Issue link: http://resourceworld.uberflip.com/i/1239546
18 www.resourceworld.com A P R I L / M A Y 2 0 2 0 At the Market by John Newell THE FUTURE IS NOW S toicism tends to get more popular in time of stress and uncertainty. I don't want to be overly philosophical; however, the quote below is worth considering in this time of health and economic issues that have hit hard. It was written by the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who was born a slave and was well versed in adversity. He said: "Every difficulty in life presents us with an opportunity to turn inward and to invoke our own inner resources. The trails we endure can and should introduce us to our strengths. Prudent people look beyond the incident itself and seek to form the habit of putting it to good use. On the occasion of an accidental event, don't just react in a haphazard fashion: remember to turn inward and ask what resources you have for dealing with it. Dig deeply. You possess strengths you might not realize you have. Find the right one. Use it." I bring this up because the world has been struggling with adversity since the beginning of time and now it is facing unpriced problems dealing with the COVID-19 pan - demic. For resource stock investors, there are lessons to be learned from earlier Canadian explorers and how they turned adversity into positive events. This takes me back to the early 1970s when a little known group of Arab countries calling themselves OPEC, raised the price of oil from $3 to $10 in the span of six months, send- ing the world into a financial shock that sent the markets sharply lower; a deep recession followed and persisted for some time. Collectively, Albertans in stoic fashion may have asked themselves back then what resources do we have for deal - ings with this crisis. The workers, investors, petroleum geologists, and just-graduated petroleum geologists with new science and techniques went back into the old oil and gas fields of the thirties, forties, and fifties and brought new life into them. They then discovered new ones and built a new and better industry that helped restore other parts of Canada, during a bleak period when eastern Canadian industry faced an uncertain future. They built pipelines under the leadership of Robert Blair, gambled in the Beaufort Sea with companies like Jack Gallagher's Dome Petroleum. New upstarts started like Numac Oil and Gas, Siemans and juniors like Canadian Natural Resources, a penny stock at the time, took risk capital and deployed it with a much bigger vision in mind and they DOES OUR CURRENT CRISIS CREATE OPPORTUNITY IN CANADIAN PRECIOUS METAL EXPLORERS? succeeded. True, they did not have to fight the disappearance of the up-tick rule, or deal with the algorithmic traders, but they too had their crosses to bear with the burdensome National Energy Policy. Despite