FAU v Peers Exploration Costs, Director payments & Admin

Comrades

I'm pleased to share with you some of the fruits of mind numbing 4 hour train trip on the weekend where I decided to spend 30 minutes looking at what a good/bad split of admin + wages & sals verses exploration expenses might look like to help me identify efficient/inefficient use of shareholder funds and which explorers may or may not give me bang for my buck in terms of using funds to drill as many holes in prospective dirt as possible with funds raised from investors.

I aslo included payments to "directors and their interests" to warning signs might look like there. It's only a small sample of 11 explorers taken from the June quarterlies of each company and I have excluded payments on irregular items like share trading, tax, plant equip etc to ensure an apples for apples comparison.

It's not perfect and not meant to be but I can say for example that $9.10 out of 10 dollars spent by YRL(whose assets are in proximity to Gimlet) last quarter went directly to exploration where as only $6.20 out of $10 was spent on exploration by FAU. Also that FAU's spend on Admin, Wages and Salaries was more than double the sample average in %age terms. Or that in %age terms FAU payments to directors and theri interests wer more than 3 times the sample average and almost 15 times more than PDI and AQX.

Hope this helps with your decision making.

*disclosure: I only hold one of the sample companies at present

		Cash Out Admin/Exporation/ Sals & Wages $'000	Exploration & Eval $'000	E&E % of Total	Admin,Corp, Wages, Sals $'000	ACWS % of Total	Payments to Directors and Interests $'000	D&I % of Total
1	FAU	$1,040	$647	62%	$393	38%	$303	29%
2	PDI	$6,605	$5,678	86%	$928	14%	$147	2%
3	AQX	$3,549	$3,093	87%	$456	13%	$66	2%
4	GTE	$1,067	$915	86%	$152	14%	$72	7%
5	MGV	$2,639	$2,315	88%	$324	12%	$133	5%
6	MAG	$652	$468	72%	$184	28%	$138	21%
7	YRL	$2,151	$1,950	91%	$201	9%	$60	3%
8	MEI	$1,618	$1,256	78%	$362	22%	$206	13%
9	KZR	$1,674	$1,493	89%	$181	11%	$90	5%
10	GMD	$3,898	$3,463	89%	$447	11%	$117	3%
11	HRN	$1,368	$1,100	80%	$268	20%	$78	6%
12	AVERAGES	$2,387	$2,034	82%	$354	18%	$128	9%