Having recently traveled to mines in Australia and New Zealand, longtime gold and silver bull Eric Sprott was at his vacation rental in San Jose, Costa Rica drinking a beer when Forbes caught up with him in late January. Silver had just hit an all-time high of $100 an ounce but he was nonplussed.
“Both the gold and silver stocks have massively underperformed,” said Sprott, 81. “ I think the prices are going much higher, quite frankly. I think silver can easily go to $200, even $300. I think gold could go to $10,000.”
Aaron Kotowski for Forbes
Days later, when silver had plunged by a third to $76 and gold dropped below $5,000, Sprott was equally unmoved, noting that such volatility is to be expected, as conflicts flare across the globe and people scramble for safer investments. In his view, the swings reflect a market that’s searching for direction amid global uncertainty.
That might be one reason why lots of new investors have scooped up gold and silver, but Sprott thinks there was another reason behind the insane rise in metals prices – irresponsible spending by central governments. It’s a song that has been sung by “sound money” pundits for decades. The theory goes that high levels of spending have eroded consumer trust in fiat currencies and driven more people to tangible assets like precious metals that are seen as stores of value. “I think all of us know that governments have been quite irresponsible in terms of the financial system and the printing of money and the overspending. Every government, whether it’s Canadian, US, UK, Japan, you name it, they’ve all overspent,” says Sprott. “They just think that if you can print money, let’s use the printer, and so we overspend.”
It’s that conviction that has led him not only to hoard bullion, but (more lucratively) to scoop up stakes in more than 200 silver and gold companies. His deep industry knowledge has allowed him to target small, lesser-known companies with what he believes are undervalued assets. “I think of deposits,” says Sprott. “I’m not a geologist– I know nothing about rocks, but I know about numbers…if the reward’s a big reward I can afford to lose.”
It’s paid off. Sprott, who currently has stakes in 120 mining outfits but is concentrated in less than ten, is now worth roughly $3.3 billion. That’s up approximately four-fold since the start of 2025 but down roughly 30% from its peak of $4.6 billion.
Those who have worked closely with Sprott credit his patient, steadfast temperament. “He never sounds uncertain,” said Jeff Kennedy, chairman of the board of Toronto-based silver company Stroud Resources and longtime friend who has an advisory role in Sprott’s family office. “He has a view and he’s willing to put his name and reputation behind that view and wait it out.”
Sprott’s path to becoming one of the world’s biggest metals bulls started in Ottawa, the capital of Canada known for its mineral-rich deposits where his dad was a government official. Sprott credits his father, who made amateur stock trades in his spare time for sparking his interest in investing. “I had a person to talk to about things stock-market-wise,” he says.
After graduating from Carleton University in Ottawa in 1965 – which renamed its business school after him in 2001 – he worked as a computer programmer and market analyst at Merrill Lynch. After three years, he moved to a boutique Canadian equity research firm where he spent a decade. Saving up some money, Sprott bought his own seat on the Toronto Stock Exchange in 1980 and started his own securities firm, Sprott Securities, providing research and portfolio management to institutional investors.
His first big win was a bet on Ontario-based Lakeshore Mines in the 1980s, which he found by scrutinizing insider trading reports and noticing a small group of mining companies repeatedly buying stakes in one another. That led Sprott to value the companies himself, concluding that the market had significantly underestimated their worth. He bought in at around $5. Within six months they were trading around $50 apiece. “It was not that I intended to be in the money management business, but it just happened that I was a pretty good investor,” he says.
By 2000, as the first dot-com bubble inflated, Sprott started to worry what would happen if the market crashed. That’s when he first gambled on gold and silver, shorting equities and going long on precious metals. It was a prescient bet. Soon after, the market fell 80%. Sprott then sold the brokerage side of Sprott Securities to his employees, held onto the asset management division for himself and began investing in mining firms. Because of uncertainty about costs and mineral quality, unmined mineral deposits are usually valued at prices less than their refined versions, even after geologist projections. With his expertise, Sprott saw this as an advantage, telling Forbes that even now he looks at measures like contained ounces, cutoff rate, and mine activity to weigh the cost of the investment against market prices.
His biggest investment, a now $1.3 billion stake in Hycroft Mining Holding Corp., was one of these undervalued, speculative investments. What drew him was the sheer size of the flagship mine’s deposit of gold and silver in northern Nevada, despite the fact that it had not yet begun production when he invested in 2019, and the company was weighed down by debt. “It might be the biggest deposit in your country, it just wasn’t in production,” Sprott said.
Trusting his thesis, Sprott injected more than $360 million into Hycroft and helped refinance its loans in a manner that secured him a 1% equity stake and 1.5% net royalty on all future mining revenue. After a few years of volatility, Hycroft’s shares started to rise. Sprott invested more. Then they soared, jumping 1482% since the start of 2025, even though the company only recently started active operations and has yet to produce any silver or gold.
Sprott’s second largest holding, Ontario-based Discovery Silver Corporation is a similar story. In May 2019, Discovery (then named Discovery Metals Corp.) and Levon Resources Ltd. combined to create a silver-focused exploration company with projects in Mexico and Puerto Rico. Later that year, Sprott invested around $6 million for nearly a quarter of the newly merged firm’s shares. Using those new funds, Discovery began focusing on its large Cordero mine property in Chihuahua, Mexico, which it forecast to contain close to a million tons of gold, silver, lead, and zinc.
Over the next year and a half, Sprott invested an additional $22 million in the company, raising his stake to 25% and leading to a rally that spiked the stock price more than three-fold. Then came Discovery Silver’s $425 million acquisition of a large gold mining project in Ontario in January 2025 that boosted shares by 998% and lifted the value of his stake to $400 million.
Looking ahead, Sprott is still focused on silver, especially as global demand outstrips supply. According to the Silver Institute, a nonprofit research organization, the global market has been running a deficit for the last five years, with demand consistently outpacing supply. It’s not just doomsday preppers driving demand: The metal is widely used in batteries, electronics, electric vehicles and solar panels.
Sprott has also begun dabbling in manganese. After reading a Samsung report in late 2024 that a pure and concentrated version of the metal (currently mostly used in steel production) was going to make a new, more efficient EV battery, Sprott snapped up shares in both Euro Manganese Inc and Manganese X Energy Corp.. According to a report by Mordor Intelligence, a market research firm based in Hyderabad, India, the global manganese market is expected to grow from about $33 billion to $41 billion in the next five years. “I probably own four or five of them [Manganese miners] and as much as 20% in most,” Sprott said.
The current geopolitical turmoil, including the conflict in Iran, doesn’t concern Sprott (“Nothing’s changed,” he shrugs.) And he is actively disinterested in hot stocks like Nvidia, Microsoft or Apple (“I am short some of those.”). Instead, as he has done for the last 40-plus years, he is sticking with metals and trusting that his grasp of the industry combined with his underlying investment thesis will allow him to continue to outperform. “I think probably some of the best advice is if you think you’re right, just stay with it and be patient. ”
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