I spent about eight years early in my Wall Street career during which a big part of my job was analyzing mining companies …including iron ore, but not steel-making, which was the job of the guy in the office just down the hall.

But that was also a long time ago. And I ultimately came to the conclusion that although this area had some Wild West appeal, I would be better off making a career in sectors like IT or the consumer, which had broader scope and were more important in a world that had plastics in it. For what it’s worth, though, here are what I see as the key issues for an analyst:

–centers of commodity trading, like Chicago, are significant sources of information about metals. In the eternal struggle between jocks and nerds, such places are hotbeds of short-term-thinking jock-ism. Still…

–government agencies take a nerdier view and may also have pertinent global data

—in some developing countries, mines are state-owned and are run to maintain national employment rather than to make profits. If such mines are significant for a given metal–think of copper, for example–overall prices may not be as high as one might think

–in my day, mining companies were very secretive about the extent of their reserves. I don’t see why that should have changed. The worries are that if governments understood the extent of the company’s holdings, they would increase taxes. Or a larger competitor might take the company over and fire all the executives.

Say Company A is mining an orebody that geologists say is three miles long. The company has opened a mine that targets the first half-mile. Once that’s up and running, management clearly knows the profit potential there. It may also have done exploratory drilling over the next half mile and therefore have a very good guess about that area’s potential. Experienced geologists say the other two miles are most likely at least that good. Arguably, the company has no obligation to disclose to shareholders either the drilling results or its geologists’ analysis.

In contrast, Company B’s similar orebody is a half mile and nothing more. People who work in the industry may have some idea of the difference, but it’s much harder for you and me.

Two consequences: there’s probably more total supply of the metals in Company A’s mine than more people realize; and for you and me there’s a significant roll-of-the-dice factor in deciding whether to hold A or B.

–grade management. Any mining company focused solely on profits (meaning not a state-owned company with different objectives) will plan to extract the highest amount of valuable stuff from a given mine over its lifetime. This means that as prices rise, it shifts to mining lower-grade ore and reverses the process if they start to fall. This is the optimal strategy for miners, but arguably causes spot prices of metals to be more volatile than they might be otherwise.

–byproducts. A base-metals mine, say a copper mine, can easily have ore that contains (usually, small) amounts of gold or silver. These are generally not regarded as a source of profits but as a reduction in the cost of mining the primary metal. Of today’s hot EV-related metals, cobalt occurs as a byproduct, but not lithium.