Renaissance Mining:
mips1.net
Gold's (almost) chastened stock promoters
By: Tim Wood
Rich: thanks for the email on this! I missed it!
Posted: 2003/03/06 Thu 17:00 EST
NEW YORK -- Newsletter publisher Bob Chapman remains out of circulation and sight after securities authorities subpoenaed several people in connection with the promotion of Renaissance Mining. It was a timely reminder about the vultures descending to feed off the gold boom.
For those unfamiliar with Chapman’s work, it is the investment equivalent of Star Trek. You alternately spend your time seeing nothing in particular go by at warp speed, thrashing through some crises, and being offered some unlikely escape to peace and profits.
Chapman was among a clutch of newsletter writers courted by Renaissance at the Vancouver Investment Conference earlier this year and which garnered lots of support in the following days. However, it was Chapman’s hyper-aggressive punt of Renaissance as the final reincarnation of ill-starred Greenstone Resources that ended his rather ripe career.
His risqué promotion style has spawned a surplus of acolytes who honestly prefer the money to the reputation. And it’s easy money because companies are so desperate for exactly the right sort of mention.
Mineweb recently had a run-in with James Sak, a Vancouver promoter for Silverado – which has had its own promotion troubles – and Teryl Resources’ sister company, Linux Gold. Sak said he is the victim of an impersonator, however Mineweb has confirmed independently that he not only used the identity masking service from which an illegal Linux Gold promotion scheme was disseminated, but raved about its stealth abilities to a client.
Sak no longer returns calls despite a generous offer from Mineweb to help him track down the impersonator and clear his name.
If he is being impersonated then unmasking the culprit is truly easy – newsletter “writer” David Vaughn was given a copy of a Mineweb sales pack solicited by the same impersonator. Vaughn won’t say where he got the sales pack from, but clearly he or his “sources” have a hotline to the impersonator. Oddly, neither Sak nor Teryl wants to pursue the matter.
Teryl appears to have opted for discretion over valour by appointing a more professional investor relations outfit out of California, whilst highly misleading statements have been erased from the Linux Gold Web site. The changes befit a company that can spurn cheesy promotion because its properties are as good as claimed.
More positive fallout from the Sak-Linux saga is an attempt by Vaughn to be more transparent in his work. It is not nearly enough yet, but at least readers can now find in the microprint that his opinions are not only borrowed, but paid for with stock options unavailable to ordinary investors.
Meanwhile, the Renaissance Mining fallout also continues. Negatively, Sedona Software, which was supposed to buy Renaissance, and in which Chapman got cheap shares before he wrote it up, has gone from a $9 stock to a 25 cent one. Chapman is alleged to have swapped Florida for Mexico, but he is not the only one missing in action with several other key players suddenly off the scene. Positively, several Web sites have taken the hint and either toned down the promotion or culled it altogether.
Even so, there are still those willing to take unusual risks. Just this week Mineweb received a copy of James Winston’s newsletter punt for Apollo Gold that leaps to an astonishing conclusion.
Winston has been able to calculate, based on a single set of drill results from the Black Fox property near Timmins, Ontario, that the Black Fox mine “could produce up to 125,000 oz of gold per year at a cash cost of US$175 per ounce for many years - an estimate based on historical production grades of 7-12 g/t at the old Glimmer mine which is where the Black Fox is operating. But these grades are better, so it's possible the mine could produce gold at a much lower cost than that! “
Winston did not return requests for a copy of his remarkable “number crunching”. |
