-- Posted Wednesday, 4 July 2007 | Digg This Article
Growth Stocks Weekly
Publisher: Diversified Financial Solutions, Inc. ~ Since: May, 1995 ~ Editor: Richard Reinhard ~ E-Mail: rreinhard@shaw.ca
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Performance: Year ended April 1996 116.9%; 1997 28.1%; 1998 36.4%; 1999 39.4%; 2000 180.9%; 2001 -50.5%; 2002 18.7%; 2003 28.8%; 2004 166.7%; 2005 28.2%; 2006 153.3%; 2007 8.8%
Junior Gold and Natural Resource Sector Report
June 25, 2007
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A New Age for Socially Responsible Mining
Vancouver’s Wunderkind
Investors in the resource markets will likely know the name Frank Giustra, a Vancouver based mining financier. Many wish they had his uncanny ability to call tops and bottoms in the resource market.
Purposefully low profile, Giustra vaulted to centre stage in North American media earlier this month when he announced he was personally pledging US$100 million plus half of his future earnings from his resource investments to help launch the Clinton-Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative (CGSGI). His donation to the initiative is being matched by a $100-million commitment from Carlos Slim, a Mexican telecom billionaire, and rumored to be the second richest man on earth.
The focus of this initiative is on alleviating poverty in the developing world, to build on the Clinton Foundation's successful track record of scaling-up development initiatives, and to bring together key stakeholders from the mining sector in a unified front to help people benefit long term in mining regions.
What This Means about the Resource Investment Climate
Before I tell you more about Giustra and his Endeavours (pardon the pun, you’ll see), I want to impart what this tells me about the resource market. One is that Giustra has obviously made an unbelievable amount of money in this sector. He has a gift, and he is committed to using it. We have followed most if not all of his companies since Wheaton River Minerals in 2001, and my subscribers are much wealthier for it. So we will continue to follow his products – whether they are publicly traded shell companies that we may have to be patient with or if they are fully producing mines.
The second thing this announcement says – is that Giustra believes this bull market in commodities will last for many more years. He is committing half his future earnings from the resource sector for the rest of his life. Giustra is only 49 years old. He generates wealth from the mining and resource sector, not the tech sector or manufacturing sector.
And mining creates huge wealth for communities as well. Giustra’s initiative will work to see that prosperity can become self sustaining. Guistra brings to the table his vast network of contacts with over 20 resource, finance and supporting companies endorsing or signing on as partners to the initiative already.
What This Means for Mining
This initiative will also improve the image of the entire mining sector. They are now working together as a force for world improvement by setting out to develop a focused, measurable, strategic plan. While overcoming global poverty seems a gargantuan task, the unified, sectoral approach proposed through this initiative offers a much-needed facelift to a much-maligned and wrongly tarnished industry.
In Guistra’s own words, Clinton has become a “worldwide brand, he can do things and ask for things that no one else can.” Clinton’s lobbying efforts will make it hard for the green groups to continue to spread falsities, organize anti-mining rallies, and generally disturb the good business that Canadian mining companies have been attempting to advance in various countries. Mining companies have suffered relentless aggravation at the hands of anti-mining groups with little if any technical knowledge, out to destroy the possibility of prosperity in impoverished areas. Unfortunately, the mining community has failed to respond effectively until now. Giustra and Clinton bring sweeping vision, moral suasion and influential charisma to the effort.
Bringing together many of the elements and drivers so instrumental to his past success, Guistra again sets the stage for ultimate success in this next venture – using his clout in the mining world to promote development in the Third World.
How Giustra Made His Mark
He is known for exiting the market in everything resource related 6 months before the Bre-Ex scandal, leaving at the top of that market, and subsequently created Lions Gate Entertainment in 1996 which became one of the largest independent film companies in the world generating $1 billion a year in revenues.
In 2001, sensing the bottom of the gold price and start of a US-dollar decline, Giustra returned to the mining finance business, becoming Chairman and majority shareholder of Endeavour Financial, a private merchant banking company.
Endeavour shortly after became a mining finance powerhouse and launched a number of mining companies starting with Wheaton River Minerals. With gold at US$255, Wheaton started acquiring gold mines, and became the sixth largest and lowest cost gold producer in the world in three short years. Wheaton became a US$7 billion market cap company with US$480 million of cash reserves after merging with GoldCorp.
Bema Gold, Northern Orion, Oriel Resources, Silver Wheaton, Eastern Platinum, Bolivar Goldfields are just a few examples of wildly successful companies Endeavour has created. Urasia Energy was the latest phenomenon which recently merged with SXR Uranium valuing Urasia at $3.5B. Not a bad return on investment in 16 months!
Factors for Long Term Success
The value of the Guistra life annuity to the Clinton-Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative will surely amount to several times his up-front contribution, and could amount to billions.
The formula for wealth creation so perfected by Giustra and his colleagues helped create billions of dollars in shareholder value for investors around the world (including my subscribers!) in six short years. It’s a formula that will now continue to provide a means to give something back to a greater cause, with relative success largely dictated by the market’s appetite for new product and the continued secular resource bull market.
And straight from the man who’s called these secular bottoms and tops, Mr. Giustra believes the resource market has “has many years left, at least another decade”.
We tip our hats to a good man with big vision making a difference in the world.
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