Not on  TSX or  Venture but ” You may find a few companies among them with interesting stories that are worth salvaging”. No large  salaries  and  SERIOUS exploration. I’m for  sure not ” sitting on  dry powder  but looking  for  a  substantial reward”!  Very  difficult  to gain entry into “Official Golddom” where  you’re  accepted  in the club  as an equal.  Mexus is  “Nose of  the  camel”  poke and probe and  just  a  sliver  of light? Camel’s in  the  tent and never  gets out!Our  zombies  sit on  the  side  and giggle whilst  the  camel works Its  nose off.  8

TMR: We’ve talked before about the fact that during this downturn, a lot of companies were going to either disappear or be reduced to walking dead on the Toronto Stock Exchange and the TSX Venture Exchange. Is one of the bright spots of the market today that it’s easier to tell the good companies from the bad?

JK: Yes and no. Just under 600 companies out of 1,700 have more than $500,000 working capital and aren’t in the big mining company league. Some 300 have between $0 and $500,000 working capital, and about 700 have negative working capital of about $2B. The negative working capital ones are pretty much dead in the water because no one wants to give them real money to replace money that’s already been spent. You may find a few companies among them with interesting stories that are worth salvaging. But most of the indebted companies are going to wither away and disappear.

That leaves about 900 companies with potential to survive. Among those, I gravitate toward the ones that have real management teams—technical personnel who know something about exploration—and projects with a story indicating that the brains of management are actually at work and that they are not just going through the motions of pretending to explore. Some companies are sitting on piles of money where management is collecting big salaries but because they have large shareholders who are treating the company simply as a keg of dry power for extremely bad times, they do not have the go-ahead to do anything along the lines of serious exploration that would risk the capital but also put the company in a position to deliver a substantial reward. One also has to be careful about those companies because they represent opportunity cost.

But, in general, it is now easier to see companies that are doing something and distinguish those from the rest because the inability to finance and the poor financial condition of most of the resource juniors make it very clear that they have nothing and are doing nothing. There is no reason to invest even a penny in such zombie companies.

http://www.kitco.com/ind/MiningReport/2014-10-15-John-Kaiser-s-Tips-for-Escaping-the-Resource-Sector-Swamp-Alive.html