Smallcappower: SmallCapPower’s “Ask the Expert.”
SmallCapPower was a Gold Plus sponsor at the recent PDAC Convention held in Toronto. We thought this would be a great time to ask our experts: “What are your top picks?”
Vikas Ranjan: I would say that in gold, which we closely follow, our Ubika Gold Index 20 Companies is a great place to look at some of those companies: Alamos Gold (TSX:AGI), Argonaut Gold (TSX: AR), Primero Gold (TSX: P), Timmins Gold (TSX: TMM), I just mentioned. They are all good picks, I believe, because they have very little debt or no debt, they’re low cost producers, and they have strong management. So they should do well. Dundee Precious Metals (TSX: DPM) is another one which may do well, as well.
Brent Cook: The problem with giving you picks like this is that these are so volatile. If you don’t follow them, you know, you can buy it today, and three months from now something goes wrong. And if you don’t catch that, what’s going wrong, you can really lose a lot of money. That said, I think Focus Ventures (TSXV: FCV), a very boring phosphate deposit in Peru, it’s going to be really economic though. I like that one. They need to raise some money right now, so I think it’s being held down because of that. Once we see that resolved, it should do well.
Another one I like a lot is Mirasol Resources (TSXV: MRZ), 20-something million bucks in the bank, good exploration guys. They know what they’re looking for, and they’ve got a whole belt that’s never really been tested in Chile that has the potential to produce a world-class deposit.
Adrian Day: I still like the royalty companies like Franco Nevada (TSX: FNV) and Royal Gold (TSX: RGL). They’re not the cheapest by any means, but they’re certainly among the most solid and the most low-risk companies. And I also like many of the prospect-generator companies, companies like Riverside that I just mentioned, Revelo Resources (TSXV: RVL) in China, Medgold (TSXV: MED) in . . . in Chile, not China. Sorry. Miranda Gold (TSXV: MAD) in Colombia. You know, I like these companies because they have a spread of projects.
Jay Taylor: I guess Aurion (TSXV: AU) would be one of them. I just mentioned Aurion. But Novo Gold (CSE: NVO) is still my top pick, and it’s the pick that I have most of my own money in, my own money that I bought the shares off the market. And it’s a very unique story. Quinton Hennigh, who’s a very highly revered geologist, Dr. Hennigh, well known and worked with Newmont for a number of years. In fact, it was his work with Newmont in which he examined the Witwatersrand rock that led him to this company, Novo Resources.
Witwatersrand deposits, two-thirds of all the gold ever mined in the history of the world has come from there. So, Quinton had a theory about how so much gold could be placed in one place, and so he came up with this theory that it was a precipitation event that took place between 2.7 and 3 billion years ago when oxygen was being created, when photosynthesis started to occur in the Earth’s environment, thus allowing the precipitation of gold out of the pregnant ocean. The ocean was pregnant with gold at that time. It precipitated into the carbon mats at the bottom of a shallow ocean basin.
And he’s found such an environment, and the evidence so far suggests that he has found a Witwatersrand-like deposit. He can’t say it’s a Witwatersrand deposit by any means, but he is in the process of developing what I think will be a very economic, open pit surface deposit, with grades perhaps over 1 1/2 grams per ton. I think it could be double that, honestly, for reasons we don’t have time to discuss now. But it’s called Novo Resources. It trades in Toronto under NVO. And so that would be my top pick.
There are a lot of others I like. OceanaGold (TSX: OGC) is one I like a lot, perhaps for the less risk-averse individuals. It’s a prosperous company producing lots of gold and copper out of the Phillippines. In fact, applying the copper credit, they’re producing gold at negative cost, negative a couple of hundred dollars an ounce. So that’s another one I like for the long term. There are a number of them, but those would be three I’ll leave with you.
Eric Coffin: A couple of companies that I’ve followed for years, like Kaminak Gold (TSXV: KAM), that you know, a great gold project moving towards feasibility. Columbus Gold (TSXV: CGT), a great gold project moving towards feasibility, but I like their Nevada stuff too. They’re going to be doing a 45,000 meter program, so it’s just going to be news flow like crazy.
Smallcappower: Great.
Eric Coffin: Actually, right after this interview, I’m sitting down with a company called Pure Gold (TSXV: PGM), which has got projects in Madsen, which is essentially part of the Red Lake camp. That’s kind of old home week for me. When I was in high school, I actually worked in the mill in Madsen.
Smallcappower: Oh, wow.
Eric Coffin: So, I actually went and visited it last fall. This is actually a good example of what we just talked about. I liked it, I liked the targets, but I was, like, “You know what? I need to see a couple of drill holes first.”
Smallcappower: Right.
Eric Coffin: Because it’s not . . . you know, these aren’t easy things to find. They actually just put up a couple of really good holes this morning, so I’m going to sit down and go through that. I’ll probably do a few meetings with Precipitate Gold (TSXV: PRG). But Precipitate, just so everybody realizes, I’m not objective on that. I was one of the founders, and I own a crapload of it. So, you know, so don’t consider that an objective opinion. But I really… that’s one of those ones where every time they’ve gone back, the target looks better. They actually drilled a discovery hole in the fall, but of course they managed to do that just as the gold price was falling apart, so nobody cared. But they’ll be back drilling again, and I really like that target.
John Kaiser: I’ll give you two picks that I own and that are current open recommendations. One is Peregrine Diamonds (TSX: PGD), which has the Chidliak project, which is probably the most interesting and undervalued advanced diamond project in the world right now. And the other company is Scandium International (TSX: SCY), which by the end of this year will have a mining permit and a feasibility study in hand to develop a scandium deposit which ranks among the three richest deposits, all of which have been recognized in the last six years and where attention is now going on them. The aluminum industry, which has been waiting for a primary scalable supply to emerge, is finally going to get its wishes fulfilled. Scandium is going to be one of the hottest topics amongst the juniors.
And there are two other companies: Platina Resources (ASX: PGM) and Clean TeQ Holdings (ASX: CLQ), both ASX listed. One is … Robert Friedland has a major stake in. They just announced a Syerston resource. It’s actually the richest and biggest deposit. We’re going to hear a lot more about that. And the Owendale is also a rich and large deposit. These three deposits, along with Scandium International’s Nyngan, they are going to supply the world with scandium for the next 50 years.
And scandium is an energy-efficiency provider, so it is apolitical. It’s not like rare earths for alternative energy, which the right wing hates and the left wing . . . everybody likes it when you save energy, because you save money. It’s apolitical. I think it’ll spread like wildfire as a concept.
