StockTalk – Bob Moriarty, Founder, 321gold, and Rick Mills, Founder, Ahead of the Herd

2025.04.24

RM: Bob and I are putting all the companies we talk about in our ‘Under the Spotlight’ series of articles in one spot.

Bob what you have for us this morning is so good you can do the whole intro….

BM: I’m going to steal some short ideas that are so appropriate for where we are today. If you want to get rich or even just retire, you can put together a basket of cheap lottery tickets at the bottom of the precious metal resource stocks. We are there.

This came from Rambus Chartology.

“Stock Trades Portfolio currently consists of mostly larger-cap precious metals stocks that trade millions of shares a day. If big institutions want to park some capital in the PM stocks, then they need to have enough volume to get in and out. As the bull market progresses, capital will start finding its way down the food chain into the small and micro-cap PM stocks, as it always does.

Presently, there are just a few microcaps that are starting to show some life, which is fairly normal at the beginning of a bull market. In previous strong bull legs in the PM complex, when the microcaps came to life, there was an expression that went something like this: the microcaps are like listening to popcorn popping, first one kernel popped, and then another, until the popping was finished. Most of the kernels popped, but there are always a few kernels that didn’t, and that will be pretty much how the microcaps will trade when their time comes, which is why you’ll need a basket of them. The ones that pop will more than make up for the ones that don’t, and the microcaps are where you get the 5 and 10 baggers.”

Banyan Gold (TSXV:BYN), 2025.04.08

RM: In 2020 you said Banyan was the most interesting gold company in the world. I know they’re up in the Tombstone Gold Belt, why don’t you tell us about Banyan.

BM: OK well Banyan is actually run by a very close friend of mine named Tara Christie and I just love Tara Christie. I think Tara Christie is wonderful, an absolute leader in the mining industry, she is a tribute to being a woman and to be a miner, unfortunately she was married to the guy that was running Victoria Gold and Victoria Gold had a technical failure, the TSX forced them into bankruptcy even though they’ve got quite a viable project, but you can buy gold from Banyan at 11 bucks an ounce and it will go into production at $3,000 gold, it’s a license to steal. I’ve got so much respect for Tara and literally it was the story of the baby got thrown out with the bathwater, but it creates opportunity and the opportunity is there for anybody who wants to take it.

RM: Yeah it’s trading at $0.20, it has a fully funded 30,000-meter drill program ongoing right now, so I mean that’s a lot of news coming and there’s going to be some hits in there, there’s no doubt about that.

Harvest Gold (TSXV:HVG), 2025.04.08

RM: Quinton Hennigh of Crescat Capital said they were very happy that Harvest had acquired a district-scale land package in the Urban Barry greenstone belt, Quinton called it “an underexplored green belt, with one of the most notable new gold camps in Quebec.” Pretty strong words.

BM: Yeah but Quinton’s got it totally confused.

RM: Do tell.

BM: He was talking about all the tactical aspects of a company having three major projects in the Abitibi gold belt of this totally under-explored area, and what he didn’t say was the most important thing. At three cents a share you can buy the entire company for under $2,000,000, now I’ve written a couple of financial books and I talk about if you want to make money in resources you want to buy when things are cheap and sell when they’re expensive. If you start a company in Vancouver or Toronto and you’ve got a three-line phone and a secretary your company should be worth 3 or $4 million so for Harvest Gold to be selling under $2,000,000 Canadian that’s simply absurd.

RM: It’s not even valued properly as a shell.

BM: Yeah exactly.

Sitka Gold (TSXV:SIG), 2025.04.08

RM: You’ve called Sitka another Snowline Gold.

BM: Nah it’s not.

RM: Pardon me?

BM: It’s not a Snowline. It’s a lot better than Snowline.

RM: Snowline’s pretty good.

BM: I hear what it’s worth is crazy and you know in all good faith Quinton Hennigh happens to be my best friend, okay and he and I talk on a regular basis and I participate in most of the deals that Crescat gets.

Quinton Hennigh was talking to me about Sitka when Sitka was, 7, 8, 9 cents a share. I loaded up with both hands, here’s the good news and it’s my opinion okay that’s not based on any numbers because Snowline has a great resource right now, Sitka is drilling deep, they’re going to be releasing a hole probably in the next two weeks that I think showed 150 examples of VG (visible gold) in the core.

While Sitka has in fact shot up from where I was buying and still got a $180 million market cap and Snowline’s got a $1.1 billion market cap, so Sitka is more accessible, they’re fully funded for a 30,000-meter drill program, they already have one hole that’s going to come out shortly that could double the price of the shares overnight.

RM: Well they’ve got a base, they’ve got 1.3 million oz indicated and 1.5 million oz inferred. Investors, there’s guys on the chat boards said it’s too deep but they obviously don’t know anything about mining, if they did they’d know that block caving is the perfect method to mine that.

Silver47 (TSXV:AGA),2025.04.08

RM: Silver47’s got a 60-kilometer trend of VMS/SEDEX, pretty much got the district all claimed up. The thing that I love about this property is that it has got so much exploration potential I mean I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much VMS indications right on surface and it’s literally everywhere. I love Silver47’s chances to grow their 168,000,000 ounces of silver-equivalent in an inferred underground [resource].

BM: Well you just raised another issue and strangely enough that’s another project that Quinton Hennigh and I were involved in and it was owned by an Australian company, and the guy that was running the company didn’t like to listen to advice.

When covid hit, he didn’t do anything about lining up the drill crew so in 2020 they did nothing in Alaska. I think it’s like 100 kilometers south of Fairbanks I mean it’s certainly accessible.

They spent all their money in Australia and then the Australian government came out and changed the requirements for putting up reclamation deposits on projects. It literally put the Australian company out of business, so Quinton and I went to the current management of Silver47. Silver47 had a big silver project in Canada but the government changed the rules there because evidently the locals wanted to take control of the project so Silver47’s fabulous silver project that the government was sitting on and wouldn’t let them do anything pretty much died.

So Silver47 realized they needed something. Now I was writing about the deposit in Alaska five or six or seven years ago, there is a resource it’s about a $5 billion resource of metal in the ground and Silver47 is cashed up, they just finished a private placement and they’re absurdly cheap. When people realize how good Silver47 is, it’s going to be one of the top silver stocks in the United States.

RM: I agree 100%, I interviewed Gary Thompson the CEO two weeks ago and the interview’s posted on my site. I think it’s one of the nicest silver plays I’ve seen in a very long time.

Trifecta Gold (TSXV:TG),2025.04.08

RM: Now let’s get back to the Tombstone Gold Belt, one of the first up there to make it big was Victoria Gold and then we talked a bit about the next one with Snowline and then Banyan and Sitka, but there’s a new kid on the block. Tell us about that one.

BM: Well interestingly enough here are the biggest of the junior companies up there: it’s Rackla [Metals], it’s Snowline, it’s Sitka, it’s Banyan, it’s Trifecta, it’s the Eagle deposit and again going back to what I recommend to people is you buy stocks when they’re cheap, you sell them when they’re expensive. Rackla with no resource has a $20 million market cap and Trifecta with no resource has a $6.5 million market cap, so I mean if Trifecta didn’t do anything and the price of gold didn’t change and Trump didn’t blow up the world’s economy Trifecta could still triple.

New Found Gold (TSXV:NFG),2025.04.13

RM: You have seen the assay results and there have been hundreds of ultra-high grade intercepts of gold. Now the one mistake that the two young guys made that were running the company is how they come out with the resource, they were using a shotgun approach and they wanted to test the entire project and it’s a very big project, and they came up with extraordinary results, but by trying to test what was a couple of dozen kilometers of strike they made the mistake of the hole spacing was way too far apart.

They had a lot of good gold intercepts, when a QP, Qualified Person does a 43-101 there’s two things he’s got to take into account. He’s got to take in the spacing between holes and basically no matter what the grade is, ok the bigger the space between the holes the lower the amount of gold that you say is there because you don’t know what’s in the area you haven’t drilled.

And another thing that’s very important that virtually nobody knows about is capping ultra-high grade ok? If you’ve got 75 grams intercept of gold you have sliced half of the core. Is the other half of the core gonna have 75 grams? And the answer is not necessarily, it could have 150 grams but it could have 5g so if you’ve got an intercept of say 7 meters of 75g gold you cap it. You say we don’t think it’s 75 grams across the whole thing, we think it’s 10 grams.

RM: What I, and a lot of other people want to know is do you think NFG has more gold than 2 million ounces?

BM: Now I don’t come out and ever use the word guarantee however I will tell you right now the chances of 2,000,000 ounces of gold reflecting an accurate measure of the 43-101, the chance of that being accurate is zero.

It is so absurdly conservative that the next 43-101 is going to have a lot more gold, that is a Fosterville deposit ok? Fosterville took Kirkland Lake from being a $3 billion company to an $18 billion company.

The guys who were buying New Found Gold for the last month are going make out like bandits, it’s an extraordinary project, it’s not a flawed project.

There were some decisions made that in hindsight were wrong but if we’d had a real booming market which we didn’t have, maybe they weren’t wrong at all they were just wrong for now but you’re going see a lot more gold than 2 million ounces.

Two serious geologists, two people I know that I discussed New Found Gold’s 43-101 with have both used the same term, and that is the 43-101 is bullshit.

RM: Well I was I was extremely shocked to see such a low resource.

BM: The gold’s there, Fosterville was deep, New Found Gold is not deep it’s shallow so it’s a lot more gold. I mean the next 43-101 is going be interesting.

And of course the management’s gonna look like absolute heroes but the price of the stock was taken down by Labrador Gold selling their shares and a exceptionally conservative 43-101.

Storm Exploration (TSXV:STRM),2025.04.13

RM: When you’re buying a company with good management, an excellent project with gold already on it, and you’re buying one for pennies a share, Cdn$0.03, sporting a micro market cap of Cdn$2m. When they’re trading below the value of a shell and you’re financing a company that is going to do a drill program in short order meaning this summer. When it has a decent chance of success, they’re not looking at something that’s totally greenfield, there’s been exploration and there’s some decent grade and intercepts. To me, all that describes STRM.

So I’m looking at Storm Exploration, they’ve got gold in a banded iron formation (BIF) in the Miminiska-Fort Hope Greenstone Belt. They’ve got two confirmed high-grade gold zones separated by 14 kilometers. On the east end is Frond, on the west end is Miminiska, in the center there is a gold showing, they’re going in there drilling this summer.

Bruce Counts is the CEO, John Williamson’s on board with it, so between the two of them that’s a quality adviser and management who are both very experienced with gold in BIF’s. I like the project, 14 kilometers long with a potentially mineralized zone gold, good share count, strongly held and again you’re buying it for $0.03 with a $2m MC.

BM: How much lower can it go? It costs you $1,000,000 a year to keep the doors open. We’re going to have a situation, and I follow sentiment, the average investor has no clue as to how much opportunity there is in resource stocks, take gold stocks right now.

When you’ve got almost $3,300 gold dirt pretty much becomes economic, okay? And nobody’s pricing that into the market. The price of gold resource stocks now relative to the price of gold is the lowest it’s been in 45 years and that’s not going last for very long.

RM: No it isn’t, and that’s why I’m getting on this theme about trying to get people to pay attention to what we’re talking about. Where’s the value in junior resource companies?

When I look at a stock like Storm, I look at the market cap, does it have room to grow 3, 4 or 5 times on one successful drill program?

I think the most money in the market to be made today is to be picking up these penny juniors that are financing to do a drill program. To me that’s your value, and it’s where I want to play. One good hit with a tiny, microscopic market cap company, and what’s going to happen?

BM: Okay, well let’s work it out mathematically. If the market cap of Storm is $2,000,000 how low can it go?

RM: I don’t think it will go any lower.

BM: Well in theory it could go to zero. If they have a good hit what could it go up to?

RM: If you’ve got a $2 million market cap and you think the stock should be sporting a $8-10 million market cap after financing a successful drill campaign in the current gold friendly environment, I don’t think that’s unreasonable.

Silver North (TSXV:SNAG), 2025.04.21

RM: Silver North has a property that’s under option to Coeur [Mining] and Coeur’s got a CRD up on the border with the Yukon.

Silver North’s Tim property is optioned to Coeur. Coeur’s been coming over and working on it. The confidence level is extremely high that there’s a carbonate replacement system on the property that is a look-alike to what Coeur’s working on their property. That’s an interesting project but like I said it’s optioned off and Coeur’s doing their earn-in.

The property that I’m going to talk about today is Silver North’s Haldane property and it’s up in the Yukon’s Keno Silver District, which is one of the highest-grade silver districts in the world. There’s been 200 million ounces of silver mined so far out of the district and the mines up there are primary silver mines with by-products zinc and lead.

SNAG’s Haldane project is right beside Hecla [Mining], who started mining in 2023 with proven and probable reserves of close to 50 million ounces @ 700 grams per tonne. And the mineralisation in their project, what they’re mining, is similar to the Haldane project.

The average silver mine in the Keno district is 30 million ounces ok, and historical production grade sits in right around 1,100 grams per tonne silver, and again they are considered primary silver mines so they’re not really going with silver-equivalent this is a primary mine.

Silver North does have a plan, they do have a focus and they’re executing. They just raised $1.35 million and this is the hard dollar precursor to an upcoming charity financing of up to $4 million and when you’re doing these charity finances it’s nice to have a good comfortable runway of hard money first.

They want to see that and they did do a charity financing last year so I expect that it will be a successful raise and they want to raise up to $4 million and as I said the focus is to drill 2,000 to 5,000 meters, depending on the size of the raise, in their most recent discovery the Main Fault.

Now they’ve done three small drill programs and each of the drill programs has made discoveries, but this Main Fault is special, it’s a very large chunk of mineralization and there’s three layers to it which is which is interesting. And they think drilling this year is going to, at the very least, achieve clear visibility towards, if not outright, attaining a 30-million-oz normal Keno deposit.

So with their share price what it is today they could do a 17 and a half-cent financing and by the time you figure it all out and everything with the full warrant they’d have 138 million shares outstanding fully diluted. There’s also $1.5 million in warrants at 15 [cents] that hopefully could get exercised.

Now, I’ll do a little bit of valuation here, there’s 12 kilometers of vein potential on the property; there’s other discoveries already including the high-grade West Fault. And I think that if you’re starting to look at this one with it’s current market cap it’s not unreasonable to think that you could get multiples on that with a successful drill program.

I like this project because it’s got standalone potential, or it could be a plug into Hecla’s existing operation. Remember, they’ve got 49.7 million ounces of proven and probable mining reserves, you’re next door, you’re 2 kilometers away from Hecla’s mill. If you can show that you’ve got 30, 40, 50 million ounces of silver, I’m thinking you’re going be looked at pretty hard by Hecla.

BM: I have not followed this but while you were speaking I did some research and again this is one of those projects that’s so cheap that if you believe in silver. There was a lot of silver that came out of there, so the Yukon is going be very hot this year.

RM: I like their chances of building a Keno primary silver deposit.

BM: Yeah, but if you like silver you’ve got to like the leverage that you get from a good pure silver play. And being right next to Hecla is a big deal.

RM: It is huge, Hecla’s a very friendly company to juniors, they’re very junior-compatible or friendly I’m not sure that’s the right word but they’re not hard to get along with at all.

BM: The timing is near perfect and I congratulate them on raising enough money for a serious drill program.

Richard (Rick) Mills
aheadoftheherd.com

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Richard owns shares of Harvest Gold and Storm Exploration.
Harvest Gold, Storm Exploration, Silver North and Silver47 are paid advertisers on his site aheadoftheherd.com

This article is issued on behalf of HVG, TG, STRM, NFG, SNAG, SIG, BYN & AGA.
Bob Moriarty owns shares of Sitka, Trifecta, Harvest and Silver47.