Investing
What is a Bought Deal Financing?
As covered in our earlier explainer on private placements, mining companies most commonly raise capital by selling shares directly to a defined group of investors. But there’s an important variant that appears frequently in financing announcements from larger, more established mining companies: the bought deal. Understanding the difference between a bought deal and a standard…
What is Mine Reclamation and Closure Planning?
Every mine, no matter how large or profitable, eventually stops producing — and what happens to the site afterward is one of the most heavily regulated, financially significant, and easily overlooked aspects of the entire mining lifecycle. Reclamation and closure planning, backed by mandatory financial assurance, exists specifically to make sure a mine’s environmental legacy…
What is Molybdenum Used For?
Molybdenum — commonly shortened to “moly” in the industry — is a metal that quietly strengthens much of the world’s critical infrastructure, from bridges and pipelines to power plants, while rarely attracting the same investor attention as gold, copper, or lithium. Its unusual production profile — heavily tied to copper mining as a byproduct rather…
What is Antimony Used For and Why is China’s Export Ban Significant?
Antimony is one of those minerals most people have never heard of until suddenly they can’t stop hearing about it. A little-known metal used in everything from ammunition to flame retardants, antimony became a flashpoint in US-China trade tensions starting in August 2024, when Beijing announced export restrictions that exposed a genuine vulnerability in the…
What is the LBMA and Why Does Good Delivery Matter for Gold?
Every time a gold mining company refers to its product being sold to “LBMA-accredited” refiners, or every time you see the “LBMA Gold Price” cited as the global benchmark, you are looking at the influence of a single London-based trade body that has quietly underpinned the entire global gold market for nearly four decades. Understanding…
What is Insider Ownership and Why Does it Matter for Mining Stocks?
For a junior mining company with no revenue and a stock price driven almost entirely by news flow, one of the more useful pieces of context an investor can gather is simple: how much of their own money do the people running the company actually have riding on it? Insider ownership and insider buying activity…
What is Autonomous Haulage and Which Companies Use It?
Autonomous haulage is arguably the most visible and impactful application of automation technology in modern mining — sophisticated haul trucks that move ore and waste rock across a mine site continuously, without a human driver behind the wheel. What began as a niche experiment at a single Australian iron ore mine in 2008 has scaled…
What Are Small Modular Reactors and Why Do They Matter for Uranium?
As covered in our earlier uranium explainer, global uranium demand is projected to rise sharply through 2040, driven substantially by a new and unexpected source: the electricity needs of AI data centers. A significant part of that story involves a specific nuclear technology — small modular reactors, or SMRs — that major technology companies are…
What is Vanadium Used For?
Vanadium is not a household name the way lithium or cobalt has become, but it plays two distinct and important roles in the modern economy: strengthening the steel that underpins global construction, and — increasingly — storing renewable energy at grid scale through a battery technology built specifically around vanadium’s unique chemistry. Its addition to…
What is a Gold ETF and How Does it Work?
For an investor who wants exposure to gold’s price movements without buying physical bars or coins, or without picking individual mining stocks, a gold Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) offers a straightforward middle path. Gold ETFs have become one of the most popular ways to invest in gold, tracked through the same brokerage account used to…
