News Flash, Feb. 10: White Gold Corp. announced Thursday that its maiden diamond drilling program on its Ulli’s Ridge target in the Yukon has intersected “high-grade” gold, encountering 6.94 g/t gold over 19.50 meters and 1.36 g/t gold over 18.50 meters, the company said.
Seven holes totaling 1,400 meters tested a 550-meter strike length in 2021, encountering 4.67 g/t gold over 6.10 meters and 1.35 g/t gold over 21.33 meters. All holes intersected gold mineralization with significant results, the company said.
The results “continue to demonstrate the extensiveness of gold mineralization in this area. Ulli’s is situated on a multi-kilometer gold in soil anomaly which hosts several other prospective targets in close proximity to our flagship deposits,” White Gold Chief Executive Officer David D’Onofrio said.
The strongest drilling results were returned from the southeasternmost hole, which intersected 6.94 g/t Au over 19.50 meters from 64.50 meters downhole, including high-grade subintervals of 39.10 g/t Au over 1.50 meters and 45.40 g/t Au over 0.83 meters.
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Yukon gold explorer White Gold Corp. (WGO:TSX.V; WHGOF:OTCQX; 29W:FRA) is highly focused on its methodical, efficient, economical and sustainable exploration efforts across its vast 420,000 ha property in northern Yukon, Canada.
Mr. Steven Palmer, a top-rated fund manager from AlphaNorth Asset Management, commented in a discussion with Streetwise Reports that White Gold's solid management team, proven track record and success in finding gold, strategic partnerships with gold industry majors and premier operating jurisdiction is what makes the company stand out amongst other firms in the junior mining space.
Mr. Palmer stated that AlphaNorth recently increased its ownership interest in White Gold near the end of 2021 as the junior mining sector had gotten pretty beaten up partially due to a large amount of tax loss selling taking place in November and December. So therefore, AlphaNorth opted to take advantage of the lower share price and became further buyers of White Gold during that time. Palmer advised that AlphaNorth has been an investor in White Gold for many years going back to before 2016 when the company first went public.
Palmer explained his rationale stating, "We like White Gold because it's got a team that's done it before, that's found gold and they've been successful, and they also have the backing of two majors, Kinross Gold Corp. (K:TSX; KGC:NYSE) and Agnico Eagle Mines Ltd. (AEM:TSX; AEM:NYSE)."
Palmer added that he thinks Agnico Eagle owns just under 20% and Kinross Gold owns about 16% of White Gold.
Palmer highlighted that another key strength of the company that cannot be replicated is that Shawn Ryan is involved in the company. Ryan is a pioneer and a legend in the Yukon having been credited with at least two major gold discoveries there.
Palmer believes that the prospects for White Gold are quite good as the company has already got a resource underway. The company is doing lots of drilling on the property and is expecting more results still to come out, which AlphaNorth believes will be good.
Palmer mentioned that another area that seems to go unnoticed is the firm's relative valuation. Prior to White Gold accumulating its large collection of properties, the properties were owned by several different companies, and a couple of years ago, when the area was a little hotter, the collective value of the companies that owned the rights to these properties was significantly higher than White Gold's market cap today.
Palmer added that this disparity in valuation has occurred even though those properties have now been advanced through White Gold's successful yearly drilling efforts which have aided in establishing a bigger resource.
Last November White Gold announced two sets or very positive drill results. The first assay results were from its Ulli's Ridge target located 3 km southwest of its flagship Golden Saddle and Arc Deposits. The work at Ulli's Ridge included a total of 11 holes totaling 937m, with 8 of the holes drilled at Ulli's Ridge and 3 other holes at the Minneapolis Creek target. The company reported that 3 rotary air blast (RAB) holes drilled at the Ulli's Ridge target intersected significant gold mineralization including hole WHTULR21RAB006H which returned 6.10m of 4.67 g/t Au. The firm followed up the encouraging results at Ulli's Ridge with diamond drilling and it is expected that the additional results will be available shortly.
The firm released a second set of very promising drill results in mid-November for its maiden diamond drill program at its Betty Ford Target, one of five targets identified to date at its newly discovered and wholly owned 17,127 ha Betty property. Initial results from Betty demonstrated broad zones of significant near surface gold mineralization including one hole that intersected 50m of 3.46 g/t Au and another that returned 48m of 1.17 g/t Au. The Betty property is located about 40 km east of Newmont Corp.'s (NEM:NYSE) Coffee Gold deposit that remarkably was first discovered by White Gold's co-founder and Chief Technical Advisor Shawn Ryan earlier in his career.
The company reported that it drilled 1,364m in 6 diamond drill holes at Betty Ford. In addition, White Gold stated that it had drill tested a second nearby target at Betty called the Betty White target and that it anticipates it will receive these results soon.
White Gold is a pure exploration company that focuses strictly on exploring and discovering gold and leaves the construction, development and mining operations to the developers with specific expertise in those areas. Regarding this approach, Steven Palmer commented, "That's the best way to do it, because in terms of evaluation lift for a stock, the big lifts are when the initial discovery is made and then again when you're going to initiate the building of the mine."
Palmer elaborated adding, "It's a long capital intensive process to start a mine and I think what White Gold is doing is they have many attractive targets on their large land position and they've got seats at the table with Agnico Eagle and Kinross already that are there advising and helping them."
Palmer continued with that line of thinking and surmised, "So you know, at some point White Gold is either going to spin out some of these assets and focus on more early-stage exploration opportunities on the property, or one of these companies, Agnico or Kinross, is going to make a move that could potentially start a bidding war for the company."
In the event that Agnico, Kinross or another suitor decides to make a bid to acquire White Gold in its entirety, Palmer indicated that AlphaNorth would most likely be inclined to accept the offer and move on to search for a new high growth prosect in the space because under that scenario it would expect to receive a premium price for its White Gold shares. The firm would also be unlikely to hold on to shares in any acquiring firm since "it's not as easy to do five times your money on a large cap gold deal and though it does happen, there are more attractive earlier stage opportunities to reallocate the money."
There is also a case to be made that one of White Gold's strategic partners might buy one of the firm's projects and not buy the entire company. In that case, it would effectively provide a dividend of sorts to White Gold that would reduce or eliminate the need to dilute shareholders and raise funds to spend on some of the other targets which in turn might present an even more attractive value proposition.
Palmer noted that acquisitions have picked up in the last few months in the gold space. Palmer added that he believes that gold price will trend higher and have a good year in 2022 and suggested that if many people perceive that the gold price is going to start moving because of higher inflation then that will spur more activity in the sector across the board.
Palmer pointed out that Bitcoin has taken away some of the investors that in the past might have bought gold stocks as an inflation hedge but said that the recent correction in Bitcoin and the like over the last couple of months may end up proving to be good for gold.
Palmer and his firm do not make any specific forecasts for gold or other metal prices and indicated that many companies often just look at recent pricing data over the last few months, discount it by some arbitrary amount and use those assumptions going forward. Palmer advised that he uses technical analysis frequently to remove the subjectiveness out of the equation. Palmer advised that chart patterns appear to show that gold wants to break out and go higher as there is not much upward resistance but cautioned that he has thought that this would occur for a couple of years, and it has disappointed him.
When asked to summarize what aspects of White Gold are most interesting to you as an investor, Palmer commented that his firm AlphaNorth has been an investor in White Gold for several years and prior to the company's public listing in 2016.
Steven Palmer replied that, "Firstly, I don't think there are many junior companies that have such a large land package with so many attractive targets on it." In addition, "they have a team of guys like the company's co-founder and Chief Technical Advisor Shawn Ryan and as you may know, there are not many people in the gold space more credible than him."
Palmer continued, "Another key factor is that you've already got two majors with a significant investment in the company, so it's well financed." The company announced in December that it completed another round of financing so therefore "they are totally cashed up."
Palmer emphasized that, "With White Gold you are able to check a lot the boxes in terms of management, project upside, and finance, etc., and one other very important thing is that the company is located in a premier jurisdiction in Canada."
Palmer stated that "the company also has a very compelling valuation with respect to the rest of the junior gold group." The company should also benefit from any increases in the price for gold as that would provide some new general funds flow into the sector.
AlphaNorth remains confident in the opportunities and potential upside for White Gold. Steven Palmer mentioned that investment returns are not always completely linear. There are times where a company or its stock can take hold and correct itself in a very quick manner when least expected. Palmer noted that there are times where "you hold a stock for a couple years and it does nothing despite the fact that it's making positive progress and then all of a sudden, there may or may not be some catalyst that just causes it to double or triple in a month, and that happens regularly."
White Gold Corp. is a gold explorer operating exclusively in the historic White Gold District in Yukon, Canada. The Company owns a portfolio of 21,111 quartz claims across 31 properties covering 420,000 ha that encompass greater than 40% of the district. Since the first gold rush occurred in the Yukon in 1896, the region has produced greater than 20 Moz Au. Several large new gold finds were made in the area starting around 2010. The company's "flagship" White Gold property hosts the Golden Saddle and Arc deposits which together have an Indicated resource of around 1.14 Moz of 2.28 g/t Au and an Inferred resource of 402.1 Koz Au at 1.39 g/t. The firm's VG Deposit located 11 km north of Golden Saddle hosts an Inferred resource of 267 Koz of 1.62 g/t Au.
White Gold Corp. shares trade under the symbol "WGO" on the TSX Venture Exchange as well under the ticker symbols "WHGOF" on the U.S. OTCQX market and "29W" on the Frankfort Stock Exchange.
WGO shares last closed for trading at CA$0.67/share on Friday, February 4, 2022, and at that time, White Gold Corp. had 138,496,170 shares outstanding and a total market cap of CA$94.18 million (~US$74.27 million).
Steven Palmer, CFA is the President, CIO and co-founder of AlphaNorth Asset Management. AlphaNorth is based in Toronto and manages the AlphaNorth Partners Fund, a diversified, Canada-focused, long-biased small cap equity hedge fund serving accredited investors in Canada.
Since the AlphaNorth Partners Fund was formed in 2007, it has returned a total of 315%, vastly outperforming its benchmark TSX Venture index, which over the same period declined by more than 65%.
In October 2021, the firm was awarded first place at the 2021 Alternative IQ Canadian Hedge Fund Awards as the top performing equity hedge fund in Canada based upon its 5-year average return rate 40.35%. Quite notably, AlphaNorth also placed third in the 1-year return category with a gain of 153.35% and came in second in 3-year performance with an average annual return of 40.98%.
The AlphaNorth fund invests in all sectors including critical and precious metals, biotech, energy, healthcare, technology and consumer products companies with the primary objective of getting in very early on situations where the firm can earn multiples on its money.
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