Fully agree Nordesmic. There are some good publicly available...

Fully agree Nordesmic.

There are some good publicly available presentations from Brent and particularly Joe from 'Exploration Insights' that make a lot of sense on this subject.

Also from presentations made by Jake Klein and some personal conversations with an MD I had recently who has a JV with Acacia in BF.

Focus on "quality not leverage" for M&A plays.

Quality means projects that have defined resources already, modeled low AISC, long LOM's and meaningful p.a. production potential. Leverage means lots and lots of oz in the ground that are not quite profitable at current prices.

Majors are looking for projects that will lower their corporate level AISC and deliver meaningful p.a. oz production numbers to their totals, which normally means +200k oz p.a. These require resources of c. 3-5m oz which can convert to reserves of c. +2m oz.

Leveraged projects will not be of interest as the majors still have lots of marginal oz on their books that they can upgrade to reserves with a stroke of the 'assumptions pen' on the price of gold - magically converting resources to reserves if they assume a higher POG.

Nord - I am taking a good sized position in that Ghanaian company you gave me a heads up on a while back. Liquidity on the sell side is looking very thin.

Cheers
John