The problem with reading a technical report

An economic study is hundreds of pages that compress into a handful of headline numbers — NPV, IRR, payback — produced by a model the reader never sees. The assumptions that drive those numbers are scattered across mine plans, cost tables, tax sections and footnotes, and reports are not free of internal inconsistencies: our coverage has found cash flows that contradict the report's own stated working-capital terms, published tables that do not reproduce their own headline NPV, and revenue that silently escapes the tax computation.

What we do instead

• Rebuild from the lowest published level. Every cost, revenue and capital line is constructed from the report's unit assumptions through physical drivers — tonnes mined, grades, recoveries, unit rates. Report totals are never wired in as inputs; they are targets the rebuilt model must hit on its own.
• Footnote everything. Every hardcoded input carries a citation to its section, table and page in the source report — or to the statute or third-party source it came from. A subscriber can trace every input to its source.
• Verify by real recalculation. The finished model must reproduce the report's headline NPV within a disclosed tolerance, recalculated in a live spreadsheet engine — and reconcile the per-year shape of each major line, not just life-of-mine totals.
• Build taxes from statute. Income tax, mining duties, royalties, depreciation and loss carry-forwards are built from the governing law and checked against the report. Where a report applies a treatment the statute does not support, both are built and the difference is quantified.
• Disclose, never force. When a report cannot be reconciled to its own tables, the divergence is published and decomposed on the model's assumptions page instead of being forced to tie.
• Independent review. Every deliverable passes an independent verification pass — economics re-derived, factual claims checked against the source report — and a line-by-line review by the founder, a CFA charterholder with more than fifteen years in valuation and a mining specialty, before publication.

What we do not do

We do not make buy or sell recommendations, price targets, or forecasts of our own. The product is a verified, flexible version of the study's economics and a clear account of its strengths, weaknesses and sensitivities — the groundwork for your own judgment.

Independence

Groundwork does not accept payment for coverage, and covered companies do not review, approve or influence the research before publication. Covered companies may buy our standard products at published prices, on the same terms as any customer.