What Really Are the ODDS of an Explorer Becoming a Mine On Its Own?

GWTW says that, "D. Webb is saying again and again that the company is not for sale and will go to production by itself....depressing the SP because only "1 in a thousand is successfully doing it"

Funny that this "1 in a thousand" figure continues to have legs. To me it seems similar to the story of the mint condition Corvette that was sold for $200 because somebody died in it. Had you heard that one too?

Anyway, the validity of the conventional wisdom of the "one in a thousand" figure became the essence of my latest Q-Call for this weekend's FSN.

I sent Dave Webb an audio file of this Q-Call, and asked him what he thought the odds were.

Here, paraphrased, is his response to that call,

He said he'd heard similar figures and didn't know its origin or its validity. He suggested one way to arrive at a meaningful figure would be to find out how many mines had been opened in the last 10 years and then see how many companies were attempting to become mines during that period.

He suggested that InfoMine or CMP might have these data. But from memory, he could think of perhaps a dozen or two mine start-ups in Canada in the 1990's that made it to production. Also, the PDAC, he said, has about 6,000 individual and corporate members, while the CIM has about 11,000.

Dave, quessed that there might now be about 1,000 companies world-wide doing serious exploration, each maybe with, on the average, about 5 properties. So, let say, with 5,000 projects, and about 1 or 2 mines in Canada, he might guess that there are about 50 mines starting up world wide.

That'd be about 1 in 100 ratio that Dave said is a made up rate, but certainly was a reasonable guess. And, he added that its a lot better than the 1 in 1,000 figure commonly bandied about.

Incidentally, Eric Hommerlberg, the newsletter writer who stated this "1 or 2 in a thousand" figure as a "fact", never replied to my email asking him where he got this "fact" from.

Cheers,

Baires