I thought daveironore's original post was close to the money...

I thought daveironore's original post was close to the money myself, here's a slightly different spin:

1) FNT was obviously reliant on their JV's for income and had no fallback for when gold tanked and NCM decided to scale back their activities.

2) It looked like a good idea when the NCM JV was signed to spin off Tassie but in retrospect, even in an alternative universe where gold didn't crash, was about 2 years too early. The right time would have been if/when FNT had some major wins with the drillbit and the PNG activities had enough momentum as a going concern.

3) I'm not pointing any fingers here, but it is undoubtedly the case that FNT as a company no longer owns the main potential source of income in the near future (mining in Tassie) despite, as daveironore pointed out, having paid for drilling the resource. Some of us have pieces of paper with "Torque" written on them which as far as I'm concerned are worth nothing if they can't be traded. The generous minded might call that bad luck as the float didn't get off the ground, but the reason I didn't invest in the float was I thought it was a lousy deal. I was clearly not alone.

4) There are still drill results from Tassie which as far as I am aware have not been released to market.

5) My rough working says that the company wasted about 2 million dollars in non core activities this year: the Torque spin off and the QRL cash injection. The fact that the QRL thing happened all of a sudden so soon after the AGM- without a chance for investors to vote on it- was particularly galling. Even an extra million in the tank might have meant some money spend on exploration

6) The NCM money, had it continued, would have covered up a lot of mistakes. The cancellation of the JV has exposed these mistakes and effectively killed the company.

7) Since the original promising Andewa results- quite a while ago now- FNT have not produced any results to the market from PNG worth anything really. QRL haven't exactly had a stellar run either. I know exploration is a tough game but the results have not exactly done much to enhance anyone's reputation.

So, whether it's fair or not, based on both the corporate performance and the lack of drill results, I would never again invest in a company with the McNeil name. If they manage to pull off a reversal of the company's fortunes I might reconsider. I was lucky (and frankly careful) and only had a little bit of money invested, I know many here are far worse off.

In theory The FNT story could be fantastic- they've got exploration rights to a large chunk of a large island in PNG, and who knows maybe OTML will come through.

At 0.007c and a tiny market cap, FNT might be worth a go for those who like the extreme end of the risk/reward map, but given that the company is by its own admission in hibernation, for me there's not a lot to recommend it until the future becomes clearer.