During the summer of 2023, I enjoyed my first visit to the "Kootenays", when I visited Eagle Plains Resources (TSX-V:EPL, OTC: EGPLF) in the Cranbrook/Kimberley area of southeastern British Columbia. This area of B.C. was built up in the early 1900s largely through the development of a mine called The Sullivan Mine. 'The Sullivan' has a storied history in Canadian mining lore, and a book was even written on the topic called "The Best Miners in the World: Stories from Canada's Sullivan Mine".
The Sullivan operated for over 100 years and during its life it produced US$42 billion worth of metal at today's metals prices. Sullivan was a SEDEX deposit that totaled roughly 160 million tonnes at 12% lead-zinc and 67 g/t silver. It also hosted relatively small amounts of tin and cadmium. SEDEX deposits can vary greatly in size, and The Sullivan was a freak of nature not only due to its size but also the extremely rich grades. Click here to watch a nice animation of the formation of a SEDEX deposit.
Eagle Plains Resources (TSX-V:EPL) is based in Cranbrook, BC, not far from The Sullivan (near Kimberley). For the last 30 years, EPL CEO Tim Termuende has worked on gradually making another discovery of a SEDEX deposit in this region of Canada. Through solid science and the gradual gathering of a mountain of data, Eagle Plains has honed in on what it calls the "Vulcan Project". During my visit, we helicoptered up to the drill pad at Vulcan and enjoyed some spectacular views (see below). Last week, I decided it was time to catch up with Tim to get an update on Eagle Plains.
The view from the drill pad at Eagle Plain's Vulcan Project near Cranbrook, B.C.
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Goldfinger
Tim, it’s great to speak with you today. So let's start with the high level stuff Tim, tell us about Eagle Plains and what the company does and how should investors view the company?
Tim Termuende
Okay, essentially, Eagle Plains is a project generator type of exploration company. That is, we're kind of ground level explorationists. We do a lot of research ourselves, we do a lot of staking ourselves. We occasionally work with prospectors and take on projects that prospectors might have come up with but for the most part, we're kind of on the front lines of mineral exploration. And with that comes probably the highest risk. Exploration is a risky business, probably the riskiest business in the world. We found over the years that the way to mitigate this risk was to bring on partners wherever we could. I mean, it's great to fall in love with the project and think you're going to hit a home run and spend a ton of money on these things but really, if you can, it makes sense to bring other companies in to help share that risk burden and keep enough of an interest in the project to really reward your shareholders in the end. That's the pathway we followed, and we've been doing it successfully for years. We're actually the first project generator ever in this business, and we've been around 30 years now. We're the 9th oldest company on the TSX-Venture Exchange. And of those nine companies, we're one of only three that have never rolled back our shares or consolidated our share structure. We've been able to do that by basically not financing very often, yet we remain very active. We don't need to finance very often because of two main reasons: One is we take on partners where we can and when it's appropriate. And two, we have an in-house geological contracting company called TerraLogic Exploration. TerraLogic works for us, but not exclusively.
TerraLogic works for other third party, independent companies, too. And from that, we get pretty substantial revenues annually. Last year, TerraLogic cleared $2 million in profit and this year we're projecting about a million dollars in revenue. Over the last five years, we've averaged a million dollars a year in revenue which has been able to keep us from financing unless we've chosen to for strategic reasons.
Goldfinger
And that's very important because in the junior mining business we see so many companies be really aggressive straight out of the gate and their share structures will quickly go to above 100 million shares and the drill programs won't really bear fruit. And then suddenly they're in a very tough spot because if you have over 100 million shares out and you have no good results to show for it, then your share price is probably going to be in the pennies. Three cents, four cents. And then you're kind of stuck. So to be able to say that over nearly 30 years you only have 115,000,000 shares out that's quite a testament to being very prudent with the treasury and shareholder capital.
Tim Termuende
Yeah, absolutely. And having said that, we have 115,000,000 shares outstanding and we also have working capital this quarter of over $12 million. And of that, eight and a half million is cash and roughly a million and a half is shares in other companies with another 1.5 million in hard assets. So you don't have to take my word for it. You can look at our history. It's all right there. We're financially very healthy right now and also very active. I know a lot of companies, as you said, that are trading at two cents per share and really the only pathway for them is likely to roll back their stock. And usually when you do that, you basically take a hatchet to your share structure and your shareholders usually take a pounding, too. Occasionally, I see these rollbacks succeed and the company moves on to great heights but for the most part, a share rollback is the kiss of death. From what I've seen, at least.
Goldfinger
Yeah, that's for sure. Just to summarize, so you have a business where you're staking projects all throughout Canada and then you're looking for partners to then take on those projects and spend their capital so they can earn into what you own at that point. And then eventually, if they advance it, let's say for several years, then you might get diluted down to owning a fifth or a quarter of the project, but you didn't have to spend any capital while they advanced it for several years. In the junior mining business, to advance a project takes millions of dollars.
Tim Termuende
Absolutely. And another successful facet of our business model is if we have a project with a partner that looks like it's sort of taking a life of its own: it's having success; drill holes are hitting constantly; maybe we've got a resource on the property or expect to build one, then we've historically spun out those projects into a separate company. At this point, Eagle Plains gives shareholders additional shares in these new companies. We've done that four times now over the last 15 or 20 years. The first one was Copper Canyon. We had an option deal with NovaGold on the Copper Canyon property and NovaGold had earned in and paid all the money and issued shares to get a 60% interest. We had 40%. Incidentally, we acquired that property for about $10,000 worth of shares way back when.
Anyway, Novagold earned 60%. We spun out the remaining 40% into a separate company called Copper Canyon Resources and gave our shareholders a share in Copper Canyon for every share they had of Eagle Plains. That company was later purchased by NovaGold for $65 million after a hostile takeover was launched (which later turned into a friendly merger). So all the shareholders received a big payday there. And we've just done it again just recently with Taiga Gold. That was started with a project that we staked ourselves called “Fisher”. We worked on it a little bit, then we optioned it to Silver Standard Resources, which became SSR Mining. SSR had earned 80%-they'd spent about $12 million to earn 80%, made significant cash payments to us along the way (~$3M) and refunded all of our exploration costs. We spun out the remaining 20% interest in Fisher and a couple of other properties in the area into Taiga Gold Corp in 2018 on a one for two share basis. SSR bought out Taiga Gold Corp for $35 million in cash in April, 2022.
And that was just to get that last 20% in Fisher and the NSR that was on the property. So our shareholders got another great windfall there. We’ve just completed another spin out recently called Eagle Royalties. We took all the royalties we’ve accumulated over the years and put them into a separate company, spun it out on a one for three share basis, and it now trades as Eagle Royalties (“ER”) on the CSE.
Goldfinger
Yeah, that's a good summary. Right now, you have over 35 projects, and it's a diversified set of projects where you have copper, you have some zinc, graphite, gold, uranium, which is hot today, and you have a number of option agreements with other companies on a portion of those projects. So, as a shareholder, one has the potential to have one of those option agreements bear fruit into something that could be quite valuable. Right?
Tim Termuende
Yes, absolutely- we've got a lot of irons in the fire. We have at least 35 projects that we show right now. We probably have over 100 different claims in different areas that, again, we're staking constantly, especially right now. We're very active in acquisitions right now because of this downturn in the markets and as a result of this, many companies are letting claims go that normally they wouldn't. We've got a lot of projects covering a lot of commodities. It's one critical thing I've learned over the 30 years that I’ve been doing this-it's important to be diversified.
There's always a flavor in the month in this business, whether it's cobalt or lithium or zinc or graphite or copper or platinum or diamonds or gold. Something is always hot. Everything seems to take its turn being the hot commodity that everybody wants to get a hold of and brokers are willing to finance. Right now it's uranium. It seems gold is starting to make its move back. Gold is always solid, but uranium is hot right now and deservedly so. I mean, the uranium market has been in the tank since 2013, since Fukushima, and there's really been a lot of companies that have not been able to get any traction in the uranium space for a long time, but now most of them are. Eagle Plains has a number of uranium projects, some of which we’ve held onto for years. I think we have about 14 different uranium projects. We're constantly talking to people right now that want to get into option deals on those properties. So you'll probably hear more about our uranium portfolio here in the coming weeks. But yes, it's important to have diversification. And at the same time, we're focused geographically in western Canada. And I think that's important too. It's important to know the politics, to know the First Nations groups, to know the communities and the prospectors in these areas. And so our focus is essentially Saskatchewan, Yukon and British Columbia. We've done a little bit of work in the Northwest Territories, but we just found that to be very expensive. Sort of the risk reward isn't aligned for that kind of work. But yeah, in my mind it is important to have geographic focus, but commodity diversification.
Goldfinger
Yeah, that's interesting to hear you say that. Right now you're seeing a lot of companies drop projects that they ordinarily would not. And you guys are very active and you sort of play the counter cyclical strategy of being more aggressive in downturns and less aggressive and being willing to take on more option partners during the rising tides that we experience every few years. If companies are dropping a lot of projects, that means that they're really cutting costs because the carrying costs of a project aren't terribly high, right?
Tim Termuende
Yes and no. It depends on the size of the property, and where it is. Exploration projects in the States are generally fairly expensive to hold onto compared to British Columbia and Saskatchewan, but you're still typically looking at $20,000-$30,000 for an average sized property annually to keep it alive. The holding costs are generally tied to the size of the property area as well, so larger areas have higher carrying costs.
Goldfinger
So $20,000 or $30,000 in the grand scheme of things, that's not a lot of capital for a company. So it really demonstrates how tough it is right now that companies are actually letting go of projects that they may have held for years.
Tim Termuende:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, in 2000, things were very tough again in this business in British Columbia, especially after the Windy Craggy decision a few years earlier. During this period the Copper Canyon property came open for the first time in 46 years. It had been in good standing for years and it was just financial duress that basically caused those claims to lapse. And an associate of ours, Bernie Kreft, staked them and we ended up with them in our company on very favorable terms. So we're seeing that kind of situation again now. I see a lot of companies right now that are, as you said earlier, trading at two or three cents per share. If you look at their financials, they've maybe got $80,000 in the bank and they've still got to pay their auditors. They're wondering how they're going to pay themselves, they're wondering how they're going to pay office rent and phone bills. And if they have four or five projects that each require $20,000 or $30,000 to keep them alive for another year, probably one or two of those are going to go, whether they like it or not.
Goldfinger
Yeah, it makes me think if a company is that strapped, maybe they shouldn't even exist.
Tim Termuende
Well, yeah, I think you'll see quite a culling here in this next cycle, and I think you're starting to see it now.
Goldfinger
There's a lot of companies that maybe shouldn't even be public. The reason to go public is because you have a project or projects that require a substantial amount of capital to explore properly, and so you want to diversify the risk among a wider set of investors and shareholders. But if a company doesn't have a project that has any real appeal, and yet you're still having to pay all the overhead of a public company, which is $250,000-$300,000 a year, just bare bones, then it doesn't make any sense. I mean, that should just be a private company at that point, right?
Tim Termuende
Probably. And I think that's the way a lot of these companies are going to go here in the next little bit, unless they can keep themselves alive through directors loans and whatever else. You can pay people stock for quite a few things, but you can't pay your auditors in stock. And so auditor bills are 30,000, $40,000 a year quite often. So, yeah, there's definitely a reckoning coming. And I've seen it before, I think Rick Rule, one of his quotes is “the author of the bear market is the bull market ahead of it, and vice versa: the author of the bull market is the bear market”. And we (Eagle Plains) are just as active in bear markets as we are in bull markets. We just have a different kind of activity in the bear markets. We're doing a lot of research, we're doing a lot of acquisitions.
We're shopping for fire sales everywhere we can. And in the bull markets, we're more focused on actual exploration, on deal making. When we were in that bull market in 2010-2011, it was very frothy in this business. There was a lot of money in the system, a lot of companies had money, and we had 24 option deals going all at one time during that period. And I could see that happening again in the next year or two. I don't know how long this bear market is going to last. A lot of people think we're over it, but I'm a little skeptical. I think there are still some dark clouds ahead, but I guess time will tell. But either way, we're rigging our sails for either sunny weather or more stormy seas.
With our strong treasury, we're able to do the acquisitions and the research that we want and we're also able to look at other opportunities that are around elsewhere in the business.
Goldfinger
Yeah, that's an entirely different topic. Where we are in this bear market is definitely worth pondering. It does seem to me like there could be some more tough times ahead, especially for the junior sector. And what we've seen in 2023 is a major dichotomy where you have the price of gold remaining pretty buoyant. And multiple times we've seen gold move above $2000 this year. And yet the junior mining sector is as bleak as it's pretty much ever been. That's kind of unusual because the 2013 to 2015 bear market gold was on its way down from $1800 to $1100. This is a bear market. In the junior mining sector we can clearly state we've been in a couple of bear market years. 2022 and 2023 are definitely bear market years. But gold has been trading between $1700 and $2000 during these bear market years.
So it's a very unusual market environment that we're in and it's quite complicated and probably way beyond the scope of this conversation. But I want to talk to you about the Vulcan project. So over the summer you guys invited me up to BC to Cranbrook, where you're located. You have your office there. It's a little town. I really enjoyed it for a number of reasons. The scenery, the people are very nice. It's a very clean town. And then we got to chopper up to where you were drilling. And this is quite a story. The Vulcan story is quite a story. And we’ve got to try to keep it as concise as possible because you could talk about it for hours, but basically you're trying to make a new discovery of a sedex deposit that could be like the Sullivan Mine.
So the Sullivan Mine, you could obviously, if you're reading this or you're listening to the recording, you could Google it and read up a lot about the Sullivan Mine in BC, the southern part of BC. It operated for over 100 years. And it produced a huge amount of metal, zinc, lead, even tin, silver. And so you guys are trying to find another Sullivan. So can you tell us about that, Tim?
Tim Termuende
Yeah, and it's interesting because I said earlier that we find partners and try to joint-venture just about everything out. We do try to keep a project that we work ourselves; that we keep 100% interest in. And when we completed the Taiga Gold deal, Eagle Plains kept a whole bunch of shares in Taiga Gold. So we had about a three and a half million dollar cash windfall to our treasury when SSR took over Taiga. So we had a very healthy treasury, with over $10 million cash in it and we decided to take a shot on the Vulcan project. It's a project that I've been involved with for 30 years. I worked on it for the first time in 1991 as a junior geologist and I've always been very intrigued with the property. Eagle Plains was able to stake it roughly 20 years ago.
We have systematically but sporadically worked on Vulcan when we felt we had enough of a financial cushion to take the risk that comes with drilling. So we did a drill program in 2022 and got some very interesting indications that we are very close to a vent type structure, which appears to be similar to that seen at the Sullivan “SEDEX” or sedimentary exhalative system. Sullivan had a deep ocean vent source and mineralization spread out from this vent. And generally because of the setting, it has a long period of time to accumulate mineralization. The Sullivan as you mentioned operated for over 100 years. It had an average daily workforce of about 400 people and its in-situ value right now would be about $45 to $50 billion. It’s a giant, world class target so we decided to take a shot at that.
Again, when we're going to target something, we're going to make it a big target. It costs just as much to drill small targets as big targets. So we're after a big target anyway, and saw very strong indications in 2022 in one of our drill holes. So in 2023 we drilled six more holes. Robert, this is when you came up in the middle of this drill program. Unfortunately we couldn't get you better weather, but we drilled six holes and every hole had very impressive mineralization. The right kind of mineralization that we're looking for. We have not yet found the vent and there will be more drilling on that property. Whether we do it ourselves or bring in a partner is yet to be seen.
We're still waiting for the final analytical results. Once received, we will be able to take a very close look at those results, looking at metal ratios, looking at overall metal content and thicknesses- things that you can't estimate with the naked eye or with an XRF machine. We're hopeful that once we get all these results compiled that we'll be able to have a stronger indication of where to drill next. We drilled six holes and really they were all about the same, which was surprising and a little bit frustrating because it hasn't really given us the direction we are hoping to get to be able to vector to where the vent is. But we're quite comfortable with the interpretation that there is a vent on our property, which is a very large area. Stay tuned, it's my favorite project-it always has been because of the scale of it. And we're not discouraged by the results we got this year. We're a little bit puzzled, but we're looking forward to more activity on the property.
Goldfinger
Yeah, I can't do it justice. First of all, I'm not a geo, but I've been a junior mining investor for 20 years. I know this business pretty well, and I would say I have a pretty good intuition. And my intuition is that you are onto something at Vulcan, you will make this discovery at some point. The problem is it takes years to find these things. It not only takes years, but it takes millions of dollars. It takes a lot of commitment and perseverance. Frankly, investors don't often have that kind of patience. And since failure is the norm in junior mining, it is so hard to make a new discovery.
CEO Tim Termuende (2nd from left) atop Vulcan during the July 2023 Eagle Plains investor tour
And the odds, I think you said it to me last year, you told me it's one in 1000 to turn something that is a good prospect and turn it into something that proves up to be a mine. It's long odds, 1,000-1. So the odds are absolutely daunting. But as I came to understand how this came together, 30 years of work came to this point at Vulcan. And it's like you were putting one piece of the puzzle together after another piece of the puzzle, putting all these pieces of the puzzle together. And when you did the presentation for us there in the office in Cranbrook, I was impressed by how logical the steps in the discovery process have been at Vulcan. It’s an iterative process, and a great deal of science has led Eagle Plains to this point at Vulcan.
It's an amount of work that you have done to get to this point. And it feels like you guys are so close, but you just haven't quite found that vent yet. Can you tell us what were the results of last year? And you guys were really excited two years ago about those first holes into Vulcan in 2022 and then that led you to last year where you drilled, I think, an additional six or seven holes, including some very deep ones. What have you learned from the last two years?
Tim Termuende
We've learned that we are very close to a very large system. We've had mineralization over 250 meters of intermittent fine beds of lead and zinc and big clasts (fragments) of lead and zinc that broke off of something that was bedded at one time and moved somehow through a current or along a slope. We've also established that we're in a sub basin. For these metals to accumulate, they need a trap. There's always currents along the ocean floor. There's movement. And you need a quiet sub basin trap or a trough, if you will. The Sullivan sits in a trough.
There's a couple of smaller mines in this same trough beside Sullivan that help to define the geometry of the trough. And we're confident now with the drilling we did this year of two things: 1) that we've got very strong mineralization, we've got very widespread mineralization, we've got consistent mineralization, and 2) we've got a trough. There's no doubt about it. We've got a deep trough that has the ability to form a trap for a lot of mineralization. So now we need to explore the trough more. Our holes we did this year defined mineralization over about 400 meters by 600 meters and over about 200 to 300 meters in thickness at depth. Again, fine mineralization, not economic grade, but it’s kind of like smoke from the fire, if you will. We're looking for the fire and we're quite confident that it's somewhere in that trough. We have an idea now of the geometry of the trough. It's roughly north-south, just like the Sullivan trough is north-south. And so we need to step out our holes farther. Our holes that we drilled this year were about 200 meters apart. For the next drill program, we're likely going to be drilling holes 500 meters to 1,000 meters apart. And hopefully that will show us a more pronounced change in mineralization that will give us that much more information to vector to a vent source. The vent source was the core of the mine at Sullivan. That's where it was thickest, that's where it was richest, and that's what we're hoping to find with drilling, but it'll take some more holes for sure. For this summer's program, (we spent roughly $2 million) and we as a company have not spent that kind of money on our own projects for 20 years, 15 years anyway. But again, we had a very healthy treasury and we had the ability to absorb the risk. I don't regret a single aspect of that program.
I wish we had more direct indication of which way to go next. But that may come with the analytical results and we haven't received all of them yet.
Goldfinger
First of all, as an investor in the junior mining sector that's been around a while, and watching you operate for many years, it stood out to me in 2022 when you told the market, hey, we're going to do our own drill program here at Vulcan. You decided to keep 100% of Vulcan and fund the exploration entirely on your own. And then when you increased the drilling budget in 2023, it made me take even more notice. Now some investors might say that you should stick to the business strategy you've operated with for 30 years, and you should have had an option partner so you don't have to spend $2 million a year on a drill program here, with no guarantee of success. So what would you say to somebody who says that you shouldn't be doing this yourself and you should find a joint-venture partner?
Tim Termuende
Well, funny enough I did hear that but I usually heard it after the program, not before. There were a lot of people that were excited about it and wanted to take the shot. And we have a lot of shareholders. Being around 30 years old we have over a 1000 different shareholders. We have 3000 on our mailing list. And I spend a lot of my day trying to find the balance, trying to piss off as few people as I can every day. So I've got one group of shareholders that wants us to spend more and on the other hand another group of shareholders that don't want us to spend a nickel. So you've got to find the balance. And the reason we decided to spend that much money is because we had the windfall the year before with Taiga Gold.
So there's no point sitting on a massive treasury either when you're an exploration company. So you've got to find that balance of risk and reward in the whole business. A colleague of mine explained years ago that this is a risk management business and I think we've found a pretty good way to manage risk and at the same time give shareholders the thrill of a potential discovery. And so it's a question of how you manage risk. We still have a very strong treasury-we can still take on a lot of risk. But in this market it doesn't seem appropriate because I personally think tax loss season is coming up and I'm not sure we're going to pull out of this dive in January. A lot of optimists are saying we will- I guess we'll see. I cannot predict the future, but my experience in this business has taught me that these downturns usually take longer to work through than the upswings. It's not a sine curve- it's not a symmetrical curve. The downturns tend to be pretty long so you have to be prepared for that as well. And again, with a strong treasury we could be picking up very impressive projects that don’t become available often. In fact we've just been staking in northern Saskatchewan. We've been able to stake a couple of old uranium mines that again have come open because companies are under duress. These projects were in production up around Uranium City.
And if you'd have told me two years ago that I could stake a past- producing uranium mine right now; and same thing: if you'd have told us we'd have been able to get Copper Canyon for $10,000 and sell it for $65 million a few years later I'd have said it’s not going to happen-but it happens.
Goldfinger
The uranium bull market feels very powerful this time. And I was around in 2005, 2006, and 2007, and I lived through that bull market that got completely insane around the peak in 2007 when U308 hit $140 a pound. And there were some big takeouts that occurred at big dollar prices in 2007. It feels like we're nowhere near the 9th inning in this run. We might be in the fourth or fifth inning, but I think there's some more meat on this bone. And with the long lead times in terms of mine permitting, even with NexGen and their deposit there in the Athabasca Basin, that's obviously the number one development stage deposit in the world. And even a best-case timeline on that is going to be another five to six years to get into production.
So the supply is just not going to be there over the next few years. There's more potential upside ahead, and it's great to hear that you've been so active in staking and acquiring new projects for the company because I feel like some of those could prove to be quite valuable here as this bull market evolves.
Tim Termuende
Yeah, definitely. The really interesting thing about uranium and uranium companies and their share prices is that there are very few companies in the space. I remember in the last big uranium swing, companies that were trading announced they had a uranium project somewhere in the Basin and probably couldn't even find it on a map. Within two weeks an analyst would notice that they had a uranium project. And again, it's just such a tight space that the players that are in it right now have seen a nice little bump in their share prices. But I don't think we've seen anything yet. I think when this thing really takes off, and I think it has to take off as far as energy demands around the world, I think everybody agrees wind and solar aren't going to cut it. And the pressure on fossil fuels right now, too, is enormous around the world. Even Greenpeace had endorsed nuclear power just before the Fukushima disaster in 2013. So uranium was just starting to get some legs with support from Greenpeace or from organizations like Greenpeace. And then the disaster in Fukushima just knocked it back for a decade, basically. And it's starting to come around partly because people are finding better and better ways to deal with the downside of uranium and nuclear energy. But it's also a supply and demand thing. Energy is always in demand and there's not for obvious sources of supply down the road for a lot of countries.
Goldfinger
This Green energy transition or so called transition that's going to be taking place over the next 20 or 30 years, nuclear energy is absolutely key. It doesn't happen without nuclear. So let's just put a bow tie on the conversation, Tim. I'm just looking at your presentation. I'm taking a look at the slide that talks about the share structure and the company's assets. And I'm looking at C$8.6 million in cash, C$1.4 million in shareholdings of other companies and real estate valued at roughly C$1.5 million. So if I add that all up, that adds up to C$11.5 million. And your market cap is roughly C$15 million. I think at this share price, it's kind of a deep value opportunity here. What would you add to that and what is the value proposition?
Tim Termuende
Our history kind of speaks for itself. I think our market cap right now basically is very close to our breakup value, which is the first sign that there's an opportunity there. But our share price right now doesn't reflect the $100 million in dividends that we've carved off over the years. I mean, if we had kept Copper Canyon in our projects portfolio and kept the Fisher property (Taiga Gold) in our portfolio, we'd be trading at probably $.80 or $0.90 right now. But through our model we “dividended” those out to our shareholders who got direct benefit and they got liquidity because those spin out companies or spin out shares were ultimately acquired by a larger company with large trading volumes. So it was easy for people to get liquidity. A lot of people in this business forget about how important liquidity is.
And if you look at a junior mining stock in the business (you can look at 50 of them) they might trade 50,000-100,000 shares a day, maybe $25,000 to $250,000 dollars in volume in a week. If you've got a large position in a company, you're going to have a hard time exiting that position without affecting the share price. But with these spin outs, which are effectively dividends, you get not only liquidity events, you get to keep your Eagle Plains shares for the next one. And we've done these pretty well like clockwork every few years for the past decade or so.
And I think you can safely assume that if everything stays the same and we keep doing what we're doing and deliver as we have in the past, you'll see another spin out in the future and you'll likely see not only that, but probably see our share price appreciate in the market. I mean, we're not the only ones that have been beat up but I think we're one of the few that have that kind of financial health behind us. And our track record too- it's there, just look at the charts.
Goldfinger
Yeah, I think that's well put. Eagle Plains isn't going anywhere. You've been around for 30 years, and been through many cycles, you'll be around for many more cycles. I am confident of that. And I am excited about the entire company portfolio, but I am also excited about Vulcan. I don't think the last chapter has been written there at Vulcan, I'm looking forward to seeing the final results from the 2023 season. And I'm also interested to see what your plans are for 2024. Obviously, that's fluid. It depends upon a multitude of factors. And also for people that are listening to this, there's a book called The Greatest Miners in the World that Tim gave me a copy of last summer, and it's a great read. It's about the Sullivan Mine and those early days at Sullivan in the 1920s and 1930s. And it gives kind of the whole history of the Sullivan story, and it's quite a good read.
Tim Termuende
And you even got to go underground, the tourist part of it, anyway but it was a great trip.
Goldfinger
Yes, it was. I really enjoyed it, and the part where we were up on the mountain and it briefly began hailing will be imprinted in my memory forever (laughs). Thanks a lot for this conversation, Tim. We covered a lot of ground today.
Disclosure: Author owns shares of Eagle Plains Resources at the time of publishing and may choose to buy or sell at any time without notice. Eagle Plains Resources is a sponsor of Goldfinger Capital. Readers are charged with conducting their own investment due diligence and recognize that micro cap stocks can deliver a 100% loss of invested capital.
DISCLAIMER: The contents of this article have been reviewed and approved by Eagle Plains Resources Ltd. The article is for informational purposes only and is neither a solicitation for the purchase of securities nor an offer of securities. Readers of the article are expressly cautioned to seek the advice of a registered investment advisor and other professional advisors, as applicable, regarding the appropriateness of investing in any securities or any investment strategies, including those discussed above. The companies mentioned in this article are high-risk venture stocks and not suitable for most investors. Consult company’s SEDAR profiles for important risk disclosures.
The author of this article is not a registered investment advisor and advice you to do your own due diligence with a licensed investment advisor prior to making any investment decisions. This article contains certain forward-looking information and forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities legislation (collectively “forward-looking statements”). Certain information contained herein constitutes “forward-looking information” under Canadian securities legislation. Generally, forward-looking information can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as “expects”, “believes”, “aims to”, “plans to” or “intends to” or variations of such words and phrases or statements that certain actions, events or results “will” occur. Forward-looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of management as of the date such statements are made and they are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from those expressed by such forward-looking statements or forward-looking information, standard transaction risks; impact of the transaction on the parties; and risks relating to financings; regulatory approvals; foreign country operations and volatile share prices. Although management of the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking statements or forward-looking information, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Actual results may differ materially from those currently anticipated in such statements. Always thoroughly do your own due diligence and talk to a licensed investment adviser prior to making any investment decisions. Junior resource companies can easily lose 100% of their value so read company profiles on www.SEDAR.com for important risk disclosures. It’s your money and your responsibility.
