What Mining's 'Legendary' Investors Do Differently

Knowing your circle of competence

The "Living Legends" panel, which featured an array of market masters, began not with stock tips, but with self‑knowledge.

Adrian Day, founder of Adrian Day Asset Management, framed his edge not as a hot model, but as a disciplined way of thinking about where he does, and doesn’t, have an advantage.

“There’s also an advantage in being a generalist because you can compare one thing with another… You can see where value is at any given time,” he said, explaining how moving across sectors lets him spot mispricings that specialists might miss.

At the same time, history serves as his guide: “Human nature doesn’t change… (History) allows you to see how things unfolded in the past… and ideally avoid repeating past mistakes.”

Jonathan Goodman, a geological engineer and portfolio manager, took that a step further. For him, the critical investing skill is not what you know, but how honest you are about the rest.

“Personally, I feel the most important skill in investing… is knowing what you don’t know… and (knowing) how to get the answers to the things that you don’t know,” he said.

During a fireside chat with Rick Rule, Grosskopf, coming from the investment banking side, translated that humility into team structure.

Mining is too complex, he argued, for one person, no matter how smart, to cover every dimension.

“You need a team to understand all the components of a mine… unless you have access to that team, you don’t stand a chance,” he said, describing his dependence on technical specialists even as a financially focused banker.

Patience, persistence and the price of a 10‑bagger

If there was a single theme that united the panel, it was patience—paired with a willingness to sit through pain when the thesis is right.

Mining is “an absolutely tough, tough industry,” said Dr. Quinton Hennigh, geologist and CEO of San Cristobal Mining. “For every one or two good years, there’s eight or nine pretty nasty (years)… You must be perseverant.”

That asymmetry of good to bad years is part of why outsized returns are so rare.

Rick Rule put hard numbers on what a 10‑bagger actually looks like in real time.

“My average 10 bagger took five and a half years… and my average 10 bagger exposed me to a 50 percent share price (decline),” he said.

“The only way I could have withstood that was to know the company well enough to know that if the stock fell by half, what I was supposed to do is buy three times as much, not sell what I had.”

That “know it well enough” is where psychology and process collide.

Day pointed out that even if you’re financially able to ride out volatility, that doesn’t mean you’re mentally prepared.

“In the mining business… stocks are inherently volatile… more important (than finances) is your psychology… Are you truly able to withstand volatility?” said Day.

For the legends on stage, high conviction wasn’t a feeling. It was the outcome of deep, ongoing work on a limited set of names.

Postmortems and a finite portfolio

Big winners get the headlines. But for these investors, one of the quiet edges is what happened to the losers.

“I like doing postmortems,” Day said. “Why did this not work out? Was it just plain bad luck… or was it that I bought the wrong thing, I didn’t know enough about it…? A post mortem to me is very, very valuable.”

That discipline extends to how many companies they even try to follow.

Rule recalled pitching ideas to Day and being forced into an uncomfortable but healthy comparison.

“Every deal I pitched you, you would benchmark it against Franco-Nevada (TSX:FNV,NYSE:FNV): ‘Explain to me why I should sell some Franco to buy this crap,’” Rule joked. “If you want a dollar out, you’ve got to displace a dollar somewhere else.”

Day credited Pierre Lassonde with embedding that discipline: “He said to me, ‘I only have five exploration companies… If I want to buy a new one, I have to decide which of the five do I sell.’ That’s a great discipline.

Rule offered a simple rule of thumb for speculators: match your stock count to the work you’re actually willing to do.

“Limit the number of (speculative) stocks in your portfolio to the number of hours per month you’re prepared to work,” he said. “Ten hours, ten stocks. No hours, no stocks.”

For retail investors tempted to own “a bit of everything,” it’s a harsh message: if you can’t follow it properly, you probably shouldn’t own it at all.

The pain of selling too early and the Eric Sprott model

If there was one regret Grosskopf kept coming back to, it wasn’t picking the wrong names. It was exiting the right ones too soon.

“It is a business where if you’re really, really good, you get one wrong… two kind of medium successes… and you get one really right. Don’t sell the right one,” said Grosskopf. “My common mistake… I was really right on something, and I sold it way too early.”

That’s where Eric Sprott’s approach—familiar to many in the sector—came into focus. Grosskopf described Sprott’s willingness to live with extremely lumpy outcomes.

He summarized Sprott’s philosophy as treating a series of large losses as the “cover charge” for a handful of spectacular wins.

Sprott is “willing to take 50 percent to 100 percent losses as long as he’s always investing in something that has a legitimate chance to go over 20 times on the upside,” said Grosskopf.

Being truly contrarian and choosing the right broker

A recurring thread across the symposium was the gap between wanting to be contrarian and actually being able to act that way.

“If you want to be a great investor in mining, you have to be a contrarian,” Grosskopf said. “And if you want to be a contrarian, you can't buy mutual funds. Mutual funds get money, and at the top, they have to chase stocks, and they get money redeemed at the bottom. They have to sell valuable stocks at prices below their intrinsic value. So you have to have a structure in your own account that can react to being contrarian.”

To act differently, he argued, you need to be structurally set up to do it.

That structure extends to relationships with brokers. For Grosskopf, the right broker isn’t a tip machine but an honest filter.

“Do you trust your broker?” he asked the audience. “If the broker’s truthful, he’ll tell you the real goods, the positive and the negative,” he said.

The time horizon has to line up too.

“You have to talk to a broker that cares about retail… and (say), ‘Don’t measure me in months… This is a journey we’re on,’” he said, framing it as a multi‑year partnership rather than a trade‑idea subscription.

What separates legends from everyone else

Listening across both sessions, what stands out is how un‑flashy the “edge” really is. There’s no magic screen or secret indicator. Instead, the legends come back to the same unglamorous principles:

• Ruthless clarity about what they know and what they don’t
• A willingness to endure years of volatility in positions they’ve truly underwritten
• Systematic postmortems and strict limits on how many names they follow
• Structural room to act contrarian and the courage not to cash in winners too early

As Rule put it when reflecting on his own 10‑baggers, the courage to buy more after a 50 percent drawdown doesn’t come from bravado, it comes from knowing the company so well that price becomes opportunity, not a verdict.

In a sector where cycles are brutal and the news flow is relentless, that combination of self‑knowledge, discipline and patience may be the real definition of “legendary.”