How to build a quarterly watchlist of competitor mine sites

Most supply models still run off company-level guidance. That's a problem, because guidance is quarterly at best, often annual, and it reports what already happened rather than what's underway. A rival's capex line tells you they spent money somewhere. It doesn't tell you where, or how big the addition will be once it's commissioned.

A watchlist built at the site level fixes that. Instead of tracking a producer, you track named pits, named plants, named stockyards: the physical assets that constrain or add to supply. Here's how to set one up and keep it useful quarter after quarter.

What earns a spot on the list

Not every asset in a competitor's portfolio deserves a line. Start narrow and add from there. Good candidates: sites with a feasibility or scoping study in motion, anything with a permit application filed in the last 18 months or so, and pits where the strip ratio has been climbing, which often points to a cutback coming before the ore does.

Don't skip the other direction either. A pit heading toward end of mine life is a supply signal too, and a watchlist that only logs expansion misses half the picture.

For each site, fix a small set of fields you'll track the same way every quarter: pit footprint, bench count, plant nameplate throughput, conveyor length, stockpile tonnage and footprint, tailings storage facility raise status, haul fleet count if it's visible on the ground. These become the baseline. Everything after that is a diff against it.

Keep company notes out of the site record itself. A site doesn't care who owns it this year. If an asset changes hands, you want the history to carry over, not reset.

Running the check every quarter

Once the list exists, the discipline sits in the cadence, not the research. Pick a fixed point each quarter, check each site's fields against the last reading, and log what moved: a new pit shell opened, a bench added, a conveyor extended toward a crusher pad that wasn't there before, a stockpile growing faster than current throughput would explain, which is usually a pre-build tell before anyone's announced one.

The lag is the whole point of working at the named-site level. A bench cut or a new haul road shows up on the ground months before it shows up in a reserve update or a production report. By the time the filing confirms the addition, the analyst who was watching the site already has a position.

This is roughly the gap a per-site change log reading expansion at named mine sites is built to close, so the quarter-over-quarter diff lands on your desk instead of getting rebuilt from scratch each time.

Keeping the list from rotting

Left alone, a watchlist tends to grow until it's tracking every asset a competitor owns, at which point it stops telling you anything useful. Prune it on the same quarterly cycle you use to update it. Drop sites with no activity for a year or two. Demote anything that's changed hands to a lower-priority tier until the new owner's intentions are clear. Add anything that's just filed a feasibility study, even if it looks early.

The list is worth keeping only if it stays short enough that someone actually reads the whole thing each quarter.

If you're building one of these for your own coverage list, it's worth seeing what a ready-made version of the change log looks like before you build it by hand.