Confused over whether you want to invest in gold explorers or battery metals? Wondering whether it’s time to get into nickel, copper, or cobalt? Do titanium, vanadium, and chromium enter your late night thoughts? Is it time for rare earths to make a run? Maybe the recent movement in uranium is your bag?
If you’re like me, you go to a different option – “Why choose when you can have them all?”
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Prospect generators are mining exploration companies that cast a wide net, make no distinction between the money that can be made from one property or another, and make it a business to do the deep digging into early stage projects the big boys can’t be bothered to do.
The thinking is, grab at a lot of things, do the early work, figure out what’s hot and flip it to a bigger player for dollars once you’ve removed a little risk.
The upside of a prospect generator is diversity of portfolio; if gold weakens but cobalt gets interesting, there’s your cobalt play front and center. If Elon Musk wakes up one day and tweets ‘cobalt is smeg lolz‘, and rare earths kicks off, no prob, send out a helicopter and get that pig fattened up for slaughter.
The downside of a prospect generator is, there’ll be swings and misses, and a lack of focus on one particular resource will see some investors assume management can’t walk and chew bubble gum at the same time.
At Marvel, Discovery (MARV.V), formerly International Montoro Resources, that issue of perception saw the company struggle for several years, with the stock lingering between half a cent and $0.06 and a market cap rarely over $3 million. That, despite having a grab bag of properties under its banner.
THE WIDEST VARIETY, THE BIGGEST SELECTION!
MARV’s roster includes:
- Gold: Exploits Zone, Newfoundland (Slip and Victoria Lake)
- Gold: Atikokan, Ontario (BlackFly)
- Gold: Red Lake, Ontario (Camping Lake, JV with Falcon Gold)
- Uranium, nickel, copper, cobalt: Elliot Lake, Ontario (Serpent River/Pecors)
- Nickel, copper, cobalt, titanium, vanadium, chromium: Quebec (Duhamel)
- Rare earths: Prince George, British Columbia (Wicheeda North)
All that for a $6 million market cap.
That’s the Wal Mart aisle 4 of resource explorer projects; come for the $2 gallon jar of pickles, stay for the rare earths play next door to Defense Metals (DEFN.C), which has run from $0.15 to $0.60 in three months as it pounds out great results.
BUY ONE, GET TWO FREE!
The red light specials don’t end at the market cap; MARV is planning to spin out two of those prospects into another company, which will see all shareholders given shares in the newco.
The Pecors project and the Wicheeda North project are battery and energy metal focused and that brings opportunities to send them sailing on the same boat, and maybe present an attractive acquisition option for someone wholly focused on that space, while freeing up the rest of the business to zero in on the potential of precious metals.
That perceived downside we spoke of earlier? The spin off takes care of that, and adds to the portfolio of anyone holding MARV stock when the spin happens.
As to the specifics of the projects, the technical detail and the geo-speak that usually comes with these sorts of companies, I’m averse to getting into that because, to be honest, most of these are closeology plays – this one is close to Defense Metals, the other is close to a $500 million Marathon Gold project (MOZ.T), another has a bunch of ground sewn up with Falcon Gold (FG.V) just south of the $700 million Great Bear Gold’s (GBR.V) discovery..
SAVE MONEY BY BUYING IN BULK (SAMPLES)!
Drilling? Not yet. In fact, most of these plays aren’t far ahead of the ‘send a geo out to collect rocks’ step on the road to production, but that’s why the market cap is only $6 million and not $16 million, or $26 million. When they’re pranking drill cores out of the ground, and showing results even halfway to what GBR and DEFN and MOZ are getting next door to them, chances are that market cap will not be seen again.
You get the savings because you’re buying at the bulk sample stage, as opposed to the “we know what’s underground” stage.
If this were horse racing, Marvel Discovery would not be a starter in the Kentucky Derby – yet. But it would be eight starters in the maiden handicap, a collection of young colts ready to run, with some likely to end up in glue pots and some likely to have a strong career earning the punters money.
If you know of Falcon Gold, a turnaround story we’ve talked about often, that we saw rise from $0.04 to $0.21 in 2020, you already know a part of this story. Karim Rayani runs FG and recently pumped money and new management blood into MARV to begin its recent rise from obscurity.
Rayani likes to be near where the big boys are finding luck, and that’s worked well for FG, and he likes starting things off with a company down on its luck, which also held well on the FG side.
His first few months at MARV have followed a similar path, with similar market action, from a similar dirt cheap starting point.
JOIN THE CLUB AND GET MORE BANG FOR YOUR BUCK!
When FG started its run, you could have bought the company for the price of a Burnaby condo.
Now it’s the price of eight condos.
And while that may still seem cheap for a mining company, it’s a significant return for those that bought in early and trusted the process. Like us at Equity.Guru.
The MARV website features all the tech information you need, if tech information is your jam, but for mine the story here is going to be Rayani’s ability to wheeler-deal, grabbing more neglected, inexpensive properties that have decent bones and are a pizza delivery area away from nine-figure giants.
That’s a good enough starting point for me.
Before they changed the company name, the CEO talked about his company extensively to Ahead of the Herd.
— Chris Parry
FULL DISCLOSURE: Marvel Discovery is an Equity.Guru marketing client and a client of Stockhouse Publishing.