Hmmm ... BDR was an "interesting" experience. I fully recognize...

Hmmm ... BDR was an "interesting" experience. I fully recognize how lucky we all got with the late 2015 gold rally that lasted for the 1H 2016. The company itself was an operational disaster despite being surrounded by gold !!

I like to think that I learned some lessons there ... along with many other memorable disasters. Luckily there are enough winners to keep my head above water ... like building a position in MLX from 8c

Lots of Cu plays around depending upon jurisdictional risk tolerance and the stage of development one is looking for. These days, I try to focus on the lower risk plays where there is at least a deposit in-situ vs. the elephant hunting days. IMO, and with many expensive lessons learned, I think that spreading the capital around to several players, backing the macro theme is best vs. trying to find the single name that may deliver more alpha but could ultimately become a major headache (so many reasons why that could happen in this sector !!).

For example, within Sn, this is why I have chosen MLX, located in Tasmania with an operating mine vs. AFM in the DRC. AFM will do better than MLX (geology, margins, growth, but is already priced for that) .... until the day it is no longer yours (we've already seen this in Central Africa with 3 x iron ore permits rescinded from Australian mining companies in favour of the Chinese).

As a theme, I quite like the idea of finding former mines where their operations were previously shut down due to economics vs. ore exhaustion. Modern exploration techniques have the potential to add meaningful additional R&R and there has been a lot of "other people's money" previously spent on the development capex with met. derisked and often some nice non JORC drill holes and datasets available along with services (water, electricity) proximate to site and in some cases tailing storage facilities too.

Cheers
John