Michael Wekerle

Michael Wekerle is a Toronto financier with more than three decades on Bay Street, now focused on hard assets. He hosts WekWorks, an interview series on gold, copper, and mining investment, and runs Altitude Capital Partners, a capital markets advisory firm that works with junior mining companies — small, exploration-stage public firms — and battery-materials developers. For resource investors, his value is a trader's view of how capital moves into and out of the commodity cycle.

Wekerle began as a phone clerk on the Toronto Stock Exchange floor and became head trader at First Marathon, where he worked on Rogers Communications' 1994 takeover of Maclean-Hunter. In 1995 he joined Griffiths McBurney & Partners (GMP) as vice-chairman of trading, and was closely involved in Research In Motion's 1997 IPO — the listing that took BlackBerry public. He left GMP in 2011 and founded Difference Capital Financial, a merchant bank that backed companies such as Hootsuite and Vision Critical. From 2014 to 2017 he was an investor on CBC's Dragons' Den, and he owns Toronto's El Mocambo music venue.

His commodity practice runs through Altitude Capital Partners, where he is managing partner. The firm advises and helps finance listed resource companies, including Electra Battery Materials, Premium Nickel Resources, and Thunder Gold, and Wekerle has been reported as a 10% shareholder of CoTec Holdings (TSXV: CTH), a small-cap investor in mining and metals technologies. On WekWorks he frames commodities as a macro position — central-bank gold buying, de-dollarization, and a multi-year run for gold that he describes as not a trade but a signal. Episodes dig into specifics: drill intercepts, market caps, and sum-of-the-parts math (a valuation that adds up what each part of a company would be worth separately).

Following Wekerle is most useful as a lesson in how a financier reads a commodity cycle: when money rotates from financial assets into hard assets, which juniors need financing next, and where M&A (mergers and acquisitions) could provide the exit. A note of diligence: several companies featured on WekWorks, among them Thunder Gold and CoTec, have been Altitude clients, and the series carries sponsorship disclaimers, so the shows are informed conversation rather than independent research.