Ridge's directors are buying!

Donald Coxe makes interesting comments on major Nickel companies.



Yesterday morning on Michael Campbell's MoneyTalks weekly radio show, his guest was Donald Coxe. Mr. Coxe is honor-bound to his institutional investor clients not to answer the perpetual question, 'What are you top three picks?' However, he did offer that his recommended core holdings now are in the three sectors that he is most comforable about at present, and those are copper, nickel and oil sands. Mr. Coxe was not asked about PM stocks, but volunteered the opinion that he currently ranked PM stocks below his favored three sectors, mainly because he thinks gold stocks are substantially more expensive, relative to earnings, than are enterprises in the nickel, copper and oil sands sectors.

Mr. Coxe's main investment criterion for his institutional clients is to buy and hold resource stocks that have three characteristics: proven reserves in the ground, unhedged positions for those reserves, and operations in a politically stable jurisdiction. In the case of oil sands, a very long reserve life index (at least 50 years) also ranks as a very important criterion, especially since reserve life indices are typically less than 15 years for most conventional oil and gas ventures.

Convincingly, Mr. Coxe explained why nickel, copper, and oil sands producers currently fit the important criteria mentioned above, and he also pointed out that many of the gold investment opportunities are unfortunately in locations lacking political stability, requiring lengthy negotiations with unsettled aboriginal land claims, or requiring costly energy expenditures for transportation and mine development.