Ann: Sarama Outlines Extensive Gold Trends at Cosmo Gold Project, page-2

Buddhist reincarnation or re-birthing is called "samsara". As it happens Sarama is currently undergoing its own samsara, from a highly prospective early stage developer in Burkina Faso to a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey early stage explorer in eastern WA, just to the west of Gold Field's Gruyere mine.

The Gruyere deposit was only discovered by Gold Road in 2013, at a time Gold Road had a market cap of $40m. That company, whose primary asset is 50% of the Gruyere operation, is in the process of being bought out by Gold Fields for $3.7b. From little things big things grow...

Sarama has two 80% holdings in greenstone tenements to the west of Gruyere, Cosmo and Venn. This announcement is about Cosmo. I'm clueless technically but I see nothing in the announcement to suggest a repetition of Gruyere has been discovered. So I'm not seeing much value in Cosmo or Venn up till now.

Some may give value to Sarama for a possible monster payout from the Burkina Faso shenanigans. To me, there is a difference between risk and uncertainty and buying SRR shares on the hope of a litigation win is as good as buying a bunch of lottery tickets, so that is a no from me.

So what has Samsara Sarama got that is of any value? For one, I'd say for a micro cap speculator the directors are unusually competent, all high achievers and all with money at risk. As an aside, I'm not sure if Michael Bohm joined the board as a consequence of the acquisition by the company of the interest in Venn or the Venn acquisition is a consequence of Michael Bohm coming on board. Sarama bought the Venn interest from an outfit run by Ian Gordon and Ian Gordon was a long term MD at Ramelius while Michael Bohm was a non-executive director at Ramelius (and late the chair on the passing of Bob Kennedy). IG's company did a lot of explorative work at Venn three or four years back as it happens under the leadership of the ex-chief geo at Ramelius and did not come up with anything amazing. I have little doubt that if Michael Bohm was involved in the due diligence process on Venn it would have been a thorough debrief from IG.

Secondly, a huge advantage Sarama has is that as a hangover from the Burkina Faso glory days the SRR registry is particularly mature, with only 31% of shares held by retail but 26% for high net worth and 18% for institutional. Sarama will need to raise some capital if it wants to go drilling and I suspect it will find it easier to raise a few million from high net worth players who are backing the directors than from retail many of whom are just here for a lottery win. Noticeable that for a Canadian domiciled company, its share registry is mostly in Australia, with 272m of the 361m shares on issue being CDIs (chess depository interests) that are traded on the ASX.

So, dunno. This goes against my current setting of looking for gold outfits that can quickly monetise what gold they have. But with a market cap of less than $9m I'm tempted to back the leadership team. Maybe I will, maybe I wont...