I have picked Trigg as an entry for the July tipping comp. It has had a good run so far this year.
Hyperlinks in
blue.
The name of the game here is antimony, a semi-metal which has uses in the military, auto and solar panel industries.
It is a critical mineral, because most production is in China, and that country has
stopped exporting it. They are unlikely to start exporting it to the US precisely because of its military uses, and of its increasing scarcity within China itself.
This latest
research note was published in late May this year by East Coast Research, which does a better job than I can of explaining the fundamentals. Several events which seem to have caused a surge in interest since May are
1) The hiring of Andre Booyzen, ex VP of Mandalay Resources who has much experience both with operating an antimony mine and with the antimony market.
2) Following this hire, the company
acquired a number of mining claims in Utah near to the town of Antimony which have been estimated by the US Bureau of Mines to contain 12.7M tonnes of 0.79% antimony, about 100,000 tonnes of contained antimony. This is non-JORC due to the US mining code not being as thorough as Australia or Canada. The company have stated they aim to bring this up to JORC standard evaluation.
It is stated by the company to be the largest and highest grade deposit of antimony in the US.
The company have since done some preliminary exploration in the area and state that there is potential for a much larger resource to exist towards the North along a 10km fault (see yellow circled area)
3) Three further high level hires followed :
i) Wiehann Kleynhans, an expert in antimony downstream (smelting) who led the construction of SPMP's smelter in Oman, the largest outside China. I imagine he wasn't working directly with the ore, otherwise they would have called him Wiehann Dirtyhans.
ii) David Fourie the ex COO of SPMP, an antimony metallurgist who was also net zero technical adviser on the project in Oman
iii) Ben Harris, ex chief of staff to the US Army's joint program executive office for armaments and ammunition
Thus the company has in a short time acquired a major project but assembled a team of experts to give Trigg a reasonable chance at bringing the resource to production and finding a market for it. Indeed Ben's main role in the company is stated as to
"assist Trigg in engaging with US Department of Defencestakeholders, navigating defence procurement frameworks, and supporting efforts to positionAntimony Canyon as a critical domestic source of antimony for US defence applications."
The US government has stated their
strategic priority of bringing production of such minerals online locally.
Late last week the company surprised the market with a capital raising. It was noted
(hearsay) that the terms are 8.5c/share for $20M raise but this hasn't been confirmed, which would put the raise as zero discount to the 15 day VWAP.
Why the capital raise? The company have stated they wish to drill the existing resource. Interestingly, they have also said they are considering short term pilot scale mining for supplying to customers , see 8 minutes into this video which I assume would be USA antimony who have a refinery in Montana.
)
There is currently very little mined in the US and due to the Chinese embargo, there is little being imported.
To me it seems that Trigg has got everything lined up very quickly, and I am betting on the great team they've assembled, which for me is a green flag.