Let's get right to feedback on attendance and mood at the Cambridge House Vancouver Resource Investment Conference. Just a half dozen hours after open at presstime and the traffic, it seemed, was respectable for a Sunday, the first day of the two day conference.
It wasn't shoulder to shoulder down the rows of booths and there certainly wasn't a mass of retail investors bustling in to hear the latest stories. An exploration panel headed up by Rick Rule and headlining Brent Cook, Exploration Insights, John Kaiser, of Kaiser Research, Peter Spina, of Goldseekmoney.com, and Lawrence Roulston, of the Resource Opportunities, was about three quarters full in chairs, with a fair number standing at the back.
It was not a teeming crowd, no. But, then it wasn't a depressing showing either. Much like the mood. The junior management I spoke with were generally upbeat Sunday. In context of 2013 - a terrible year for juniors - that is something.
First I caught up with Roland Butler, CEO of Callinan Royalties. He recalled 2002.
It was not a great year for juniors. But it was a year on the cusp of a turnaround after years of a chill from the Bre-X scandal and low gold prices.
Butler vividly remembered a talk at a January Roundup Conference (which is coming up about week from now) in 2002 by Dorothy Atkinson, an analyst with Wolverton at the time, he said.
"I get the sense that something has changed in the past week," Butler recalled her saying.
"Now 2002 wasn't a spectacular year," Butler noted. "But it was the year before 2003." That was the beginning of a turnaround for juniors.
This memory was now on Butler's mind after a good run for a number of junior stock since late December 2013. Could the move have some legs?
Then again Butler added: "It may be just a rebound off such an awful, awful 2013."
The least impressed person I spoke with about the upbeat mood at VRIC was Greg Davis, Sunridge Resources' vice president of business development. He noted that last year there was also some optimism at VRIC on the back of a new year market uptick, a regular occurence for junior stock. The hope back then was that things would pick up again after an unspectacular 2012 for juniors.
And then we had 2013. In Davis' estimation, the optimism was back again this year and he wasn't reading too much into it.
Next, over at the UEX booth, Sierd Eriks, vice president of exploration, fell decidedly in the more positive camp.
"I'm surprised how busy it is for a Sunday," he said.
For comparison, he recalled the San Francisco Hard Assets conference last year. "That was pretty slow," he said, a description some would consider an understatement.
Like Eriks, Luquman Shaheen, President and CEO of Panoro Resources, pointed to a pick up in conference mood and activity. In terms of vibe he said this year was, so far, a little better than VRIC 2013.
Last year he would have described sentiment as "scared caution," he said. This year he described it as cautious optimism.
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