True Width

Read a financial thriller. Finish it knowing how the junior mining business really works.

Mara Duval is a laid-off Bay Street banker when a charming Toronto CEO hires her as chief financial officer of a seven-million-dollar gold shell: eight months of cash, a deal for a permit in West Africa, and a market that has forgotten it exists. Over the next three years she lives the entire life of a junior explorer, from the first handshake to the drill hole that remakes the company overnight, and on through the resource, the study, the money and the exit.

The gold is real. That is the problem. Someone has been salting the samples. Someone has read the title papers more closely than she has. And every document the company has ever filed carries her signature.

True Width is a novel, and it is also a course. Every term is explained the first time it matters, by people with something at stake. By the last page you will understand:

• How a junior explorer stays alive: cash, burn, placements, warrants and dilution
• How gold is found under cover: soil geochemistry, magnetics, trenching, RC and diamond drilling
• How to read a drill result: grade, gram-metres, and drilled width versus true width
• How assays are protected, and how they are faked: blanks, standards, duplicates, salting and umpire labs
• How holes become ounces: block models, Inferred, Indicated and Measured, cut-off grade, NI 43-101
• How ounces become a mine, or don't: recovery, refractory ore, PEAs, NPV and AISC
• How the money works: royalties, streams, bought deals, the Lassonde curve and takeovers
• Why title, permits and communities can matter more than geology

An appendix maps every mechanism in the story to the real world, and a glossary covers the trade's vocabulary. Written for investors in resource stocks, people starting out in mining or mining finance, and anyone who wants to know what really happens between a press release and a gold bar.