Amazing Journey from Economic Geologist to Portfolio Manager

I grew up in mining towns. My dad did his time as an apprentice underground in copper mines in Australia. My granddad, too. So it's kind of natural I gravitated towards a career in metals and mining. I liked solving puzzles. I was naturally curious, so geology was a natural fit.

What I did a little bit different perhaps was I was fortunate to have lots of different opportunities early. It would be wrong to call it a plan. It was more about just saying yes to things. But what it meant was I had the chance to work in open cut mines, underground mines, doing geostatistics and building resource estimates, exploration, taking different projects all the way from discovery through to the studies to show their economic through to production.

I ended up working for some of the world's biggest miners like New Pneumont, helping to run junior explorers, ultimately doing a lot of corporate development work analyzing other deposits as potential acquisitions. So I sort of ended up as a Renaissance geologist with a broad set of skills, and I didn't know it at the time, but it was actually very well suited for analyzing metals and mining investments.

I've been fortunate to be able to hone that here with the team at Sprott for the last seven or eight years as a portfolio manager and an investment strategist. The team that we have as co-PMs at Sprott is very complimentary. We've got Shri Kaka who's just a wizard on financial analysis and markets, and Maria Smanova who's one of the world authorities on silver markets if you ask me. We work directly with luminaries like Eric Sprott. We've got a very well put together team that I think is one of the best anywhere.