Most people read the drill results. The money's in reading the financing.
Everyone memorizes assay tables. Almost nobody reads the placement announcement properly — and that's usually what decides whether you actually make money on a junior.
Here's what I look at when a financing drops.
Who took the paper > how much they raised
$5M isn't $5M. It's a question of who owns your company now.
Strategic partner or a known resource fund? That capital sits. Filled by a retail broker syndicate? That capital trades — and it trades on you.
And check insider participation in the closing release. Management writing their own cheques alongside you is one of the only signals in this business that actually costs the signaller something. When there's none on a big raise, notice that.
The headline price isn't the real price
A unit at $0.40 with a full warrant at $0.60 isn't a $0.40 financing. It's $0.40 plus a pile of stock that gets created if things go well — sitting right above you as supply.
Quick read on terms:
Half warrants → book filled easily. Good sign.
Full warrants, cheap strike → they struggled to fill it.
5-year term on an explorer → years of overhang.
Acceleration clause → underrated. Lets the company force exercise if the stock runs. Turns overhang into treasury instead of dead weight.
Here's the part almost nobody does
Every warrant tranche out there is a known price level where supply shows up.
Pull the old financings off SEDAR. Write down the strikes and the expiries. You now have a map of where the stock hits resistance on the way up — and where a block of paper expires worthless and that ceiling disappears.
It's all public. It takes twenty minutes. Almost no retail investor does it.
Flow-through will fool you if you let it
Flow-through prices at a premium to market. That premium isn't the market valuing the stock higher — someone's buying a tax deduction.
Two things that actually matter to you:
That money is legally locked to exploration spending. It cannot pay the light bill. So a company that raises flow-through while short on hard dollars is coming back to market soon — and that's the raise that dilutes you.
Also, flow-through demand bunches up near year-end. Which is exactly when tax-loss selling is happening. Those two things colliding every December is not a coincidence.
The only question that really matters
Take the raise, subtract fees, and ask: does this actually answer the question the market has about this asset?
Funding 3,000m when the target needs 15,000m to be properly tested = they bought news flow, not an answer. They'll be back.
Funded straight through a real catalyst with G&A covered = dilution working for you.
Dilution isn't the enemy. Juniors have no revenue — the alternative to raising is dying. What matters is whether the terms read as strength or desperation, and whether the money gets them to a decision point.
One habit worth building: read the closing release, not the announcement. The announcement is what they hoped for. The closing is what actually got filled, at what terms, and by whom. That gap is where the story usually is.
