Sinbob,

Based on your description, I may be one of the bullish professional writers you mentioned. Yes, I am a professional engineer with my own business, but the only job I have done for Wall Street or Howe Street is that I analyzed the foundations for Goldman Sachs new headquarter building in New York a couple of years ago. Yes I have written bullish articles on ECU because the information I wrote about is based on objective numbers which indicate ECU is undervalued and also because I own shares of ECU and would like to see their share price increase also. Most of my shares were bought at $0.30 several years ago before lift off, and the remaining were bought around $1.67 per share on the way down about a year ago. My average purchase price is $0.61 per share, so my 10 bagger has turned into a 20% loss.

For the last several years, ECU has done the big things right including discovering a huge deposit and more recently purchasing and operating a mill. They have also done some things wrong including upseting their JV partner and making relatively unsecured loans to their employees. They also have a fair amount of debt and several million dollars of accounts payable. More recently they anounced an employee stock option plan just when the share price was starting to move up and then suddenly retracted it. Also ECU has great grades but many of the veins are narrow. The NI43-101 cost estimates show these veins can be mined profitably, but big money may want proof first. Also most of ECU's metal is in sulphide ores which are processed into zinc and lead concentrates. Until recently zinc and lead prices have been in the cellar.

I would give ECU the following grades:

Deposit Size - A

Deposit mineability - B

Geotechnical staff - A

Mine operations - B

Corporate Management - C+