Last year about 12,000 people attended PDAC. It's the Super Bowl for miners and explorers, and liars; but it's a time to meet everybody in the industry, and have a great time as well.

This year I will be attending PDAC March 5-8. I will write it up extensively.

One of my goals will be to put together a list of purchase candidates for you. I'll bring a lengthy list and meet the corporate officers, talk to analysts and knowledgeable observers, and so forth. Then I can whittle the list down to a manageable number for basket trading.

Could a mutual fund do the same job? Let me say flat-out that no mutual fund will do the job you need whenever small cap and micro cap stocks are involved. First, the managers too often get personally involved. Then the fund could not withstand the customer withdrawals whenever a sell recommendation needs to be made.

So the bottom line to dealing with this type of stock is to do your own fund. You'll never include all the companies that make new mineral discoveries, or avoid all the ones that suffer problems of which there are too many potential ones to list.

The best many traders can do is to create a small list of potentially good ones and trade them in baskets " all at once. If you are really close to the action you can buy and sell individual selections on the basis of price-volume studies, RSI and stop losses.

The problem of course is that this type of speculative trading is not portfolio management.

Some will say that playing the junior miners is in fact like rolling the dice, but it's not. If you approach this part of the market objectively and intensely, you can make huge situational gains. To do that you have to understand that it's you versus the promoter.

A good promoter (with a good mineral resource in hand) doesn't mind of course. His or her job is to increase liquidity " so your trading is welcome " and to move the speculators out of the stock and long-term institutional holders into it as the risks and the valuation (via discounted cash flow studies) become better known.

I call them junior explorers, but they might be in pre-production or actually have small production. But they all have stories, and they are all exploring for ore.

And there is one cardinal rule: never get hooked by the story. You are not a fish and the stock promoter is not a fisherman. These junior company stock promoters believe their stuff so much, and can tell such good stories, that even their mothers get taken in.

Regardless of the terminology they use, nobody truly knows how much of a mineral resource lies underground until it is mined and processed. For example, in the ground it could be (i) "proven" (which is to say it's likely), (ii) "probable" (i.e., still likely), (iii) "possible" (i.e., makes a good story because there are some possibly believable elements), and (iv) a figment of the promoter's imagination.

A drill hole might intersect the motherlode or it could just be a small pocket of high-grade material that engineers will need to study further.

So at the end of the day, your best indication of value is price and volume of the stock. Remember, with almost all juniors, there are no stock options, so price AND volume are factors.

So cardinal rule number two is when you see lots of volume and a flat price, there is distribution going on. That means the promoter is selling " even if he (or she) swears on holy papers he's not.

And they will. And, if you meet them: trust me; they'll smile to your face while lying to you.

Distribution in the junior mineral resource game is at its peak when the news releases, interviews, media kits, etc, are running at a fever pitch. That's the time to really focus on price and volume and beat the promoter (and friends) to the exit.

As this part of the broad market is so small, I can only cover a few stocks. So, I'll try to pick some good ones, and follow them in a pdf report to help you get a leg up.