Ladies / gents:

...here's an interesting article from last week's "Business In Vancouver" magazine (June 12th; Issue #1181; page 11) re: explaining the dearth of news releases from junior miners the last little while.

Maybe it's not just CUU that has been slow to release any worthwhile news the past few months.

By Glen Edwards Tue Jun 12, 2012 12:01am PST

Investor indifference has many resource companies adopting a flip-flop on an old proverb: "Good news is no news."

With a chill in the equities market, resource companies are finding their news updates – even positive developments – are not garnering any investor traction. As such, companies are bunkering down and holding back non-material news until the storm shows signs of passing, said Judy Hutchins, senior vice-president sales (Canada) for Marketwire.

Marketwire is one of the main disseminators of news for publicly traded companies in Canada and is a hub for business trends and activities.

Hutchins said the company has "definitely seen a decrease over last year" in news filings from both TSX and TSX Venture companies.

"What we generally see is that companies just retrenched. There's so much instability in the marketplace. They're not getting financing; IPOs are not coming out. So, really all they're doing is sending out what they have to – material news, which legally has to go out. Any of the more promotional news or non-material news they're not sending it out because it's not making an impact on their share price."

However, investors and exploration companies alike remain addicted to bonanza-type discovery news. Vancouver-based GoldQuest Mining Corp.'s (TSX-V:GQC) share prices sat at $0.08 and daily volume of less than 100,000 shares until recent news of drilling in the Dominican Republic returned 231 metres of gold-copper mineralization.

By end of day, GoldQuest soared 288% to close at $0.31 as 16.3 million shares changed hands. The share price for Mawson Resources (TSX:MAW) recently surged 33% to $1.44 on a relative spike in volume of 236,000 shares after it released news that drilling hit six metres of 617 grams gold per tonne from its Rompas property in northern Finland.

According to most recent year-to-date statistics for the TSX Venture Exchange, IPO and equity financings have declined a dismal 51.7% compared with last year, from $4.64 billion to $2.24 billion. On the TSX, although IPOs have plummeted 75%, overall financings have increased 21.5 % year-to-date, to $17.24 billion from $14.20 billion.

The positive-negative split between the TSX and TSX Venture reflects the level of risk that institutional and retail investors have an appetite for.

And that quality still counts, said Ali Pejman, Canaccord Genuity's managing director of investment banking.

"We're still cautiously optimistic. Good products will always find money and shareholders," Pejman said. "But definitely there's been a flight from risk. And there's lot of capital sitting on the sidelines."

Ongoing uncertainty about the financial stability of the Euro zone, as well as economic weakness in United States and China, has put pressure on some financings, said Kevin Campbell, Haywood Securities' managing director of investment banking.

However, although the past 12 months have felt like "a death by a thousand cuts," Campbell is quick to point to the blue sky that lies ahead.

He said funding shortfalls are simply delaying inevitable supply needs in the foreseeable future.

"In the longer term, we here remain extremely bullish. If anything, supply has been further restricted by what's going on right now in so far as new project financing not being available. So there's projects being put on hold that have been factored into supply curves going forward – combine that with demographic growth and economic activity in the developing world, which is not taking a breather."