grade smearingThe clowns at Crux Investor wrote this about NFG smearing rsults. Even though they were not smart enough to analyse the results and demonstrate where the smearing occurred they still felt they had the right to print their opinion. An opinion without concrete evidence is simply an opinion and has no place in an analysis. 'What we are not sure about is whether the Company may have smeared results from down-hole, or not. Of course it is tempting to report good grades over wide thicknesses, but it can potentially lead to misrepresentation of the integrity of the deposit in the public arena.
For a Company, or indeed the investor, to recognise smearing is important, as smearing hides the fact that the target may not be as consistently present as implied. Not only that, but smeared grades have a significant impact in the resource estimation process as the very high grades that contribute to the good average grade of an intersection would be cut to a much lower value if they were just constrained to the source structure, and not smeared. We are uncomfortable with some of the data that has been presented by New Found Gold, as it looks as if some of the results have indeed been smeared.
The most extreme example is hole NFGC-20-23 which had a headline intersection of 22 g/t gold over 41 metres. A closer look at the data indicates that with 90% of the gold intersected in this reported width of 41.3 m is present in 0.35 m. Remember all the preamble about structural complexity at the start of this report? Well, seeing 90% of the gold in a 35 cm width fits the model, but it does not seem to fit with 41 m @ 22 g/t Au.'