These properties aren't generating royalties right now, so you would be incurring costs to spin out shares that won't actually have a dividend to pay, and will be incurring corporate costs to manage the company (ex/ management services, registration costs, etc.), Plus, if you combine it with Magpie, you would have a long term exploreco combined with unrelated royalties, doesn't make a whole lot of sense - whereas right now FNC is an incubator, it makes sense to still hold the NSRs until at least they're generating decent cash. Then, spinning out the NSRs might make sense down the road once they're actually generating sufficient cash flow and can actually pay dividends - if you have sufficient access to capital to develop your core properties without having to rely on the royalties for funding. But also - having cash flow in FNC improves its bargaining power when negotiating future financings which will be needed, and that might benefit any one of their projects...It's just too soon IMO to be considering spinning these out.

Doing an IPO on Magpie might make sense once the iron ore sector is trading strongly, now it looks like it's trying to move out of a two year decline, so any kind of pricing you'd get on an IPO would be weak, people are only tentatively moving into the sector, and weak pricing is not what you want. Think about it this way, you are the one that would be selling Magpie here, since you are a shareholder. So looking at the iron ore sector, do you want to price your interest in this environment, or would you rather wait until the sector improves more and you can get a better price? Because if you price your IPO in a weak market you're diluting yourself. The IPO market will track sentiment in the sector, it doesn`t matter how wonderful the asset is, especially if the property is further out for cash flows due to infrastructure versus some comparable properties. In addition, pricing on an IPO would be weakened in this environment because of the tax question in Quebec - very difficult to price something when you don`t know how big a hit those taxes will be, and so if an underwriter is pricing a deal, guaranteed they`ll be pricing even more conservatively because of that...Just not the right time yet IMO.