Following is my recent reply to a Private Message Writer: 

Although you asked me privately, I’m taking the liberty of answering you publicly (on the Message Hub). After all, from time-to-time, others ask me the same things. 

I don’t have much faith in investor relations firms, except sometimes the written analysis they do can be very helpful if communicated to the outside world with persistence and conviction. Communications that will make a real honest-to-goodness difference can only come directly from responsible management people who are true believers and who cannot contain themselves. 

These people (or even one person so charged) need to have enough initiative and self-motivation to act like they know how to make use of a secret modern technological device called the telephone. What they need to do is pick it up twice a day, if their wrists (and hands and fingers) are strong enough to bear the heavy workload. 

When you care enough to make regular use of the telephone (and keep track of what you’re doing), it’s possible to initiate and develop hundreds of valuable resource industry and investor company relationships per year. Compare what would have happened had we done this (as I recommended too many times to count) as opposed to the company’s communication strategy, which never changes: Tweedle Your Thumbs And Sit Back And Wait For The Cows To Come Home.

You say FNC stock should be 25 cents. So far as the denomination, you’re dead wrong. Counting Magpie’s proven billion tonne in-situ resources alone, 25 dollars is still short of the mark (at a modest two percent of the spot market). I’m talking valuation as a resource in the ground, many years from production. Of course, at production, 25 dollars would no longer be anywhere near the case (because we would no longer be stuck looking at a tiny itsy-bitsy two percent of the spot market). 

Why is it that I insist on talking dollars, when everybody else talks cents? Simply, I believe what I believe. It is a hard fact that (due to a deficiency of gray matter in the brain) management has allowed the selling price of our shares to become disconnected from the hard realities of the hard assets we own. Disconnected means no connection whatsoever. None. When you uncouple a locomotive from hundreds of freight cars behind it, those cars don’t go anywhere, no matter how far the stupid engineer drives the locomotive with nothing but empty air behind it. 

So far as my thinking of the future, other private message writers have asked me the same. I will take the liberty of repeating here how I last replied: 

“As I said to you way back, (without any inside information), it continues to be my firm belief that we will (at some undetermined time) be taken over by CIA. The way these deals are generally done is by stock swap.

“I would strongly approve it. The dilution of our proven assets would be very great. But we can well afford it because we have so much.

“We would own shares instead in CIA, made vastly richer by the FNC assets acquired in the deal. Of course the main attraction would be the new (for us) and worlds-better leadership at CIA.” 

Be well.