Live blogging from VRIC Day Two: Turning rocks into money and fun uranium facts

The three presentations I attended provided some good advice for investors looking to invest in gold and uranium companies. I also caught the end of a presentation by Marin Katusa from Casey Research where he tried to correct some of the misconceptions about shale gas/ fracking and recommended four shale gas plays. His recent article “Don’t Frack Me Up” is a useful link.

You can also follow us on Twitter @mining.

You can find a full agenda at the Cambridge House website.

Eye Opener Panel: Roger Wiegland, Ron Hera, Greg McCoach, Sean Broderick

What do you look for in an exploration company?

• Ron Hera: I have a no longshots rule.
• Greg McCoach: I look at 30-40 companies and most of the time I say no.
• Roger Wiegland: So many areas of the world we reject out of hand right now. We have nothing in Africa. We like Alaska, CAnada, northeast Nevada and northern Mexico for about 95% of what we do. South America in many places is getting pretty scary. You’ve got to watch the political problems.
• Sean Broderick: Find a company that has succeeded before, whatever his business plan was, and is doing it again. Also, they have to be cashed up because the financial markets could be bumpy towards the end of the year.

Should an investor look for highly speculative early stage stories that are cheap, or buy the stars when they go on sale?

• Ron Hera: You should avoid the speculative exploration stocks like the plague because 98% of them aren’t going to be worth anything. We’re looking for companies where they definitely have a resource and there’s resource expansion potential, or companies that are actually going to go into production.
• Greg McCoach: How much risk are you willing to take? The exploration companies can be the biggest winners but be aware of the lifecycle of a mining company.
• Roger Wiegland: You can’t call tops and bottoms. Nobody is that brilliant. The stuff in the middle is where you want to be.
• Sean Broderick: I think gold mining stocks are so cheap, you should be looking at the ones that are going to be snapped up by the big fish.

Brent Cook: Turning Rocks into Money, Why is It So Hard?

•  The gap between discoveries and production is where we stand to make a lot of money.
• We are mining so much metal that we cannot find, develop and put into production enough new deposits to keep up with the current production. Of 430 projects in the prefeasibility stage, we can maybe put 20-30/yr into production.
• now about 10,000 prospects being explored. There is a one in 1,000 probability that one of those could have an economic discovery; one in 10,000 probability that the deposit will be greater than 4 million ounces, which is what the majors are after. 70% of deposits are less than 1 million ounces, 10% are greater than 4 million oz.
• whenever I go into the field to look at a rock, it’s not about what is this rock, it’s about what is it going to take to get the metal out of this rock?
• what is your exit strategy? Who are you going to sell the stock  to and why? I’d rather sell to someone smarter than me, but I’ll always take dumber. In my view, I don’t want to get into any project that doesn’t stand a shot at finding something significant to be bought by a major.
• Brent Cook picks: Almaden Resources (NYSEAMEX:AAU), Canaco Resources (CVE:CAN), Espereanza Resources (CVE:EPZ).