My purpose in writing these commentaries arises from frustration. For years, low gold prices and market scandal, especially that created by Canadian company Bre-X, virtually eliminated small gold exploration company activity. Brokerage firms eliminated their investment analysis of such companies, concentrating on the major producing miners. The combination of art and science needed to find companies with extremely undervalued potential, the ones providing such high reward that the high risk of financing exploration is warranted, was largely lost. "Analytic" reports written were too often in support only of underwritings done by the firm when gold prices drove new interest in exploration. As is to be expected in gold exploration, most new exploration efforts did not succeed. Companies that did achieve success are making their news known, but there do not seem to be any competent interpreters of that news. The strictures created by regulators prevent the companies themselves from communicating their hopes and raisons d'etre. My specific frustration stems from the fact that as far as I know, no analyst consistently follows and comments on the junior mining companies. Based on what I can see, prices go up and down on the say-so of often anonymous know-nothings. The small companies have traditionally been the discoverers of the reserves that the majors are depleting. Without the analysts following them, they don't do as well as (or as badly) as they should.

Ed Zederayko