Precious Metals Summit stakes its claim as destination number one for juniors

Think of a mining conference in the latter half of the year and your mind probably goes to the Denver Gold Forum – which remains one of the premier mining destinations on the calendar year.

And while there are no shortage of top level executives, deal-makers, fund managers and sell-side representatives hob-knobbing at the three day event, the Forum has never been a great platform for junior miners.

It was a set of circumstances that never sat well with the Denver Gold Group’s former head, Jessica Levental, and this year she did something about it.

Levental served as the executive director for the Denver Gold Group for over four years but when her contract expired in December of last year she decided to pursue a thought that had been hatching in her mind for some time.

The idea was to make a more junior focused conference, one that remained close to the Denver Gold Forum so that participants could attend both, but one that would foster a more intimate atmosphere than the larger scale Forum allowed for.

“I realized there was a gap,” she says of the genesis of the junior focused idea. “The only other shows were the PDAC, Hard Assets and Cambridge House and they’re not really adequate for exposing juniors to larger institutions.”

With the successful completion of the inaugural Precious Metals Summit in Vail, Colorado on Sept. 16th, Levental proved her instincts were right by tapping into a niche market.

Of course bringing an idea into the real world is a long process, and Levental is quick to give credit to some key people in the investment community who offered early support.

Those people included John Hathaway, senior managing director of Tocqueville Asset Management, Robert Cohen, vice president & portfolio manager at Dynamic Funds, Joseph Foster, portfolio manager at Van Eck Associates and David Harquail, chief executive at Franco-Nevada (FNV-T, FNV-N) – all of whom now sit on the Precious Metals Summit’s advisory committee.

“Their enthusiasm exceeded my expectations,” she says. “They all said that I had to ‘go for it’ and that there was a need for this because no-one else was doing it.”

As for how the desired intimacy was attained, in part that came from keeping the number of companies in the program below 100 (there were 82) and registering 340 delegates (Levental says she wants to keep the number below 400).

By way of comparison, the Denver Gold Forum had over 1,100 delegates last year with roughly 150 companies in program.

Another advantage to keeping the show comparatively small was the pace at which it was able to unfold. The Precious Metals conference opened on Wednesday Sept.14 with a gala dinner and a speech by George Will, then saw a full day of presentations on the Thursday and a half day of presentations on Friday.

But how does the average junior become get become a part of such cozy confines?

Levental explains that the thrust behind the selection process was to take the point of view of the investor and try to determine what they wanted to see.

“I developed a list of over 200 companies, some of them were ones I had to turn away from the Denver Gold Forum,” she explains. “Then I looked at research from a variety of brokerage firms that cover the junior space and used The Northern Miner and created a big list and vetted it to a half dozen investors.”

The vetting process made clear which companies institutional investors were most interested in, and it was those companies that made the cut.

Over at the Denver Gold Group, the screening process was much more cut and dry, and left many interesting mining stories out in the cold. The methodology for selecting juniors at the Forum was to simply rank them by market cap with the 25 largest being allowed to pass through the gates. That process generally resulted in only juniors with market caps of between $800 and $250 million getting in.

The Precious Metals Summit, on the other hand, had over 20 companies with market caps in the US$25 to US$75 million range.

By bringing in those smaller companies the Summit also managed to import their enthusiasm. Cocktail receptions were bristling with activity, one-on-one meetings were steady, and executives and other industry types consistently commented on the air of approachability that was generated at the conference.

In short, this wasn’t the sort of event where a big-time CEO flies in for a quick presentation only to be quickly whisked off to another part of the world to attend another function.

“The juniors need exposure and are warm and open and want to intermingle as opposed to seniors, whose CEO’s can be suffering from conference burn-out,” Levental says.

In all, the event attracted roughly 60 institutions, 120 investors which included a host of fund managers whose firms manage in access of US$1 trillion. Then there were the 11 senior miners that sent corporate development teams and 30 sell-side delegates made up of 20 analyst and 10 from institutional sales.