In the subversive and highly valuable book The Underground Lawyer the author demonstrates how the strongest legal case is still a crapshoot if the judge cannot understand why you should win. Relevance? For junior explorers, if you’ve got a great property and story, but it’s not being explained well to anyone, you won’t get financing or market support. And we all know what happens then.
For any readers who have not yet taken a position in Founders, please exit this post now and proceed immediately to the company’s current slide deck,
https://www.fdrmetals.com/_resources/presentations/corporate-presentation.pdf?v=0.112 to view it for its informational content.
For everyone who already owns all the FDR shares they want, sit back as we take a look at the deck through fresh eyes, as a work of art. I confess I hadn’t noticed just how well done it is. From the standpoint of communicating the essentials, in the right order, with the right illustrations, in what seems like a beautifully compact layout, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a better PowerPoint.
If you are continuously excited to see what the next slide holds, you know you’re watching a highly professional pitch. And that’s what we’ve got here.
The executive summary slide (p3) gives the viewer a quick sampler of what’s to come. Six strong general reasons to like FDR. Four excellent drill results – and they’re modestly not even including the biggest ones! Plus, the Suriname map showing all of that nation’s other gold deposits.
The overall message I see is *not* one of difficult, risky gold exploration from scratch. It is like the whole region is one massive gold rush, and we’ve simply secured the rights to a very tasty corner of it to harvest our share. The esthetic attention to detail is also evident, with the reddish brown colour used in the slides matching the gorgeous Suriname soil, pregnant with our soon to be proved-up gold.
Next, we have a thing of absolute perfection: a slide (p4) with plentiful eye-pleasing white space because the simple summary info speaks so highly of our management. Speedy progress last year. Frugal capital structure. Full treasury. Hefty warrant exercises incoming over the next 14 months. And the put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is 25% insider stake, alongside the 34% institutional stake.
With viewers’ appetites sufficiently whetted, here comes (p5) the clever origin-story of our gold deposit, encapsulated in an innovative but instantly understandable 200-million-year-old map, capturing the picture just after super-continent Pangea began to break up into our modern layout. (After first forming in a titanic collision that presumably caused so much gold to well up from the depths in those regions of Africa and South America. How could we NOT strike it rich here?!)
As Colin Padget joked live after Eric Coffin first introduced him to the stage in May 2023, “when people ask me if the Guyana Shield is in Africa, I tell them ‘it used to be.’” Possibly the most high-brow humour I’ve ever heard in a mining pitch. The obvious thing our CEO *didn’t* say, but which I’ll add here: we’re exploring in the safer of the two continents.
And then to underscore what I said earlier, a slide of the region (p6) demonstrates how we’re not merely off in the wilderness somewhere looking for gold. We’re arrived at a crowded, raucous party, where everybody is already having lots of fun.
Our particular patch of ground (p7) has a number of good attributes, all conducive to drilling out a resource - and fast. A minimum of stumbling blocks and potential sources of delay.
Tomorrow I’ll run through the rest of the wonderful slides. So satisfying to see what our management created (or caused to be created, and then approved).
One more sleep until the mining conference!