JEAN, Nevada – When paper is crushed, as it is now among resource equities, rock rules.
There is likely no better time than now to request property tours of your target prospectors and near-term miners. That’s because the stock market has bruised metals (and most other commodity) prospectors.
In the good times, say in February and March of this year, ordinary folks, individuals, had to beg and barter their way onto property tours. The waiting lists for gold, uranium, platinum and silver tours in South and Central Americas especially were filled with brokers, asset managers and researchers.
Now, small companies that hope to broaden their shareholder audiences have a clutch opportunity to get the tour buses filled.
To be sure, individual shareholders have “lives” and cannot always break away to see, say a property in the Nevada desert, or one in Mexico’s Sierra Madre. Or the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Nicaragua, Peru.
Still, if ever there were a time to pitch a company’s investor relations executive or contract IR firm, it is now. My only advice is to offer to get yourself to the departure point: Miami, Houston, Las Vegas, Vancouver.
Those looking to plan ahead and “lock in” today’s equity desperation for the coming summer’s tours might probe operators in Alaska, Yukon, Quebec, Ontario, upper British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Mongolia, Croatia. You get the idea.
Suggested IR strategy for the companies: combine these tours for individual shareholders with a short-term offering (Canada) that allows for small share purchases from so-called non-qualified investors worth less than $5 million net worth.
I just completed a tour of Boxxer Gold (TSX: V.BXX, Stock Forum) and its Boss property in Nevada. Boxxer’s Boss property is situated across 14,000 acres of the Goodsprings Mining District, which once was a leading producer of copper and gold in the early 20th century.
“You’re our first what you call interested party to come out,” says CEO Elmer Stewart as we examine visible copper and other mineralization across the sprawling hills of Boss. (That’s Elmer Stewart at left of photo, me next to him – Photo Gemma Calandra)
Mr. Stewart is perhaps best known for his work as a geologist and CEO of $1 billion Copper FoxMetals (TSX: V.CUU, Stock Forum). His stints include Alhambra (TSX: V.ALH, Stock Forum) in Kazakhstan. The Boss project will see about 8,000 meters of exploration drilling this year, he says. Several holes already are published, with several more on tap. I got to see them and listen to four barrel-chested drillers plot how to approach one steep target: Hole No 7 in the current program.
Boss is a porphyry copper deposit with a bit of gold, as much as 0.4 grams per tonne. “I’m going for the porphyry approach,” says 59-year-old Mr. Stewart, a geologist and the tiny Boxxer’s do-it-all exploration chief. “There is no doubt this is a skarn, with an intrusive. I am out for the source of the skarn.” Some silver also is in that sedimentary rock.
(I do not own shares of Boxxer, nor do I own shares of CUU.)
As for other tours, I will be seeing Sandspring Resources (TSX: V.SSP, Stock Forum) and its Toroparu in British Guyana for a second time early next week. It is a copper-gold project. I do not own SSP shares.
Coming: Join Stockhouse later this month as we size up how record-high gold prices and new technologies are re-invigorating fabled North American camps in Nevada, Yukon, Red Lake and more.
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