Email Alert to KRO Members
I spent part of last week in New York at the Hard Assets conference which, to answer a common question, was good for me, though that is not the answer exhibitors want to hear except those with whom I spent time trying to understand their story. It was good for me because it was easy to buttonhole company executives for updates and clarifications of their stories. Delegates that might have gotten in the way were parked in chairs in the main speaker hall pretending to hear something they had not heard countless times before.
With regard to my workshop on Tuesday morning at 7:40 am I was quite fortunate despite an inauspicious start. The speaker ahead of me had a dozen delegates, half of whom left when the session ended and I took the podium. But I braced myself with a reminder of Bob Bishop's story of the time he showed up for an early morning session - and this was after his Voisey's Bay glory days when he was the ultimate guru - only to have just one person present. Chin up, he introduced himself as "Bob Bishop", only to have the startled delegate exclaim, "you're Bob Bishop? I'm sorry, I'm in the wrong room".
Fortunately, things are nowhere near as bad as during the resource sector abyss between Bre-X and the dot-com climax in 2000, because by the time I got rolling about 50 people had trickled in to absorb my 62 slide presentation, with only some of them slinking out at 8:30 am to hear Paul van Eeden in the main speaker hall help them understand why most people stay away from resource sector conferences. I thank those who stuck around for the duration of my presentation, and I thank the Hard Assets organizers for slotting me in a time when it was possible to run overtime. The Hard Assets Workshop Presentation is now available in the conference speeches section
While some of the slides are familiar fare from past conference presentations, there is new material which will form a key part of my keynote in the upcoming Cambridge Vancouver Conference on June 3-4. The keynote topic for 1:30 pm on Monday June 4 is "The Return of the Big Anomaly", which that sly devil Joe Martin has pitted against a 4 star panel consisting of Michael Berry, Frank Holmes, Doug Casey and Peter Schiff who under the guidance of Michael Levy will for a full hour discuss "Global Impact on your Portfolio". Let me offer a summary and suggestion: the impact will be negative and you will be better off catching my presentation about how the next market wave will be about rock and roll discovery exploration and joining me at my booth afterwards for a scrum about super cheap high risk high reward exploration plays. Be sure to register in advance for the Cambridge Vancouver June 2012 Conference.
On Sunday June 3 at 1:00 pm my workshop "Searching for Bottom-Fish" will be an overview about how to exploit the troubling time ahead of us and use the KRO search engine to separate the wheat from the chaff. I invite everybody to join me at my booth afterwards where I will have a live internet hookup to conduct searches on your behalf for the rest of the afternoon. KRO members are alerted that the Cambridge show exhibitors are now loaded in the conference special parameter and that you can start using the KRO search engine to narrow the field to the 10% of companies on which you wish to invest 90% of your due diligence time.
On June 7-8 I will be in Las Vegas at the Metals for Energy and Environment 2012 conference where on June 8 at 9:30 am I will present "The influence of new projects on the supply of rare earths 2013-2020", an overview of the non-Chinese rare earth supply contenders who have published a PEA or better for their plans. This is a technical and thus expensive conference.
General resource sector conferences are not what they used to be, namely events where delegates and speakers go in search of information only foolishly sent by email or whispered over the phone. Conferences have become boring and expensive events where the choir goes to hear the preachers confirm that nothing has changed, that keeping the faith remains justified no matter how retarded and disconnected from reality the message might be. Although I am not abandoning number-crunching based speculation on future metal prices via advanced projects, I am making a deliberate effort to focus on old-fashioned exploration targets for whose evaluation my rational speculation model is well-designed. I think we are about to see the junior resource sector rediscover discovery exploration, not because I am particularly clairvoyant, but because in the current macroeconomic climate the junior resource sector must deliver on this front or face a mass extinction crisis.
The purpose of this message is to alert KRO members to the revival of the Kaiser Blog, a free commentary I started in 2006 but abandoned in late 2007 when the market became so difficult I had to devote all my efforts to paying KRO members. Since then I have made enormous progress upgrading Kaiser Research Online as an information portal, and my web site host Adnet has delivered on a powerful search engine which allows KRO members to design complex company-project parameter based search criteria. I have also given up pretending to know what is going on with all of the 100 plus bottom-fish in a bottom-fish edition, and have focused my detailed coverage on Spec Value Hunter picks. These SVH comments show up in the Daily Kaiser Research Report and get posted as individual "excerpt" comments at the end of each week. The current DKRR contains an update published May 22 about Mountain Province and its KDI spinout plans as well as the Tuzo Deep story.
Since the 2008 Crash I have periodically published a DKRR summary which included the individual company comments and often a long macroeconomic discourse that sometimes trashed my ideological enemies. On occasion this offended paying KRO members, who felt obligated to read what they were paying for, and concluded they did not need to pay for stuff they did not agree with even though they found my company specific analyses well worth the KRO membership fee. My solution to this revenue limiting problem is to shift this non-company specific discourse into the free Kaiser Blog which KRO members can read if and when they feel like. The benefit for me is that if I am going to offend people with my opinions, I will offend a much broader audience than just those who are paying KRO members, and possibly reach potential KRO members who find my views refreshing for a sector notorious for its ideological myopia. The Kaiser Blog Overview tentatively explains what shows up in the free Kaiser Blog and what remains restricted to paying KRO members.
The inaugural Kaiser Blog comment for this new approach addresses my concern that the junior resource sector faces a mass extinction crisis. I have been exposed to this junior resource sector since 1978 when fresh out of high school I visited the viewing window for the old Vancouver Stock Exchange trading floor with a check-book sticking out of my back pocket that attracted the laughter of the old-timers who haunted that venue. During the subsequent decades I have witnessed multiple bull-bear cycles, each one shaving off a layer of intrinsic ignorance with a hefty dose of disappointment, though every one of these disappointments was characterized by a conviction that things will go much better with the next cycle. Often I played an indirect role in affecting changes that pulled the industry out the death spirals created by its penchant for shortsighted greediness. Now the sector has become too big and important to be influenced by peripheral critics. Kaiser Blog: Staving off Mass Extinction with the Big Anomaly highlights my concerns and offers a solution to avoid this outcome. Read it all the way to the end to discover why support for this solution goes well beyond me.
