Having read through this announcement I just wanted to share some technical thoughts on the estimation.
For reference, here is my armchair-backyard hack job of an attempt at an estimation using the publicly available data from last week, I will use some learnings from that as a basis for some comments here:
1) This jumps out as a relatively high quality estimation for initial JORCs for smaller cap juniors of the ASX. I can tell they are using surprisingly conservative estimation parameters and wireframes - they could have easily gotten away with parameters that would have produced significantly higher resource numbers and appear to have demonstrated professional restraint - this is a rare sign of integrity. I see some intersected mineralization at the boundaries of Yin ( north, south, and east) which has not made their way into the wireframes. Wireframs are also cut off at a relatively shallow depth, basically right below the drill holes. They are also using some relatively sophisticated techniques - I.E. unfolding, thoughtful and meaningful geological domaining, subsampling. While this has a long way to go before its ready for conversion to reserves, this really is an impressive product relative to peers on the ASX for their first stab at this. The take away here is that Dean and team are serious about either marketing this or developing this resource on their own.... the objective here is not to pump the SP.. its clearly to get as accurate of a resource estimation as possible for use in economic and feasibility studies.
2) The grades are really good. Much much better than I think I was expecting. I'm not talking about the average grade over the 14mt resource, I'm talking about at higher cut-offs there maintains quite a lot of tonnage. The grade-tonnage curve looks elite. This will bode extremely well for future economic studies. Can see a fair bit of what *may* be artificial smoothing/extension of extremely high grades by the use of what *may* be a nugget on the higher side of things (see image below where I circle what I mean by this), which if true would slightly bump up the amount of higher grade material. However, I'm honestly not really qualified to analyze this because I really don't know much about this type of geology. The Competent Person(s) conducting the estimation and setting the nugget values - in theory - have the experience and knowledge to do so properly. Judging by the rest of the parameters and techniques uses (see point #1 above) the estimators appear to be of high quality and demonstrating professional restraint.
3) I am a little surprised by the classification. I'm left confused why the drilled out area (to 50x50) wasn't classified as an indicated resource. (FYI in my model, this zone accounts for roughly 25% of the mineralized volume and contains some of the highest grades. Perhaps most disappointingly, there is no discussion about why. Dean and the team did an incredible job breaking down the technical nitty gritty of the geology and estimation, however, notably left out any discussion of why the 50x50 infill area is still classified at inferred. My guess is that the DRE team is as surprised as I am and perhaps does not agree with the estimators logic/reasoning for the classification and therefore elected not to share. This is yet another line of evidence for this being a pretty conservative estimate. My only real guess here is that the estimator wants more density data. Perhaps they were uneasy about reporting tonnage at anything more than inferred with very little actual measured density data.
(20min delay)