This was hard to find so I thought I would blow her up. Reads very nicely.
A RECENT trip to Chile has only served to reinforce my admiration for those companies involved in the high-risk/high-reward business of mineral exploration. Other than having capital to burn, which is never really an option, the best a junior explorer can do is to grab as much prospective dirt as it can usefully explore and hit the ground running, quickly discarding dud projects before they cost too much.
It is a strategy being followed by Condor Blanco, an explorer that has joined other Australian companies large and small in Chile including BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, Hot Chili, Metminco, PanAust, Chinalco Yunnan and most recently, Kingsgate Consolidated.
According to chief executive Glen Darby, the game plan is to take Condor's Chile projects as far down the value chain as it can before eventually doing a deal with a major mining company.
... Condor's projects are high in the Andes among the younger rocks which increases the risk and the potential reward for successful exploration.
The most exciting but least explored is Yaretas, which lies in the rich Domeyko Cordilla, a belt of very large copper, gold and silver mines.
After a long and very rough drive, Yaretas opens up like a massive bowl rich in altered rock formations.
I joined highly respected Condor Blanco technical director Carl Swensson on his first drive on the rough tracks that have just been carved into the sides of this area that could swallow the MCG whole.
The local geological team, who somehow survive breathing the thin air by living in three domes, have assembled a series of rock chip samples.
Carl pores over them as he pushes ahead with plans for further sampling and mapping of the huge area to prepare for drilling.
If this area is found to be a massive, deep copper/gold porphyry as hoped, it would have to be developed by a large miner with significant capital.
A decision to mine has already been reached on Condor's Carachapampa deposit but it was made by a host of small scale miners with picks, shovels and even a bobcat that have been chewing into some outcropping rock.
The illegal miners in this mini gold rush have since been chased away but the fact that they made a good living using primitive techniques to extract fine gold such as sluicing ore through a ram's horn is promising.
Condor Blanco's scout drilling program turned up strong silver grades across a wide area of ground, with a potential for gold grades to rise once a diamond drilling campaign targets the right structures.
With another three projects on the boil and plenty of large, acquisitive neighbours on the prowl, Condor Blanco's experienced geological team promise a significant flow of drilling and sampling news over the next couple of years and the stock is upgraded from a hold to a speculative buy.
ISONEA is another speculative buy based on the significant upside in selling a truckload of iPhone and Android applications that can track a patient's asthma and provide warnings about pollen and weather events.
Health apps are big sellers on smartphones and offer significant margins for developers even after Apple takes its non-negotiable 30 per cent slice.
US-based chief executive Michael Thomas has invested a lot of his own money in the stock and together with his newish management team has a strong history of turning small medical device companies into much bigger ones.
With significant patent protection on algorithms that decode how serious an asthmatic's wheeze is and a progressive series of app rollouts that include significant social media promotion, this is one of those rare stocks with the capacity to multiply your investment in a year or so.
ISN Price at posting:
8.0¢ Sentiment: ST Buy Disclosure: Held
