What II find intriguing about this transaction is the $67m transaction is more than what Capricorn Metals paid for Mt Gibson

Mt Gibson had a MRE of 2 million ounces which they paid $40m in 2021 (actually MRE is 79.7Mt @ 0.8g/t Au for 2,083,000 ounces of gold so all low grade)

But looking at the Mt Gibson map it is debatable which one is better value. While Mt Gibson has a bigger resource and also now a reserve of 1m Oz, Mt Gibson appears to be more spread out than Millrose and does not have the "western trend" Time will tell if NST made a good purchase but I think they did.

In summary I don't blame Strickland for accepting that offer. There are some companies with resource estimates trading below 65m market cap including Barton Gold (BGD), Brightstar resources (BTR) and Astral Resources (AAR) but that does not mean they are good value (just look at the maps as comparison to Mt Gibson or Millrose).

I regret watching Tech and other non-gold mining shares when I should have been watching Strickland more closely even when STK appeared on my scan a few times.

Although the main project is gold, I'm of the belief now shareholder value can be extracted the same way as any other non-gold company on the ASX if the project proves there is scale and economics even amidst the falling gold price.

Meanwhile I'm still waiting the STK shares to pull back a bit to 10c so I can get more but I don't think that will happen as mentioned in the earlier posts.

We are also due for some drilling results in the next few weeks.

I think that one thing people tend to forget when looking at gold grades, such as 0.8g/t Au (lower than 1 gram of gold per tonne of dirt/ore) is that you also need to look at how shallow that gold is, the ore type - i.e. how easy/hard and cheap/expensive is it to extract that gold at scale, and how close is that deposit to existing infrastructure, particularly a working mill that could be used to process the ore. Regis made good money at Duketon for years with low grades - and there are plenty of other examples. The management who were so succesful at Regis in those early years are mostly now at Capricorn (CMM) or Emerald (EMR) and both companies are doing really well. Grades are certainly important, but it's only one part of the picture. The best gold company management teams know value when they see it, and they are taking a lot of other factors into account to determine that value as it pertains to their company in the context of their existing assets.

For NST, all they have to do is wrap a mining study together and put it through the Jundee mill. CMM has to do more drilling, feas work etc... and build a new plant to make any money from it. Different values applied to different approaches to monetisation. Same for WGX/RMS when bidding for MSV as all either had to do was mine and put through an existing mill, hence why the valuation on their bids were multiples of any gold M&A on the ASX for years (see my slightly outdated table below).

*edited to update the table

@BkrDzn I agree it is hard to compare Mt Gibson to Millrose. And ti is obvious there are synergies for NST to acquire Millrose with one being trucking distance to Jundee Mill which I was aware of also.

Could explain why only Capricorn would be interested in Gibson as Clark and team have the experience to do low grade ore projects although I know the Capex will be huge.