The South American (Junior) Mining & Exploration Opportunity
How I'm playing resources in a part of the world I've been embedded in for four years - living it, working inside the companies, and building positions with a deliberate appetite for asymmetry.
Lately, I keep coming across the phrase:
“The Golden Age of Latin America.”
For the purposes of where I see the real asymmetric value in resources, I’ll call it:
“The Golden Age of South America.”
You’re watching a generational political shift play out in real time. Argentina and Chile have already made the turn, shedding the left-wing socialist experiments that hollowed out their economies. Colombia and Venezuela (ojalá) are next. Capital is coming back. The conditions for genuinely asymmetric returns in junior resources are back.
The stocks I’m about to cover aren’t for everyone. If you’re looking for safety, stop reading. We’re talking a copper porphyry in the Colombian jungle, a gold shear zone in the Guyanese rainforest, an unopened mining district in the Andes, an early stage high-grade Chilean gold discovery, and one of the most extraordinary precious metals deposits ever drilled - sitting idle in the Brazilian Amazon since 2014. Speculative by definition. That’s where the real asymmetry lives.
I’ve lived in South America for the past four years. I’ve been an active investor in junior exploration companies the entire time, and for the last two years I’ve held operational roles inside two of them.
When I left Australia in 2022, for good, I had no intention of returning to the geology work I’d left behind. Project Exploration Geologist for a major and a mid-tier before that. Good jobs. Perth fly-in fly-out. Zero long term appeal for me.
What I found in South America was something different. Being part of a company that went from a C$12M market cap with near-zero cash to sitting at C$200M with C$27.5M in the bank - even with the spectre of WW3 keeping a likely temporary lid on everything - while copper pushes toward $6/lb, changes how you think about what’s possible.
With joining Andina, it was the whole process: buying when it was beaten down, making sure that if what we were planning at the time (the acquisition of Cobrasco Cu-Mo project from Rugby Resources and recommencing exploration) worked out, I’d position myself in something large enough to be life-changing. Discovering that owning a meaningful personal stake in what you’re building is a better motivator than anything a major mining company’s HR department ever came up with.
And way more fun (see below photos)…
Here’s where I’m positioned, what I’m watching, and what I missed - five stocks, all with projects in South America, and what I believe could be some of the most asymmetric risk-reward setups available to punters, speculators and retail investors in the Golden Age of South America.