Disclosure: The following represents my opinions only. I am long NRN. I have not been paid or compensated by NRN for writing this.
I’m a big believer in the idea that the universe has a way of telling you things if you’re paying attention. You can call it superstition, but when you think about it, superstition can be one of the roots of optimism… and when it comes to the exploration game, having a sense of optimism is not optional. And why am I thinking about optimism? A little storytelling is required here. A friend of mine has two boys who collect those little Hot Wheels cars. Those cars come out in sets, and in each set, there is what’s known as a “super treasure hunt” version of one of the cars. It has different paint, different wheels, and different detailing than its “mainline” version. Finding one is like finding a gold nugget in a river, and yesterday evening I found one that I’ll give to the boys this weekend. To find one of these cars, you have to be optimistic — because if you take the time to go to the store, odds are that someone else has been there before you looking for the same thing — and the only way to know is to go there yourself.
Keeping all that in mind, I’m going to draw an analogy to junior mining exploration here. When it comes to investing in junior mining exploration companies, I find that you either have to be crazy, or optimistic, or a little of both. The odds are always stacked against you, and pre-drill data is just data until someone comes up with the goods in a drill core. Sure, you know what you hope to find, but Mother Nature is the only one in control. All you can do is tease out as much information as you can before drilling, come up with a target model, and run with it. Most often you fall flat on your face, but we all know the stories where fortunes have been made on the back of that rare bird called “discovery”. Hitting a mining discovery is like finding a super-treasure-hunt Hot Wheels car. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it’s pretty sweet. Naturally, this is leading to a specific idea that I have, which is Northern Shield Resources (NRN.V, last at $0.055).