As one who is completely naive with regards to valuing mining...

As one who is completely naive with regards to valuing mining stocks I took Huntley's recommendations as being better informed than mine could possibly be.

However, after the latest update from Huntley, I feel less informed. Huntleys now has re-adjusted in-ground valuations based on resource changes, added some risk factors and come out with a new valuation. To guess at a value a cost of US$60/tonne is (somehow in the calculations) assumed for all copper resources (both oxides and sulphides).

Now presumably everyone agrees that it is naive to simply add up all the resources and assign a share value related to the total value. The cost of extraction is extremely important.

With regard to oxide processing, the cost of processing seems to be rather important (as some nickel miners are discovering). If it costs more to extract the minerals, then the value is zilch. Given the current price of sulphuric acid the Huntley cost estimate is probably wrong (at least in the short/medium term).

With regard to sulphide process there is a rather worrying few words in the Compass release - "Browns contains potentially economic concentrations".

Now, given the track record what is one to make of that word "potentially". Does it mean that CMR don't know if it is economic to extract the minerals from the sulphide resource? Surely they wouldn't write that if is definitely was economic, and they are just investigating the best way to do it?

I have no interest in down ramping CMR, but can somebody please provide a reasoned argument for a valuation. I don't think that Huntleys has done so, and sadly some of the more negative posts seem to have more reasoned arguments than the positive posts.

How can I make any sense of this, other than joining in with the chartists, which sadly seems to something that I should not, at least, completely ignore.

So can somebody provide a reasoned valuation?