Champion Electric Metals Inc C.LTHM

John Kaiser notes

[GripnRip]

https://www.kaiserresearch.com/s7/KaiserBlog.asp?ReportID=975683&_Type=Kaiser-Blog&_Title=Kaiser-Watch-November-3-2023-MinRes-arrival-heats-up-Azure-takeover-battle One financial sector person who did attend said that he saw very few fund managers and zero brokers. A lot of Australian resource junior executives were present, perhaps feeling out XPLOR's vibe and considering a booth presence in 2024. The critical mineral and lithium technical talks on the final day November 2 were well attended; perhaps this is equivalent to March 1993 at PDAC when the Lac de Gras diamond play was just over a year old and Pat Sheahan organized a short course on diamonds that was very well attended at what proved to be still early days in a multi-year Canadian diamond exploration boom. Sayona had a multi-booth exhibit that was very busy, and Brunswick also had constant traffic. But others such as Harfang Exploration Inc $HAR received less traffic. One executive told me that if you do not already have a pegmatite system with a visible footprint of 50 million tonnes at 1% L2O or better, nobody is interested. That statement captures the tragedy of the 2023 forest fire closure which shrank the 5 month prospecting window of June-October into less than two months, with a few companies lucky enough to get boots on the ground by mid August, and some of those having to stop work again for the moose hunting season during September 15-October 15. Predictions of an early winter have proven correct; snow has arrived in Quebec, and unlike Montreal in southern Quebec where it quickly melted away, it blankets the ground farther north in the James Bay region. The boots on the ground prospecting season is over. News flow that should by now have delivered up a dozen or more interesting prospects with significant size potential and ignited market interest in the James Bay lithium area play has also been hampered by logistical problems. For example, some juniors had field crews that lacked designated qualified professionals who can visually identify spodumene in the field, and many seemed to lack an XRF unit to take potassium to rubidium ratio readings. The James Bay region is absolutely loaded with pegmatite outcrops, but only a small percentage will be LCT type. Many juniors simply collected samples from outcrops, in some cases hundreds of samples, which are now in backlogged assay labs. News updates frequently do not mention spodumene because in many cases the samples were shipped directly to the lab by the service contractor without the junior's in-house QP getting a chance to examine them. One partial exception is Champion Electric Metals Inc $LTHM which did a LIDAR survey last year on the greenstone portion of its large land position north of PMET's Corvette trend property. I say partial because the company did not report finding any spodumene bearing outcrops like some juniors have done, which I initially read as a bust declaration. But Champion did publish a map of K-Rb ratios for all the pegmatite outcrops its crew sampled. I have not seen such a map published before by any junior but if an XRF unit is used in the field this sort of map which posts various colored crosses representing different K-Rb ratio ranges should be demanded by investors from companies that have sent outcrop samples to the lab. Those juniors which do not bother to equip their boots on the ground with an XRF unit and somebody trained to use it should be downgraded in one's preferred list of James Bay area players. At least as far as next year is concerned because this year the uncertainty about the forest fire closures made it difficult to coordinate programs. An XRF unit may be preferable to a LIBS unit which can only measure light elements like lithium because the XRF unit can check rocks for the presence of heavier elements including base metals; who knows what James Bay after decades of disappointment might cough up via lithium prospecting. An example would be Harfang Exploration Inc which failed to publish an update ahead of XPLOR because it is still waiting for assays from the spodumene bearing pegmatite outcrops at Serpent-Radisson it last reported about on September 13. This outcrop which did not exhibit significant scale is in the vicinity of the Mista copper showing found several years ago; it has an untested associated IP anomaly that stretches under garbage rock at surface. Harfang, which is well financed, plans to mount a dual purpose drill program in Q1 of 2024 at Serpent-Radisson. As a sign of the collective capitulation now underway in the Canadian resource junior sector CEO Ian Campbell had to suffer the indignity of having to explain why on November 1 as he manned his XPLOR booth Anonymous went on a selling rampage during the last half hour trading. Since then Anonymous has dumped nearly 3 million shares at an average price of $0.145. Ian tells me that Harfang has avoided doing flow-through private placements with tax avoiders and presumably has a shareholder base of investors focused on fundamental outcomes. He is puzzled who at this stage with a possible drill program in Q1 of 2024 would blow out such a large position at a price just above the $0.10 cash breakup value of Harfang. KRO members had their mitts open to catch some of this paper dump, but in the KRO Slack Forum some were mumbling about the wisdom of bottom-fishing, reinforcing the notion that if bottom-fishing on the bid side doesn't make you feel sick when you get a fill it probably will not work out well in the long run. One thing that puzzled me about XPLOR was that the Canadian resource junior executives I talked to were ignorant about the amazing Azure Minerals story I talked about in last week's Kaiser Watch Episode. Only Brunswick's Killian Charles was aware of Azure and its implications for the James Bay Lithium Area Play, which was largely due to Brunswick exploring a dual ASX listing. When even James Bay resource junior executives are ignorant about the big picture, how can we expect Canadian investors to become interested in Canada's potential future role as a major supplier of pegmatite sources lithium?