Jeff Phillips — Resource Stocks He Likes Across Copper, Silver, Uranium & Royalties

Gladiator is a copper explorer drilling old ground right next to Whitehorse in Canada's Yukon. Hudbay, a big miner, dug several small pits there decades ago and left. Gladiator's bet was that the leftovers weren't the story — that the whole belt is a "district" with several more deposits nobody ever followed up on. Two and a half years of drilling has largely confirmed that, including a fresh discovery called Cub East where the copper grades run above 1%, which is high for a deposit you can mine from surface rather than underground.

Phillips is a paid consultant to Gladiator and one of its bigger shareholders, in since its very first financing — so this is his own book, and he says so. What he points at as outside confirmation is BlackRock leading a roughly $25 million placement: a firm that size doesn't write that cheque hoping a stock triples, it writes it hoping the company is sitting on something a major will eventually buy. His template is Arizona Sonoran, another copper explorer he owned before it listed, which Hudbay bought for about $1.5 billion.

The caveat he states himself: at roughly a $300 million market value, Gladiator has already moved a long way from the ~$30 million where he bought. The easy money is behind it; what's left is whether the district becomes big enough for a takeover.

GreenLight is exploring for copper in Wisconsin — a state that effectively banned mining for about twenty years and reopened to it five or six years ago. Rio Tinto once ran producing mines there. GreenLight's idea was simple: quietly lock up all that abandoned ground before anyone else remembered it existed.

Two things make Phillips like it at roughly a C$24 million valuation. First, price: the stock trades below where the company raised $12 million a year ago, and that raise came without warrants (no sweetener attached), which tells you it was priced honestly. It has cash and doesn't need to sell more shares soon — so existing holders won't be diluted. Second, politics: copper is on the US critical-minerals list and GreenLight just received FAST-41 status, a federal programme that puts a project on a faster, more predictable permitting track. Domestic copper with Washington's thumb on the scale is a very different proposition from copper in a difficult jurisdiction.

He consults for GreenLight and is a large shareholder — and he explains the mechanism plainly: he only consults where he already owns a lot, because his pay-off is the share price, not the fee. Drill results are due in early September.

Daura (the auto-captions render it "Dora") is a tiny explorer — about C$22 million — holding three projects that have already been drilled by somebody at some point, which matters: it means the geology is known to carry metal, rather than being a blank map. In Argentina it has Cerro Bayo, optioned from Latin Metals, where the first drilling returned silver grades over 700 grams per tonne, though only across narrow slices of rock. A follow-up programme starts once permits arrive.

The two Peru projects are what he's most interested in. One sits directly around Highlander Silver's Bonita discovery — a find rich enough to carry that company to a $400–500 million valuation — and the same veins run onto Daura's ground, where old holes hit gold in every attempt. The other shows 4–6 grams of gold per tonne right at surface and hasn't seen a drill in fifteen years. Permits for both come next year.

Phillips is a large shareholder and a paid consultant. He's honest that he arrived through a broker-led financing, a structure he generally dislikes because brokers optimise for their own fees, and that early holders had to be shaken out first. His suggestion that Daura might spin one project into a separate company is a standard junior move: three good projects at a $22 million valuation means none of them is getting the money or attention it deserves.

Kingsmen is drilling Las Coloradas, a large district in Mexico's Parral silver belt that was mined before. It has hit very high grades, but across narrow veins — which is the open question: rich rock in thin slices may or may not add up to something you can profitably mine. Three of about twenty holes from the current programme have been reported, so seventeen results are still to come, including the first-ever test of a target called the Saddle that Phillips' own geologists rate highly.

The real reason he owns it is the share structure — the single thing he says he concentrates on. Kingsmen has roughly C$14–15 million of cash against only about 36–38 million shares in existence, inside a C$40–50 million company. In plain terms: a third of the value is cash in the bank, the drilling is already paid for so they won't be issuing new shares (which would dilute your slice), and because so few shares exist, any good hole moves the price a lot. Most juniors of this size have five or ten times as many shares out and are perpetually raising money.

Empress is a royalty and streaming company. Instead of digging anything, it hands a miner cash up front in exchange for a permanent slice of that mine's future production or revenue. The attraction is that the royalty holder's costs are fixed at the moment of the deal — if the mine's operating costs blow out later, that's the miner's problem, while the royalty keeps paying. Franco-Nevada and Wheaton, which Phillips holds passively in retirement accounts, are the giant versions of this; Empress is the small, early one.

His view is that Empress finished its hard first phase — Alexandra Woodyer Sherron built it from nothing in about five years to the point where four producing assets generate more cash than it spends — and is now in phase two, redeploying that cash. Being cash-generative matters because it lowers the company's cost of capital: it no longer has to sell shares cheaply every time it wants to do a deal.

The structural edge he emphasises is deal flow. Chairman David Rhodes runs Endeavour Financial, an advisory firm that arranges billions in mine-building finance and therefore sees deals worldwide before anyone else. Small royalty deals that never reach the big players get shown to Empress first. Phillips came in with Rick Rule's financing four years ago and thinks it's still somewhat undervalued — though less so than three years ago.

North Shore holds a uranium project in New Mexico that Kerr-McGee — a serious operator — had actually started building a mine on in the 1970s before uranium prices collapsed and the work stopped. About 11 million pounds of historic resource sits there. The pitch is that an asset good enough to nearly mine at 1970s uranium prices is a very different animal at today's prices. The company has just finished drilling to validate that old data; results are pending.

The macro backdrop he lays out is the reason he owns any uranium at all: nuclear power supplies roughly 22% of America's electricity, but the US mines only about 2% of the uranium that feeds it. The rest comes from Russia, Kazakhstan, Africa and Canada — a supply chain that only looks safe until it doesn't. A domestic pound of uranium is therefore worth more to Washington than a foreign one.

As with everything here, he's really betting the person: director Blake Steele took Azarga's Dewey Burdock project through permitting and sold the company to enCore Energy, which Phillips calls one of his big wins. He is a shareholder and describes it as early stage and high risk.

Banyan owns AurMac in the Yukon, a gold deposit that CEO Tara Christie has grown to roughly 7–8 million ounces. It's low-grade but enormous, and that combination is what "highly leveraged to gold" means: when the gold price rises, the value of a huge low-grade deposit rises far faster than the metal itself, because a larger share of the rock suddenly becomes economic to mine. The same maths cuts the other way if gold falls.

At roughly a half-billion-dollar market value this is the most developed name on his list, and unlike most of the others he is only a small shareholder with no consulting relationship — so it's the cleanest of his views. What he's endorsing is the operator: he's watched Christie work through several market cycles, and she is now drilling to find higher-grade zones inside the big deposit, which is what turns a bulk-tonnage asset into a more profitable mine plan.

This is a pure people-bet, and he presents it as one. Marc Blythe — Banyan Gold's chairman, a mining engineer Phillips has known for twenty years — also runs Au Gold Corp, and Phillips says he is "very excited" about it. The near-term event is a drill programme in Australia in October, on ground in the Victorian goldfields prospective for both gold and antimony (antimony being a critical metal used in ammunition, flame retardants and batteries, and currently dominated by Chinese supply).

He gives no valuation, no resource figure and no ownership disclosure for it — so treat this as a name to research rather than a thesis he laid out. The whole substance of the recommendation is that a man with a twenty-year track record he trusts is running it.

Asked for silver ideas, Phillips makes a point first: there are very few companies that are genuinely pure silver plays, because most silver comes out of the ground as a by-product of mining something else. That scarcity is why silver bulls have so little to choose from.

AbraSilver is one of the exceptions — it owns Diablillos, a large silver-gold project in Argentina — and he says plainly that he likes it, holding a few shares among the larger names he follows. He offers no detailed thesis here and has no consulting relationship with it, so this is a favourable mention rather than an argued position.

Geomorphic.ai is Phillips' own private company. It uses artificial intelligence to comb through existing geological databases — decades of government surveys, old drill records, historic mapping — looking for prospective ground that people missed. This is the "prospect generator" model applied with software: rather than mining anything, you find and stake good ground, then let a partner spend the money drilling it while you keep a share of any discovery.

The part relevant to a retail investor is that the company publishes its research for free: white papers on tungsten (which Phillips commissioned for himself), uranium, phosphate, and on what the US government is doing with critical metals. It is not investable — it's private — but the reports are a free window into the same screening work he pays for.