Contrarians survive mining market cycles

(miningmx.com) – If you accept the definition of insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result”, then we must be crazy in this industry. Every last one of us. The failure rate of mining projects and companies is remarkable and possibly unique in business, and yet we keep developing projects badly and wasting money in the same ways. An analysis of mining project failure over the last four decades reveals that the causes of failure are remarkably consistent. In a nutshell: inappropriately qualified (and too often unscrupulous) and incentivised people are being given too much money with too little oversight to develop projects with too little merit when commodity prices are high. This leads to wholesale failure and value destruction when commodity prices are low.