Ahhh, one of the great pleasures of this blog is the quality of mail feedback received by your humble scribe, with this morning’s crop particularly rich. I’ve been given permission to share from both of the following.
First, regarding the Batero (BAT.v) post of yesterday this came in from a reader that prefers not even to have his initials up in lights (respected).
The reason why I’m emailing you is because of your statement about Batero yesterday. The company released a resource estimate of 6.1M ounces (3.5M+2.6M), and not 3.5M, as you pointed out in yesterday’s blog post. I agree 200% with your remarks on the grade. It’s pretty shitty.
That’s fair comment, especially about how your humble scribe missed out the inferred. Corrections always welcomed (unlike Chez CampbellSoup)
Second, on the back of the post yesterday about 43-101 disclosure rules for drilling results the following was sent in by a professional geologist working the LatAm region (can say no more) and your humble scribe found it particularly enlightening:
The 43-101 workshop at Round Up this year was pretty interesting, with a full review of the new rules. However, the real eye-opener for me was to hear how understaffed they are over at IIROC and at the Securities Commissions. They admitted that they do not go over in any sort of detail up to 90 or 95% (that’s the number that stayed in my brain; it may be off slightly but it was definitely north of 90%) of technical reports. That’s full-fledged technical reports, not NRs! If they don’t even have the resources to police full-fledged technical reporting, you can imagine what this means for NRs. I think this means the onus is on the investing public (and those professionals who care about our industry’s reputation) to send complaint notes to IIROC or the BC Sec Commission when we spot more egregious examples of non-compliance. Hopefully they DO have the manpower to follow up on complaints. Come to think of it, they should subscribe to your blog. They would get their daily dose of non-compliant NRs in one easy read!The other point is about drill location data. I asked this exact question at the Round Up workshop. It seems that from the point of view of disclosure, it doesn’t seem that they are that bothered about *how* you disclose location data. A table of XYZ coordinates is obviously best for the technically minded amongst us, and to my mind is the least obfuscated way of presenting data, but a map with drill collars hosted on the company’s website is apparently also acceptable. However, I agree that at present the vast majority of NRs coming from the junior sector are non-compliant. And given the attitude of many, it seems likely to stay that way until the Commission gets more teeth.
That sure fits with what IKN sees happening in the market.