Golden Hope Mines

Good morning, everybody. Sorry about my ill-timed need for some personal time, but some things are more important than the stock market. I'm sure that there has been some wonder about what I might think about those assay results.

The assays fell short of my expectations, in two respects. The widths and grade both fell short of the mark. Had either one been at or above expectations, I'd have not been so disappointed, but coming up short in both categories is hard to overcome with rational thought. That said, these results are incomplete. There are a number of outstanding holes, including hole 127, which will give us more information to consider. It is premature to write off the 88 zone, although it is reasonable to place lower limits on our expectations.

One of the pieces of information that gave me hope that the 88 zone was potentially of higher grade than is Timmins 1 was the high proportion of VG instances in the 88, when compared to T1. But to see a VG interval reported in the assay table as grading at 0.08 gpt was quite unexpected. One of the things I'll want to do on my next site visit is to examine the stored half-core on some of these VG intervals, to determine if the VG is still sitting in the coreshack. It's a 50:50 chance which half goes to the lab, but I do want to get a sense of how those odds played out. If the VG was in the lab sample, then that, too, is an important variable.

Much has been said these last few days about the psychology of GNH investors, buying into the blue sky dreams. But it's not fair to judge that from the position of hindsight, after the assays are released to the market. Last spring, one of the largest, if not the largest, staking rushes in Quebec history was underway in the Beauce region. Some very well-trained, and highly experienced exploration professionals, expended a great deal of effort, time, and money, on obtaining blue sky rights on properties in the Beauce. Now, what drove that staking rush? I'm going to suggest to you that it wasn't because The Hoov mentioned Golden Hope on an Agoracom bulletin board. The staking rush was well underway by that time. No, the blue sky potential of the region surrounding Golden Hope claims was recognized by professionals in the exploration business. Why should we judge ourselves more harshly than we might industry professionals?

You may recall that Frank Glass, a geologist under contract to Golden Hope, invested some $140k in GNH in the open market, a few weeks ago. When I was listening to him speak to us during the last site visit, I formed the opinion that his major sense of excitement over exploration prospects for the company arose from those other 80% of the company's claims outside of the Bellechasse Gold Belt. It wasn't Timmins/88, Laval's Mtn., Beland et all that was making him gush. It was the potential for large intrusive deposits at other sites, such as the FSG (named after Frank S. Glass, it's discoverer), which is now drill ready, as I understand things. As are a couple of other targets in those many regional claims. All summer long, field geologists were advancing our knowledge on those other properties, and in some cases, advancing them to drill-ready status. There has been a lot more going on than just the drilling on the 88.

One thing I learned while conducting my research for my report on GNH was that the company once held more claims in some areas of the Beauce than they now hold. Because they were pretty much the only active explorer in the district, some years ago, they had the luxury of staking and examining broad swaths of claims, and dropping a good number of them if they didn't appear to hold promise. What they also were able to do is to take on more claims if their target structure seemed to trend outside of their claim boundaries. When the staking rush came on, they felt they had the best of the best of the regional targets. A significant number of claims taken up in the staking rush were ones that GNH had dropped.

Now, coming back to the 88 zone drill results.....That was pure exploration drilling. If the visuals from the core had not been promising, I'm absolutely certain that the number of holes/total metres put into that zone would not have been as many as they were. I'm going to express a purely inferential conclusion that there must have been a lot of quartz in those holes (hence Snow White), but that the quartz came back from the lab with low mineralization. Mother Nature can be cruel.

But 88 was a small part of the prospectivity of Golden Hope. It was only a twinkle on the horizon when I first bought in. The first holes into this target began in late May 2010. The holes into 88 since that time have been purely for exploration purposes. But right now, definition drilling is underway on Timmins 2, and soon on Timmins 1, with the intention of determining a 43-101 compliant resource estimate, with both inferred and indicated resources. In reasonably short order, we will have "ounces in the ground". Much sooner than that, we will have the results of surface bulk sampling, to increase our understanding of the true grades of the multiple surface exposures. And we await the results from drilling at Laval's Mountain. But those programs are being conducted on only a small portion of what is itself just 20% of our claims in the region. In the bigger scheme of things, very little has changed for me, with the release of these drill results.

Before I close, I also want to make some quick comments about some other topics that have seen debate these last few days. I disagree that the market is always right. Instead, I would assert that the market is the market. Momentum traders rely on the fact that some people think that the market is always right, as they merely trade on the psychology of the herd, rather than the underlying asset itself. The pump and dump could not ever succeed if the market was always right. All the market is, IMHO, is an arbitrary valuation system that can be significantly divorced from fundamental metrics of valuation. A snapshot of the herd's average valuation, with little correlation to fundamentals. Warren Buffet has secured his position as (IMHO) the best-ever value investor, through his ability to look past market values when assessing the true investment value of a security.

The other one I wish to remark upon is the assay turn-around time. I do not expect it to ever fall to six weeks. A comparison was made to results released by Galahad Metals, but I don't see that comparison as being meaningful. Galahad did 4 metal screen/total pulp metallic assays, not 400. A premium was paid to obtain results ASAP. And Galahad's results took longer than 6 weeks from core box to NR. But there's something more at play with Golden Hope, as well. GNH wishes to interpret the results, rather than to simply publish tables of assays, which must inevitably add to the timeline. Last summer, there was a large shareholder uproar when the company released results without sufficient interpretation to help explain their significance. Shareholders can't have it both ways; we can't have the fastest possible data release, and obtain a full interpretation, as well. I believe this recent NR was incomplete because management bowed to shareholder pressure, and released what they had available. I, for one, would really have welcomed the concurrent publication of longitudinal sections of the interpreted diorite/mineralized structures in the newly discovered sub-zones within the 88 target.

For the record, I bought some more shares on Monday, before the news. And I bought more yesterday, after the news.

Lar