George Ross was a geologist whose posting on the HotCopper forums under the pseudonym “GeoGeorge” led to a career as a senior analyst at Argonaut.

Ross was working for junior mining companies when he analysed an exploration deposit so accurately, that an Australian equities company was concerned information was being leaked to the market!

GeoGeorge analyses Peak’s REE deposit

George tells the story of how his amateur analysis on HotCopper about small cap explorer Peak Resources – now Peak Rare Earths (ASX:PEK) – and its discovery at Ngualla in Tanzania was so accurate that it led to an investigation.

“From a very early stage – from the drilling – you could tell that this particular deposit was going to be something special,” he told HotCopper.

“Pretty much every drill hole into it returned really high rare earth grades.

“They were publishing lots and lots of data and putting it out into the market and that gave me the opportunity to assemble that data, put together a resource model, and ultimately publish that on HotCopper.”

Suspecting a leak

“I received a phone call from Richard Granger who was at Blue Ocean Equities and we had a bit of a chat about the work that I had done, the numbers I had come up with, and I think he went from a point of suspecting the worst – suspecting that someone was releasing information out into the market – to being pretty impressed with what I’d done,” George Ross said.

“I had the realisation that perhaps I could actually get paid for doing this kind of analysis.”

George Ross then did his MBA and has been a Senior Analyst for Metals and Mining Research at Argonaut for about five years.

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