Articles

Has the grade improved, or just the adjective?

Warwick Anderson's question: read a year of ASX announcements, find every "high grade", work out what it actually means by commodity, include the interval, and track how the definition moves.

What companies call "high grade"

The grade, mostly. When an ASX release calls a gold intercept "high grade", the median is 7.77 g/t. Releases that don't use the phrase headline 1.6 g/t. For copper it's 2.5% against 0.91%.

The word tracks real grade and didn't drift over the year. The one habit worth noticing: "high grade" intervals are about half as long (7 m against 14 m for gold). Even so, grade × length is still 2.7× higher for gold and 1.7× for copper.

Intercepts called "high grade" against everything else

Each dot is one announcement's quoted drill intercept. The upper row in each pair is an intercept the release itself calls high grade. The lower row is the headline intercept from a release that never uses the phrase. Hover a dot for the company and intercept.

Did the bar move during the year?

Only intercepts called high grade. The line is the median of each three-month window.

How it was built

2,795 unique ASX announcements from 21 Oct 2025 to 21 Oct 2026, pulled from Canetoad's processed announcement index with searches for "high grade" and for ordinary drilling and assay results. Intercepts ("7m @ 4.9 g/t Au", "30m at 0.90% Cu") were parsed from each title and summary.

An intercept counts as called high grade only when "high grade" sits in the same sentence just before it, with no other intercept in between, and isn't tied to a different metal. "High-grade rock chips" or "high-grade copper" never label a gold intercept. Metal-equivalent grades are excluded.

What was checked

Five of six randomly drawn "called high grade" gold intercepts use the phrase in the company's own PDF. The sixth was the summary's wording.
Five of six randomly drawn "plain" releases don't use it. The sixth did, so a few genuine high-grade calls sit in the plain group. That narrows the gap, so the real difference is if anything larger.
The difference is far beyond chance: Mann–Whitney p ≈ 10⁻²⁶ for gold and 10⁻⁸ for copper.

Limits

Each release counts once, at its headline intercept, and headlines are a company's best result. The comparison set is drilling and assay releases found by search, not every ASX announcement. Silver, uranium, rare earths and lithium had too few clean pairs to compare. Twelve months is a short window: gold traded roughly US$4,000–5,200/oz all year, so Matt Briggs' price test needs a longer one.

The ledger

Every intercept behind the charts, exactly as reported. Click Date, Grade or Length to sort; click again to reverse.

Source: Canetoad.ai processed ASX announcement index, extracted 21 October 2026. Grades and lengths as reported; no top-cutting or compositing.