Travis Ricciardo and Jonas Dorling sat Ross Beaty down for Money of Mine and asked how a man with 16 public companies kept showing up at the right metal at the right time.
Beaty did not dress it up. He is a cyclical buyer. Resource businesses are cyclical. Bulls follow bears. You make the real money when you buy low and sell high. That is hard. It is also true. Timing the big cycle is not enough. You still have to pick people and assets. You can lose a fortune in a bull market with the wrong company. You can make money in a bear market with the right one.
He started as a junior field assistant in northern British Columbia for Kennecott in 1970. He took his first company public in 1985. He could not raise a nickel from the market. Family put up $145,000 Canadian. That company lasted eight or nine years, went to Hecla Mining, and taught him almost everything he later used. The Rosebud discovery in Nevada — found, he said, by walking the mountains — is what paid for the first fortune. The Zenda permit fight in Kern County, California, for 50,000 ounces, taught him the opposite lesson. Three years of pain for 15,000 ounces a year does not make anyone rich. Focus. Look for big stuff. Keep it simple. Prefer ground that is already de-risked. If it is a dog, drop it.
That is the whole interview if you strip the war stories. The rest is how the rule survived silver at $4, copper at the bottom of a 50-year sine wave, a stolen mine in Russia, and a Teck share cheque that closed beside Lehman Brothers.
Silver First, Then the Sine Wave
Pan American Silver was the first real application. In the early 1990s there was no primary silver company of the kind Beaty thought the market wanted. He read every mine. He bought deposits that worked at $8 when the metal was $5. He forecast $10 by decade’s end. By 1999–2000 the price was $4. The company almost went under in 2001. Bill Gates was a shareholder. That cheque, and a little of Beaty’s own money, bought six more months. Then 2002 turned. Silver never gave the company back. He said Pan American has hardly raised equity since.
The copper chapter was more deliberate. An Australian piece on long-cycle prices and rarer discoveries sat in his head. Copper looked like a sine wave whose bottoms and tops were both rising. In 2001–2002, inflation-adjusted copper was cheaper than it had been 50 years earlier. He did not know when it would rise or how high. He was sure it would rise. He could not start another silver company. He would not try to build copper mines. Copper takes billions. Gold and silver take hundreds of millions. So he spent a year and a half buying every copper deposit he could find in North and South America. Ten deposits. One was worthless. One was tiny. One sat in a hard place. About $200 million went in. A little over $2 billion came out across six or seven companies. Early money, he said, was an 80-times return.
Regalito in Chile — later the Caserones mine under Lundin control — was the template. About $13 million in. $137 million out. After that, friends financed the rest. No brokers. Annual budgets only. Beaty backstopped about 25% of every Lumina financing. Success made the next call easy. China Minmetals and Jiangxi Copper took Northern Peru Copper in a deal struck in late 2007 and closed in spring 2008. Relincho went to Teck. That sale closed around 15 September 2008. Teck stock was about $42. Months later it was $3. By 2011–2012 it was back near $62. Lehman Brothers did not unwind a committed close. It unwound the paper you were paid in.
Lumina Royalty packaged the slivers he kept on the way out. Franco-Nevada paid $66 million in 2011. Beaty said you could add a zero today. Franco-Nevada shares then were in the $40–$50 range. They have since lived in a different postcode. He did not keep the stock.
The Ones That Got Away, and the Ones That Paid Anyway
Fruta del Norte is the scar the hosts wanted. Around 2014 Kinross Gold was tired of the social fight. Beaty’s Lumina group bid. Lukas Lundin bid too. Neither knew the other was in the room. Kinross needed something like $300 million. Lundin put it up front. Beaty offered about $30 million down and the rest on milestones. Lundin Gold got the orebody. Beaty takes his hat off. He went looking in the same Ecuador that had just left Rafael Correa’s penalty box. Cangrejos — a large, low-grade Newmont-era book — cost about $3 million. Roughly $100 million more went in. CMOC Group later bought Lumina Gold in an announced all-cash deal of about C$581 million. Three million versus 300 million was the return-on-investment bet. Fruta del Norte was the home run he did not own.
Dukat, in Russia, was four years and what would have been one of the largest primary silver deposits on earth, on his telling. Privatization chaos. Boris Yeltsin to Vladimir Putin. A raid. Money back. Project gone. A third of the way through construction. He said he would probably do it again if he were younger. No guts, no glory is the Lundin line he still repeats. Adolf Lundin is the elder he named. Lukas Lundin and the next generation are the ones he said keep hitting.
CMOC showed up twice. Western buyers would not take Cangrejos at half a gram. CMOC did the site visit and called while Beaty was strapping a kayak on Vancouver Island. Equinox Gold’s Brazilian book followed because the relationship existed, even though the assets were small for CMOC’s new size. Chinese outbound rules forced a messy path. Public terms on that sale were about $900 million in cash plus a contingent slice of up to $115 million. Beaty said he was the one person in the Equinox room against the timing. The group did it anyway. He wished CMOC well. He also compared the company’s gold ambition to how fast Zijin Mining has grown. Move on. Don’t hunt the last nickel. Take a good bid if it fits the plan.
Ventana Gold went to Eike Batista for something Beaty recalled in the $1 billion to $1.2 billion range. Cash, not paper. Batista’s fortune went to zero a few years later. The mine still was not built. Sometimes the high price is the win.
How the Money Actually Got Raised
The Lumina model sounds simple on a podcast. It was not simple in 2002. Metals had been in the toilet since 1995–96. Juniors were dead. Beaty had Pan American capital and his own cheque. That 25% backstop is the unglamorous fact. After the first 10-bagger, the rest was a phone call. Raise only the year’s budget. Finance higher as the copper price rose. Minimize dilution. Equinox Gold, started at the end of 2017 when gold was about $1,350 after an $1,100 low, got the same backstop four times at the start. Beaty said he retired from Equinox at the end of July 2026.
Lumina Metals in Poland is the last founder-developer file he says he will do. The company has spent years around Nowa Sól, Mozów, and Sulmierzyce. The barrier, in his telling, is a copper-and-silver tax built about 15 years ago for KGHM Polska Mied?, the only large base-metal miner in the country. He wants the regime reset for a multi-billion new investment. He hopes “the fullness of time” is three years, not the rest of his life. Lumina and KGHM have since signed a letter of intent on possible concentrate talks. A separate public memorandum involving KGHM and an outsider was, in his dry telling, news they were pleased to read.
Renewables sat in the middle. Magma Energy was the geothermal start in 2008. He called geothermal a poor business once he was inside it. The company moved into wind, hydro, and solar, merged into what became Alterra Power, and later folded into Innergex Renewable Energy, a Quebec name. The Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec sat on that path as financier and later as a privatizing force. Beaty called the whole renewable chapter a double. Not a home run. Flavor of the month, then out of the month, then back.
The Market He Says Will Unwind
The hosts asked whether the capital famine of recent years had changed the promoter’s job. Beaty said that was last year’s story. This year’s gold and copper breakout brought generalists back. Specialists can raise again. The evidence he offered was Lumina Metals. Four days at a desk on Bowen Island. Seventy or eighty virtual calls. Orders north of $1.2 billion for a book they meant to raise in the $250 million to $400 million range. They took about $400 million. Tom Kaplan’s silver and NovaGold-related books were the other examples of oversubscribed paper.
Then he said the line that should sit above every critical-minerals slide.
There is a lot of wind in the sails. Fundamentals look fine for most metals under the present mania. It will unwind. Smart investors would take money off the table now. It may last a few more years. Then it is going to collapse. Watch.
That is not a price target. It is a cyclical buyer talking his own language at the top of a crowded trade. He also said if he were 35 he would be going crazy in graphite, lithium, and every metal he already knows how to find. He is not 35. He would not go “anywhere” today. He would in the 1980s. Liberia taught him why. A civil war in 1987 sent the team out with nothing.
Bre-X and National Instrument 43-101, in his telling, turned a promoter’s casino into a boring professional market. Investors now often know more than junior explorers. You cannot trick people when the news is instant. Wealth creation is more real. It is also less romantic. Murray Pezim’s paper machine and Peter Brown’s book — the penny dreadfuls — he kept his head down and stayed out of that street. Clive Johnson at Bema Gold was a peer who did the same. Frank Giustra he named as a financier of that older tape, not as a model he copied. He said he had no mentor. Hard knocks. Quick study. Different mistakes the next time.
The Buying and Selling Rules He Would Repeat
Do not overpay. If the seller will not price risk, leave early. Skin in the game — royalty, stock, milestones — turns a sale into a combination. Irrational asking prices waste years. A good bid that fits the mission beats a perfect bid that never comes. On the buy side, Equinox took four companies in seven or eight years. Some dear. Some cheap. They balance.
Hold a significant property through the cycle if you can. His old lithium pegmatites and U.S. brines were worth zero in 1994 and carry real market caps now. Drop the dog. The California ounce and the Russian years were the two he named when asked for regret. He still defends the risk on Dukat.
Grassroots discovery is rare. Dusting off a known body when the metal turns is how value shows up. That is the 2026 junior tape in one sentence. It is also how a mania gets filled with projects that were dogs in 1994 and are stories again today. Beaty’s own warning sits on that pile.
What a Reader Should Do With a Titan
Do not treat 16 companies and a stack of 10-baggers as a shopping list. Pan American Silver, Equinox Gold, Franco-Nevada, Lundin Gold, Teck, CMOC, and Lumina Metals are names in a memoir, not recommendations. Beaty backstopped deals with his own capital. Most listeners cannot. The transferable pieces are smaller. Buy when the metal is hated. Size the asset, not the story. Finance little and often if you can. Do not marry a dog. Do not hunt the last nickel. Do not confuse a generalist IPO book with a permanent cost of capital.
And do not ignore the man who bought copper at the bottom of a 50-year chart when he tells you this critical-minerals crowd will unwind. He has been early. He has been wrong on the year. He has rarely been wrong on the shape of the wave.
Conclusion
Ross Beaty told Money of Mine that cyclicality is the job. Silver at $5. Copper under a 50-year floor. Gold at $1,350. Renewables when they paid. Poland while a tax written for one company still blocks the next. The career is a long application of buy low, sell high, drop dogs, and take a bid that fits. The live sentence is the last one. This mania has wind in it. It will not last. Take that from a man who has already sold into one top and watched Teck go from $42 to $3 on the same calendar.
Disclaimer
This article is based on Ross Beaty’s appearance on the Money of Mine podcast with Travis Ricciardo and Jonas Dorling. Figures for deals, returns, share prices, and timelines are Beaty’s recollections on that recording unless separately noted from public announcements, and may not match later audited accounts. Company names appear as historical context, not as recommendations to buy or sell. This is not investment advice. Speak with a licensed adviser. The author and publisher accept no liability for actions taken on this article.