breaking things is fun

It takes a special kind of person to work in the mining industry, whether you're a geologist or an engineer or a miner or a bush worker, you need to been passionate about what you do. A teacher used to tell me that "without the heart, there can be no connection between the mine and the hand". The working conditions can be terrible, from extreme heat to frigid colds, and there's always the fact that you're probably going to be working long days for long stretches of time in the middle of nowhere. The business can be a killer to your social life, I see a lot of people bail out after a couple years or months because they just can't hack it anymore and really, I can't blame them one bit. so..where am I going with this?

One thing I used to do, besides fish every day and break things (if you keep breaking things, you'll always have something to fix, thus, you'll never be bored) is play the stock market. The rush of making a quick buck and the time it takes to do all your research can keep you pretty level headed. Over the past few years you couldn't lose if you played the junior market, honestly, you had to be retarded to not at least make some money on some stocks if you played it regularly, every commodity was up, every major was swallowing juniors...times were good. This of course breeds the "I r smrt" crowd of people who think the good times will never end and it was their savy inestment knowledge that predicted a gold junior with extremely narrow high grade gold would jump from 0.20$ to 0.50$ when they released news that they were now changing said gold property into a rare-earth metals play with values that were...normal earth crust values at best (MJO.t)....wtf, sometimes the market confuses the shit out of me and people are willing to buy into anything. But of course we all know how things have turned, it's much harder for anyone to convince Bay street that what they have is worth some cash, speculative stocks isn't something people look for in times of economic turmoil. But it's not all bad, a good and well informed investor should be alright if he/she sticks to the basics.

Companies with cash in the bank are your friends, they are the ones who will wheather the storm and possibly grab good properties or companies at firesale prices, besides them and majors with producing mines, there aren't too many places I would invest my money into, a lot of companies who have good properties will need to dilute their shares if they want to keep working, either that or they will sit out for a while until the good times and commodity prices roll up again. Gold is still very bullish, so if there's one place I wouldn't be scared of it would be gold juniors in established mining districts.

I now own my first Gold major stock, I just tendered my Aurelian shares for Kinross, the buyout that I was waiting for came, it just came at a much lower price than I was hoping for. Besides that I own a few gold juniors and one Mcfauld's area play. I've shrunken my exposure to the markets and it seems my timing was pretty good (lucky). Keep an eye out for bottomed out companies, just watch out and don't buy dogs that won't recover from the crunch.