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• Mark Creasy has upped his stake in Galileo Mining after its big Callisto palladium discovery last week
• The billionaire prospector extraordinaire is credited with roles in the Jundee, Bronzewing and Nova discoveries in WA
• Creasy’s Yandal Investments holds Top 20 stakes in more than 20 ASX-listed companies, most of them junior explorers

Galileo Mining (ASX:GAL) is on a tear after making what could be WA’s second substantial and surprising platinum group elements discovery in a little over two years.following the Julimar find by Chalice Mining a couple years earlier

The strike of 33m at 2g/t palladium, platinum and gold with rich notes of nickel and copper at what had been known as the Norseman cobalt and nickel project sent the company’s drifting shares soaring 200% in one day last week.

Once a massive gap in the mining State’s dominance of the global resources industry, WA now promises to become one of the few PGE provinces to challenge the dominant South African and Russian suppliers .

But excitement was also generated by the fact Galileo is one of the many listed vehicles of legendary prospector Mark Creasy, WA’s man with the Midas touch.

Renowned for his role in the discoveries of the Bronzewing and Jundee gold mines and the Nova nickel mine, the billionaire prospector is a name market watchers follow closely.

And when news emerges that he wants to buy into a stock, investors tend to flock.

Already Galileo’s top shareholder after folding projects owned by his private Creasy Group at Norseman and the Fraser Range into the 2018 float, Creasy sent its shares soaring even further to a record 86c after buying 3 million on market in the wake of the ‘Callisto’ discovery.

A self-fulfilling prophecy if ever there was one, Creasy’s purchase at 58c was already in the money within minutes of the trade being revealed.

Creasy’s 26% stake in Galileo was valued at a cool $38.6 million as of Monday’s close, making it his third biggest investment on publicly available data.

What does Creasy hold?

Want to catch a Creasy wave?

According to top 20 shareholder and substantial shareholder notices compiled by * Creasy is sitting on a share portfolio worth at least $1.05 billion.

That probably masks Creasy’s true wealth, ignoring material assets like property, cash from dividends and mine sales and companies in which the prospector is not a top 20 shareholder.

(At one point Creasy held ~3m shares in Evolution Mining and picked up a big Northern Star Resources stake in 2014 as a condition of waving his pre-emptive right to buy Newmont’s 300,000ozpa Jundee gold mine.)

Creasy also boasts equity stakes in projects like his South African Wits Basin gold explorer White Rivers Exploration and his 40% share of Azure Minerals’ Andover nickel-copper project.

Not all of Creasy’s stocks have been winners. A gold bug famed for his love of the sparse Aussie outback, Creasy tends to favour junior explorers with a high risk to reward ratio, many of whom the uber-prospector has done business with over access to his extensive and prospective tenement holdings.

Some, like collapsed former gold producer Millennium Minerals, have gone to the dogs.

But when his picks hit, the 77-year-old Creasy tends to go big.

Creasy’s portfolio is dominated by his 9.6%, 80.5 million share stake in battery minerals miner IGO (ASX:IGO), which tallies over $858 million in paper bucks.