A sound structure. An outright short on a miner is two bets at once, the company and the metal, and pairing against same-metal juniors isolates the one you actually have a view on. In a market where gold set 53 record highs in a year, the outright version was a hard trade regardless of the quality of the research.
The non-producer point is hard to argue with. TMC rose 53% in the month after two firms published on it, with nothing yet in production to test the story against. Hype has no earnings date.