The Hole Truth: Mining Investment Podcast

It would seem opportunity knocks for investors in Sunstone Metals. There appears to be a big disconnect between the market cap of the company and the amount of metal they have in the ground.

Guest bio

Patrick Duffy is Managing Director of Sunstone Metals Limited (ASX: STM), an Ecuador-focused gold-copper explorer advancing the Bramaderos gold-copper project in the south of the country and the El Palmar gold-copper project in the north.

Duffy is a Chartered Accountant who began his career at Ernst & Young. He was Chief Corporate Development Officer and Chief Financial Officer at Red 5 Limited (now Vault Minerals), where he led financing for the King of the Hills gold mine and the sale of the Siana mine in the Philippines. Earlier he was Chief Financial Officer of the Tampakan copper-gold project and Director of Strategy and Performance at Xstrata Copper and for the Koniambo Nickel Project, and has worked in management consulting, mining private equity and agricultural technology. He joined the Sunstone board as a Non-Executive Director in November 2023 and became Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer in April 2024.

Produced by Resource Media

The Hole Truth: Mining Investment Podcast is a product of Read Corporate.

Please note that Read Corporate does not provide investment advice and investors should seek personalised advice before making any investment decisions.

Resources

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Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theholetruthpodcast/

Company website: https://www.sunstonemetals.com.au/

Key Insights

A $55 million market cap sits against a resource Duffy values at 30 to 50 dollars an ounce.

Duffy calls Sunstone absolutely mispriced. The Bramaderos resource now stands at 6.2 million ounces of gold equivalent, and across the company's global resource of 7.5 million ounces the market is paying less than US$10 an ounce, where he believes the stock should trade at between $30 and $50. He thinks the market has not yet grasped the scale, and compares the potential of an open-pit Bramaderos with Lundin Gold's Fruta del Norte, a single-asset Ecuadorian producer now worth around $25 billion. He also draws on his time at Red 5, where he helped build the King of the Hills gold mine, and says Bramaderos is a far superior project.

The resource doubled in 12 months, and Duffy sees a short path to 10 million ounces.

The new estimate is pit constrained and rests on holes that were mineralised from surface to the bottom of the hole through the year. Beyond it sits an exploration target of a further 4 to 11 million ounces, and Duffy sees a pathway to at least 10 million ounces in the short term and 15 to 20 million ounces one day. The resource is currently split between two pits, with an undrilled strike connecting them that he expects to grow into one super pit at least two kilometres by two kilometres and 300 to 400 metres deep. A recent 26 grams per tonne intersection over six to seven metres shows higher grade pockets that the resource does not yet reflect.

The grade is low by ASX standards and normal for a South American porphyry, which is where the economics come from.

The resource averages 0.42 grams per tonne gold equivalent, rising to about 0.45 grams per tonne in the 3.3 million ounce Indicated category across roughly 230 million tonnes. Duffy says that is typical for a porphyry in the region and argues that what matters is the margin on each ounce, which he puts at US$2,500 to $3,000 an ounce at current gold prices. He expects a future mine to produce at least 300,000 to 400,000 ounces a year at an all-in sustaining cost of about $1,200 to $1,300 an ounce, with higher grade material arriving in the early years.

El Palmar is a 15 to 45 million ounce exploration target, drilling again for the first time in three years.

In northern Ecuador, El Palmar sits on the Toachi Fault system that hosts the Cascabel and Llurimagua copper systems, and Duffy believes it could be a third major discovery and a replica of Cascabel. Drilling has restarted after three years, aimed at deeper systems comparable in scale to the region's large copper porphyries, with results expected later this year. DGR Global, led by SolGold founder Nick Mather, has taken a 10% stake in Sunstone, which Duffy sees as endorsement from a team that has been through this before.

A bigger Indicated resource and better metallurgy could make a new scoping study far more compelling.

Duffy says metallurgical results since April have shown a significant improvement in gold and copper recoveries and a cleaner copper concentrate, and the Indicated portion is much larger. The previous scoping study returned a valuation of $1.2 billion, and he expects a study released now would be significantly higher, with the possibility of higher throughput and a de-risked, resource-based case. He recently met investors in Hong Kong, where he found more optimism than in Australia and strong belief in gold, and expects that interest to start showing in the share price.

Xpedra has generated some sensational drilling results from its Springfield gold project in New South Wales. The company and the project appear to be at an inflection point. Another round of drilling is about to start. There's plenty of gold. It's just a question of how much.

 

Produced by Resource Media

The Hole Truth: Mining Investment Podcast is a product of Read Corporate.

Please note that Read Corporate does not provide investment advice and investors should seek personalised advice before making any investment decisions.

Resources

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/the-hole-truth-podcast

YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLI4sZkSfEpPi_u7OrD7lQ-tZHbdy6EhCC

Website: https://resourcesrisingstars.com.au/the-hole-truth-podcast/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theholetruthpodcast/

Company website: https://xpedraresources.com/

Gateway appears to have cracked the code at its Yandal Gold Project in Western Australia, with some cracking results. The upside now could be huge.

Guest bio

Richard Pugh is Chief Executive Officer of Gateway Mining Limited (ASX: GML), a Perth-based gold explorer whose flagship Yandal Gold Project covers 1,780 square kilometres on the eastern flank of the Yandal greenstone belt in Western Australia, alongside the Glenburgh South and Barrelmaker projects.

Pugh is a geologist with more than 18 years of industry experience, having worked as a senior consulting geologist and exploration manager for ASX-listed explorers. He came to Gateway with the ground already familiar. As Technical Director of the Yandal Gold Project at Strickland Metals, he ran the work that turned Millrose from an unloved asset into a $61 million sale to Northern Star Resources, and led the drilling at Horse Well that more than doubled the resource there and established what controls the gold along the belt. Gateway acquired the Yandal project from Strickland in August 2025 for $45 million in convertible preference shares, and Pugh was appointed Chief Executive Officer shortly afterwards.

Pugh holds a Bachelor of Science in Exploration and Resource Geology from Cardiff University and is a Member of the Australian Institute of Geoscientists, acting as Competent Person under the JORC Code for the company's results. He works alongside Executive Chairman Andrew Bray, a foundation shareholder and former Chief Executive Officer of Strickland Metals, and Non-Executive Directors Anthony McClure, David Morgan and David Crook.

Produced by Resource Media

The Hole Truth: Mining Investment Podcast is a product of Read Corporate.

Please note that Read Corporate does not provide investment advice and investors should seek personalised advice before making any investment decisions.

Resources

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/the-hole-truth-podcast

YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLI4sZkSfEpPi_u7OrD7lQ-tZHbdy6EhCC

Website: https://resourcesrisingstars.com.au/the-hole-truth-podcast/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theholetruthpodcast/

Company website: https://www.gatewaymining.com.au/

Key Insights

Five years of watching where gold sits, and where it doesn't, produced a four-box checklist.

Pugh frames the Cowza discovery as an overnight success five years in the making. Working across Millrose and Horse Well from 2021, he and his team noticed that the deposits behaving best were the ones sitting on a particular contact. Palomino and Warmblood, the two largest at Horse Well, sit on a mafic-intermediate contact, run high grade, plunge north and remain open in fresh rock. Bronco and Marwari, formed in the footwall, carried good oxide and transitional gold but had no contact for the gold to drop out against, so they stayed shallow. From those observations came four criteria: the mafic-intermediate contact, evidence of fluid flow in the form of demagnetised zones where the fluid has stripped magnetite from the rock, northeast-trending structures creating the gaps for gold to settle into, and a position on the Celia Shear. Cowza jumped out of the dataset more than anywhere else.

The first test of the thesis in fresh rock returned 41 metres at 2 grams per tonne.

Cowza had been drilled in the 1990s by Eagle Mining, which found good oxide and transitional results in the southern part of the prospect but nothing with roots underneath. Gateway pulled the historic chips, sent them for multi-element analysis and found a single rock type with no mafic component, which said the contact they wanted was further east. Three lines of aircore on that contact returned 4 metres at 3 grams per tonne and 4 metres at 4.7 grams per tonne. Cowza ticked every box: 4.5 kilometres of demagnetisation, buffered against two northeast-trending structures on the Celia lineament, and now a proven mafic-intermediate contact. Six reverse circulation holes were then drilled into fresh rock beneath the oxide intercepts. The first punched through a 40-metre-wide shear zone and returned 41 metres at 2 grams per tonne gold from 104 metres, including 9 metres at 7.5 grams per tonne. As Pugh puts it, the hypothesis was right.

The checklist travels, and there is more than 13 kilometres of strike to run it across.

The value of a repeatable set of criteria is that it can be pointed at ground nobody has drilled. Gateway announced one such target on the morning of this interview: Pewy, a Cowza look-alike sitting south of the Ward prospect along the Celia Shear, with three kilometres of demagnetisation on the mafic-intermediate contact and no drill testing to date. Flanking aircore has already returned 8 metres at 1 gram per tonne to the south and 4 metres at 1.4 grams per tonne to the north, which Pugh reads as everything vectoring towards the demagnetised zone. With Cowza, Celia South and Ward's seven-kilometre trend, the known mineralised corridor runs beyond 13 kilometres and could stretch to 19 if the gap between Ward and Cowza fills in. Pugh's view on what that could amount to is unambiguous: Horse Well could be a million ounces in its own right, Cowza multi-million, and Pewy multi-million again.

A $25 million raise that closed at $45 million, and a $60 million war chest behind a $230 million company.

Gateway went to market for $25 million and came away with $45 million at 8 cents a share, lead managed by JP Equity Partners. The swing factor was London-based Jupiter Asset Management, an existing shareholder Pugh says was one of the few funds appearing on the register daily and actively picking up stock. Gateway had modelled Jupiter for $5 million to $10 million. It came in for $20 million. Add $15.1 million in cash and liquid securities, including $8.23 million banked from selling the Brightstar Resources shares Gateway received for the Montague East gold rights, and the company is carrying roughly $60 million against a market capitalisation of about $230 million. Ninety cents in every dollar goes to the new discovery and ten cents to tidying up the existing resources. Two diamond rigs arrive at the end of the month, around six rigs should be turning at Cowza by year end, Pewy drilling starts in October, and a 120,000-metre reverse circulation and diamond program is now funded.

The existing 400,400 ounces still has a depth story, and Jundee is 50 kilometres away.

The Yandal resource Gateway bought from Strickland stands at 8.17 million tonnes at 1.52 grams per tonne for 400,400 ounces, weighted to the Horse Well camp with Dusk 'til Dawn alongside it. That resource was built for a purpose, constraining as much oxide and transitional material as possible into $4,000 gold pit shells to around 140 metres depth, which is why the fresh rock below it has barely been tested. Palomino and Warmblood are both open at depth and down plunge. On the corporate question, Gateway sits about 50 kilometres from Northern Star's Jundee operations, and Pugh is straightforward that the same management group transacted the Millrose deal with Northern Star, making a sale one option among several. The bigger the company gets, the more options it has, and at multi-million ounces it could stand alone. Executive Chairman Andrew Bray has put more than $10 million of his own money into the register and takes no options or performance rights.

Kaoko's share price has run wild on the back of the first two holes at its copper project in Namibia. The company is clearly onto something. The only question is, how big is it?

Guest bio

Gerard O'Donovan is Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Kaoko Metals Limited (ASX: KAO), a West Perth-based explorer advancing the Chalkos Copper-Silver Project in Namibia's Kaoko Copper Belt and the Karibib Copper-Gold-Tungsten Project in the Damara Belt.

O'Donovan brings more than 18 years of experience across exploration, project development and mining operations, spanning IPO delivery and growth-stage resources companies. Before co-founding Kaoko, he held roles with Pilbara Minerals, Fortescue Metals Group and Rio Tinto. He formed the company in 2024 with geologists Callum Standing and Harry Madley around a deliberately contrarian strategy of true greenfields exploration in highly prospective ground, and took Kaoko to the ASX in May 2026 through a $6.5 million IPO at 20 cents a share.

O'Donovan holds a Bachelor of Engineering (Civil and Structural, Honours) and is the company's largest individual shareholder. He is joined on the board by Non-Executive Chair Mark Thompson, founder of Talga Group and Catalyst Metals, and Non-Executive Director Jody Dahrouge of Dahrouge Geological Consulting.

Produced by Resource Media

The Hole Truth: Mining Investment Podcast is a product of Read Corporate.

Please note that Read Corporate does not provide investment advice and investors should seek personalised advice before making any investment decisions.

Resources

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/the-hole-truth-podcast

YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLI4sZkSfEpPi_u7OrD7lQ-tZHbdy6EhCC

Website: https://resourcesrisingstars.com.au/the-hole-truth-podcast/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theholetruthpodcast/

Company website: https://kaokometals.com.au/

Key Insights

Two holes from one drill pad delivered broad, shallow visual copper at Otniel.

Kaoko's maiden diamond program at the Otniel prospect drilled two holes from a single pad, angled in opposite directions roughly 60 metres apart at depth. DDOT001 returned 51.83 metres of visible copper mineralisation from 39.27 metres, including 17.20 metres of strong visible mineralisation from 58.37 metres. DDOT002 went better again with 60.25 metres from 36.65 metres, including a 32.36-metre zone of strong visible mineralisation from 59.30 metres, where chalcocite and malachite were estimated at 5 to 8 per cent and native copper at around 4 per cent between 86.40 and 91.66 metres. O'Donovan describes the moment the first core came out of the tube as a "holy moly" moment, with chair Mark Thompson telling him on site, "this isn't normal." Holes three and four have stepped out 75 metres either way and drilling is continuing.

Until the assays land, the mineralogy is the story.

O'Donovan is careful to point out that these are visuals rather than grades, with assays four to six weeks away. What the logging has confirmed is a copper mineral suite that reads well: malachite as an oxide, chalcocite as a secondary sulphide that can carry up to 80 per cent copper, and chalcopyrite as a primary sulphide, alongside cuprite, native copper and dioptase, a gem-quality mineral collectors buy in its own right. Mylonitisation zones in both holes coincide with the strongest mineralisation, pointing to structural control on where the copper sits. The presence of primary sulphides also feeds the bigger question O'Donovan wants answered, which is where the source of the system lies at depth.

A ten-bagger in four months, built on grassroots conviction that the market initially passed on.

Kaoko listed on the ASX in May 2026 at 20 cents with a market capitalisation of roughly $12.1 million and $6.5 million in the bank, on the back of an 80,000-hectare land package with high-grade surface expressions including 69.6 per cent copper and 2,030 grams per tonne silver. O'Donovan is candid that plenty of investors he pitched told him there was "not enough meat on the bone." The stock closed at $2.50 the day before this interview. He credits the foundation shareholders who backed a genuine greenfields story when the fashion was for advanced assets, and frames his job simply as custodian of shareholder money.

The raise came in well above target, funding a second rig and a second work front.

O'Donovan went to market targeting $15 million at $2.20 a share. The book closed at $20 million from institutional investors, taking Kaoko's cash position beyond $24 million before costs and settling on 14 September. The money brings a second diamond rig to Chalkos through drilling partner Optima, allowing the company to keep testing Otniel while opening up Donkey Hill, 2.2 kilometres away, within weeks. O'Donovan is deliberate about who comes onto the register, wanting new shareholders aligned with a technically driven, methodical approach rather than a quick trade.

One prospect drilled inside 800 square kilometres leaves most of the story untold.

Otniel carries around 600 metres of outcropping copper at surface and remains open, potentially dipping under cover. Donkey Hill has more than 800 metres of surface expression across three north-south trending zones, with historic artisanal adits and trenches where chalcocite is still visible in the footwall and hanging wall. Between the two sits Bootless, a third prospect the field team found while mapping, named after co-founder Callum Standing's boots disintegrated in 30-degree heat and had to be tied back on with calico bag strings. Kaoko holds the ground across two exclusive prospecting licences in the same Otavi Subgroup setting that hosts the historic Tsumeb mine, which produced 1.7 million tonnes of copper at 4.3 per cent, and neighbours Midas Minerals' Otavi work. Roads are still being cut across ground that has never been touched.

Lachlan Star is churning out some fantastic drilling results from its New Waverley Gold project. It's a brownfields exploration campaign. The project has sat relatively dormant for many years in the hands of private prospectors, and now Lachlan Star is hitting it hard with the drill rig.

Guest bio

Andrew Tyrrell is Chief Executive Officer of Lachlan Star Limited (ASX: LSA), a Perth-based gold and base metals explorer advancing the New Waverley Gold Project near Norseman in Western Australia's Eastern Goldfields.

Tyrrell brings more than two decades of minerals industry experience built around gold exploration and discovery. He joined Lachlan Star as CEO in February 2024 after serving as General Manager of Discovery at Gold Road Resources, where he led the company's transition into a national explorer and restructured its Discovery Group into a self-generating business development model. Before that, he spent a decade at AngloGold Ashanti, including as Technical Manager overseeing global greenfields exploration and as Exploration Manager for the company's USA operations, where he played a key role in the discovery of the Silicon epithermal gold project in Nevada.

Tyrrell holds a Master of Science in Ore Deposit Geology from the University of Western Australia and a Bachelor of Science in Applied Geology from Curtin University, and is a member of the Society of Economic Geologists, the Australian Institute of Geoscientists and the Geological Society of Nevada.

Produced by Resource Media

The Hole Truth: Mining Investment Podcast is a product of Read Corporate.

Please note that Read Corporate does not provide investment advice and investors should seek personalised advice before making any investment decisions.

Resources

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/the-hole-truth-podcast
YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLI4sZkSfEpPi_u7OrD7lQ-tZHbdy6EhCC
Website: https://resourcesrisingstars.com.au/the-hole-truth-podcast/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theholetruthpodcast/
Company website: https://lachlanstar.com/

Key Insights

1. A chance meeting at a Norseman servo delivered a 90%-owned high-grade gold project.
New Waverley was privately held for close to 40 years by two individual prospectors before Lachlan Star got involved. The most recent, David "Golly" Pascoe, a Norseman local who picked up the ground around 15 years ago, granted the mining lease only last year. Lachlan Star's field team crossed paths with Pascoe by chance at the local service station while working an adjoining project, and months of conversation turned into a deal: Lachlan Star acquired 90% of the project for cash and shares, while Pascoe retained a 10% free-carried interest through to pre-feasibility, a 1% net smelter royalty, and shares in the company. The ground includes the old Waverley open pit, mined by Great Fingall Mining Company NL in 1988 for around 4,500 ounces at an average grade of roughly 14 grams per tonne, before the gold price crash sent the operator into administration and the tenement lapsed.

2. Early drilling is already turning up shallow, high-grade gold.
Since completing the acquisition in March 2026, Lachlan Star has pushed through roughly 5,500–6,000 metres of combined diamond and RC drilling, with the RC program expanding well beyond its original scope on the strength of what the rig was turning up. Results include intercepts such as 16m at 5.3g/t gold (including 4m at 20g/t) and 4m at 13.83g/t gold (including 1m at 53g/t), with the individual quartz-reef veins themselves regularly assaying at an ounce or two per tonne. Crucially, the mineralisation sits close to surface — around 40 to 50 metres deep at Waverley Pit, and effectively at surface at Trial Pit, where the company panned free gold from a quartz vein just six metres down.

3. The system is open in every direction across a 400-metre strike — and there are signs of much more.
Lachlan Star has now traced the same style of quartz-vein mineralisation across 400 metres of strike, linking the historic Waverley Pit with the Trial Pit and the old Baker Boys shaft to the north, and the zone remains open at depth, down-plunge and along strike. High-resolution drone magnetics acquired in August 2026 point to something bigger still: a structural corridor potentially extending one to two kilometres, comparable in scale to nearby systems such as Pantoro's Royal Group, Harlequin and Mainfield. Lachlan Star's adjoining Killaloe project, about 20 kilometres northeast of Norseman, adds further regional exposure to the same structural setting.

4. Lachlan Star sits ring-fenced by established regional gold producers.
New Waverley is around 17 kilometres from Norseman and Pantoro's processing plant, and the project is effectively boxed in by major operators — Pantoro to the west, Westgold to the north and east, and Sinclair Gold (formerly Alicanto Minerals) to the south. That neighbourhood matters: shallow, high-grade ounces like Lachlan Star is finding are exactly what those nearby plants want as feed, opening up toll-treating options at operations such as Westgold's Higginsville or Pantoro's Norseman plant, alongside a standalone development or a straight-out buyout. With a market capitalisation of around $56 million at the time of the interview, Tyrrell argues the company doesn't need a large tonnage outcome to move the needle for shareholders.

5. A maiden resource is targeted for the first quarter of 2027, backed by a fresh 10,000-metre drill campaign.
Assays from the remaining RC holes are due over the coming weeks, and Lachlan Star is already lining up an RC rig for a further program of around 10,000 metres to begin within a month or two, aimed at infilling and stitching together the high-grade zones at Waverley Pit, Trial Pit and Baker Boys. Tyrrell is targeting a maiden mineral resource by the first quarter of 2027. The register underpinning that push is tightly held: DevEx Resources (ASX: DEV) retains around 20%, substantial shareholder Tim Goyder holds roughly 11%, and Pascoe remains invested through his retained stake and shares.