Clayton Fisher

Clayton Fisher is the CEO and a director of IDEX Metals, a Vancouver-based explorer that has assembled one of the larger land packages in Idaho's newest copper district: 15 projects across roughly 50,000 acres, anchored by the Freeze copper-gold project. Resource investors should know the name because IDEX is one of the few juniors drilling the porphyry belt — the large, lower-grade deposits that supply most of the world's copper — that Hercules Metals' 2023 Leviathan discovery put on the map, and Fisher's Kismet target has already returned 101 metres of 1.02% copper from surface. The project also carries tungsten, a critical metal with no current US mine production, giving IDEX a two-metal story rare among juniors.

His route here ran through capital markets. Fisher started as an assistant broker at Canaccord's White Rock, BC office in February 2008, watched the financial crisis hit within months, and spent the next decade raising money for junior mining ventures as a venture broker, then managing treasury and foreign exchange for issuers. He crossed to the operating side about six years ago, seeded IDEX with a $150,000 first raise, and built the company through staking and option deals until it went public in June 2025, adding a US OTCQB listing that August. In spring 2026 IDEX closed roughly $15 million in special-warrant financings to fund drilling.

Fisher's signature win came through patience with paperwork. When Hercules' discovery set off a staking rush — Barrick blanket-staked some 100,000 acres nearby — IDEX could not compete for federal claims, so it pursued Idaho state mineral leases, which are awarded by auction. IDEX arrived registered and prepared; competing majors did not, and Fisher won 28,000 acres at the minimum bid. The ground held the Kismet breccia (rock shattered and re-cemented by mineral-rich fluids, a common host for metals), where 2025-2026 drilling confirmed tungsten sitting with the copper — including 180.5 metres of 0.11% tungsten trioxide. Fisher prices the tungsten at about one-third of spot in his copper-equivalent arithmetic — an interval he says works out to roughly 1.87% copper equivalent (the grade a deposit would carry if secondary metals were converted into copper value) — but declines to publish the combined figure until metallurgical work backs it.

The 2026 season keeps the focus on Freeze: an induced-polarization survey — a geophysical method that maps sulphide-bearing rock — outlined four chargeability targets in August, and tungsten enrichment was confirmed in all six of 2025's Kismet drill holes that September. Fisher has also been optioning away non-core gold and silver assets, including deals with Integra Resources and, in 2026, WestGold Metals, to concentrate the company on copper. For investors, following IDEX is a real-time lesson in how a small, disciplined junior assembles ground, patience, and drilling into a discovery story in a brand-new US copper belt.