For those who’ve been paying attention, we finally got the expected official Dataram/US Gold name/ticker change…. it’s now U.S. Gold Corp, an the ticker is now USAU.
The stock is not moving at the moment, which makes sense — I’d guess that the highest probability near-term news is a secondary offering, which would be negative… but preliminary exploration/drilling results could also come out at any time, which would be either positive or negative depending on what those results are. Frank Curzio has been promoting this Curzio Venture Opportunities idea just to his list of podcast listeners, and it’s a very high cost letter with presumably a small list of subscribers, so the impact of the newsletter recommendation might be fairly muted by itself. From what I can tell, his “buy this Secret IPO” pitch that hints at USAU hasn’t yet been widely disseminated to the millions of folks who he might access if he buys access to the Agora or other lists, so we’ll see if that happens in the future. For now, this one is a hold and wait stock as we wait to see whether USAU finds a major gold deposit on their Nevada lands.
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Maverix Metals (MMX.V, MACIF), my newest little precious metals royalty company bet, announced a deal this week as well — they’re getting an investment from CEF Holdings (which is a joint venture of Li Ka-shing’s CK Hutchison Holdings and CIBC) that includes a term loan of up to US$20 million and an equity investment in five million shares at C$1.35/share. I haven’t heard anything about what they might use that cash for, but presumably it will be used to acquire additional royalties.
That doesn’t change the valuation scenario much, though now Maverix has a little debt (at a cost of 8% — 5% in cash and 3% in shares) and a slightly higher market cap (roughly C$230 million). Whether it ends up being a worthwhile financing depends on whether they use that $25 million or so in cash to increase the value of their royalty portfolio and improve the cash flow — given what seem to me to be high-quality deals they’ve made so far, I’m still happy to hold and wait to see how it works out, and will hope that this becomes a royalty company that I can hold for a long time.
Gold has been slowly ...