We ask Hedley Widdup about every gold mining junior

Great one was sitting there with have you on. They were the obvious buyer of the rest of have you on from from Newmont. And if anyone bought that, why the hell wouldn't you want Telfa? You know, they, they haven't managed to push that decline in as fast as people thought. How many tons do you get out of an anagram? It's not going to fill Telfa. So you know, something extra is required in that region. You know, that's not just my view.

There's obviously enough people in the market who keep buying Antifa. Right on Buddy Waters we had a bloody impromptu surprise visit from a great friend of the show, Henley Widdip. Line selection, Kurt, good short notice recruit and Travis. What a lucky coincidence that he happened to be available in in town the exact same day I messaged him. We had such a wicked conversation about every school gold junior you can think of.

Maddie. We asked I. Was surprised how many gold juniors you across. Have you got a new? Found passion. I cut my teeth in that sector. Maddie, I once you, once you're across, once you do the gold comps in corporate finance, you never forget the companies. They're all had Reg paid histories, but yeah pretty much went through frigging everything other than a mid cap in guards. We can talk about them. Yeah, and if they're potentially producing or bloody, Yeah, he's

no, It was a frigging good yard. It's awesome. Keen to hear it guys, Maybe they'll last sort of get their big day in the sun as we're starting to see. Jade, have you heard if Vice aren't have thrown that offer to Gerard James yet? WA Waterboards. Cannot confirm or deny Maddie but I've I've got a sort of price that I think gets the deal over the line in my mind. What are you thinking? Mate, if you've got a contact there, Matey reckons 30 mil would do it.

But based on the fact that the best bloody mud Rotary drillers in the world are at WA water balls, they'll probably make that in a year and a half. So that multiple doesn't even make sense for me. So vice, Ange. Checks. Checks the box for. Open up the checkbook. I reckon you might be mate. They they find water with gold in it in this bloody environment. So we're talking bloody bore field installations. You want to find water? You want to fuck water off? You want to bloody do anything

water related mate. You can even drill paste tiles in the underground with the WA water balls team and the bloody vertical angle. Anything anything. They are the absolute gurus and. God will come out of them. Pretty pretty much you can flush it's gold straight up the bloody paste tile into your into the back of your truck if you want go Gerard James, go vice on by and Gerard James open your. Check. Let's let's do WA water balls to be clear. Yeah, yeah, but no.

Well, bloody maybe. One and the same. Yeah, 2 transactions, righto. Let's get into it with headers. Righto buddy. Miners Headley by Kay while the sun shines, mate, this is your time to do as many podcast interviews as you can. Oh, tell you what Headley, we're at Law and Selection Group. How are you mate? I'm well, thanks, Maddie. And I must say it's a great privilege to be sitting at this round table, which has become

quite famous. I've been, I've been blessed to be on your podcast before, but never in this office. So this feels like. Table mate. Feels like a first time for me. It's, it's, it's pretty impromptu and serendipitous. I sent you a text message this morning and I said, mate, when you're in Perth next, I was thinking like this is this is Gold junior time and you are Mr. Gold Junior and, and, and you replied and said, I just landed, I'm I'm here, do you want to get a beer?

And I said, well, why don't we have a beer miked up and you've popped in. Well, you said, you said when you're coming to Perth, I thought, shit sounds like an invitation, I'll book a flight. No such thing as a free lunch, mate. I didn't want to have a beer. We're getting an episode. Out I even managed to organise a site visit for tomorrow, so, you know, legitimise the whole thing. Awesome, I heard you're visiting a deposit with my my name. That's right, the mighty Ricky.

Ricky. The Murchison region. I don't want to. Well, it sounds like. I mean, you know, they say don't kiss and tell. I haven't even kissed this one yet. So what's it like? So what's it like that you've

since we first interviewed you last year, you're one of the, I guess, more publicized early movers seeing the value in junior gold stocks And they're they've all had a bit of a run and a lot of yours, most of yours have had a pretty good run, some yet to probably run as much as you like. What's the vibe like? How do you feel about picking it and it's finally sort of happening? I think I've been working in mining finance now for 18 years and then there was 10 years of mining before that.

And I think one of the things which you recognise after that long in the industry is how cyclical it is. And you know, there's good times, but you got to recognise when there is a good time because you need to, like you said, make hay when the sun shines.

They don't last forever. At the moment we've seen the gold price rocket away and we started buying into the junior golds just thinking that they were the most depressed, as in they've been sold off the hardest, particularly when critical minerals were all the rage was like who gives the stuff about gold? So we're investing in it at that time, feeling contrarian, but also feeling that the risk profile across the entire junior space was very much skewed.

And if you're paying a lot for critical minerals at that time, you're also taking marketing, metallurgical, etcetera, risk. And in gold, that is a risk which is generally much, much lower, if at all, you know, you can dig gold up, separate it and sell it a lot easier than anything else. So if you're getting it cheap, it's a great time to be in it and then you wait and, and hopefully it goes up. So that thesis played out and it feels great.

But you know, now we start to think where does this lead? And I guess nobody knows the answer to that, but I do feel like quit quite early. Well, and it seems like a very basic overview of it. It feels like they were so many companies were stuck in the whole of very small market caps beating up like anything inability to raise cap that much capital that can actually get a much. Now there's actually a bit of equity and momentum in the mall.

They're right. Like just the, the tailwinds you get from being able to raise, you know, 2 figure amounts of money and now just set up. It just seems it's either one end or the other and it just really feels like that's pushing them all at the moment. Yeah, well, I mean last year if, if, if you took the first half of last year and then even trickling through into September, October, a big raise was 10 million bucks if you're a gold company and even if you're

really advanced. Replacement capacity. Yeah, yeah. Well now I mean you've got companies raising 30 million bucks every second day and and not much has changed other than the gold price. But yet, I think the, the, if you look at it from a a value perspective, you're still a long, long way behind what you would be buying in terms of dollars per oz or whatever metric trick you want to use that kind of values what a company might be able to produce versus the producers.

The producers have benefited from the gold price, maybe not as much as you would have expected in a 1980s style cycle or a 90s or even naughties style cycle where gold starts going quite hard and and a lot of speculation starts to get built

into the equities. I think we live in a world now where gold is being bought by such a large market, which doesn't necessarily include a lot of Western speculators, whereas it's the Western speculators in the Western markets which need to purchase the equities. So whatever is driving the gold price isn't also applied to the equity price. And in the past, that leverage would have been much more significant than what we see

now. And I think that has probably had something to do with the lack of feed through into the development space and the junior space, although there's a lot of relevant recent history which probably has put people off of taking those risks as well are. You are you still saying a pretty substantial like disconnect between the the equity valuations of the, you know, the undeveloped juniors versus the producers and and kind of how are we quantifying

that? Yeah. How do you how do you measure a whole sector? Not so much in valuation that that that's a harder piece, Although I would say subjectively, non empirically, yes, I I see that that as a big, big difference.

If I just took aggregate prices and the way that they trade and you say, well, you know, if someone's got some good answers to come out of the ground, then that group of companies with good answers should be trading in a similar pattern to the people who are producing good answers. And there must be good answers because you're producing them and you're making money. Some are better than others, but you know, there's good that make money and there's bad that

don't. I suppose if you just draw that very black and white distinction. For the last three years, the gold producers have taken advantage of a robust semi solid, now almost vertical gold price and they've been able to expand their revenues. They've been very fortunate to be doing that against a backdrop of prices not inflating all that heavily. Price inflation in the mining market has been driven by iron ore in the naughties and coal at the same time.

We've had the critical minerals boom and all these new lithium mines that had to compete with the labor pool that wasn't expanding, but the amount of mines wasn't contracting. So that that pushed costs amazingly and that's not a factor at the moment. A lot of those jobs are falling

away. So the gold industry I think is able to make more money at the same time as costs not chasing it up. And we haven't seen the kind of, you know, let's all push our pit optimizations out and start mining marginal material to make more answers that make less money. I'm sure that'll come, but we haven't seen it yet. So the producers have runaway, they've had that price trend for three years.

In that same three years, the developers have been on a downward trajectory, I would say until very early this year or late last year when the the junior slash Explorer class, if you just take it as a whole and I'm sure you could pick out the ones which are the better performance versus the worst

performance. But if you just take a median across a very large group of maybe a hundred, 120 of them that sit below a 200, two, 150 mil market cap, that ticked up as of last year and that broke a very significant three-year trend. So it wasn't the gold price which pulled it out of that. I think it was money coming down from the producers and saying where can we take a bit more risk to expose ourselves to a bit more performance. So I feel like that corresponds with the raisings that got

bigger. You know, the two seem to go hand in hand. So if I had to say, you know, it is now the time for gold juniors. Yeah, I think we're into we're into that era now. I. Think Connor bit bit devil's advocate against what you said about the the labour pool and everything dropping off. Like I agree with the the lithium and the nickel providing putting a lot more people into

the market. But I guess what's happened in in parallel with, you know, with gold, like you got more obviously a lot more of a underground mining pool that you have to pick from and you know, word on the street the amount of people that Northern Star are consuming for this Kalgoorlie expansion is really chucking a lot of pressure on the employment pool at the moment. There was a lot available, but it's like that expansion is really taking a lot of people

out of the market. So and, and when we get to the point where like these prices are up here, they're not and and lithium's dead, like how how we're not producing as cheap. Yeah, like those big operations are actually sucking a lot of people. Well, that's true. And I suppose that there will be other gold projects which are also expanding or you know, bringing more people on.

I'd just contrast that if you, if you were to take now and the expansion of the Super pit, and perhaps that's another hundred, 150 people, I don't know, rough numbers, you might know better than me. But I can think back to when I was finishing up being a geologist and moving into mining investment. That was when iron ore was going

from 40 bucks to 100 bucks. And that was a case of you used to get paid 60 grand a year as a truck driver and suddenly it was 120 and then it was 150. And it was just they needed bums on seats and it was expansions that were bringing in thousands of people, not not hundreds. So I think that you know that and that was in a market which needed to expand in order to do

that. My sense would be that if Northern Star or anyone else in the gold space says we need a couple of underground operators, we need a hundred of them. You put an ad in the paper and you're more than likely to have, you know, a large proportion of that pool that apply. Have some experience that they can bring to it in which case they can be picky. So it's probably not having to

expand the labour pool too much. Whereas you know the the case of the truck drivers in the Pilbara and the the naughties to the late naughties, I would say there was very few of them went with any experience. Got to ask had the if, if, if the gold juniors have kind of picked up already and some of them are fairway off their lows. You know, some some of them are are yet to really tick up yet. But certainly it feels like that tide's turned. Why, why are you not fully

deployed? I mean at 303131 Jan, you had what was it $61.3 million in, in investments, but cash and term, term deposits of $47 million. Don't you wish you had that deployed before or they just weren't like ways to actually deploy in that size in the junior market? Part of me does, but we're not traders.

So the part of me that wishes we were deployed would also be the part of me that was now sitting there going well, if I want to top up in anything like a satin minerals, which we did yesterday, sorry, yesterday was Sunday. So we announced that today if we wanted to top up in anything, we'd be needing to sell something and you'd be, you'd be crystallising a return. But when you go to sell anything to follow your money, you're, you're stressed and you might not be making the best decisions.

So I know that's probably a weak defence for not being fully deployed. I must say it's difficult to time when you think a market is really going to run. But what we've been focused on, I mean, we, we exited the market to a large extent in 20/21/22. We went to 90% cash. We felt like we were at the top of the market. There was opportunities to sell some big investments and I don't know, opportunity meets preparation I guess. But at the same time, you're probably only half clever.

You're also very lucky and but you know, found ourselves in a situation which I don't think too many other asset managers were to be fully cashed at the top of market. And then as that market and our market is the juniors fell away, the purchasing power of that increases. So the temptation to be coming into the market was always there, but it was also met by, are you going to be investing too, too far before that market turns around.

And because we feel that the the investment return which we're hoping to get off of this pool of assets is going to be over let's say three to five years in. In practice, it could be longer, it could be a bit shorter. But I suspect 3 to 5 is probably fairly near to what the ultimate boom phase might be. And to crystallise value, some of them are going to have to make discoveries, extend their deposits, develop mines. We can't be looking to sell once we've had the return that we have.

So I think in that same quarterly it would have said we'd invested about 31,000,000 bucks. And that pool of money which has been invested just in Australia was up about 52% at that marker. It's up by more now, but you know the, the, the market is fortunately moving. We can follow that money and every single one of those companies. They're gonna need more. Is is at risk of needing more capital?

There's one. There's one I don't think they will, but the rest of them do. So let's say across the portfolio, we need to be prepared to follow our money. And when you're following your money, you're probably waiting for another low price move marker because no one, you know, very few companies in that space get it right where they go right, we've gone from 10 to 50. Let's raise all the money we

need now. You know, they, they kind of get to a point where they come issue and if they'd hit 50, they'd come right back to 35 before they raise money again.

So you're, you're probably always getting a bargain when you're putting fresh money in. So we're very conscious of following our money to that extent because our position as a visible shareholder is sometimes something which can influence the success of a raising as well, particularly in a market which is not yet roaring it. I think it's going well, but we're also cognizant that if we're, you know, a 10% shareholder in something someone's raising money and we

go, we're not interested. You know, that book might not be as full, it might put pressure on the price. And it's, it's often something that we're either there and we're investing or we're finding a way not to be there. And there's not too much in between that the market will be happy with if there's a raising on it's. Probably a weird question, but with the market I, I, I guess yeah, rewriting to some extent. Is your investable opportunity set bigger or smaller than it was 12 months ago?

Well, the investable opportunity set has probably got most of the critical minerals in it now, whereas 2 years ago I would argue they weren't. And it's, you know, there's no objective marker. It's what I think because if I decide I'm not interested, then I won't do the work, right.

So, so I think, you know, there's some of those which I could be quite skeptical about, but if someone came in with a, what is obviously a large and attractive, you know, sector leading lithium deposit or rare earths, I'm, I'm happy to have a look at that. I'm happy to think contrarian. It might not be something that we put a large amount of our money into, but it's something that we're very happy to think about and see how that's going to play.

Because if the lithium price starts to move, the most leveraged thing that you can be in is the biggest, best grade undeveloped deposit that's in that space. And that's that's where we often try to put our money. So I mean, we'd put money into rare earth and that was the mentality we had. Look for that. If it doesn't exist, don't do it. But so that's, I would say that that opportunity set has

broadened. Now it's easy to say when the gold price is almost doubled in that period of time that the critical minerals couldn't possibly do that. We've seen them all come off quite horrendously in many cases and probably been the worst performers across much of the commodity market. So how can you be so contrarian about that when, you know, gold was maybe a bit obvious? We're biased by the performance that we've seen. It's difficult to make that comparison, so I'm open minded

to looking at them. But the other thing to think about with gold is that, like I said before, they tend to be lower risk. So if you've got 10 bucks to spend in the mining market and you want to do 10 stories, there's a pretty good chance to have all the things you assess. Four or five of them are going to be gold that race to the top just because of pure weight of numbers.

And if you're risk influenced, if you want to hold something to three, three to five years and see it grow, see the project be successful and the value which you've, you know, come up with in an empirical way is realised by the market because it's time. You need to have that time for that to play out, which means you can't, you can't take an institutional approach to something that starts off being capitalised at 10 or 15 because you might be right, but then you're trapped in a lobster

trap. And, you know, if it's just new liquid stock, you might never get price discovery. So we've, we've, there's a lot we've got to manage in that sense. And we, you know, we often get shareholders will often come in and say, oh, did you see this trade? You know, I made a lot of money off of it. And it's buying an esoteric option in a company which was, you know, a death's door and something happened and squeezed and the options went great.

It's like, well, you know, there's about 50 or $0.60 of liquidity in that I wanted to put half 1,000,000 bucks in would have swamped it. It's it's impossible, couldn't get in, couldn't get out. So there's a lot that happens in the junior space where, you know, for an institution to invest, you have to be very careful about what you pick just because that money can influence prices in the wrong way as well. Right, you want to extract 100% of these bloody resources that

headers is talking about? You need a pace plant. You need, you need an EPC contract in a designer pace plant. Quite your bloody pace plant, you know. Oh, they quattro, they, as you said, design engineer construct and that pace has to go somewhere, goes into the pace fill Retik pipes underground, they put those in that goes through a quattro pace diverter valve to optimise the flow of this pace so you don't have to

bloody turn the plan off. I think in the future that the generic word Pace Phil will be termed Quattro Phil because they have just freaking taken over the world of Pace Phil and it's going to be like Band-Aid or Red Bull. There is no underground engineering that these guys have not, you know, wrapped their their fingers and hands around. This is this is their bread and butter. They are, you know, just Jeremy. What, what, what?

An entrepreneur starting a company, having a crack, building something special with Quattro Get around. Them mate, they've been it's decades long now, so absolute APC gurus keep an eye on them for at underground operators conference and get them to tell you how good they are instead of me. Don't Quattro as well. Let's get back into it. What do you think about if

you're going to split up the gold juniors at the moment, the ones that have performed well, performed not as well as those who are well in terms of the information they have out. I'll pluck a few names, ones that have really outperformed of light, like Medallion, like Astral Maker. They all have like a there's a bit of there's a study, there's some numbers that you can wrap your head around of like

hopefully what will happen. One that probably hasn't performed as well and starting to go is probably great. Boulder doesn't have a study yet that looks like they're trying to get to 1,000,000 oz before they actually wrap a plan out. Another announce the other week that you know, bring on some people to progress studies and everything is that is that influencing the performance of these juniors.

If you like, they've got some got some numbers for the investors to sign up that makes sense or don't want a bar of. It well, short answer is yes, I think that's very important. But I think you've also got to take step back and I've seen some very clever people in the mining space. I'm not going to give you their names, but you'd probably guess it pretty quickly. They know their story back to

front. If you put them in front of a purely retail audience and you say you've got 15 minutes spewed out, they'll hit you with grades, they'll hit you with tons, they'll hit with timeframes and costs and all this other stuff. And the retail people just go, what the hell are you talking about? I don't understand. Like it, there's no relativity around a parcel of 10,000 oz. There's no relativity around how many millions of dollars it costs you to produce that.

So studies are useful because it gives you the basis to announce something and then to put that into a layperson's terms. And I think that's probably where the magic is, is having a story where you can genuinely say we have done the study. So if you've got the time and the intelligence, go and read it and digest it. Come back with questions if you like. But but I can say with confidence that this is what we're going to do.

And I think those companies which have proceeded, sorry, have have really flourished in this market have been ones who can say things like we have a plan a la a study. We are advancing and they've made tangible progress towards being in cash flow and in many cases they've been able to procure some kind of a surprise or at least a step down in terms of how much it was going to cost.

So they're not standing before the market and saying it's going to cost us half a billion dollars to build a project and that is all we can do. You know, we're, we're a small company and one day we're going to need that capital in the case of Medallion, which is I like talking about that because we put 1,000,000 bucks in at $0.10 and last I looked it was 20 something 20. 5 1/2 tonight. 25 There you go, they.

IPO D at 25 yeah, come back they I think it went down as low as like 3. Yeah, but we didn't get any in the IPO and we didn't get any at 3, but we did get some at $0.10 not long ago. So what they did was you know they had a study and it showed we're going to go into production. We've got a great inventory and it I think it's a very well drilled deposit. You know, it's well understood from a geological perspective.

It's not a new resource and that there's an advantage in that, but one of the disadvantages, it's been sitting in the ground for a long time and people say, well, what what straw needs to break this camel's back to pull it out of the ground. And I think in this case, the straw that broke the camel's back was stepping away from, we have to spend, I can't remember what the CapEx was going to be, you know, was it over 150 to

build a brand new plant? And by the time you're doing that for one deposit, which has copper with gold oxide, transitional and fresh, you need to be able to try to come up with a CapEx solution which meets as many of those requirements. And as you know, I mean, if it's plain gold, you can use one plant reasonably simple. By the time it's copper, you need to think flotation. And by the time you add weathering into that it, it can

be a nightmare. The nickel collapse happened, IGO found many of its operations unsustainable. So they've been able to get access. Well, they've got an option on the Cosmic Boy plant, which is 150 odd KS by Rd. which is, you know, it's not next door, but it it still makes sense when you're taking. 2 grand. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I think it's a bit more than that that comes out of the ground. But it, it enables them to go in with a smaller development footprint, smaller CapEx and get

into business. And I think there is an element of the market which in the last, I would say call it two to four years has been much more open to, you don't have to develop something which is going to be 100,000 oz per annum because there's so many deposits which were shoehorned into that. And they should have been longer life, smaller capacity or, or

whatever. But you know, some of the mistakes I've seen in the market that that's probably part of the reasoning in the medallion case, You know, they've found a way, it looks as if they found a way into production, which cuts the CapEx back that they need to raise. And you know, by the time they get to it, well, how much do they need to raise? They need to exercise an option. There's a, there's a net off for the the environmental

rehabilitation cost. And what they've told the market is that, you know, it's AI think it's a $50 million option. So they're not going to have to pay 50. It'll be reduced by a, a liability amount. And then they need to pay the CapEx to, to do the bits and pieces to make that plant work for gold. So, you know, instead of the original. And I can't remember what it was, but maybe it was 150 million bucks. It's now, you know, sub 100.

So it's a it's a big reduction, but the other advantage of doing it that way, well, not everybody can is instead of saying we need to build all of this from scratch, which means you've got to raise all that money in one go. It's not like you can do a raising one year and buy your crusher in your camp and then come back the next year. You know, you need once you're committed, you've got to do it

all. In this case, it's like they they raise the money to to pay for the option, raise the money to do do a bit of the cap ex raise the money to put yourself into production of this couple of bite sized chunks there, which make it eminently more manageable. And because you're scaling up your market cap each time, you know, you've got a much bigger rump to to raise money off of. So I think that's probably part of the success and that that applies to some extent to some of the others.

Astral is probably the odd one out there and that they don't seem to have an easier way into production other than than building their project. But they've very successfully demonstrated to the market. And you know, it's up to Mark de Clair. Some call him Chocolates de Clair. I quite enjoy introducing Mark to conferences and he's not here to stare at me or send me rude

text messages now. But I'm sure I'll hear about this when it goes to it. Have you ever get a picture of, if you Google Alex Perry, the fat fashion icon with sunglasses, you got to stipulate sunglasses. Just tell me what it looks like, because when Mark De Clair calls my phone, that's the picture that comes up.

So Mark Mark has very successfully compared their project to something like a like what what Capricorn did with Kalawinda. And basically it's it's not high grade, but it's large tons, it's stable costs, it's stable throughput. It's a very bite size meal. You know, you're buying everything is vanilla in terms of putting it on the ground with CapEx, you're not taking too many technology risks or anything like that.

And I think that that story has been well told and persevered with and you know, as one institution comes bit of success, another institution come, you know, so that one been built up a bit more piece at a time there. And I wouldn't say that there's been a breakthrough other than Mark convincingly telling that story. Not everybody can do that because you know there's a, there's a circumstance, audience, timing, all the rest

of it that comes into that. Today, and like all those two companies specifically and everyone else, they all grinded it out in the absolute dog shit time of exploration being hated. Yeah. And it just make more sense if that went to an expanded Higginsville mill. That project have just wrapped up Maximus I think. Yeah. That went yeah, yeah. Well, there's been Pulsory acquisition. I mean, there's been trucks go further than that. Not even that far to. Take material to the Saint Ives

mill, which. Yeah, well, that's a logical 1 for them, but. If you ever flew over St. Ives in a helicopter, I'm not saying I'd do that very often, but I did it once and there was nothing on the romped. I used to work there so I know what the romped should look like. So they've. They've been put in crushed heap ledge through that, you know, semi recently I believe. Yeah, yeah.

I believe so, I think. The thing on Medallion now, the one thing you didn't mention is the fact that they can market the copper now. Yep, because copper was the taboo for that stock. They're like, how are you going to deal with the copper? And that was the whole thing. And now they can put drill results out that say 5% copper because they've got the processing solution. So they've got extra, you know, firepower in the perception of

that stock. Well, and 10 years or maybe not ten years ago, but in the last market where copper was, you know, hitting choppy levels, TCR, CS and what you'd have to pay away in a copper concentrate was a much, much higher value in proportion of the value of the of the ore. So you know, if you were selling 5% copper or 5% ore going into a concentrate and going off site, you know, you would still see a material cost that you pay in that.

There's been so many smelters built, you know, Glencore is tracking some of the shittest concentrates in the world up the train line 2 man iser to keep that smelter full. So there's arsenic going to places where I think probably need not go, not saying it goes up that train line, you know couldn't substantiate that. But there is a demand for copper concentrates now and if they are good quality they are in high

demand for blending. So I would say that that's something which is also inflated that copper story for them in that that can enable finance. So what I said the other day was that have a number of off take interests and some of them are offering debt terms alongside the the off take contracts. And if you can do that, then it means you don't need to deal with the bank. And the more gold in it, the more they'll take. That's right, yeah.

Another portfolio company that has really bounced and it was a catalyst Antipa. It's not like 300 ish ish percent since Greatland acquired the rest of of Haveron and Telfa. Talk us through you know how you how you see Antipa in their recent performance well. We invested in Antipa. I can't remember the exact date, I'd say it was, it was definitely before Diggers and dealers because I remember talking to them about it

afterwards. So let's say that was mid 2024 and at that time we were looking at something where I think they're raising about 6,000,000 bucks. They already had a reasonable size inventory and where they were was in the Patterson. And you know, I, I cast my eye across WA, rest of Australia, the most heavily developed part of Australia for common infrastructure would which would be useful to so many people irrespective of where the tenement boundaries are is probably the yield gun.

And you know, the central area of the Gulf fields around Kalgoorlie, the Murchison, etcetera. The Paterson is not heavily developed. In fact it's quite remote, but it's very close. Well, Telfer is in the heart of it. And, and Telfer is a pin up operation. It's very large, has been a very large gold project. So we were looking at Antipa thinking these guys have a big

inventory. And if you take a 5 year view, particularly if the market turns around and turns into a boom, this is something which should become interesting either the people that want to build projects or for these guys to be able to fund it. And at the time we were looking at it thinking, you know, it could be a stressful financing as their market cap at the time we entered was about 60. But you know, give the passenger time and add a boom to it,

market caps can increase. So we sort of took that risk on our thesis was definitely A2 fold 1 though. And one thing that we've tried to be a lot more cognizant of in, in this generation of investing in the last, let's say five years is you're not just investing in the project and, and that has to be successful because that's always something

you look for. But if you can have a second exit point which is just you know, is there a factor which is close to that could procure a development pathway or an exit for you from the stock even that that takes all the project risk, development risk off the table and M&A is one of those. So we weren't buying Antipa because we thought there's M&A in this. It was more there's a very obvious process facility there. It's 20 odd, 22 odd million tons per annum. It's like 12 mils.

Yeah. Well, it's in one. I mean you think of a big, a big mill in the yield gun is 3 to 5 million tonnes, right? And so here's one which is 4 to five times larger than that which you know, great efficiencies in that all the rest. But Telfer has had a very long life and found itself with a very little actual law. In fact, when Newmont sold it,

it had 0 reserves. So that that picture is changing now with Greatland having got hold of it and investing in all the rest of it. But we took the view that whatever happens with Telfer, there's a good chance that the anti parole there is of great use. And we clearly, you know, it's hard to escape the obvious story. We we didn't know it at the time, but Greatland was sitting there with have you're on.

They were the obvious buyer of the rest of have you're on from from Newmont. And if anyone bought that, why the hell wouldn't you want telephone? So we thought, well, if you do that, how hard is have you're on? We were speculating a bit, but it looked like something which the development maybe hadn't stalled, but it come to the most challenging part of the development of it. You know, they, they haven't managed to push that decline in as fast as people thought.

How many tons do you get out of an anagram? It's not going to fill Telfa. So, you know, something extra is required in that region other than have your own. They've done a great job of, of expanding the resources at Telfa since they've owned it. And I think the thesis still fits. But, you know, that's not just

my view. There's obviously enough people in the market who keep buying Antipa who either they share the thesis that it's a developable project or I would say given, you know, the apparent ferociousness of buying in the stock, it's probably more like they also share the M&A view. So you know, I think that's something which a lot of people are talking about. But it the thing with M&A is it it's so difficult to deliver into because it's all

speculation until it happened. And you know, we I know you guys talk about M&AA lot. The thing I often smile about is that we all sit outside of an M and a deal and talk about what the obvious factors must be. When you're on the inside of it, those obvious factors are sometimes really difficult or, you know, just no on impossible and you try to deal with them.

But you know, I think so in, in something like this, you look at it and go, well, there's a mill there, there's a deposit there. There's a gap. Just go on there. Go there. Go and do it. Yeah. But I mean, you know, greatly needs to list in Australia first. Yeah, I think that's that's something which they need to do and. And Tipper needs approvals to fill that gap in the mine plan, too. Right. That's right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But meanwhile, and Taper got one of the exploration JV's back from Newmont that already had a ripping target on it and and off they go. They're going to be trying to drill that fairly shortly. They raised money and it was a, it was confusing to me because they, they were pretty cashed up because they'd sold the remainder of the JV with Rio back to Rio and that had to cash. And then they raised money and I was like, well, didn't see that coming.

Are you as a shareholder comfortable with that raise because it just gives them a bit more? Yeah. We participated in that raise and it was priced at, or they've reconstructed the price price, but that was priced at $0.20, which seems a long way in the rearview mirror from 40 odd or the mid 40s where we are at the moment. The thesis at the time was they'd been, you know, they've been doing Rd. shows, they're always doing Rd. shows. And one of them I think was the

first foray overseas. It might not have been the first foray overseas, but it was they presented to a lot of North American institutions. And this was in the lead up to Christmas. So there was this question around where's gold going? It was starting to feel quite pleasant, like a lukewarm bath. But you know, we all knew we were going to the hiatus of Christmas and anything can happen over that period of time. So that had this interest.

And I think I think what they felt was that in the book, they were going to get some interest from North American institutions which were ready to go, ready to pay a good price. And they would be able to come out to the market and say, look, we're funded right through we we can actually do everything we want to do. And if you think about that in the context of developing a project, it's very defensible to raise the money to say we don't need to raise any.

But that's that's the second most powerful thing you can say other than we've just dropped the CapEx is we don't need to raise any more money for a long time. The only way to get those shares is to go on market and buy it. So I think it was a good thing for them to do in that case that

regard. If you think that there is any MNA coming and I know no better than anybody else does here, but if that was to occur, you want to give yourself the longest possible time to, we've got to work through that. And so having an expanded Kitty there also puts them in a very strong position to be able to say, look, we're, we're drilling, we're doing our PFS. You know, if someone's interested here, then let's talk.

But the, the worst time to enter into an M and a discussion and I've, I've been a part of this is when you know, you need to raise money in the next 6 months because once that M&A discussion starts, it's incredibly difficult to raise money. And once that Ave. is taken away, it takes away a real platform of strength. You can be you can be starved very rapidly. While we're talking about M and

A2 of your portfolio companies merged very recently in Bright Star and and Alto, was this, was this a, you know, a deal you were pretty, pretty keen to see happen as a, as a shareholder of both and kind of encouraged. Definitely blessed it. Yeah, we were. We were very happy to see that

as an outcome. And the the pure, the biggest reason for that is that the operating assets which Bright Star have, I mean Bright Star had nothing in it at that point which was extremely large, high grade or anything like that. It was a scatter of smallish things. And by smallish I mean up to a few 100,000 oz but quite close.

M&A that company. Yeah. Well, I mean, one, one thing which I would say Alex recognised very, very well a couple of years ago when he stepped in to be the MD was he said these might not be glamorous gold deposits, but they are so close to other people's process facilities don't need to build 1. So to get into business, we need only a small level of CapEx. And that's, I think that's been a very good thing for him it because he's gone through a few transactions.

I would say that the market is saying, well, you show me that you can make money now, but you know, he's making money poured gold the other day. So I suspect that you give it a couple of quarters of delivery there and the market will start to listen and we'll start to say, well, let's talk about

growth. All of a sudden the, the growth story which they now have is that the cash flow they make from those small assets and this, this, this, this trend of commercializing small assets has become possible in the gold market because there's so many big mills around. There's a lot of capacity to be processing parcels of all. I mean, I, I know that's a glib remark. Not every single one has capacity and it can vary in time. But it wasn't possible 10 years

ago. 10 years ago, if you had a gold deposit, you had to build your own mill. That was just the way it worked. And it was almost a disgrace to go to the market and say, no, we're just going to dig it up and sell it to make a little bit of money. Now, if you do it, you can achieve a pretty reasonable valuation off of the back of doing that, and you can make good cash, particularly if you're doing it today. Yeah, so.

Then you can risk share like you don't even have to stump up the CapEx to do it. Like we're drinking stubbies of of MMS, right? Like, yeah, and and they're one of The Pioneers. Of that model funny you should mention it. You guys are usually pretty quiet about your sponsors, aren't you? So no, we're he's. Given you the layup mate, have we done them this way? But it's it.

Is interesting, right? Like, I mean, I mean, you know, they're one of several who who've been willing to come on the scene and, and, and really provide an Ave. for cash flow for these gold juniors by taking like wearing a fair bit of risk in the process, but sharing the upside, the equity upside. And in a rising gold market, everyone's very happy with that situation. Including shareholders and therein is the is the the point as well.

So all of a sudden you can do these small gold deposits. The thing is that for anyone who owns a small gold deposit, you know, if they go to institutional investors and say, well, we're a $15 million company, we've made $8 million of cash in the last 12 months, aren't we wonderful? You should buy us. The institution goes, well, that's great, but what next? I mean, you've made that money, you've got nothing left, what are you going to apply it to?

So that's the question with a lot of these companies. And for us, Bright Star was something we wanted to get involved with because we saw this commercialization over a, you know, it was, it was a good million oz that we could see were possible between the in the Menzies area. And that's over a period of time that that would generate a reasonable amount of cash. But at the start, and that was a smaller investment for us to start with, there wasn't the big

growth asset. So when Alex's approach to us was to say we'd like to do something with Alto, that's where the growth project came in. So, you know, to fund Alto all on its own, there's dilution to shareholders. You got to take that into account with whatever return profile you think you're you're

expecting from the asset. And if you put that into a company which has the ability to fund it without having to raise money, then all of a sudden that just gets squeezed into the amount of shares which are on issue. So that, that was the investment thesis that saw us build our position when that deal took place. And I, I still think it was a fantastic deal. So interestingly, you know, Bright Star has traded fairly

flat since that deal took place. And I think when you buy something and you issue a lot of shares, there's indigestion. So a lot of those get turned over style, shareholders, whatever. Consolidation of shares too, so. I think so too, yeah. Yeah. But but you know, they've, they've done that. I think they've got a lot of that hard work in the market behind them. They're now concentrating as far as I can see on develop on delivering that, that first part

of the story. And you know, for them to be able to work aggressively on a project like that sandstone project, which Alto had that needed that was living on 2 to $3,000,000 a year of exploration and spend, which is not enough to be doing it justice. I think the market won't sit there and be patient and say we'll reward you for that.

If you're spending between 5:00 and 10:00, that's where you can start to meaningfully grow resources and do it in a period of time where the market can see that and go this is getting a lot bigger. And I mean, that's, you know, there's, I think there's been about 5-4 to 5 million oz produced over that sandstone greenstone belt, which Bright Star don't own the whole lot of, but between them and the neighbor, they have most of it. That's a hell of a lot of gold

for one greenstone belt. And I mean, the average depth of drilling is like 70 or 80 meters. So, you know, you extrapolate that to 200 and what's the inventory going to look like? You know, you're still well within open pitable depth and there's some pretty big footprints in there. So that that is an exploration and growth story is amazing. So I mean, if you're asking me and this is not informed by what they've told me, I'd cast my eye over the maps and, you know, use my own imagination.

They bought something at Sandstone between that and the Gateway Gold tenure which was dealt in, which is about one, one and a half million oz. So for that to turn into a two and a three, I think can happen reasonably rapidly and in the sense of, you know, 1-2 or three years. And by the time you've got 3,000,000 oz sitting in that part of the world, which is ringed by Mills, but no one in the middle, it's like, well, it's a 3,000,000 oz asset, which would be very attractive. It's in.

The middle. But it's not very, very good news. It's pretty much dead, yeah. Yeah, by by process facility, I mean something that you can put ore into and then gold comes out the other end. Well, do you think they're probably and do you think they're probably getting penalised because they essentially have to build a mill there? Like what The the only two options I can think of that have enough potential scale close enough by will be Kirka Locker and Walluna. And they're both pretty

trackable. It's trackable, but it's still a good chunk. So there. Do you think they know that there's a big, it is a growth story, yes, but they're going to have to build it. Well, I think that they're in business elsewhere and their intention is to apply the cash flow.

They're getting to reestablishing cash flow out of their own process facility at Laverton, which would mean they're an owner operator and you know, they they would have a lot more control over their own destiny than from the Labourton perspective. Might they just keep giving it to RAL? Well, they.

Couldn't wouldn't be a lot of because that's a until Genesis get their, you know, get their own operations up and go under the to feed, you know, potentially 4 million tonne through that Mount Morgan's mill. Like they'll be crime for dirt. Well, I would have thought so too, but I don't know how rallied feel about me saying that He's desperate for that dirt.

I don't know if it's quite so simple, but you know, there's bound to be a playoff between how much it costs to, you know, have the dirt process there anywhere else or to bring your own facility along. Now, if there wasn't a an existing facility at Laverton, the bright star could rejuvenate. Different decision, you know. So clearly it gives them that optionality which can be very,

very helpful in discussions. But I suppose if in, I don't know, let's say it's three years from now, they start saying what should we do at Sandstone? If you've been operating for that long, you've built your market capitalization to a certain level. Yeah, you'll, you'll have to build a new milling facility, but how will you do that? Well, I would expect you'd have a much bigger market cap to be able to raise money off. So it might not be as

dilutionary. You may have the cash flow to, to fund your equity and your ability to raise debt is going to be, you'll have far more flexibility. So I, I don't know if that penalisation would be occurring now. If I had to say what's what's holding Bright Star back, it would be there's been selling of former Alto shareholders and there's probably been a perception that there's been a couple of deals to pull things together. Is there any more of that?

And they just need to settle into a rhythm of delivery. And it looks to me like that's what they're doing. What about the Menzies stuff like do you think they need to probably simplify the business a bit and divest because it's, it's, there's a lot going on and it's probably, it's a bit hard to actually wrap your head around of, you know, what's, where's all this shit coming from?

I've introduced Alex at a couple of situations recently where I think he had 15 minutes and in both situations I was standing next to him at about the 17 minute mark. Go mate, are you finished? So he has a big story to tell. So I mean your point around simplification, you know, if someone offered to take it off your hands, would you do it?

I, I don't know. I as a shareholder, I'd say, well, if there was value coming in, you'd, you'd be foolish not to think about it. But they, they had produced from Menzies in the last 12 months, which I, I think that probably shows you that. But for getting the resources set up in a milling arrangement, they could do that again. In which case, if you think you can make money from it, then the impetus to be trying to do something with it might diminish

pretty quickly. So I, I guess, you know, if people are talking about it, then they'd be weighing up 1 alternative against the other. But I think I mean from from chatting to those guys and keeping in touch with them, they seem pretty focused on delivering gold and there's

probably far more kudos in doing that than there would be on executing more deals unless they were ridiculously priced. So and. You've got another gold junior which has probably, yeah, not had a real run like some of the other portfolio ones. Saturn who yeah to that to announced today raised 23 million bucks. You guys tipped in another 4 and you you kind of maintain that 17 1/2 percentage shareholding of the company.

You speak to people and historically there's there's been a, you know a knock on Saturn that it's 10 million ton per annum heap leach. So everyone's scared of it because it's massive size and also like how many 10 million ton per annum heap bleach is going around that's a lot of dirt to move yadda yadda, but at these gold prices probably makes a fair bit of money. Are you not worried about any of the, the, the, the logistical kind of nerves that, that a lot

of the market has here? No, not so much. I mean, I think, I think the Western Australian mining industry is very familiar with bulk operations. What they're not familiar with is bulk operations in a gold mine. And that's because in most gold mines, you need to be extremely selective because your gold, your gold zone, you know, could be somewhere between half a meter wide and 10 meters wide, you know, 10 meters in a great

case. And if you leave half a metre of that behind or put it in with a waste or take too much waste, it can be a real problem for you in the Saturn case. I mean, one of the reasons which we really like Saturn and this is our biggest investment by funds deployed. So it's something that we've demonstrated a fair bit of commitment to. And I think by the time you've invested that much money in it, your futures are somewhat

intertwined. I mean, if we decided tomorrow that we're sick of Saturn, the ability to sell that for us is it's a moot point. So you know, we are, we think very highly of those guys. The reason to be there, the feeling of longevity is all is all present. But looking at the project, take your point about heat bleaching, if that project was in North America, we wouldn't be having this discussion. We'd be talking about how they started producing 6 months ago and the resource is still

growing. I think it's a, it's a market that that isn't as familiar with heat bleaching. And I get that, you know, that's just a, that's a bridge that needs to be crossed. But the important thing about that deposit is inside of a pit design, the strip ratio is about 1 1/2 to 1. So you look at any other gold mine in WA and how much waste do you have to move to get a tonne of ore to the wrong? And it's probably the average is going to be between 5:00 and 10:00.

In this case it's 1 1/2. So you're moving a lot less waste. So the tonne, dollar per tonne cost of moving ore of generating ore is just like a fraction. Plus, you know any other open, most other gold open pits, you might blast 10 metres of of of material then to mine it, whether it's oral waste, you take it in 2 1/2 meter flitches, maybe 5 if you're really being aggressive in order to be

selective. In this case, you know you blast 10 and you'll mine it with a face shovel rather than needing you use a digger. So the, the efficiency of moving that material and, and the need to be selective, just being so much less. I think he's a big protection because you don't, you just don't face that risk of accidentally throwing the ore away because you're going to be in awe for three days, not for half an hour as you are in most open pits. And then heap leach processing.

I mean, the, the risk you have on heap leach processing is will the recovery work and will the heaps stand up in a geotech sense to the height that you need them to in order to efficiently irrigate them? I think it's 44 odd percent of gold is produced in the world comes out of heap leachers. This is this is a technology which is not new.

It's very, very well understood. So I think, you know, we feel like we've been buying something which is poorly understood in a, in a market which really gets gold. So, you know, I'm a bit puzzled as to exactly how that'll come about. But I know that there are there are foreign companies that drop in and say hello and they're like, jeez, mate, you've got something special there. So if there's that kind of eyes on it, these companies, you know, aren't operating in the Australian market.

But if they needed an excuse to having the right size asset, you know this is 120,000 oz per annum for 10 years or more. Speaking like a 7 1/2% shareholder. There. What do you say? Ding, Ding, Ding. Yeah, yeah, Must disclose it, but. We're gonna have to say a few of them when we talk about ally stocks, which, yeah, Shorty chop. Can't believe you haven't mentioned 1 yet. Yeah, we'll get there. We'll get there. She did give us her To Do List, didn't she? So yeah, could you put a good

word in for? Yeah, exactly.

And I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm looking at your portfolio and, and we're kind of there's, you know, there's a couple of names I'm not very familiar with, to be honest as well, like Coon, Coonberry Gold and you know, in addition to them Sunshine Metals. Run me through what you what you see there with those names. Well, Cunenbury first we invested in Cunenbury when it had one project, it's namesake, which is in northwestern NSW, Cunenbury project.

It's a, it's an area where there's been a very substantial amount of alluvial gold mining. So there's been shedding of Nuggets which don't look like they've travelled very far for a long period of time. It's sort of had a gold rush in the era of gold rushes, but very remote, very dry, very difficult to get to, and close enough to Broken Hill that when people started finding gold, there was also a big silver rush to the Broken Hill area. So it kind of was found and then

forgotten. I think there's been a lot of modern prospecting success and there's been a few Hard Rock intersections and, you know, golden quartz samples picked up. So there's all this smoke. We invested in that at a valuation which was incredibly low. I think it was like an EV of about 1.2 million bucks that the day we first invested. So we put money in effectively buying into a shell which had a project in it. It had a chance. It had fantastic management.

I think very highly of the, of the MD there and also the board and off they went to explore. That wasn't to be they, they just didn't get the instant success. And you know, exploration, sometimes it can cost you 1,000,000 bucks to find something. It's just you don't know if it's going to be your first million bucks or yeah, 100th, 1,000,000 bucks.

So in their case, they wisely said, you know, rather than keeping being aggressive with this, they came across a deal to deal into some effectively a back door listing of selection of NSW exploration portfolio. And there were some real crackers in this. I mean, this was some ex Newmont guys. They put together some big targets. They had some JVS with Newmont. They had a high grade gold situation up close to Armadale that got vended in and and from there I think I think that

stocks up about 4 1/2 times. So it's been a fantastic performance off the back of that deal in and the new slow which can come from that and you know fantastic valuation that had occurred at as well. So it was not one of those silly deals where it it happens in an enormous number and then it trades backwards because everybody realises how greedy it was. It was exactly the other way around to that. So Coonabri to us when we invest in early stage exploration, you can't value it.

You're you're trading on speculation. You don't know what's going to happen. You can have all the hopes in the world. You can have magnificent science. It can happen on a really nice weather day. You can be as lucky as you want. But you know, in the end, if it doesn't produce a discovery that really gets the market going, then you don't get your price return.

So to do it, you have to feel like you're doing it at a absolute rock bottom value and you have to be able to see a transformational outcome to it. So in Canonbury's case, we reasoned that it, it wouldn't take as much to produce a 10 or 20 times return from, I think we're about $600,000 in there from that level of investment. And, and so it was something where we could feel, well, there's, there's a really good possible return. We can see many, many, many

opportunities for that to occur. And we're doing it at a cheap level. So there's, there's not a lot holding back that return if, if they get lucky with the result. And Sunshine, Sunshine is probably the opposite of that. Damian Keyes, the managing director, is a guy I've known since uni. He was a year above me at uni. Casey wouldn't thank me for saying he started a couple of years ahead of me and I, I didn't catch up. It's, you know, he took his time.

So Casey's going on to, I mean, he has been behind some fabulous project pull togethers. So probably the best one is Penny W, which was a chemical spectrum got taken over by Remilius for about 300 million bucks. And Casey had been involved in the pull apart of the geology and then putting it back together. And that's what Casey does. Fantastic with data sets, fantastic with working with people in that environment. And he was exploring in North QLD Red River had gone into

administration and there. We just spoke about them that I on the back of Hillgrove, OH. I haven't, I haven't listened to that one that yeah, just. Just got up. Poor, old, poor old River went out of business at just the wrong moment there. They had a, they had a troubled operation at Falanga. And by troubled, I mean they'd run into all kinds of financial problems and, and Falanga had brought that operating entity to its knees.

So it was put into administration shortly before the whole of Red River went to the administrators. So Casey and Sunshine dealt with the administrators of Red River to purchase this. And what was attractive was the Thalanga project gets pulled out, you get everything else. So you take no liabilities, you're not operating. But there is a hell of a lot of money had been spent in the data

set. And I think, you know, the replacement value of the data which they acquired in that move would have been probably 40 or $50 million worth of years and years and years of soil work, geophysics, drilling. There was an existing resource at a project called Lyontam. They've grown that by about 50%. I think it started at about 4 million tonnes. It's now 6,000,000 tonnes. And it was a mixed metal. So it's AVMS, it's got zinc, copper, gold. They drilled a few holes.

But the, the, the wonderful thing which Casey did yet again was pulled the geology of pieces and said where are the high grade shoots? You know, first we invested in this as a base metals investment wanting to diversify our commodity sort of exposure. And I think the second or third result that he had was about 20 odd metres at 19 grams gold. And it was like this is supposed to be our base metals exposure. So they performed strongly off of that.

They repeated it with another hit and this was drilling into high grade shoot in the deposit. So it didn't, you know, it didn't reflect what the rest of the deposit look like. But they've done a wonderful job of fleshing out exactly what loads of which and, and I don't think that have been particularly well done. So they now have a resource which I think has been upgraded in terms of quality.

It's been expanded. But in that same period of time they've also brought many, many targets forward. So we bought into that for circa a $10 million EV. It's more or less been the same each time we've invested and we put a bit of money in another half $1,000,000 in recently. And and the thesis was Lion Town is not far from being the scale that it probably could be thought about to be developed.

No one is thinking outside of probably the heartland of WA about how you can put your roar into someone else's mill. And that's a very well developed area, the Charters Towers area. So there's you know, four or five plants or former plant sites. There are, there are some tailings opportunities which would be quite valuable that I think probably feed into the critical minerals piece in Queensland. So that doesn't exist in WA, It does in North Queensland and there's a clean up that goes

along with that. So sunshine has a very dynamic outlook there. But they they have something which is very valuable in the ground. I think it is developable. They're going to add to that in the next couple of years and you know if you're going to back anyone to look in the right place, easy to be one of the very few people that I'd choose to do that. And he's operating in a data rich environment. So that one continues to go under the radar of the market.

But everybody has their moment and I think that one, that one will probably set up really reasonably soon. Like it? It's our sunshine soon. Yeah, yeah, it'll have its day in the sun. We should we should pick your brain Headley about, you know, a

lot of the the gold projects that aren't even in your in your portfolio, but I'm sure you've you've run your eyes over them and and have a view. And there's there's no shortage of, of companies that have a fair endowment that yeah, like maybe go under the radar or, or or or or maybe you're going to have their moment or have had their moment in the past. But Ozgold's Katanning really comes to mind. Been around a long time. You know, there's, there's

3,000,000 oz resource there. Will it, will it be a, you know, will it get developed in the midst of this gold cycle? Do you think? Are you, are you kind of on the on the sidelines watching? Well, everything that has an established inventory now has the best chance that it's going to have, right? Because when the gold market comes, your ability to raise money comes with it.

I think one of the things, and particularly in WA is there are a lot of people who look at a project and then go, what's it near? Who could take it over? Where's the tension? Is there another mill? You know that and that in this current market that's a big feature. Osgold sits out there on its own. That project was originally called Boddington South by some of the original management, which you know, it is South of Boddington, but bloody long way.

So, you know, it's not like you can consider it a, an extension or even analogous. It's just in the vague region. You might as well call it fucking Perth South or something. But you know the originally as well. I can remember some of the intersections that came from the first management team after that company listed and it went from about a $8 million IPO to being 160 mill market cap company. I remember writing due diligence on it and scratching my head just going, they've got an

incredibly small deposit. Why is this going to such a value? A lot of border under the bridge since then, but things that sort of get a run on and then fall flat on their face, which is what happened many, many years ago. That rejuvenation is always challenged because anytime you get a run of luck, there's always someone style that just goes, oh, I don't trust you anymore. And you know, your price goes up, comes straight back down as they sell.

So I don't know if that's still a factor, but it, you know, it is distal. So it needs to develop itself all on its own. It needs to find that scale. And I think that's probably one of the things, which is what the market would be thinking, do I fund them or do I fund something where there is that bit of tension? Now, having said that, they have a register, which is pretty impressive. You know, Dundee's a big shareholder there. They're a global gold investor.

They know what they're doing. They've put representatives on the board. And John Dalwood's been around. He, he's operated in some very tough parts of the world as well. So, you know, if you want to give something a good chance, give it a gold, a good gold market and give it the people who know what they're doing. So, you know, if you could pick that up, which I know you can't, and put it right next to Kalgoorlie, it wouldn't be in

the ground anymore. So I'd say the fact the reason why it's undeveloped is, is because of where it is, and that's one of the things that I'll need to overcome it. Was it was a historic mine, right Like there is there is like, you know, historic open pits there. So at some point it was mine, but. It's Peter Alexander who was Dominion at the time.

I remember bumping into him. It would have been 10 or 12 years ago and I, I happened to mention to him that I've been looking at and he goes, I remember mining that and it was probably 30 years ago at that point. So Dominion Once Upon a time. Is he not the follower that made the pyjamas different? Peter Alexander. I asked him that. I asked him that myself once, and he he was suitably ambiguous. But no, I don't think the two are connected.

You're right. Or if you're a bloody speaking because back to Medallion though, you know, pushing the story around the exact same time. Do you think Alkane are going to act on them? They wouldn't have went in there for no reason. Well, Alkane's invested in a number of companies in an equity sense. I've been involved in companies where the name's been mentioned. So you wouldn't be the first time they bought equity in a company and they haven't taken

one over yet. Callitus, Genesis, historically. Yeah, Yeah, yeah. Now that doesn't, I mean that all that is, is a pattern, right? And patterns can evolve in interesting ways because sometimes you try something and try something and try something and then you do it and you succeed at what you were going out there to do. And I don't know what they're

trying to achieve. I, I would say they're not an investment company because they are a gold mining company and a, and a mining company, in which case you can see some of the reasoning. Now I look at the pattern of the things which they had done. And Genesis was before RAL, they were backing something where I think they probably felt they could import some mining expertise.

Then the deal came together, which created the modern Genesis and Rally came in with it and what Caddell came at then if they were value oriented, they probably said, well, you know, the equation has changed Caledus long way from the heartland of gold. So I think they'll probably around the edges going where is the something where we can see value. We might be able to aid with our

balance sheet. So, you know, maybe if you and then in Caledus's case, it, it probably tipped the other way and he knows maybe they looked at it after it after it fell over. But so medallion, you know, fits that that that pattern of it's on the edge. It's something where all came probably felt that they could add value. And I'm guessing at that. I don't know those guys, but yeah, probably felt they could add value. So does the equation evolve from

here? The fact that it looks to have a milling solution which reduces CapEx of developing it has

changed the share price. But does that change the way that you look at it as a potential acquirer? I don't know. It probably makes a few things easier. So I, I think it's probably too early to, to conclude which way they might go. And I don't think there's any evidence to say whether they're

coming or going at the moment. So, you know, we can only speculate and I love it when people speculate because Ted's people pay a lot more for something that they don't understand than what they do. So long may that go on. Rocks you and me yeah had a pretty pretty hefty raise recently and Hawks points been really patient and and and continue to to put capital into it sort of you know their patients certainly paid off with or abandoned recent history. Will it? Will it repeat with rocks?

And Capricorn, they, yeah, from, from sitting and sitting and sitting. They, they've done well with some projects which have, which have flourished. Look, I, I don't know. You've got to be careful. Any investor looking into something, whether it's genius or luck, it wears off sooner or later. So you got to be careful following people into situations. And I think in the the case of rocks, they do have an established resource base.

There's a hell of a lot of money been put into drilling there. It is high grade, you know, just compared to anything, it's highest grade. You guys did a fantastic session with Rob. I think you called him Refractory Rob at the time. It's extractory, Rob. Extractory, Rob. In addition to that, we did a met episode with Nathan Stewart. He's now joined the board too. Yeah. Well, I mean, rocks has kind of changed its tempo recently had it, hasn't it?

And I think sometimes it might not be that a management team is doing the wrong thing. It's just that they do they March along the strategy pathway that they've agreed and sometimes that just doesn't float the boat of the market. And you know, so I think it's possible to say that with Rocks, the market was just not in the groove of that.

And by changing the management and in doing so changing the pathway and they've more or less said, right, let's raise money, let's start dewatering this thing and we'll go for it. I think that probably portrays a sense of confidence to say we think this is going to work. Follow us, you know, and and you'll you'll find out one way or the other right now. Gold price obviously turned it it was. I think that's a lot of. Coincided with the time as well

where all juniors started going. Well, it hasn't been all, but I think the point is that if you are putting yourself in a position to show, you know, we've got this, the shape works for us, we think we're going to make it work, then it yet the market is more likely to follow. So I think that's how they've hitched themselves. Yeah, and the incentive package that just got announced for the MD is heavily focused around pouring concrete and building something Yep as well.

Hopefully they pour gold as well. Yeah, magnetic. So lady, lady Julie, they've had AI think it's lane four or something like that. Is a is, you know, a new discovery. Yeah, interesting, interesting lack of of reserve to to date, but you know, not, no, no lack of kind of revelations of we've got a data room open. Yeah. What do you make of the deposit? Well, aggregate numbers all

appear quite interesting. You know, every so often a project comes along and you sort of think, wow, tons of great grades, great. Those numbers on costs look like they're a bit lower than I would have thought. You know, I haven't gone through their estimate in a great deal of detail. Whenever, you know, sometimes you look at a project at a point and Northern Star was a great example of this going back many years now.

You look at it at any point in time, particularly when they're raising money and you think, shit, you've really got to perform to to match this price. If I just go by my estimates, and it's not that you demand perfection, but you've you've got to perform quite well. And Northern Star did so, you know, over the raisins that they did in the way they executed.

And I think probably magnetic is one of the ones that every time I've looked at it, when there's been an opportunity come along, I've thought there's other opportunities which which I can probably find a larger position for the same money. And for that reason, I see value elsewhere. Now having said that, what I'm missing clearly is that at a larger market cap, you can raise more money, which means that you can progress faster. So, you know, that's where

they've been successful. So my lens doesn't quite work on that one. I'm looking for the deeper value and, and the deeper value takes delivery risk out of it to some extent. But to, to, to adequately remove delivery risk, you also need to remove funding risk. And they've removed funding risk better than many of the ones that I've looked at. So I suppose, you know, there's a collection of comments there. But one thing that I've sort of lacked is just an understanding of the detail.

I mean, if I take a Saturn presentation for example, you, you look at that and any gold E, any gold BD team of a major in the world is going to go, OK, we understand this one quite thoroughly. We know where to stop next time we're in Perth. Other companies, prezzo's, you look at them and you just think, still don't know what it means. And some of them have big numbers, but which appeal probably more to a retail audience.

So Magnetic's one of those ones that I'd probably need to go and sit with them and go through the sections to feel like I understand it myself. And when business has been quite busy, I just haven't had the opportunity to do that. So I'm afraid I can't really offer the sophisticated view on that one. What about assets that have been purchased off the mid caps that have come to the end of their mid cap life and that are sort of getting rejuvenated?

Well, God, obviously Gorilla Gold's like a self fulfilling prophecy at the moment that just keeps going up for after they got Vivian. But Lewin Metals purchasing the martyr assets from Remelia so that they're being a bit quieter. It looked like there wasn't much happening until the deal actually went through.

It's gone through these projects that are on, you know, on mining leases, permitted mining leases that have a bit of exploration potential to find some extensions or take some take some crumbs where which might not have been at the, you know, appetite of the Remelius. That's what do you think of that

one? Well, I mean those things they're always interesting because you know, any midcap which is working a set of assets, if it starts to slip in terms of scale and what's, what's the sensible scale to operate those, I don't know. It's probably smaller than the Remelius threshold. So at that point there's probably an effort where they go, well, we either drill and find enough to go on or we go, well, we'll leave a little but a little bit of meat on the bone for somebody else.

So I think you could probably you know, you can look at those assets and say, is there a way to make a success of those? And just because they've been sold by a Remelius, I think can can often provide a an overview which isn't quite correct really they. Sold some valuable assets in the past. No, they they sold Kathleen Valley, the lion town for 400K or whatever. Yeah. Is that right? Yeah. There you go. I I had AI had a long discussion.

Well, I, my first job as a geologist was a proper geologist was working at Mount Keith, which is a nickel mine, which is developed by Western Mining. And every so often on weekends, you know, we'd grab a couple of four wheel drives and find a picnic spot in the Bush or something like that. Kathleen Valley was one of the places. There's an old shearer's Hut near there, which was a not a bad place. There was a nice stone fireplace

in there. So in any way that you could go in and have a fire and have a couple of beers and you just get your crib out of the out of the mess. So we would have driven over that Pigma type. This is cars full of geologists, you know, and there's quite a few people I think have kicked themselves for that opportunity. You know, buying it at that point gave you the opportunity to run with it. That's been an interesting operation, hasn't it? I mean, you guys have done a lot

of diagnosis of that. I got a mate who is a fantastic project guy. Like he, he, he, he devours everything that companies put out. And we talked about, I reckon we talked about that asset over dinner once and we were, you know, we were getting quite feisty about it. And he was like, I can't believe that they sold it for that. I should have bought it.

And I said to him, well hang on mate, after the conversation we've just had, would we, if you and I had bought it, we've just disagreed on, you know, orientations and how easy it's going to be and how many jumbos you're going to need and how you process it and all the oil qualities. And this is always some stuff we know now we would have fallen over at the first hurdle. We probably would have sold it to someone else after we'd bought it.

So, you know, you you need to buy it with the vision. And Remilius is a gold company. They're not a, they're not a lithium company and. It was, there weren't even drill holes into that Pegmerton at that point. It was just Rockship samples. And yeah, so I mean, it was like. Lithium wasn't really a thing. Yeah, yeah, it didn't. It didn't hurdle out of the blocks either. So yeah, yeah. So no, I mean things like things like Marta, I haven't looked at.

I think the, the, the exploration prospectivity of those things is interesting. A look at a lot of them which are here's an asset which comes out of a a largish company plus or minus a mil. That's often problematic because you got, you got to pay for the value of the processing facility which might come with it. Don't think it did in that case, but there's another one I looked at recently which did. So you're paying, I don't know, AV of 20 ish to have some sort

of process capacity there. But if it comes with no or where you got to go and explore, it's worthless. You know, you have the mill, but you got to keep it in good working order. So you know, this complexity that comes with it, this huge option value, anything you find you might be able to act on, but there's also a threshold consideration. So just because it's been done by someone bigger doesn't sterilize it.

But at the same time, that option of being on a mining lease and everything else can sometimes be a poison chalice in that, you know, you, you might have higher expenditures. So the exploration picture needs to hurry and hurried exploration is always the hardest. It's you need time to sit back and think about it and consider what you're doing so that you don't you don't drill in the wrong place just because you're

hurrying. What a bit juniors that are on their way to production there or pre development at the moment there's a few of them. Is there any that stand out that your flag is a bit of a risk of not executing? Well. Only given you the heebie jeebies. There's. Obviously ones you don't I'll. Because I yeah, yeah. Because that's why we don't hold them.

No, there's, there's plenty that we haven't invested in that I wouldn't, I wouldn't say we've kind of come up with a negative value on it, a negative impression. It might be that we've, we've had our hands full with something else. So something came in last week and I was thinking, geez, I'd love to have a better look at that. But I'm just finishing my paper

on Saturn for the board. And you know, I know that if I put two things in front of my board, they're just going to say, mate, one at a time now we'll do none. So we've got to manage that carefully. And that's often the reason why we might look something over is

just to remain focused. But I'd say one of the biggest factors, and this is a roundabout way of answering your question, one of the biggest risks that many investors who are peripheral to the gold space would perceive in gold at the moment is that there's been a long history of, of failed projects. And it's not that they developed something which was absolutely shit and wouldn't work.

It's that the financing decisions that they made, the hedging decisions that they made, the, the production forecast decisions that they made have it some of it, the mining of it at some stage have brought them unstuck. So, you know, was was Caledus a story which should never have been mine? Well, I understand that that's producing quite a lot of money now that the balance sheet issues have been extinguished via an administration process.

Bellevue has been a very successful story in the market from whatever it was when it bought that asset to its peak price. Is it going to be a success from its peak price to wherever it is now and whatever happens next? Well, the problem is that's another part of the promise making to the market which has been broken and I think indelibly marks the sector Western Australian gold project developments, you know, is there a tainted promise that that

comes with all of them? So I think the more you squeeze your economics, there's a lot of projects that I look at where they're trying to be 80 to 100,000 oz per annum and really what they need to be is 50 to 60. But there's this feeling that if you're not producing at a certain rate that institutions won't look at you. I think that's, I think that's flawed. You look at what happened with, I mean the history of Vault,

right? Vault was essentially brought about by bringing two companies together, Doray and Silver Lake. They were both small asset companies. As soon as they did, they found themselves above the threshold of being able to be bought by institutions because they're in an index game that beautifully doubled their price and they've dealt through M&A from there as well. So I think small assets can work. It's more about the commercialization process and

how you then go on from there. So it's. One of those things, Maddie's, you know, a reflection I have is like, you know, nobody has a natural rate it should be mined at. Yeah. Yeah. Well, as your guiding post, rather than the broker telling you you need a, you need 100,000 oz scenario for me to go and raise the money for you. Yeah. And you can't easily just get 20% above it, but you can very easily get 20 plus percent below it by not doing it right. Yeah.

And the problem is that so many people in the market who might be tempted to buy the shares are wowed by the output that you think you can generate from it and the numbers that you can put on a piece of paper and don't understand the difference between that and what is probably a more natural right. So look, I can't think of any which are howlers and there might be a bit of personal danger in it for me if even if I

could think of a great example. But maybe maybe I should say the most attractive things that I see in pre development gold juniors at the moment are you've got a reasonable size inventory to sponsor growth. So you know, there's a, there's a prize, which if you make those answers more valuable, if there's a lot of them, then you've got a great leverage

effect. You've got a way into production, which might not be the huge CapEx route as well as you know, if you if you grow your market value that that big CapEx route is available to you as well. So it being in a situation where permit pathways and stuff aren't a blockage. So if you're on some sort of a mining lease, great start. And if you can, if you can come to the market and say we've found a way to be in business without having to raise that full amount, that's a great

surprise for the market. But being in a part of the world where some sort of MNA speculation can be helpful. I'm not saying want to buy in things that have that speculation. It's just that if there is another mill that needs that ore, then there's that tension which exists and no one can deny it might not come true, but it helps a lot more people look at it. And the more people look at it, probably more people are going to convert into buyers. So it's good for the price.

I've got a few more companies that maybe tick at least a couple of those boxes. Vault Allejo say Ding Ding Ding. Yeah. And Remelius for her. And Remelius. So Bart and Gold they're they put in a study last year and it was like 1 to one kind of MPV to CapEx ratio of a gold sword since then. So there's, you know, real kind of talk, talk in the, in, in the we. Haven't had a talk for a while, have we? No, bring it back, but I don't think might talk great again. Exactly.

I don't think the equities kind of really propelled yet, but there is a big endowment there SA, what do you think? Well, they have 2 interesting deposits. One's not so big, but it's reasonably close to their process facility. So if and I always get them mixed up because they are so close in namesake. And Takula. Takula is within tracking distance of the old Challenger plant which Dominion built.

So, you know, if you find any answers there, which are, which are economic, then you've got a way to commercialize them. So they might be off to be able to generate cash flow. That I've always found interesting about Barton is that that's a part of their story which you know, could come to fruition very quickly. There's not a hell of a lot of permitting etcetera required. And then Tan Killia, which is

the big one. In fact, I, I did work experience, I think as a year 11 student in 1995 in the offices of JB Weir, which was when my father was working at the time. And the week I was only there for a week, but the week I was there, a company called Helix its first hole into Tonkilla and discovered it. So I've always, I've always felt like I had a personal connection to that deposit just because I remember the day it was discovered.

And when I'm talking about it, my girlfriend thought I was a Dick head because no one talked about that at our school anyway. So I mean, big amount of answers. It's sat in the ground for a long time. And you know, it's one of those assets which will really benefit from a gold price running because all of a sudden the CapEx that you need to to pre strip is more available.

But I, I think, you know, combining those gold assets in the same company has been very wise because one could very well lead to the other, maybe not in terms of a process solution, but in terms of being able to stay around long enough, generate some cash flow that might help, but it also builds a bigger rump of market cap in order to fund yourself. So I think, you know, if that was my strategy for them and I, I don't think they're too far off that.

Although, you know, Alex is a clever guy who thinks about economics in a different way than most other people that I know than the gold market. So he seems to have avenues to connections which might be useful for financing, which might might be different as well. Yeah. Golden Horse Minerals recent, recent IPO, but they're, they were like a ATSX company, but they're in the, we're talking about the Southern Cross kind of gold field. Now there is a mill nearby.

Do you think they've got a an endowment that warrants interest? Well, the thing I found interesting about that is Nick Anderson used to be the CFO of an unlisted company which had been involved in processing ore at that mill. So struck me, yeah, struck me that he and there was a collection of other companies sort of around that. So you know, the that consortium wasn't particularly successful in executing on its business plans, but Nick knew the area quite well.

So that struck me as interesting that he was agglomerating these assets. They look as if they haven't been particularly deeply drilled. And you know, when you list a company you want your first few holes to be a success. So I'd say they've had a good think about where's the best place to put them.

But I think. I think they've pulled out some pretty reasonable thicknesses and grades, so it's on my list of things to keep an eye on. But at the moment, you know, you're speculating on Oz inventory accumulation. If if I'm going to buy 10 things across the market, the speculative ones where I don't know what they're going to find, I need to see real cheap. And the ones which I want to get into, which have answers, I want to be buying those answers cheap

as well. And then he sort of sits in an unusual place in between because he's not dead cheap, he's just listed. But at the end of the day, he needs to find them. So I'm, I'm sort of watching that for, for how that evolves. If the situation overtakes the value, then it might it might slip on the list. I think of a company where the the answers are certainly cheap because the company trades with a negative AV after you factor

in the cash, but the liquidity is completely absent. 10 of my gold Oh. It's been so long since I've looked at that one. Yeah, It seems to have been a part of the world where it's just been exceptionally difficult for anyone to commercialize anything that's, you know, of an ordinary scale you need. I mean, Newmont has some excellent assets in that part of the world so that it's a remote place. I think that adds a lot of expense and difficulty.

Northern Star bought 10% more of that JVI think last year for like 15,000,000 bucks and yet you know, so 10 of my gold, I still have 50% of it, $30 million market cap and 30 odd million cash, yeah. Is Metals X still on the

register for? Them oh they own a little bit, but most of it's with AIPAC who own I think it's over half I. Can remember there there was a year when metals X and Northern Star were maybe it wasn't an all out bidding war, but you know, one of them had made a proposal and then metals X had made a proposal and northern star came over the top and seemed to win

out. And I think Peter Cook got asked about it, the diggers and dealers and I was sitting in the audience and he said something like we'll just like sunshine be the disinfectant on that one. So I don't know what he meant because you know, it's sort of all gone quiet. But I mean the thing I've always found interesting about it was you've got two big companies at that time and Peter Cook and and Bill Beaman at the time. You know, they they understand gold projects. No mugs.

Northern Star has done so many things in that time other than making Tanamar success. I can't help thinking that something has held that back. And I mean, Northern Star bought bought into Platonic. They subsequently off sold that and it's, it's taking consolidation of that field for that to be a success. Under Catalyst, you know, Northern Star grew from Paulsen's, which no longer fit

their, their portfolio profile. So, you know, Tantami might not necessarily get the the capital allocation that it needs perhaps, but I can't help thinking that there's been another reason. I don't know what it is, but I think it sounds difficult just on that basis, and that's me.

There's a huge tendency in financial services and brokers are the worst at this, that if you ask them a question and they don't know the answer, the answer will be no or the answer will be it's shit, or it'll be I haven't heard of it. I'm not bothered. So I could be falling into that bias tendency of saying, look, I don't know enough about it so I'm not going to, I'm not going to go out and be too optimistic. So I could be being quite unfair there. Word I. Word I I I did say I wouldn't

kiss and tell, didn't I? So one thing I think that's interesting about Warridar is they've drilled out a reasonable gold inventory now and they're still going. It's a very long structure. I mean, they've got about, I think it's about 2526 kilometres of one structure. There's a couple of places there where that structure doesn't look particularly well understood and it's undercover. They've got a couple of shallow holes that say, hey, you know, you, you change your interpretation.

You might have missed the mother load. I don't know. One day we'll know. But there's there's gold dotted all up and down that. So it hasn't been closed off. The previous owners of it were fascinated with oxide ore. So there's been a lot of unfinished geological business. That's what attracts me is that it's wide open. Now. What is also interesting is that they've they've found significant antimony, which is semi associated with the gold in

the fresh rock position. And at the moment antimony is a bit of a buzzword. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing or just a mutual factor for the asset, but I suppose I look at Waradar as being something that has a very reasonable. It's probably got the scale, it's definitely got starter scale gold asset. And then you've got this optionality from from the antimony that could give in a moment and you just I don't think anyone really understands how well that could work.

It might not work at all. But you know, getting an option for nothing is always interesting. But of those answers, they've shown that some of the fresh rock answers are going to need flotation. So they're to some extent refractory. Now, if there was no rocks developing, you and me, you'd say, or that might be a bit tough if you float some answers into a concentrate there, it sounds like there could be a process pathway which exists in WA where you could take those

the extra step. This golden Grove, which is just up the road as well, which you know the base metals mining there won't last forever, so that there may be a flotation plant. There are some free milling answers there as well, and they will I think probably grow a free milling inventory so. Deflector as well. That's Yep, that's closer to Geraldton. There's been times when that was pronounced deceptor, but yeah, it's got a, it's got a flotation NCIL process facility there.

And I mean you've got a question that could come a time where that is subscale for Volt. So, you know, perhaps there's a consolidation in the area that makes sense. But waving my arms around there, all I'm saying is that on that one I can see one or two different pathways where in many companies you only have one and they have 1-2, maybe 3. So I think it's interesting, I think very highly of Amanda.

She's a colleague of mine on another board in an unlisted company, which we didn't do any Ding dinging on. They don't have an inventory at all. That's just completely speculative exploration. But Amanda is a a deep thinker, a very hard worker. So I was excited to go for a look when the opportunity came up. And Kairos. In the Pilbara, yes, yes, well, they're an interesting 1.

So I look at them the other day they did the rounds of Melbourne and I kind of had them in my head as being something which was kind of in the slightly, it's a difficult basket. What I realized is that they have gold which is associated with arsenopyrite and sulfides. And when someone says that to a geologist, you think or refractory and that, I mean, you're going to be careful with the R word because it can stretch from refractory means that the gold is just, you know,

encapsulated in something. And you can break that very simply just by cracking it. You can break it by oxidizing it in various ways. You can do that in this case, the test work that that's been done in previous years, if they grind it and it's not even super fine, I mean, it's a fineish grind, but it's not ends of the earth and you're grinding, you're fine grinding sulfides rather than the whole rock. So that that that shows a very reasonable pure cyanide recovery

off the back of that. So it made me think this is worth looking at. The other thing which was interesting about them is that they sold some tenure to Pilbara for 20 million bucks. I think 10 of that has been paid. So they're well funded for now. They've got about 22,000,000 bucks of liquidity, 10 still to be delivered, but there's no reason to think it won't. So you know, if you if you have a reasonable size gold inventory

and they swap some tenements. So it looks like they can follow their trend onto pilgrade ground and who knows, that might grow to scale and they look like they're funded to do it. So it's an interesting one. It's on my list to look at, but I haven't come to a landing on it yet. And I don't customarily sort of say, hey, I'm looking at this one. I'm really excited. But I look at a lot of things and you know, the excitement can wear off pretty quickly on a few.

But those were the points which really grabbed my attention with them and I thought it was well worth spending a bit more time and. How are you? What's going to be your best performance stock this year, Hadley? And we're going to hold it against you at the end of the year. Well, last year it was Saturn and there's a there's a fund manager in Melbourne who he's a journalist.

I don't know if he doesn't sound like the kind of person I'd go to Christmas parties with, but they have a famous Christmas party and they have it after Christmas so that they make sure that everybody goes. Maybe that's just his character. He's famous, he's giving people cars and all this stuff, like for someone gives him a tip and if it goes really well for him, that's how he rewards them at his Christmas party.

So I thought, well, when we have our AGM, we invited Saturn Bright Star and Platonic, which is an unlisted company, to present at our AGM just to talk to our shareholders and say what they're all about. And then we had a dinner afterwards for the those speakers and the board and a few of the largest shareholders. So I was thinking I just need some sort of silly shit to talk about over dinner.

And we had these these medals which were cast many years ago from some silver which we'd come across. And they've got a, they've got a lion image on it. So I was giving them each one as a token to say thank you. But I wanted to stir one of the MD's up. So I am Ian Bambra from Saturn. Actually he and I have quite an interesting personal story that has crisscrossed.

Ian and I were born in the same hospital in the north of England. I don't, I think there's only three geologists have ever come out of that. That's my dad, me and him. And he also likes Land Rovers. I like Land Rovers. So I made-up this crap and I, I don't know, I probably went on for about 5 minutes and I said all this other fund manager who buys people cars. So for the best return in our portfolio this year, I've bought them a car and, and it's his favorite sort of car.

And I had this little Hot Wheels Matchbox Land Rover which I gave him. And we we, Ian and I swaps swap photos where I put one of my toy Matchbox Land Rovers on a rock and take a picture to show him where I've been. So, so Ian won a Land Rover that was that was our best performing stock last year. I hope that it's sat in this year. And I couldn't tell you what it's performance has been since that point. I think it's done quite well in this gold market.

But satin I think has an awfully long way to run on its value. But it's going to struggle to compete against Antipa and Medallion in terms of return to date in a very short period of time. And I mean, short returns can, you know, you can't extrapolate that trend too far, but both of those look like they could have stuck. So who knows, maybe Antipa won't exist by the time we have our AGM in 2025 and Medallion, who knows. I mean, we were speculating about M&A for both of those.

So I'd love to give them a Hot Wheels of their choice. And yeah, we'll be definitely be inviting a few stories to come and talk at our AGM as well, just to spice it up and provide a different event for our shareholders. I mean, congratulations on, you know, really timing the the thematic really well. I shouldn't be surprised you did invent the mining clock. So I can't let you go without asking you where we are on the the clock, right?

Now I would I have to give full kudos for the creative concept of the line clock to my father Robin, who used it as an an analogy when he was working at JB Weir. So it probably dates back to pre 9. Let's say pre 97, it'd be maybe mid 90s. And I think he had observed that in the period of time there, they'd done, you know, they'd all got involved at, at a part time in the market without doing small raisings that are hard

work. And then all of a sudden the metals prices came along and they're doing big raisings. And then they formed line many of that management team so that that concept is carried. And from that time, I would say that was probably fairly subjectively set at that point. Now we monitor it and and the underlying theory is that liquidity which is money coming into the market or going away is what sets the time. The last time we published it, it was 4:00. Now the boom starts at six.

And I think that we might look back at now and say we were at six. What we're going to do in our next quarterly, which will be published in May will be to set the clock at 5:00. And I think the reasoning around that is liquidity has definitely increased. But the signal which we're getting to 6 or going through 6 is that we're starting to see things like IPOs starting to

happen. And as much as things like greatly and gold are coming to Australia, shit big IPO, but that you know, that's a one off very unusual story. And the reason they want to come here is to migrate their listing. So I think we need to see exploration IP OS coming to the market and I can see them developing. I want to see that stick. So I think, you know, we might look back at now and say boom's

on good chance of that. And if we don't look back at now, then it could be some other time in 2025. But I think that's where we are, which is a great time to be investing. If you invest in pre development things, you need to be able to follow your money. So if you miss those opportunities when they have a distressed raising, it affects your investing experience

incredibly. So you know back to me not being fully invested that's we will be investing right through to 9 until we start trying to harvest. Two, it's probably dependent on lithium because there's too many lithium shells from the 2021 IPOs that are getting used for gold. So unless lithium comes back, there's too many shells for IPOs to happen. Actor ammo, Yeah. I noticed that Core came out with some announcements recently of a massive gold trend in the

NT site. You don't say you had a big lithium project and now on the exact same ground you got a big gold project you said nothing about before. Oh. They got both. Bloody great, they. Bought the crusher from Minrez. 90 million bucks. Yeah, pretty interesting Got. To be careful what you pay sometimes, don't you? So that's. Not a bad break for you, it's all. Right, very good headers. Thanks very much mate. Thank you very much for having me. Thank you for the.

For you, because if you're going up, I'm going up. We'll kick up this. Crap my stocks. They're way too specular. Is that why you never Ding, Ding, Ding, Yeah. You'll be like oh you're a Dick head. Jeez, brother. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me, guys. It's been fantastic. Right. Oh, there you go Jay. So you missed that bloody episode. That was right up your. Alley, Oh I. Know I now it's I'm sort of doing a bit of a you I haven't quite I haven't watched it yet but I. Can't.

Wait to it was I'm sure it was amazing. So they're probably a bit small cappy for you. Actually small. Cappy, I love it. Right, let's RIP through bloody everything on offer at the moment. We're JRX Conference Brisbane May 2020 Second, get your bloody tickets exclusive discount by us and I'm going now. I'm going, I'm going, I'm going full conference mode this year and that's after Oz IMEM

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Money. Information contained in this episode of Money of Mine is of general nature only and does not take into account the objectives, financial situation or needs of any particular person. Before making any investment decision, you should consult with your financial advisor and consider how appropriate the advice is to your objectives, financial situation and needs.