Approach

A small number of positions, built over time

We hold a concentrated portfolio. Each position is sized according to the strength of the case for it, not to a target allocation, and we are willing to be substantially concentrated in the situations we understand best.

The portfolio is being built deliberately over a period of years. We add a position when the case for it is complete, and not in order to reach a number. We expect the portfolio to grow, and we expect it to grow slowly.

Discovery-stage, not development-stage

We invest before a resource is defined. At that stage the principal driver of value is geological information — the results of drilling into a well-reasoned target — rather than commodity price, construction cost or offtake. That is the risk we believe we are competent to underwrite, and the horizon over which we are prepared to wait is measured in years.

We do not invest in producing companies. We do not take development or construction risk.

We underwrite people before ground

The first question we ask about any company is who is running it and what they have done before. Exploration is a long sequence of judgements made with incomplete information; the record of the people making those judgements is the most reliable evidence available to an outside investor.

A strong asset with an unproven team is a pass. We look particularly for teams that have made a discovery, taken it to a transaction, and are doing it again.

Entry discipline

We participate in private placements where we are invited and where the terms are appropriate to the risk. Where we build a position in the market, we do so patiently, in stages, and at prices we set in advance. We do not pay up to complete a position, and we are content to end a process holding nothing.

We add to a position only after new information — a drill result, a financing, a change in the technical picture — has confirmed or improved the original case. We do not average down against an unchanged thesis.

Geography and geology

Our positions share a single geological thesis: structurally controlled orogenic gold systems in Precambrian and Pan-African terranes that remain under-explored by modern methods. Our present exposure is to Namibia, Morocco and Côte d'Ivoire in Africa, and to Suriname and Guyana on the Guiana Shield. We monitor the Zambian Copperbelt and the Arabian-Nubian Shield of Egypt.

The inclusion of Suriname and Guyana follows from that thesis rather than qualifying it. The Guiana Shield is the conjugate margin of the West African Craton; before the opening of the Atlantic the two were a single landmass, and the Trans-Amazonian greenstone belts of the Guianas and the Birimian belts of West Africa are the same rocks of the same age, hosting the same style of deposit. A team that can read one can read the other.

We favour district-scale settings over isolated targets — ground where a single discovery implies a series of them — and terranes where a modern soil, geophysical and drilling programme is being applied for the first time.

We work in jurisdictions where mineral title is recorded and verifiable, where a junior company can hold and renew licences without a local operating partner being imposed on it, and where an outside shareholder can form an independent view of the legal position. Where we cannot satisfy ourselves on those points, we do not invest, irrespective of the geology.

Commodities

Gold is our core exposure and represents the substantial majority of the portfolio. We maintain a smaller exposure to copper, and we monitor critical minerals where the geological setting is one we already understand.

We do not hold coal, uranium or bulk commodities, and we do not invest in artisanal or alluvial production.