interpreting drill resultsInterpreting drill results for junior resource speculating success"
For Part 1 of this interview please click here
Craig Stanley is Vice President of Research for Pinetree Capital (TSX: T.PNP, Stock Forum), a merchant banking firm focused on investing in early stage micro and small cap resource companies. Although Pinetree became well known for uranium back when there was a boom in that commodity in 2006, the company is focused on small-cap mining in general. Its biggest positions currently are in gold and other precious metal related equities and that’s what they’re focused on for the longer term. They still have uranium companies in their portfolio, though, and Pinetree CEO Sheldon Inwentash also runs Mega Uranium (TSX: T.MGA, Stock Forum).
With a Master of Science in Geology, Stockhouse asked Craig Stanley if he had any advice for investors/speculators in the junior resource space as to how to interpret drill results.
“There’s a number of things you can look at and it’s always best to ask someone with some geological experience,” said Stanley.
“I look for grams times (x) meters. Say a company puts out 10 metres at five grams (per tonne) – is that good? Well you first of all have to put it in context. Is it a new hole in a new area? Is it an infill hole, so they’re drilling between two existing holes that have similar mineralization? Or are they twinning an old hole? So, I first of all want to know all that – the location of the hole. Secondly, I want to look at what I call the grams/metres – so you take the grams per tonne and times (x) it by the width or metre. And roughly as a rule of thumb I look for 100 there. So 100 metres of one gram is awesome and 10 metres of 10 grams is great.”
Stanley added, “One of the things investors should always look for is grade smearing. So, a company might hit one metre of say 10 grams (per tonne) gold but might ‘smear’ it out and say it is 10 metres of one gram or something like that – they will try and report it over a lot bigger width and I’m thinking of Trelawney that has done that a lot.”
When asked how important depth is with drill results Stanley stated that it depends. “If it’s low grade and it’s too deep and you can’t open pit it then – an open pitted target (roughly) could have grades anywhere from one to three grams or even a bit below one gram per tonne. Anything below three hundred metres is not going to be open ‘pittable’ probably so anything below that I wouldn’t even count it,” he said.
Stanley asserted that open pit mining is the “cheapest” per tonne but the company will make it up in volume produced. “Open pits are low grade but (the company) will be moving and mining a lot of tonnes.” He stated that if the deposit is really deep the company will have to have the grades to make it worthwhile.
“Then again you have to look at whether there’s a bunch of waste rock on top. Say (the company) is reporting results that are 200 metres down but it STARTS at 200 metres; that is you have 200 metres of rock. That’s too much money to strip all that rock as an open pit.”