Interview: Andrew Jarmolkiewicz on Gold and the Junior Miners

October 21, 2025 | In this edition of The Institutional Risk Analyst, we speak with Andrew Jarmolkiewicz, a portfolio manager based in Nassau, Bahamas. Jarmolkiewicz has spent 28 years as a trader, investor and hedge fund manager in structured credit, commodity futures and junior mining. In 2004 he co-founded a multibillion dollar hedge fund manager and created a highly active restructuring business that completed landmark transactions in the wake of the global financial crisis. Most recently, Jarmolkiewicz has spent the past decade focused on junior mining advisory and investment, working intensively with mining management teams and major institutional investors.

The IRA: Thank you for taking the time Andrew. It’s been very busy in the markets, especially with President Donald Trump poking Xi Jinping of China, and sending stocks and crypto lower in highly correlated unison.  We found that especially amusing. But how have you reacted to the move in gold and other metals, especially when you and other friends in the Bahamian metals community have predicted this sort of move a long time. Our X friend Adam Schiff is having a lot of fun playing old clips from CNBC where market people denigrated the positive view of gold.

Jarmołkiewicz: Yeah, it's shocking, but so are a lot of other things today. I’m speaking to you while I am back in the UK visiting family and the economy is a complete mess. It's everything I feared would happen. So watching the move in gold is not a surprise, but it is a shock even for people heavily involved in metals. It's never easy to time these things. It's a lot easier to predict them than to time them.  We as people get used to permanence, so it's hard as people to deal with and assimilate sudden change. We like to have stability, so when you suddenly realize that you gotta go live somewhere else, that's a big deal. That's something Americans have a great deal of trouble with when we start talking to them about gold. It threatens all of their assumptions. So they get very uncomfortable.

The IRA: Having worked in Mexico and Venezuela years ago, we appreciate what a currency devaluation does to a society. We worked with several Mexican banks in the Carlos Salinas years and always asked them to let us know if there was a line outside the bank in the morning. Tellers could count those large peso notes very slowly and carefully. We see the same scenario unfolding in Argentina, but across the border in Uruguay the country is largely dollarized. Americans are not used to thinking about inflation and currency devaluation. And then when you remind them that stocks and real estate are going down in gold terms, that doesn't really make them happy either.

Jarmolkiewicz: Absolutely. The problem is that we kind of grew up in a world where we didn't have to worry on a weekly or monthly basis about what was going on in the world.  There were periods when we did, but for the most part, we didn't. We've had basic stability from one year to the next.

The IRA: Pax Americana. That's right.

Jarmolkiewicz: We don't have that any longer. We've got to worry about stuff all the time, unless you really are a pretty detached person, or have no assets at all, and just live off government support. That's half the UK. If you're not in that half, you've got to worry all the time now. Same is true for Americans, particularly because we benefited so much from that little stability bubble for, you know, most of my lifetime. Well that’s over now.

The IRA: And you’ve had a very good view of the change, working at Bear, Merrill and hedge funds and working in the capital markets and structured finance. The folks who work in mortgages and structured finance, and insurance, are the smarties on Wall Street.  Anyway, so tell us, you obviously worked in the biz for a while. When did you first start to really focus on metals?

Jarmolkiewicz: As I began to realize how credit-driven everything had become, I wanted to get out of that. I left the structured finance business in 2010, which was pretty much the halfway point of my career. I wanted to only work with real assets going forwards, and, you know, in particular, gold and precious metals.

The IRA: That's interesting, because you were at Bear when restructuring was the rage, right? Everybody was dumping time and people and capital into that business, but you felt like there was a better direction. It's the bottom of gold, too. How was it like in 2010 to tell people you were starting to focus on precious metals? Kind of reminds us of the journey of Henry Smyth, who we interviewed previously ("Interview: Henry Smyth on the Return of Gold as Global Reserve Asset.")

Jarmolkiewicz: Well, you know what it's like. No one buys into what you're doing, until you achieve something. So even though I'd had a great career, it didn't really satisfy me, because in the end, I'd kind of lost belief in a lot of the products that I've been working with during my career up until that point. I wanted to focus on commodities, and I managed commodities strategies and managed futures. But in terms of mining, I got to know mining executives who lived in the Bahamas, where a lot of them do live, and just became aware of the companies they were involved in, the challenges they had, they had, you know, the most fantastic assets.

The IRA: And in 2010, the market gave them almost no credit at all for those assets.  The shift of trading to Asia had not yet started to impact prices for gold or production assets fifteen years ago.

Jarmolkiewicz: I invested and was happy to help them all I could, any way I could, and that's how we got involved in mining and running strategies focused on the sector. That soon overtook managing future strategies and commodities and became the main focus on my time.

The IRA: What is it about the Bahamas that attracts the mining executives? Is it just that they're in a global business?  And they have to be in a venue that's friendly to that?

Jarmolkiewicz: There are not many centers for financing mining around the world, and Canada is the best one. You've got Australia and, to a lesser degree, you know, London and South Africa, although they've really faded. You tend to find with the exploration sector, with junior mining, that the Bahamas is a welcoming warm place, especially in the winter for Canadians.  Many of them come down there, they don't have to pay any tax. They're not subject to worldwide taxation like Americans, and it's a popular place for successful Canadians to come.

The IRA: Now, have the Chinese started to spawn a mining community in terms of private companies, or does the government still control most of it?

Jarmolkiewicz: There is Zijin Mining Group (FJZB.F), you know, who are a big mining company, and they're active, they're acquiring other companies. Other Chinese mining companies are less visible in the Americas, they're not as active as they are in Africa. In the Americas, it's basically Zijin.

The IRA: After a long period of relatively quiet pricing action, how is the mining sector going to recapitalize? 

Jarmolkiewicz: Capital is now coming back into specialist mining funds as it hasn’t for years. And they are buying junior mining companies. Soon we may see a return of generalist investors who have had little if anything allocated to mining and that would be epic. We are in a situation where the entire mining investment ecosystem was damaged for decades and capital left the sector in that period. Major mining companies over-invested in the 2000s and early 2010s as China growth roared. An unexpected slowdown in Chinese economic growth then led to a commodity slump. Investor allocations to mining slumped. The junior mining sector basically missed out on inflows from passive investment vehicles such as ETFs. Persistent redemptions from mining funds led to capital withdrawal and severely depressed the valuations of the juniors. This greatly diminished the ability of these companies to raise capital and develop their projects. Major mining companies have chronically under-invested in new production for over a decade and must now invest in junior mining companies just to maintain production and replenish their somewhat high-cost and low-grade reserves

The IRA: But if you look across the metals sector, and you're looking at shortages, not just in gold and silver, but also copper. Are we about to see another manic surge in investment in the mining sector a la the early 2000s?

Jarmolkiewicz: It takes many years to locate and develop a mine. We are coming off a period where we've had no real investment in mining, where we've seen capital actually leave the industry. Now the majors are being bailed out with surging cash flow. Now you're at a point where the industry has to come up with new capacity, and the only way it's really going to do that is to acquire juniors. The junior miners are not really ripe for passive investment, they're not really included in the ETFs, because they're not big enough or liquid enough. But fundamentals will now completely change the equation and fast. There is a scarcity of new major mineral discoveries and a trend of smaller, deeper, lower grade, less accessible discoveries. So you better go shopping in the juniors!

The IRA:  Sounds like you are going to be busy. Thanks Andrew.

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