all of this discussion of aurelian is making me feel nostalgic. for a moment i thought i had stumbled onto the old aru board.

if you look at historical data you have to be careful to make sure all of it is consistent with the 4-for-1 split. if it isn't, and only the raw prices are shown, then the stock price looks like it falls off a cliff in june, 2007 after the split.

aru traded around 40-60 cents until just before the discovery hole in april, 2006. the stock price started to run just before the announcement, and then was halted, and reopened above $2. it spent the next few months working its way higher (not always straight up) to around 6. then they announced the monster hole of 24g/ton and the stock was halted again, and if memory serves, it resumed trading around 12.

it was only then that i realized aru was something special. some of the assays included nuggets of more than 1kg/ton. and not only were the grades amazing, but also each news release would have some info on visuals of cores that hadn't been assayed yet, which gave us confidence that each new 100m step-out hole had hit something. btw, that's the kind of news that noront is not providing, for whatever reason.

if anyone is still wondering whether to trust patrick anderson, it was at the june, 2006 agm that he said aurelian would not apply for a tsx listing, nor would the stock be split. this was because those things cost money, and he didn't expect the company to be around much longer. even then, he was already planning to take the money and run. needless to say, the stock moved to the tsx, and the shares were split 4-for-1. some theories have been advanced as to why the stock was split, some more sinister than others, but that's something that doesn't need rehashing.

the stock traded over $40 (pre-split) but in the end, geoplitical risk trumped everything else, and aru stock would go up and down depending on which ecuadoran minister said something into a microphone that day, and kinross took advantage of its opportunity. but since noront is in a safe political jurisdiction, that won't be a problem.

still, you can draw some parallels with noront. management will release news when it works to its benefit, and don't expect this management team to stick around long enough to build a mine. you can think of them as explorers, or more cynically as promoters, but they are not miners. if you're in this stock hoping for a takeover, i think you will get your wish, but just be aware that the greatest rewards in mining go to whoever builds the mine, not the exploration company that sells out, especially if they do so at an early stage.

although trading in aru was halted a few times during its run up, i would prefer that not to happen with noront. if (when) there's news that will launch the shares higher, i'd like to see it allowed to run, instead of being halted.

glta.