Methodology

The problem with reading a technical report

An economic study is hundreds of pages that compress into a handful of headline numbers — NPV, IRR, payback — produced by a model the reader never sees. The assumptions that drive those numbers are scattered across mine plans, cost tables, tax sections and footnotes, and reports are not free of internal inconsistencies: our coverage has found cash flows that contradict the report's own stated working-capital terms, published tables that do not reproduce their own headline NPV, and revenue that silently escapes the tax computation.

What we do instead

• Rebuild from the lowest published level. Every cost, revenue and capital line is constructed from the report's unit assumptions through physical drivers — tonnes mined, grades, recoveries, unit rates. Report totals are never wired in as inputs; they are targets the rebuilt model must hit on its own.
• Footnote everything. Every hardcoded input carries a citation to its section, table and page in the source report — or to the statute or third-party source it came from. A subscriber can audit any cell.
• Verify by real recalculation. The finished model must reproduce the report's headline NPV within a disclosed tolerance, recalculated in a live spreadsheet engine — and reconcile the per-year shape of each major line, not just life-of-mine totals.
• Build taxes from statute. Income tax, mining duties, royalties, depreciation and loss carry-forwards are built from the governing law and checked against the report. Where a report applies a treatment the statute does not support, both are built and the difference is quantified.
• Disclose, never force. When a report cannot be reconciled to its own tables, the divergence is published and decomposed on the model's assumptions page instead of being forced to tie.
• Independent review. Every deliverable passes an independent verification pass — economics re-derived, factual claims checked against the source report — and a line-by-line review by the founder, a CFA charterholder with more than fifteen years in valuation and a mining specialty, before publication.

What we do not do

We do not make buy or sell recommendations, price targets, or forecasts of our own. The product is a verified, flexible version of the study's economics and a clear account of its strengths, weaknesses and sensitivities — the groundwork for your own judgment.