Good afternoon
slightly weaker economic numbers in the States are good for bonds...and as such, also drive equity prices a little higher following yesterdays little setback, when the market took the new FED-bosses comments as slightly hawkish.
Still, the Euro below 1.22 US$ for the first time in a while....not helping the metals once again, which are down by about 1% across the board. Gold can hold yesterday´s, reduced level.
South African Miners are feeling the negative side of Ramaphosa - the Rand is strong these days, and the Rand gold price has now fallen from 18500 Rd/oz back in late 2017 to 15500 today - that´s the lowest since late 2015. Not nice, if you have yearly wage increases!
Apollo Minerals - tungsten seems to be back en vogue! Tungsten Mining, which is a reasonable advanced tungsten developer in Australia, exploded over the last few days and is now 5x up on the level from december, with a market cap of 290 mill A$....fertile ground for Apollo Minerals to advance their asset in France. While TGN is developing an open pit resource grading just below 0,2% tungsten + some molybdenum, Apollo´s mine, which stopepd producing in 1986, had historic grades between 1.5-and 2.5% tungsten underground, and used to be the world´s highest grade tungsten mine at the time. The plant could not produce the gold contained in the ore - but old tailings have been checked and contain up to 8g/t gold as well. As I said the otehr day - very early days, and in France, no hard rock mine has been developed for at least 5 years, to my knowledge. AON have had various government meetings, though, and the Macron-administration sa far has been very supportive. I think we will hear much more from tehse guys shortly, once they can reenter the old underground workings, which are in excellent condition. A bit of a stoyr without too many hard facts right now - watch it closely.
Peak Resources - interesting - they seem to makle very good progress to receive their Special Mining Lease in Tanzania, which raises hopes for others as well in this country, which has made many negative headlines over the last 9 month, since the new government came in. Peak management has had meetings with top senior mining officials incl the Deputy Minister Biteko, They confirmed, that a mining comission will be formed within 4 weeks, and following it´s constitution, would fast track a large backlog of mining applications incl only three applications for SML´s, which will be given priority. Again - tehy will not get their SML tomorrow - but it´s a big step forward, that a clear pass seems to be established now, how to get there. Foreign investment in Tanzania to my knowledge, had come to a complete stand-still - definitely in the mining sector, which is in nobody´s interest - least the people of Tanzania. I had reported earler, hat Graphex and their Chinese JV-partner have had senior meetings in teh country very recently as well....progress for both companies could see some very nice performance of these companies over the next month or two. The world is very keeen for more graphite, and rare earth - these guys would be able to help out!
Have a nice evening
WS