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“If you buy one gold stock this year… make it this one”

Sniffing out some favored gold and silver miners from a Diggers and Drillers teaser

By Travis Johnson, Stock Gumshoe, November 10, 2011

There are going to be a few folks who are frustrated with the navigator of the good ship Gumshoe today, because we’re again looking at an Australian newsletter teaser — and I’m guessing the stock will be tough to trade for US investors, if our past reveals of Diggers and Drillers picks are any indication. But we’ve got a lot of beloved readers Down Under, so bear with me if you’re sick of hearing about stocks from the lucky country.

Today we’re following up on the other picks teased by Alex Cowie in his recent ad for Diggers and Drillers — the first one was a potash explorer that’s Australia-listed but is actually trying to develop a resource in Utah, but he also teased a gold company and a silver company. So what are they?

The headline of this article comes from Cowie’s tease, saying that this is the one to buy if you buy only one gold stock this year — and he thinks it will at least double in 2012. Here are the clues:

“Firstly, its deposit has a very high grade at 12.5 grams per tonne. It’s unusual for any company to get gold deposits with grades in the double figures. Most gold miners are very happy to be looking at 3 grams per tonne.

“But this stock’s high grade means it can get away with mining and processing less ore. And that massively reduces its operating costs making its profit margins bigger.

“Secondly, as well as the gold, it also has 161 grams of silver per tonne. This silver grade would give most silver producers a run for their money on its own! But to have this high-grade silver ALONGSIDE the high-grade gold is a real bonus.

“The result? This stock’s production costs are 75% less than the average gold mine, making it the lowest operating cost gold producer on the Aussie market right now.”

Hoodat? Well, we toss it into the ol’ Thinkolator, turn it upside down to make sure we can get the right Aussie spin on things, and our result comes tumbling out the other end: This is Kingsrose Mining (KRM in Australia, no US pink sheets listing).

Kingsose is a small, profitable, producing gold and silver miner — they have two projects, a tailings pile in Sardinia and a high-grade gold and silver mine in Sumatra called Way Linggo. Way Linggo is producing now, and they’re targeting 45,000 ounces of gold and 500,000 ounces of silver per year and believe they can significantly ramp that up with processing improvements to handle the newest high-grade discoveries they’ve made. This is an underground high-grade mine, they’re targeting pretty narrow seams of very high gold concentration (that’s where the 12.5 grams/ton number comes in), and they have a high silver production so their effective net operating cost for gold production is very low if you include those silver byproduct “credits” (ie, you pretend you’re a gold miner, not a silver miner, so you net out silver sales before calculating the production cost per ounce of gold).

Interesting company, to be sure — they’re small but have a few analysts covering the stock in addition to Cowie’s coverage, you can see some of the (positive, of course) analyst reports on Kingsrose’s website. According to Yahoo Finance the forward PE on these shares is under eight, which is quite cheap — they started producing recently, so the trailing PE is quite a bit higher in the low-30s, but obviously all those estimates rely on whatever gold and silver prices are going to be over the next year.

I don’t know anything about this particular part of Indonesia in terms of political or mining risk (they’re in South Sumatra, which I think has historically been more of an agricultural area, but Indonesia overall certainly has its share of large mining projects). They seem to have a joint venture there (they own 85% of the project) and the project has been under long-term development with renewing permits, so I don’t imagine it’s particularly a concern. They don’t have any debt to worry about, and they don’t seem to be hedged, so this looks like a pretty pure play on low-cost gold and silver.

(Do note that low cost gold and silver producers enjoy some additional stability, but they also don’t get the same boost from rising prices that a high-cost producer does because their profit margins don’t increase as dramatically with higher gold prices — there are a few newsletter touts out there now promoting this idea of investing in high-cost producers because they’re the ones who get the most dramatic immediate benefit from rising prices. I’d still prefer low cost producers who have more stable profitability, but I’m sometimes a bit of a fuddy-duddy.)

I’ve personally been avoiding individual gold stocks because I’m more comfortable having my gold mining asset allocation directed to financiers, but my lack of interest in this specific name doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with them. They

And there was one other stock teased — let’s see if we can identify that … and if it’s tradeable outside of Australia.

Here are Cowie’s clues:

“Few mainstream analysts realise this silver start-up is already producing

“I’m very bullish on silver right now, and this Brisbane outfit is the first Aussie stock to start producing silver.

“But none of this is reflected in this little stock’s share price… yet.

“A few months ago it started pouring giant silver bars. In fact, I was at the mine recently watching them do just that.

“But there’s some urgency in this opportunity too.

“You see, before the end of this year they will be in full flow, producing 1.5 million ounces of silver a year.

“I actually saw them pouring molten silver into giant moulds. This one could be a real winner!

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“If you think silver is going up, this could be a great way to accelerate those silver profits.”

So … Thinkolator sez, this is: Alcyone Resources (AYN in Australia, ALCYF on the pink sheets). And yes, it is technically possible to buy the stock on the pinks, but be careful — it doesn’t necessarily trade every day, and even when it does trade it’s sometimes only $1,000 or so worth of shares in a given day. It’s a small company, market cap in the neighborhood of $100 million, but it does trade reasonably well in Australia.

And yes, it is a silver producer — but it’s more of a “restart” than a “start-up” … this is the rebirth of a company, Macmin Silver, that effectively went bankrupt building a silver mine that had operational problems at the same time that the global financial crisis hit three years ago. They were recapitalized as Alcyone The mine is the Twin Hills silver mine near Texas, Australia (in Queensland), and it is only about 150 miles from Brisbane and they are “on their way” to an annual production rate of at least 1.5 million ounces of silver with a fairly recent startup of operations. They’re also exploring pretty actively in the area of the Twin Hills mine, hoping to boost the mine life to at least a decade with additional resources, and they seem to have quite a few targets in the Texas area for additional exploration. The stock has been trading up and down in line with silver as that metal has bounced around a bit, and

Oh, and the picture of pouring molten silver that Cowie used in his ad is also exactly the same pic that Alcyone uses in one of its presentations … just in case you need a little more confirmation. There’s a quick article about the recommissioning of the mine here from the West Australian, sounds like they still have some work to do to create a sustainable mining operation but they are producing nicely from the tailings stockpiles and they do have a plan. And no debt, thanks to the recapitalization, so hopefully they can fund their ongoing operations from cash flow from this point. Beyond that, I don’t know much about them.

So there you have it — a couple gold and silver stocks that Alex Cowie is excited about, and they do sound like they’ve got some good production and solid financial positions assuming that gold and silver prices remain lofty, but I’ve only just learned of both of them. What do you think, is either of these worth your hard-earned cash? Let us know with a comment below.

And don’t worry, next time I write it will be about stocks that are traded while most of us here in the US are awake …

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terencio
terencio
November 10, 2011 2:31 pm

Travis i have to say these Aussie thinly traded stocks are of absolutely no interest to me. Of course i do realize you have your Aussie followers to think of and i’m sure they are happy to see these reports just as i am when you reveal your northern neighbours teases. Great work as usual, many thanks.
Terence

Dean Addison
Guest
Dean Addison
November 10, 2011 2:48 pm

Being an Australian reader I am pleased to see that at times you Americans occasionally realise that there are other countries around that have share markets, and trade shares other than the good ‘ol US of A. Anyway, to the point. Alcyone Australia is actually Alcyone Resources Ltd (AYN.AX) Previosly known as Macmin Silver. Trading at $0.093 AUD. As in the US it is a buyers market for shares in some very undervalued businesses. It would be nice to see you delving into a few more of our little gems in the not to distant future. Best regards to all.

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blackjack
blackjack
November 10, 2011 10:07 pm

great stuff
some of these small fish get bought out by the big fish and so value is added when theyre bought out
This happened to me recently when i invested in one aussie share Andean that later got taken over by GoldCorp – so my small aussie shares were converted to Goldcorp.
You see the large companies are running out of high grade ore and so have to mine more and look out for minnow gold mine to keep their yearly targets up.
Keep these smaller co’s on your radar
have a look at asx.mml asx.kcn (also going to do an IPO in Thailand), asx.alk asx.krm
all potentials

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Londonian
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Londonian
November 11, 2011 11:52 am

I’ve owned Kingrose for a year and am 20% up. My biggest Aussie gold miner holding is Focus Minerals (FML.AX) up 9% in the same period. Certainly worth a look – “a profitable gold producer operating in WA’s Eastern Goldfields. On track to produce 100,000oz in 2011, Focus is pursuing an aggressive expansion programme to become one of the largest producers in the region.”

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Robert Michael
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November 14, 2011 6:33 am

Well Travis, to appease your American readers, perhaps you could give us your take on a stock I have the name on; the real questions are if it will be worthy due to: 1) Its small size-as far as I could initially gather (headline reading, mainly; all the reports are on its website, but I’m no Gumshoe 🙂 its holdings on its main Yellow Banks mine are just 115,000 tonnes-did I mention THEIR Numbers? 23 grams of gold per tonne! As if that weren’t bad enough, 2) there’s the question of how hard it is to get to: pictures showed planes with water-ski landing gear, barges to provide supplies (and I’d imagine to get the gold out. The company was Banks Island Gold, Ltd.-just fell 10 cents to 28 cents on Friday-not sure why-hoping the good ol’ Gumshoe can tell us if this is a good “dip” buy opportunity, or start of falling prices to come. Thanks for all your great work!
One P.S.-I just signed up for a no-risk, 1yr guaranteed subscription to “Freedom & Capital ($49/yr, Angel Publishing), who had three specific “Compound Gold” Co.’s like the ones you mentioned-one was “Paulson’s smallest gold stock” – He bought 10.1 million shares in January, when prices of this stock were $1.50/share-hit $2 even on 11-11-11, off its high of $2.27 on 9-6-11. Drill holes to begin 2nd eek of Nov. (now). 11-10 report on initial and “historical” drill holes showed numbers Well Above its earlier numbers of .51g/t gold,12% copper. Holes intended to show the “fenceline”-outer perimeters of this find now showed veins as high as 2+g/tonne with copper as high as 4-5x original estimates. They have 52 holes to drill, so if it’s worth getting in, now’s the time! If they get more results like this…. Also, I like the premise. Their fictitious example went something like this: In the ’80s, Gold was at $400/oz. One Co. had 3 million ounces of Gold in the ground, but since it cost $400 to mine it, it was a Liability, not an asset. If gold goes up $1, the previously “worthless” mine is now worth $3mil. If you bought stock dirt cheap when gold was below $400 in Feb. ’87, & held it until later that year, when prices hit $470/oz., your company’s Market cap soared to $210 million! (they also provided real world examples that included an earlier Paulson winner-his best performing stock in ’09? ’10? percentage-wise, that “had Wall Street big wigs scratching their heads” as to why the greatest Gold laden hedge fund was buying ~20% of this tiny penny stock-now I think some get it-I do! (the premise, anyway, & I certainly believe in following Paulson when it comes to Gold). SSRI was an example of buying worthless mines for pennies, which turned that company into one of the largest Silver Producers in the world. Paulson personally made $5billion in ’10, but his greatest performer that year was his “compound gold” 20% purchase of the “worthless” company that made over $10 billion NET-a company with $5.1 Billion of Gold in the ground at Gold prices of $1000/oz–“worthless” with mining costs above the in-ground gold value, as this low grade gold mine would cost $800-$1200/oz to mine. With gold hitting $1700+, it became profitable to mine-thus the $10 billion net, with Paulson holding 1/5th of that company. They are Much harder to find now-esp. compared to the ’80s before that boom, but when you DO find one (or 3, as F&C has), and a bust Highly unlikely to follow THIS Boom, what’s not to like? Where else can you invest in 20yr old, proven companies with payouts like Select Penny Stocks, sans the risks? Maybe the Gumshoe ought to re-visit this one-let your readers in on this “secret” that only the top 1% hedge fund managers have used to rake in big bucks. Sorry such a long “P.S.”-I’m writing this when I should be sleeping! Thanks again for all your great work!

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bill fairbrother
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bill fairbrother
November 14, 2011 10:44 am

whilst you are looking at australian gold miners, here one you will soon be able to buy in the states as it lists in canada soon, “panterra gold” PGI formerly envirogold, this copmpany will be producing next year, and they dont have to dig anything up, its lying on the surface from previous tailings, high grade.

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Barry
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Barry
February 4, 2012 8:41 am

ALCYONE is 0.09 as of late
KINGROSE is $1.40
Great to read some of the Aussie research though on StockGumshoe

bill0
Member
bill0
November 17, 2012 11:00 pm

The gold stock could be medusa asx.mml. Based in the Phillipines. Has costs of $200 oz. (Average in Aus is $900 oz). No debt. currently 100,000 oz pa. moving to 400,000 oz pa in 3 years. Funded from cash flow. Paying a dividend. Who needs gold to go up but that would put a rocket under it.

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