The playbook — copper · November 3, 2026
Osisko drills 314 metres of copper at Gaspé, and the system stays open south
Long infill holes confirm the block model at Murdochville; one step-out 400 metres southwest keeps the deposit open while the stock slides.
Osisko Metals reported drill results from its Gaspé Copper project at Murdochville, Québec, headlined by a hole that cut 314 metres averaging 0.44% copper — meaning every tonne of that rock carries a bit under half a percent copper by weight, over a drilled length longer than three football fields. Inside it sat a 9-metre core of 3.23% copper, a narrow, richer streak. Other infill holes ran long too: 552.5 metres at 0.3% copper, 240.5 metres at 0.44%. These are low grades stretched over huge intervals — the economic signature of a big open-pit system where scale, not tenor, does the work. The company is partway through a 50,000-metre program led by CEO Robert Wares, the geologist who co-founded Osisko Mining and is credited with the Canadian Malartic discovery.
Here is the honest read: most of these holes are infill inside the existing 1.83-billion-tonne resource at 0.32% copper-equivalent. They confirm the block model rather than add to it, and management says the results fall within anticipated model values. The one hole that breaks new ground is 30-1260, drilled vertically about 400 metres southwest of the 2026 pit boundary, which returned 121.5 metres at 0.42% copper between roughly 301 and 422 metres below surface — showing the system stays mineralized and open to the south. Agnico Eagle, Hudbay, Franco-Nevada and CDPQ all bought into a December placement, so the institutional names are watching. The stock, meanwhile, has done the opposite of celebrate: down 17.1% over three months while copper itself slipped only 1.2% and the copper-equities group fell 8.8% — a steady staircase lower that looks company-specific, not sector-wide.
What to watch. The true widths are disclosed only as a blanket 80 to 90% of core length, not hole by hole, so the real thickness of any single intercept is uncertain given the steep, stratabound geometry. The headline grades of 0.30 to 0.48% copper only work at scale, and lean on recovery assumptions baked into the copper-equivalent math. The southern extension rests on isolated step-out holes — 30-1260, 30-1265, 30-1268 — not yet a defined zone. Ahead: the rest of the 2026 assays, an updated resource estimate built off an assay database the CEO expects ready in January 2027, and a preliminary economic assessment the CEO now puts in late 2027 — later than an April 2026 fact sheet that said second-half 2026.