Nobody reads the whole junior mining sector. Thousands of exploration and development companies are listed across Canada, Australia, the United States and London, and on any given day dozens of them put out drill results, resource updates, financings or permit news. Each company formats its releases differently, and the codes that govern disclosure, NI 43-101 and JORC, set out what must be disclosed without making two companies present it the same way. The result is that most institutional and private capital ends up watching the same few dozen names, because those are the ones that get covered. That is a reasonable response to an impossible reading load, but it means a lot of the sector goes unexamined. The alternative is a screen: a fast, consistent way to decide which releases deserve an hour of your attention and which can wait. After 30 years of reading these announcements, I use four steps. None of them requires special software.
Step 1: Shrink the universe before you read anything
Decide what you are looking for, and cut the list down to that. Start with the commodity. A gold explorer, a copper developer and a lithium brine project are different businesses, and the same grade or the same recovery figure means different things in each. Then the jurisdiction, and go below country level. In my years working in Zambia, Ethiopia and elsewhere, the country was rarely the useful unit. The province, the type of licence and how the relevant ministry actually behaves in practice were. A project in British Columbia and one in Saskatchewan face different permitting timelines, and so do projects in Western Australia and New South Wales, Nevada and Arizona.
If you hold a view on, say, copper in the Americas, the screen should start there and ignore everything else. Beginning with the full list and trying to cull from it is how people end up reading whatever happens to be on the front page.
Step 2: Sort by what happened, and count the evidence
Within your shortlist, sort the releases by type: drill results, resource updates, metallurgy, permitting, financings, partnerships, production. Each type calls for a different question, so it helps to batch them. Reading ten drill releases in a row makes the unusual one stand out. Reading one of each type in date order does not. Then check how much sits behind any pattern. If four releases in a month point the same way, that is a thin base, and it says very little about the sector. If forty do, you are looking at something more. I make a habit of writing down the count next to every theme I spot, because it keeps a handful of loud announcements from passing for a trend.
Step 3: Check the disclosure before the substance
This is the step that saves the most time. Before judging whether a result is good, ask whether the release gives you enough to judge it at all. For a drill release, I look for five things, and it takes about a minute:
- Is true width stated, or only the downhole length?
- Is there a named laboratory and a qualified person's sign-off, with some mention of blanks, standards and duplicates?
- Is the cut-off grade given, along with how the intervals were composited?
- If it is a resource, is it broken out by confidence category, or is it one blended number?
- If it is an older number, is it labelled as historic?
A release that answers all five is not necessarily a good project, but it can be assessed. One that answers none is asking you to take the headline on trust. I put releases in two piles on this basis. The first pile gets read properly. The second gets set aside and revisited if the company publishes a technical report or a fuller table later. Plenty of perfectly decent companies end up in the second pile for a month or two. That costs them nothing and costs you very little.
Step 4: Read the survivors properly
What comes through the first three steps is a short list, and now you do the real work. Open the technical report, or the filing on SEDAR+ or the ASX platform, and look at the hole table, the sections, the QA/QC data and the assumptions behind any economic study. Ask what the program was designed to test, how the result fits with the holes around it, and whether it changes the resource model. This is where geological judgment comes in, and no screen replaces it.
Keep a record as you go. A spreadsheet with a row per company, the date, the announcement type, the pile it went into and the reason is enough. Over a few months it shows you which companies keep landing in the first pile and which keep slipping into the second, and that pattern is often more informative than any one release.
Where a tool can help
I should be upfront about my interest here. I founded Minestarters, and my team built Atlas, a research tool that filters junior mining news by commodity, jurisdiction and announcement type, and tags how each release was disclosed, for example whether true width or QA/QC details are stated. It covers much of the same ground as the first three steps, and it is still in beta. Whether you use it or a spreadsheet and an afternoon, the logic is the same. A first pass of this kind is not due diligence and does not replace the source documents. All it does is narrow what you read.
Screening decides what to read, not what to own
None of these steps tells you whether to buy a stock, and I would be wary of anyone who says a screen can. What they do is move your reading time from companies that talk loudest to companies that disclose best. In my experience those are often the same ones that run their exploration carefully, because a team that states its true widths and names its lab usually knows who is reading.
Disclosure: Marcel Nally is the founder of Minestarters, which built Atlas. This article is commentary and does not constitute investment advice or a recommendation.
