Negative: more shares; Positive: drilling will happen

Shares to be added: 450,000,000 - if all have to be put to Tangiers (LBSR's option to do this, and not at all certain that they will need to do it, and not at all certain at what price they will be able to do it, could be lower, could be higher).

End result of adding shares: drilling the first two holes (at least) gets done.

As shares are put to Tangiers to fund drilling will the price fall? No way to know.

If shares were being added to the outstanding just to keep the lights on with no prospect of doing anything else with the money a decline in the price of the stock would be almost guaranteed.

However, the money raised by this new issue will be used to test JB's theory. To anyone who thinks there is a chance of a significant success this is a motive to buy the stock on speculation (with significant risk).

Question is, will the effect of expectation of good results from drilling outweigh the effect of the greater number of shares to be issued?

The price could fall, or it could rise. If market cap stays the same the price will fall. But, as it becomes clear that drilling is actually going to happen, and it's known when it's going to happen, the hope for a major strike will have a powerful effect, perhaps leading to a significant speculative increase in market cap, perhaps even enough to overcome the increased share count and cause the pps to continue to rise, thus allowing for far fewer shares to be issued than may have been thought necessary.

Once it is understood that the money for drilling will (finally) be available, a more critical and informed attention will be devoted to JB's data, reasoning, and intuition. I would expect NDAs to be signed so prospective investors can dig into all the info available.

The Hay Mountain project is transforming from a maybe into a really. Drilling will happen unless the prospect of a flood of stock coming onto the market drives the pps so low it can’t be paid for. That seems to me to be unlikely.

Given all this no one should blame JB for trying to make the drilling of Hay Mountain an exciting adventure. I'm sure it is for him, and see no reason why it shouldn’t be for others too. There are a lot of people out there who are reasonably able to take a flyer on something like this, and now that JB’s guess is about to be tested they may decide to do it.

Rambling post because kind of like trying to solve a set of differential equations in head. Lots of moving parts, lots of different weights to be assigned to conflicting forces. Anybody's guess about some of them. Investment in exploration mining is anything but a completely rational undertaking. There are always weights to be assigned to factors beyond the limits of computation. Key factor that must be weighed: How good is this guy’s intuition?

When ZTEM of Big Chunk was begun, after staking claim to the entire caldera no one could know that multiple footprints matching Pebble would be found. They were. JB guessed right about that one. I’ve always been impressed by that. Maybe he’s right about Hay Mountain too. That’s worth something, but who can say how much. The fact that politics made further investment in BC not worthwhile has nothing to do with the point I’m making.

It’s easy to look at 450,000,000 and conclude that the pps must fall. I’m not so sure.