Jayant Bhandari

Jayant Bhandari is an Asia-based institutional investor adviser who has spent two decades studying and investing in the junior mining sector. A former analyst with U.S. Global Investors, the San Antonio-based boutique natural resource firm where he spent six years, Bhandari now advises funds on resource investing and is widely cited as the originator of the term Junior Resource Value Arbitrage.

His track record includes initiating what he has described as a $100 million merger negotiation and analyzing over 800 exploration and mining companies. He served as a director of Gold Canyon Resources, a publicly listed Canadian company, until its merger, and previously ran the Indian subsidiary operations of a British and a German-Swiss firm before entering the resource markets. He holds an MBA from Manchester Business School and a Bachelor of Engineering from SGSITS in India.

Bhandari's investment philosophy starts with physical precious metals. As he has put it, "The foundation of my investments start with physical gold and silver, and then from there, I get into speculating in the mining stocks." From that base, he looks for junior miners with high insider ownership, tight share structures, and management teams that treat per-share value creation as the central discipline. He is sharply critical of junior managements that dilute shareholders through mispriced financings, and prefers opportunities bought when "blood is running in the streets," when valuations offer the most upside per unit of risk.

His commentary extends well beyond markets. Bhandari writes regularly on the moral and cultural preconditions of capitalism, and runs an annual Capitalism & Morality seminar in Vancouver. His bylines have appeared in Liberty, the Mises Institute, Casey Research, Mining Journal, the Northern Miner, Mauldin Economics, Zero Hedge, the Fraser Institute, and other outlets. He is currently at work on a book examining the civilizational roots of Third World dysfunction.

For a resource investor, the practical takeaway is consistent: build a core position in physical gold and silver, add a small basket of carefully vetted junior miners in safe jurisdictions, and ignore the noise. Bhandari's framework is the closest thing the junior mining world has to a working checklist for separating real value creators from the constant flow of paper-asset promotions.