Works if you're going to privately finance everything, forgo insurance, and are able to keep all of your operations secret so that analysts are unable to estima

Works if you're going to privately finance everything, forgo insurance, and are able to keep all of your operations secret so that analysts are unable to estimate your operations by proxies such as fuel, craft size, the asteroids you're mining and their composition, etc. The physics of space flight are rather precise. Mass and density of the craft before and after visiting the asteroid can be worked out fairly easily with relatively few data points. Composition of the asteroid will possibly be known prior to visiting the asteroid, otherwise, why go to the expense of mining it? Could be exploratory, but then not even the people running the mission know the value of the asteroid's ore until the last minute, and in that case the market will likely have just about as good an estimate, or better, of the risk adjusted market value of the mission. Unfortunately, it's fairly difficult to keep all of this hidden due to the regulatory environment of the space industry and the wide open nature of "space". You can't really sneak out and back just staying low and below radar or benefit from the cover of darkness.