https://business.financialpost.com/
One week before Halloween, Canada’s biggest gold enthusiast, the septuagenarian billionaire Eric Sprott, wearing a neatly pressed tuxedo, bounded onto a stage in a downtown Toronto ballroom and accepted his induction into Canada’s Investment Industry Hall of Fame.
He declared himself both humbled and honoured, and then rollicked into the wee hours of the night at his home in a nearby tower with expansive views of the city’s sparkling skyline. The next morning, though 75 and technically retired, he showed up at his office, grumbling about a lack of sleep, but dressed in a magenta-coloured, paisley button-up, ready for a 9 a.m. meeting with a penny stock exploration company.
“I keep reading that people are never making (gold) discoveries, the rate of discoveries is going down,” he said, occasionally rubbing his temples and closing his eyes. “The funny thing, well, I guess I’m the sucker then because I keep buying guys who say they’re making discoveries.”
But Sprott added he believes there are discoveries, not by the major miners, but by junior gold and silver explorers. Just as the price of gold often moves in the opposite direction of the stock market, Sprott has a strong contrarian streak that means he also often moves in the opposite direction of the market. For example, this past spring, after years of middling precious metal prices and declining discoveries had led most investors to abandon Canada’s gold and silver explorers, he decided to go all-in.
Sprott launched an investment blitz, the likes of which the junior mining precious metals sector had seldom seen, doling out somewhere between $200 and $300 million in a matter of just a few months to acquire large stakes in about two dozen companies, most of which have never earned a dollar of revenue.
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