Brian I think you have found a good way of segregating different...

Brian I think you have found a good way of segregating different gold producers to quickly determine whether they are overvalued or undervalued relative to their peers, ie if a company's EV/production (AISC adjusted or not) is near or below the bottom of one of your ranges then they are undervalued and conversely if they sit near or above the top of one of your ranges then they are relatively overvalued but I would not throw away the skill of drilling deeper into individual mining companies and more importantly their mines to look for perculiarties which might negatively or positively effect future performance. Your ranges are pretty broad so not that helpful to do delicate surgery with. Reserves and resources are important even in your own analysis as I've pointed out as production and reserves are generally dependant variables but more importantly IMO are the quality of the reserves. I look for simple geometry, for reserves to exist preferably in fewer deposits along with long mine lives. For UG mines I look at the grade, the horizontal footprint (again easy geometry) and most importantly how the ore will be hoisted. Are there enough opening for the mining method, the last thing you want are bottlenecks in your mine. As I said high grade narrow vein mines can increase tonnage by lowering grade but they can't scale tonnage intrinsically. Syama can scale in principle without grade loss. I've given the example of NST who have been desperately reducing grade to maintain tonnage (production) but you can also look at WAF's Sanbrado project (in construction). They to will reduce grade down from high average grades of >20g/t at thier M1 depoist to more like 13g/t by mining lower grade rock (ie living with significant internal dilution). That is how they will maximise gold production and attain the higher production level which the market tends to place a higher value on as you have demonstrated.

Hopefully you will understand why I like the potential of the Syama UG mine so much as it has capicity to scale to about 295,000oz at low cost with a long life. Even if this maximally optimistic level of scaling doesn't occur in the future there should be potential enough to scale to >200koz/annum for > than a decade IMO. This is the sort of core asset a company can really build around.

The March quarterly will let us know if milestones are being hit. Exciting (and a little scary) times ahead waiting for confirmations to come through. Esh