Just a brief note here to let the Irregulars know that I increased the size of my investment in First Mining Finance by about 50% today.

This is not because of any abrupt change in the story or the valuation, simply a decision to allocate a little bit more to junior/exploratory gold because it seems that market is starting to show some life (and because the shares of this particular investment haven’t really responded as of yet). The rise in gold we’ve seen in recent weeks could well be temporary, and this is, of course, best seen as a long-term speculation — but they were able to pick up some low-priced assets over the past year, and made another deal just this week, so I like the stockpiling of potential mineable assets.

This is what I wrote about First Mining back in January when I did my Annual Review, FYI — they’ve announced two acquisitions since then, and the price is within 10% or so of where it was at the time:

“First Mining Finance (FF.V, FFMGF) C$0.37, personal cost basis C$0.38, suggested to Irregulars at C$0.35. Sentiment: Buy with extreme patience. Trade Stops “smart stop” would be C$0.33.
This is a speculation on a “mineral banking” strategy — Keith Neumeyer has built a few mining companies, and he’s using this startup to acquire small and prospective companies who are in distress because of the downturn in junior miners. They’re using their stock to acquire companies, and there’s no reason to think anything will happen with them other than more small acquisitions from time to time, this is really just a bet that an experienced mining executive with a pretty strong shareholder base will be able to continue rolling up exploration-stage, “almost ready for development” projects while prices are low and will make deals with miners to take over the projects in exchange for a junior/royalty position as things improve. They’ve made one tentative deal with a large Mexican miner to essentially buy a copper project in exchange for investment in the project and a 2% royalty, and that’s the model they’d like to follow going forward — not spending any cash, but using their stock as currency to make acquisitions and waiting for partners to emerge. There won’t likely be any financial results that mean anything for many years, this is a “hold and see what happens” ...