Cejay and Mat sat down again on CEO.CA’s Digging for Dollars after a long pause. Their last tape was July 30. The world had moved. Their market, they said, had not.
Copper was at all-time highs. Precious metals were rebounding. GDX and GDXJ were modestly green on the year. The Venture, as they counted it, was still down. “Thematically in our space I think nothing has changed,” one of them said. Capital still had not spilled into the junior exploration sandbox they actually live in.
That sentence is the investor opportunity. The commodity cycle is loud. The junior cycle is late. Big money is already writing large checks—for brownfield rock, infrastructure, and assets that can work in this cycle. The Venture index has not priced that spillover. The people who get paid are the ones who can tell a now asset from a three-cycle dream, and a material visual from a marketing photo.
Where the real dollars went
They were not arguing that mining is unloved. They were arguing that the love is picky. Real money is still going to projects that already have a hole in the ground and a road to it. “They know the resources are there,” Mat said. Prices rebounding a little is enough to unlock those books.
StrikePoint Gold is the blunt example. A small Venture name agreed to buy Newmont’s Northumberland gold project in Nevada’s Walker Lane for US$70 million upfront. The company then closed a C$190 million subscription-receipt financing to pay for it and to drill. Shawn Khunkhun, who also runs Dolly Varden, stays on the board. Alan Pangbourne comes in as chairman. That is not a grassroots story. That is a known ounces-and-infrastructure story with a giant check attached.
They also pointed at an old Kerr-Addison-style Cadillac file that private holders finally took public with hundreds of millions spoken for out of the gate. The exact book size will settle in filings. The shape will not. When the bid arrives, it arrives first for rock that has already been kicked around for decades.
A uranium technology spinout from a high-grade Athabasca story raised on the order of $100 million, they said, with more behind it. Valley venture names and traditional resource funds showed up in the same sentence. A Montana mill-and-tech file was described as a half-billion raise. Whether every dollar lands exactly as remembered on a podcast is less important than the direction. Private-equity and recovery-tech money is entering commodities. It is not, yet, flooding every $20 million explorer on the Venture.
Mark Carney’s Canada, they noted, now has the chairman of Rio Tinto on a national investment committee. War and protectionism made metals matter in boardrooms that used to treat them as a rounding error. Chevron’s line about oil no longer having one world price was their shorthand for a fractured market. Guaranteed barrels cost more. So do guaranteed pounds. The Venture still trades as if that memo is optional.
The filter: what can work now
Mat’s working rule was the cleanest line in the hour. Find assets that can work now. Do not wait three cycles. That is why brownfields and infrastructure keep winning the first checks. That is why a mid-continent-rift copper hole an hour north of Sault Ste. Marie, with year-round drilling and cheap meters, sits in a different bucket than a pretty target that needs a road, a mill, and a new government.
Sterling Metals is their own copper file on that rift. Market cap was in the neighborhood of $60 million as they spoke. Assays have been filling out a porphyry-style system at Soo Copper near Batchewana Bay. They talked about core scanning that returns a read in about 48 hours and about killing five holes fast. Fail fast is not a slogan on a small budget. It is how you stop lighting money on dead ground while copper sits at records.
Canada producing about 1% of its own copper appetite was the frustration underneath. A modest-grade, scalable system in a place you can actually drill, they argued, can matter more than a 1% copper fantasy in the wrong zip code. Corex, NorthIsle, Surge Copper’s study—those were the comps they used for “you don’t need a monster grade if you have a place and a size.” That is a research frame. It is not a scorecard.
Kirkland Lake-style camp ounces were the other now file. A proven camp, a road, a pit, and a contact they think runs for kilometers. Canadian gold names with fat NAVs that refuse to move were, in their telling, what a late Venture looks like. Downside feels limited if the rock is real. Upside waits for the index to notice. That is the lag again.
Visuals are not assays
The longest argument of the show was not a ticker. It was a photo of core.
Visual assays proliferate when labs get slow. Labs get slow when the market is good. Mat remembered 2009 into the $1,000-to-$1,900 gold run. One old name counted gold flakes in core. The stock went to a $200 million idea. The assays came back as seven meters of 0.2 grams. There was gold in the system. There was not a mine in the press release.
His rule from that scar: selective visuals are a problem. If you show one hole, why that hole? Why not every hole? If you cannot answer, you are marketing. If you show everything, or you have a hard comparison in the same rock, the market at least knows what game it is in.
Talon Metals was the visual he would defend. On Aug. 6 the company put out a record 46.43-meter intercept of massive and mixed massive sulphide in the Vault Zone at Tamarack. It had already drilled the same rock at extreme grade. Later assays on that interval printed 46.43 meters of 13.37% nickel and 16.54% copper, or about 54.8% copper equivalent. That is material. You do not wait two months to tell the market you hit the same unit again. The stock rerated into the billion-dollar class because the rock was the rock, not because someone liked a picture.
BCM Resources sat in the middle. A team with prior copper discoveries put out 550 meters of visual porphyry-skarn after already drilling a strong hole. Each hole costs a fortune and starts hundreds of meters down. A comparison existed. The stock still ran hard on the photo. Assays remain the judge. Credibility bought a hall pass. It did not buy a grade.
Decade-style pictures of a quartz vein and some pyrite, with no width, were the other pole. “What are we buying?” Mat asked. Presence of sulphide in a good belt is not a number. Juggernaut-style vein names that later come back as five meters of three grams are how expectations get set and then broken. Gold is harder to read in a photo than a massive-sulphide contact. That is why gold visuals fail more often.
The opportunity inside that rant is process. Do not pay a 340% move for a picture unless the company has a comparison hole and a reason the market cannot wait. Prefer consistent disclosure—show the ugly core too—or wait for the lab. Summer drilling is about to hit the tape. The next two months will mint both kinds of release. Only one kind pays you twice.
How to use a late Venture without becoming the exit
Their rapid-fire book was a field guide, not a shopping list. First-pass VMS in a new kingdom at a $70 million cap got a shrug until the system grows. Grade under a historic Sudbury deposit got a lean-in because infrastructure and metal already exist. Ounces below a pit at a sleepy cap with cash got a buy-the-lag vote. A giant NAV that will not move got the “prove the PEA” treatment. A whole Nevada district rolled up after a century of split ownership got “now you have to drill it.” Oxide at a gram in Nevada is a different animal than sulphide at a gram. Heap leach is cheaper. That distinction still separates a mine from a science project.
Management can reprice a copper porphyry overnight. They watched a file jump toward $450 million to $500 million when a known seller of companies walked in, with Barrick already in the ground for tens of millions. The district jumped with it. At the new number they sounded less eager than they had at 65 cents. That is the other half of the opportunity. The Venture pays for people. It also pays you to ask what is left after the people are in the price.
A large copper explorer with major-company partners, a lot of cash, and a 200-meter one-percent hole beside a district that already drew a multi-billion purchase was their contrarian pitch. Seasonality and share count were the discounts. Discovery was the floor. “If you have 200 meters of 1%, you’re not wondering if something else is there,” Mat said. “Something else is there. Just how good is it?”
The map for the fall
Write two columns. Column one: copper at records, gold and silver bouncing, war and protectionism, brownfield checks the size of a mid-cap’s market value. Column two: a Venture index that still has not caught the spillover, juniors that need news, and a flood of visual press releases as labs jam.
The opportunity is sitting in the gap with a rule. Prefer rock that can work in this cycle. Prefer teams that show the comparison hole or wait for assays. Prefer infrastructure over a pretty map. Summer meters are about to become fall numbers. That is when late indexes either notice or give you another year of the same complaint.
Cejay and Mat did not claim the Venture must rip tomorrow. They claimed metals matter now and their sandbox has not been paid for it yet. If they are right, the next useful skill is not finding another photo of core. It is knowing which photo was mandatory—and which one was just the market needing news.
Disclaimer
Market commentary as of late September 2026, based on a CEO.CA Digging for Dollars conversation with Cejay and Mat and on public company disclosures cited for context. Figures on air can differ from later filings. Hosts discussed names they follow or helped incubate. This is not investment advice and not a recommendation to buy or sell any security mentioned. Junior mining stocks can go to zero. Visuals are not assays. Do your own work. Past performance is not a guide to future results.