Taboon, I won't be drawn on that because I would prefer to wait...

Taboon,

I won't be drawn on that because I would prefer to wait for the BFS. Suffice to say, however, that I'd put a higher pice on a CDU which wants to do Rocklands via a 5-15Mtpa mill than one which is constrained by a 3Mtpa mill mismatched to the grade of the resource.

Clearly I believe its less than $2/sh as judged by my sell sentiment.

pjemmett
Yes, you are correct, it would worth something like that if you had 2 holes 50m apart with two separate 8% Cu intersections.

But consider the scenario where, with a nuggety orebody, one hole had 10m @ 2.125% including 1m @ 10% native Cu and 9m @ 0.8% , and the other hole is 10m @ 1%.

Halfway between that 1m @ 10% and any point on the other hole there's a 100% probability assigned that the grade is 5.5% Cu. However, you have to consider that a block of mineralisation is informed by all other relevant datapoints within the 50m radius.

Now, assume that your block is filled by 20 separate measurements, 10 from 1 hole and 10 from the other. Your average grade of that block is composed of, roughly speaking,
1/20th x 10%
1/2 x 1%
9/20th x 0.8%
Total: 1.08% - the native copper raises the grade but doesn't contribute to a gigantic bonanza.

Thus, if you have, say, 240Mt of material and 5Mt of it is 10% native copper, and the rest is 0.28% Cu...the real grade is still 0.48% when treated statistically. Where the native copper sits, MIK doesn't tell you. But to say the native copper isn't included in such a statistical treatment of the data is plainly false.

The company clearly has an idea where the native copper sits. They have photos showing it all over the place. They have logs of it. They have assays of it. They can drill it with their met holes - repeatedly. This says they know where it is.

The fact they haven't said they have a high grade bonanza zone, as previously stated, is because they lack the evidence to convince their consultants it is appropriate to announce it as its own separate subset.

The thing is, knowing where it is and being confident enough to declare it as a Resource you want to convert to reserves are different things. he paperquoted above is a plaintive critique of being too rigid in applying the JORC rules. Which is crap; for JORC Inferred you can invent whatever crazy SG you want because there's absolutely no compunction to report it or declare your assumptions.

this is the foundation of the 25Mt 2006 resource - completely fantastical SG of 3.8 which was trimmed to 2.38 to 2.9 resulting in a 65-80% drop in mass for the same resource.

Arguably, scorpion should be complaining the JORC isn't as rigorous as the National Instrument 43-101 used in Canada. If it was, the company directors would have landed in serious hot water in 2006 (more than just a slap on the wrist suspension) and would not have been able to release the 2006 JORC and hence, no surprise disappointment in 2010.

JORC is a joke. Investors should demand more of the industry than loose and fast wishy-washy rules to make geo's feel good about theorising how much stuff *could* be there. Screw that - its people's livelihoods at stake when an SG of 3.8 is chosen when every geo woth his salt would have picked 2.8.