I'm not going to make a habit of cross-posting, but I do believe in TBLC.OB and Goldplunger just made a very valuable post on the "other Forum" in response to someone asking about the Silver Summit
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#212 Today, 02:21 PM
goldplunger
Senior Member Join Date: Jan 2007
Posts: 186
Rep Power: 1
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I did not attend but I had some friends that did.
A brief history for all of you:
First you all have to realize that the Silver Summit Group (what I call the silver OPEC) hate John Swallow thus TBLC. The silver summit group is good friends with SRLM and Ray Demotte who everyone knows don't exactly like Mr. Swallow. Swallow basically single handedly got SRLM the Sunshine way back when and has the yellow sticky note to prove it..Swallow even paid the remaining taxes owed on the mine with personal funds when that was the last $40,000 he had to his name...This was before ole Ray had enough money to even buy cigarettes. Basically what happened back then was SRLM acquired the Sunshine and at the time it only had 5-6million shares outstanding. The stock went to $10 in short order as you'll see on any 5 year chart. Swallow wanted to raise $30million immediately to fund the effort to bring the sunshine back into production, while Ray wanted to go on roadshows to brag about what SRLM just pulled off. John also wanted to bring in people immediately to replace himself and Ray since neither had experience to take a mine into production. This different thinking lead to conflict and since Swallow was lower on the pecking order he resigned...so thats it in a nutshell. To sort of backtrack on this tangent, you will find that a quality that I appreciate (i call it the Henry Ford quality) is to know when you are over your head, leave your ego and replace yourself and take on another role within the project. I say this because its ironic that Swallow just did this at TBLC when they hired Randy Hardy, so this gives a little background into why it was a good move.
Okay now to the summit:
So that rant was basically the reason why TBLC will always have the worst booth spot and worst presentation spot during the Silver Summit.
I spoke to Swallow over the weekend and he said that the booth was packed the whole time. Institutions were all over the company and loved the model. A billion (with a "B") dollar fund stopped buy and chatted with Swallow for an hour and basically said that his fund is too big to invest in TBLC, but if we can prove that the cashflow from drilling can support exploration starting in 2008, that TBLC is the most no brainer investment because of the following: Lets say that the drilling company does 10-12 million in ebitda next year ..should probably trade at a 15x multiple to ebidta which basically is like saying that the stock should be worth 150-180 million market cap in 12 months just based on the drilling side..ie (say 35m fully diluted) $4.50-5.50 stock price. And thats valuing exploration at ZERO. When you add in our exploration component who knows where it will be but it will be North of there. So his point was buying TBLC was like buying a long call option on the commodities industry as a whole. Your basically guaranteed $5 with unlimited exploration blue sky.
So they were packed at the booth..They had the last or second to last presentation slot on friday...and John said the room was surprisingly full. One guy even commented (and I thought it was funny), that he was so sick of hearing about silver, he actually wanted to hear about TBLC's gold properties.
So a good conference for TBLC..lots of institutional interest.
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Tue Sep 25, 2007 3:37 pm
