Strike threats at Southern Copper’s Cuajone and Toquepala mines in Peru and Chile’s Collahuasi mine – all three account for 4.5% of the world’s copper production – could be the red metal’s gain, with the base metal one of the few commodities to head into positive territory overnight on the London Metal Exchange.
Both copper’s spot and three-month prices climbed 1.3% each to last trade at $US7586 per tonne and $7519/t respectively.
According to JP Morgan, the copper price could track higher in the short term to $7600–7700/t levels, as the strike at Xstrata’s refinery near Montreal continues along with talks of industrial action by contracted workers at Codelco.
However, with the impending strikes copper plays didn’t follow the path of the almighty dollar, instead succumbing to the generally negative day observed by most resource stocks.
Copper plays to shed the most, in order, were Jabiru Metals which lost A10c (6.5%) to $1.43, Universal Resources dipped 0.5c (4.8%) to 10c and Anvil Mining shed 88c (4.5%) to $18.72.
However, the biggest copper play of them all, BHP, managed to stay in positive territory for most of the day’s session and even cracked another all-time high of $35.09, its third for this week alone, and managed to end at that price at the end of trade.
Meantime, it was a race between Azure Minerals and Mining Projects to see which company would finish on top of the highest movers list for the day.
Azure managed to beat Mining Projects to the finish line and recorded a new year rolling high at the same time of 22c, before cooling to settle at 20c – a leap of 7.5c or 60%.
The massive leap and heavy trading volumes – nearly 42 million shares traded hands as opposed to an average trade of around 500,000 to 1 million shares – caught the eye of the ASX, which issued a “please explain” to the Mexico-focused explorer.
Azure put it down to its positive assays received from initial surface sampling at its newly acquired La Providencia project reported earlier this week, which boosted the company’s share price by over 22%, and also a favourable recommendation by a “prominent investment magazine” which rated the company as a Buy.
Mining Projects could soon be issued with a speeding ticket by the ASX with its jump of 0.3c (50%) to 0.9c on no news. The company had the heaviest volume of shares traded out of all the resource stocks with nearly 141 million shares exchanged, compared to its average of 5 million.
Argosy Minerals’ news of its wholly owned subsidiary, Andover Resources, taking the Government of Burundi to court saw its shares obliterated by 66c (63.2%) to 38.5c.
Aim Resources fared a little better than Argosy, but investors didn’t take too kindly to news that the company would offer just over 75 million shares and nearly 170 million escrow receipts priced at 31c apiece to raise some $75 million.
Shares in Aim shed 6c (14.5%) to 35.5c.
