March 18th, 2009

Among the junior exploration companies out there, it's hard to find one that looks like it's going to make it through the credit crisis winter alive. Dorato is however one of those few that looks very likely to pull through.

They're part of the Cardero Group which has a great track-record and so far they don't seem to have had a lot of trouble raising money. The company is focused on the highly prospective Cordillera del Condor gold district (located between Ecuador and Peru) on the Peruvian side, and as some may remember, this is the same district where Aurelian Resources made their huge discovery on the Ecuadorian side. Dorato has claims of about 800 square kilometers and has so far made a bunch of very early-stage discoveries. The district has a lot of placer mining, as well.

The concessions of Dorato have seen very little exploration because of previous political problems in the region as well as a now partly removed natural reserve status. The purchases of the concessions require about $9.2M in payments and an issuance of 10.15M shares, which would give Dorato a 100% interest.

Dorato today has an mcap of ~CDN$17M (0.50/share). And by judging from the last financial statement they have perhaps $1-3M cash and basically no debt. There is an ongoing private placement of $5M, which I judge very likely to succeed based on the great prospects of the company.

If one is well acquainted with the work of Aurelian Resources then you already know just how interesting the Cordillera del Condor district really is. The Aurelian discovery was about +15M Oz of an average ~7g/t gold. There are a number of other very good (mostly recent) discoveries on the Ecuadorian side, and as I already mentioned, the Peruvian side has seen very little exploration.

The results that Dorato has produced so far are indeed impressive; if you want the whole story of the geological settings, I suggest you go to their website and read it; I will only present the just recently released (and most interesting) sampling results from the Taricori zone. This zone has shown average grades of 11g/t gold and 131g/t silver (from 168 samples) in vein material. Further results from sampling in the area is incoming. The Taricori zone is located just 1km from the Jerusalem deposit in Ecuador (probably containing over 1.3M Oz gold) which is considered to be just a continuation of the Taricori discoveries - which is based partly on the old small-scale mining but mostly on the magnetic mapping of the area which shows some large anomalies - these anomalies will hopefully be strengthened by the coming sample-results.

Dorato has some extremely promising projects and I would be very suprised if they don't end up finding at least one world class deposit like the one Aurelian Resources found. In comparison with other junior exploration companies, Dorato's CDN$17M mcap does not look too pricey considering the remarkable concessions they've been able to acquire. Although things are looking extremely good, there have been many cases in the past where a junior explorer has had great prospects and failed miserably ... but I would still maintain that this is an extraordinary situation and I think it's reflected in the share-price; no other juniors that I know of come even close to a similar valutation. Investing in junior explorers is the riskiest of risky businesses - but the most rewarding if you nail it.

This press-release covers a lot of exploration results that I haven't.