Rising metals tide is not lifting all junior boats

Metals are on a bit of a tear of late yet there is a lot of bleating from junior explorers that the more buoyant prices – including gold being in record territory – are not trickling down to their share prices.

The bleating almost always comes from juniors that have managed to keep the doors open during the investor capital strike in the explorer space of the last couple of years but have done precious little else.

The first to benefit from a return of investor interest in the explorers in light of the improved outlook on the commodity price front has and always will be those that are active explorers. When they have light market caps and projects with the potential to become a “company maker,” all the better.

They are the ones that get talked about and followed while their sleepy peers continue to be ignored. That was clear at the Resource Rising Stars Gather Round investment conference in Adelaide last week which just happened to coincide with the AFL’s gathering of the clans.

There were two presentations in particular that got the room’s attention – Legacy Minerals (ASX: LGM) and Great Western Exploration (ASX: GTE), trading at 16c ($17 million ) and 6.1c ($21 million) respectively.

The pair are as active with potential high-reward programs as could be hoped for. It’s as if they are responding in kind to the legendary half-time plea of AFL Hawthorn coach John Kennedy Snr back in the 1970s for his players to “do something”.

Legacy:

Legacy listed two years ago as a focused NSW gold-copper explorer. It has $3.2 million in cash and has secured $25.5 million in joint venture spending for some of its projects with the likes of Newmont, Mark Bennett’s S2 Resources, and Earth A1.

The way Legacy MD Chris Byrne sees things, the company is in the thick of drilling programs across four properties with the potential for a breakthrough discovery. The rundown on the projects can be found on the ASX platform.

Suffice to say they look to be full of merit as is reflected in the quality of the three projects involving farm-in partners, with the results across the four projects worth keeping an eye on given Legacy’s current small cap.

“We have got four projects that are to be drilled within the next six months,’’ Byrne told the RSS Gather Round investment conference.

“We are aggressively drilling for Tier 1 discoveries. It’s quite a phenomenal amount of drilling for any junior exploration company.”

And it is too.

But Legacy has just added to its story by picking up the Mt Carrington (Drake) project in the New England fold belt in NSW for a knockdown price from the administrator of White Rock Resources.

White Rock and owners before it pursued Mt Carrington as a gold-silver play. And it does arrive in the hands of Legacy with a resource of 320,000oz of gold and 23Moz of silver for a silver-equivalent of 52Moz.

Given gold is in record territory and the silver price has been rising alongside it with the added kicker of it becoming a clear beneficiary of the booming use of it in solar panels, the gold-silver resource clearly has value, not that any of it is currently reflected yet in Legacy’s market cap.

But Legacy is coming at Mt Carrington from a different perspective. It reckons the big magmatic system could host game-changing epithermal gold/copper and/or porphyry copper systems.

“We quite quickly realised there’s an untested porphyry copper story up there,” Byrne said.
“So we’ve gone up there to what is a legacy project (titter titter) with a completely new vision. We’re looking at the blue sky exploration upside.”

Extensive copper mineralization (18m at 5.8% copper from 52m) was never followed up in the past because hey, it was a gold-silver project.

Copper too is now on the tear, and there is an absolute shortage of exploration projects with some scale to them, making Mt Carrington another one to watch within the Legacy stable.

Great Western Exploration:

Great Western MD Shane Pike didn’t mince his words in his presentation to the conference.

“What the industry needs, and what we are intent on doing at Great Western, is making a once in a decade discovery.” John Kennedy Snr would be pleased.

“The Tier 1 targets we are going to be testing in the next few months have all the hallmarks of discoveries that get made every 10 years or so,” the veteran geologist with a steely resolve said, adding that the company is obsessed with making a discovery.

The market has already been warming to this one. It is not that far off its 52-week high of 7c a share.

“What is a little bit unusual about Great Western is the size of the targets we have isn’t ordinarily found in a junior exploration company’s portfolio, certainly not one with the market capitalisation we have,” Pike said. It’s a point seemingly not lost on the market. Now for the drilling.

While the company has a deep well of targets in WA, the initial focus is the Fairbairn copper prospect (a DeGrussa-style VMS target) and the Oval/Oval South prospect (Winu-style copper-gold).

A drill is being rolled up to Fairbairn to kick of a drilling program late this month, and Oval/Oval South gets its turn next month.

“Either of these could be company-makers in their own right, and we have got two of them,” Pike said.

Oval/Oval South in particular is probably one of the biggest targets to be tested with the drill anywhere in Australia this year.

It’s the one Rio Tinto had a crack at back in the 1990s. After it picked up the ground, Great Western brought in Sandfire, owner of the now mined-out DeGrussa, as a farm-in partner.

Sandfire spent $4.5 million and its geologists liked what they saw but when Sandfire went looking for its post-DeGrussa future in mines in Africa and Spain, it made a wholesale retreat from exploration in WA.

So it’s back 100% with Great Western. In conjunction with the work done by Sandfire, Great Western reckons a hole drilled by Rio pulled up 70m short from where the latest in remote sensing says the main target is located.

“If they had this data they would have continued this hole and we wouldn’t be talking about it today,’’ Pike said.

There are no guarantees in exploration. But the hope now is that it is one that will continue to be talked about in the future for all the right reasons.