IKN

IKN notes that Warren Irwin of Rosseau made it to the pages of The Gold Report this morning. Which is nice for the peanut gallery in Canada, he’s the demigod of the month and you ought to watch them fawn over his every word over at CEO.ca, highly amusing viewing. Me personally, I prefer to remember when Irwin got conned by Ari Sussman. A salutary reminder that your demigods of finance aren’t immune to losing very very large amounts of money through stupidity and naivete. That trade also made the pages of The Gold Report but somehow and for some reason it doesn’t get talked about much any longer. Wonder why?

TGR: What about Colossus?
WI: Colossus Minerals is one of my favorites for a number of
reasons. Again, the jurisdiction is one I like—it’s in Brazil, a
mining-friendly country. But what’s interesting about Colossus is its
very, very rich property. The grades are unlike anything I’ve seen in my
career. And because of the tremendous grades, in terms of gold and some
of the other precious metals—platinum and palladium—they’re able to
achieve a substantial amount of ounces of precious metals in a very
small plot of land.
In my opinion, Colossus will get to 3 million ounces of gold and with
byproduct credits, such as platinum and palladium, that gold can be
mined at a negative cost and over a short period of time. That’s
extraordinarily lucrative and attractive for a major mining company to
step in and mine this ore.
Right now, the company is extremely cheap and definitely on the
majors’ radar screens. The risk I see going forward is Colossus’ ability
to handle its relationship with partners. Its partner is a company
called COOMIGASP (Cooperativa de Mineração dos Garimpeiros de Serra
Pelada), an organization of the Garimpeiros who once mined the deposit
in a large open pit. They’re teamed up with Colossus to work on mining
the underground portion of this deposit. It’s frankly an extremely
exciting deposit, probably richer than anything else I’ve ever seen. It
has a negative cost of production and could be mined very quickly. It’s
like having almost $3 billion worth of metal just sitting there ready
for you to take it out. I think it’s extremely cheap and I imagine a
number of majors see the same benefit, too.
TGR: It’s a large lake, right?
WI: That’s right; the old open pit has filled in with water.
What Colossus has is the down-dip extension of that high-grade material
found in the pit.
TGR: What would it take for Colossus to go into production?
WI: It would not be very difficult. It’s very shallow and,
again, very concentrated. All these millions of ounces are in a very
small area. It would require some underground expertise, which the local
COOMIGASP does not have, which is why they brought in Colossus. But at
the end of the day, I don’t really believe it will get to that stage
because the majors see the same things I see in this deposit. I don’t
see Colossus making it through to actually getting it into production.