I totally agree on your heading, "the poor old venture exchange". However I would add a couple of comments to yours if you don't mind.

Firstly, very few companies disappear from the tsx.v. A lot of them will go into hibernation, and suddenly reappear when the time is right. At times it seems like a flower in the desert that can lay dormant for years and with the first rain, up they come. Actually a good number of the ones in trouble right now are exactly that. They have been around for years, and when the resource market came to life, so did they. They will go back to sleep for a couple of years and rejuvenate themselves when appropriate. I held seven of them from the last runup and managed to get rid of four of them this time in the black. A lot of posters say this downer is going to be a deep and long one, but I look back on this exchange shortly after the bre-ex shemoozle. There was no way anyone was ever going to take the tsx.v seriously again, it was down and out, a dead issue. Yet shortly after that came the tech bubble, and although this exchange was not the prominent one then, it did a huge runup on all the exploration companies reinventing themselves as tech companies.

Not is unique in this present market. It now sits with the prominent exploration play in the canadian market. It is also now financed to the extent that it should be able to continue to prove up value in the ground while all others are trying merely to survive. I am looking at the market in general and think that maybe we have seen the bottom.

I am possibly fortunate in that I have watched the present scenario play itself out a couple of times in the past, and can therefore be a little more at ease when posting here, but I do see a good opportunity for any of us that are true speculators. I am very optomistic about the medium term prospects with Noront. What else can I be. As Crasydik says, I am down a big seven figures from it's peak and still holding.

Best of the season to all

K