Category: The Mining Biz

How To Survive A Bad Market

Serious Advice For Resource Investors

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens.

“This is worse than a divorce. I’ve lost half my net worth and I still have a wife.”

Anonymous Stock Trader.

Some things are inevitable. Death. Taxes. Sagging testicles. Gout. And market downturns: 4 of the last 19 years have seen hefty declines on the big boards.

The junior resource markets are mired in the absolute worst of times. It’s hard to remember when raising money was so difficult. First-time resource investors could be forgiven for thinking that losing money is the new normal. Nose pressed to the glass of the fancy restaurant windows, they stare wistfully at the caviar-gobbling wealthy inside who avoided mining stocks and bought cannabis instead.

The promised land of ten-baggers.
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A Guide to Common Ore Minerals

Geology students are trained to identify the commonest rock- and ore-forming minerals. It’s a vital skill for professional geologist. Sulphides, silicates, oxides, phosphates; we slog through dozens of them in our petrology labs, learning to identify the important ones using properties like colour, hardness, lustre (the way it shines or doesn’t), cleavage (how they split), density and such. As a kid, I loved this aspect of geology and by my early teens I could already identify the most common economic minerals such as galena (lead), sphalerite (zinc), chalcopyrite (copper), hematite (iron) and the flashier oxides and carbonates like malachite, rhodocrosite and azurite.

I Was Conned

But lately I’ve had this nagging feeling that I was conned at University in my undergraduate days. I missed out on an entire earth-science discipline, and I’m still stewing over it. I touched on this feeling of disquiet in an earlier post (Crystal Power).

I was conned. Honest guv. Second row up, far right.

In a futile attempt to scratch the itch, I decided to take a deeper look at the mineral properties we should’ve been learning about; the ones that haven’t made the mainstream textbooks yet. More’s the pity because I think these could be far more diagnostic and helpful to field geologists, particularly geologists with inter-dimensional Kundalini issues or Chakratic aura problems.

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Infamy, Infamy

The Northern Miner’s Got It In For me*.

Despite my lonely role as the solitary occupant of the urbancrows e-rookery, from time to time I do get to celebrate a small win; some minor success that I can share with regular readers. And so it is, I’m happy to report that the esteemed mining newspaper, The Northern Miner, recently published 2 of my stories about Pakistan. They appear in the Odds and Sods column and are linked below.

Next stop. The Times.

A shout-out and big thank you to John Cumming, the dashingly handsome and discerning Editor-in Chief of the Northern Miner -a fellow geologist and deep thinker- who spotted my obvious story-telling talents. Or, more likely, he needed a few hundred words to fill up page 4 and was clutching at straws for content when my desperate-for-any-attention e-mails arrived.

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Things Geologists Do. Part 1

Report Writing.

In an earlier blog post, I took an unpleasant but necessary dive into the murky waters of earth science to ask the question “What Is A Geologist?” All very useful if you spot one in the wild, but it left many questions unanswered. At the top of the ask-list is something you’ll hear whispered by the senior management of every major mining company. Skulking in Blenz in Bentall #5, sipping on their triple shot, half-sweet, non-fat, caramel macchiatos with extra soy foam, contemplating the latest quarterly compensation figures, someone finally looks around the group and asks: “What the bloody hell do our geologists do anyway?”

Not to worry. Urbancrows is here to help with Part 1 of an interminably long series of posts “Things Geologists Do.” I promise by the end of the series you’ll have a renewed appreciation for them. You’ll gasp at their daily trials, and you’ll end up pushing HR to big-up their annual salary increment. Really.

Trust me, I’m a geologist. A bit greyer now though.
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Mediocre May

Stock picking club update

What follows is an edited version of my monthly junior mining update to the members of the carnivorous stock picking club informally known (for this month anyway) as the “Lows and Lowers”. The usual disclaimers.. all names of members have been removed and some of my more abusive comments have been diplomatically edited out. The update is firmly tongue in cheek so don’t take it personally if you work for one of the companies I’ve mentioned. Consider it a free daily dose of sarcasm. PS: may involve swearing.

So here we go…

Greetings Stock pickers,

I’ve just about recovered from the trauma of watching Liverpool beat Spurs in the God-awful Champions League final. As one wag on Twitter noted, he chose the wrong game to introduce some American friends to footie. Can you imagine paying good money just to see 2 top-flight teams stand around for 90 minutes, trying desperately not to get a shot on goal? Things were briefly livened-up by the appearance of a Spanish-style streaker. Beats the usual fat, red, drunk bloke from Newcastle that we English always seem to get in EPL games. Doesn’t the security guy look happy?

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How To Promote A Mining Stock

All The Rules You Need To Know.

Over the weekend, I was perusing archived computer files from my days with Anglo American PLC in London, 20 years ago. It was a bit of a lost cause- I was looking for digital photos from a trip I took to western Pakistan (see “My Project Went Boom“) to illustrate an upcoming print article on my misadventures there, but couldn’t find them.

The other AA, not that one.

The files are stored on a collection of dusty CDs, saved in a variety of file formats, some long since extinct. Tucked away in a folder, I spotted a Word file named “How to promote a mining stock”. It turned out to be a series of humorous rules for promoting a mining company, which are spot on even decades later. The piece is at least 20-years old and I’ve no idea who wrote it. It may well have been me but I don’t remember and can’t claim ownership for it, although it is along the same lines as my earlier blog piece “Mining stocks are crap”

To be honest, I suspect it’s not mine; there’s too much junior markets cynicism in the piece. Back then, I was still latched firmly on to the warm bosom of Anglo American, well paid and with little or no exposure to the dark side of the Canadian junior markets. There’s also a reference to a “portly chairman” that suggest to me a UK provenance for the piece. Anyway, I’ve taken the liberty of updating it a bit, adding a couple of rules of my own, and have removed some of the less “PC” bits. If you wrote it, or you know who did, drop me a line through the Comments section.

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The Things Geologists Do.

Last week, a regular Urbancrows reader emailed me to suggest I write about what minerals geologists actually do. Not a bad idea thinks I, from up high on my perch in the Urbancrows e-rookery. So I’ve decided to take him up on the idea with an informal series of blog posts, starting soon, loosely themed “The Things Geologists Do”. It’ll be based largely on my own experiences since I graduated in 1984, but I’d welcome suggestions or questions from non-geologists who might find themselves puzzled by the activities of their rock-hound cousins.

Hi tech geology style. My well-worn Estwing. And a rock.
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Mining Clichés Explained

A Cheese Primer for Investors

There’s nothing like a cheesy marketing cliché in a news release to make you immediately buy a bucket-load of a company’s stock, right? Spend five minutes talking to any IR professional at an investor conference and see how many clichés you can spot. This is the kind of stuff I mean.

“We’re undervalued relative to our peers and poised for success.”

“Our management is best-in-class with a proven track record”

“That’s the steak, now here’s the sizzle.” (wtf?)

I’ll buy 20,000 at 2c above market, because…sssssssssssizzle.

Anyone who follows the junior mining sector will -just maybe- have spotted the odd cliché tucked away in marketing materials, or in one of the many stale corporate PowerPoints that end up unread on a dull home page. The judicious use of meaningless phrases is an art form that our industry has perfected, and sadly we all use them, UrbanCrows included. I admit it -guilty as charged- before you start pointing fingers. It’s hard to come up with marketing copy that sounds fresh without delving into the bloated lexicon of hackneyed phrases at some point. So as a public service to my readers, I’ve polled some mining friends (thanks, you know who you are) to compile a short list of the ones that we see regularly, and that we love to hate.

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Enchanted April.

Stock picking club update.

What follows is an edited version of my monthly junior mining update to the members of the steak-eating-red-wine-drinking stock picking club informally known as the “Get Rich Short Our Picks Club”. All names of members have been removed and some of my more abusive comments have been diplomatically edited out too. Which is a shame really. I’d love to leave them in so you can all see how bad this motley collection of mining experts is at choosing winners. Anyhoo, here’s the table, dateline end of April.

The “Get Rich Short Our Stocks” portfolio in gory smell-o-vision.
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Mining Stocks Are Crap.

Q. How to make a small fortune in mining?

A. Start with a large one.

This is an update to an article I posted a few months ago on urbancrows.

It’s an old cliché but very apropos at the moment. To put it in simple terms, the prevailing climate in the resource world I inhabit is beyond crap and has been for a few years. There’s been a slow, persistent drizzle of shitness scaring speculative money away. Investors have all but abandoned the mining and exploration sector. The TSX Venture Composite Index has drifted up a little recently, but the reality is, it’s simply inching its way slowly up from a 10-year low. The amount of investment capital available to the sector has shrunk, and as a direct result the pace of new mine discoveries has slowed to an historic low.

Mining stocks: flushing your cash down the gurgler.
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