added another $10 million of cash to roughly $36 million, with 15,000-plus ounces produced and no equity raise since September 2024; Reyes expects the company debt-free by the end of Q2.
With $25 million earmarked for exploration over the next few years, the plan is to push toward a 100,000-ounce run rate this year and ultimately a 200,000-ounce producer by replicating the model on additional distressed Mexican assets.
Daniel Henao of Mineros S.A.
Daniel Henao of Mineros S.A. co-founded a value-investing shop after the gold-price correction roughly 12 years ago, which eventually led to a 2023 deal — brokered after CIBC flagged a Latin American banking family divesting a 30% stake in a “200,000 ounce Latin American gold producer” — that gave his group control of Mineros, a 52-year-old miner listed on the TSX only since early 2022. Since taking over, the share price is up “about 10 times” while the company kept paying dividends and buying back stock, yet Henao says it still trades at only “two to two and a half times... trailing EBITDA.”
Mineros operates century-old, still-producing mines in Nicaragua (140,000 ounces last year, the platform’s largest) and Colombia (about 90,000 ounces), plus a new Chilean asset. Q1 2026 gold output rose 22% and silver 109% year-over-year, driving record quarterly revenue of about $300 million, adjusted EBITDA of $154 million, and a cash-and-bullion position over $200 million; full-year 2026 guidance is 233,000 gold-equivalent ounces.
Growth catalysts include a 40% processing-capacity expansion in Nicaragua, the near-fully-permitted Pontenegro (Porvenir) polymetallic project — a PFS-stage asset with a 38% IRR, $200 million capex and $460 million NPV at $1,300 all-in sustaining cost — and an 85-kilometer exploration program drilling at under $100 a meter, including a recent hit of “8 meters at 17 grams per ton” connecting its two Nicaraguan mines. Management’s stated target is 500,000 ounces by 2030.
Benoit La Salle of Aya Gold & Silver
Benoit La Salle of Aya Gold & Silver is a tax accountant by training who stumbled into mining in 1994 on a pro bono trip to Burkina Faso, co-founded SEMAFO with “$60,000 in the bank” and 18 exploration permits, and rode it to a $3.5 billion market cap and six discoveries before selling to Endeavour in 2019 — a trade he says returned shareholders “up to 60 times their money.” He’s applying the same playbook at Aya in Morocco, where the company holds first-mover ground across an 800-square-kilometer, 1,600-kilometer-long unexplored belt.
Flagship mine Guemassa (referred to as Gundere) is Africa’s largest silver mine and just posted Q1 free cash flow of “$70 million US,” with 2026 company-wide free cash flow guided at “200 to 300 million.” The second asset, Boumadine, is finishing a revised PEA and feasibility study La Salle calls tier-one: $440 million capex for 400,000 gold-equivalent ounces a year over 11 years at a $900 AISC, with mineralization La Salle says carries “six times the horsepower” of Guemassa — construction starts late 2026/2027 for 2029 production.
The company survived a 2025 short-seller attack that knocked shares from $18 to $11 before they recovered to $29; this year’s exploration budget is roughly $60 million for 240,000 meters of drilling, following a track record La Salle pegs at “10 cents” per ounce of discovery cost on more than 600 million silver-equivalent ounces found to date.
Chad Williams of Honey Badger Silver
Chad Williams of Honey Badger Silver is a mining engineer and former top-ranked sell-side analyst who says he originated the streaming-finance concept later commercialized by Wheaton Precious Metals, went on to found brokerage Red Cloud Mining Capital, and now owns “almost 20%” of Honey Badger on a fully diluted basis. He took control of the then-shell company five years ago on a public call that silver would hit $100 (when it traded near $15) and has since assembled eight silver projects across northern Canada holding, by his estimate, “well over 500 million ounces of silver equivalent” — none of it discovered by drilling, since Honey Badger has “never drilled one hole,” against a roughly C$200 million-plus market cap.
The centerpiece is Prairie Creek, a fully permitted, 95%-built polymetallic mine and mill (built to that stage in 1982 by the Hunt brothers before silver’s collapse mothballed it), acquired for under 3 cents per silver-equivalent ounce versus peers trading near $23 an ounce; Williams expects the deposit to run roughly 50% silver, 35% zinc and 15% lead revenue, with newly identified germanium and tungsten credits as potential bonus economics.
Near-term plans emphasize non-dilutive financing (government grants), de-risking cash flows, and possibly limited concentrate production within a year to prove out the project, an approach Williams compares to the early playbooks of Silver Standard Resources and Pan American Silver.
Gerard Bond of OceanaGold
Gerard Bond of OceanaGold is entering his 30th year in resources, including 15 years at BHP across multiple countries and commodities before 15 years in gold, and he runs a $7.5 billion market-cap producer with four cash-generating mines: Haile in South Carolina (45% of this year’s output, up roughly 30% year-over-year at 25% lower all-in sustaining cost, guided to about 245,000 ounces and set to become the fourth-largest US gold producer), two New Zealand assets — Macraes (36 years in operation) and Waihi — contributing about 40% of production, and a Philippines mine.
Bond’s core valuation pitch is that OceanaGold trades at roughly 3.5 times enterprise value to cash flow versus a peer average near 7 times, despite one of the sector’s highest free-cash-flow yields; the company is debt-free with “$620 million of cash in the bank,” and last year allocated roughly 20% of operating cash flow to sustaining capital, 20% to growth, and returned about 40% to shareholders via buybacks and dividends.
Growth catalysts include the newly opened Wharekirauponga (WKP) portal in New Zealand — a maiden 1 million ounces at 9 g/t feeding an existing mill — plus recent strong drill results extending mine life at both Haile and WKP, and full life-of-mine permits secured for the Waihi North project within a single year of filing.
Richard Young of i-80 Gold
Richard Young of i-80 Gold started his career at Barrick in 1990 building out the Goldstrike mine in Nevada, later ran a mid-tier West African gold producer (Semafo) and did a turnaround at Argonaut, and now controls four past-producing Nevada gold properties shed by Barrick and Newmont after their own consolidation — already permitted historically, with known geology and metallurgy. i-80 currently holds “14 million ounces of gold” and “200 million ounces of silver,” split evenly across measured, indicated and inferred categories, and Young’s three-phase plan aims to take annual production from roughly 50,000 ounces today to “more than 600,000 ounces” over five to six years.
Following a recapitalization that leaves the company fully funded with no further equity needed, Young pegs the market cap at “less than a $2 billion,” against an after-tax NAV he calculates at “about $10 billion” based on existing PEAs at current metal prices — a gap he attributes largely to unrecognized value in the flagship Mineral Point deposit (a prospective 20-plus-year, 300,000-ounce-per-year mine akin to Round Mountain) and roughly $2 billion of remaining capex across all three phases.
A key near-term catalyst is the refurbishment of the company’s Lone Tree autoclave — one of only two permitted autoclaves in Nevada alongside Nevada Gold Mines — due to finish in Q4 2027 at a cost of “a little over 400 million” for an asset Young says is “probably worth a billion and a half dollars,” saving $1,000-$1,500 per ounce currently lost to third-party toll milling.
Sean Roosen of Osisko Development
Sean Roosen of Osisko Development is the dealmaker behind Canadian Malartic, which his original Osisko group bought for “$88,888 in 2003” and sold to Agnico Eagle for $4.1 billion in 2014, spinning off Osisko Gold Royalties (now trading at a $10-11 billion market cap) and Osisko Mining, sold to Gold Fields for $2.18 billion in 2024 — a track record Roosen pegs at “around $20 billion” of shareholder value created over two decades. He’s now running Osisko Development full-time since 2023, a roughly $1 billion market-cap company (NYSE/TSX: ODV) built around the Cariboo Gold project in central British Columbia, on the historic Barkerville gold system that produced about 5 million placer ounces in the 1800s gold rush.
Since its spring 2025 feasibility update, the company has raised “885 million US in equity and project finance,” leaving $350 million still to be drawn at a final investment decision expected this summer; the feasibility study shows a 200,000-ounce-per-year mine with an NPV of “roughly $3.2 billion” at $4,500 gold against phase-one capex of $653 million, on a reserve base of 2 million ounces plus another 3.6 million ounces of measured, indicated and inferred resources.
Final construction permits arrived in November 2024, an underground mine at 2.2 km with initial 4,900 tonnes-per-day throughput is under construction for 2028 production, and an 11-rig (scaling to 20) conversion and step-out drilling campaign is underway across a permitted mine envelope that runs to 1,500 meters depth, plus a new “Proserpine” target 4 km away on a system with 83 km of largely untested strike length.
Shawn Khunkhun of Contango Silver & Gold
Shawn Khunkhun of Contango Silver & Gold previously ran Dolly Varden, growing it from a $30 million market cap before merging it into the company now known as Contango, alongside assets including Homestake and High Gold’s Johnson Tract. Contango’s producing asset is the Manh Choh open-pit gold mine in Alaska, averaging 60,000 ounces per year of Contango’s 30% share (Kinross holds 70%, or 200,000 ounces annually), generating “on average, about $100 million of free cash flow” — with a $102 million distribution in 2025 and a projected $250 million next year at conservative gold prices.
That capital is funding the past-producing Lucky Shot project back into production by 2028 for a $50 million investment, adding another $100 million in projected free cash flow and taking output from 60,000 to 100,000 ounces. Johnson Tract, bought for roughly $37 million US, carries a “$615 million net present value” per a $7 million economic study on 1.1 million ounces at roughly 10 grams per tonne, with payback in “about 7 months.”
Contango trades around a “$700 million market cap” with “about $100 million in the bank,” only 33 million shares outstanding, and no planned dilution — yet at just a 0.3x NAV multiple versus a peer average of 0.7x.
John Florek of Emperor Metals
John Florek of Emperor Metals spent 35 years as a geologist, including as chief geologist at Detour Lake Gold from 2016 until Kirkland Lake’s takeout, before taking over Emperor to pursue two Abitibi gold projects 30 kilometers apart with a combined “close to 2 million ounces.” The smaller Lac Pelletier deposit holds 237,000 ounces with an existing mining permit for 1,000 tonnes per day (roughly 40,000 ounces annually, worth “$200 million” at $5,000 gold), targeted for production in Q1 2028, while flagship Duquesne West doubled its resource in 2025 from 727,000 to 1.5 million ounces and is targeted for “3 to 5 million ounces” with a PEA expected in 2027.
Florek walked through the math: market cap averaged roughly $30 million over the prior two-to-three years, now $43 million, against a gold price up “2.5 to 3x” and a resource doubling that alone implies $140 million of unrecognized value. One drill hole hit “21.7 meters of 35 grams per tonne” in the open-pit zone, and the company is drilling hole 46 of a 15,000-meter program at roughly $250 per meter all-in cost, under budget.
Florek also flagged over 20 million undeveloped ounces held collectively by Emperor, First Mining, and Stellar near New Gold’s Holloway mill as a potential consolidation target.
Ammar Al-Joundi of Agnico Eagle Mines Limited
Ammar Al-Joundi of Agnico Eagle Mines Limited laid out the company’s regionally focused operating strategy, explaining that unlike peers who “will go anywhere in the world to build a mine,” Agnico only enters regions with both long-term geologic potential and durable political stability, a discipline he credits for the company’s “onethird the turnover of our peers” in core operating areas like Quebec’s Abitibi region. Al-Joundi, a 28-year mining industry veteran and former Barrick CFO who succeeded Sean Boyd as CEO, detailed plans to grow Detour Lake from roughly 700,000 ounces to over a million ounces annually by adding an underground mine beside the existing open pit, leveraging mill, power, and tailings infrastructure already in place.
He described a similar buildout at the Malartic complex, where the original ore body was discovered in 1923, targeting growth from about 600,000 ounces to over a million by the early 2030s, which would make Agnico’s two largest Canadian mines two of only a handful of million-ounce producers in the Western world. He also flagged a new mine under construction in Nunavut expected to add 400,000 to 450,000 ounces, and a recent consolidation of three companies in Finland to control what he called the most prospective land package in Northern Europe near Agnico’s existing Kittila mine.
Al-Joundi argued the market systematically undervalues multi-decade mine life because net present value models “ignore all the cash flow generated after year 10 or 11.”
Caleb Stroup of Headwater Gold
Caleb Stroup of Headwater Gold described a hybrid prospect-generator model built around a portfolio of twelve Nevada exploration projects targeting high-grade epithermal vein systems, six held in partnership with majors including Newmont, OceanaGold, and Centerra, and six funded entirely by Headwater itself. A geologist by training who cut his teeth at Novagold in the mid-2000s before founding Headwater, Stroup said the company reserves roughly “a half a million dollars and $1.5 million” of its own capital to conclusively test high-conviction targets before deciding whether to retain, drop, or joint-venture an asset.
He pointed to Spring Peak in the Walker Lane, where drilling with Newmont hit a blind epithermal discovery beneath a barren alteration cap, and to a newly announced project called Jupiter with characteristics similar to the Merlin discovery, as evidence the company’s recently expanded generative team is restocking its pipeline.
Stroup put Headwater’s market capitalization at roughly $43 million against $7 million cash and no debt, with monthly overhead near $100,000 partly offset by $30,000-$40,000 in management fees collected from partners, and noted insiders own 28% of the company alongside Newmont’s 7% and Centerra’s 9.9% equity stakes.
Ian Bamborough of Saturn Metals
Ian Bamborough of Saturn Metals brings a Newmont pedigree to the Apollo Hill gold project in Western Australia, having cut his teeth as chief geologist at Newmont’s Tanami operations before turning to bulk-tonnage heap-leach development. Apollo Hill now carries a 2.24 million ounce resource, 86% measured and indicated, after roughly 80,000 metres of infill drilling in the past six months, with a positive PFS complete and a definitive feasibility study due this November or December.
At a conservative A$4,300 gold price the PFS shows production of about 106,000 ounces annually over a 14-year mine life, a capex of A$472 million (roughly US$300 million), payback in 2.3 years, a 51% IRR and an NPV just under A$1 billion — metrics that improve sharply at spot, where Bamborough says NPV runs “up to around 2.4, 2.5 billion” with sub-one-year payback.
Recent step-out drilling to the north returned “4 metres at 70 grams” of coarse visible gold, hinting at further resource growth ahead of the DFS. The company holds a mining agreement update with native title holders pending in the coming months, the last major permitting hurdle.
Tara Christie of Banyan Gold
Tara Christie of Banyan Gold grew up in a Yukon placer-mining family, trained as a geological engineer with a master’s in geotechnical engineering, and took over Banyan in 2016 because she already held the alluvial rights sitting atop what became the company’s AurMac project. The balance sheet is the headline: Banyan is sitting on “over $70 million in the bank” after closing a $46.5 million financing, funding a fully-paid 20,000-metre drill program this year and extending its runway “well through 2027.”
The existing resource stands at 2.2 million ounces indicated and 5.4 million ounces inferred, with an update due in the weeks before the Rule Symposium expected to show more defined high-grade zones rather than a large ounce increase. Christie points to Franco-Nevada’s recent purchase of a 6% royalty for $52.2 million, buyable down to 1% for $10 million, as the best third-party read on project value against Banyan’s roughly $650 million Canadian market cap.
Infrastructure is a genuine edge — existing hydro power lines, roads and cell service at the property boundary — and management believes AurMac can join the rare club of deposits with over 5 million minable ounces, with a PEA targeted for the second half of the year off a 70,000-metre 2026 drill program.
Jason Kosec and Jonathan Awde of Hemlo Mining Corp.
Jason Kosec and Jonathan Awde of Hemlo Mining Corp. paired a structural-geology track record — Kosec reinterpreted the Cote deposit before its $600 million sale to IAMGOLD and later built Integra Resources — with Awde’s capital-markets history founding Gold Standard Ventures (sold to Orla) and Dakota Gold, to take Hemlo off Barrick’s hands from under 32 competing bidders in what they call “the largest transaction in the history of the TSX Venture Exchange,” raising over $1 billion with backing from Bob Quartermain.
Hemlo has produced over 25 million ounces since discovery, and Barrick’s own technical report shows a 14-year mine life averaging about 140,000 ounces annually — a starting point the new owners consider underexploited: the mill runs at only 40% of its 10,000-tonne-per-day nameplate capacity, with a roughly $130 million investment plan to lift throughput from 3,800 to 6,000 tonnes per day. That technical report’s NPV5 of “$1.1 billion” was run at a $2,610/oz long-term gold price, well below spot.
A 130,000-metre 2026 drill program — one of the largest globally — underpins an updated technical report due mid-2027, backed by over $40 million of the management team’s own capital invested in the deal.
Matthew Allen of Andean Silver
Matthew Allen of Andean Silver brings a Perth-based resources background to the CEO role — 20 years in oil and gas ranging from single-well developments to mega LNG projects, followed by six or seven years across various mining commodities — and is now leading his first CEO role at a company built around the Cerro Bayo silver-gold project in southern Chile.
The asset carries more than 30 years of prior mining history and comes with a full operating process plant currently on warm idle, existing environmental permits, water access, and a local workforce already in place — infrastructure Allen calls rare to find paired with a pure-play silver resource of this scale, sitting within the Deseado Massif silver-gold belt.
Andean picked up the project in early 2024 for roughly “$4 million” during a distressed asset sale, when the company’s market cap (around A$150 million a year ago) roughly equaled the replacement cost of the infrastructure alone, effectively getting the silver resource for free. Since then, the resource has grown from an initial “25 million ounces of silver equivalent” to “111 million ounces of silver equivalent” after 30,000 meters of drilling, with a further resource update due this quarter. Market capitalization has risen to “$410 million Australian dollars,” backed by A$54 million in cash following a successful raise at A$1.85 in December, and roughly 54% of the register now held by institutions including Sprott, Equinox, and Scotia.
A feasibility study is set to begin mid-2026 and is targeted for delivery by mid-2027; Allen noted Australian listing rules prevent publishing a PEA-style economic study while the resource remains substantially inferred, but an internal scoping study has given management confidence in “a 10-year-plus mine life.” A 65,000-meter drill program over the next 12 months will split roughly two-thirds toward infill conversion of inferred to indicated resources and one-third toward expansion drilling, with four rigs having operated within 1.5 kilometers of the process plant for the past two years.
A newly approved second drilling district 10 km from the plant covers historic high-grade zones that fed the mill at “680 grams-plus headgrade” between 2002 and 2008 and has not yet been drilled, part of a broader roughly 400-square-kilometer land package. Additional permitting work is underway on the Trumao-to-Cerro Hill corridor, an 8-kilometer vein system with limited prior drilling, targeted for permitted drilling in 2027, ahead of a targeted mill restart around 2028.
Alastair Still of GoldMining Inc.
Alastair Still of GoldMining Inc. spent over 30 years at Kinross, Placer Dome and Goldcorp — including more than $10 billion of M&A work for Goldcorp — before taking the reins of a company founder Amir Adnani built by acquiring gold projects across the Americas when bullion traded “at in around $1,000” an ounce. With gold now above $4,500, Still calls the portfolio’s seven projects “in harvest mode,” highlighted by the San Jorge project in Brazil, near G Mining’s producing Tocantinzinho mine, and an April 2026 PEA on the Lamina project in Colombia showing a “$1 billion NPV” at a conservative $3,500/oz gold price.
Company-wide resources total over 13 million indicated and 9 million inferred gold-equivalent ounces against a market cap of “just under 400 million Canadian dollars” — a valuation Still notes is nearly matched by cash plus GoldMining’s equity stakes alone: a 74% interest in Nasdaq-listed US GoldMining and just under 10% of Gold Royalty Corp, worth roughly $800 million on a 100% basis.
With about $26 million Canadian in cash and the year’s programs fully funded, Still argues the core project portfolio is essentially being ascribed little to no value by the market.
Tony Reda of Tectonic Metals
Tony Reda of Tectonic Metals built his junior-mining resume as the second hire at Contango (formerly Konnex) Gold Corporation in 2005, helping raise $165 million, deliver the Coffee Gold discovery — now a 5-million-ounce resource — and take the company from a $5 million market cap to a $520 million sale. He has since grown Tectonic from roughly $10 million to about “$250 million market cap,” anchored by the Flat Gold Project in Alaska, 40 kilometres from the world’s fifth-largest undeveloped gold deposit.
The company just closed a $92 million financing that Reda calls possibly the largest single junior-mining raise for a company with no formal NI 43-101 resource, funding work at the primary Chicken Mountain target — 191 holes drilled with a “100% drill success rate” across more than three kilometres of a 6.5-kilometre structure.
Standout intercepts include “9.95 grams over 35 metres” that remains open in every direction, part of a bulk-tonnage, reduced-intrusion gold system with quartz veins running as high as 200 g/t. A maiden resource estimate is targeted for early 2027, followed by a PEA.
Joaquin Marias of Argenta Silver
Joaquin Marias of Argenta Silver is an Argentine-born geologist who spent 16 years tracking a silver project in Salta before bringing it to the Fura Group and Frank Giustra, forming Argenta in October 2024 and beginning drilling in May 2025 — a debut that vaulted the stock to number 30 on the TSX Venture 250 within a year. The project holds roughly 50 million ounces of silver, with the indicated portion at “45.3 million ounces of pure silver at 482 grams per ton,” on ground that’s been explored to only 8% of its potential after a year of work.
Marias pushed back hard on internet chatter about metallurgical penalties, noting historical recoveries of “93 to 96% recovery” and that after meeting with eight of the world’s largest smelters — including Boliden, Umicore, and Trafigura — in Europe last November, he learned the concentrate is actually “too high-grade” and would need blending, with penalty-level arsenic (0.4%) and unpaid-but-unpenalized antimony (1-2%) posing no real economic threat.
Infrastructure is already in place: a railroad, gas pipeline, high-voltage power line, and two solar farms all sit within roughly 20 kilometers of the site.
Keith Boyle of New Found Gold
Keith Boyle of New Found Gold is a 40-year mining engineer with eight development projects behind him, most recently Reunion Gold’s sale to G Mining, who came out of retirement to run the Queensway project in Newfoundland. Tight 5x5 meter infill drilling de-risked the high-grade core, where “75% of the ounces are in 25% of the tons,” and Boyle is targeting 100,000 ounces annually for the first three years at 10 to 12.5 grams per ton before scaling to 170,000-172,000 ounces a year — cash flow he pegs at “over $300 million a year” at $1,300 all-in sustaining cost, or “almost a dollar a share.”
The company’s acquisition of Maritime Resources brought the Pine Cove mill, which is being doubled to 1,400 tons per day and converted to gravity leach, eliminating the need for a separate Queensway mill. Boyle put the combined net present value at “2.8 to 3 billion dollars Canadian” against a capital cost “less than 200 million dollars.”
New Found Gold’s Eric Sprott remains the largest shareholder, recently joined by EdgePoint and Merk Investments in a $220 million debt-and-equity raise, with Sprott taking his full pro rata share of a 20% equity tranche.
Walter Coles of Skeena Gold & Silver
Walter Coles of Skeena Gold & Silver, a former UBS credit analyst who partnered with the late Ron Netolitzky in 2014, is rebuilding the legendary Eskay Creek mine, which produced “3.3 million ounces of gold and an astounding 160 million ounces of silver” at an underground grade of “2 and a half ounces per ton” before Barrick shut it down in 2008. Reconceived as an open pit, the project now carries 4.6 million ounces of proven and probable reserves (set to grow toward 6 million in a fall update), averaging 5.5 grams per ton in the first five to six years against a typical open-pit grade of “a gram, a gram and a half.”
Coles put net present value at spot prices at “approaching 7 billion” against upfront capital of “around $565 million US,” generating an estimated “1.1 billion a year of after-tax cash flow” — a payback of “just over six months.”
Skeena just closed a $750 million high-yield bond led by KKR and Bank of America at 8.5%, replacing costlier Blackstone/Orion financing, and is over 50% through construction with mill startup targeted for April 2027. The Tahltan First Nation holds a 1.5% royalty plus roughly 3.4 million shares, worth over “$100 million” at current prices.
Hugh Agro of Revival Gold
Hugh Agro of Revival Gold, a mining engineer who helped grow Kinross Gold “from 1.7 billion to 17 billion” before founding Revival seven years ago, is rebuilding two brownfield U.S. gold projects last mined when gold traded near $250 an ounce. Agro argues the projects’ existing infrastructure — energized power lines, paved roads, water systems, and at Bear Track an ADR processing facility — alone is worth “somewhere between 200 and $250 million,” effectively covering the company’s entire market cap before counting any gold.
Merger (Utah) holds 1.4 million ounces and a PEA contemplating 100,000 ounces a year, generating “$750 million” of net asset value at $3,000 gold and “$1.2 billion” at $4,000 gold, against startup capital of about “$210 million,” with a construction decision targeted for early 2028. Bear Track in Idaho carries a 4.6-million-ounce resource open at depth and along strike, with the first phase (1.1 million ounces, open-pit heap leach reusing the existing ADR plant) costing about “$110 million.”
Against a market cap of “about $250 million Canadian” and cash of “about 34 million Canadian,” Agro noted the stock traded near 40 cents a share at last year’s Rule conference.
Dr. Robert Quartermain of Dakota Gold Corp.
Dr. Robert Quartermain of Dakota Gold Corp. is the 50-year mining veteran who grew Silver Standard from a $2 million shell into a $2 billion company and discovered the high-grade Brucejack deposit, and he’s now applying the same “buy old districts nobody wants” playbook to South Dakota’s Homestake district — a formation that produced over 40 million ounces historically but has seen no exploration since 1996.
Dakota’s flagship, Richmond Hill, carries an SK-1300 resource of roughly 3.5 million ounces measured, indicated and inferred (2.6 million in the M&I bucket used for the pending prefeasibility study), envisioning a 17-year mine life producing about 150,000 ounces annually with minimal strip ratio since mineralization sits near surface. Nearby, the high-grade Maland project has returned 47 intersections averaging around 11 grams over 4 meters.
The company raised $75 million in a February bank-led financing (BMO and Scotia), bringing cash to roughly $105 million against last year’s $28 million spend rate — funding, Quartermain says, through 2026-28 permitting toward a targeted 2028 production decision and late-2029 first output. Two miles away, Coeur’s Wharf mine has produced 90,000-100,000 ounces annually for 40 years.
Rudi Fronk of Seabridge Gold
Rudi Fronk of Seabridge Gold has run the company for 27 years since founding it in 1999 when gold traded near $260 an ounce, building what he calls the largest undeveloped gold-copper project in the world by reserves and resources: KSM in British Columbia’s Golden Triangle. At current metal prices, KSM’s prefeasibility economics show an after-tax NPV “north of $30 billion” against Seabridge’s roughly $3 billion market cap — Fronk puts it plainly: “we’re trading at about 10% of our NAV.”
The scale is staggering — 100 million ounces of gold and 20 billion pounds of copper measured and indicated, rising to 180 million ounces and 47 billion pounds on a total-resource basis across 15 billion tonnes under NI 43-101. Seabridge has spent over $1 billion on KSM, including roughly $600 million recently on early-site construction that secured “substantially started” status, locking in permits for the life of the project.
A formal joint-venture process run by RBC has narrowed to a single preferred partner, with an announcement possible before Rick Rule’s July conference. Shareholders will also vote May 22 on spinning out the Courageous Lake asset (15 million ounces, $3 billion-plus NAV) into a new entity, Valor Gold, while the Bronson Corridor project has delivered a fresh 9.2-million-ounce discovery at Snip North.
Bradley Langille of GoGold Resources
Bradley Langille of GoGold Resources has built and sold Mexican gold and silver mines since 1997, including the Alamos Gold predecessor bought for $20 million and sold for $375 million, and now runs GoGold with a market cap of roughly $725-750 million against $270 million in cash and no debt. The company’s Parral tailings-retreatment operation already throws off $70-85 million a year in free cash flow, funding development of the Los Ricos district, which Langille frames as “a generational top-five silver district.”
Los Ricos South — a fully engineered, 70%-complete-detailed-design, 2,000-tonne-per-day underground mine awaiting its Mexican permit — carries an NPV near $1.4 billion at consensus pricing ($3,500 gold, $40 silver), rising toward $2.3-2.5 billion at spot; Los Ricos North adds another $1.8-3 billion, putting the full district NPV at $4.5-5 billion against roughly a $400-450 million enterprise value once cash and Parral’s own $200 million NPV are stripped out.
Build cost for Los Ricos South is pegged at $227 million, with first-18-months free cash flow after tax projected near $600 million. “That’s the $150 million question,” Langille said of the still-pending permit, which he expects “in the very near future.”
Base Metals & Critical Minerals
Keith Bodnarchuk of Cosa Resources
Keith Bodnarchuk of Cosa Resources built his career in the Athabasca Basin, spending nine years at Denison Mines on the Phoenix and Griffin deposits before joining Craig Parry at ISO Energy, where his team made the Hurricane discovery that “sent the share price from 30 cents to $6.” He later helped incubate Cosa under the Inventa Capital banner, listing in 2022, then struck a 2025 deal with Denison for 70% of three exploration projects — including Murphy Lake North, just 3 kilometers from Hurricane — in exchange for Denison taking just under a 20% equity stake.
In March 2026 Cosa hit uranium at Murphy Lake North, “5 meters of 0.55% uranium, a half a meter of 1.7% uranium,” a result Bodnarchuk notes sits at a shallow 250-260 meters versus 400-plus meters at deposits like McArthur River, and one that roughly doubled the share price.
The company holds just over C$18 million in cash, funding drilling into 2028 at roughly C$200,000 per hole (Cosa’s 70% share), against a market cap of C$75-80 million that is tightly held, with management and Denison together controlling more than a third of the stock.
Taylor Melvin of Ivanhoe Electric
Taylor Melvin of Ivanhoe Electric spent nearly 15 years at Freeport-McMoRan under Richard Adkerson and Jim Bob Moffett, including work on the Phelps Dodge acquisition, before Robert Friedland tapped him to run Ivanhoe Electric starting November 2022. The company’s flagship is the Santa Cruz copper project on 6,000 acres of private land near Phoenix — a rare structural advantage that limits permitting to state and county authorities rather than the federal process that has left the nearby Resolution deposit “28 years in permitting limbo.”
Santa Cruz’s PFS, run at $4.25 copper, produced an after-tax NPV of $1.4 billion against $1.24 billion of initial capital (roughly $20,000 per ton of capacity), with Melvin noting “every 25 cent move in copper equates to about $240 million” of NPV — implying over $3 billion at today’s roughly $6.35 copper. The mine plan holds 1.5 million tons of contained copper at 1.1% grade with average life-of-mine recoveries near 92%, plus an untested 1.5 million tons of adjacent primary sulfide and 2.7 million tons inferred at the nearby Texcoco deposit.
Beyond Santa Cruz, Ivanhoe is running its proprietary Typhoon geophysical technology in equity-linked exploration joint ventures with BHP in the U.S., Mubadala across roughly 50,000 square kilometers in Saudi Arabia, and SQM in northern Chile — against a market cap of “a little bit north of $2 billion.”
John Black of Regulus Resources and Aldebaran Resources
John Black of Regulus Resources and Aldebaran Resources is an exploration geologist who spent the first half of his career hunting copper for major miners before co-founding Antares Minerals roughly 20 years ago, discovering the Haquira deposit in southern Peru and selling it to First Quantum for about $650 million — “about a 10 bagger” for early shareholders. His playbook now: find elephant-sized copper-gold porphyries in the Andes, add value through drilling and studies, then sell to a major rather than build the mine himself, since “the average time from the discovery of a big copper deposit to when it comes into production is now about 20 years.”
Regulus’s flagship, Antakori in northern Peru, holds “a little over 500 million tons” of indicated and inferred mineralization at roughly 0.7% copper-equivalent grade, sitting alongside a neighboring deposit held by Southern Copper/Buenaventura that pushes the shared district total to “1.3 billion tons” — a brownfield setting Black says draws interest from “virtually every major copper or gold company.” Regulus trades around a $500 million Canadian market cap (TSXV: REG) with about $5 million cash, no further financing strictly required since drilling has stopped while the company pursues confidential district-consolidation talks.
Aldebaran’s Altar project in Argentina’s San Juan province, 80%-owned since a discounted 2018 acquisition, has grown to “over three billion tons at about 0.4% copper,” with a completed PEA showing $1.6 billion initial capital, $6 billion total capital, and a $2 billion NPV — modeled at $4.35 copper, a figure Black says would roughly double at today’s prices. Aldebaran (TSXV: ALDE) also carries a roughly $500 million Canadian market cap, with a prefeasibility study due mid-2027 and Argentina’s investment climate under President Milei cited as a tailwind drawing major-company attention across the country’s nine advanced copper projects.
Tim Coughlin of Royal Road Minerals
Tim Coughlin of Royal Road Minerals is an exploration geologist with 36 years across more than 25 countries, holding a PhD on how large copper and gold deposits form during Andean mountain building, who has been involved in discoveries exceeding 5 million ounces in Armenia, Peru, and Nicaragua. The Nicaragua deal is his proof point for the company’s model: Royal Road’s 50/50 JV with Mineros yielded the Kirribe grassroots discovery — found when a team member stumbled on float sample grading “about 3 grams per ton” and follow-up drilling returned “200-odd meter holes at 1.2, 1.3 grams per ton gold” — and the company exited its Nicaraguan interests for “22 and a half million US” against roughly “5 million US” invested, a 4.5x return.
Royal Road’s focus is now Colombia, where it holds what Coughlin believes is still the country’s largest title package at “1,840 square kilometers,” a mix of self-generated targets and a curated set acquired from AngloGold Ashanti in 2019 — ground Coughlin knows intimately as AngloGold’s former South American chief geologist — on which Anglo had previously spent “something in the order of $34 million.” The flagship GAM project is an evolving porphyry cluster where drilling has returned intersections “well in excess of 300 meters at over a gram, 1.1, 1.2 gold equivalent” (gold-copper-silver), with a defined cluster of three porphyries and the near-term priority being to drill a maiden resource at the primary target, Guinda.
AngloGold’s original interest in the district was reserved for systems with “5 million ounces potential” or more by definition, giving a sense of target scale, though a second tier of exceptional-quality assets along strike from Ecuador’s Cascabel porphyry remains difficult to access and dependent on political conditions following Colombia’s upcoming election.
Roger Lemaitre of Homeland Uranium
Roger Lemaitre of Homeland Uranium brings two decades of uranium-sector pedigree to the CEO chair, having started as a field geologist at Cameco’s Eagle Point mine in 2001, risen to run Saskatchewan’s exploration portfolio and later its global M&A team, then spent nine years running UEX Corporation until it was bought out by Uranium Energy Corp in 2022. Homeland, launched about a year and a half ago, controls two properties on the Colorado Plateau in northwest Colorado: Coyote Basin, where a February drill program “didn’t work out quite the way we hoped,” and Crossbones, the company’s new focus, which carries a historic resource of “45 million pounds... at.3%” and is believed to be open-pittable.
The thesis is to prove up conventional, non-ISR pounds — Lemaitre argues “it’s really hard to squeeze a million pounds out of an ISR project in a given year unless you’re in Kazakhstan” — targeting a million pounds a year for a decade using modern heap-leach and ion-exchange technology never before applied to conventional US uranium. The district has precedent: the nearby Maybell mine produced 5 million pounds historically.
Homeland has funding for its first Crossbones drill campaign but will need roughly two more field seasons and two-and-a-half to three years before a PEA-stage resource is defined.
Luis Azevedo of Bravo Mining Corp.
Luis Azevedo of Bravo Mining Corp., a geologist and lawyer who has mined in Brazil for 40 years and remains the company’s largest shareholder at “around 40% of the shares,” bought the Luanga project from Vale in 2020 in the Carajás mineral district. Since then, roughly 80,000 meters of drilling has expanded the resource from an initial 120 million tonnes at 1.2 g/t to “15.4 million ounces” of palladium-equivalent metal across measured, indicated and inferred categories, and Azevedo calls it “the largest undeveloped PGM deposit” outside Russia and South Africa, sitting on 240 million tonnes and still growing.
A PEA is complete and a PFS is due in Q3 2026; the base case (selling concentrate) shows capex of $495 million against an NPV of $1.25 billion, while a vertically integrated case — smelting on site inside a government-approved free-trade zone that exempts the project from capex and opex taxes — shows $688 million capex against a $1.8 billion NPV, with opex of $697 per ton against a $1,550 basket price. Those figures were modeled at platinum near $1,400 and palladium near $1,200, both since up over 25%.
A sulfuric-acid byproduct sells for roughly $500 a ton into Brazil’s agribusiness market, and 17 drilled geochemical anomalies point to additional IOCG-style copper-gold upside, with infrastructure — hydro power, sealed roads, rail, and a deepwater port corridor — already in place across the district.
Ned Jalil of Collective Mining
Ned Jalil of Collective Mining is a mining engineer with over 25 years of experience turning around underperforming operations for Kinross and Freeport in Arizona and completing construction of the Serrote mine in Brazil for CBMM Capital before joining Collective, dual-listed on the NYSE and TSX, with headquarters recently moved from Toronto to Miami. The company’s flagship is the Apollo system at its Guayabales project in Caldas, Colombia, a multi-element copper-gold-silver deposit that also hosts one of the first documented tungsten occurrences in the country.
With 120,000 meters already drilled and another roughly 80,000 meters planned this year, Jalil says the data supports “a deposit between 5 to 10 million potential ounces,” with a maiden resource statement targeted for the first half of 2027 and a longer-term ambition of a tier-one asset producing “over 500,000 ounces per year” for a decade-plus. Credibility comes partly from the team: chairman Ari Sussman, CFO Paul Begin and Colombia president Omar built Continental Gold from scratch and sold it for “over two billion Canadian” in 2020 — that asset, the Buriticá mine, is now Colombia’s top gold producer.
Collective ended Q1 with “over 100 million US dollars in the bank,” which Jalil expects to fund exploration and the string of scoping, PFS and feasibility studies ahead, with perhaps one further capital raise before a construction decision.
Guy Goulet of Cerro de Pasco Resources Inc.
Guy Goulet of Cerro de Pasco Resources Inc. is a geological engineer (Ecole Polytechnique, 1986) who has listed 11 companies, founded the first lithium-space listing on the Montreal exchange in 1995, and built Aya Gold and Silver (now a “3.5 billion market cap company”) before retiring for “one day” and taking on Cerro de Pasco. The company owns mineral rights to the historic tailings and stockpiles of what was, financed by J.P. Morgan in 1906, the largest gold-copper-silver mine in the world — 300 million tonnes extracted, only 75 million tonnes processed at roughly 60% metal recovery, with head grades of “4% copper,” “2 to 3 ounces silver,” “8% zinc,” and “3% lead,” leaving tailings “higher than the average of an underground mine on the planet” and already above ground.
A first drill phase on a 96-hectare permit came in close to expectations, and Cerro de Pasco has now secured an easement to extend drilling across an additional 180 acres, with 80 more holes starting by “the end of June” and a feasibility study — skipping a PEA entirely — targeted for Q3 2027.
Goulet disclosed a market cap of “about $450 million Canadian,” “$40 million cash,” a $5 million US government grant tied to gallium content, and $10 million of warrants held by Eric Sprott, with no company debt.
Sam Spring of Kincora Copper
Sam Spring of Kincora Copper is a chartered accountant and CFA who moved from banking into Ocean Equities (later Pollitt & Co.) before helping form Kincora, which pivoted in late 2014 from dilutive self-funded exploration to a prospect-generator model in New South Wales, Australia’s Macquarie Arc — a belt hosting a “160 million ounce gold equivalent resource inventory.” Partners have funded “over 20,000 meters of drilling” and “over $10 million worth of investment” plus “a bit over 600,000” in management fees, including an ongoing program with AngloGold Ashanti in a district where AngloGold and juniors have already spent “over $20 million,” and a new program at the Kobiln project on the Cobar belt.
Kincora’s technical team includes John Holiday, tied to the Cadia discovery (New Crest’s flagship, later acquired by Newmont), and Peter Leaman, known for the Reko Diq discovery in Pakistan.
Spring disclosed “about 48 million shares outstanding,” a market cap of “45 to roughly 50” million, “7 million in the bank,” insider ownership of 25%, and a further roughly 20% of the register locked up for 12 months from a recent North American financing.
Christian Easterday of Hot Chili
Christian Easterday of Hot Chili has spent 18 years building Costa Fuego on the Chilean coastline, a 1-billion-tonne, 85% measured-and-indicated copper resource at roughly 0.5% copper equivalent that ranks the company among the top five independent copper developers globally by scale, with a production profile of about 120,000 tonnes of copper-equivalent metal annually, nearly 100,000 tonnes of which is copper.
The past year’s news is the Leva discovery 30 kilometres south — a likely tier-one deposit that Easterday expects will “well exceed that bar of 5 million tons of contained fine copper and 5 million ounces of gold,” offering higher-grade open-pit material and a fresh leg of growth just as copper prices have “nearly tripled” the project’s post-tax NPV.
Less appreciated is Hot Chili’s water position: one of only two maritime desalination-water concessions granted in Chile in 22 years, secured after a decade-long application process, now a strategic asset in the parched Huasco region surrounded by undeveloped copper projects with no water access of their own. Management is targeting a revised PFS by year-end or early 2027, backed by recent drill results of “725 metre intercepts” and 60 metres at 1% copper equivalent.
Darren Gordon of Centaurus Metals
Darren Gordon of Centaurus Metals is a chartered accountant who started his career in Western Australia serving resource-sector clients, later became CFO of Jindalee Metals (a small gold project that was built, produced, and closed), and has run Centaurus for roughly 16-17 years — first as principal shareholder of a cash shell before building it around the company’s flagship nickel sulfide project in Brazil.
The Jaguar project sits in Brazil’s Carajás mineral province, an area with extensive existing infrastructure. Gordon describes it as “1.2 million tons of contained nickel metal,” calling it a genuinely large and well-understood deposit after “about 200,000 meters of diamond core drilling” since Centaurus acquired it from Vale, work that has taken the resource through to the measured-and-indicated category.
The economic case rests heavily on Brazil’s cheap hydro power — around “four or five cents a kilowatt hour” — which Gordon says makes Jaguar a bottom-quartile-cost producer able to compete with Indonesia’s laterite-dominated nickel supply regardless of where nickel prices sit in the cycle. A study completed last year showed a post-tax net present value of “about 735 to 740 million US” at an 8% discount rate against capital costs of “$380 million US” for more than 20,000 tons of annual nickel production. Gordon says once in operation, the project should generate “over $150 million US a year” at current high nickel prices, against a market capitalization of roughly “$250 million” — implying an approximate 18-month payback of the entire market cap.
The near-term catalyst is financing: Centaurus is working through debt and equity funding to support a final investment decision targeted for the end of September this year, having already received multiple debt-funding proposals “over 250 million US up to about $300, $320 million US,” alongside an initial offtake agreement with Glencore covering roughly a third of annual production. The company holds about “20 million Australian dollars” in cash — enough to reach a construction decision but not to fund the build itself — and recently hired a project director who previously built Ero Copper’s nearby Tucumã project for about “320-330 million US dollars” in 21 months, a template Gordon hopes to replicate for Jaguar’s planned 3.5-million-ton nickel float plant.
Stuart Gale of Meteoric Resources
Stuart Gale of Meteoric Resources built his development credentials at Fortescue’s early T155 iron ore project and later in lithium at Mineral Resources before joining the Caldera ionic-clay rare earth project in Brazil, drawn by “the grade and the scale” once he dug into the data. Caldera sits in brownfields territory with a century of mining history, full highway and grid infrastructure, and power sourced almost entirely from hydro.
The resource runs to 1.5 billion tonnes at over 2,300 ppm total rare earths, with a PFS reserve of just over 100 million tonnes at “over 4,000 ppm” — about four times the grade being mined in China and Southeast Asia’s ionic-clay operations today. On a $450 million US capex, the project is set to produce over 4,000 tonnes of NdPr and roughly 130 tonnes of the heavy magnetics dysprosium and terbium, around 5% of global supply.
At $110/kg NdPr the PFS delivered an NPV of “a little over $1.3 billion” with payback “in just over two years.” An installation license application lodged in March should clear by late September, opening the door to a final investment decision on a project Gale says is “at the leading levels” on both capital intensity and cost curve.
Amir Adnani of Uranium Energy Corp
Amir Adnani of Uranium Energy Corp started the company “over 20 years ago” as “an idea on the back of a napkin,” building it through what he describes as roughly 17 bad years and three good years in the uranium cycle by staying contrarian — making over a billion dollars of US acquisitions near cycle lows when uranium traded around “$20 per pound,” well below today’s roughly $85 level. UEC is now a “$6 billion market cap” company and the largest uranium miner in the US.
The asset base underpinning that valuation includes “over 500 million pounds of resources,” much of it assembled from ground previously held by Rio Tinto and Rosatom, with the majority already permitted — a distinction Adnani stresses since permitting alone “typically takes over a decade.” The company operates three fully licensed in-situ recovery processing plants (two currently producing) in Texas and Wyoming, and holds “over $800 million of liquid assets” between physical uranium and cash, with no debt.
Adnani highlighted UEC’s unhedged pricing position as a key differentiator: the company’s most recent uranium sale realized “$101 a pound,” compared to sector leader Cameco’s most recent realized price of “$64 per pound,” a gap he attributes to Cameco’s older long-term contracts dragging down average pricing. UEC’s production cost sits around “$35 per pound” using in-situ recovery, which Adnani calls the lowest uranium production cost in the country.
Operationally, the company began mining in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin about 15-16 months ago and just started production at its Burke Hollow project in South Texas after 14 years of development, with a third Wyoming mine currently under construction. Total capital requirements — capex and opex combined — over the next 12 months are projected at “over a hundred million,” against more than “400 million of cash” on hand, leaving what Adnani calls ample funding plus dry powder for opportunistic moves.
Adnani also outlined a vertical-integration strategy — combining mining with uranium conversion, mirroring the Chinese and Russian model — that he says no other US company is actively pursuing, framing it as essential given that the US consumes “50 million pounds of uranium annually” but produces “less than 2 million pounds” domestically, importing over 95% of its needs, including from Russia and China. He pointed to bipartisan political support for rebuilding the domestic nuclear fuel supply chain, plus demand-side interest from hyperscalers like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft investing in nuclear power for data centers, as new tailwinds distinct from the historically China/India-driven uranium growth story.
Aurora Davidson of Amerigo Resources
Aurora Davidson of Amerigo Resources is a chartered accountant who rose from CFO to CEO six years ago at a company she describes as “essentially a utility rather than a mining company.” Amerigo reprocesses copper tailings from El Teniente, the world’s largest underground copper mine, under a contract with state-owned Codelco dating to 1992, giving it decades of feed without exploration risk — Codelco’s disclosed mine life runs to 2085.
The financial engine is striking: Q1 2026 free cash flow of almost $15 million funded a base quarterly dividend (now 4 cents Canadian per share, doubled over four to five years) plus a record performance dividend of 16 cents Canadian tied to copper price upside, on top of ongoing buybacks. Davidson pegged the stock’s free cash flow yield at “7.7%” against a market cap that “just over a billion” Canadian dollars this year — a record that got Amerigo added to the COPPX ETF’s April rerating.
With paybacks measured in months and the company debt-free since last year, Davidson argues traditional NPV math understates Amerigo because, unlike depleting mines, “the valuation tail is ultimately worth as much as the whole.”
Jason Jessup of Magna Mining
Jason Jessup of Magna Mining spent six years at FNX Mining in Sudbury before founding Magna in 2016, modeling it on FNX’s run from its 2002 Inco asset acquisition to a 2010 takeover that delivered “about 4,200% return.” Magna now controls one producing mine — McCreedy West, generating cash flow since Q4 — plus four fully permitted past-producing mines (Levack, Crane Hill, Podolsky, and the open-pit Shakespeare project) across a polymetallic camp with seven payable metals including copper, nickel, cobalt, platinum, palladium, gold, and silver.
Because Sudbury already has two underutilized third-party mills owned by Vale and Glencore, Magna can restart mines without building its own milling infrastructure — McCreedy West has sold ore to both for 23 years under existing agreements. Levack, last operated in 2019, carries footwall zones “historically mined at 10% copper and 10 grams of platinum-palladium-gold” and a new discovery (the R2 zone) is being drilled now, with a PEA due Q3.
Jessup reported “$55 million in cash” plus $21 million in receivables from ore already sold to Vale, against a market cap of “right around $600 million Canadian.”
Ian Harris of Copper Giant
Ian Harris of Copper Giant, a mining engineer who cut his teeth on the Mirador copper discovery in Ecuador under Corriente Resources, is now applying the same Jurassic-belt thesis to Colombia’s underexplored Middle Cauca extension at the Makoa project. Copper Giant crossed a self-described threshold in November by pushing the resource past a billion tonnes at 0.51% copper-equivalent — grade Harris calls “one of the highest-grade near-surface deposits” in the belt — and is now compiling hydrogeological, geotechnical and metallurgical data to fast-track a PEA targeted for Q4 2026, timed to coincide with a new Colombian president taking office.
The company is drilling roughly 23,000 meters this year and has operated 18 straight months without interruption despite Putumayo’s historically difficult sociopolitical backdrop, a challenge Harris addressed by spending his first month on the ground “sitting in the plaza of Makoa” building local relationships.
Currently valued on a dollars-per-pound-in-ground basis “way lower” than peers, Harris says the company’s 2027 focus shifts toward NPV-based valuation as drilling continues to test whether the deposit can grow further.
Royalty, Streaming & Prospect Generator Companies
Alexandra Woodyer Sherron of Empress Royalty Corp
Alexandra Woodyer Sherron of Empress Royalty Corp brings a finance background — the Northern Miner, PwC’s mining group, and Endeavor Financial’s structured-finance desk in London, where she worked on more than $1.5 billion in mining transactions — to the royalty and streaming model she calls “one of the smartest ways of investing in the industry.” Co-founded in late 2020 with Endeavor’s David Rhodes to fill a gap in junior-focused streaming finance, Empress now holds four producing royalty/streaming assets in Peru, Mexico, Mozambique, and South Africa, plus one development and ten exploration assets.
The company generated “$17 million in revenue in 2025” and already “$9 million in Q1” of 2026, is debt-free enough to carry a $20 million credit facility, and is sitting on $19 million in gold, silver, and cash for redeployment. Sherron pegs the net present value of the four producing assets alone at roughly $100 million using $4,000 gold and $70 silver, against a market cap of “just under $100 million Canadian” — implying the exploration and development pipeline is essentially a free option.
She flagged active due diligence on new near-term producing and development-stage opportunities, including a recent trip to Africa, as the next 12-month catalyst.
Rajesh Sharma of Fancamp Exploration
Rajesh Sharma of Fancamp Exploration spent his early career at the Tata Group across India, Africa and Europe before 15 years doing mining M&A, JVs and development deals in North America, and he’s now unwinding Fancamp into two pieces. The exploration assets — mainly gold and base-metal ground in the Canadian Shield, including a New Brunswick district-scale project abutting Puma Exploration’s Kinross-funded ground and an Ontario cyanite target near Timmins — are being spun out into a new entity, Gold Era Exploration, by July 2026, with roughly 6,000 combined meters of drilling planned.
What remains in Fancamp is a “financial assets” vehicle Sharma pegs at “$50 to $60 million” in realizable value against a market cap of only “roughly 30 million,” including cash and securities of $23-28 million, a $40 million finite production payment from Champion Iron, a royalty on the Black Horse chromite deposit in the Ring of Fire, a newly acquired near-term-producing iron royalty expected to cash-flow in 2026, a 10% stake in EDM Resources (whose shares have run from “9 cents... to 60 cents”), and a secured promissory note with Canada Chrome Corporation in the Ring of Fire now extended to August 2027.
Sharma calls it a business trading “at a substantial discount to liquidation value” that also throws in the exploration spin-out “for free,” and notes insiders and board hold over 25% of shares, with recent additions including ex-Newmont/Triple Flag director Blake Rhodes.
Kody Penner of Nations Royalty
Kody Penner of Nations Royalty is VP of corporate development and employee number two since the company’s 2014 founding, a Tahltan First Nation member who previously worked at Teck Resources and served four years as vice chair of the Tahltan Nation Development Corporation’s economic development board before joining Nations Royalty full-time.
The company’s structure is its differentiator: it’s majority indigenous-owned, with the Nisga’a Nation of northwest BC holding “72%” of shares after rolling five existing impact-benefit-agreement royalties into the public vehicle in exchange for what was originally a 77% stake (diluted after a $15 million raise). The portfolio includes a royalty on Newmont’s high-grade Brucejack mine, where payments have grown from “around 70,000” to “1.2 million last year” as production and gold prices rise; a BC mineral tax interest on the Premier and Red Mountain assets, now owned by Cambria Mining after a $175 million recapitalization with an updated feasibility study due Q4; a 2% NSR on the past-producing Kitsault molybdenum project targeting 2029 restart; and, as the largest piece of NAV, a royalty on Seabridge Gold’s KSM deposit — “47 million ounces of gold, 7.5 billion pounds of copper in reserve” — which Penner frames as “a call option” on Seabridge itself.
Nations Royalty trades at roughly a “150 million market cap,” is approaching free-cash-flow neutrality as Brucejack payments and treasury interest grow, and is tightly held (72% Nisga’a, ~1.5% management), meaning any new indigenous-group partnership bringing fresh royalty assets into the structure could meaningfully tighten an already thin float. Penner says the company has spent nearly two years building relationships with First Nations across Canada’s top gold camps — the Abitibi, Red Lake, BC’s copper belts, Saskatchewan uranium country, and the Yukon — with “multiple talks that are very, very advanced” and a hope of announcing at least one new partnership this year.
Brian Dalton of Altius Minerals Corporation
Brian Dalton of Altius Minerals Corporation has run the company for “29 years,” since taking it public on the old Alberta Stock Exchange at a five-cent IPO price that raised $300,000 against an $800,000 market cap; today Altius trades in the “mid $50” range with a market cap “a little bit over three billion.” The royalty portfolio spans potash mines covering “about a quarter of the world’s potash production,” the Voisey’s Bay nickel-copper mine acquired in 2006, iron ore mines, an electricity-generation royalty business Altius pioneered a decade ago, and Lithium Royalty Corporation’s brine assets in Chile and Argentina.
Dalton projects revenue “tripling” by 2030 purely from operator-funded expansions already announced, calling that the “appetizer” before larger new mines start up after that. He cited a recent windfall: a $400,000 Canadian “grubstake” royalty funding decade-old exploration backing near Nevada Gold’s now-flagship discovery returned “just under 500 million Canadian” in proceeds for selling two-thirds of the royalty, with the remaining third still held.
Altius was “quite active” on its buyback last quarter, reflecting Dalton’s view that Altius shares are cheaper than acquiring external royalties at prevailing net present value.
Keith Henderson of Latin Metals
Keith Henderson of Latin Metals has a track record of turning small stakes into large exits: an iron ore deposit in Peru bought for about $300,000 and sold for “$100 million US cash” to a private Chinese buyer, and more recently, as CEO of Velocity Minerals, a deal to sell that company’s Bulgarian assets for $80 million Canadian — “two and a half times market cap” — to a private Turkish company, with proceeds slated for return to shareholders as a dividend or capital return.
Latin Metals itself runs a prospect-generator model across Peru and Argentina that Henderson says favors “asset level dilution over shareholder dilution,” with no need to raise equity this year and possibly not through 2027 or 2028. Past joint-venture partners have included Yamana, Newmont, Barrick and AngloGold Ashanti, and Henderson expects existing projects to be substantially partnered out by year-end.
The company also spun out a subsidiary, Latin Explorer, retaining a 6% interest while Latin Metals shareholders received 25% ownership on closing — a structure designed to let the company pursue more capital-intensive acquisitions without diluting the core prospect-generator vehicle.
Jason Attew of OR Royalties
Jason Attew of OR Royalties brings 30 years in mining across geochemistry and exploration, investment banking (advising on formative sector deals), corporate roles including at Goldcorp before its sale to Newmont, and CEO of South Railroad, sold to Orla Mining, before joining OR Royalties as president and CEO two and a half years ago.
Since taking over, Attew has simplified the business from a more complex “incubator/generator” model — buying development assets and retaining royalties, which required a larger team — into a pure-play precious-metals royalty and streaming company run by “just over 20 people.” He frames OR’s differentiation around four pillars: capital allocation discipline, a peer-leading organic growth profile, its cornerstone Canadian Malartic royalty, and peer-leading cash margins in safe jurisdictions, arguing the stock is undervalued relative to mid-tier and senior peers largely because it only has two years of track record as a pure-play entity.
Canadian Malartic, operated by Agnico Eagle, is the portfolio’s “crown jewel” — a 5% NSR royalty acquired as a byproduct of a 2014 hostile-takeover defense rather than through a normal auction process, giving OR exposure with no capital contribution or operating cost exposure. Official reserves put mine life to 2042, but Attew cited Agnico Eagle’s COO stating on a recent call that the underground Odyssey deposit could extend life “to at least 2060.” Other top assets include royalties on Éléonore and LaRonde in Quebec, Alamos’s Island Gold, a silver stream on Taseko’s Gibraltar mine in BC, and a royalty on Harmony Gold’s high-grade CSA copper mine in Australia — with over 75% of net asset value concentrated in Canada, the US, and Australia, and roughly 90% including Chile.
On capital discipline, Attew noted OR sat out most of 2025’s $9.3 billion of sector-wide royalty transaction volume, deploying only “25 million” of that total while peers like Royal Gold, Wheaton, and Triple Flag chased scale — instead going debt-free in September and raising its dividend “18%” in each of the last two years. Since early 2026 the company has closed four deals totaling close to half a billion dollars, including an $115 million, eight-royalty portfolio from Gold Fields anchored by a 1.5% royalty on Buenaventura’s San Gabriela asset in Peru, a doubled-down 1% royalty on the Nandini project in Ghana, and a $168 million royalty package including a 6% royalty on the Spring Valley gold project in Nevada. Attew said the existing portfolio is modeled to deliver “120 to 135” thousand gold-equivalent ounces by 2030, roughly 50% growth off the 2025 base, entirely from already-owned assets without further dilutive acquisitions.
Marc Bishop Lafleche of Ecora Royalties
Marc Bishop Lafleche of Ecora Royalties came out of Citigroup’s industrials M&A group in London before joining the royalty company in 2014, spending twelve years transforming it from a single legacy metallurgical-coal royalty into a diversified critical-minerals platform. He called 2025 “an inflection point,” the first year more than 50% of royalty income came from non-coal assets, with critical-minerals revenue growing from “less than 5 million in 2020 to approximately 36, 37 million in 2025” and a target of “well above 100 million at the end of the decade.”
Key growth assets include Voisey’s Bay, Mantos Blancos, and Capstone Copper’s Santo Domingo project, which is targeting a final investment decision this year, plus an early-stage NexGen uranium royalty in the Athabasca Basin. Bishop Lafleche disclosed the coal royalty (Kestrel) will see volumes fall roughly 50% year-on-year into 2026 before stabilizing lower through 2030, but that the company delevered from a peak of $130 million drawn debt back to its starting point within a year despite acquiring a $50 million copper royalty.
He pegged enterprise value at “roughly 550 million US dollars,” trading at “10 times EBITDA” and “0.6 times price to net asset value.”
Teo Dechev of Mundoro Capital
Teo Dechev of Mundoro Capital moved from investment banking — equity research, then M&A and corporate finance doing IPOs for juniors — into the prospect-generator model at Mundoro, where he’s spent 16 years. The capital efficiency case is stark: over the last four years, only “3 million” of the roughly “35 million dollars” spent exploring Mundoro’s ground came from Mundoro itself, with partners funding the rest, a roughly 10x leverage factor Dechev calls the model’s “secret sauce.”
Mundoro hunts big Tethyan- and Laramide-belt porphyry copper-gold systems in Serbia and Bulgaria, and its partner roster reads like a who’s-who of majors: current partnerships with BHP (which has “swallowed” its entire Serbian land package across five agreements) and Japan’s JOGMEC, plus past tie-ups with Vale, Freeport-McMoRan (which made the Čukaru Peki discovery via Reservoir Minerals), First Quantum, and Kinross.
At a roughly “45 million market cap Canadian” with “5 and 1/2 million” in cash, Mundoro is forecasting 2026 operator-fee revenue of $1.6-2 million against G&A running near $1.2 million annually.
Charles Downie of Eagle Plains Resources
Charles Downie of Eagle Plains Resources, a University of Alberta geology graduate who has spent 27 years at the company, runs what he calls a five-pronged model: exploration, prospect generation, a corporate incubator that spins out bundled projects, an in-house geological consulting firm, and a royalty book. Over 20 years, Eagle Plains has paid out roughly “$115 million” to shareholders via spinout dividends — a figure Downie confirmed “by far” exceeds total capital raised — while the company itself carries a market cap of “around 20 million” against “7 million in cash” plus owned real estate and equities worth roughly “$3 million,” meaning the market values the entire 100-project portfolio and 27-year track record at roughly $10 million net of cash.
Current catalysts include the Tudyone-area copper-gold porphyry project optioned to Sun Summit, and a six-project uranium option deal with Excite Uranium in Saskatchewan carrying a roughly $7 million 2026 budget across up to six drill programs.
Downie estimated third-party partners could spend “between 20 and 25 million” on Eagle Plains ground over the next year or two, while its wholly owned geoconsulting arm brought in “almost $2 million cash” last year.
John-Mark Staude of Riverside Resources
John-Mark Staude of Riverside Resources, a Harvard-trained economic geologist who cut his teeth at Kennecott, Rio Tinto, BHP, and Teck before founding Riverside in 2007, runs a prospect generator that has completed “over 85 projects” and spun out seven companies while keeping share count under 100 million after 18 years. Riverside claims over “$180 million Canadian” in third-party exploration spending across its projects, funded historically by strategic-alliance partners including BHP, Antofagasta, Kinross, and Centerra Gold.
Its signature move is monetizing spinouts back to shareholders: Staude said the company has “been able to give more than triple the value of Riverside out” through prior spinouts, with another one — Blue J — set to roughly double that again, citing Sable Resources’ predecessor Capitán Silver as a 10-bagger example (20 cents to over $2).
Riverside’s own market cap is “Canadian 22 million” against “$5 million cash,” an enterprise value of $17 million, with active partner-funded drilling underway with Questcorp in Mexico, a rare-earth partnership in British Columbia, and another spinout in the works.
Paddy Nicol of Orogen Royalties
Paddy Nicol of Orogen Royalties brings 30 years in mineral exploration, having built Ely-era prospect generator Renaissance Gold before its 2019 merger created Orogen, a hybrid prospect-generation-and-royalty company focused on Nevada, Mexico and British Columbia. The company’s marquee win came via hyperspectral-driven staking of the Silicon project, sold to AngloGold Ashanti for $421 million, leaving Orogen with a royalty on what is now the Arthur Gold project — a deposit that has held steady at roughly a million ounces even as its mine life has stretched from 7 years in 2021 to an estimated 8-10 years today.
Nicol says the royalty’s net present value is “roughly half of our market cap,” implying $100-110 million against a ~$200 million market cap and $26.5 million in working capital with no debt. The Magistral royalty, generated for about $150,000 and sold to First Majestic, has since paid Orogen over $25 million. Last year the company posted $13 million in revenue ($9.5 million royalty, $3 million-plus from prospect generation).
Partners are currently funding 14 drill programs, spending $50-75 million this year after raising over $100 million themselves, all at no cost to Orogen. As Nicol put it, “our royalties are being created for free.”
Zach Flood of Kenorland Minerals
Zach Flood of Kenorland Minerals, who worked the Oyu Tolgoi discovery as a field assistant in 2003 before a stint evaluating projects globally for the Ivanhoe group, founded Kenorland in 2016 to run large-scale, third-party-funded grassroots gold exploration across Eastern Canada — a project-generation model where partners earn into properties while Kenorland retains minority equity and royalties. The model’s proof point is Renault, a northern Quebec gold discovery staked for roughly $50,000 that drew in Sumitomo Metal Mining, which has now spent about $20 million proving up a large-scale, narrow, high-grade vein system and owns and operates the project outright, leaving Kenorland with a royalty.
This year Kenorland has three third-party-funded discovery-stage drill programs running: the South project in Ontario (Orenova earning 70%, Kenorland retaining equity plus a 2% NSR), West Wabigoon (Santacruz earning 70%, Kenorland carried to a PFS plus a 2% NSR), and the Opinaca project in James Bay (a 3% uncapped NSR plus small equity).
“It’s a numbers game,” Flood said of the model, which lets Kenorland “get paid by” the technical expertise of major-company partners rather than fund it directly.
David Cole of Elemental Royalty Corporation
David Cole of Elemental Royalty Corporation, an 18.5-year Newmont veteran who later built Eurasian Minerals into what became EMX Royalty, now runs the combined entity formed by the EMX-Elemental Altus merger — a royalty company spanning over 200 royalties across 22 countries with a market cap north of $1 billion and analysts projecting close to $100 million in royalty revenue this year. Cole’s prospect-generation-to-royalty model nets over $100 million a year in third-party exploratory drilling across roughly 300 mineral property assets, plus hundreds of millions more in mine-development spending, all at minimal cost to Elemental since counterparties fund the work while the company retains a free-carried royalty interest.
The most notable recent development: Tether, the stablecoin issuer generating what Cole says is “over $20 billion a year” in profit, has been reallocating capital into hard assets including gold, copper royalties and farmland, and now owns 32% of Elemental’s stock, with Tether’s Juan Sartori serving as chairman.
“The market rewards scale,” Cole said of the royalty sector’s dynamics.
Mining Merchant Banks & Holding Companies
Craig Parry of Inventa Capital
Craig Parry of Inventa Capital returns as a serial mine-builder whose group represents Vizsla Silver, Vizsla Copper, and Cosa Uranium at this year’s symposium. A former Rio Tinto global head of project generation who worked in 70 countries, Parry co-founded NextGen Energy, now a $12 billion company built on the Arrow uranium discovery, and chaired Skeena Resources through the advance of Eskay Creek, which he calls a “tier one gold project” running roughly 450,000 ounces a year at an AISC near $600/oz.
His flagship, Vizsla Silver, controls what he describes as one of the world’s great silver discoveries in Sinaloa, Mexico, with about 400 million ounces near 500 g/t anchored by the 11-meter-thick Copala vein; the group recently sold Vizsla Royalty to Elemental Altius for $330 million. The newer bet is Vizsla Copper’s Palmer project in Alaska, where Parry, fresh off a flight from site, reported drilling “44 meters at 8.2% copper, including 24 meters at 9.22% copper and one gram per ton gold.”
He was candid about the tragedy overshadowing Sinaloa this year, in which ten workers were abducted and killed, while noting Mexico’s government, up to President Sheinbaum, has voiced strong support for the project moving forward.
Sean Wade of Power Metal Resources Plc
Sean Wade of Power Metal Resources Plc has run the company as CEO since March 2023 after two decades in capital markets broking, starting at Kleinwort Benson in 1993, and describes the business as a “mining merchant bank” that takes shareholder capital and compounds it through successful spin-outs. The clearest proof point is Guardian Metal Resources: Power Metal invested “something a little below 2 million pounds” to acquire the largest undeveloped tungsten asset in the US, IPO’d it, and has since exited via two transactions for “more than 12 times our money, or around about 23 million pounds.”
That cash now underpins a balance sheet holding “just around about 8 million pounds of cash” against a market cap of just 14.5 million pounds — meaning the market is pricing the entire non-cash asset base at roughly £6.5 million. Wade pegs shareholders’ funds at 23p per share against the current 13p share price, and an “attributable value” of listed and unlisted holdings, including a uranium joint venture in the Athabasca Basin and Labrador and a 12% stake in Apex Royalties, at 28p per share.
Apex’s tungsten royalty alone, struck over Guardian’s own Pilot Mountain and Tempute assets, is worth “12.2p” against Power Metal’s total market cap.
Collin Kettell of Palisades Gold Corp.
Collin Kettell of Palisades Gold Corp. built his career shepherding Newfound Gold Corp to a “couple billion dollar market cap” before founding Palisades’ predecessor merchant bank in 2013 and taking Palisades public via direct listing in 2022. The company has distributed “$75 million” to shareholders across seven distributions while raising “less than $15 million” since inception — roughly five times return of capital to cash raised — and Kettell personally owns 23% of the company.
Palisades holds over 1.5 billion warrants across more than 200 junior resource companies at an average acquisition cost of “around a penny a warrant,” alongside 90% of Made in America Gold Corp, the third-largest landholder in Nevada with 13 district-scale projects. Kettell states net asset value is “about $310 per share” against a share price “trading around $2.70,” built from $80 million of Newfound Gold shares (8% of that company), $50 million in junior equities, and roughly $100 million of in-the-money warrant value — with a further $90-100 million of Black-Scholes warrant value using 75% volatility not yet counted.
Liquidation value of the portfolio is “about $200 million,” backstopped by a Bank of Montreal facility drawn to $12 million of a possible $40 million.
Peter Grosskopf of SCP Resource Finance
Peter Grosskopf of SCP Resource Finance started as a gold trader in the 1980s, worked with legends like Lukas Lundin and Sean Boyd, co-founded Newcrest Capital (sold to TD Bank), was a founder of Sprott Securities (later Cormark) alongside Eric Sprott, and served as CEO of Sprott Inc. SCP is an investment dealer covering corporate issuers on one side and institutional plus accredited retail investors across “Canada, the US, and Australia and the UK” on the other, differentiating itself as an owner-operated, globally-reaching boutique that invests alongside its own underwritten deals rather than chasing “league table” volume like bulge-bracket firms.
Grosskopf described a strategic pivot toward US high-net-worth retail investors, arguing they can be “just as valuable if not more so than institutions” because they aren’t bound by index-following mandates.
On fraud risk in the current up-cycle, he warned that “the pigs are beginning to fly” and urged investors to vet management teams’ associates and never take unsolicited cold calls from unknown financial service providers.
Jonathan Goodman of Dundee Corp.
Jonathan Goodman of Dundee Corp., son of the late Ned Goodman and a geological engineer by training, runs Dundee as a mining merchant bank that takes 10-19.9% strategic stakes (often with board seats) in undervalued juniors and works alongside management to unlock value before exiting on the open market — a model that previously built Repadre Capital (sold to TVX Gold for roughly $400 million) and Dundee Precious Metals (now an $11 billion producer).
Goodman pegs Dundee’s current share price around C$4 against an estimated net asset value of C$7-10, driven by stakes including Magna Mining and Saturn Metals, an Australian heap-leach gold project with roughly C$60 million in cash and a C$200 million-plus market cap heading into a feasibility study projecting 100,000-120,000 ounces annually.
The template case study is Reunion Gold: Dundee built a stake to 17-18%, got board representation, and steered the company toward drilling shallow trenching data at Oko West that “kept going deeper,” ultimately selling to G Mining Ventures for a roughly $150 million gain. Dundee’s newest direct-interest deal has it earning up to 60% of West Haven Resources’ Shovel Nose project by funding $85 million of project spending. “We don’t always feel that we need an exit,” Goodman said.
Precious Metals Dealers, Wealth Management & Financial Services
Matthew Piepenburg of Von Greyerz AG
Matthew Piepenburg of Von Greyerz AG offers a different kind of pitch than the miners on this list: he is a partner at the largest private gold and silver storage and trading service for high-net-worth individuals outside the banking system, founded decades ago by Egon von Greyerz. Piepenburg’s own background runs through Goldman Sachs connections, a dot-com-era IPO windfall, and years running family-office and multi-family-office allocations across credit, equities, and commodities before he “discovered gold kind of later in life in the last 10 years.”
The firm’s model, built around von Greyerz’s own preferences as a former Geneva banker, centers on holding physical bullion outside the banking system in vaulted, non-bank jurisdictions, sourced directly from Swiss refineries, with a trading desk for liquidity; the firm now serves clients in “over 90 countries.”
Piepenburg’s framing for Rule’s audience is that gold and silver are not “a pet rock” or simple inflation hedge but a core wealth-preservation allocation for a “critical turning point” in credit and debt cycles — noting von Greyerz was urging people to buy gold around 2000 near $300 an ounce, decades before its more recent multiple-fold rise.
Andy Schectman of Miles Franklin
Andy Schectman of Miles Franklin has run the bullion dealership since joining his father’s business at 19; he’s now 55, and the firm is in its 36th year with “north of 14 almost 15 billion in sales” and, he says, zero material customer complaints on file. The differentiator he leans on hardest is regulatory: Miles Franklin remains domiciled in Minnesota, the only state that licenses and bonds bullion dealers despite the industry being federally unregulated, a burden Schectman claims causes “north of 98%” of competitors to avoid the state altogether.
The firm holds roughly “a billion half dollars worth” of client metal across nine vaults in the US and Canada through Brinks, and its year-old YouTube education channel has grown to nearly 40,000 subscribers.
On precious-metals IRAs — a product he calls both a “wonderful choice” for savers nearing distribution and the segment most rife with abuse — Schectman warns that firms marketing IRA-only, oddly sized fractional coins (quarter-ounce, three-quarter-ounce) from mints like the Royal Canadian Mint are typically overcharging on custom-mold “limited mintage” product; he points listeners to a whistleblower interview with a former competitor CFO, Dale Whitaker, as a cautionary primer.
Van Simmons of David Hall Rare Coins
Van Simmons of David Hall Rare Coins has been buying and selling gold since the late 1960s — when it was still illegal to own — and has run the business full-time in bullion since 1980. He co-founded David Hall Rare Coins with business partner David Hall in 1979-80, and together they built the industry’s first bid-ask coin market and first guaranteed grading standard before launching Professional Coin Grading Service (PCGS) in 1986, a company Simmons says has since graded “about 45 or 50 million coins” through some “1,800 or 1,900 authorized dealers” worldwide.
Simmons and Hall also founded Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA) for grading sports cards in the early 1990s, took both companies public in 1999 as Collectors Universe, and sold the business to Steve Cohen (owner of the New York Mets) three years ago in a private buyout — a company Simmons says now employs “4,000 or 5,000” people.
On current positioning, Simmons said the bullion market has been busy for five or six years while the rare coin market only “started to change” around November-December, and is now “pretty much on fire,” up “15 to 25%” over the past year, most of that gain in the last five or six months. He personally favors platinum at current ratios — “it used to take 2.4 ounces of gold to buy 1 ounce of platinum; now it takes about 2.4 ounces of platinum to buy 1 ounce of gold” — despite platinum being roughly 80 times rarer than gold and mined mostly in Russia and South Africa.
He agreed with Rule’s thesis that high-quality, rare-dated collectibles behave like premium real estate in downturns — a flight-to-quality asset investors don’t check daily — citing recent trophy sales as evidence: a PCGS-10 1955 Roberto Clemente rookie card traded for $20 million, and an offer of $30 million for a 1957 Mickey Mantle card was turned down. Simmons noted roughly “180 coins” now trade above $1 million each, up from the mid-1990s when the first million-dollar coin was a 1913 Liberty Head nickel that eventually sold for $1.5-1.7 million.
On vetting dealers, Simmons warned buyers to stick with coins graded and certified specifically by PCGS, since dozens of copycat grading services have emerged without real standards, and counterfeit PCGS coins and holders exist. He advised avoiding cold-calling salespeople, high-pressure pitches, and guarantees that a coin will “double or triple in price.”
On products, Simmons said he favors mainstream, recognized items over generic “rounds” of uncertain purity: Canadian Maple Leafs and US Silver Eagles in silver, pre-1965 90%-silver “junk” bags (now trading at a discount, roughly “$3 or $4 under spot,” as flatware and tea-set liquidations have backlogged smelters), and US Gold Eagles over Canadian Maple Leafs for gold, since Eagles avoid the 1099 reporting trigger that applies when certain bullion coins are sold back in quantity. He has also been recommending $20 gold pieces for their low premiums, and prefers platinum coins from the US or Australia over reportable 10-ounce platinum bars.
Robert Villaflor of Sprott Wealth Management
Robert Villaflor of Sprott Wealth Management brings an unusual pedigree to natural-resource wealth advisory: a 1990s start at a discount brokerage where he learned trading, compliance, and margins from the ground up before rising to CEO after eleven years at Sprott. His pitch to Rick Rule’s audience is that Sprott’s advisors are backstopped by the firm’s roughly $80 billion asset-management platform, including in-house economic geologist Justin Tolman, who “serves as a resource for the entire Sprott organization” and joins a company-wide research call every Monday plus daily geologist calls reviewing drill results.
Villaflor detailed the firm’s product menu for prospective clients: retirement and individual accounts, separately managed accounts where “everyone buys at the same price at the same time,” and proprietary vehicles including a Resource Exploration and Development Fund that can access discounted PIPE deals, and the Value Plus strategy spanning mining, energy, and agriculture.
He emphasized that Sprott advisors “eat our own cooking,” investing alongside clients rather than ahead of them.
Adrian Day of Adrian Day Asset Management
Adrian Day of Adrian Day Asset Management, a London School of Economics-trained historian who has run his money management firm since 1981, positions himself as an unapologetic generalist and global value investor with a four-decade friendship with Rick Rule. On gold, Day was direct: “I could not be more bullish on gold over the next 3 to 5 years than I am,” while flagging that copper, oil and gas, uranium, and agricultural commodities look more undervalued than gold and silver at this point in the cycle.
His bigger call is on non-U.S. equities: after 15 years of U.S. outperformance, he noted foreign markets “basically doubled the performance of the S&P last year” yet still trade “at 50-year lows relative to the US,” a gap so wide that foreign markets “would have to move by 20% a year for the next 5 years” just to reclaim their prior cycle high relative to America.
As a bottom-up stock picker, he named Britain, Hong Kong, and Brazil as “well-stocked ponds.”
Dana Samuelson of American Gold Exchange
Dana Samuelson of American Gold Exchange has run the physical bullion and vintage U.S. coin dealership since 1998, following two years training under Jim Blanchard at what was then the largest retail precious metals firm in the country. Samuelson steers investors toward the “big three” — U.S. Eagles, Canadian Maple Leafs and Austrian Philharmonics — for their liquidity, warning that premium spikes on the U.S. Mint’s products reverse once the Mint catches up on supply.
He offered a stark read on the January silver squeeze: as prices ran from “$19 or $20 to $80 or $90 or $100,” refineries processing 90%-pure junk silver into deliverable form “choked,” leaving undercapitalized dealers unable to convert client silver into cash and effectively freezing smaller players out of the rally.
As founding architect of the industry’s anti-counterfeiting task force, formed after Chinese counterfeits began flooding the market around 2015, Samuelson pushed the U.S. Mint to redesign Gold Eagles in 2021 to defeat forgers.
Rich Checkan of Asset Strategies International
Rich Checkan of Asset Strategies International, a 30-year veteran of the firm founded by his uncle Michael Checkan and Glenn Kirsch in 1982, runs a full-service physical precious metals and numismatic coin dealership built around a straightforward litmus test for vetting counterparties: “ask that question... when I am ready to sell this, will you buy it back? If they say no... run away.”
Checkan cited a World Gold Council survey finding 85% of respondents believe they should own gold, yet actual ownership rates lag far behind — a gap he attributes to either investor confusion or distrust born of dealers who overprice product on the way in and decline to repurchase it. Asset Strategies’ business model is commission-free for sales staff, takes no speculative positions, and moves metal same-day rather than holding inventory.
On storage, Checkan warns that facilities using “fractional insurance” are inadequate, and recommends investors hold some metal at home before graduating to vetted third-party storage with full-value coverage.
Nick Hodge of Digest Publishing
Nick Hodge of Digest Publishing got his start in financial media in Baltimore in 2007 writing about energy stocks before the 2008 crash redirected him toward the Federal Reserve, monetary policy and precious metals. Six years ago he launched Digest Publishing with partner Gerardo del Real, now running a free weekly podcast (”Investing in Bizarro World,” running over five years), a deal-flow letter called Private Placement Intel that alerts subscribers only when the firm is deploying its own capital into a vetted private placement, and a weekly speculative letter, Underground Alpha, published continuously since 2007.
Hodge’s stated edge isn’t geological or technical analysis — “I am not a geologist. I am not an analyst” — but rather share-structure and management vetting, the subject of his planned talk at the Rule Symposium, where he plans to walk through “past examples of success based on people” and how company structuring choices help or hurt shareholders.
Frank Trotter of Battle Bank
Frank Trotter of Battle Bank, who co-founded EverBank in 2000 and grew it to $28 billion in assets before its 2012 IPO and eventual sale to TIAA, is now building a non-branch “community bank without geography” aimed at hard-money-oriented, financially self-directed investors. Battle Bank deals directly in physical gold, silver, platinum and palladium, offers a “metals equity line of credit” letting clients borrow against bullion without triggering a capital-gains sale, provides foreign-currency deposit accounts across more than 20 currencies, and pays 3.35% APY on its flagship high-yield checking account — contrasted against big banks’ roughly 0.01% and $15,000-20,000 minimum-balance requirements.
The bank launched its rollout from a 23,000-person waitlist on February 23, starting with 25 accounts on day one and expecting to work through the full list by end of April; Trotter noted the bank maintains a 10%-plus capital ratio (versus roughly 4% at large banks) and expects to return to the capital markets for a growth raise by “this summer at latest this fall.”