Here’s the lead-in to the latest ad for Luke Burgess’ Junior Mining Trader…
“Urgent: With mined gold output about to fall off a cliff, we’re staring at the biggest event in over 300 years…
“Peak Gold
“And on September 30, a tiny, under-the-radar stock will release drilling results that send the stock soaring — and hand investors a potential 5,600% gain in record time.
“Follow the simple instructions below, and you could turn every $5,000 into as much as $285,000!”
Those “simple instructions” are basically, “buy my favorite junior mining stock” — so we’ll get to identifying that secret stock for you in a moment, but first let’s get a little taste of what this “peak gold” phenomenon is…
“For the first time in over 300 years…
“Mined gold supply is about to fall sharply and permanently, sending gold prices through the roof.
“I’m forecasting gold will hit $15,000 per ounce over the next 12–30 months (up from just $2,000 currently).
“But DO NOT buy physical gold, precious metal ETFs, or stocks of large mining companies.
“This strategy I’ll show you could earn you EXPONENTIALLY more profit.”
That would be a seriously crazy run for gold, or a serious crash in the value of the US Dollar, but yes, usually if gold goes up, the junior mining stocks who have a good “story” do go up much faster. At least for a while. They also usually go bankrupt and disappear, eventually, since most gold discoveries never get built and never become mines, but we’ll leave that skepticism aside for a moment.
He throws in a couple famous names to support his “peak gold” alert…
“Famous investors and mining moguls are already warning that future gold demand is set to massively outstrip supply, leading to a dramatic and unstoppable surge in prices.
“They include Pierre Lassonde, the billionaire founder of mining giant Franco-Nevada, who recently stated that gold prices could climb as high as “$20,000 per ounce” in the coming years…
“Rudi Fronk, chairman and CEO of Seabridge Gold, who notes:
‘Peak gold is the new reality in the gold business with reserves now being mined much faster than they are being replaced.’
“And legendary resource investor Ian Telfer, who says:
“‘We’re right at peak gold here.'”
The first reaction to that should be, “hmm, the people who profit most if gold goes up are convinced it’s going to go up? Color me surprised!”
But it is also true that the world hasn’t discovered many massive gold deposits in recent decades, or built many big new mines, so I would assume that it’s likely that the production of gold will slip for a while at some point — these things go in cycles, and they tend to be pretty long cycles because it often takes more than a decade (sometimes several decades) to go from a gold discovery to actual mining of that discovery.
More on the difficulty and expense that are making it harder to mine gold these days…
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“Surprisingly few people realize just how rare this precious metal is.
“The average American still imagines lucky prospectors pulling nuggets of shiny rock out of the ground.
“While that might’ve been true a long time ago, after 350 years of aggressive exploitation, most of today’s gold exists as microscopic flecks in rock formations that are barely visible to the naked eye.
“If you own a pick and a shovel, you’d have to dig up approximately 200 tons of rock to find just ONE ounce of gold….
“And THIS is the key reason why I expect prices to soar in the coming months.
“Because while gold is already very scarce…
“It’s becoming almost impossible to mine gold profitably.
“As recently as the 19th century, the average reported ore grade was 20 grams–30 grams per ton (g/t)…
“But now it’s tumbled to less than 1.5 g/t.”
And the lack of big new “jumbo” mines…
“Although the amount of gold being discovered per ton of rock has dwindled to close to zero, the supply of gold entering the world market has stayed broadly constant.
“The ONLY reason this is possible is because of what McKinsey recently concluded…
“That ‘jumbo’ mines — meaning mines containing over 30 million ounces of top-grade gold ore — could STILL be found up until the turn of the century.
“And given that gold mines have a 10–30 year life span, these old discoveries have been supplying the world with the gold it needs.
“But those mines are now rapidly reaching the end of their natural life, and, since 2000, there hasn’t been a single jumbo gold mine discovered anywhere!….
“All of gold’s ‘low-hanging fruit’ has been picked.”
So what’s the specific “junior” mining story we’re being told today? Here’s how Burgess gets into it…
“The only possible scenario from here is DRAMATICALLY higher gold prices.
“And that’s great news for the company I’ll introduce you to shortly as it may well have the last sizable gold mine in history.
“… one tiny, unknown company is about to grab a gigantic share of the gold market just as Peak Gold sends prices parabolic.
“The moment this firm confirms the results of its latest drilling project, proving once and for all that it has one of the last abundant gold mines in the world…
“I expect it to become mainstream news…
“Sending its income and valuation metrics soaring to multiples we haven’t seen for decades in this industry.”
So why is this such big news? Apparently it’s all about the high grades of gold found in this potential mine…
“In a gold mining environment where all the low-hanging fruit has been picked, this company is a ‘unicorn’…
“Its initial 100,000-meter diamond drilling program is coming to an end….
“And the results are INSANE….
“… it’s extremely unusual to find average concentrations over 30 g/t.
“But this little firm has ripped up the rule book.
“Some of its grab samples have yielded more than 1,000 g/t!”
So that gives us an immediate guess about why this is a junior mining stock, not a big company — a “grab sample” is essentially what you get when someone finds visible gold in a rock outcropping and hacks it out to begin to study for the potential of a larger gold system. You cannot compare a high-grade “grab sample,” or even the highest grade small segments of a core sample from an underground drilling campaign, with the average grade of an actual identified gold deposit or a potential mine. That’s like taking your sample from a Taylor Swift concert at Soldier Field and saying that the average resident of Chicago is an upper-middle-class 30-year-old white woman (that’s not a careful assessment of average Swifty demographics, just an example).
But those are good clues, at least — so what else do we hear about those grab samples and drilling results?
More from Burgess…
“… the drilling results from its main vein are almost as spectacular.
“The company has struck deposits of 128 g/t, 276 g/t, and even 284 g/t, which is 100–200 times more than the industry average of 1.35 g/t.
“So we’re not just talking about a very special deposit here.
“This under-the-radar company made a truly historic gold discovery — one that will almost certainly prove to be the last of its kind.”
What else?
“… this river of gold isn’t buried miles below the surface in some dangerous and remote corner of the world.
“It’s located in one of the most civilized and mining-friendly jurisdictions on the planet.
“So business risks are minimal…
“Plus all of the deposits are located at incredibly shallow depths.
“In fact, the majority of big strikes were discovered less than 100 meters from surface level, while the deepest holes on site are somewhere in the 500-meter–700-meter range.”
He even includes an image of one of the samples from this project, which shows the visible gold — so that’s exciting, since visible gold is pretty rare in mining samples, for those of us who aren’t geologists and didn’t bring our microscopes to work.
And then Burgess makes a claim about the value of the whole project, which would definitely get him in trouble with the Canadian authorities if he worked for the company:
“It has a river of gold worth $2.4 billion lying just beneath the surface.
“And that’s at TODAY’S prices of close to $2,000 per ounce.
“But with gold about to soar like I’m predicting, this could be a jackpot worth a staggering $24 billion!”
Making claims like “a river of gold worth $2.4 billion” is exactly the kind of thing the regulators were trying to do away with when they passed new securities rules after the Bre-X scandal, so I’m sure we won’t hear the company itself making that claim, it sounds like it’s based on Burgess saying that “my research suggests our firm has around 1.6 million ounces of gold in the ground.”
What else does he say about the company?
“It’s led by a CEO who’s a pioneer in his field.
“He’s a world-renowned exploration geologist with 30 years of experience spanning four different continents….
“I’ve scrutinized this firm’s balance sheet and it’s super healthy, with ZERO debt to its name.
“As it happens, it has over $10 million of working capital on the books — enough to fund its operations for well over a year.
“It also owns its site outright, meaning there won’t be any problems with leasing, plus all the upside on this historic gold deposit is effectively the company’s.”
And apparently it owns more than just this one “$2.4 billion river of gold” — he says the firm owns other projects, too:
“This little company is no one-hit wonder — it has TWO more amazing gold projects up its sleeve!
“And just like the first project I’ve been telling you about today…
“Both of these sites could contain fantastic quantities of high-grade gold ore.
“The second is huge, at nearly 100 square miles, which is a bigger area than my hometown of Baltimore!
“And the initial sampling results have sent shock waves through the team of engineers and geologists on site.
“The three grab samples tested yielded 1,672 g/t, 2,831 g/t, and 8,263 g/t…
“Or, in plain English, between 1.7 and 8.3 KILOS of gold per tonne!”
And he drops some hints about the third site, too…
“The third site is also 100% owned by our little company, and, just like the other two, the initial indicators are very, very good.
“Of 19 samples submitted, 15 contained gold grains, with one sample alone containing 48 individual grains.”
So what’s the stock? Let’s get one last bit of hype in first, before we start talking about the company… Burgess compares their potential discovery to the giant Fosterville mine in Australia:
“… this company’s main project is a once-in-a-generation find — in all likelihood, it’s the last great gold discovery on Earth.
“The only mine I’ve seen that comes anywhere close is Fosterville.
“If you’re not familiar, Fosterville is an aging Australian gold mine that has striking similarities with the little-known project that I’m revealing to you today:
“Both contain high-grade ore in excess of 30 g/t — a rarity these days.
“Both are mined from quartz carbonate rock formations….
“All of this suggests…
“Production costs per ounce will be around 2x–3x LOWER than the industry average AISC.
“I know this because while most mines struggle with AISCs of over $1,200…
“Fosterville enjoys an AISC of just $450 an ounce!
“(For what it’s worth, I think our little firm’s AISC might even be lower than Fosterville’s, but I don’t want to get too carried away, so let’s assume $450 for now.)
“The math is very simple:
“With gold prices at around $1,950 per ounce currently…
“And production costs of $450 per ounce….
“Our firm is looking at $1,500 per ounce of pure profit — a 75% margin!
“It doesn’t take a genius to see that at those margins, 1.6 million ounces in the ground would net the company over $2 billion right now…
“Sending this stock’s $20 million market cap potentially skyrocketing by 50x–100x!”
Enough hype? OK, now we can check out the Thinkolator’s result: This is the little junior gold explorer Labrador Gold (LAB.V in Canada, NKOSF OTC in the US). Whose stock is, before I say anything else, EXTREMELY SMALL and ILLIQUID ($20 million market cap, often trades less than $20,000 worth of shares per day). If this story interests you, be careful.
Here’s how the company describes itself:
“Labrador Gold has a 100,000m drill campaign underway targeting high-grade epizonal gold mineralization along a 12km stretch of the Appleton Fault Zone. Near surface high grade-gold intersections from the Big Vein target include 50.52 g/t over 2m, 276g/t Au over 0.5m, 44.08 g/t Au over 4.28m and 128.51 g/t Au over 1.12m. Exploration of other targets along the Appleton Fault resulted in the discovery of 5 additional gold occurrences with mineralization intersected in early drillholes. The Company is also continuing to generate additional targets along the Appleton Fault that are being advanced to drill-ready. LabGold is well funded for its aggressive exploration of the Kingsway Property with approximately $12 million in working capital.”
And they’ve certainly been marketing themselves, based on the gold they’ve found in their initial discovery work… even posting a video on YouTube with CEO Roger Moss back in 2021, when they were just beginning to find gold.
The important caution, in all of this, is that most of the very high g/t numbers are associated with very small segments of their core drilling — so the 284 g/t and 276 g/t numbers that burgess highlights from this drilling campaign are real, they were announced in mid-2021 and mid-2022 and those are among the higher numbers they’ve reported, but each of those intercepts was over a distance of only 0.5 meters, which in this context feels kind of like digging through your tuna casserole with a crochet hook to find out if there’s a strand of hair baked in. There’s definitely gold, in some pretty rich veins, but how big those veins are, or whether there’s a huge resource hiding underground on their property, seem to still be unanswered questions.
And I think some of those numbers are just wrong — those crazy-sounding grab samples (“The three grab samples tested yielded 1,672 g/t, 2,831 g/t, and 8,263 g/t…”) seem to actually be pulled from Labrador Gold’s press release about some of their sampling on their Hopedale project, but those grab samples assayed out at 1,672, 2,831, and 8,263 parts per billion of gold, not grams per tonne (a tonne is one million grams, so that would actually be 1.67, 2.83 and 8.26 g/t — still worth noting, but not “eight kilos per tonne!”).
Discovery announcements and photos of visible gold are fun and exciting, though, and lots of investors love betting on little speculative stocks like this, where the story can change dramatically with a press release or two. Some folks just need a little fuel for their daydreams, whether that means buying a lottery ticket or imagining what a junior miner’s discoveries might become.
And Labrador Gold does have an updated presentation about the Kingsway Gold Project here, that’s their primary focus right now (Hopedale and Borden Lake Extension are the other two projects). The hope is that at Kingsway, they’ve identified a potential gold deposit that’s similar to the neighboring Queensway discovery being explored by New Found Gold (NFG.V, NFGC). Both are near Gander, Newfoundland in the Appleton Fault Zone and near the Trans-Canada Highway — and like Labrador Gold, New Found Gold enjoys a substantial investment from Billionaire mine financier Eric Sprott (he bought 20% of New Found Gold, and says it’s his largest mine investment… he owns about 10% of Labrador Gold, though that’s a much smaller amount of money), and compares its potential deposit to the Fosterville Mine in Australia.
New Found Gold is further along in their exploration, unlike Labrador they have posted their first NI 43-101 Technical Report describing their initial discovery work, but their Queensway Project is also quite new, they drilled their first discovery hole in 2019 and have not yet made any claims about the potential size of the resource (they haven’t even told investors when they might issue their first resource report — the resource report is really the first time at which a company can claim to have a reasonable estimate of how much gold they’ve found).
So the hope is probably that Labrador Gold expands on its drilling results to date and gets people as excited as they have been about New Found Gold, since NFG is now a billion-dollar company.
Will they get there? No idea. The highlights so far on the financing side are that they’ve gotten Eric Sprott on board with a ~10% position, and New Found Gold itself also owns 8% of the shares… but it looks to me, anecdotally at least, like the drilling result announcements, though they sound impressive and are loaded with lots of intercepts of high-grade gold, are not as dramatic as they were for New Found Gold early on — not quite as high grade, and generally indicating that the seams they’re finding might be narrower (that’s a wild guess, just based on my impression that New Found Gold reported more long intercepts of high-grade gold than Labrador Gold has).
In terms of “what’s next,” it’s true that they’re likely to report the last wave of drilling results of their 100,000 meter exploration campaign in the next couple weeks (they’ve mostly reported their “intersect” results from the drilling about every six weeks, and the last one was in mid-August) — though there may be a few more announcements as we close out the year, as of August they had completed about 83,000 meters of drilling and reported the assay highlights from about 75,000 meters.
As for how much gold might be in these veins underground, this “river of gold,” it seems to me that anyone would be guessing at this point. This seems to be an area where there are a bunch of relatively high-grade veins of gold, of unknown thickness, but it’s not dispersed at all evenly throughout the property… which means it’s going to take a LOT of drilling to get to any kind of confidence about how much gold is there and begin issuing resource statements or, much later on, declaring that they have reserves and actually thinking about building a mine. Even New Found Gold, with its billion-dollar valuation, is nowhere near that… and is probably really thinking not about building a mine, but about how much drilling they have to do before a giant miner takes enough interest to buy them out.
So could the stock of Labrador Gold soar higher if there’s a gold bull run? Sure, teensy companies with press releases about high-grade drilling results often go flying when gold goes bonkers. They’ve already had one such run, in the early discovery days of late 2000 and early 2021, when the shares went from about ten cents to over a dollar for a brief while and got them a bunch of “next New Found Gold” attention, but their more recent drilling results have not yet inspired another bout of that kind of enthusiasm. This is an almost impossibly tiny company right now, with a share price of about 12 cents and a market cap of about $20 million (both US$), so the stock could easily double or get cut in half in 30 minutes if Eric Sprott sneezes.
Could it disappear into nothingness as they have to keep raising money to do more drilling for several years, and don’t get to the point where the results are shockingly good and get investors excited again? Sure. Especially if gold prices fall 10% or they announce a couple dry holes in a row.
Which is more likely? I have no idea. It depends on where gold goes, and on what the drilling results are… if only because sometime in the next few months, once this drilling campaign is over and they’ve summed it up as best they can, they’re going to need to raise more money to do more drilling.
So I’ll leave it there for you, my friends — ready to speculate on the drilling results of a tiny miner after the initial discovery enthusiasm as waned? Think investing in $20 million junior explorers is a fun hobby, or a terrifying gamble? Have any experience with the other players in the Newfoundland Gold Rush of recent years, or any other insight to share particularly about Labrador Gold? Let us know with a comment below.
Disclosure: I do not own shares of any of the companies mentioned above, and will not trade in any covered stock for at least three days after publication, per Stock Gumshoe’s trading rules.
Not my first choice – look at first mining gold
That was a super-hyped story a few years back, I recall — I owned it for a while from 2015-2017 or so, mostly before the name change (it started out as First Mining Finance, with plans of being a passive investor), and sold when they became more of a project developer in 2017 and 2018. Last time I covered them in detail, I think, was when one of the Stansberry newsletters was pitching them in 2017 as a play on the Springpole property (which is still their lead project, they’re pushing to get a feasibility study done now).
And just as a cautionary tale for everyone who hasn’t gotten involved in junior mining projects, at that time the Stansberry folks were saying Springpole (they called it “Goldwater”) had something like $6.8 billion worth of gold, and yet the company’s valuation was just around $350 million, which they saw as a huge bargain. Now, six years later, Springpole has made progress and has reserves of 3.8 million ounces, and the pre-feasibility study in 2021 values it at about a billion dollars, their second project is also moving forward with a PEA and has a NPV of $588 million, so their two largest projects are assessed, with reasonable judgement about their resources and the likely mining cost, as being worth close to $2 billion, varying a bit depending on the assumptions you make about the gold price, etc. Interest rates were much lower when those assessments were made, and that will impact their ability to finance construction of these potential future mines, but still, they’ve done a lot of work and made progress on permitting, too… and yet, shareholders have seen their shares lose 70% of their value over those six years… during which time the price of gold actually went up by 46%, and even the average large miner, usually a weak long-term investment, gained 34%.
I think the lesson isn’t necessarily that First Mining is a particularly bad one, or Labrador Gold, or whatever example any junior speculator might provide (anyone who has bought these kinds of stocks has plenty of stories of promise unfulfilled)… the lesson is that exploring and defining a mineral resource and then planning, permitting, financing and building a mine is a terrible business, with low odds of success and a large number of potential points of failure, even if you get lucky about the cycle of commodity prices (which most people don’t, of course, since enthusiasm runs highest for pouring money into these projects when you’re close to the top of the cycle). It may be that landing on the occasional great discovery stock makes all the awful ones worthwhile, there is still something magical and enticing about the idea of turning a chunk of barren or unremarkable-looking land into gold… but we should always start out with the assumption that the average idea in this space is going to stink.
FF – Dan tells a good story and with Keith holding a huge position it should run however should and will are as far apart as Victoria and Halifax … FF is stagnant at $0.14 CAD… do think there are any number of micro’s that will perform better when gold starts to move – to be sure on FF (I write this for myself) – take profits and get out of it… it’s going to be a number of years before FF sees share price in the > $0.50 CAD range
I’ve owned WRN in my junior mining sector position, ( technically it it Copper and Gold), they are fun to speculate on these types of stocks. But as Travis says it doesn’t take much more than a sneeze to seem to send them plummeting down by 10%, just when you were certain they were looking good to be in a position to be bought out by RioTinto in a year ( or not, pfft). Definitely only for a fun little micro side investment…don’t expect to make your fortunes in junior mining, to volatile, and while still somewhat cyclical ..sort of like a mini cyclone and you just get on for the thrill ride as you might at any amusement park.
Following Eric Sprott (whoever that is these days) could be profitable, but note that he has more money than you and has positions in a lot more properties than you. He works on the idea that some of those speculations will turn out to be very profitable and the losses will be very small in comparison to his overall wealth. If you can afford to imitate him you won’t be reading any news letters or this one. He has other, very private sources of information. By the way, grade does not matter on its own. Grade/thickness does.
Is this the same company that Jim Rickards at Strategic Intelligence has been pitching? Sounds very similar.
Haven’t looked at his latest ads, did he drop clues?
floridahouse, no it’s not the same one that Rickards is pitching at the moment at least. I have a Rickards promo video playing as I type. Rickards, on the video, is pitching a new mine in Nevada – “something big” that “only a handful of people know about.” This is so new, you can’t even buy it on the stock market – its not even pink, it’s not OTC, but it’s “American’s Gold Kitchen” in Nevada. He has a deal where he is going to invest, and of course I’m sure one pays a few thousand dollars just for the privilege of investing alongside Jim, a “backdoor” way to make a fortune. Anyway, Labrador Gold is in Newfoundland, and Jim is in Nevada, so it’s not the same. But if it is that early – yeah, a big “potential payoff – that early, how can they know for sure this is going to be our lottery ticket. I already knew I would not want “in” on this, but turned it on for entertainment while I read comments here. They’re showing real gold right now… massive opportunity. Lots of hyperbole – billions of dollars of gold just waiting to be mined – I am still a subscriber to Strategic Intelligence, but I got burned on something and I have not wasted time with him since then, and I’ve been pretty cautious about all the genius advisors since then. Oh, he’s even saying it’s like a lottery ticket, this is risky, but – relax, we get to invest alongside Jim, so it’s alright… (not).
That might be Nevada King Gold. owned by Palliside the same company involved in NFG in Newfoundland
I commented a few minutes ago, but since I’m new, maybe it’s being moderated. I am listening to a promo video of Jim Rickards – it’s a mine in Nevada – or a royalty company that owns mines in Nevada. Anyway he’s in Nevada with a film crew and a pitch, but he’s not giving clues, plus he’s saying his deal is not something you can even buy on the stock market, so very secret and very risky, and no clues. It is a complicated deal where one has to put in at least $1000.00 and we’re investing alongside Jim on this deal. Maybe he has something else in the newsletter, Strategic Intelligence, but right now, he’s pushing this deal in Nevada. Not Labrador Gold which is in Newfoundland. Ah, as the video progresses, it is Paradigm Venture Group. and they are saying Jim is leading this group of investors along with two others from Paradigm Press. I don’t recommend.
Good luck to the juniors…for now, gold is cold. Liquid gold (oil) and uranium is winning the investor dollar for what’s in the ground.
Travis, thanks for looking into the 5600% possible gains as being heavily pushed by Luke Burgess, The Crow’s Nest, the Outsider Club and probably other titles. There are so many factors to consider in Junior Mining companies. Labrador Gold is in proximity to New Found Gold, which is much further along in its exploration process. Apparently First Mining Gold is farther along than New Found Gold since it has issued a prefeasibility study. It seems to me that until a feasibility study is completed, we have no basis on which to value any company (whether it is worth 25 cents per share or $5.00). But it is fun to guess and speculate a little bit.
Had NFGC last year, it went down quickly, & thus OUT.
Maybe its time to try again, they’ve been announcing new drill results all Sept. They’ve definitely got gold, so eventually the stock must go up. Right?
It can never lose 20% a year for a decade, despite their deposits, Right?
Gold is supposed to go up a lot, real soon now, Right?
Buying Physical Gold ! Dealers in my area will sell you Maple Leafs coins etc for cash with no paper work ! Best to keep your purchases away from prying eyes!
LAB – closed today at $0.16… one penny above it’s 52 week low… like many micro cap stocks in Newfoundland , LAB will either rise of fall with the rise and fall of NFG and NFGC (Newfound Gold)… to wit Eric Sprott continues to add to his already sizable holding and is aggressive in his support of the NFG – much of the share ownership of other companies in the Province is directly corelated to ES’s spreading $$ offensively and defensively
I looked at NFG after it had pulled back from its big run up. They may have a lot of gold, the way the ownership is set up and who and how they get their money lead me to believe that it will never be the big winner once promised. Oh and guys like Sprott who get to buy shares after they have been run way down always get a carrot in the form of warrants or options attached to the purchase. So they can sell the stock and keep the warrants at some point in time. In all, a good deal, for them and not for the retail buyer.
Is Labbe mangaged differently? Call me a skeptic on this one.
I have a question about Labrador Gold. I am relatively new to investing and am on a learning curve regarding mines and junior mines. From both the above article and from the company’s website, it appears that Labrador Gold has only been at the Kingsway Project since 2020. I know that with any project, they always do a lot of drilling for apparently several years to map out what they have got and to figure out exactly where they want to mine – then there is permitting, etc. I know Marathon Gold in the same region is pretty far along with that process and expects to be producing gold by 2025. I have shares of some other mines that seem to be on track to actually be producing by 2026 (not just gold mines, but lithium and uranium, and not all of them by 2026 – some expect to start producing later on). Anyway – it looks like it is too soon to have any idea IF Labrador Gold will actually make it to the production stage – but what I wonder is, IF things go well and things move forward, I know that things could get stalled at any time and take years longer – but to assume best case, how long before Labrador Gold could get to the point of producing gold?
It seems like I have heard that it’s somewhat usual that the whole process is going to take 8 years from start to finish, unless they can’t get funding, it take a longer time to get permits etc. which can delay for untold lengthy periods of time. But if things actually go well, is it a reasonable guess that the soonest Labrador Gold would actually produce any gold might be 2029. I get that no one can know for sure, and there are many variables that could add years, but from where Labrador Gold is now, I would like to have an idea of when is the soonest and if my guess seems that that is the soonest realistically possible.
And if it is not going to be till 2029 or later, if that is a reasonable guesstimate, is there any reason to think shares truly would go up before they start producing? Luke Burgess had said that this would go vertical right after Sept. 30, but that was obviously just a fiction to try to get people to buy his newsletter. Because there is no spectacular news, of course, and they won’t truly make any money till they are producing, or I would not think so.
I have some shares of Labrador Gold and they are holding at 12 cents a share, so I have not lost anything, but I am thinking that I may reinvest that money into something like lithium or uranium which is more likely to go up soon. I’m not asking for investment advice, but just to make sure I am thinking correctly about the life cycle of a junior mine. I have come to understand that people will make up all kinds of fairy tales to sell their newsletters. I have managed to do my own research and figure out which mines were being teased, even before I found Stock Gumshoe, but the part I did not get right away is, even if you know what mine or what stocker the tease is about – it is still fiction or wishful thinking in many case. Anyway, I am very glad I found Stock Gumshoe, because I am finding it to be really good education – everyone else is just concerned to mislead and get the sale, and that’s it. Or so it seems.
The actual mining and profitability is almost irrelevant for most of these explorers — what tends to drive share prices are shocking drilling results or optimistic feasibility studies. The long process between a good drilling campaign or a preliminary economic analysis or a feasibility study and the actual “let’s raise a gazillion dollars and build the mine” decision, which leads to usually at least 2-4 years of construction, deters most investors at some point.
If you want to really catch lightning in a bottle, you need to be lucky about finding a company who has good drilling results and encouraging reports, hopefully at the same time that the gold price is spiking higher. And almost as important, you have to sell before the slog while they talk about raising money or actually building something.
Every once in a while a real new mining company emerges that’s real and viable and becomes a profitable operation. But man, looking for them sure sucks the life out of a lot of hopeful investors.
It’s sorely tempting. But there are plenty of good reasons to avoid the whole Megillah.
Thanks, Travis. I appreciate your post.
Thanks for the Megillah, Travis – that’s a new one : perfect month to remind us!
At any rate: from what I understand, what really makes juniors become valuable is when larger miners are running out of gold, and it is easier for them to buy a junior which has already done its research than to start digging from scratch. From what Jason was saying – I don’t know if it is true – it is getting harder and harder for large miners to find gold on their properties without having to spend a fortune on digging, deeper and deeper, etc. So this is their cheaper solution: buy a junior. The question is which ones, of course….???????
Luke Burgess is gone as an editor, unfortunately. They’re going to fold this publication completely, putting everyone into Jason Williams’ Future Giants.
Thanks for the update, I guess it’s hard to sell gold mining newsletters these days… maybe that’s a sign the market will turn higher, though it looks like gold is having trouble competing with 5% T-Bills at the moment.
I had a free trial to Luke Burgess’s newsletter, and I liked his articles in that I did learn some things about mining and about junior mines that I would not have otherwise known, so to a point, it was good education for me. But thus far I have not actually made money on his recommendations and I could not afford to continue after his free trial. He was saying Labrador Gold was going to go “vertical after Sept 30 – well, it’s still at 12 cents a share. Some of the things he was pitching may eventually pan out but it may be years before it happens, if it does. No 5600% gains on anything yet. I suppose when all of these guys over-promote and make claims that are never coming true – people get where they don’t believe you, and you can’t sell your newsletters. I actually do like Luke and appreciated reading a lot of what he wrote – but the only thing he recommended that I actually made a bit of money on was Snowline Gold it went up for a minute, and then it went down – he had seemed so confident it that I waited longer than I should have when it started going down, and then I sold it and made a tiny bit of profit. I have not been in the market long enough to judge whether I’m really totally just getting bad advice or whether the markets are just so volatile and crazy these days that number really knows they are going to do, or – both at times… I wish I had been investing 30 years ago and had more experience. Anyway, looks like we won’t seeing any of this enormous gains that Luke promised any time soon. I kind of knew it was not really going “vertical” but I hoped.
But Luke Burgess’ mining newsletter was NOT only Gold, he recoommend Arianne Phophate, in the US, DRRSF, a phophate mine, which he thinks will make money in future because we need phophate for fertilizer (China has stopped selling fertilizer or fertilizer ingredients to us, and we won’t be getting any from Russia or Ukraine these days), and they use phosphates in making some kinds of lithium batteries. And – we definitely will need it, but there are not that many places to get what we need. Arianne phosphate looks to me extremely promising, there will be phophate produced, and it’s not going to be 100 years from now, it seems like they have a lot of phosphate and it seemed like there was a realistic expectation they will produce relatively soon. The stock was very inexpensive, so I thought I could hardly lose to buy a little – I think it’s likely if I live long enough I ought to make money on it eventually – but the world is so crazy these days, war, and who knows what all, I think it is a crazy time to be able to predict anything. Yet, unless we get nuked, we need fertilizer for food, and good to have a good supply in North America. So, it’s possible I will still make some money off one of Luke’s recommendations. But I am tried of all the fairy tales that all these newsletter writers put out – they must know they are promising things that absolutely will not happen in the way or in the timing or the amounts that they promise.
Well, just this week, they have recycled Luke Burgess’ “Peak Gold” promotion, completely identical, word for word, photo by photo etc. under Jason Williams’ name and photo – but still, Peak Gold as Paradigm Press pitched earlier in 2023. Luke Burgess said that this one special junior gold mine would “go vertical” before the end of the year, now the same teaser has been resent, still titled “Peak Gold” and now with Jason Williams name and photo in the pitch. Earlier this year, I had been carefully following Luke Burgess “Junior Mining Traders” newsletter series, so I was very familiar with the little gold mines he was following, and the first time I received the “Peak Gold” pitch, I knew it was Labrador Gold and as a secondary pitch, Exploits Discovery. I still have some of both, but I have sold some of my gold mining stocks to buy uranium instead which goes up a little but not that much right now. Meanwhile, just interesting to see how they recycle same teaser. And yes, Jason Williams’ newsletter is “Future Giants” which I am not reading, but the “Peak Gold” was a special promo piece, and they are still using it. Unchanged.
Ha! Thanks for the update. The publishers hate to give up on a marketing campaign that works (“works” means “brings in subscribers,” of course, not “makes money for investors”).