Willem Middelkoop did not come to Beaver Creek to find a story. He said so in the first minute. If he needs a conference to show him something new, he has not done the work. He came to sit with management. The room, in September 2026, was too full, and the meetings were too many. That, he told Paul Harris of Kitco, is what the start of a bull market feels like.
The feeling is the trap. Juniors can raise. They have plans for two or three years. They walk with a spring. Middelkoop, founder of the Commodity Discovery Fund, is not short of meetings. He is short of ore. More drills are turning. He is surprised by how few of the holes deserve the words tier one or tier two. This piece is his standard. It is not a recommendation to buy or sell any share, any metal, or any placement.
He already owned the copper
The meeting he wanted to talk about was Hercules Metals. Chris Paul, a young geologist, found the Leviathan copper system in Idaho in 2023, under an old silver showing. The first hole, HER-23-05, cut 185 metres at 0.84 percent copper, including 45 metres at 1.94 percent. Paul was the chief executive. Middelkoop's fund was a large holder. He watched Paul struggle for two years. The geology was not the weak point. The market job was.
Middelkoop says they first brought in a chairman, Matthieu Bos, whom he described as a former lieutenant of Robert Friedland. After a site visit he decided the company still lacked a strong investor-relations lead. In March 2026, at a conference, he asked George Ogilvie what he would do next. Ogilvie had just run the sale of Arizona Sonoran's Cactus project to Hudbay. He told Middelkoop he might take a holiday. Middelkoop asked if he had looked at Hercules. He had not. Middelkoop sent him the file. By the summit, Ogilvie was the new chief executive.
The appointment took effect on September 1, 2026. Paul moved to senior vice president of exploration and stayed a director. He said he was glad of the support. Six former Arizona Sonoran executives came with Ogilvie, across finance, legal, permitting, geology, and investor relations. Harris had heard the group put in nearly C$5 million of their own money. Middelkoop added a smaller scoop. The team of six wanted to put in more personal capital and were not allowed to. Treat the dollar figure as summit talk, not as a share-register audit. The direction is the point. The people who had just sold a copper company wanted more of this one than the rules would take.
Hercules described that sale as a climb from an implied equity value of about C$125 million in July 2021 to about C$2 billion when Hudbay bought Cactus in 2026. Wires have used a U.S. figure near $1.4 billion for the same deal. The multiple, not the rounding, is what Middelkoop was hiring. Ogilvie is a mining engineer, not a geologist. He had already had exits, including Battle North's sale to Evolution in 2021, and he had run Kirkland Lake. Middelkoop's test for a chief executive is simpler than a résumé. You must be able to tell the story to dozens of investors, year after year, and you must not sound like a used-car lot. Most geologists, he said, fail the first half. Ask them to take 40 meetings in three days at a resort and they hate it. They want to kick rocks. That is a different character. Paul, in this telling, gets to kick the rocks again. Ogilvie has to like the room.
Two copper jobs, and a line he drew too neatly
Harris had been impressed by the Hercules hire. Then, a few weeks later, he was surprised. Ogilvie was also becoming chairman of Barksdale Resources, another copper explorer. A chief executive's job is full time. A chair can be too. Are the two companies in conflict if a visitor has C$50,000 and wants one copper exploration stock?
Middelkoop said he is not Ogilvie's spokesman, and that they had not discussed the chair that day. He does not mind a non-executive chair. Ogilvie, he said, is 59 and has energy to spare. Middelkoop is 64, runs the fund, and does other things, and he has scaled the extra work down on purpose. His distinction was the money. Ask Ogilvie where to put the C$50,000 and Middelkoop's answer was Hercules, because that is where Ogilvie had put millions of his own. Barksdale, he said that afternoon, was a different fruit. He had not seen the same personal cheque.
The record after that week is less tidy, and it should be said. Barksdale appointed him chairman and said he is investing alongside the new management at Sunnyside, a copper project in Arizona next to South32's Hermosa. The company has talked about renaming itself Arizona Standard Copper. So the clean line, Hercules yes and Barksdale no, was Middelkoop's view in the meeting, not a final tally of his chequebook. What survives the correction is his actual test. A chairmanship is not a discovery. A personal cheque that is large, relative to the man's wealth and to the company's need, is closer to one. Two copper stories can sit in one diary. Only one of them, in his book, was the district.
He added a reason that is about the buyer, not the conflict. Ogilvie knows American copper. The more U.S. copper projects he touches, the more useful he is to a major that is hunting. Middelkoop is thinking about the exit before he argues about the org chart.
A full room is not a full pipeline
Harris had noticed the mood. The financing window has been open. Companies have raised, done the work, and look less desperate than they did two years ago. Middelkoop called that the bright side, and then turned it over. He is in the room to find discoveries. There are very few. More money and more drills should mean more of them. He is surprised by the quality. Tier one and tier two are scarce. New stories that clear his bar are hard to find.
He has cut the meetings to five or six a day. He stopped listening to dozens of companies that predict they will discover something. He waits until the discovery exists. Then the fund goes in size, and then it spends the time on diligence. Brokers who call with a private placement hear no, many times a day. The polite version, he said, is that the fund only does tier one and tier two. Most of what is offered is tier three, four, or five. The promoters are offended. They think they are advancing a tier-one shot. He does not.
He will even define the words, which most promoters will not. Tier one, for him, is at least 10 million ounces of gold. Tier two is at least 5 million. On that ruler, 95 or 98 out of 100 stories fail before the first slide. The ruler is gold ounces, and he applies the same idea of size to copper and nickel, because the fund is now about C$400 million. A small market cannot absorb a fund that large. He stopped the rare earths and the specialty metals for that reason. One or two producers, he said, are the whole buyer list. If there is no one to sell the project to, it is not a discovery he can own. It is a sample.
One hole he will name
He had just come from Minnesota. Talon Metals, at its Tamarack nickel-copper-cobalt project, reported a hole that matches the kind of sentence he means. Hole 25TK0562A cut 46.43 metres of massive and mixed massive sulphide grading 13.37 percent nickel, 16.54 percent copper, and a suite of cobalt, palladium, platinum, and gold. The company reported that as 54.78 percent copper equivalent, or 27.39 percent nickel equivalent, starting at about 753 metres. A shorter stretch inside it, 26.22 metres, was higher. It is the longest combined massive-sulphide intercept Talon has reported at Tamarack. Middelkoop rounded it, fairly, to more than 45 metres at about 50 percent copper equivalent.
He then made the comparison that has to stay in his mouth. Look at the size of the system, he said, and you can set it next to Norilsk. Norilsk is one of the great nickel-copper camps on earth. One hole, however rich, is not that camp. A copper-equivalent number adds nickel and precious metals into one percentage. It is a way to rank a drill intercept. It is not a reserve, and it is not a mine. Harris added that Jack Lundin has been putting in personal money and has walked the site. Middelkoop said the Lundins are on the story. That interest is a fact about who is looking. It is not a resource estimate.
The hole is still the exception that makes his complaint sharp. In a week of rattling cans, he could point at one interval and say the rocks had already spoken. Everywhere else, he was being asked to fund the hope that they would.
The majors are shopping. They are not buying.
Harris had heard less takeover talk than in hungrier years. His theory was that juniors no longer need a saviour. They can work, and they can make a bidder wait. Middelkoop wants that work. He also thinks the majors share his complaint. There are not many great discoveries left on the shelf. The best, he said, are already gone. He named Rupert, Reunion, and G2 Goldfields as examples. Those are his examples of a picked-over shelf, not a closing auction this piece re-checked deal by deal.
In June he was on the Yukon mining tour. Three majors sent teams. In a normal year, he said, that tour is fund managers and a few wealthy individuals. The majors are struggling. Arizona and Nevada, in his view, are not where the next large discovery is likely to sit. Idaho is being opened. That is why a company like Hercules matters to him, and why a major's scout team matters. The easy ground has been walked.
The substitute for a takeover, this year, is a small cheque and a long option. Harris raised Agnico Eagle's deal with Scout Discoveries, announced in September. Agnico agreed to invest about US$14.8 million for 14.9 percent of Scout, at $1.50 a share. Harris called the dollars Canadian. The placement was in U.S. dollars. Electrum put in about US$10.2 million alongside, taking its stake to 30 percent, in a combined private placement of about US$25 million. Agnico can earn 51 percent of the Elk City project in Idaho by funding $20 million over five years, and 70 percent by funding $40 million more over the next three years. A similar option sits on Muldoon: $10 million over five years for 51 percent, and $20 million more over three years for 70 percent. Harris's "$60 million and $30 million" is that math.
Middelkoop called it a good example, and a small one for Agnico, a large one for the junior. Agnico is building a portfolio of these. He has seen other majors do it. The logic is a foot in the door. You learn the project. You stand ahead of your peers if a sale ever comes. He does not think the foot in the door becomes a wave of takeovers. He is doubtful. A healthy sign for the industry, he said, is not the same as a bid.
That doubt belongs next to the financing boom. If the majors will not pay up for anything short of a real discovery, and the real discoveries have mostly been sold, then the money juniors are raising is not the same money as a takeout. It is time. Time to drill. Time, also, for a weak story to look busy. Middelkoop would rather the company spend the time adding ounces or tonnes before a bid. He does not pretend the bid is close.
Stop showing the cross-section
Harris asked about the slides, because neither of them is a technical reader. Companies want to walk a long section and a cross-section. The picture goes over his head. Middelkoop agreed, and said he would love a side business teaching them what to leave out. They once ran a discovery day in Amsterdam and stopped, because it was not the fund's job. While they ran it, they coached the presenters. Drop the technical slides that work in a North American investor room. A European audience will not follow them. Talk about supply and demand. Tell a true story.
John Hathaway, speaking at the same summit, had told Harris the same thing. Companies present themselves badly. Middelkoop's version is not an insult to geology. It is a split of labor. The geologist's slide is for the geologist. The fund's question is size, who will buy it, and whether the person in the room can tell that without a cartoon of a drill hole. A chief executive who cannot do that is in the wrong chair, which is how the conversation started.
How the fund is actually built
Harris asked for a portfolio. Bullion, royalties, producers, developers, explorers. Middelkoop answered with the fund's own changes over 18 years, not with a shopping list. It began as a gold discovery fund. It is now aimed at what he calls critical metals, a label that used to say battery metals and will say something else later. Size is the filter. Gold and copper have it. Lithium has become large enough to matter. Uranium is still a small industry, so he wants the big stories in it, not the small ones. Nickel has very few projects with scale. Talon is one he will name.
He will not put the whole fund in juniors. They are too volatile. About 50 to 60 percent goes into what he calls the real juniors, the largest discoveries, a top 40 worldwide. The rest is in producers. Around those he uses hedges and options so the book is closer to market-neutral and the fund swings less. He keeps a lot of cash. Drawdowns, he said, are nasty, and sometimes they are crashes. Cash is what you put to work when they arrive.
The year in the fund is the same split, in numbers he offered and this piece did not audit. Last year, a 71 percent return. This year opened well in January, then a correction he called nasty. Gold shares, he said, fell about 40 percent. The fund fell about 20 percent in that stretch, and was up about 15 percent for the year to date when they spoke. He thinks the correction is nearly done, and he expects a strong last two or three months. He also sees interest rates rising around the world, and that makes him nervous. The same recovery could sit in front of a larger break next year, or the start of a financial crisis. Be defensive while you are early, he said. That is what the cash and the hedges are for.
Harris noted that some mid-tier producers and silver companies had just made 52-week highs, a few of them all-time highs. Does that mean the next leg has started? Middelkoop said that is why the fund owns producers. At these metal prices, he said, they have a license to print money. He expects gold back toward $5,000 rather soon, silver back to at least $100 later this year or early next, and a strong copper market because data centers and artificial intelligence need the metal. Those are his prices, not a forecast from this page. A producer printing money is also a producer that can stop printing if the price he expects does not arrive. The juniors underneath them do not have the license. They have the drill.
The idea, once
Middelkoop's week in Beaver Creek had too many people because capital has returned to a sector it had starved. That is good for work programs and bad for standards. He will not fund a company that promises a discovery. He will fund one that has made one, if it is large enough that a C$400 million fund can own it and a major can one day need it. Ten million ounces, in gold, is his line for tier one. Five million is tier two. Almost everything in the hallway is below that, and almost everything is offended to hear it.
Hercules is the method, not a tip. A geologist found the copper and was drowning in the capital-markets half of the job. Middelkoop sent the file to a builder who had just sold a copper company for a sum Hercules puts near C$2 billion of implied equity. The geologist went back to the rocks. Talon is the other kind of evidence, a 46-metre massive-sulphide hit that does not need a prediction. Agnico's 14.9 percent of Scout is the majors' version of caution. A foot in the door, not a bid. The best projects, in his view, are already sold. Idaho and a few other openings are what is left.
The money is back. The discoveries are not. A bull market in meetings will finance the difference until it cannot. He is trying not to be in that book when it does.
A note on sources and limits
This account follows a Kitco interview at the Precious Metals Summit in Beaver Creek in September 2026, with Paul Harris and Willem Middelkoop, founder of the Commodity Discovery Fund. His age, Ogilvie's age, the C$5 million figure, the fund's C$400 million size, the 71 percent year, the 40 percent drop in gold shares, the 20 percent drop in the fund, and the 15 percent year-to-date gain are what was said in that conversation. They are not a new audit of the fund.
Hercules Metals said on July 30, 2026, that George Ogilvie would become president and chief executive on September 1, with six former Arizona Sonoran colleagues, and that Chris Paul would become senior vice president of exploration and remain a director. The company described Hudbay's purchase of Arizona Sonoran as an implied equity value of about C$2 billion, up from about C$125 million in July 2021. Other reports have cited a U.S. dollar value near $1.4 billion. Leviathan's discovery hole is the company's figure, 185 metres at 0.84 percent copper. Matthieu Bos is the chairman named in the company's welcome of the new team. The Friedland description is Middelkoop's.
Barksdale Resources appointed Ogilvie chairman in late September 2026 and said he is investing alongside new management at the Sunnyside project in Arizona. Middelkoop's comment that Ogilvie had not put personal money into Barksdale was his view in the meeting. It should not be read as the company's later statement.
Talon's September 9, 2026 release is the source for hole 25TK0562A: 46.43 metres grading 13.37 percent nickel and 16.54 percent copper, reported as 54.78 percent copper equivalent. A comparison to Norilsk is Middelkoop's, not a resource. Agnico Eagle's September 18, 2026 agreement with Scout Discoveries is the source for the US$14.8 million stake and the Elk City and Muldoon earn-in amounts. Electrum's US$10.2 million is from the same release. Harris's list of 52-week highs, and Middelkoop's $5,000 gold and $100 silver, are expectations, not prices this piece is quoting live.
Nothing here is investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any security or metal. A discovery hole is not a mine. A tier label is one fund's ruler. Readers should read the filings and speak with a licensed adviser before any decision.