I appreciate your commentI totally understand if EVN had a brand...

I appreciate your comment

I totally understand if EVN had a brand new, ready to go deposit, which was ready to proceed into production.
Of course finance is needed to build it up, and it makes sense for financiers/banks to want to de risk any downside movements in the Spot price which could affect the viability of the project in the early years and their ability to repay the loan.
So I get the logic when debt is involved on an early project.

However, EVN is a well established Miner with no mines ramping up from nothing. So to me hedging is totally a choice for EVN.
Why couldn't a capital raise support Evolution's financing requirements?

To illustrate the opportunity cost of the current hedging, I found this very relevant comment in the Dec 2018 Quarterly report

"During the quarter, the Company took advantage of the elevated Australian dollar gold price to hedge a further 300,000oz of production at an average price of A$1,871/oz for quarterly deliveries between July 2020 and June 2023."

If you look at the AUD Gold price since July 2020 to now, you can see that this was a really bad deal for EVN shareholders.
My conservative estimate of the average price for this period is about 2,500 AUD. Lets assume that it's similar for the next 5 months too.
Therefore, we have a 600 AUD difference on average between the spot price and what these awesome hedging prices are at $1,871.
If we multiply the 25,000 ounces per quarter by the 600 dollar differential for 12 quarters, we get a cool opportunity cost of only 180 Million dollars in lost revenue over 3 years. This is terrible.

I still think hedging steals value away from shareholders. And I still believe it's a choice. There is always the capital raise.