Matt Youkee

Mat Youkee (also credited as Matt Youkee) is a freelance journalist and political risk analyst who interviews resource investors and analysts for Mining Network, a UK-based mining investment media outlet. His August 2026 conversation with Joe Mazumdar of Exploration Insights — on gold equities (shares of gold mining companies), how major producers allocate capital, and copper — was republished on Exploration Insights' own media page. For resource investors, his relevance lies in the combination: market interviews informed by more than 15 years reporting Latin America's mining and oil sectors from the ground.

Based in Latin America since 2010 — first Bogota, now Panama City — Youkee has covered the Colombian oil and mining sectors as a business journalist, with bylines in The Economist, The Guardian, The Telegraph, LatinFinance, Americas Quarterly and World Politics Review. His reporting has engaged the resource economy directly: illegal gold mining in Colombia, Indigenous land-and-resource conflicts across the region, and Ecuador's mining corridor, home to the Mirador copper and Fruta del Norte gold mines. He is the author of Forty Days in the Jungle (2025), an account of the 2023 plane crash in the Colombian Amazon, whose film rights were optioned by Scott Free.

His approach treats jurisdiction risk (how a country's politics and institutions shape the economics of a mining project) as central to resource investing. Through Nostromo Research, the political risk and due diligence consultancy he founded in 2016, he analyzes Latin America and the Caribbean for business clients. That lens carries into his Mining Network interviews: with Mazumdar, the discussion covered why the majors (the largest global mining producers) favor shareholder returns and buying existing production over building new mines, what makes a development-stage project worth acquiring — permitting timelines, mining method, capital intensity, infrastructure and management capability — and why copper stands out among critical minerals (metals governments class as strategically essential) for its liquidity and constrained future supply.

His Mining Network interview catalogue is still small but already notable: a June 2026 macro conversation with investor Rick Rule on gold, silver, oil and copper preceded the Mazumdar interview. Youkee is an interviewer and reporter, not a fund manager, so his value is context rather than stock picks. Investors following Latin American producers — where permitting, community relations and government policy often decide a project's fate — will find his questioning useful, and his Substack, The Sulaco Times, adds analysis and opinion from Panama City.