Pretium 2017 recap – “they will not have a mine producing 425,000 oz. a year for the next 20 years”

(Pretium has a US$1.8B market cap and the borrow is in the low single digits.  I have written about this stock previously.)

Back in 2013, Strathcona resigned from the Brucejack gold project due to disagreements over what Pretium was telling investors.  Graham Farquharson (Strathcona’s head honcho) was being a gentleman and allowed Pretium to disclose on their own terms (with their own PR spin).  Unfortunately, Pretium instead tried to discredit Strathcona.

So, Farquharson did an interview with The Northern Miner, a trade publication.  You can read the interview on the website (no paywall):

Yes, and we told them that it has an excellent chance of being a small-tonnage, high-grade mine in the Cleopatra vein, and a couple of other similar occurrences that they found in the last drilling program.  If they lined all those up, there’s an excellent chance that they could have a small-tonnage, high-grade gold mine. But they will not have a mine producing 425,000 oz. a year for the next 20 years, as they have been advertising so far.

Here’s the crazy part.  This is 2017 and Pretium is almost finished building that mine.

Aren’t cars supposed to be flying by now?

Flying cars as depicted in this cartoon series from the 60s.

Predicting the future is hard.  Yet many people talk about self-driving cars as if they will become reality in a few years.  Unfortunately, the current reality is that we are far away from commercialization of fully self-driving cars.  Google is the closest, yet its self-driving car technology has some serious limitations:

• It requires an attentive human driver to drive safely.  This largely defeats the point of a self-driving car.
• It doesn’t work if there is heavy snow or rain.
• The car only works in areas with special 3-D maps, which are currently expensive to create.
• The system can’t handle construction zones.
• Because they drive in a non-human manner, the cars get rear-ended more often than human drivers.
• There are other situations where the cars may have problems – left turns without a light and heavy traffic, potholes, pulling aside for emergency vehicles, obeying directions from a police officer, ice on the road surface, cyclists doing a track stand, etc. etc.

I find it interesting that so many people have been sucked into the idea that self-driving cars will be an imminent revolution that will disrupt our lives.  Mostly, there are many people who want to believe that technology will disrupt our lives in a positive way.  There is no differentiation between technologies with major technical obstacles (e.g. artificial intelligence, machine learning) and technologies with few obstacles (e.g. cloud computing, social media, smartphone apps, over-the-top video, etc.).