Niocorp Developments Ltd (NB)

[Contrarian58]

It's unlikely that you can "lose every penny" on your Niocorp investment. Unlike exploration plays, where a resource is unknown and its value highly speculative, this particular project has known resources worth billions of dollars. Even if Niocorp isn't able to pull this off, it's likely that some other mining company will pick it up, if only for the option value. My guess is that half to two-thirds could be shaved off the current price, but the project is far too advanced to be abandoned.

That being said, I think the prospects of that happening are pretty slim, barring a worldwide economic meltdown. As the saying goes in the mining business "The best projects will always get built." That's generally true, as long as you add the word "eventually" to the sentence. I got into this investment at around a dime, back when it was still Quantum, and before Mark Smith. The fact that he eventually joined (and after I had made a bucketful of money on Molycorp) was a bonus. I have confidence in him, not because Molycorp was a huge success, but because of how he resurrected a California Superfund site into a functional mine.

I confess that this project is a couple years behind the schedule I originally anticipated so long ago, but I think the reward will be worth the wait. Mining projects rarely yield a quick return, unless you happen to get lucky during the exploration stage, but they can sometimes handsomely reward those with patience.