A Quick Way to Analyze Silver Drill Results

With a Portfolio company's recent batch as an example

When a gold miner reports drill results, one common way of analyzing them is to multiply the width of the intercept (aka interval) by the grade (grams intercepted) to yield a “gram-meter” reading.

Assume an intercept of 10 grams of gold over 10 meters. 10 x 10 = 100 gram-meters, which is generally seen as very good.

Silver drill results are less clear because silver is both cheaper and more plentiful than gold, so grades tend to be higher while the value of a given weight of metal in the ground is lower. This can be fixed by converting silver results to “gold equivalent gram-meters” using the gold-silver ratio, which is the number of silver ounces needed to buy an ounce of gold at current prices.

Here’s a real-world example using results just released by one of our Portfolio companies: