Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: Gold Stocks

Exploration Insights' Joe Mazumdar on FinEx (TSX-V: FINX) & Quality Exploration in Finland, Fraser Institute’s Top Mining Jurisdiction

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real here with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the quarterback in chief over at Exploration Insights, Mr. Joe Mazumdar. Joe, how are you again, sir? Good to have you back on.

Joe Mazumdar: Good. Yeah, thanks again for the invite. Appreciate it.

Gerardo Del Real: Listen, you write and oversee and own one of the best newsletters for mining companies and junior resource companies in the entire space. I wanted to have you on because you and I share a common interest in a company, and I'm biased. I'm a shareholder, but FinEx. FinEx is a company that just initiated a drill program. I met with them recently and I was really... I'm not a geologist, right? You're an economic geologist, obviously, so I wanted your take. But I was really impressed by their technical acumen and the way that they approach exploration.

And when I started looking at Finland and I started looking at the companies that surround them and the geology, even a non-geologist like me could kind of draw the lines and see the rocks and see the belt and assume that there's probably some damn good mineralization on their property.

So I'm excited by the drill program. I want to get your take. Finland was just ranked as the most attractive jurisdiction for mining by the Fraser Institute, so it's got a lot going for it. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the company and Finland overall.

Joe Mazumdar: Yeah, well, I guess let's start with Finland. I've been in and out of Finland for the last, I don't know, more than 10 years following different companies, like Mawson at one point. I visited that project. I've been up to see Rupert, which has probably got the best undeveloped gold deposit out there right now in this kind of jurisdiction. And then, also Orion. And also I visited Agnico's Kittilä gold mine also in Finland, which is not far from FinEx.

So what's attractive about Finland, it's got the rule of law, stable jurisdiction. There were risks with the Nuturo sites. They became problematic initially. Now with the push in Europe for critical minerals in that, definitely there's a lot more government support for mining and for developing domestic resources. So that's a definite push.

Yeah, I don't know how much geopolitical risk you put around being obviously having a very long border with Russia, but definitely the number of Russian tourists since I went there prior to the Ukrainian skirmish to now is a lot less and they're much more wary of that, and such that they're more about developing their own resources and doing things for themselves.

But if you look at not only stable jurisdiction, the holding costs are high, but high holding costs, those costs are going straight to the landowners. And so what's good about it is you automatically get social license because when you're working there, you're paying them, and so when they see you, it's like ca-ching, they know they're getting paid.

Gerardo Del Real: I also believe that keeps unserious players away, right? Because if you're not serious about the region, you're not going to want to come in and start paying out of pocket immediately.

Joe Mazumdar: Yeah, it's harder for junior explorers probably to hold big land packages without doing joint ventures. Like Orion does joint ventures with other companies to defray the costs of the holding. But like you said, it gains social license, but also it really takes the wheat from the chaff in terms of serious entities. And also in the end, the big deal also is infrastructure.

Where you are north of the Arctic Circle, you couldn't mine some of these projects, obviously, in a lot of places in the world at that latitude. So Kittilä, if you took that latitude and moved it to Canada, there's no way that would be a mine. It's like four or five grams underground. It's refractory. So you need a lot of power. You need an autoclave. But there, with the infrastructure grid power, you don't need a camp. Road access, you can make things work. And so the cutoff grades can be much lower for some of these deposits. And so that's the attractions, basically, of Finland.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent. Excellent. And I don't just want to talk FinEx. I would love to start there, but obviously you visited so many of the mines and so many of the potential mines and deposits there. So I'd love to just hear your take on companies you're watching. FinEx is the one that I know we share interest in. So I would love to start there and just what your impressions have been on the technical acumen on the property, some of the sampling that's been done that's returned some phenomenal numbers. And of course, the initiation of the drill program that was just announced to you recently.

Joe Mazumdar: Yeah, they've got a land package. They've recognized this sort of east-west trending, I believe, shear zone in the greenstone belt there, and they didn't bother with glacial till sampling and a lot of things people were doing 10 years ago. Now people tend to do either bedrock sampling, or if the till isn't too deep, they do trenches. And what these guys did was they went straight into the trench.

And so when they trench sample, they're digging up the till and going as close to bedrock as they can. It can be oxidized and fractured, which is what they dealt with, but it's pretty darn close to bedrock, and that's where they sampled and they got these decent results up to over 90 grams in some samples. And with these sort of deposits, you can get these shear zones, you can get some veining, but it's very obviously important to get the grade. And getting that sort of grade suggests that you might be in a fertile system.

Like you said, they're not killing it with the meters because this is very a first pass program, and it's shallow, so they're drilling about 2,500 meters. The down-hole depths won't be more than probably 250 meters going right underneath the veins at surface as they are.

So this program shouldn't take very long because they got one rig, but it's very shallow drilling and it's very competent rock. So I suspect the drilling might take six, maybe eight weeks tops, and hopefully we'll see results into September. And if we do see results similar to what they're getting up at the top, that will obviously be very beneficial to shareholders.

Gerardo Del Real: Yeah, agreed. I mean, good share structure, tiny market cap, right? And so it's off to the races if they're able to reproduce some of the results they've gotten.

Joe Mazumdar: Yeah, and the company's part of that group of companies, including Inflection, Headwater, and some others with the same group of technical people, same financial people and stuff like that. That's what attracted me as well, because when I bought it, I bought it as a private company, and in the letter. And so that's usually I don't ever do that, but I trusted management enough to know that when they told me that we're going to be listing in about a couple of months, I was confident that that's what was going to happen, and that's what did happen.

Gerardo Del Real: It's good when management does what they say they're going to do, right? Because how many times have I heard that and two months turns into two years? I mean, I have a little piece of paper right here. I won't say the company's name, but I forgot I had it, and it's not an inconsequential number of shares.

Joe Mazumdar: Yeah, and it's illiquid and you can't trade it, and nobody wants to sell it, and it's just like, "What do I do with this?" And so yeah, so with private stuff, I'm not a lover of putting that in the letter unless there's a clear path to an IPO. And these guys I've known for a while, so I trusted them implicitly that what they said that they were going to do. I wouldn't do that with a management team I wasn't comfortable with, obviously.

Gerardo Del Real: Agreed. You mentioned Headwater and them sharing a lot of the technical expertise there. Headwater’s caught a bid in the market here recently. They just announced another pretty lucrative deal with potential exploration expenditures now that total well over 100 million between its two major partners. Now, of course, will all those projects be carried through to feasibility? Absolutely not. But to have the option on several different projects to be able to go in and attempt at discovery as well as having some of its own projects that are owned outright and being in a phenomenal jurisdiction in the Western U.S. Thoughts on Headwater while I have you here?

Joe Mazumdar: Yeah, no, I own it in the letter, and getting that extra partner with Oceana to check out some of their other projects is a big positive because now they've got multiple projects. They've got a couple with Newmont, and then they got more with Oceana that are fully funded by them, and then they also take whatever, a 10 or 15% management fee. And because they don't spend a lot of money and share GNA and all that with the bigger group, with Inflection, with Headwater, FinEx and some other companies, their GNA burn is very little. And so anything that they get in terms of management fees from Newmont or from Oceana basically covers them and then they could keep turning over properties and look for new ones.

When I visited a couple of years ago, they were not only in Nevada, but they were also in Idaho and that. But I think now they're very focused on... Their model is looking for these very specific type of high-grade, low-tonnage, low-sulfidation, epithermal gold-silver veins. And that model is what they're taking everywhere, but I think they're pulling back definitely to Nevada.

Gerardo Del Real: And look, there's other companies that are doing similar staking and exploration. One that sticks out is another one, and I don't know that you cover it, but it's another one that I followed for some time. I cover it in one of the letters, and has absolutely caught fire here over the last week or two, and that's Almadex Minerals with Morgan Poliquin, who's applied a similar kind of theory here over the last several years, staking a ton of projects in Nevada and in the Western U.S. Any thoughts on Almadex, if you're familiar?

Joe Mazumdar: Yeah, I don't know. I talked to Morgan about it maybe less than a year ago or something like that. I never got down to see the projects, and so I don't have an update with respect to what they're doing. But the thing is, people think that places like Nevada, Arizona that are well-known states, they don't know that a lot of the really grassroots exploration really hasn't been done because a lot of companies have held ground for a long time and not done anything. And so that sort of stuff really needs to be done by companies like Headwater and Almadex, and so it is good to see that happening.

Gerardo Del Real: No good stuff. Before I let you go, what else do you like, Joe? And then I know you're traveling, you're always up and at it, the conference circuit and site visits. So first and foremost, anything else that you really like in the market? And then before I let you go, where can we catch you, where can we see you, where can we read your stuff?

Joe Mazumdar: Yeah, I mean, I'm looking like a more potential M&A, where is it going to come in the precious metal sector? And I think eventually that's going to go to some of these advanced development plays in jurisdictions that people are comfortable with. And I know places like Argentina are moving up, and so we have a silver-gold play down there called AbraSilver, which is advancing. They just put out a new resource, which is great.

Another one on that sort of stage would be Arizona-Sonora with their copper project in Arizona. I know the cathode premium is gone, which I don't think they ever needed. But the idea of producing domestic cathode is still a big positive for anybody in the states. And so that's another one we're pretty positive on.

Gerardo Del Real: Good, good. Where can we find your stuff and where will you be here in the next several weeks and months?

Joe Mazumdar: Yeah, I mean, it's explorationinsights.com. As you know, it's a weekly publication about what I'm buying, selling, updates on news. And just recently, last week I did a bit of a rant on Silicon Valley based companies coming into the mining sector and the money they're drawing on and their completely different model in terms of being funded by venture capitalists and staying private for a lot longer than any retail company.

And so there's a lack of reporting and all that, but funding there is not a problem. So we're looking for all these different financing hubs. That's definitely one that's come up over the last couple of years. So that's another thing that we do in the letter. Yeah, weekly publication, explorationinsights.com to subscribe.

Gerardo Del Real: Beautiful. Joe, I know you're on the conference circuit. I know you'll be at Beaver Creek, I'm assuming?

Joe Mazumdar: Yes, I will be at Beaver Creek in September, and then I head down to Chile for Latin Rocks to do a talk there, and then I got three site visits there. And then if the stars align, I might be heading to Columbia in November.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent. Safe travels, Joe. See you at Beaver Creek. Thank you so much for making time. Always a pleasure, man.

Joe Mazumdar: Great. Thanks, man.

Gerardo Del Real: Cheers.

Click here to see more from FinEx Metals