The Next Bull Market Move Interview - Jim Pettit, CEO of Aben Resources

On The Next Bull Market Move we have a new guest Jim Pettit. How are you today, Jim?

Very good, thanks for calling.

No problem. You are the CEO of Aben Resources, and over the last week or so there's been a lot of excitement in the market about certain drill results you've had. But I want to start with your background. You previously were the CEO of Bayfield Ventures Corp. Can you give our listeners a description of the history behind that company?

Sure, yeah. Bayfield was another junior exploration company that I started up. We were initially actually over in Asia, in Mongolia, and pulled out of there when ... I just didn't have a really good flavor for the government of the day, that sort of thing. I don't like political risk, so we moved back to Canada and I acquired some ground in northwestern Ontario. Turned out to be the right thing to do.

What we did is we ended up with a property that ended up being right inside the mine plan for New Gold's project, Rainy River, and while we were drilling away, coming up with some really good grades, that sort of thing, we got their attention. They had to do something because they actually had a big part of our property in their conceptual pit plan.

So it turned out pretty good for the Bayfield shareholders, at the end of the day we ended up selling out to New Gold all shares, just as the market was turning down. We consummated the deal New Year's Eve 2014. And now I've got Aben as my main focus, it's a company that's been operating out of my office for a while, but I took it on and redirected it from uranium into gold, and we've now got three projects. All early stage exploration projects with a lot of historical data, that's kind of a criteria.

I'm not alone in my background here too, I've got Ron Netolitzky, who's a bit of a legend in western Canada, especially in the Golden Triangle area. He discovered the Snip Mine, and was involved in the discovery of the Eskay Creek Mine. His background is also very much keyed into M&A, he develops projects and majors come along and end up buying them, that's just the way that ... Our whole system is really geared for that.

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The junior explorers take the grassroots project, and you develop them to a point, your plan is to go to production, so you work your way through that whole process, and along the way the majors who have all trimmed back their exploration budgets utilize these juniors to do that work for them, and they kinda go around and they cherry pick. They will come to the companies that have the good management, good exploration techniques, and histories of success.

And Tim Termuende is also on our board, he's a very active director with me. He started his whole career with Ron Netolitzky up in the Golden Triangle many years back. And we've got some really good advisors there too, directing us, who also have great careers in the Golden Triangle. Because the Golden Triangle started 30, 35 years ago in earnest, when those discoveries were made, Snip and Eskay Creek. There's been a couple of resurgences of that area over the years, every decade or so, largely because something will happen up there where the infrastructure improves and you can get in easier. Costs are coming down.

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Speaking of which, this last week the market has definitely been excited by the first drill results that you've made in your drilling program. Can you give our listeners a description about that and what will be happening going forward?

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