The KRO 2025 Favorites Index was up 4.4% as of January 10, 2025 which is largely due to PJX Resources Inc bouncing back from the year end round of tax loss and flow-through fund selling which is now no longer a lid on the stock. In today's Part 2 of the KRO 2025 Favorites introduction I explain why PJX is undergoing a January Effect bounce. Apart from the odd resource junior 2025 has had a lame start despite gold trying to claw its way back above $2,700. Gold peaked at $2,742.55 on November 5, 2024 but began a retreat once it became clear that Donald Trump and his entourage of merry pranksters would control all branches of the US government in 2025. Gold bottomed at $2,592.45 on December 19 but developed an uptrend when the new year began. None of this is reflected in the trading activity of TSXV resource listings whose daily traded value remains below the levels of the September-October period when the market was starting to believe the gold uptrend had staying power. There is no sign of new capital flowing into the resource juniors as happens in years when the January Effect manifests itself.

Another sign of the market's unwillingness to embrace the resource sector is that the share of total traded value by TSXV resource listings, which ranged 50%-80% for most of 2024 reversed after the election and since then it has been non-resource TSXV listings which have dominated 50%-70% of traded value. The main driver of this shift has been Bitcoin's ascent through the $100,000 level as investors celebrated Trump's promise to make America the crypto capital of the world. Trump's promise to emasculate the SEC has Wall Street rubbing its hands as it contemplates raiding America's pension plans by loading them up with crypto products and units of its illiquid private equity investments.

There is great uncertainty as to what exactly Trump will do after his inauguration on January 20 which may explain the market's caution toward resource sector equities. A major concern is that his tariff policy will push the global economy into a downturn which will not be helpful for metal prices. China's economy has failed to develop an uptick in domestic consumption to offset the malaise in the real estate sector, leaving China dependent on its export markets. It was troubling to see prices for Australian thermal coal and iron ore dip lower this week, a sign that a further slowdown in the Chinese economy is anticipated. The unintended longer term consequence of a harsh anti-China tariff policy by the United States will be that it will force China to get serious about boosting domestic consumption and make its overall economy less dependent on exports.

Another concern is the growing tension between the ambitions of Emperor Musk and President Trump. Emperor Musk's interference in the politics of Germany and Great Britain comes across like an indirect rebuke of Trump. Who is actually in charge, the self-appointed philosopher-king or the nowhere near as wealthy elected president? The tech sector's hunger for H-1B visas issued mainly to workers from India does not sit well with the MAGA movement whose proud boys have no interest in doing the jobs done by undocumented immigrants but might be interested in the sort of jobs handed to H-1B visa holders. The argument that Americans in general are too stupid to fully feed the tech sector's worker needs is insulting and can be countered by the accusation that the tech sector gets away with paying a lot less to H-1B workers because they lack job mobility thanks to their visa status. The general equity market whose stellar performance during the past two years has been driven mainly by the Magnificent Seven is vulnerable to a rupture between Trump and the tech sector. The push for free speech absolutism so that "Hate Makes Great" based messaging is not censored may backfire because only a minority of the people who voted for Trump need to hate in order to sustain self-esteem; the vast majority are actually decent people.

Although this time around I do not think resource stocks would be roadkill if a major general equity market retreat happens as was the case in 2008, the widespread conviction about the invincibility of America's stock market perversely spawns a contrarian caution with regard to the resource sector. And so far there is no sign that anybody within the incoming Trump administration appreciates how vulnerable the United States, and for that matter the entire Global West, is to a disruption of raw material supply from the Global East. There may be an inkling of this in Trump's bluster about turning Canada into the 51st state which at the moment is just him trolling Canadians as losers. Canadians, however, should take this threat seriously because the real reason the United States might find it necessary to annex Canada is not because it needs more "Lebensraum" as Germany's Hitler claimed, but because it needs a ramped up supply of minerals and minerals from a secure jurisdiction if its conflict with the Global East spins out of control.

The decision by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to make Canada a signatory of UNDRIP and elevate First Nations into a race based aristocracy with a final say on what happens to Canada's natural resource potential has turned Canada into an underachiever in terms of resource exploration and development, which is evident in the sorry state of its junior resource sector that has to deal with misaligned funding, permitting and seasonal cycles exacerbated by the new "consultation" role of First Nations groups. When the raw material supply problem becomes critical for the United States, and it sees that Canada has done nothing to boost mining even as its manufacturing sector is being decimated by Trump's America First tariff policies, annexing Canada and ripping up UNDRIP in the name of national security may be an easy sell for Americans. Trudeau's resignation is an important step, but Canadians need to realize that unless they want to end up a conquered people they need to revive its natural resources economy. And Canada's First Nations need to be careful that they do not forfeit their gains by overplaying their hand. The is room for productive collaboration that preserves Canada's independence and its integrity.

P2 Gold Inc, which was a KRO Favorite in 2021 and 2022, was made a Bottom-Fish Spec Value rated 2025 Favorite because the junior has pretty much eliminated risk that it might default on the Gabbs copper-gold project optioned 100% from Waterton in 2021 and which now serves as the primary focus for Joe Ovsenek and Ken McNaughton. Joe as the financial and Ken as the geological brains were the drivers behind Pretium Resources Inc and its high grade Brucejack gold deposit in the Golden Triangle that was spun out from SSR Mining. When they left Pretium in early 2020 they acquired control of a shell through which they began optioning exploration plays in northern British Columbia. The name "P2" signaled their ambition to turn their new venture into Pretium 2 just as Clive Johnson did with B2 Gold. In early 2021 they optioned the Gabbs project from Waterton on fairly expensive terms. After the endless resource junior bear market began in 2011 Waterton acquired many projects that had been advanced by juniors during the China Super Cycle bull market from 2003-2011. Gabbs is located in Nevada's Walker Lane and hosts four deposits related to a porphyry system. The project was marginal at prevailing copper and gold prices, but Joe and Ken saw potential to develop a better flowsheet and expand the existing resource while counting on stronger gold and copper prices to drag Gabbs well into the money.

The market welcomed them as heroes, which should have been cemented when Newcrest paid $3.6 billion in stock and cash in April 2022 to acquire Pretium and in turn was later acquired by Newmont. But oddly, that was about the time the market went cold on P2 Gold. When the junior went to raise money, the market balked, prompting Joe and Ken to dig into their own pockets to put up over 75% of the financing. The Golden Triangle properties had not delivered major discovery results and expensive option payments were looming. While Gabbs has some deep discovery exploration potential, work had focused on upgrading the resource estimate, sorting out the metallurgy, and delivering PEA level economic studies. But Gabbs also had escalating option payments. The Pretium heroes found themselves now being treated as zeroes shunned by Bay Street, a predicament not that different for most of the junior resource sector. During the past two years the company has dropped or sold all its British Columbia projects and renegotiated the Gabbs option terms to stave off default. Waterton, renowned for its hardball strategy, agreed to renegotiate and is now a 17% stakeholder in P2 Gold compared to management's 22% stake. Management, shocked by the funding drought, flirted with capitulation in June 2024 when it agreed to merge with Eskay Mining Corp on punitive terms for P2 Gold shareholders, but backed out when it became apparent that Eskay Mining itself had become impotent at financing.

The latest Gabbs PEA update was delivered in May 2024. It envisioned a 15 year open pit mine of which the first 5 years would involve heap leaching the gold rich oxide cap after which the operation would transition to milling the copper rich sulphide ore at 14,000 tpd. The mine would yield 1,472,000 ounces gold and 419 million lbs of copper over its life. CapEx was USD $366 million with cash flow from the heap leach operation funding the future mill capital cost. The market sneered at these numbers. Copper had started the year strongly with a $4.50-$5.00/lb price range, which enabled management to use $4.50/lb copper as a base price while using $1,950 for gold. That delivered an after-tax IRR of 21.0% and an NPV ranging from USD $257 million at 10% discount rate to $550 million at 5%. The PEA provided a "low case" which used $4.00/lb copper and yielded an IRR of 14.4% and an NPV range of $105-$327 million. Unfortunately the price of copper has retreated to the $4/lb level and the market is unwilling to take the current $2,600-$2,700 gold price range seriously for the discounted cash flow model. The market consigned P2 Gold to a $0.05-$0.10 range because it deems Gabbs permanently worthless, does not like the optics of the balance sheet even though most of the liabilities are owed to insiders with a major investment in the company, and seems to assume a bleak future for real copper and gold prices.

P2 Gold Inc was made a 2025 Favorite, albeit Bottom-Fish Spec Value rated, because the valuation allows enormous upside if the market's pessimism proves unfounded. Trump's policies are more likely to accelerate than decelerate the conflict between Global West and East which would have two consequences. One is even greater demand for gold ownership by the rest of the world, possibly driving gold through $3,000 in 2025 which Wall Street thinks is the optimistic upside limit for gold while viewing the sky as the limit for Bitcoin. The other is the reality that the Global West, and in particular the United States, has a dangerous import reliance on metals produced by the Global East and its friends in the Global South. The United States is a decent copper producer and has lots of copper development potential if its economy suffered an import supply drop. In the case of copper, although the United States under Trump appears poised to ignore energy transition goals by discouraging EV adoption, China already sells more new EV than ICE cars and will by the end of the decade have zero ICE car sales. Furthermore, the soaring electricity demands of AI data centers and air conditioning needs caused by rising global temperatures (2024 achieved the 1.5 degree celsius gain from pre-industrial time to which energy transition goals hoped to limit global warming) will boost copper demand. Meanwhile as we wait for copper and gold prices to break out, P2 Gold management will continue to work on securing better metallurgical recoveries and doing the environmental baseline work needed to support a plan of operations that will allow it to begin a feasibility study. Once metal prices are in a sustained uptrend the market will first rush into juniors run by zeroes who were once heroes.

Patriot Battery Metals Corp was continued as a Fair Spec Value rated Favorite in 2025 because its Shaakichiuwaanaan (Corvette) project in the James Bay region of Quebec is a world class lithium deposit which is now moving towards a feasibility study. The CV5 pegmatite deposit at 109 million tonnes of 1.46% Li2O is the biggest and richest so far found in North America. Its location within a 50 km trend that has multiple spodumene showings may ultimately yield a resource double the current size. That still would not put it in the league of giants like Greenbushes in Australia and Manono in Congo, but if EV adoption relying on a lithium ion battery continues to replace ICE cars, the IEA predicts that the world will need a six-fold expansion of lithium supply by 2030 if net zero emission goals are to remain on track. This demand prediction assumes that a solid state LiB will never be commercialized, but there is a race underway to develop a solid state LiB which really is needed to make large scale consumer EV adoption in the Global West a reality. If that should happen the use of lithium in the anode instead of graphite will boost future demand to more than 10 times current supply.

The other 2024 lithium Favorites, Brunswick Exploration Inc and Winsome Resources Ltd, were dropped because in the case of Brunswick, the junior does not yet have evidence of a world class discovery though that may yet happen at Mirage if they can find the source of the lithium enriched boulder field, and, in the case of Winsome, the 1% grade of its Adina deposit is even less in the money than the CV5 deposit of PMET at current lithium prices. The first lithium boom took place in 2015-2018 when lithium carbonate prices ranged $10-$15/lb and there was a lot of hype about the growing EV sector. The Australians were so successful at mobilizing domestic pegmatite sourced supply that it overshot demand growth from the EV sector. As a result a lithium winter reigned from 2018-2020 when the price of lithium carbonate plunged below $3/lb where most pegmatite mines lose money.

When Trump was defeated by Biden at the end of 2020 it became apparent that the world's carmakers and in particular China had ignored Trump's dismissal of climate change as a hoax. Stalled supply development during the lithium winter created a shortfall which sent lithium carbonate prices into the $30-$35/lb range which is unsustainable because far too many LCT-type pegmatites are in the money at that price. The high prices resulted in renewed mobilization of lithium supply which once again overshot demand when Global West consumer interest in EV cars stalled. While liberal minded economic elites were happy to buy a Tesla, the ordinary consumer wanted an affordable EV with the same range and "charging" time as Toyota's top selling Camry and Corolla ICE models. China meanwhile had developed much cheaper models that were "good enough" at the price, but its effort to export BYD's EVs to the Global West was blocked because this would destroy the EV future of Global West carmakers. The result is that in early 2023 the price of lithium carbonate began to crash and by the end of 2024 it was stuck below $5/lb where only the richest pegmatites such as Greenbushes make money. The antipathy of the Republican Party toward electric vehicles suggests that the new lithium winter will last until solid state lithium batteries become commercial reality at an affordable price, and that is unlikely to happen before 2027.

The reason PMET is trading at a fraction of the $15.29 price at which Albemarle injected $109 million in August 2023 is that the PEA it published one year later in August 2024 shows that CV5 needs a lithium price double the current spot price to be worth developing. The PEA indicated an after-tax IRR of 34% and NPV at 8% discount rate of USD $2,232,000,000 for a mining scenario that would eventually process 5 million tonnes of ore annually (about 14,000 tpd) to produce a spodumene concentrate. That NPV at the current exchange rate and 152 million shares fully diluted translates into a future stock price of CAD $21 per share. Unfortunately, that economic outcome relied on a base case price of USD $1,375/tonne 5.5% spodumene concentrate compared to the current lithium winter price of $840/t which is 61% of the base case price. With CapEx at USD $761 million if this were the long term price CV5 would never be developed. The reason PMET chose $1,375/t was because that is the level where long term forecasts peg the price of spodumene concentrate, which in lithium carbonate terms would be double the spot price. Unless there is a miracle in DLE technology applied to oilfield brines that allows unlimited lithium supply to be profitably mobilized below $5/lb, the projected lithium demand for 2030 will never be met with supply. Realistically the future price of lithium carbonate needs to stabilize in the $10-$15/lb range.

The market, however, has no experience with the pace and scale at which demand for an obscure metal whose market in 2005 was worth only USD $200 million has soared thanks to new technology. It takes the lithium spot price as the basis for valuing a lithium junior such as PMET. In terms of lithium exploration juniors this second lithium winter has created a serious bear market. But if solid state LiB powered electric vehicles end up replacing internal combustion engine cars, the value of the annual lithium supply market will range $100-$200 billion during 2030-2040 at a modest price gain into the $10-$15/lb lithium carbonate range. Major mining companies such as BHP, Anglo American and Glencore do not think this will ever happen, but Rio Tinto does think so. In early October 2024 Arcadium Lithium agreed to be acquired by Rio Tinto in a cash transaction that values Arcadium at USD $6.7 billion. Rio Tinto has been interested in lithium for a long term thanks to its Jadar high grade claystone style deposit in Serbia whose development has been blocked through Russia bankrolled protests. But Rio Tinto is advancing the Rincon salar brine project in Argentina. The Arcadium acquisition which will close in mid 2025 gives it additional salar brine assets, the Mt Catlin pegmatite operation in Australia, and a major upstream and downstream footprint in Quebec. The market has failed to appreciate the importance of Rio Tinto's imminent control of the Canadian lithium supply and refining infrastructure.

PMET itself received a major boost on December 18, 2024 when it agreed to a CAD $69 million financing at premium priced $4.42/share with Volkswagen which will also receive offtake rights on 25% of stage 1 production and 12.5% of stage 2 production from CV5. The price paid for 5.5% spodumene concentrate will be linked to market indices. While the price is 29% of what Albemarle paid just over a year earlier, this financing/offtake agreement comes at a time of deep pessimism about the lithium winter and the incoming Trump administration's hostility to energy transition trends which does conflict with the Tesla agenda of Trump's biggest backer. PMET was continued as a 2025 Favorite because it is a highly leveraged proxy for the future of the electric vehicle sector and a bet that Trump will figure out a way to embrace energy transition goals.

PJX Resources Inc was continued as a Bottom-Fish Spec Value rated 2025 Favorite despite a disappointing finish in 2024. PJX sparked interest among Sullivan 2 hunters in October 2023 when it published news about finding boulders in the talus of a mountain slope at its Dewdney Trail project in southeastern British Columbia. These boulders had the exhalative textures of a seafloor smoker and silver-zinc-lead grades comparable to the now depleted world class Sullivan deposit. This differed from the high grade mineralization of the nearby former Estella Mine which is a stratigraphy crosscutting vein system with limited tonnage potential. Prospectors never found any bedded stratiform mineralization in the area so these boulders were quite a surprise. John Keating's crew was in the area investigating much younger intrusions for copper-gold mineralization, spurred on by anomalous copper and gold values in a soil sampling grid and a placer gold history. While they could see Proterozoic stratigraphy at the upper part of the mountain which was younger than the Sullivan Time Horizon, the lower half that attracted the crew was what appeared to be a syenite intrusion. Eventually they realized that this rock was a dyke intruded perpendicular to the older sedimentary layer cake which acted like a curtain that hid the lower half of the stratigraphy. It was hypothesized that the high grade SEDEX boulders had spilled from small erosional windows in the dyke. This talus discovery came too late in the season for follow up prospecting so PJX applied for a major modification to its Dewdney Trail drill permit.

To make sure it had sufficient funds to allow a drill program when the snow cleared from the mountainside in late May, PJX did several cheap financings during the last 2 months of 2023 including with several flow-through funds. PJX was graduated from the 2024 Bottom-Fish Collection where it started at $0.09 to the 2024 Favorites Collection on April 19, 2024 at $0.28 after it raised an extra $3.6 million from a group that included Crescat and a strategic investor. Although management thought it would have a drill permit by May, the convoluted BC permitting process which requires First Nations consultations delayed the permit which was not granted until mid July with some extra required inspections. This messed with the timing of crew mobilization with the result that drilling did not begin until mid August. PJX had 2 drill platforms built, one to test outcropping SEDEX mineralization peripheral to the likely source of the boulders and the other closer to where they thought the mineralized horizon was located.

In early September the first update told the market that finding the boulder source was not going to be easy and the stock started to slide. A second rig was added but it focused on drilling in the valley. By mid October the company realized that the classic SEDEX horizon was either higher up the mountain in younger stratigraphy which was obscured by rubble or located laterally to the south. Early freezing temperatures forced PJX to shut down drilling without delivering a discovery hole. The company declined to provide any graphics about what it thought was going on because it first wanted to have all the geochemistry from assays so as not to look like it was flip-flopping. The market realized that this was still a vectoring play and the stock sold down to $0.10 through a combination of tax loss selling, required flow-through fund liquidation, and shareholders disgusted by the endless bear market throwing in the towel. Once this selling pressure was gone the stock had an early rebound and the market is now waiting for PJX to reveal what it learned in 2024 and where it now thinks it needs to drill in 2025 to find the whereabouts of Sullivan Two. On the plus side the drill permit has lots of flexibility for spotting new drill holes at Dewdney Trail, the First Nations in this area are not opposed to mining, and drilling with a full season can begin as soon as ground conditions allow. PJX is a 2025 Favorite because this is the year Sullivan Two has to arrive or disappear as a phantom.

Silver North Resources Ltd was made a Bottom-Fish Spec Value rated 2025 Favorite because results reported on November 14, 2024 for its summer drill program at the Haldane silver project in the Keno Hill district of Yukon are very significant despite being ignored by the market. At the start of 2024 Silver North had hoped to mount a $2 million program to test new targets along the West and Main Faults as well as the emerging Bighorn target in the northwestern part of Haldane. Keno Hill style high grade silver-zinc-lead mineralization occurs within jogs of the northeast oriented faults that cut through the quartzite country rock, creating intermittent high grade lenses. This is very similar to what Alexco mined at Keno Hill to the east, now owned by Hecla. The challenge is to figure out where these jogs occur and a high grade lens or shoot is present. The simplest approach is to drill lots of decently spaced holes and when mineralization is encountered drill smaller spaced holes to delineate the lens. The idea is to build up multiple high grade zones with an inventory of 30-40 million ounces silver. The exit strategy for Silver North would be a buyout from Hecla whose Keno Hill mill is under-utilized, a problem that helped sink Alexco. The story, however, could also capture the market's imagination as a silver discovery play because Haldane has the potential to host a silver endowment similar to Keno Hill. The reason this has not been confirmed by past exploration is that the surface is much more deeply oxidized which hampers finding the jogs which host the high grade lenses.

Silver North's ambitions were wrecked by the ongoing resource junior bear market which, in order to avoid hideous dilution, forced the junior to raise only enough money to fund a much smaller drill program of up to 4 holes which was done in September. That further lowered market expectations because Silver North would have to get very lucky with such a small program. Silver North hoped to leverage its program by drilling several holes designed to cut through both the West and Main Faults, plus a fourth hole in the Bighorn target to secure a better understanding of the geology in this promising new area. The West fault already has a high grade lens but past drilling on the Main had not delivered such a lens. One hole proved useless because it deviated, and the other two appear to have overshot the West fault. However, Silver North did get lucky in that these holes intersected high grade silver mineralization in the Main fault 200 m downdip and offset by 50 m from a past hole with so-so results. This even included a 1 m interval (0.73 m true width) of 2,470 g/t Ag and 9.64 g/t gold. Not only does this demonstrate that the Main fault is also fertile for high grade silver lenses that should repeat along its strike, but it gives the junior a delineation focus when it returns in July. Of course the market simply did not care that Silver North got lucky at Haldane with a minimalist drill program, so the junior will have to spend the first half of 2025 explaining the story and getting the stock price to a level where it can fund a much bigger drill program in 2025.

Silver North may get some help from the Tim project in southern Yukon optioned up to 80% to Coeur Mining which spent nearly $1 million drilling a half dozen holes for which assays are still pending at the start of 2025. Tim is a carbonate replacement type system similar to the silver-zinc-lead Silvertip deposit Coeur is mining on the BC side of the border. Coeur did allow Silver North to publish a visual description of the results in early September which revealed that Tim is indeed a CRD system with a large enough footprint to become a major discovery. Tim is about geological context, not grade, so getting assays has not been a priority, and when they arrive they are unlikely to impress the market, though Silver North is eager to see what several short mineralized intervals did assay. An important milestone will be confirmation that Coeur will return with a bigger drill program in 2025 that could deliver discovery confirming results. One future issue is that while Coeur will likely vest for 51%, the 3 year window to deliver a feasibility study to vest for 80% is not realistic in Canada's permitting environment. This does contribute to an interesting dynamic for Silver North. Coeur and Hecla are rivals which vie for the attention of silver bulls. If Haldane started to reveal that there is more potential to Haldane than just as future ore feed for Hecla's adjacent Keno Hill mill, Coeur might be keen to treat Haldane as a future potential standalone silver mine, especially if work at Tim starts to reveal that it should also own 100% of Tim rather than end up in a 51:49 relationship with possibly Hecla as a partner.

Silver Range Resources Ltd was made a Bottom-Fish Spec Value rated 2025 Favorite because it is the American equivalent prospect-generator-farmout junior of another 2025 Favorite, Eagle Plains Resources Ltd. Spun out a long time ago from Strategic Metals Ltd, the Yukon prospect-generator which remains a shareholder of Silver Range, under Mike Power and John Gilbert the junior has developed a focus on southwestern United States, in particular Nevada's Walker Lane, though they are expanding into Arizona. The Walker Lane received a lot of attention during the 1980s after gold had stabilized in the $350-$400 range and heap leaching became a new method to extract gold from oxidized low grade ore. The Walker Lane, unlike northeastern Nevada where Carlin-type deposits became the rage after Barrick discovered Goldstrike in the mid 1980's, is home to copper porphyry systems such as Yerington and epithermal systems which range from low sulphidation epithermal deposits created by hotspring activity to the intermediate and high sulphidation epithermal deposits associated with the periphery of porphyry systems. Bodie and Comstock are the most famous high grade epithermal deposits in the Walker Lane from the early prospecting waves that started in the mid 19th century. Until recently the perception has been that the Walker Lane's high grade epithermal potential has been exhausted and what remains are low grade open-pittable, heap leachable deposits such as Hasbrouck near Tonopah owned by West Vault Mining Ltd or Goldfield being developed by Centerra. These are seen as proxies for higher real gold prices.

In recent years there has been a revival of interest in high grade gold-silver epithermal systems driven by evolving concepts such as alteration geochemistry. Prospects that previously failed to yield any joy through shallow drilling of modest outcropping mineralization are undergoing a rethink where juniors like Silver Range compile historical data and collect new information from the field through sampling and geophysical surveys. Hyperspectral Aster data is an example of new tools that identify alteration systems with large footprints as proved to be the case with the 13 million ounce Silicon-Merlin epithermal system discovered by AngloGold in southwestern Nevada. Digital technology fed multiple data sets allows unprecedented 3D visualization geologists can use to identify new targets. This is what Silver Range does differently on a much enhanced scale than available to past explorers. For a while it was able to attract farmout deals with Australian companies or private American groups. The increasing severity of the resource junior bear market has slowed down farmout activity, exacerbated by the NIMBY mentality adopted by the USFS and BLM with regard to permitting drill programs. The "deny and delay" tactics are a problem for resource juniors because although not hidden beneath barren cover rock, the type of targets developed by juniors such as Silver Range are still effectively blind. They require scout drilling to deliver geology that allows vectoring in on more focused drill targets. Silver Range is thus a proxy for the speculation that the incoming Trump administration will force the USFS and BLM to stop behaving like America's health insurance companies.

Silver Range was made a Favorite partly because it is well positioned to secure farmout deals for projects such as East Goldfield if an exploration bull market returns to the junior resource sector. Another reason is that deals it did where it sold 100% of projects for a royalty and a meaningful equity stake are starting to bear fruit. Late last year one of these partners finally went public, which gave Silver Range a chance to liquidate its paper and bring its treasury to $1.7 million so it is no longer limping along as during the past year. 2025 may also be the year when Silver Range finally gets liquidity for the 10% equity stake it received in Broden Mining in exchange for its Key silver-zinc-lead deposit in the Faro District of southern Yukon. Mining stopped many decades ago and left a reclamation mess which Broden plans to fix by redevloping the Faro District in a manner that Alexco did with the Keno Hill silver-zinc-lead district in 2006. The project has stalled because Broden has been unable to get one of the First Nations groups in the area to sign off even though the Yukon government supports the Faro District redevelopment. This FN group, however, now needs approval from the government to proceed with an unrelated mining project and may cease to be so recalcitrant. 2025 may be the year when Broden gets the green light for Faro, and this would be important for Silver Range because its 10% equity stake could be worth $10-$20 million to an institutional buyer. If Silver Range gets a non-dilutive cash windfall of this scale it will be in an excellent position to include scout drilling to boost the farmout prospectivity of its projects.

Sitka Gold Corp was made a Fair Spec Value rated 2025 Favorite because it was one of the few members of the 2024 Bottom-Fish Collection to graduate to Favorite status. It started 2024 at $0.20 though by summer it had sunk into the $0.10-$0.20 range despite gold's remarkable upside performance. Sitka began with 1.3 million low grade but open-pittable ounces outlined at the RC project which is located in the Yukon between Dawson City and Hecla's Keno Hill underground silver mine. This resource split between the Blackjack and Eiger zones was completed in 2022 based on 34 holes for 11,630 m. Since then Sitka has boosted the count to 72 holes for 25,136 m of which 27 holes (14,476 m) were drilled into Blackjack in 2023-24. An updated estimate in 2025 should boost the resource above 2 million ounces, and will probably not include the high grade results delivered for Blackjack in 2024 at a depth below the open-pit limit, results which launched Sitka into an uptrend in September.

Sitka Gold managed to experience a just-in-time miracle during 2024. Sitka Gold was flagged as a Bottom-Fish because there was room for resource expansion, the location is good in terms of First Nations support and infrastructure, and because the combined resource of 61,105,000 tonnes at 0.68 g/t gold for 1,340,000 ounces in situ would benefit from a rising real gold price. But one sticking point was the location of the Clear Creek claim within the RC land package just to the south of the Blackjack deposit. This posed potential infrastructure related development limitations, though it was assumed that eventually Victoria Gold which operated the Eagle heap leach mine to the north would acquire Sitka Gold. But Corwin Coe bit the bullet and negotiated a deal to acquire Clear Creek from Victoria Gold that was inked on June 24. 2024.

The next day disaster struck at Eagle when a heap leach pile collapsed, sending mine water into the local creek. Although there was limited evidence of fish kills the spectacular failure stirred up Yukon's First Nations and the anti-mining lobby which would have been out in full force during this time of the year when daylight merely dims at night. The Yukon government forced Victoria Gold into bankruptcy from which Sitka Gold would have had a hard time extracting the Clear Creek property. Sitka stock went down after the Eagle disaster because the market figured this was the end for mining in the Yukon, but the hand wringing eventually subsided, and Yukon appears to still be open for mining business.

Sitka Gold broke out in September when it reported assays for the Blackjack zone in September which ranged in the 1-2 g/t range compared to the 0.5-1.0 g/t range historically delivered. The market's perspective on Yukon's Tombstone Gold Belt rocks had changed in 2022 when Scott Bergdahl's Snowline Gold Corp discovered the Valley intrusion related gold system at its Rogue project in eastern Yukon. The stock has attracted B2 Gold as a strategic investor and hit a $6.40 high in 2024 that implied a value in excess of $1 billion. The Valley discovery surprised the market because prior juniors such as Golden Predator had explored the area and not found anything interesting. Furthermore, the grade range of 1-2 g/t gold was much higher than other big gold systems in the Yukon. In July 2024 Snowline delivered a maiden resource estimate which came in at 157 million tonnes indicated and inferred with a grade range of 125-1.66 g/t gold for 7.3 million ounces in situ that will grow bigger. Despite gold trading over $2,700 in 2024 the major producers remain unexcited by bulk tonnage systems below 1 g/t gold, though Valley has unveiled a new and interesting potential for Yukon.

The beyond open-pit limit assays for Blackjack got the market wondering if Sitka's RC project might also eventually yield grades in the 1-2 g/t range at an open pittable depth. On October 9 Sitka announced meaningful visible gold in the first hole drilled into the Rhosgobel intrusion to the south within the Clear Creek claim. On November 25 Sitka Gold reported assays which confirmed that much better grades exist beyond the 75 m vertical depth tested by Kennecott during the 1990s within what appears to be a structural corridor in the Rhosgobel intrusion. The location is much better for development than Snowline's Valley discovery whose current valuation of about $800 million makes that story a waiting game. Sitka Gold at 408 million fully diluted has a valuation of only $120 million at $0.30. It has $15 million working capital and can resume drilling by Q2 of 2025. Its valuation at 15% that of Snowline gives it lots of room to increase during 2025 and it will be the market's Yukon intrusion related gold system trading favorite in 2025.