Lion One & the Curse of Rich ProjectsBob Moriarty Lion One (LIO-V) came out with a press release in early June that shot the shares from $1.04 to $1.67 in less than a week. Obviously the results were excellent. Most of the people who read it appreciated it for what it was. One of the clowns who posts on CEO.CA maintained that the company was only finding high-grade but narrow intercepts and didn’t believe it could be put into production. So I posted a piece on June 7th and showed Mr. Doom and Gloom a map of Fiji showing the seven million ounces of production from the Vatukoula gold mine only forty km to the North East. The deposits might as well be identical. Same age, same grades and thickness, same type deposit. The uptick didn’t last long. The shares came off their high and dropped to a low of $1.17 in early July before climbing a little. Gold shares seem to have lost their luster. Right now it really looks like everyone hates gold and gold shares. That is wonderful news for investors. But first I want to talk about something that I have been tempted to discuss in one or more of the interviews I have been doing lately. It doesn’t have anything to do with investing but it’s a lifestyle change I learned almost fifty years ago when I worked at Electronic Data Systems. That’s the company that made Ross Perot a billionaire. EDS made Perot a billionaire within two weeks of the company going public in 1968. He was the first of the billionaires created by taking a company public. When Perot took EDS public only three people made over $1 million. Perot, his secretary and his number 2 man. The company that created the largest number of millionaires was Microsoft. Anyone working there for over five years had picked up enough options by 2000 to be a millionaire. So Perot made the least number of rich employees and Bill Gates made the most. Perot was a squid; he attended the Naval Academy and served as a line officer in the Navy before leaving the service and going to work with IBM in 1957 selling mainframe computers. In 1962 he formed EDS that made his fortune for him. Perot actually never operated a computer and never wrote a line of code. But he did understand the potential of the machine. EDS hired me in 1971. We all went through training in Dallas before launching off to whatever contracts EDS had providing computer services. Perot came up with a lot of interesting approaches to life. The most valuable to me was the concept of how to get a lot of things done. A lot of people who actually believe they are organized will make a list of things they want to do and figure out when it will be convenient to do them. Don’t ever do things when they are convenient. You will never accomplish very much. Do things when they are inconvenient. And the more inconvenient the better. That sounds counter intuitive much like investing in stocks when people hate them but it actually works in real life in both cases. You see, no matter what you want to do, a lot of the time, in fact most of the time; it’s just inconvenient to do something. There are a lot more inconvenient times to do things than convenient times. So you will accomplish a lot more by doing them when they are a pain in the ass to do. They might never become convenient. Lion One announced another set of great assays at their Tuvatu Gold mine in Fiji on the 12th of August. Since then the shares have dropped 16%. That’s simply nuts or the assays did nothing more than create a liquidity event. Tuvatu is 100% owned with no NSR. Lion One came out with a 43-101 back in June of 2014 showing slightly over 910,000 ounces of gold at a 1.0-gram cutoff. They have done a lot of drilling and intercepts since. Remember their neighbor 40 km away has already produced seven million ounces of gold and has another four million identified. But rich projects require a lot of money and a lot of time to advance. Lion One is drilling for expansion of their resource at the same time they are doing mine planning for their mill scheduled to be into production in Q4 of 2023. Lion One is my biggest single position. I have an average cost of $1.18 and as of today it trades at $1.16. But I only know half a dozen stocks that have the market cap potential of Lion One and it is by far the cheapest in relative terms. The company has excellent management and technical team. They have their own lab on site supporting the six drill rigs turning. Lion One is an advertiser. I am a shareholder and just as biased as I can be so do your own due diligence. Lion One Metals ### Bob Moriarty |