Mate I said I'm going to de-risk by selling half my holding if it hits 38cents and see the rest of my holding through to production. I have lost faith in the whole industry, it's all over the place, valuations make little sense to me anymore, banksters crawling all over these stocks, basically I've had a gut full of the circus so am selling out except for TBR which I will hold and hope more juicy dividends come my way before the EKJV mines are depleted. I don't need more than that. Started looking at collectable cars, far more fun and when the tenants move out of my family's commercial property in Jolimont in a few years I can store as many cars as I like there. Hopefully the market crashes in this time and I can pick up some nice ones for a song as people start bleeding cash
I started in the industry in the early 1990s when just out of Uni (couldn't get a job with my maths and physics qualification) and got involved with Kevin Parry (one of the WA Inc era entrepreneurs who defended the Americas cup in Fremantle and gave that word a bad name) after his sprawling listed conglomerate went down the gurgler after the stock market crashed in 1987. He was trying to make a come back by listing a company here but he had burnt most of his bridges in Perth so it all end up out of NY where an even bigger pair of Canadian "entrepreneurs"/shonks (brothers) out manoeuvred him to the assets the company had optioned (the Zod gold mine in Armenia and Copper mines in Georgia). Kevin was a tenacious but questionable entrepreneur who didn't give up even after his fall from grace in Perth. He saw the opportunities from the break up of the old Soviet Union and jumped on a plane to go pick over the spoils. Pity it didn't work for him, running into even bigger crooks than even the WA Inc era had bred up in Perth. I met Anton TBR's MD in 1991 at the Golden Eagle pub in Boulder at the beginning of the 1990s when I was sent to start working up some ground at Kundana that had fallen out of the then Tern/Tribune ground. Rand was called Tern in those days. I could never figure out what the consideration for the land was as when I looked at the founding shareholder register of the new company, the only person that seemed to remain to ascribe the transaction to was a mysterious German back backer. I spent many years working out of the house at Boulder in the early days when the companies were auger drilling up and down the Zulika shear from Binduli to way north past of the Kundana mine. Anton had pegged the hell out of the whole corridor in the mid- 1980s and floated the companies when the Kundana mine was first owned by Pancontinental Mining. There was a young geologist in those days that used to live out of his Suzuki 4wd (I won't mention his name) who along with many of us bought shares in Tribune. I remember he had 300,000 shares that he bought at about 10 cents (I thought he was nuts considering he was living in his car and 30k was a lot of money in those days). Those shares are worth about $3 million today (including the dividends paid) and last time I looked he is still on the register holding strong. I have a theory he crashed his Suzuki in the bush and died and those shares have been sitting unclaimed for 30 years as nobody knew he had them. It makes sense because any normal person would have been tempted to sell them (or at least a few). In any case those where the days when Ron Manners had Croesus and the Lalor brothers had Gwalia. Come to think of it both these iconic 1990s gold companies end up in voluntary administration, things never change, the industry has always been a basket case. Well if you got in during the 1980s and stood firm on a good deposit like Anton did then you could get very rich. He must be the longest running managing director of an Australian gold company in history, except for the few years he was barred as acting as a director and the year he spent in jail to save the companies. One of Kevin Parry's other disgraced WA inc compatriots, Alan Bond (who won the Americas cup) was responsible for putting the Golden Mile together in the late 1980s (you can read a brief history in the link below) . For all their faults and shonkiness I'll take these old school entrepreneurs over the crooked banksters we have running the shows now.
I have been trading shares all my adult life. I remember my mates, that came around to the shared rental house we had on Shenton Rd in Claremont, would always have a chuckle because while they were all heading off to their jobs I'd be sitting on the veranda in my dressing gown, taking in the sun, cup of tea in one hand, newspaper in the other (open to the business section of course). Even to this day when they see me they ask if I ever got a real job. Well it's time for me to pull out of these crazy markets that have thrown up things like bit coin. The Yanks think that they can kick the can so far down the road that they'll never catch up to it. I can tell you they will and its going to be very ugly when they do. Call me a loser. Water off a ducks back I'm afraid. Esh
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