The playbook — vanadium · October 8, 2026
SAGA drills a 408.5-metre oxide slab at Radar — the market shrugs
One hole cut 495.6 m of iron-titanium-vanadium rock. Grades are modest; the bet is on scale, and the shares are down 29.6%.
SAGA Metals reported a drill hole, R-0085, that cut 495.6 metres of iron-titanium-vanadium oxide rock at its Radar project in Labrador — grading 37.86% Fe2O3 (iron oxide), 5.51% TiO2 (titanium oxide) and 0.273% V2O5 (vanadium oxide). Inside that long run sits a richer 68.2-metre stretch at 52.95% Fe2O3, 8.57% TiO2 and 0.381% V2O5. The company says the true width — the honest thickness, not the stretched-out angle the drill cut through — is 284.2 metres, with the oxide zone starting 10.1 metres down the hole. This is the near-final piece of an 85-hole, 22,432-metre program now complete.
Here is the mechanism. This is not a gold vein where a flashy grade is everything; it’s a bulk-tonnage oxide body, so what matters is grade times thickness — a lot of rock that’s consistently good enough to dig and process cheaply. The headline hole works out to roughly 135 %V2O5·metres of grade-thickness, and the broad enriched 203.2-metre interval at 0.336% V2O5 lands in the 0.35–0.44% band where these vanadium deposits tend to pay their way. The standout fact is consistency: the company disclosed a true thickness for every hole, and 100% of its 80-plus holes hit oxide across multiple cross-sections. R-0085 is said to sit on the same drill fence as a previously reported hole, R-0072, that cut 470 metres — but the release does not state how far apart the two holes are or how far the zone was extended. The holes here reach from 8.3 to 418.6 metres below surface. Behind it all: CEO Mike Stier, whose public career runs through early-stage juniors with no mine-building or exit on record, and a geologist, Michael Garagan, with about 20 years of exploration work.
Now the honest part. The grades are low in absolute terms — 0.19% to 0.38% V2O5 — so the economics live or die on tonnage, on co-product iron and titanium credits, and on metallurgy (90%-plus recoveries are claimed, not yet proven at scale). No cut-off grade was disclosed, so the interval boundaries can’t be independently checked. And there is no resource yet: GeoGlobal is still building the maiden NI 43-101 estimate, expected in Q4 2026, with a preliminary economic study slated for Q1 2027. The final five assays, R-0088 to R-0092, are promised within a week. One more data point for readers: over three months the shares fell 29.6% while base-metals peers rose 8.2% — a gap that points to company-specific selling, not a weak sector.