Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: General Precious Metals / Gold Stocks

Almadex Minerals (TSX-V: DEX)(OTC: AAMMF) CEO Morgan Poliquin on Discovery Drilling in a Gold Bull Market

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the one, the only, the CEO of Almadex Minerals (TSX-V: DEX)(OTC: AAMMF), Mr. Morgan Poliquin. Morgan, how are you today?

Morgan Poliquin: I'm excellent, thanks. How about you?

Gerardo Del Real: I am well. I am well. I want to provide some background and context for everyone. I have known you now, Morgan, and we're going to date ourselves here just a little bit, but I've known you now for roughly 15 or 16 years. And Morgan is someone that me, as a non-geologist, I've relied on. Him and his father have been extremely kind and generous with their time anytime I have a geology curiosity or a geology question. Thank you for that, Morgan. But I say all that to say that I met you initially in 2009 and was next to you when you made not just one but multiple discoveries down in Mexico, and Ixtaca being the one that took the stock from 30, 40 cents to $5 in a hurry.

We had a mini bull market for a couple of years. That fizzled away. And this time, it looks like we have a real bull market that could be with us for many, many years with record highs in the precious metals space. When I hear that you have all your own drills and that you've done this regional staking and brought in what's got to be coming up on, what, 20 projects across the Western US, we'll get into that here in a second, I get excited because I haven't seen you in a market like this making discoveries before. And I absolutely believe that the portfolio you've put together will yield multiple discoveries. I had a friend of ours, a mutual friend of ours, Mr. Jeff Phillips, on recently, and he talked about why Almadex checked all the boxes for him. The structure. The drills. The projects. The jurisdiction. The cash position. I thought, what better way to get it than straight from the horse's mouth? Here you are, Morgan. How are you doing?

Morgan Poliquin: I'm doing great. Well, thanks for that introduction.

I'm delighted to talk about ... I really am excited about the market, of course, gold prices and silver prices. As an aside, I like physical things and metals. I've been around it my whole life. My father is my mentor and partner. It's nice to see these kinds of markets and people appreciating real, physical things and the necessity for them. We're starting to see, with all the requirements for an advanced electrical grid and the demands that AI and other things have, all these entities are now looking at how they're going to get the physical materials to supply that, along with the fact that geopolitically the world is shifting, and they have to be sourced domestically. We feel there's a lack of a pipeline of new projects. And what we're focused on in particular is a little unusual.

A lot of people are focused on, as we should be in the market, advanced assets, but we like to find brand-new things. Our view of our golden link is that we're here to supply the metals of the future through exploration and discovery. And as you kindly said, we've done it before. We've made a series of discoveries in Mexico, three based on a regional exploration thesis which we've recognized has similarities to some of the rocks in the western United States. As we re-tasked to putting all our exploration efforts into the United States, we've focused on this belt, and we think that it's very clear to us that scientifically we have a belt of rocks that are permissive for large copper-gold porphyry and related deposits like epithermal high sulfidation and vein systems and that those things are under-recognized at a particular age and along a particular path that we've identified and that there is opportunity to make new discoveries in these areas of clay alteration that are representative of what we think are hidden systems.

We spent the last few years staking. That is ongoing, our generative work, staking, acquiring these projects and doing the preliminary work on them. And with a number of them, we're ready to start drilling them. And that's what we plan to do in the next couple of years. We have put all that together, and it seems, as you point out, our timing with metal prices is pretty good. We have a treasury to support this kind of early stage exploratory work. And not only that, but we have a team, and we have diamond drills which enable us to drill in-house, we think cheaper but not only that, far more flexibly.

That's what we've kind of been putting together the last few years. And it's exciting to be able to try to execute and make another ... Obviously, the goal is to try to make another discovery, and that's what we're focused on.

Gerardo Del Real: Listen, six months ago, we did an interview, and we post them all so people can timestamp, go back and look and timestamp. It's timestamped. But we did an interview, and I was pounding the table saying, "Folks, the stock is cheap. It's trading below cash levels." And all that's happened since then is you're up 150%. And someone that may have listened six months ago and didn't buy the stock may be saying, "Man, Gerardo and Morgan were right. The stock was cheap." Well, listen, I'm telling you again, folks. The stock is cheap. It's a $40 million market cap in a bull market. They have their own drills.

What does the cash and gold position add up to right now, Morgan?

Morgan Poliquin: Our working capital, just roughly speaking, is around $20 million Canadian. As you pointed out, we have a gold holding, and that sort of fluctuates. We have some equity holdings in cash.

It's a tough thing to go out and try to make a new discovery. We all know that, but we have the capacity to do it. And I think what I was alluding to before is that a lot of the industry is focused on advanced assets because you've already defined something, and then it's about trying to determine the economics or expand it or grow it or look for something underneath it and so on. And I think a lot of juniors are focused on more advanced projects or require one in order to finance. And that leaves a lot of opportunities.

We have peers. We have competitors, if you like, other people out there looking for new things. We're not alone, but it leaves a lot of opportunity for that. And capital seems to chase these advanced assets. But from a societal point of view, there's a real need for new discoveries and fast. And you can see a lot of even the political classes talking about these things in my country and your country and that critical minerals are needed and required. That's the way I see it, is that we have to, as nations, go out and make discoveries. That's what our treasury enables us to do is to focus on these earlier stages.

The discoveries we made previously were conceptual in nature. We identified areas that were permissive, both in terms of the geology, but beyond that, the actual nature of the rocks and how they formed and whether they're in that top-tier geochemically of having the potential to be very fertile. Once you have determined that, then it's a swing at the fences. And that's what we're prepared to do with the two things we have at our disposal, not only the ability to find these areas that have the potential but then the treasury and the drills.

Gerardo Del Real: You have the treasury, you have the drills, and you're taking your first swing at a project called the Paradise Project. Can we talk about that? It's in Nevada. You're in the midst of a vectoring program, I believe.

Can you speak about the program, how it's going thus far, and what you've ascertained from that first hole that came back?

Morgan Poliquin: Well, we put a couple holes in last year, and it really confirmed for us that we were dealing with a porphyry system, which we had identified there as being the potential. This year we did a bunch of geophysics after that, and we found a very large IP chargeability anomaly. What that is detecting is the presence of sulfides. Of course, it's pretty common to get lots of pyrite in these systems, and pyrite is not what we're looking for. It's hard to vector in when you're dealing with such a large area of alteration.

Our capacity to drill, as we've been speaking about, has allowed us to go and lay out four holes. And we drilled the first two. And they're scattered out over a big area. It's taking quite a while to get assays and put it all together right now, but we're hoping that when we have all the four holes in hand, we've just started the third ,and we plan a fourth, that we'll be able to put all that together and figure out how we follow it up. That was the nature of this first-step program, is to basically, over this huge area, allow some focus.

And when we have all the results and some of the holes ... The fourth hole hasn't even been drilled yet. We will be in a better position to understand it, but that's the nature of it. We've had good fortune in our history of being able to ... We actually had a discovery we made drilling on the first hole, and that's unusual. These projects are likely going to require several scout holes before we can figure out how to follow it up. That's the plan for the next couple of years on the whole portfolio of projects.

Gerardo Del Real: I think it's going to be a heck of an end to 2025 and a blockbuster 2026. Discovery is the name of the game. You were one of the first people to be a big advocate when I started in this space by saying the best way to find something is to drill it. And I love the approach. You have the war chest for it. I can't wait to see what these projects yield.

Anything to add to that, Morgan?

Morgan Poliquin: I think that's an excellent way to finish off. Thank you very much for the opportunity to be interviewed here, and we're excited as well about the rest of this year and especially next year. We plan to be very aggressive.

Gerardo Del Real: Appreciate the time, Morgan. Thank you.

Morgan Poliquin: Thank you.

Click here to see more from Almadex Minerals