Under $10 Million: Where the Real Leverage in Gold Lives

0:01 Okay, we are now live. Hello everyone and thank you for joining us today for another live event. Our topic is NanoCap Explorers and why they could offer huge leverage to the gold price. I'm pleased to welcome our panelists today, Noel Kamogli, President of Ashley Gold, Daniel Cohen, Executive Chairman at Caprock Mining, and Darcy Viss, VP Exploration and Director at Golden Access Mining Corp. We'll start with a broader discussion on the main topic today, then move into questions about each company. So I've prepared a few questions, but we'd love to hear yours too. So if you want to participate and ask questions, please just submit them at any time using the chat feature at the bottom of your screen. And as always, this event is being recorded and the replay will be available shortly after we wrap up here. With that, Let's dive in and maybe I'll let Noah kick things off here.

0:49 With gold trading near record highs, why do you believe sub 10 million explorers are where investors find the most leverage rather than the larger, more established gold names? Yeah, great question. It's a loaded question. The larger, more established gold names may have already had their most significant moves. That's not to say that more upside can't be had in those names. They're spinning off record cash flow. And I do think that we've yet to see a significant trickle down effect both from that record cash flow into the junior space, but also from investors who have large gains who might be starting to look at, you know, diversifying down the ladder, so to speak into developers, and then into more of the junior space.

1:36 So I think that's where the niche market of the really small companies that haven't had massive moves, I think that's where you could get some really large upside. And Daniel, any other commentary on that? Yeah, sure. First of all, I agree with everything Noah said. I think another element as well to think about is that if you're looking for day to day, week to week, maybe even month to month correlation, Large caps probably continue to be the right space to be. You can even buy an ETF for that matter. Aside from the fact that, you know, it hasn't necessarily and I agree with Noah that it hasn't trickled down yet. I think just trying to explain the concept behind behind it, at least from my perspective, which is why I think investors should think about this. You're looking to make a move into gold and you want to benefit from the leverage to gold over a longer period, whether it's 1 year, 2 year, 3 years.

2:31 And you don't want to necessarily be able to time when that massive move happens. You're actually really you're better off investing in whether it's a couple of juniors or a basket of juniors. And the reason is, is that over a period of a cycle, a full cycle, the most money that you can make is to buy an asset that is out of the money that suddenly becomes in the money. So if you take an asset that, you know, is not profitable at $2,000 an ounce, but it's suddenly profitable at $3,000 an ounce. And next thing you know, gold's at $5,000 an ounce. It doesn't happen as soon as it passes $3,000 in terms of the gold price, but at some point it will. At some point, the market's going to turn around and going to say, that used to be an asset that didn't make sense. Now it makes sense and you'll never have a better return than being able to participate in that revaluation.

3:23 You can't necessarily pick the timing, so it's not a day to day correlation, but it's a, it's a leverage to gold that can outpace investing in seniors. Thank you. Yeah, just to add there, yeah, just to add there Kyle, definitely agree with both of those. And yeah, I think that it's all about share volume. You know, a junior minor is gonna make a lot more growth if they hit something good than a major. So if you want to make money, invest in juniors. If you want to save for retirement in your RSPs and want something a bit more stable, the bigger players are more stable and less risky. But if you're into speculation, The juniors is where you're going to really get those value increases. And Darcy, to make that money, you have to evaluate the ground as an investor. What actually makes a target high impact enough to move the needle for a company at this size?

4:16 Well, I mean, at a nano cap size, it doesn't take much because, like I said, there's not a lot of shares out. But really, I think that any sort of discovery is going to move the needle up. Any positive momentum is going to move the needle. So yeah, pretty much anything there. You can show progression towards the potential deposit is going to be positive for your stock price. And yeah, you're just not going to see that with a bigger company. Noah, you have a few targets as well. Why don't you add to that question? What actually makes a target high impact enough to move them for a company? Yeah, well, I mean, even on a broader scale, not just the target, but the project needs to be located, or at least the way we've been evaluating our projects. We want to be close to established players in the district. We're operating in the Dryden Gold Camp. So we're adjacent and bordering NexGold, the Goliath Gold Complex, which is the most advanced in the district.

5:17 So that helps. There's, you know, they're permitted or they're going into their final phase of permitting. The infrastructure is amazing. You've got highway, you've got road access, you know, skilled workforce, you name it, you've got it in that area. So that makes the project selection easy. For targeting, we want to make sure that we can deliver the most tonnage at this stage. And then within that, we're obviously looking for those higher grade chutes that can deliver the ounces as well. So we want tonnage and then we want that mix of higher grade. And I think we've started to see that, like we intercepted higher grade veinlets in the 6-7 zone. And now that we've started the step out campaign, We put out news this morning of about 0.5 gram over 55 meters. We're seeing the tonnage envelope.

6:08 I think there's a lot of growth and upside in how we're stepping out and evaluating targets with the drill. I think it'd be good for people new to some of your stories. Maybe they joined for 1 company and they're here in your story for the first time. Why don't we talk about the ground around you and Daniel? Noah, you touched on it briefly. So if you want, go ahead and continue to give a little quick pitch for Ashley Gold, then we move on to Daniel here. Yeah, I'll just keep it very quick here. So we're against NexGold on patented ground, which is an amazing type of land tenor. We've got a very large project in mining claims also continuing off of the Conclave ground on the northeast of the Goliath gold complex and then we've got 2 other 3 other main projects within the belt as well. In terms of main players, we've got Dryden Gold, very active in the region, obviously with that namesake.

7:08 And then we've got Canoraland who has staked massive blocks up against our southern boundary at Burnhut. And then as I already alluded to NexGold. So those are our neighbors, Pretty, pretty active camp. Daniel, tell us about Caprock Mining. Well, the interesting thing about Caprock Mining is that we have the ability to create a new trend in an area that is already extremely established. We're 75 kilometers northeast of Val d'Or and so we're right in between 2, you know, the largest trends in Canada. Historically you got the Casa Berardi trend right north of us And you got, you know, the Duster porcupine Cadillac trends right beneath us. We're on another fault called the Chukobi for, for, you know, certain reasons. It was never explored properly. It has an overburden. It was harder to look for outcrop.

8:01 And so what I think is really exciting for us is that we're on the Chukobi trend. We've seen the beginning of a deposit. We're refining our geological model. And so if we have success, we have plenty of room to grow, but we'll be creating a new area in an already established camp. But what makes this extremely exciting is that, although, like I said, we're going to be something new as we develop our asset, we're a couple of hours of drive away from 5 major mills. Every major gold company that produces in Canada produces near us. So, you know, it's very easy logistically for other companies to find our asset interesting if we get to the right size in terms of what they're looking for. You know, what's really important is, you know, you need great, you need tons.

8:52 You need relevance in terms of where you are. Do other people need you? Even if you end up going into production yourself, you're only going to get that valuation if the market believes that you have an asset that other people want. That's right. And Darcy, tell us about Golden Access. Yes. So we're a newly listed company. A couple of months ago, We've got our flagship Fishpaw project, which is about 65km South East of the Blackwater, the operating Blackwater mine. They're just doing an expansion to become one of Canada's largest Gold mines, producing Gold mines. And so We're right on that trend with them near the 3 Ts, near a project called Coblasco as well, that Evolution Mining just picked up.

9:42 We're in an area that's been relatively underexplored. The reason for that is a lot of people didn't really understand the mineralization type until 15 years ago. Then, of course, we've gone through a number of ups and downs in the market. We managed to get that claim and we're actively exploring it as a Blackwater similarity, an analog. We've done a significant amount of groundwork to prove up those closer connections. And we're really excited. We're looking at going into our inaugural drill program here. So first pass drilling on the project. They did some in the 80s, but again, it was like 60, 70m depth, very minimal. That was done by Phelps Dodge. It's a really cool area. It's a place that is close to my heart. That's really where I started my geology career was in that region.

10:32 It's a cool spot to check out for us and we're really excited for it. Great. I'm sticking with you, Darcy. The sub $10M market cap companies are exciting, but often you're working with a tight treasury. How do you decide which programs get funded first so that every dollar does the most work? Yeah, I mean, it always comes down to value, value for dollar. You know, every project that I've looked at and I've done, you know, exploration plans and whatnot for at this point, hundreds of different projects. And it's all about understanding where the project is, where the state of its data is, and where you're going to get the most information for the cheapest cost, essentially. So on the fish pot, we were really fortunate. There was really good historic soil data. And fortunately they took those soil samples at the time because there was a major wildfire that went through and likely screwed up our soil horizons.

11:24 So we're pretty lucky in that. And so we've really put a lot of investment in trying to understand the system from a geochemical perspective with more rock sampling. We've done modern magnetics, mag inversions, and we've recently completed our IP survey as well. So it's about that progression. You wanna lay a really strong foundation to increase the probabilities of hitting with your drill holes. Drilling's expensive, so anything we can do on the surface to understand and really knock it out of the park. And missing on your drill holes is even more expensive than drilling, so it's all about just getting the best bang for the dollar and understanding where your project is and where you need to be to progress it through to mineral resource and PEA and hopefully eventually development. Well said. Noah, do you have any further commentary on how to spend every dollar you want to make possible?

12:16 Yeah, no, I think Darcy summarized stuff very well there. Really, it's about minimizing risk and maximizing return or potential returns. And so that comes down to, you know, how Ashley's approaching our drill program. We did our IP, we're now flying LIDAR, We'll be looking at doing some really tightly spaced mag as well to really lock in on our future drilling. But yeah, minimize risk, maximize return. Definitely. Moving on to you, Daniel. And correct me if you agree with me, great. If not, tell me why you don't agree. But the junior space is crowded right now, in my opinion. How do you go about standing out and de-risking your story for investors? I think there's lots of different types of juniors. There's pure exploration, there's development and there's some who have a mixture of both. And we have a mixture of both. And I think that makes a stand out. What I think is extremely attractive for us, And I think we're in the midst of, you know, presenting that to the market right now.

13:23 Relates back to the original question you asked, which is, you know, about your leverage to gold. We have 1 million ounces in an open pit resource or a pit constrained resource. We actually have technically more than 1 million ounces but you're only going to report the ounces that can fit within a conceptual pit. And the market believes that for some reason that that's not necessarily enough at this point in the market. I think I agreed with that at $2,000 an ounce or $2,500 an ounce. I don't agree with that at $4,000 an ounce. That being said, if you can grow to the size that the market believes should be the right size, then you get a significant revaluation because you grow, you know, your ounces, your valuation per ounce at the same time as well. So you get the valuation per ounce can go, can double, can triple, and the number of ounces you have can go up significantly as well. And that gets you a significant revaluation.

14:22 But at the same time, you also want to make sure that you have some expiration upside to be able to tweak that as well. And so I think we have both in our situation. We have what I think is already enough size for it to be economic. Market hasn't necessarily reflected on that yet. That being said, we know that we're going to be able to grow our resource. How much? Obviously, I'm not going to say. It would be improper for me to say, but we know that we can grow that pit to a point where the market will say, oh, wow, that is big enough. And so that's a major, you know, I think, revaluation that we're focusing on right now. But at the same time, we did some deep high, you know, drilling last winter that focused on higher grade and we had some major hits. And so I think that we're going to have 2 different avenues to focus on. Over the winter, we'll focus on expanding the open pit And in the summer, we can focus on drilling deep for the higher grade intercepts below.

15:21 Bring up an interesting point between summer and winter. I'd like to ask Darcy this question probably. Between drill results and other news, how do you keep both retail and institutional investors engaged through the quieter stretches? I think for Golden Access itself, we haven't yet had a quiet stretch. We listed through our IPO back at the end of July. Since then, we've done our IP survey, we've done mag re-inversions, we've done drill planning, we've done everything virtual drill and we're leading into our drilling. We're hoping to have drill results out early next year and then on the fish pot we can be exploring as early as March. So really for us, there's not going to be a slow season. And I think for a lot of companies as well these days, you know, the old sort of cycle of seasonality in Canada is shifting substantially.

16:17 You know, we're able to do winter trail programs or we're more open to it because you can actually get drills in the winter, not like in the summer these days. And so, I think it's about maintaining that momentum, especially as a small company. The only thing you have on your side is momentum a lot of the time. It's about keeping the technical side of things operational. If you're not actively exploring, you're reviewing data and talking with investors and getting your next capital raises organized and everything like that and maintaining that momentum. So I just don't think we see very many sort of slow seasons anymore in this industry like we used to. But you know, do you agree with that? Yeah, I think that's a well for you know Darcy's story it sounds like it's the case and I mean at Ashley Gold we've tracked a very similar case since acquiring the TAC.

17:13 It was go go go right, a historic data compilation, IP was deployed and then we've been drilling intermittently since then, since early 2026. So I haven't, Ashley Gold hasn't had a slow time yet in the markets. But I think there are ways to infill that news flow, assuming there are lulls in the market. And sometimes it's just as simple as showing how, you know, like for example, we're flying a LIDAR survey. I have a feeling that that's gonna show what's undercover on both of the properties it's being flown over. That's something good that you can drop in, in low points. I want to dive into some company specific questions. So Noah, we'll stick with you and we'll just go around in a circle here, but for Ashley Gold specifically, what is it, Phase 6 drilling, I believe is underway.

18:06 Phase 4. Phase 4. That's right. Yeah. Attack with the stated goal of unifying the 6-7 zone and the D-99 zone. So what would connecting those 2 zones mean for how you view the scale of the project? Well, that gets us, you know, obviously there's a lot of hypotheticals in there, but that would get us a starter resource at the surface or near to the surface. So That's our ultimate goal, putting together a mated resource against the property boundary of NexGold. That would be very, very major for us. That's our goal near term. I think based on some of the mineralization that we've seen in phase 3 holes and then even in phase 2 and 6-7, we do have to start doing some deeper drilling eventually.

18:56 I think there is going to be some potential to track deeper mineralization within the patented ground and That's going to change the scale as well. Near-term, the scale is constrained around the patented boundary or onto our mining claims, but then maybe off into next goals claims. It looks good. It looks like unifying the zones will create at least some level of maiden resource and we'll grow from there. I'll stick with you. You've engaged Pioneer Exploration for a helicopter LIDAR survey across both the TAC and Alto Gardener. So how do you expect that data to sharpen your drilling from here or drill targeting rather?

19:42 Yeah, well there is outcrop on the TAC and Alto but I don't know what the percentage of outcrop is. It's not exceptionally high. I'm expecting the LiDAR to show us a lot of what's undercover, maybe even some different types of faults that might crosscut the structures on both properties. And that'll be important for coming back in with the drill in a future campaign, likely our winter program. Over to you, Daniel, regarding Caprock. Now you've touched on this quite a bit already and it's a little loaded question, but like you already stated, Destiny carries an open pit constraint 43,101 resource near Val d'Or and your recent deep holes return grades above 8g per ton. So how does having a resource already in hand change the leverage story for a company of your size?

20:32 Well, you know, it is consistent with what I was saying before, but I'll take it to the next level. Right now, we have just about 1 million ounces. We've drilled some deep holes and there's historic deep holes that shows that there's some high grade below the pit. That being said, our pit shell is, you know, is the initial pit shell. It's not the ultimate pit shell. We have, you know, ounces that are outside the, you know, the notional pit shell. The pit shell goes down to about 300 meters. You know, There's many pits in the area that go way below that. And we have holes that were drilled that were below 300 meters down to 325,350 meters. So that's number 1. Number 2, the fact is that We know that the mineralization continues to the west, the southwest of the pit.

21:19 How far? We don't know. We have to continue drilling, but we know that we have not hit the limits of the resource to the west. If you look at our block model, or if you look at our resource, literally the mineralization ends in a straight line. There's been no pinching out and it just ends in a straight line because it's where the last hole was drilled. So we're drilling that right now. We're drilling, we're starting to expand that. Over the winter, we're looking to expand that significantly. So we can grow the ounces by material amount to the Southwest, which can grow the pit. And then the third place where we can grow the ounces is that on the East side, We have the beginnings of a, you know, I wouldn't, it could be called the second pit, but it's an extension of the pit. The holes there only go down to about 125,150m.

22:10 Historically, the previous people that were on the deposit focused on the main part. They didn't finish drilling there. We can go to that side on the east side and drill that down to 300,350 meters. So we have literally 3 areas where we can grow the pit constrained resource. One of them, the ounces already exist. Just some more rock mechanics can show that we can get a more reasonable assumption on our pit slopes and the depth of our pit. But then 2 specific areas where we know the mineralization has not ended and is open and we can continue to drill out. Right now we're trading at $12 an ounce, which is ridiculously low. I've just resumed or re-updated the comp table of our area, companies trading in our area. And most of the companies that are in our stage of development are trading between $30 and $50 an ounce. Obviously, there's some that are trading a lot higher, but they're more advanced.

23:03 But $30 to $50 an ounce, the lowest I found was trading at $29 an ounce. So if we can go from $12 to $29, I'm talking about the bottom of the pack, but At the same time, we also increase our resource by not going to name a number, by a significant amount. You can see without the exploration at depth, you can see a massive return on the share price just by doing that. How do we do that? I think as we come out with drill results that show that the open pit is growing, we're going to start to get that. And we plan to have a new resource out in the spring that will show, we believe, a larger resource. We have the first 3 holes that should be coming out in the next 3, 4 weeks. And then we plan to drill 10 to 20 holes over the winter. And all of that will culminate in a new resource next spring.

23:56 So again, we're trading at $12 an ounce, lowest at $29. If we can go to $30 an ounce, just the bottom of the pack and grow our resource, I think there's a lot of upside. So you closed a $600,000 flow through financing in June with gold where it is. How are you thinking about funding the next phase at Destiny without over-diluting shareholders? Well, like I said, the first thing is we're going to come out with some drill results, which are going to be the first drill results in the pit. If we can back up a little bit to what we talked about before in terms of what is the best place to drill. You always want to minimize your risk. You also have to think about where you're at in terms of the cycle. When the market was at 2500 bucks an ounce, the market wasn't really excited about about us trying to expand the pit. They wanted to see our, you know, our potential at depth in terms of the high grade.

24:48 They wanted to see the expiration side of the story. So we did that. And the stock price increased fivefold in terms of when we did that. But then when you got to 4,000, $5,000 an ounce, the market started saying, oh, well now let's look at your pit. And so, you know, what we're going to be having coming out soon is the beginning, our first initial drill results that we drilled ourselves in the open pit. And I think that being able to show the market that the pit's going to grow. And starting to show the market where the pit might grow to, I think is going to, you know, should be able to yield a significant revaluation before we raise money to drill a lot more of the open pit. Thank you for that, Daniel. Over to you, Darcy. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe you went up to Quesnel last week to meet with the local First Nations about the fish pot project. How those meetings go?

25:40 Yeah no yeah so we went up myself and our community consultant Richard Truman went to Quesnel last week. It was a lovely visit. I went up with my wife who's from Prince George, just north of Quesnel, and to visit with family while I was up there. And we had a couple of really great meetings with the local First Nations that overlap with the project, the NASCO and the Qalisqus Nations. I think this day and age, social license, coming back to risk is a critical component of any project. And so before we put any drills on the property, it's really imperative that you you discuss with local communities, not only First Nations, but also, you know, the the towns and whatnot there. So we're looking at following up with the city of Quinell and the regional district as well. Just to share our story, there's been a lot of support from the community. We were on the local news last week discussing our project as well. And we actually saw a lot of volume come out of that surprisingly. So, and yeah, the discussions with the nations went really well.

26:50 You know, we're formulating agreements and whatnot already before we even start. So I think, you know, should we hit what we hope to hit in the drills and have drill success, we'll have a really clear path as we progress the project to having community involvement, which is critically important. There's a lot to prepare for a maiden drill program. How's all the drill planning going? Are there any updates on when your IP results will be ready? Drill planning is going really well. Everything is coming together nicely. Not to say too much about it, but it's a rare thing to have such quality information that correlates with one another when it comes to geology.

27:37 So I'm really happy with the targets we're developing. I did get, we have received the results from the IP. We're just reviewing them right now. So look out everybody for a news release for that shortly. So I can't talk too much about until we release that information. But if I look tired today, it's because I was up late last night. We just got the results last, yesterday afternoon. So I stayed up with our geophysical consultant, Sean Rustad, and we really dove into that information, that data, as well as we've got a new mega anomaly or a mega inversion that we were looking at. We're comparing the data. So some very strong targets coming out of that. So we've identified some areas of interest that we want to target with our drilling. And then after that, it'll be putting our pad locations in and then really starting to hone in our azimuths and dips for our drill holes.

28:32 Because, you know, in the next few months, we're going to be drilling our inaugural drill program we're looking at doing between 8 to 10 holes in about roughly 2 000 meters we'll see how deep we go the rocks are really going to tell us where to go And I'm really excited for this first couple of drill holes on the property. Last question for you, Darcy, and this is going to be a question for everyone as we conclude here today. And try and keep it to 1. I know there's always multiple catalysts that can really leverage a company. But I want to ask you this, looking out over the next 6-12 months, what is that one milestone you would point investors to as the real test of your leverage? It's obviously going to be our maiden drill program. It's the most exciting point of any new junior mining company is their first drill program.

29:23 I think that is going to tell us whether or not all of the smart things we were planning for and looking at and all the data we've really been consolidating, whether or not that's gonna hold true. And so this is really, you know, for me, this is the most exciting part. And this is one of the reasons why I'm in this industry is just that sheer excitement behind that drill program. So watch out for that. And then of course, everything as it leads into that, and then all of the results that come out after. And then hopefully more drilling into the future. Great. Thank you. Noah, same question for you. 6 to 12 months out, what is the one milestone you would point investors to as a real test to your leverage? Yeah, I think very similar to Darcy once more, I think drilling is going to be the ultimate catalyst for Ashley Gold. We're going to prove we're going to work on and hopefully get there proving out what we have on the tack.

30:15 And Then we're going to swing our focus down south to the Alto Gardner, which is another high-grade Gold system located very, very close, 20km due east of the proposed Goliath Pit. 2 high-potential flagship properties We're going to be drilling. We're permanent for drilling on the Alto and we'll get her done. And Daniel, the drive at home next 6-12 months, what is the one milestone you would point investors to as the real test to your leverage? Well, it's always drilling, right? Drill, drill, drill. But we're going to be coming out with our initial drill results in the pit and then we'll be spending the winter really drilling out the pit which will culminate which is the major thing with a new resource in the spring And I think we'll finally be showing the market that the initial pit-constrained resource we have is not the ultimate pit. It's not the pit we're using to move forward towards a PEA.

31:12 It's just the initial pit-constrained resource. What they'll see next spring is a PIC-constrained resource that is vastly different economically than what they had seen previously. And that should spark a significant revaluation of our company on a per ounce basis. Great. Excellent. Gentlemen, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day. For people in attendance, thank you for staying until the end. There is a request meeting button when I close the tab here. So if you're interested in meeting any of these companies, please submit a request and I'll be sure to pass it along to the respective teams but thank you for the discussion and until next time.