Equinox Partners Precious Metals, L.P. - Q1 2019 Letter
Dear Partners and Friends,
Our positive performance so far this year is in part a reversal of the aggressive tax loss selling some of our companies endured at the end of last year. Goldmoney, Altius, Great Panther, West African Resources, Mandalay, and Bear Creek are each up double digits this year after having declined double digits in Q4 2018. Shortly after Canadian tax loss selling season expired on December 27, the shares of these companies began rebounding on little to no fundamental news.
We also own a handful of companies that had very good Q4 2018 performance and which continued to perform well thus far in 2019. Sandstorm and Dundee Precious Metals are up over 10% for the year to date after appreciating substantially in Q4 of last year. The shares of MAG Silver and Gold Road, which were down slightly in Q4, are also up substantially for the year to date. In these four cases, the share price performance is correlated with positive company specific developments, which we highlight as follows:
· MAG: On April 11, 2019, MAG’s joint venture partner, Fresnillo, formally announced their decision to put the Juanicipio joint venture into production. While the JV has been actively building the mine for more than a year, this announcement put to rest most of the lingering doubts about Fresnillo’s timeline or intentions with respect to the JV property.
· Gold Road: After some initial slippage last year, Gold Road’s Gruyere project has been tracking the company’s revised schedule and budget. Recent site visits have confirmed that when the asset comes on line later this year it will be a world-class facility with a mine life of at least 15 years.
· Dundee: The production start date for Dundee Precious Metal’s Krumovgrad mine slipped one quarter, but the build came in ~$13 million under budget. While this result exceeded the markets expectations, the market is waiting to see how Dundee’s board will allocate the company’s substantial free cash flow before more fulsomely revaluing the company.
· Sandstorm: As of late April, Sandstorm had completed over 1/3 of the share buyback program they announced last September. Over the course of the twelve-month buyback program, we expect Sandstorm to reduce their share count by ~10%. The company has continued to find attractive streaming deals with double-digit IRRs and is making good progress on their JV project in Turkey.
portfolio Changes
In March, we sold the entirety of our Fortuna Silver position and invested that capital into Pan American Silver. While we continue to have confidence in Fortuna’s management team, particularly CEO Jorge Ganoza, the company’s Lindero mine in Argentina has suffered from a series of problems. Fortuna’s experience is proving that even for seasoned Latin American operators, Argentina is often an unworkable jurisdiction. Local engineering-and-construction firms have been unable to deliver on schedule and the local work force is extremely inefficient. Add to this the new export tax and the possibility of a shift to a more unfriendly government, and we believed the time to sell had arrived. We hope to partner with the excellent team at Fortuna again, but we’d like to do so without the aggravation of Argentina risk.
Pan American Silver, our substitute for Fortuna, is trading at NAV with silver at $15. Pan American’s management team is top-notch, and Pan American’s purchase of Tahoe Resources has given them ownership of one of the best non-producing silver mines in the world. Higher silver prices will result in the rapidly growth of this well run, diversified company’s NAV.
With the $25m capital addition in late March, we also added three, more liquid companies to the SL portfolio: Alamos Gold, Detour Gold, and B2Gold. Of these, Detour aligns best with our investment philosophy, and has become the largest of the three positions. Detour Gold trades at an attractive ~0.5x P/NAV. Moreover, the Paulson team’s involvement assures us that the board is well aligned with shareholders. Importantly, Detour’s board has managed to fill their CEO position with Mick McMullen, an executive known for his focus on culture and cost control. While relatively high cost at $1000 AISC, Detour provides good governance, long-mine life, and excellent jurisdiction at a discounted valuation.
Alamos, like Detour, trades at 0.5x-0.6x P/NAV. The company is making good progress with the Young-Davidson mine in British Columbia and its Island Gold mine continues to perform well. The company has also moved the permitting process for its Kirazli asset in Turkey forward. While the market remains skeptical about the path forward at Kriazli—as do we—the company’s shares are undervalued even if Alamos continues to struggle to get this particular asset into production.
We bought B2 and subsequently sold the company as the shares appreciated from our initial purchase price. The company has an attractive mix of assets but is trading at close to $300 per reserve ounce: at the upper end of the valuation we are willing to pay. We have reinvested these funds into Detour and K92.
With a market cap of approximately $200m USD, K92 Mining is the smallest company we added to our portfolio this year. Operating a single mine in Papua New Guinea, it trades at ~0.5x-0.6x P/NAV. The company is expanding the mill, which in turn is increasing production and driving cash flows higher. More importantly, the company’s currently exploration program will likely double the size of their resource and make K92 an attractive acquisition target for intermediate gold mining companies.
Sincerely,
Sean Fieler









