RE: RE: RE: RE: PT Barnum once said... These are all legitimate questions, my friend and I am not sure I have the answers for all. But for a few, the most important, I may have something to say. We buy stock, or stocks in themarket based on the published records of the companies. We assume also that there are checks and balances in the system to verify the truth or falsity of these records. We do not always go into the lab of a drug company to see if an experiment is successful or not. We trust our scientists that they will tell the truth. That is why we esteem and respect them. Something similar happens with our CEOs. We trust them, may be too much sometimes, and at the end they may disappoint us. Either by their own fault or the force of circumstances we are let down. That is why they call these companies "speculative" and not "blue chips". So buying into such companies entails a high risk and high risk companies are not for everybody. The money you lay out there to buy their stock, is money which you can afford to lose. No visit to the mine would have saved the day for anyone of us because, appearances are deceitfull. Our senses do not always tell us the truth. The sun you're watching is it traveling from East to West or the earth revolves around the sun? Your senses tell you one thing and your reason something else. And unless you have formed specific questions when visiting a mine, you would not know what to look for. And when you don't know what you're looking for, you don't know what you find. So you must know a thing or two about mines if you are going to make sense of what is in front of you. And to quote another famous German Philosopher of the Renaissance, Emannuel Kant, and the founder of modern science, "thought without experience is empty, and experience without thought and/or theory is blind" So we should take it from there