Could be taken either way actually. The results as announced are...

Could be taken either way actually. The results as announced are fairly meaningless because the head grade of the composites is so high as to be unrepresentative of what could be expected in real life. I mean a tail grade of 12g/t for a met recovery of 93%!!. OMG - like, am I right?

On the other hand, getting 190 and 140 g/t assays out of chips originally assayed as 90g/t is nice to see. Sending those particular samples to the lab is questionable though as "were they really representative in the first place" is the question anyone should reasonably ask. Perhaps making up some composites from a few separate holes might have been a good idea - in parallel with these tests.

The reporting to 4 significant figures is questionable. The assays are only to 3 figures and even they note that they vary by up to 100% from duplicates, which usually vary at least 5-20% under normal conditions anyway. No assay should ever be interpreted as the actual grade - it is a common misconception. You could assay the same sample 20 times and get 20 different answers at any mine anywhere. Over hundreds and thousands of samples you start to get closer to reality. It is one of the main reasons why geostatistics are so complicated. In this case I'd not expect any more than 2 significant figures to have been reported, eg. 93% or even only >90% or 90-95%, not 93.52%. Greater precision implies greater accuracy and is a big no-no in the Mineral Resources game if it is not backed up by statistical analysis. Doesn't stop people still doing it all the time unfortunately, even the big players.

Overall - encouraging. Anything better than 90% is OK for a most gold mines. Each 1% over that adds maybe an extra 3-5% to the profit margin. Another 10 rounds of met testing should start to show a trend. Unlikely that this mob will do anything like that though - Rio have done something like 200 rounds at Oyu Tolgoi but most minnows rarely think they can afford to do more than a couple. At $20-50 grand a pop they come with a bit of sticker shock. A few 2 and 5 g/t samples would be good next time.