This is a stock I owned for a number of years. It does not have...

This is a stock I owned for a number of years. It does not have the greatest record for creating value for shareholders despite having what appear to be some reasonable exploration assets. Who knows, maybe one of them will eventually become a producing assets. Time will tell.

To partly answer your question, just look at the Dec2016 financial statement. The balance sheet clearly shows accumulated losses of just over $40million. That's a fair bit of expense over the years to deliver the sale of an exploration asset for $20m.