Review of Gerardo Del Real’s Junior Resource Monthly – Worth Joining or Not?

This Review of Gerardo Del Real´s Junior Resource Monthly will help you find answers to the following questions:

• Are we at the cusp of a next Supercycle?
• In other words: Is the timing right for joining? Or will you be long gone before the advice pans out?
• Are you the person for long-haul propositions? Do you have the time and the patience? 
• Should you invest in ventures with a high grade of uncertainty, risk, and volatility? High rewards will only come in some cases.
• We will help you look at them based more on past hard results than future foggy promises.

You will learn about the fascination of mining and, the exhilaration of discovering metals, and how it feels to be the modern-day Christopher Columbus.

Furthermore, to avoid being misled by predictions of a gold rush in the twenty-first century.

Finally, is Gerardo the real deal? Is he legit? Does he deliver? Will you make a fortune with his help?  

How soon? How late?

Stay with me.

Overview

Name: Junior Resource Monthly

Editor: Gerardo Del Real

Publisher: Digest Publishing

Website: www.digestpublishing.com

Services: Monthly Investment Advisory on early-stage resource stocks across the precious, base and energy metal categories

Cost: Annual subscription fee of $99

Refund Policy: six month money-back guarantee.

Who are Gerardo Del Real and Nick Hodge?   

I took this image with more information from the Daily Profit Cycle. Gerardo (from now on, I'll just call him "G.") seems to be a private person. Still, like many others in this industry, he brags about becoming rich and says that, with his help, you can get there too.

LinkedIn shows that he has a Bachelor’s of Finance from DePaul University, Chicago (2006–2010) and is, —among other things, a private equity investor and co-owner of Digest Publishing. 

There I also found a publication by G. on "3 Tiny Mining Stocks for your Radar here. Your first door into G's world of resources and mining.

On Nick Hodge, his business partner and co-owner of Digest Publishing, go here.

What does Junior Resource Monthly offer?

Bear with me. 

Before we dive into the newsletter, I'd like to tell you a little about the mining business itself:

The companies Gerardo Del Real has on his radar have to get a grip on the following:  

• Capital
• Permits 
• The technical planning 
• infrastructure requirements

Railways, roads, and everything related to access and infrastructure come later in the game. Costs are like climbing Mount Everest.

There will be some initial drilling and maybe some other findings. They would look for gold, silver, copper, nickel, zinc, cobalt, molybdenum, uranium, thorium, graphite, rare earth, etc.

On average, you must mine one ton of ore to get an ounce of gold—less if it is open-pit mining and more if it is underground. Imagine that!

Real extraction will begin far into the future.

Then come the mechanical processes of separation, filtering, and washing and other, chemical procedures.

Operations begin tiny, with few employees and little to show but ifs and whens. That's why shares are cheap. Investors want to expose themselves only a bit to startups. 

Most of the pitched companies are small-cap to mid-cap. This means their market value is between $250 million and $10 billion.

The projects are most of the time in the wilderness, far away from everything, in the territories of powerful and influential native tribes or individuals. You have to negotiate with them, sell the idea to them, motivate them, and include them in the operations,

To make matters worse, mining is a filthy business. The environmental risks are ever-present and huge: big-time contamination and carbon emissions. 

A deluge of stumbling blocks.

Many operations will never take off.

These images are from an exploration site from a Canadian company. They are drilling for gold, copper, platinum, silver and lithium.

Now, onto what you came for.

Portfolio pages

Let me help you understand the Notes to the “Buy Limits” that read: "If the stock is above this price, it is a Hold.” These are on the sheets that follow.

Gerardo establishes an amount that should not surpass X. This is the “buy limit.” If the current price exceeds that, it is a “hold," not a “buy." In these cases, he considers that the current price for the stock is already above its upside potential.

The portfolio charts should always include the current price and the percentage gain or loss. 

Saying that you can't give a percentage gain or loss because the position is "open" is a cheap way out that makes people suspicious. 

Let me explain:

If you, as an advisor, have pushed a position that has not gotten anywhere in five or six years, show the courage to present the adverse result and come up with an explanation.

I filled in the blanks as best as I could in my spidery handwriting, using the graphs available to everyone on Yahoo Finance. This is tedious work.

The service should do it for you. When you have to do the math to see what the results are, someone is hiding something.

In some instances, Yahoo Finance shows a buy or entry price for the buy date indicated that is higher or lower than what you see on G.´s Pages. I indicate the cases where the distortion was huge. Who are you to believe?

Of course, this can change the outcome completely.

But I had to use G.´s figures. 

Gerardo Del Real's Junior Resource Monthly shows five portfolios:

Core Holdings 

On this table you see eight items, but in the meantime G. has suggested his readers sell the one in the third position.

Only one of the remaining seven positions seems promising (it has been there for little more than a year and is a big winner!). It covers gold, copper, silver, platinum, and lithium.

Exciting eh?

But G. gives it an upside potential of only 34 percent: 17.00/12.72 = 1.34. 

Go figure.

Another (there for only 40 days) has a stock price already far above the buy limit Gerardo indicates—blah. It seems he doesn't believe much in its future.

Number 3, I skipped (gold—royalties and streams). It has been there for 2+ years, and its price is lower today than the entry price. I only looked at it again after seeing it teased by a primary advisory service as their No. 1 gold play. But I did not change my opinion. So off my radar, it stays.

The other four did not merit any interest. 

Exploration Plays

Of the eight positions, two have been sleeping there for 6+ years, two for 5+, another couple for 4+. They are still considered in the “exploration stage.”  I can't understand why G. was holding on them for dear life. Maybe he also fell asleep.

The two most recently bought are ho-hum.

Energy Metals

These are lithium, graphite, nickel, cobalt, and rare earths in Sweden, Romania, the USA, and Argentina. One position purchased more than six years ago has dropped; the other, bought a year ago, has not moved significantly up or down.

Will these stocks explode tomorrow?

No way.

Sold positions

We get better information here because it shows the sale price and gains and losses.  You be the judge. 

What about Number five?

It looks like this:

• The first position went up  32 percent in 6+ years.
• The second, indicates a buy price of 2,01 USD. I got one from Yahoo Finance of 0,12 USD. If that were true, it would have earned +2.617 percent in 5+ years. As explained above I go with G., even though his figures show only + 62 percent (over 5+ years) and a mediocre 15% upside potential.
• Number 3 even went down in 5+ years. But according to G., it's still a buy. ??
• Number 4 went up 194 percent in 5 + years. Not earth-shattering when you annualize that percentage. G. shows that we are five percent short of his buy limit. So, why pitch it?
• The fifth position looks like the best G. comes up with. But it is an Exchange Traded Fund (ETF). That position has gone up 39 percent in one and a half years. 

Read on to see more about this mysterious portfolio.

Now you will ask what on earth is Portfolio Number Five? It is Uranium.  Watch this video by Nick, Gerardo's partner in crime.

Uranium has a bad reputation, and -- from what you have seen above, none of Junior Resource Monthly's portfolio positions in that space look too promising. 

But it is also is the latest buzzword because, nuclear energy is by far the cleanest and safest technology now available at a reasonable cost.

So maybe you agree with Nick's vision that the public's and governments’ attitudes vis-a-vis Uranium/Nuclear power will change quickly. 

Well, Uma Thurman does.

Are these stocks (or some) to rise from the dust and explode in the short term?  

Are these the winning moonshots?

Nick thinks so, specially as to the second position on our table above. GreenBull Research's own Theodor, who de-teased the stock pitched by Nick as EnCore Energy in March 2022, does not agree and seems to side with me, with a rather less enthusiastic opinion,

The Dewey Burdock project in South Dakota, which was owned by Azarga Uranium, goes now under the name enCore Energy

In Stock Gumshoe's edition of January 12, 2023 by Travis Johnson: "DE-TEASE: “THE NEXT PALADIN ENERGY” — CAN YOU TURN $1,000 INTO $1.3 MILLION IN THE NEXT BULL MARKET"?, we find this:

Here's how enCore energy describes itself

“enCore Energy is the most diversified In-Situ Recovery uranium development company in the United States and recently announced it entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the Alta Mesa In-Situ Recovery uranium project (the “Transaction”). The Transaction will position enCore as a leading US-focused ISR uranium company with the proven management expertise required to advance multiple production opportunities within its portfolio. enCore is focused on becoming the next uranium producer from its licensed and past-producing South Texas Rosita Processing Plant by 2023. The South Dakota-based Dewey-Burdock project and the Wyoming Gas Hills project offer mid-term production opportunities, with significant New Mexico uranium resource endowments providing long-term opportunities...”

Now Stockgumshoe's comments:

What does that mean? Well, it means there’s probably still room for a speculative frenzy — if uranium goes back to the $70+ range of previous spikes sometime soon, then there will be plenty of investors happy to drive the stock higher as those projects come closer to production. But there’s also room for a pretty strong collapse if uranium prices go back to the $20-40 range and these projects get delayed further. Going by the somewhat rosy projections of net present value for those Azarga projects, which probably need to be discounted further because of inflation, my initial judgement is that enCore’s share price is in the “fair” range. Not wildly cheap, so get daydreams of 130,000% returns out of your head, but probably justifiable if uranium stays steady.

Note: The bold letters are from me, signaling what I find most interesting of the quotes.

Monthly Issues 

Since my subscription, I have only read the February 3, 2023 Issue. It mentions:

Automakers start buying Lithium from Miners

This refers to GM taking a stake in Lithium Americas.

Goldman Sachs and other forecast a bear market of Lithium because of oversupply. Gerardo's service denies this.

The CEO of Albemarle, the world’s largest lithium miner, says there is a potential jump of 40% in 2023. The prices in 2022 had already doubled.

So: The lithium price is a tough cookie.

Here are my two cents on the electrical vehicle (EV) battery space:

Graphite and graphene are the buzz nowadays, and they say that the demand for these is or will shortly be as big as Mount Fuji. You need lots of it for electrical vehicles and it's ideal for energy storage.

Shouldn't the world be looking for this material?

My colleagues think so, and they quote famous specialists like Keith Kohl, Alex Koyfman and Ray Blanco, in different articles:

July 5, 2020 by Anders: 

“Trade War Kickbacks” Review – Legit Opportunity to Get “Filthy Rich”?

June 29, 2021 by Theodor:

Ray Blanco’s “Million-Mile Battery” Stock – Revolutionizing The Most Explosive Industry On Earth?

G. predicts the same will happen in the uranium and copper markets in the next 12 months.

Portfolio moves

Our man advises you to sell the copper position in Peru with an order limit of “good until filled.” This means: You set a price X for your stockbroker. He sells when the stock goes above that price (that can happen anytime with such volatile stocks). That was the third position in Core Holdings, where only seven are left.

In this part of the newsletter, he gloats that his most recent pick (see the last item under Core Holdings), is up over 100 %. That is true, but he does not consider it a buy anymore! So, if you have it, hold. If not, you are not supposed to buy it. What's the buzz then?

In his mind, gold mining or royalties look very good at its current level of 1.900.  

Here is what the people at Stock Gumshoe's think:

"Gold is EXPENSIVE to mine, you’ve got to spend years (decades sometimes) finding it, plotting out how much there is and exactly where it is so you can plan to mine it effectively, and then you’ve got to spend huge amounts of money digging up tons of dirt and rock, crushing them to extract the small amount of gold hidden in there, then purifying and melting it down. All using a giant factory that you built, using huge piles of borrowed money and investor capital, maybe hundreds of miles from civilization and partially hundreds of feet below ground." 

G. gloats about  the seventh item in his Core Holdings portfolio  and says, “we are over 3.000 percent”.

According to Yahoo Finance, it is up 2.665 percent as of this writing (Feb. 16, 2023); it was up 3.067 percent at its peak, and all of this in less than a year and a half.

Between the Core Holdings and Exploration Plays, we have 13 pure or mixed gold plays.  And only that single position I mention above, got me excited.

But, G. indicates it has only a 34 percent upside potential. So what? We are late - what a deception. Then why care?

Portfolio News

This is the place where the newsletter educates about the projects.  For instance:

“It is hard to find words to adequately describe the impressive nature of the lithium mineralization in drill hole CV22-083. Visual estimates of spodumene abundance may give you a sense, but assays are the true measure and have certainly astounded with this hole..."

Much of the information is difficult to understand. I'm not an engineer, much less a geologist. So, it is over my head. 

Subscribing to the monthly issues will teach you a lot about a fascinating world. But G.'s flamboyant presentations might distract you from the real purpose of an advisory service—to help you get good results within a reasonable time frame.

You, on the other hand, will probably find it interesting anyways.

VRIC 2023 Overview  and G.'s closing thoughts

G. on his participation in this critical annual conference: the industry sees a “good time ahead.”

"I spoke with several financiers, CEOs, geologists, IR people etc. and across the board the sentiment is turning. Does that mean we have a raging bull market in the next quarter or two throughout the bulk of the commodity space? Not sure but I am sure you should be using what I consider the last of the quiet period in the commodity space to shore up positions you’ve had your eyes on."

Head over to this page to see more about the 2024 edition of this important annual conference. Nick Hodges will be a speaker.

Alerts

The February 16, 2023 alert titled “New Recommendation and the Next 10-Bagger” contains Gerardo and Nick Hodge’s thoughts on a Brazilian company in the palladium, platinum, rhodium, nickel, and gold space. It has also added a copper-nickel dimension.

This company is not yet  on any of the portfolios. 

Reports

This screenshot shows part of what the “Reports” tab in the Feb. 3 issue contains.

Archives

The tab on the webpage gives you access to Issues and Alerts from Jan. 2021 to Febr.2023

Subscription Process

After subscribing for a year at $ 99, there was a push “for an extra one-time investment of "only" $ 299." I wasn't ready for that one, so I got another offer instead. Answer: No. Finally, I was rewarded with a thank-you note. 

Refund policies:

"If at any time over the next six months, you’re not satisfied with Gerardo’s research ……Simply contact our customer service team, and you’ll be refunded every penny you paid for this service – no questions asked!" Gerardo Del Real.

What do others say?

Nothing on Gerardo Del Real, Nick Hodge, Junior Resources Monthly, or Digest Publishing on Trustpilot, and nothing on Pissed Consumers.

Better Business Bureau BBB:  Nada.

But: I did find these remarks in Stock Gumshoe's de-tease on uranium.