Resource World Magazine

32 www.resourceworld.com O C T O B E R / N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 7 WELL-RESPECTED mining stock analyst John Kaiser, often a standing room only speaker at resource investment confer- ences, spoke to Resource World regarding his current bullish views on mining explo- ration stocks. RESOURCE WORLD: After the run- up in mining stocks in the first half of last year, things quieted down unless there were fantastic results. Some stocks such as Ivanhoe Mines have seen over 5,000 trades in one morning. This tells me there is a great deal of money waiting in the wings for something attractive. What are mining stock investors waiting for that would cre- ate a general bull market in mining stocks? JOHN KAISER: The two main drivers are upwards-trending metal prices with a rationale behind it as to why it's not going to end next week. The other is a major dis- covery that restores faith that the juniors can make great discoveries which have a scale large enough to pull in enormous capital to replenish what is still a pretty depleted system since the bear market began in 2011. Its brief reversal last year largely tracked the price of gold until it counter-intuitively went down in mid- August last year. Now, gold is trending up again. Base metals across the board are trending up. There seems to be a surprising economic strength driving the higher metal prices and gold, of course, is being driven by geopolitical concerns about the leader- ship role of the United States on the global stage. RW: What do you think of the discov- ery potential of the Golden Triangle region in northwest British Columbia? JK: Northwestern British Columbia has extraordinary metal potential and we're even seeing one place suggesting that maybe there's significant nickel potential up there. One bad thing about the Golden Triangle is that it gets the most snow of anywhere in BC. Exploration pretty much dies down after November. But we are heading into a period where companies got financed and are doing large exploration programs.We have a significant discovery by GT Gold involving the Saddle Project on the Tatogga property. Essentially, this is a result of climate change – a retreat of glaciers exposing areas for sampling and new anomalies. We have a potentially high-stakes exploration program going with Eskay Mining where SSR, the former Silver Standard, is drilling to try and find Eskay Creek No.2. There are other juniors up there that could provide interesting results but the problem is everything stalls once the snow flies. RW: Do higher gold prices have much of an effect on grassroots gold exploration projects? JK: Higher gold prices do not affect and, in fact, are harmful to exploration discovery programs because there are already so many known mineralized sys- tems that were marginal at the prices that prevailed yesterday. You get a higher real price and all of a sudden you get the insti- tutional money coming into the space and saying, "Well, here's the money needed to infill drill and do metallurgical studies, get the prefeasibility done. Get the feasibility study done and then hopefully, one of the mid-tier or even top tier producers will acquire you and you will get cashed out to recycle it elsewhere." Grassroots exploration needs a sym- bolic discovery that captures the public's imagination such as we saw with the dia- mond discoveries of Dia Met in 1992, the Voisey's Bay discovery in Labrador and, while it lasted, the phony Bre-X discovery in Indonesia. These produced multi-billion dollar market valuations that pulled in brand new money and that resulted in the recycling. The investors who sold too soon looked at something else they could John Kaiser stalking metal stocks With rising metal prices, a recovering mining sector and a great deal of exploration activity, now is an ideal time to invest. by Ellsworth Dickson INVESTMENT John Kaiser

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