With a positive feasibility oromins valuation could jump 6 fold

arlene you may be right .. 4.20 anyone?

What’s a Company’s Gold Worth?
01/29/2010

Louis James & Andrey Dashkov, Casey’s International Speculator

At any given time, there’s a single international spot price for an ounce of refined gold. Gold is priced in U.S. dollars: $1,076.50 per ounce as we go to press. But what about the gold an exploration or mining company has in the ground – how do we value that?

Given sufficient data, you can estimate a reasonable net present value (NPV) for a project and deduce what each of the company’s ounces should be worth. To do this, you need to know annual output of the proposed mine, proposed capital expenditures, energy and other costs, and many more things. For most deposits held by the junior companies we tend to follow, there’s just not enough data available.

Another approach is to compare the value the market is giving a company per ounce of gold in hand against the average value the market gives companies with similar ounces.

The most obvious way to define “similar” ounces in the ground is to use the three resource and two mining reserve categories defined by Canada’s National Instrument NI43-101 regulations – the industry standard. We combine these into three broad groups, as we believe the market tends to do as well:

* Inferred: the lowest-confidence category, based on just enough drilling to outline the mineralization.
* Measured & Indicated (M&I): these higher-confidence categories have been drilled enough to establish their geometry and continuity reasonably well.
* Proven & Probable (P&P): These are bankable mining reserves – basically Measure and Indicated resources with established value.

So, what does the market give a company, on average, for an Inferred ounce of gold? M&I? P&P?

To answer this, we combed through every company listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) and the TSX Venture Exchange (TSX-V) and pulled out the ones with 43-101-compliant gold resource estimates (or mostly gold) – no silver, copper, etc. Of these, we kept only those with resources that fall almost entirely into only one of our three broad groups: Inferred, M&I, and P&P. In other words, we did not include companies with half Inferred and half M&I resources (though we did include companies with mostly P&P reserves, because most are producers – or soon will be – and are regarded that way). That left us with about 90 companies to calculate some averages on.

That’s not a large sampling universe, and we had to make some judgment calls when it came to defining what companies should fall in each category, but it’s what we have. So take these averages with a large grain of rock salt, but here they are:

* US$20 per ounce Inferred
* US$30 per ounce for M&I
* US$160 per ounce for P&P

Armed with this information, if you didn’t know anything else about an M&I resource (political risk, type of ore, etc.), but you saw that the company that owned it was trading at $10 per ounce, whereas its peers are valued at around $30 an ounce, you can conclude that there must either be something very wrong with the project or the stock is a great speculation. If there’s nothing wrong with the project, there’s an implied growth potential in the stock price, based on the difference between what the company is getting per ounce and the market average for similar ounces. In this case, it would be:

$20 x # Ounces ÷ # shares.
As a matter of perspective, a few years ago the market was giving a company about $25 per ounce Inferred, $50 for M&I, and about $100 for P&P. Then, when gold ran up over $1,000 before the crash of 2008, these valuations went out the window, and some companies were getting over $100 for merely Inferred ounces – do we have your attention now?

Conversely, just after the crash, there were companies having a hard time getting $10 for M&I. That was clearly a sign that it was time to buy, and we did, with gusto.

It’s also why, when the Mania phase gets underway, we’ll be selling into it as gold approaches the top; we will not be attempting to time the top. It’s far better in this business to be a day early than a day late.

Today, the market is willing to pay more for advanced and producing stories ($160 P&P) but is discounting earlier-stage stories, hence the lower M&I valuation than in previous years ($30). These figures will change again as the market’s appetite for risk changes.

March 8th, 2010
Categories: General . Author: admin