This Copper Stock Exploded Before Anyone Knew the Grade | Decade Resource
The Deep Dive Sep 11, 2026 9:45
Summary
Decade Resources' stock rerated on visual porphyry alteration at Bonaparte — but no assays, no resource, no grade are yet proven.
Junior miners can rerate sharply on photographs of rock and alteration order — yet one deep hole never proves or disproves a porphyry deposit.
Three open questions for investors: is there copper, are they near the core, and can a 557-meter-deep porphyry be mined economically?
Block caving at 557 meters needs enormous tonnage and consistent grade — neither is confirmed at Bonaparte.
Steve Hyland's takeaways
- Top takeaway The guest's top-line call is that Decade is "in the ballpark, not necessarily at home plate" — the textbook porphyry pattern in DDH1 is encouraging but does not yet prove there is economic copper, that the hole hit near the centre of the system, or that the deposit would be mineable from that depth.
- He frames the rerating skeptically: the stock moved from 3 cents a year earlier to a market value near $50M dollars in early September on visual alteration alone, before any assays were available.
- He lays out three questions he says are still open for investors — is there metal in it, are they near the middle, and is any of it deep-mineable.
- He warns that many porphyry systems look exactly like this and contain nothing worth mining, and that you can be inside a real deposit and still drill its edge — i.e. "beautiful rock 800m from where the money is."
- He credits Decade for disclosing in the press release that visual observations are not a substitute for assays and that copper minerals do not mean economic grades, and commits to coming back with an "honest take" once the assays and soil-sample results come in.