"Micro-cap companies, many of which are considered designated securities by FINRA in today’s marketplace, lack the recognition required to raise the necessary capital to increase equity liquidity. Wall Street institutions have traditionally shunned the micro-cap community and, until recent regulation, the small cap hedge funds aimed specifically at this market. This lack of broker presence has forced thousands to look elsewhere for exposure.
Benchmark Advisory is well aware that there are numerous undervalued publicly traded companies waiting to be discovered by retail investors across the globe. The majority of these companies don't have the time or resources to tell their story to a wide range of investors, let alone keep in touch with their own shareholders. Benchmark Advisory thrives upon this opportunity to introduce the company to a multitude of potential investors while allowing management to center their efforts on the core aspects of the business."
My impression from talking to Bill James at Benchmark is that they have lists of people who have been advised by Benchmark in the past (and have had positive enough results from the information Benchmark has given them) so that when Benchmark calls them to recommend a company, they listen, and may then buy shares or invest in that company.
Benchmark does not guarantee the companies will do well, but makes recommendations to potential buyers (based on what the companies are telling Benchmark). Benchmark only makes recommendations for companies who have hired them; but if they give bad advice, then the list of people willing to take calls from Benchmark would shrink accordingly. (That would be the "bias" I warned you about).
I don't know why the current management decided to go with Benchmark when the prior management chose not to. I assume URHG would hire Benchmark if it felt that Benchmark could reach a larger market of people and increase the average shares traded per day and thus help get the pps increased. When Benchmark first called me on behalf of URHG it was to let me know that URHG had told them they were getting the circuit ready to run, that Benchmark had been out to Dun Glen and that they thought Dun Glen was a good buy, and that once the circuit was going the pps should rise.
Shortly thereafter, URHG announced delays or repairs or something. I spoke to Benchmark again, and they said that they stood by their belief that once the circuit was running this would still happen. However, even if Benchmark recommended URHG and brought in buyers to bring the price to ten cents, then to twenty cents, with the short sellers, etc out there, that price could not hold until the company got the circuit running and produced data of actual gold mined.
Once that happened, they had a large pool of potential buyers they would contact who could then come in, get the price up, and sustain it. Then the short sellers would not be able to keep doing what they had been doing. This tracks with URHG telling us their plan on Facebook to make progress towards getting to a point of running 40 hours, getting real numbers from that production, getting it verified, and then putting out a PR report. URHG (and we) thought progress would be faster, but at least there does seem to be steady progress.
Based upon their website, Benchmark might also be helping URHG distribute their press releases, but I don't really know. If you are going to speak to Benchmark this week, you can find out all of this stuff. If so, please feel free to correct anything I have wrong here.
It seems to me that if a "real numbers" report can be put out by URHG by the end of the third quarter (which is only a couple of weeks away), URHG would then move to become fully reporting. I assume that would take a few months. It would also cost some amount of money; but if the report was a favorable one, that might enable Benchmark to get the word out, get the share price up, attract new investors and thus pay for the costs of becoming fully reporting. I might be unrealistically optimistic here (since I definitely want and need want this stock to work), but if you speak to Benchmark you might get a clearer picture you can share with us. Be sure you make a list ahead of time of ALL of the questions you have about Benchmark and about URHG so you don't forget any when you talk to them. :^)
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