Ron Netolitzky, Bob Quartermain, Duane Poliquin, Ron Parratt, Ross Beaty, Jim O’Rourke
Moderated by Louis James, Casey Research
The following is a video recording of the Casey Research Explorers’ League panel – moderated by Louis James – at the Cambridge House Investment Conference in Vancouver, January 2012.
Listen to the valuable information and guidance passed along by some of the most successful mineral explorers in the world… or read the transcript below.
To see the video…[Ron Netolitzky, Bob Quartermain, Duane Poliquin, Ron Parratt, Ross Beaty, and Jim O’Rourke are some of the “serially successful mine finders” that over the years have literally made fortunes for Casey Research subscribers. And now there’s a new generation of emerging natural resource giants that we are watching closely: The Casey NexTen – young professionals who already have remarkable successes under their belt… and a great future ahead of them. Learn who the NexTen are and why it could pay off big to start following them today. ]
TRANSCRIPT
Hosted by Louis James, Chief Metals and Mining Investment Strategist, Cambridge House Vancouver Investment Conference
L: Thank you very much again for coming down. Welcome. Explorers’ League panel. As you may or may not know… how many people are subscribers? So mostly subscribers…. So, for those few of you who don’t know, the Explorers’ League is Casey Research’s way of honoring what we call the serially successful explorers in our business: the people who have found not just one economic mine but several, multiple times and mines on a scale that really matter, a million ounces plus of gold equivalent or better. So these guys are mine finders – a company by that name just got bought, but these are the guys that actually do it or have done it several times over. We’ve got Ron Netolitzky, we’ve got Bob Quartermain, we’ve got Duane Poliquin, and if I’ve got my heads right here, we’ve got Ron Parratt, Ross Beaty, and Jim O’Rourke, who just built the Copper Mountain Mine. That’s your fifth mine, Jim?
Jim O’Rourke: Pardon?
L: Copper Mountain is your fifth mine? You’ve lost track, you’ve built so many… fifth or sixth. Is it sixth? All right, onto the seventh in Gold Mountain. So anyway, these are the guys who have done it. These guys are, in our view, the best in the business. We are always having our doors open when they have a story to tell us, when they have a new project coming, we’re all ears, because these are the guys who know how to get it done and have done so repeatedly. So, I guess, we’ll just go down the row a little bit and take it one tranche at a time. Ron, if you can tell us what are you working on now, what’s happening now that you’re most keen to discuss and bring to people’s attention, and we’ll go back the other direction and talk about what’s coming next.
Ron Netolitzky: My main work has been an “instant success” called Golden Band where we finally started pouring some gold; and now I’m hoping I can get away from operations and engineering and do what I really want to do in the belt, which is explore it for the deposits I haven’t found or our guys haven’t found. So that’s the main thing. I’m watching northwest BC; I think it’s exciting. We worked a bit in the Yukon through a company called Aben last year, and we were one of the few guys who at least had a drill success, but the market never appreciates it. I don’t think anybody made any money on Yukon stocks last year unless you sold early.
L: Wait: before you give up the mic, tell us a little bit more about Golden Band – the symbol’s GBN. It was an agglomeration story. You had all these satellite deposits. You’ve got an old mill for a dollar or something like that, and you put it all together.
Ron: Yes, it was a story that basically I got involved in the La Ronge Gold Belt in the early ’60s for an oil company, so I kind of knew it was there. And then I got into the uranium business, and then 1977 came along, Three Mile Island came along, and the next week, my consulting business wasn’t looking so hot anymore, so I started staking claims in the La Ronge Gold Belt. They ended up in a lot of joint ventures, a lot of other companies, one that disappeared off the board called Golden Rule. It got salted in Ghana – well after I left. And we got back into the La Ronge Gold Belt about 1994 with an associated mine called Komis. Klaus Lehnert-Thiel is VP of exploration, and it’s his till techniques that allowed us to find a whole bunch of new deposits and new discoveries. And we’re continuing with that game, and right now we’re mining one that’s unusual, and there are some samples at my booth called the EP Zone and we’ve got about 7,000 ounces in the glacial till running around 12 grams, so we’re now just mining into the source of that, and it’s definitely supergene enriched with chalcocite and native copper, which you aren’t supposed to get in the Shield, and the grade of that is getting – probably going to approach an ounce, and then we’ll get into some primary ore, but that whole thing was supposed to be 9,000 ounces, and I think at the start of the pit we’ve already probably got 9,000 ounces on the stockpile, so it’s been a lot of fun.
L: Very good. So if you’re moving on from the engineering, then I guess… you’ll let us know when is the next Ron Netolitzky play for us to get involved in?
Ron: Well, I think the next play is the same company. I think I got some excellent expiration targets to maybe find the deposits that are going to give the belt some respect. I think there’s natural evidence of a lot of bulk mineable targets there that people haven’t worried about and definitely we have proven that – and history has proven there are lots of small, high-grade narrow-vein systems there. But I think there’s opportunity for bigger deposits – low grade – that could be exciting. I am playing in northern BC, but frankly, I’m after a property. Until I get it, I wouldn’t bring anybody else in because it’s somebody I consider a little haywire that controls it.
L: All right. Bob, everybody here probably knows or has heard about the Pretium story. We gave you an award – a Best of Show award – so I don’t want to repeat ourselves too much, but we got a question this morning maybe you can take on. The stock is trading at its all-time high. I mean it’s a new stock, but still it’s trading at its 52-week high, all-time high, whatever you want to call it. Can you persuade us that this is a good time to buy, or should we wait for a correction or what happens next with Pretium? Is there enough value added in the very-near term that it makes sense to buy Pretium at $16 right now?
