The one thing I found interesting in reading the great post by aitakahashi is that the NRs after the PP were very regular and I have been told the NR will be coming with much more regularity after the luncheon...strange coincidence??

i will try to respond to all those who sent me pm's and posted here. aurelian and noront have many simliarities, but the economic and poilitcal enviroments are very different.

the fact that noront is doing a pp at 2.80 doesn't mean management has lost confidence or is diluting the stock for any nefarious purpose. similarly, aurelian did a pp for less than $3 right after the stock popped on the discovery news. that may seem foolish considering the stock was on its way to $40, but you have to look at the company's past. aurelian had early success at a project called bonza las penas, and the stock ran up from 50 cents to $2.50. but then when the results from blp didn't pan out, the stock crashed back to 50 cents. one could imagine that when the stock went up to $2.50 again, and none of us knew yet how large fruta del norte would become, so management jumped at the chance to fill the treasury in case fdn turned out to be a one-hit wonder like blp, and the stock might decline to 50 cents again.

consider that noront's shares fell from $7, and have languished around 60 cents for what seems like forever, and then you can understand management thinking if they could ever issue shares at any reasonable price, they would do it. when your stock used to trade at 60 cents, it's hard to argue with raising capital at $2.80, especially since everyone remembers that the wheels nearly came off the global financial system last year, and capital has been hard to come by. this way noront is well financed now, regardless of what happens.

prior to aurelian's discovery hole, there was no discussion of assays in their news releases because there wasn't a lot of activity. in the early days, aurelian only had 2 drills. but after the fdn discovery acquired several drills, and usually had 6 or even 7 drills operating, so the tempo of activity picked up considerably. with more drilling came more news releases. the company's goal was a nr every 5 weeks, although they never seemed to happen quite that often.

after a while, we figured out that each nr from aurelian could be as important for what it did not say. when they had visually inspected a core that hadn't been assayed yet, they would report visual gold or some geo-speak about silicification that the technical people in the forum could interpret for us. but when they told us they would be drilling to the south, or at a regional target, and two months would go by with no mention of any results, we could read between the lines and guess that they hadn't found anything.

i expect that going forward we will see more of that from noront. they have the money to acquire more drills now, so we can look forward to more exploration activity. in addition, the environment is much better now in some ways than it was is 2006. back then, there was a scarcity of just about everything. drills, geologists, drill crews, equipment, and even spare tires were hard to come by. if you gave a drill crew a two-week vacation, you might never see them again! some other mining company would offer them more money, and they would be gone. but since the credit crunch, many explorers have gone out of business or placed their properties on care and maintenance, so noront should be able to acquire the resources it needs more easily than aurelian did. also, the assayers may not be as backlogged with activity now, so we may see faster turnaround times on drill results.

there were area plays near aurelian too, and speculators that missed out on aru bid up their prices. but aurelian had acquired a huge land package, so their neighbors didn't look as attractive. then came the political turmoil in ecuador, and only aurelian and the biggest players appeared to have any chance of viability, so the area plays didn't amount to anything. anyone who wants to gamble on the micro-caps in the rof is welcome to do so, but noront should be exciting enough for most of us. i hope that answers the questions i've been asked.