Jamie Spratt

Dr Jamie Spratt is the geologist a mining investor reaches for when a PEA or PFS lands. He is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College London, based at the Royal School of Mines, and the way his career is wired into academic ore-deposit research is exactly what makes his read on a company's study worth hearing.

On the academic side the record is concrete. Spratt holds a PhD in geology from Imperial, has published on ore-deposit formation in journals that include Ore Geology Reviews and Mineralium Deposita, and holds visiting appointments at the Natural History Museum in London and the Economic Geology Research Centre (EGRU) at James Cook University in Australia. His published areas span gold, base metals, rare earth elements, cobalt, antimony, tellurium, and indium — an unusually wide footprint for a single economic-geology researcher.

The value of Spratt's lens for an investor is the look-before-you-leap skill it produces. He works on the geology of hydrothermal systems — the class of deposit that hosts most of the world's gold, copper-gold porphyries, and critical-minerals vein systems — and the way he frames a study is from the rock up rather than from the press release down. What does the resource model assume about ore controls? Is the implied metallurgical recovery realistic for the mineralogy? Does the headline NPV track what he has seen on analogous deposits?

For a mining-stock investor following Pixys, the practical use of his work is on studies like the one this video covers: a PEA or PFS that prints a multi-billion-dollar number and asks the market to price it as a development project. Spratt's read tends to be the honest one — whether the underlying geology supports the headline, and what that implies for whether the equity or the M&A bid is the better trade.