Heliostar Metals Joins the GDXJ as Its Growth Story Accelerates

Trevor Hall (0:18)

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 Heliostar Metals, trading on the Venture Exchange with HSTR and on the OTCQX with HSTXF. And Equity recently included in to 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. 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?

Charles Funk (1:14)

It's certainly being one of the more significant that and we go to Denver Gold straight afterwards as well. 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 Ana Paula Feasibility Studies. I suspect yes, we are in that group.

Now, 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.

Trevor Hall (1:44)

Yeah. Well, I remember last year was the most jubilant precious metals summit I have ever seen. Do you expect that same jubilancy to go into this year, Charles? I mean, we have had a little bit of a pullback.

Charles Funk (1:59)

I don't think it will be quite as fever pitch, but I would put it in the upper 10 percent of confidence. We're in a bull market for most metals and we survived a rate lift. So I suspect it will still be, if not bullish, it will certainly be ebullient.

Trevor Hall (2:17)

Yes, it was the great bearer market of junior mining August of 2026 It didn't last very long of today. Is anything to do with that? Anyways, okay, let's talk about the company. I do want to chat about this inclusion into the GDXJ. There was 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?

Charles Funk (2:47)

Yeah, I think a couple of things. I think it's a lovely validation of our business model that we're pursuing. We've benched ourselves against the GDXJ for a number of years.

Tomorrow, it'll be interesting to see, having not been through it, 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, anyone else who benchmarks their portfolios, their indices against it, are going to have to look at companies like Heliostar, and choose whether they want to fade it or own it in an outlay to performance. So 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.

Trevor Hall (3:36)

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 mention that you had commenced open pit mining at La Colorada. 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?

Charles Funk (3:59)

Yeah, so full steam ahead at La Colorada. But 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 of maintenance. We found low-grade stockpiles. Then 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, we can squeeze the lemon only so hard and continue to, at some point, you've got to add some more lemons. And so we'll be pre-stripping until the 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 Colorada, which is always a pleasing thing from a mining perspective.