ASX Runners of the Week: Dateline, Mamba, Image Resources & BOA

And the finger-pointing begins.

Albo is acting annoyed and flabbergasted that the RBA had the temerity to jack up interest rates again, as if the latest rise has somehow arrived from another planet rather than after years of rampant government spending.

Meanwhile, RBA Governor Michele Bullock has finally stopped gaslighting the Australian public on spending and made one thing pretty clear: demand is running too hard relative to supply, productivity growth is doing bugger all and monetary policy can’t fix everything. In other words, ‘it’s not our fault’.

She was careful not to play the blame game, but the message is getting harder to miss. The economy simply cannot keep consuming more than it produces without the public’s hip pocket paying the price.

The rate hike has taken the cash rate to 4.6 per cent, its highest level in 15 years and the highest in the developed world!

For the average Aussie mortgage holder, that means nearly $1500 a year in added repayments. Across all four rate hikes this year, the extra annual hit is now around $5,500. What cost-of-living crisis?

Good news… The RBA has left the door open to another increase, with markets already pricing a serious chance of a November hike as inflation remains stubbornly above target.

Australians evidently can’t do a thing to cool Albo, Jim and Bowen’s spending themselves. So, while households are being told to tighten their belts, the Labor gang keep jetting around the world, accepting awards for Net Zero virtue signalling and pursuing policies that critics argue are piling further pressure onto already brutal electricity bills.

The contradiction was hard to miss. This week Albo was also busy praising India’s Modi for expanding electricity access and lifting living standards, while India still relies on a majority of its coal from Australia.

The irony is almost too good.

We dig up the coal, load it onto ships and send it overseas to help other countries manufacture, grow and burn our CO2, while simultaneously making energy more expensive for the Australian industries competing against them. We can virtue signal about Net Zero until the cows come home, but apparently the virtue stops at the wharf.

Energy arguably has the strongest correlation with economic growth of any fundamental economic input. Look back through industrialisation and the pattern is difficult to ignore: abundant, reliable and affordable energy drives industry.

Which makes Australia’s position look increasingly like an extraordinary act of economic self-sabotage.

Don’t worry though, our Albo is going to save everyone a few cents on their morning coffee. The card surcharge ban should do the trick – assuming the already struggling small businesses don’t immediately pass on the cost.

Beyond the broader economy though, the ASX looks like it is coughing up a lung as we size up the big R word — recession.

It was another ugly week in ASX land, with investors having plenty to digest from rates, inflation, energy prices and an economy. As such, our Runners list was tough going. The Runner of the Week was once again a company springing strongly off its 12-month lows, with the rebound this time gathering momentum amid a rather entertaining critical minerals arm wrestle between the Trump administration and the Democratic Republic of California’s environmental establishment over its gold and rare earths sitting beneath the Mojave Desert.

DATELINE RESOURCES LTD (ASX: DTR)

Up 130% (6.3c – 14.5c)

Bulls N’ Bears Runner of the Week is Dateline Resources after the Californian gold and rare earths hopeful landed some seriously heavyweight backing from Washington in its fight to restart operations at its Colosseum project.

Judging by the market’s reaction, this was exactly the tonic Dateline punters wanted, with the stock rocketing after the US Department of Justice filed its own motion seeking a stay of the preliminary injunction that halted work at Colosseum. At the same time, the Department of War has weighed in with a sworn declaration arguing that exploration at the project is in the national security interests of the United States.

If granted, the stay would allow Dateline’s wholly owned subsidiary, Colosseum Rare Metals, to resume operations under its already-approved Plan of Operations, while the broader appeal works its way through the courts.

The Federal Government is also arguing that the District Court erred in finding the “valid existing rights” savings clause under section 508 of the California Desert Protection Act did not protect the approved Plan of Operations. More importantly for Dateline, it says leaving the injunction in place creates irreparable harm to US national security interests and the broader public interest.

The strategic logic is pretty obvious. Rare earths are increasingly being treated as a national security issue in Washington, and Colosseum sits right next door to America’s flagship operation, MP’s Mountain Pass.

Away from the courtroom, Dateline is also getting increasingly interested in what might be hiding beneath Colosseum beyond its established gold story.

The company has pulled its geophysical and geochemical datasets into a consolidated model, sharpening up three carbonatite-style rare earths targets. The standout is the 1.2km-long Clark Mountain Fault Zone, where electrical, radiometric, gravity and geochemical anomalies are stacking up in the same patch of ground.

With the US Government now stepping into the ring alongside Dateline, the stakes have certainly been raised ahead of the October hearing.

MAMBA EXPLORATION LTD (ASX: M24)

Up 115% (3.8c – 8.2c)

Continuing where it left off and making it back-to-back Runners appearances is copper-gold explorer Mamba Exploration, after the company unearthed a treasure trove of historical high-grade copper results at its Meeka East project in WA’s Murchison region.

The historical data dive delivered 165 copper intersections from just 47 drill holes across the Copper Hills and Lady Alma prospects, outlining a mineralised corridor stretching for around 3km.

And with the ground sitting just 30km along strike from Solstice Minerals’ Nanadie project, which has emerged as one of WA’s more intriguing greenfields copper discoveries, Mamba has found itself sitting in a rather interesting postcode.

The obvious question is whether a Nanadie 2.0 is hiding down the road.

Mamba’s share price, which was languishing around 2.1 cents two weeks ago, ripped from 3.8 cents last Friday to as high as 8.2 cents on Friday as the company followed up the exploration story with a $6 million placement and a new earn-in over the Poison Hills copper-silver project. The placement was priced at 3.8 cents, giving the company a serious cash injection to get stuck into the Murchison.

At Copper Hills, the historical drilling included a 26-metre intercept grading one per cent copper and 0.33 grams per tonne (g/t) gold from just 24m, while another hole returned 23.1m at 1.1 per cent copper from 39.9m and a shallow 10m at 1.3 per cent copper from only 2m downhole.

Now Mamba has the cash to start putting some fresh drill holes through the story, with detailed mapping, rock-chip sampling, soil work and a reinterpretation of the existing geophysics planned before reverse circulation (RC) and diamond drilling gets underway.

And then there is Poison Hills, where Mamba can earn into a new copper-silver project through an agreement with Strategic Metals. Rock samples there have already returned eye-catching grades of up to 2906g/t silver and 2.63g/t gold, giving the company another piece of prospective ground to throw into the exploration blender.

IMAGE RESOURCES LTD (ASX: IMA)

Up 92% (1.2c – 2.3c)

Image Resources has made a rather handy reappearance on the Runners list on the final spot of our podium, with the mineral sands player suddenly giving investors something new to chew on after drilling at its Erayinia-King gold project near Kalgoorlie returned a swag of high-grade results.

The standout was a 4.5-metre hit grading 22.4g/t gold from 128m, including a chunky 1m at a whopping 98.55g/t. Other drilling returned 14m at 2.84g/t, 16m at 2.51g/t and 10m at 2.71g/t, helping confirm the gold system is carrying plenty of grade and continuity.

Image has now completed a 50-hole, 5450m drilling campaign at Erayinia-King, with mineralisation traced to around 140m vertical depth. The project already carries a resource of two million tonnes at 2.1g/t for 139,000 ounces of contained gold, with an updated resource now being prepared.

The gold story is particularly interesting because Image isn’t some tiny explorer trying to reinvent itself from scratch. It is already an operating mineral sands producer, meaning Erayinia-King provides a completely different string to the company’s bow - and potentially a rather valuable one if the latest drilling continues to build the resource.

But the gold isn’t the only reason Image suddenly found itself back in the spotlight.

The company also secured a $5 million funding advance from LB Group while negotiations continue over a potential broader transaction involving its Durack and Yandanooka mineral sands projects.

The advance provides some useful breathing room for the strategic discussions to play out, with a strategic review underway over the mineral sands at Image’s Durack project, which has just tabled a mineral resource upgrade of 43 per cent to some 37.7 million tonnes of material.

So investors are now looking at a company with an established mineral sands business, a sizeable WA mineral sands portfolio potentially attracting strategic interest and a gold project throwing out some genuinely tasty grades. Not a bad combination for a company that was sitting down around the one-cent mark only a short time ago.

BOA RESOURCES LTD (ASX: BOA)

Up 76% (10.5c – 18.5c)

Rounding out our Runners is a serious new copper player in WA, BOA Resources, after its Neds Creek copper story got launched into the stratosphere following results at its Ricci Lee prospect. The best hit returned a chunky 22m at 3.05 per cent copper and 9.5g/t silver from 250m, including a cracking 9m at 6.86 per cent copper and 22.1g/t silver.

And this wasn’t just a random high-grade hit in the middle of nowhere.

The result sits within the same mineralised system as historical drilling 80m to the south, which included 10m at 5.12 per cent copper from 218m, strengthening the case that Ricci Lee could be far more substantial than a collection of isolated narrow copper zones.

BOA has now hit significant copper mineralisation in nine of its first ten RC holes at Ricci Lee, with assays from another 36 holes still to come. The latest hole also picked up a separate, shallower hanging-wall lode, returning 10m at 1.81 per cent copper from 133m, including 3m at 4.96 per cent copper, giving the geos a much better picture of what sits beneath the surface.

Ricci Lee is hosted in the Thaduna Formation, 2km south-west of the Thaduna copper deposit and extends for roughly 500m. However, the mineralised neighbourhood certainly doesn’t just stop there.

Neds Creek sits in WA’s Murchison Copper Belt within the broader Capricorn Orogen, home to Sandfire’s DeGrussa and Monty copper deposits, while the Earaheedy base-metal province lies 85km to the east. BOA has now stitched together a hefty 1378-square-kilometre footprint across the project, giving it plenty of ground to chase if Ricci Lee keeps delivering.

The company’s maiden Neds Creek campaign is also much bigger than simply proving up one hole, with drilling targeting Ricci Lee and a suite of other copper prospects across the project. The plan is to use the growing dataset to work towards a maiden resource at Ricci Lee while testing extensions along strike and at depth.

BOA’s share price has now rocketed more than 677 per cent from its 1.8-cent lows last August, so the market clearly thinks something rather interesting is happening.

With high-grade copper turning up repeatedly, a substantial landholding in a proven copper district and plenty more assays still in the pipeline, Ricci Lee is rapidly moving from an exploration target to a high-grade copper discovery in red metal royal territory.

Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: matt.birney@wanews.com.au