Junior and mid-tier miners.
What Is A Junior or Mid-tier Miner Anyway?
Contacted the nice folks at the PDAC (Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada) and asked them for their definition of a Junior Miner Company and a Mid-tier Miner.
Their response was this:
Mining companies are defined largely by the way in which they derive their revenues. A senior producer or operator generates its revenues from the production and sale of the commodity it is mining. A junior mining company has no mining operations and is essentially a venture capital company. It must rely almost entirely on the capital markets to finance its exploration activities [I say "almost entirely" because some juniors derive their financing from private sources]. There is another category: mid-tier producers. These are generally junior companies that have decided to go into production on properties that they have discovered.
Whether it is or isn't really does not matter much and there are many definitions just like the one above. Some just be in production, some 100,000oz., some 150,000oz.,some 200,000oz.. Arguing about clueless metrics seem to be appropriate here. Try looking at PE Ratio, EPS, Stockholder's Equity, growth and reserves. Measuring the worth of a company by production volume is really a ridiculous analysis and arguing over it is even worse.
