ALDE · Aldebaran Resources 2.89 CAD +0.01 (+0.35%) 2026-SEP-18 12:35 EST

Aldebaran split itself in two. Shareholders now hold a new Aldebaran share plus shares in Centauri Minerals, which took roughly everything that was not the flagship Altar copper project in Argentina.

The logic is about focus and about defence. Altar is a very large copper deposit — 22 billion pounds, a 48-year mine life in its preliminary study, ~$2bn of after-tax value — and management is trying to push it through the next study stage while fending off enough takeover interest that the board adopted a rights plan. Early-stage exploration ground scattered across three provinces clutters that story without adding to it.

Mart's conclusion is unchanged: "the reason to own Aldebaran is still Altar," with an updated resource incorporating over 40,000 metres of new drilling due within weeks.

Aldebaran is an exploration company sitting on a very large, undeveloped copper deposit in Argentina. It doesn't produce or sell anything yet — you own it for the ore in the ground, on the bet that a bigger mining company eventually pays up for it or that copper gets valuable enough to justify building the mine.

It is one of Paulo's two concentrated copper positions in this note, and the reasoning is deliberately top-down. He argues copper is set up to rise hard because the world's visible stockpiles have been vacuumed into US warehouses by tariffs and can't easily come back out, while everyone else — China especially — is quietly running short of metal. The way he chooses to own that view is not the big miners: those trade at over 15 times next year's earnings, which he calls "rather full." Small explorers like Aldebaran are priced as if copper will stay cheap forever, so they move far more than the metal does when the metal moves. The trade-off is that these shares barely trade: he warns to use limit orders, never market orders, or you will pay a silly price just to get filled.

Aldebaran is another junior copper developer and Paulo's single largest position (Surge is his second). He mentions it only in passing here — as the anchor of the copper-junior book that's "taking some of the sting out of the oil collapse" — so there's no fresh thesis in this note beyond the fact that it's his top holding.

Aldebaran owns the Altar copper-gold porphyry in Argentina's central Andean belt — a massive bulk-tonnage deposit already measured at 2.4 billion tonnes in the measured and indicated resource categories, containing roughly 22 billion pounds of copper plus 5 million ounces of gold. Porphyry copper deposits are graded differently from other mining projects: world-class examples like the ones right next door to Altar (Los Pelambres, El Pachón) all run at 0.4–0.6% copper over enormous tonnage, so that is the yardstick, not the high-grade vein thinking you might apply elsewhere.

This issue they released infill drill results showing holes up to 1.3 kilometres long averaging 0.45% copper equivalent, with a 500-metre higher-grade core at 0.71%. These are excellent numbers for a porphyry, and more importantly they show the system is continuous and predictable at depth — which is what you need to upgrade the resource from inferred to indicated and eventually to reserves. The share price has not ripped because the market already knows Altar is a huge deposit; the question is who will write a big cheque to put it into production. That question gets answered at the Q3 resource update and the 2027 pre-feasibility study — the real value-unlocking events. Today's holes are an incremental step toward both.

Aldebaran is a small Canadian mining company ("junior") developing a huge copper-gold deposit called Altar in Argentina. It just published a PEA — an early engineering study estimating what the mine would be worth if built — and the numbers were strong: about US$2 billion of value (NPV, today's worth of future cash discounted 8%) at conservative copper prices, rising to US$3.3 billion at today's $5/lb copper, over a ~50-year life. Aldebaran owns 80% of it.

A year ago Aldebaran signed a clever deal: Rio Tinto's tech unit "Nuton" agreed to pay up to US$250 million in stages to fund the studies, in exchange for a 20% slice — so Rio effectively paid for Aldebaran's PEA. Then Rio suddenly walked away. The stock crashed -30% because investors feared something was wrong with the deposit. Paulo's argument is the opposite: nothing is wrong with Altar — the problem is Rio, a giant that's slashing costs and "seems lost" under a new CEO. He bought the panic in the $2.60s.

The real payoff is subtle: while Rio was in the deal it acted as a ceiling on any takeover (no rival would bid if Rio could just counter). With Rio gone, Aldebaran is a clean, 80%-owned, world-class asset that other majors (South32, Glencore next door, Sibanye) can now compete for — and the study can be re-run at higher copper prices, mechanically lifting the value. At roughly 15-25 cents on the dollar versus that estimated value, Paulo thinks Aldebaran gets taken over in 2026 "and the market does not realize it." He's a buyer.

Aldebaran is a small Canadian company ("junior") developing a large copper-gold deposit in Argentina. Paulo's whole copper trade is: copper is quietly setting up for a big move, and the cleanest way to profit is to own cheap junior developers that the big miners will eventually buy out in a wave of takeovers. Aldebaran is one of his two largest such positions here, flagged just before it published its first economic study of the mine (the PEA that lands a month later).

Why juniors and not the metal itself? Because if copper re-rates to a higher long-term price, a proven, buildable deposit owned by a tiny company can be worth a multiple of today's share price to an acquiring major — that's the "torque" he's after.