Methodology

The 5B universe

Resource Explorer covers every ASX-listed company that files an Appendix 5B — the quarterly cash flow report required of mining and oil & gas exploration entities under Listing Rule 5.5. That’s typically 600–900 companies at any given time: the entire exploration sector of the Australian resources industry.

Inclusion is activity-based, not size-based. A company can be worth billions and still file 5B if it hasn’t commenced material production. The ASX uses a ~50% rule of thumb (exploration vs production expenditure) to decide whether the “main undertaking” has shifted, so many companies continue filing well into early production.

Companies that have graduated to full production file standard annual reports instead. Biotech and tech start-ups admitted under the commitments test file Appendix 4C, not 5B.

Delisted companies are retained — no survivorship bias. Ticker and name changes are stitched together so a company’s history stays intact across rebrands and consolidations.

Data sources

• Appendix 5B filings — every line item, extracted from the source PDFs lodged on the ASX.
• Quarterly Activities Reports — the narrative companion to the 5B; project, drilling, and capital-raise commentary.
• ASX announcements — full announcement history with PDFs, sourced from IRESS Pro.
• Top-20 register snapshots — monthly shareholder register data.
• Norgate Data — historical price, volume, market cap, and corporate-action data, fully adjusted for splits, consolidations, and entitlement offers.
• Project registry — a canonical model of mining projects, ownership over time, drilling activity, and resource/reserve disclosures.

Cleansing

The raw 5B data is poor. Companies lodge these reports and make all sorts of errors: wrong signs, transposed line items, figures in dollars instead of thousands (or vice versa), phantom cash balances that don’t reconcile with the cash flow statement.

We cleanse all of it:

• Sign reversals are detected and corrected against the section-level totals.
• Scale errors ($ vs $'000s vs $m) are identified by reconciling against market cap and prior quarters.
• Transposed rows are detected when totals don’t match.
• Cash balance is reconciled against the prior-quarter close + this-quarter net flows. Material breaks are flagged and corrected by reading the source filing.

The data here is better than the source. Where we cannot reconcile a quarter, we mark it explicitly rather than guess.

Scores

Every company gets six scores each quarter, rated 0–10. A score of 0 means no data or no activity. Scores 1–10 are a percentile rank against all peers in the same quarter — 1 is the bottom decile, 10 is the top. Five of the six scores normalise by the square root of market cap so they measure intensity, not absolute dollars. Volatile metrics are EWMA-smoothed so a single noisy quarter doesn’t whipsaw the score.

• Size — pure market cap percentile. The only score that is the size dimension.
• Activity — operational intensity across exploration, development, and production. Composite of three sub-scores.
• Funding Access — how well-funded from all sources (cash on hand + undrawn facilities), relative to size.
• Admin — overhead intensity (staff, admin, director payments). Low scores flag potential shells.
• Burn — cash burn rate relative to size. High score = fast burn.
• Debt — leverage ratio (debt / enterprise value). Balance-sheet snapshot, no smoothing.

Sub-score breakdowns and composite weighting are documented in the screener’s “learn more” tooltip.

Indices

The Universe page displays four equity index curves for the 5B-filer universe. All indices use a quarterly-rebalanced, buy-and-hold methodology with spread cost friction.

Spread cost friction is deducted at each quarter boundary, proportional to the amount of rebalancing required. The half-spread (50% of one tick) represents the one-sided cost of crossing the bid-ask. Volatile penny stocks with large weight deviations incur the highest friction.

Quarters with fewer than 50 members are excluded. The indices begin from Q1 2021 when the universe reached a stable size of 500+ companies.

Refresh cadences

• 5B reports: ingested within 24 hours of lodgement.
• ASX announcements: within minutes of release.
• Prices and corporate actions: daily, after the ASX close.
• Top-20 register snapshots: monthly.
• Project registry: as new disclosures land.
• Scores: recomputed quarterly, when the 5B universe is fully populated for the period.

Versioning

Methodology changes are tracked explicitly. When a score formula or index weighting scheme is updated, the change date and reason are recorded; backfills are explicit and dated so old scores remain reproducible.

Specific change-log entries will be published as they occur. The current scoring methodology has been stable since Q1 2025.