The company can’t tell anybody about the data until it’s public, but if you can figure it out without the company telling you because you’re smart, then you’ve got information that the public doesn’t have. It’s all there, you just have to do the work. And that gives us a great advantage.

GRR: What other tools do you have at your disposal?

NG: There’s a new device out there called a handheld XRF reader that can scan a drill core and give you an elemental reading right there on site. You know how difficult it is to get an assay. Sometimes you have to wait a month or more. Now we can go to an exploration project with one of those and pretty well tell what the grade’s going to be.

So the company spends a fortune on drilling, then they let Ned analyze the cores for free, and in private, with a hand-held XRF so he can have an advantage over everyone else.

To me that is insider information. Just because the information is not in the form of a written statement or even a whisper in the ear, it is still information that is given to a favoured person. It is information derived at huge cost to the shareholders and encoded in the drill cores. Just because Ned has a magic decoder (XRF), it doesn't make this right.

What is the solution? Prevent such visits or at least the analysis? Require the results of such measurements to be made public? Insist that the company make their own XRF scans and publish them? Band together with other investors to make our own XRF measurements and use them to out-manoeuvre other less fortunate investors?