Hi All,

I want to preface my musings by saying that today's share price, and the share price activity for the past two months is nothing to by happy about for those who have watched the stock hit a high of $7+. Which is why I will temper my enthusiasm.

Making money in the market is difficult at the best of times, and many of the long term NOT holders have seen very many "best of times" in the last short year and a half. How else do you explain an .18 cent stock hitting over $7.

But like those who bought at $4 - $7 only to see today's price, there were a group of us who owned a lot of Noront shares at averages between .75 cents and $1.00 only to see the price drop last August to a low of .29 cents.

The similarities between the two drops is compelling.

The market last August during that drop was one of fear and selloffs as the world markets begin to unravel the hysteria often referred to as the subprime crisis. Don't quote me on these numbers LTGold, but I believe a couple of hundred billion in bad loans triggered a trillion dollar loss in market equity.

Then we saw a similar fall in January, and more recently June.

So three significant market drops in a one year period.

Why is the overall market important? Most investors desire investments that are less risky, yet provide some kind of return that beats inflation. I am not talking about the speculator (like all of us on here) who is willing to risk some money for a large return. I am talking about the hundreds of billions of dollars invested by pension funds, mutual funds, banks, ...

Most of these funds invest in the safer stocks. Those companies with steady ROIs, those that annually pay dividends, those with good market share, and those with low debt and high assets. Some call this the "blue-chip" type of investment. You should be able to average 6 to 10 percent with this type of investment each year. During bullish years, much more. But on average 6 to 10 %.

A look at how the markets overall perform every year (as a collective average) will show similar numbers.

Investing in Noront is no where in the same league as the blue-chip investment. All of us know why the risks are different (and thus the potential gains) this so I will not elaborate. What I do want to show is that there is a link between the overall market and Noront.

If the overall market is down, it does not matter that the price of Gold is high, nickel is high, or platinum is high. A down market weighs on the collective psyche of investors, big and small.

For the past few weeks I have watched the share price drop from $3.50 (where I got back in) to a low of $2.12 before the rebound to $2.35 today. I have averaged down three different times during this period because to me $3.50 is still a safe price for this stock in a stable market. The key word is stable. The market of four months ago is not the same market today.

One of my colleagues shared a story with me today that I did not find too much press about. Something about two large investment firms not properly reporting $75 Billion in short term mortgage losses on their books. I believe this had something to due with the bad morning the markets faced. Then Oil drops 8 bucks over two days. This helped the recovery of those markets. All of this casts a light (or shadow as the case may be) on our little stock on the TSX Venture.

I believe Noront is suffering from an overall investor confidence loss in the economy and investing in general, and not in the company, the management, or the high grade properties. Overall a bearish view on the SPs potential during the summer. If the general belief is that the trend is down, people will react that way. If one person blow their nose on television and says "sub $2" the lemmings follow creating a self fulfilling prophecy.

It does not matter what the company is worth. There are many companies out there today that are worth more dissolved than their share price is showing. Reminds me of that movie "Wall Street". This is especially true of those trading in the sub .10 cent range. As one poster mentioned on here that those will be the ones to rebound the highest when the market turns around and future speculation based on resource shortages return. My hope is to take some future Noront profits and pick these ones up.

Coswil has been doing a good job explaining TA (technical analysis) on here. This is essentially trend analysis of past behavoiur in order to predict future behavior. Behaviour being buying or selling, thus the likelyhood of a share price increase or decrease. Some will argue as to the relevance of such methods to a stock (especially when out of the blue news hits) but I pay attention to it for the sole reason that many others use this to base their actions.

As there are many automated systems out there using similar TA prediction models to create a buy or sell decision for their owners, then an investor needs to acknowledge that these have an impact on a share price, sometimes positively and sometimes negatively.

Day traders and trend traders make their bread and butter understanding the intricities of these systems and following trends.

But what about the average guy or gal trying to get ahead. The ones without the actuarial science degrees or even Level 2 access.

All I can say is that learning from the more experienced retail investors often helps. People like OldJoe who posted a whallop of a post today. Nice to see the 20 year veterans come out to support the troops when the shelling is going on.

This may be a shock to many, but I have only invested in stocks for just over two years now. I have followed stocks for 20 years, but was never really interested in making 10 percent on my money ( I would rather spend it). It wasn't until a friend of mine with his entire life savings in junior mining companies talked to me about these companies and shared his information with me that I decided to open up a brokerage account. Then I found I enjoyed the research and have been hooked since.

And one week after my first 5K investment I was down 20%. It was a leveraged Gold fund and gold dropped from $480 to $380.

A few months later I convinced my fiance to invest in a Diamond mine called Tahara. Even with some "good wink wink" information the investment went dud. It took two months to see my now wife's money drop 54%. Selling at that point and admitting the company was a dud was harder than the financial loss.

My first lesson: A dud stock is a dud stock and no amount of hopeful thinking will return the price to its past levels. Best to sell if you think it is a dud and look forward to the next investment.

In hindsight, this was a good move as that stock I bought for $2.07 cents and sold for exactly $1.00 is now worth .03 cents two years later. The proceeds of that sale went to buy Noront at .19 shortly after the sale.

I made over 300 trades last year and after calculating the results at the end of the year, I lost more money than I made on all but a half dozen or so trying to day trade or riding hypes. We are not talking huge losses here. I seem to have a knack for knowing when to get out because of lesson number one above.

But with Noront and some others there were some good profits to be had. To help pay for a honeymoon, I remember selling TCR (a good moly company) for .145 cents just before the moly boom. Something had to go and that one had not seen action for two months and was what some would call a dead stock. Not a dud, just dead. No volume. And then two weeks later I walked into an Internet cafe while away to see it had jumped to .90 cents. 500% profit gone (but I am still married :)

Lesson #2: If a company has the goods, best to stick long with it until news proves otherwise.

I have told many on here never to set stop losses. Why is that? First, it is trying to predict the future. That is, if the future is really bleak and I am not at my computer, then the computer will sell the stock for me. The underlying assumption to all of this is that the stock will continue to go down after your stock loss is triggered so that your sell will prove wise.

I remember a uranium stock I bought during Uranium mania in early 2007. Bought in at 1.93. Next week the price dropped to 1.75 then low volume trading hit whereby the bids were very low. Out of the blue the stock dropped to $1.20 before returning that same day to $1.75. What happened?? Somebody had set a stop loss and somebody else dumped a few shares to drop the price, trigger the stop loss and then scoop up those shares at a low price on a low volume day.

Lesson #3: If you believe a stock will lose enough to trigger your loss, why not sell now and lose less instead? Better to do that than to watch your shares get scooped during a low volume trading session whereby you have to buy them back at a higher price.

The opposite is also true. I remember buying a stock at .005. That's right. One half of one cent. The stock then hit a day high of .05 for one second, and then returned to .005. What happened? Somebody set an ask at .05 and somebody else bought for the market price. The demand for the stock due to hype saw millions of shares trading with the asks being quickly taken out. At one point the only remaning shares left for sale were this "shot in the dark" open order. Somebody lost 90% on that trade (and it wasn't me).

Lesson #4: Always set a price you are willing to buy a stock at. If you bid too high (the price has gone lower in the mean time) you will get the stock at the lower price most of the time. If you miss it during a wild run up, the extra cost you might have to pay while you change your bid may be a lot less than if you take out an much higher open ask at market.

Finally, I use my business background when investing. The same questions you would ask your buddy if he wanted to open up a home business and was asking you for a loan. (lesson #5 is never lend to friends or family but that is another story. Better just to give them the cash if you are so inclined to do so).

You would ask questions like: What experience do you have? What is your market? Who is your competitition? What are the risks facing your business? Who else is investing with you? How much do you plan on paying yourself as a salary? What are the chances I will see my money back?

When I ask these questions of Noront, I see very good experience. That was the reason I went long way back in 2006. When you have a president who is already rich (his family owns part of a very large steel company in Ontario) I have more faith than somebody looking to "get rich". When his buddy was the former president of Hemlo Gold, this tells you something. Especially when the office is made up of only seven people including the receptionist. These guys has been there and done that and believed they could ride out into the Canadian Mining history sunset with what they had found at Windfall Lake.

In terms of the other questions and Noront, I still believe that Gold will be in demand, even more into the future than it is today. $2000 an ounce gold is not very far off. It seems hard to believe but so was a Canadian dollar at par just three years ago. So there is a market for what they will produce.

I also saw that Mr. Nemis made a salary of $60,000 a year plus all those options which people still criticize him for when he sells just a few. The man was sitting on the biggest gold find in Canada since the gold rush and did not give himself a raise. He let the share price do that for him. Though the bashers will harp on this at every turn, even the president will sell some shares some of the time. It is not treason, especially at his salary.

Then of course there is the proof in the pudding (the product). The 52 ounces of visible gold over 4.8 metres at Windfall and the 7% nickel and high copper, PGMs and chrome at Double Eagle. The 62 million in the bank does not hurt either as it protects them from having to shake hands with the devil one more time.

Unlike many days I have owned Noront, I had a nice smile on my face today. I was able to buy more shares at under $2.50. Today feels the exact same way as it did last August when Conseco and I were buying up shares all the way down to the drop to .29 cents. I believe I paid .36 for mine ;) Given what we knew about Windfall, this was a steal back then.

Given what I know about Double Eagle and Windfall, $2.45 and $2.35 were steals for me today. Should this drop to $2. So be it. I will be finding more ways to get more shares at that price. Like Old Joe says, opportuntities like this only come around once in a lifetime.

Lesson #6: Not everything that shines like gold is gold, but when it is you best be staking a claim and making an investment. Not only do we have gold in that ore at Windfall, it is highly visible and it is real. Those that choose to stay the course, though there is still risk, may very well find that these lazy days of cheap Noront summer shares will be a thing of the past, just like last year's .36 cent shares.

M1.