“The seniors have blown themselves out of the water,” the former CEO and founder of Goldcorp Inc. said in an interview in Vancouver. “They’re just going to be ships rising in the tide. It’s going to be the intermediate and juniors who have the big runs in this cycle, and that’s where I want to be.”

That trend has already begun. Gold companies listed on the Venture and Toronto Stock Exchange with a market value of less than C$2 billion have climbed on average 247 percent this year, while their larger peers are up 125 percent, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.