Neil Adshead

Dr. Neil Adshead is a Vancouver-based economic geologist who has spent more than 30 years on both sides of the mining investment table — first exploring for deposits, then financing and evaluating the companies that chase them. He serves as a consultant analyst to the Commodity Discovery Fund, a director of Vancouver advisory firm Cupel Advisory Corp. and an advisor to Australian copper explorer Inflection Resources, and he is best known for showing mining investors exactly how he judges an early-stage junior stock.

Adshead earned a Ph.D. in Economic Geology from James Cook University in Australia in 1995 and spent his first post-graduate decade with Placer Dome and its subsidiaries in exploration, mine geology and corporate roles across Canada, Australia and Papua New Guinea. He then crossed to the investment side, working more than seven years as a Vancouver-based senior mining exploration analyst for a San Francisco-based investment firm before joining Sprott Asset Management as an investment strategist and later portfolio manager covering resource stocks. In late 2016 he invested early in GT Gold, whose Tatogga project in British Columbia's Golden Triangle delivered the Saddle South epithermal vein system — gold in near-surface, hot-spring-style veins — and the Saddle North copper-gold porphyry, one of the large, lower-grade deposits that supply much of the world's copper. Newmont acquired GT Gold in an all-cash takeover in 2021.

When Adshead evaluates a junior, he starts with people: whether the management team has the track record and funding to drill its own idea. He then weighs jurisdiction — the political and regulatory risk of where a project sits — and share structure, asking how much dilution a discovery will cost existing shareholders, before ranking the geology itself. He has said he underwrites deals on long-term metrics rather than spot prices, and on Kamoa Capital's The Drill Down in April 2026 he argued that major miners should acquire more juniors, citing that 12 of 17 notable gold discoveries of the past decade were made by junior companies, many of them later bought.

Investors who follow Adshead get a working education in discovery-stage risk. His recent commentary has centred on whether gold mining equities are mispriced after the sector's long run-up, on gold M&A — from the Barrick-Newmont deal and what it implies for the value of Nevada's Fourmile project to the Equinox Gold-Orla Mining merger — and on where the next wave of copper discoveries will come from. Through Cupel Advisory he teaches a Basic Principles of Mining Investment short course, most recently at Mining Forum Americas in September 2025. The lesson he repeats: in a sector where most explorers fail, the team, the ground and the share structure decide who gets paid.