POWER NICKEL | FIRST MINING | Yukon Landslide

TCRs, a multi-metallic explorer again is snagging stock bids early this week.

The activity comes at the close of a party-pooping June for mining stocks.

Terry Lynch’s Power Nickel PNPN with its multiple-element Nisk deposit in Québec is probably Canada’s most vociferous and creative booster of its own goods.

Latest headline: getting tycoons to back its latest stock offering.

$20 Million Offering Closes With 'All-Stars' Robert Friedland, Rob McEwen, Others.

Terry Lynch, known for a campaign to fight naked short-selling, and his chair, Peter Kent, go back 35 years in Toronto circles. Their networks include brokers, lawyers, tycoons, bankers. Terry has launched Canada companies in mining, oil, gas, media, biomedical.

Power Nickel stock PNPN PNPNF is up 4x this year to $150 million CAD. The company’s releases are among the most forward looking, and boldly declarative, of Canada’s miners. These, for example:

Power Nickel’s Lion Discovery Makes an Enormous Roar

Power Nickel Extends Momentum

Still the nickel, copper, cobalt and platinum group metals of Nisk, such as 15 meters of 9.5% copper equivalent, back up the releases and support a promising 2023 open-pit mineral resource estimate. The Nisk concession appears to have zones with decent gold, silver intercepts as well.

Power Nickel had to backtrack an April release iof “rock values” with a clarification — see release please.

I’ll keep an eye on this. I do not own it but had a chance to buy in near 35 cents CAD; PNPN is at an all-time high of 89 cents CAD right now. The shares started trading in the millions from next to nothing in late March-early April 2024.

Like I said, polymetallic is “in” during this off-again, on-again investment market for small miners.

First Mining Gold

“We’re at unbelievable low levels. The developers (of potential gold projects) are down 50% while the commodity is up 40%.” — Dan Wilton, First Mining Gold

Dan is 52 years old. In 2019, he took over as CEO of First Mining FF FFMGF and its 4.6 million ounce Springpole gold project, which is traveling toward its federal environmental assessment for the Ontario gold and silver deposit — probably in 2025. The gold price then was $1,300 an ounce.

“If you asked me then what our stock price would be when gold hit $2,300, I’d say in the dollars and I might be retired,” he shares. The $110 million CAD FF is 12 cents CAD.

The British Columbia-based exec and I discussed market dilution through equity placements for small mine explorers, a subject that he gets grilled on — what with First Mining’s share count reaching toward 1 billion. The metrics, Dan says, show that FF’s peers are double and triple the 70 percent ‘dilution’ that Dan helmed from 2019 to 2024.

They include, he said, Troilus, Sabina (eventually purchased), Osisko Gold, O3 Mining. “Skeena has increased 270% 2019 to 2024 in share count … Troilus is 448%.”

Dan is convinced Springpole will become a mine. Naturally, that is his prerogative as a CEO. “There are not many projects that will be developed in Canada in the next few years … you have had 7 major gold mines being built already or built in the past 10 years here.”

Dan adds about the years-long push on federal enviro approvals, “You want to have your project ready when the industry is ready to go.”

TCRs, a lot of explorer-hopeful developed are in the same fix as First Mining Gold; at least this one has some market cap (presently, $120 million CAD). I do not own FF shares.

Aztec Minerals: a hopeful sign today for a long-worked gold-silver project in southern Arizona — Tombstone.

Watching Tombstone develop into something that investors can sink their paint brushes into is like watching that paint dry.

I have been there twice, and the historic Tombstone concession is impressive for the variety of possible gold and silver markers.

Today, Aztec Minerals, a tiny-co with another property in Mexico, said rock-chip samples “support” the exploration drilling there for the three years through 2023.

Yes, the lengths and grades of the so-called channel lines look consistent, some with 30 and 50 and 54 meters of interval gold-silver (gold-equivalent) sampling with 0.8 grams a ton, 3.7 grams, 5.8 grams. See exact figures in release please.

The stock, AZZT AZZTF, while depressed, is Monday rising 15% to $19 million CAD — an uncommon rise for rock-chip releases.

Yukon Landslide

Victoria Gold: A report of a landslide at VGCX’s Eagle Gold Mine in Yukon is confirmed. See Victoria Gold’s confirmation of what it calls “a heap leach pad incident.”

Operations at the mine “are temporarily suspended.” No one was injured.

Second-hand observations said crushers and conveyors might have been buried.

Victoria Gold confirmed there was “damage to infrastructure.” See release please.

Yukon News first reported the slide Monday approx. 12 p.m. PT. See: https://www.yukon-news.com/news/breaking-photos-show-landslide-at-victoria-gold-mine-in-the-yukon-7407932

Trading in the shares VITFF VGCX in Toronto and the U.S. is halted.

Yukon company Banyan Gold‘s shares BYN BYAGF fell 15% amid greater than usual trading volumes Monday.

Banyan’s AurMac gold project is some 60 kilometers from the Eagle Gold Mine. Banyan counts Victoria Gold as a major investor.

AurMac is 56 km northeast of the village of Mayo.

— Thom Calandra

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Thom Calandra is a writer and an investor. Research and material are meant as editorial opinion. He is not a professional investment adviser. Please do not consider his reporting as a recommendation to buy or sell securities.

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