Here are some excerpts from an investing service about a major drilling company. Interesting thoughts about junior mining investments. Thought you might enjoy reading it. Italics are mine:

"According to S&P Global Market Intelligence, there are 4,434 listings on the various Canadian stock exchanges, and 1,494 of those listings are tied to the metals and mining sub-sector. Based on my 20 or so years of experience, I’ll boldly state that less than 1% of those ~1,500 listings are what we’d consider “investable.”

You see, the vast majority of those metals and mining listings are companies that are little more than a hope and a dream. Offering the promise of an undeveloped plot of land in some far-flung corner of the globe and the resources it may, but probably will not belch forward. We steer clear of such situations in this service—the same goes for our personal portfolios—and we highly recommend you do the same.

To be sure, metals and mining companies are critical to the global economy. Generally speaking, though, they make for horrible businesses.

Historically, gold has been the primary demand driver for XXXX’s services, and, indeed, at last report, gold-related drilling accounted for approximately 40% of the company’s revenues. However, this was down from the more normal 50% representation. Increasingly, “battery metals,” led by copper, are part of the mix, accounting for approximately 30% of revenue in the last quarter. This shift, as they say, is interesting.

One of the primary reasons that we’re putting this recommendation forward is that a very intriguing supply/demand situation is shaping up around copper. As alluded to off the top, copper miners tend to be horrendous businesses, but XXXX offers an appealing side door.

Maybe you haven’t heard of XXXX, but I suspect most of you have heard of a company by the name of Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA).

Just in case, Tesla, along with an expanding cohort, makes electric vehicles.

Here’s the thing. The next time you see a Tesla Model 3 in the wild, what you should really be envisioning is a big pile of copper—85 kg of it, to be precise. That’s how much copper is used to make the battery that goes into every Tesla Model 3.

Now, the price of copper, like all commodities, is a supply-and-demand story.

As illustrated by this Tesla anecdote, you don’t have to go on much of a hunt to find supportive stats when it comes to the demand side of the equation. Electric vehicles are here, and we’re believers in the narrative that they are only going to become more prominent. As it stands, they require about 3.5 times as much copper as a conventional car.

There’s an issue, though, in terms of where the supply is going to come from to support this electric vehicle revolution.  In a nutshell, the world needs more copper mines—like, yesterday. To close the gap illustrated above requires eight mines the size of the world’s largest-producing copper mine (Escondida). That’s not going to happen. But it’s our opinion that more, and potentially significantly more, drilling for copper is in XXXX’s future.

While many of the companies that hire XXXX to drill for copper and all else do so with money raised primarily (exclusively?) through dilutive stock issuance, XXXX offers a way to gain this exposure via a real business with real fundamentals.

Ok, we’ve got copper exposure and a fundamentally sound business that we can wrap our heads around.

The kicker to this story is, and always has been, junior mining activity. Again, personally, I swore off investing in junior mining companies early in my career, but even that was too late, given their ability to eradicate one’s hard-earned savings.

However, from time to time, market forces unite, and capital flows into the coffers of these money-hungry entities. Generally, this is on the back of a supply-demand mismatch along the lines of the one that copper is forecast to have. A similar dynamic exists in the world of gold.

Junior mining has essentially been dead for a decade; however, in headier times, these companies can account for as much as 50% of drilling activity in the industry."