Ann: Alexander River Resource Estimate, page-14

You are mixing different strategies in your question, so perhaps even going to a 'decent' financial adviser might be your best option. You already indicated not particularly competent - so an etf could well be the best option. You are also mixing a gold bull run, which is quite a different issue to buying shares at current gold prices. If you believe gold is going to go up, then gold price options may the best - but I have never been involved in this. One the surface Tiento is fair-valued, the downside is exposure to sovereign risk. The upside is exploration potential. In general one would not recommend a share such as SNG to someone like you, simply because (as you point out) it is a small Company and the time to production could well be many years. So if you read common recommendations on buying shares such as SNG most investors should only invest a small proportion of their portfolio. Hence shares such as SNG are 'fun, learning' shares whereas an etf is more passive. But if you aren't interest in increasing your knowledge about gold company investments I don't really see the point of investing. Ii did my own analysis of SNG and I am more than happy to invest on the high-side as I think its potential return is huge. At the moment it seems 'too good to be true' so the best strategy is 1. do your own research, 2. try and prejudge the resource potential, this is not as hard as it looks, and simple calculations often come in very close to geostatistical estimates. 3. Avoid anything with less than say 30 000 oz of gold as infrastructural costs will be too high. 4. Try and figure out if there are other dominant issues - sovereign risk, remoteness, etc. 4. Use a simple economic cut-off of 1 gm/ton (this is conservative). That is anything above 1 gm/t is profit. But then remember the tax-man.
I would rather you did the calculations yourself - but personally I am looking at a 25 times (and I am more than happy to wait ten years). So I think it is a great investment. But if you are one of the many people who gets angry because the share price might halve in year, forget it.