The 'including' trick: how one fat metre carries a whole drill hole

Every junior mining press release has a hero number. "5 g/t gold over 40 metres!" Looks great. Then, in smaller type: "including 150 g/t over 1 metre."

Do the subtraction they hope you won't. 5 × 40 is 200 gram-metres in total. That one monster metre is 150 of them. The other 39 metres share the remaining 50, which works out to about 1.3 g/t. That's a very different rock.

Second thing to hunt for: true width. Drills almost never hit a vein square-on, so the length down the hole flatters the real thickness. If the release doesn't give a true width estimate, assume it's smaller and ask why it's missing.

Third: depth. 1.3 g/t at surface can be a mine. 1.3 g/t at 700 metres is an expensive hole in the ground.

None of this means the company is lying. It means the headline is marketing and the table underneath is the news. Read the table.