Kevin C. Smith

Kevin C. Smith, CFA, is the founder, CEO, and chief investment officer of Crescat Capital, a Denver-based global macro asset management firm, and the lead portfolio manager of its Crescat Precious Metals Fund. He matters to resource investors because that fund has become one of the more visible activist holders of exploration-stage gold and silver juniors: it builds large positions early, leads or co-leads private placements, and works alongside management teams to advance deposits.

Smith has been managing investment portfolios since 1992, according to the firm. He holds an economics degree from Stanford University and an MBA in finance and statistics from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and he started out as an accountant at Arthur Young (now EY) before becoming a stockbroker at Kidder Peabody. Crescat traces its roots to the late 1990s, launching a long/short hedge fund in 2000 and a global macro fund in 2006. In 2019 Smith brought in economic geologist Quinton Hennigh, and in August 2020 the firm launched the Crescat Precious Metals Fund. Crescat's letters reported a 235% net gain in that fund's first year, and the firm estimates annualized net returns near 30% since inception as of July 2026 — figures from Crescat's own reporting, not audited third parties. The fund states that its portfolio companies are exploring for more than 300 million gold-equivalent ounces (deposit value expressed in ounces of gold), with over 100 drill rigs running across them annually. In 2023 a Crescat-backed vehicle, San Cristobal Mining Inc., completed the purchase of the San Cristóbal silver-lead-zinc mine in Potosí, Bolivia, from Sumitomo Corporation, with Hennigh as its president.

Smith's method combines top-down macro with bottom-up geology. He created Crescat's systematic equity valuation model, which he has applied for three decades to find deeply undervalued sectors, and his long-running thesis is that fiat currency debasement makes precious metals miners among the cheapest assets in public markets. In mining, the fund practices what Crescat calls friendly activism: negotiated private placements (share sales to selected investors, often at a discount with warrants) plus technical guidance, rather than hostile campaigns. His screen for a project is plain: "You need a big Tier-1 scale geologic target. It's got to be in a jurisdiction where you can ultimately build a mine." The goal, as he put it in 2021, is "buying stuff for pennies on the dollar" — ounces in the ground cheap, before a discovery re-rates them.

Today Smith argues the precious metals bull market is still young — "we think it's still early in the cycle," he said at the PDAC convention in March 2026, where he described exploration companies as capital starved — and Crescat has published a long-run gold scenario of $20,000 per ounce. He appears regularly on CNBC, Kitco News, and other financial media, and his recurring message is that pullbacks in metals are buying opportunities for patient investors. Following him offers a working example of how a macro fund sizes, funds, and supports junior explorers — and of the risks, since discovery-stage investing can fail even in a bull market.