Heliostar Metals Joins the GDXJ as Its Growth Story Accelerates

0:18Mining Stock Daily: All right, everybody, welcome back in to Mining Stock Daily, the last corporate update of our week before we get into tomorrow's long form as everybody starts their travel to well my neck of the woods here in colorado for the beaver creek precious metals summit we're going to get one more in happy to welcome in helio star metals trading on the venture exchange with hstr and on the otc qx with hstxf and equity recently included into the gdxj along with 43 other companies, huge reallocation within the GDXJ ETF. So more of that in a bit. But CEO Charles Funk joining me once again. Charles, I don't know how many Beaver Creek Precious Metals summits you've been to in your career.

1:02Mining Stock Daily: How do you prepare as a company doing all these one-on-one meetings? What's there to prepare? What do you guys do? Do you have to have news in your back pocket, have something to talk about before you get into these things? It's certainly being one of the more significant that, and we go to Denver Gold straight off, So it certainly is a point on the map where you want to have a focused message. Many companies put out news. We forecast that we'll have an update on our Annapola feasibility studies. I suspect, yes, we are in that group. No, it's a good chance to sit and calibrate your investment thesis and make sure that you're on track and you're presenting it appropriately.

1:43Yeah.

1:44Mining Stock Daily: Well, I remember last year was the most jubilant precious metal summit I have ever seen. I, you know, do you expect that same jubilancy to go into this year, Charles? I mean, we have had a little bit of a pullback. I don't think it'll be quite as fever pitch, but I would put it in the upper 10 % of confidence. We're in a bull market for most metals and we survived a rate lift. So I suspect it'll still be, if not bullish, it'll certainly be ebulous. Yes, it was the great bear market of junior mining, August of 2026. It didn't last very long of today's anything to do with that. Anyways, okay, let's talk about the company.

2:26Mining Stock Daily: I do want to chat about this inclusion into the GDXJ. There is a huge reallocation within that ETF Heliostar amongst it. So congratulations on that. It's been a couple of days since that. Have you noticed anything with the equity, the volume or anything like that? What can you take from this inclusion? Yeah, I think a couple of things. I think it's a lovely validation of our business model that we're pursuing. you know we've benched and marked ourselves against the gdxj for a number of years tomorrow you know be interested to see having not been through it now to watch whether it has a particular on the day movement as has often happened in the past but i think more importantly going forward you know anyone else who benchmarks their portfolios their indices against it are going to have to to look at companies like heliostar and choose whether they want to sort to fade it or own it in an outweighed performance.

3:27So I think ultimately in the medium term leads to more buying of your stock. And hopefully for all of us, that leads to a higher share price.

3:36Mining Stock Daily: All right. Well, we will see obviously higher share price would be awesome to have in your pocket going into Beaver Creek. But also you need to do the work. Back in late August, you did talk, mentioned that you had commenced open pit mining at Law, Colorado. This has been some time coming. You announced that commencement. What's been the latest here the last couple of weeks with how that's progressing? Yeah, so full steam ahead at the Colorado. The turnaround story continues to kind of astound me of how it's all come together as well as it has in that the mine was on care and maintenance. We found low-grade stockpiles.

4:14Then we recognized that there was gold that hadn't been fully dissolved and recovered out of the leach pads. So we went through an injection leaching process that we've been doing and continue to do for the foreseeable future. And then we were able to expand Veda Madre and get a permit to expand it. So it was quite a significant milestone. It was lovely to be at site. It was lovely to be there for the first blast. You definitely saw the mood of everyone at site. There's a real sense that you're getting, you know, we can squeeze the lemon only so hard and continue to, you know, at some point you've got to add some more lemons.

4:50And so we'll be pre-stripping until second quarter next year, and then we'll be putting some quite high-grade oxide material on the leach pad and returning to active mining at La Colorado, which is always a pleasing thing from a mining perspective.

5:08Mining Stock Daily: Where's the current mining taking place here? So incredibly, it's production without mining. We recognize that we've got quite a bit of coarse gold in the leach pad. And for a very quick leach pad explainer 101, you put a pool liner on the bottom, you crush the rock to sort of the size of gravel, you put a solution through it that dissolves the gold into liquid, it hits the pool liner and drains out, and then you run it through the plant and you reverse that and get the gold back out of the liquid. But the color art is unique. It's got not much clay and a lot of gravel and it drains very quickly.

5:40So the fluid doesn't spend a lot of time in contact with the larger gold grains. So it doesn't fully dissolve it. So our approach since December last year has been to drill some holes and inject that solution in at different levels, meaning that you get the active solution seeing more of the gold or more of the gold seeing the active solution. And, you know, probably, you know, two thirds of nearly 20 ,000 ounces of gold is going to come out of that technique this year. so you know in some ways money for nothing just by squeezing a bit tighter but you know really hats off to the team at site for coming up with a pretty incredible way to keep production whilst we're not mining right now all we're doing is pre-stripping with our mining fleet

6:23Mining Stock Daily: okay you're still on track to meet production guidance here from La Colorado of up to 22 and a half thousand ounces of gold, 22 ,300 to be specific for the year here, Charles, anything of note that would maybe keep you from that or maybe exceed that guidance? No, I think the way we're looking across the company is we're well on track for the mid to upper end of our production guidance range. We had a very strong Q2. A lot of other companies I noticed pulled back a bit. Very comfortably remaining on track with our production guidance across the company and the colorado is performing very strongly for us okay all right so love colorado love this thing i mean it's not huge but it is consistent and you're doing exactly what you need to do and that obviously drives cash flow too uh and apollo more on that in a little bit uh you also put out news here late in august something you and i haven't chatted about much in the last couple months since the deal was done but that's on the gold strike project in utah And you did some sampling, found some critical elements, I guess, antimony, obviously being one of those hot metals along with the gold.

7:33Mining Stock Daily: Walk us through GoldStrike and the latest on the ground there. Yeah, and I think, as you know, recent transactions, including as recently as today, I think make the GoldStrike acquisition look very well-timed and very well-priced. We bought it, as we see, a million ounces in resources that is going to go into our growth pipeline. We also, on the eastern edge of the deposit, there was a former antimony mine, small-scale antimony mine, and some interesting high-grade and up to 5 % antimony rock chip samples. So we've kind of got a two-fold approach, one more exciting for news and one in the background.

8:10In the background, we're working on the work required to progress the project to a pre-feasibility study, but we've also taken the opportunity. We did some systematic channel sampling and then followed that up with a drill program that's just wrapping up to explore for the antimony. Our view is kind of threefold. You know, potentially you've got a standalone antimony opportunity, which obviously is pretty attractive in the current market. It can potentially improve the economics of the gold project. Or on the third sort of lever, it has the potential to accelerate permitting pathways or timelines to production.

8:47So we thought let's do a small drill program to see what that potential is, and then we can make some decisions about how it can potentially help the advancement of the Gold Strike project overall.

8:59Mining Stock Daily: Utah is getting to be a very, I don't want to say hot jurisdiction, but incredibly bright, bright future. A lot of people working in Utah really is one of those jurisdictions that's coming along quite nicely just with its favorable regulations. Yeah, I think it's always been a pragmatic state from a business perspective. It's never got too far away from its origins as other states in the Western United States have. So we're very comfortable with the development project in Utah. Okay, very good. All right, all this leading next week. Anticipate big news from Annapala here. Charles. So let's not bat away from that.

9:42Mining Stock Daily: Obviously, you've talked to a lot of people internally, but maybe what do you think the market expectation is? Yeah, I think it's good to update the market as we progress. You know, we intend to publish the feasibility study in the second quarter of next year. But we thought let's start with, you know, every quarter putting out updates. And we've guided this for a number of months that say intention to do this. So shortly we'll have that update out, showing the progress that we've been making. We're fairly advanced on the updated mineral resource. I think it's nearly 25 ,000 additional meters from the PEA that'll go into the updated mineral resource.

10:18Very advanced on our metallurgy, making good engineering progress on mill design, mine design, tailings facilities. So Annapola continues to progress very well for us. um you know our target is to make a construction decision mid next year that would see us pouring our first gold at the end of 28 we've kind of reorganized the the company structure for the focus you know and a pool is clearly the largest new value creation opportunity um in the company and you look at the back end of that lesson curve you know and that transition of into increased production for us it's increased production for others new production is a proven outperformance metric, dare I say it, to the GDXJ.

10:58So we look forward to continuing to deliver Anapola to provide those updates. It is the largest internal focus in the company right now is Anapola.

11:08Mining Stock Daily: Yeah. Okay. Your stock's up almost 7 % today here. Obviously a higher move. Everything's green today, higher move in the gold price. I don't know if that's necessarily lifting everything, Charles, but you're also, you're seeing this inclusion into the GDXJ. I mean, And what do you allocate this bounce in the market, your market specifically? I mean, anything you can hang your hat on? Yeah, I think there was a lot of nervousness in a macro. I'm not a big macro guy, but you could definitely sense there was nervousness going into that Fed's rate decision and particularly the language around it. I think the fact that it came in line, you know, reminded people that, you know, we're in an environment where dollars continue to get printed.

11:48So anything priced in dollars is likely to appreciate in value. and we move back to the basic fundamentals of the debt issues that the Western world has. So I think you Fed watch or you government watch for policy and then you go back to underlying business conditions. And I think it's a reversion to another few months, few quarters, understanding the world that we live in, which is sadly favorable for gold price on the basis, I say sadly in the sense that the profligate nature of currency creation in the Western world means hard assets, particularly gold, is the measure of that.

12:22Mining Stock Daily: All right, Charles, good to see you. Look forward to seeing you in person next week. Safe travels to you and everybody else from the team coming up, and we'll get one more in one of our mini meetings that we have. So we'll talk to you again next week. Thank you. Yeah, thanks, everybody. All right, that's HelioStar Metals training on the Venture Exchange with HSTR and on the OTCQX with HSTXF. tomorrow morning our long form porter collins great conversation can't wait to air that one to get you into the weekend safe travels everyone we will see you up on the mountains take care the information presented should not be considered investment advice mining stock daily and affiliates are not responsible for any loss arising from any investment decision in connection with the material presented herein please do your own research or speak with a licensed financial representative before making any investment decisions.