Interesting that Pantoro also have just got away a decent cap...

Interesting that Pantoro also have just got away a decent cap raise, of $100m in a placement at not much of a discount. They are currently running with a market cap a fair bit under that of Spartan's: $416m compared to our $689m. Also not quite the same in that they finally look to be sorting out their production issues while of course Spartan's production is in suspension for likely at least another 9-12 months but of course seem to have more blue sky in front of it.

However the main takeaway for me is that finally the capital markets may be finally returning for gold miners. Both raises are substantial relative to their market caps. Also one is for producer that has had its fair share of the wobbles, and the other is for a company that will remain pre-revenue for some time so both raises involved leaps of faith.

I was thinking the other day that the blokes who were running Apollo Consolidated in 2021 should get medals for the prescience they showed in bailing out of developing their Rebecca project and selling it to Ramelius instead. They got $128m for their shareholders for what is frankly a pretty ordinary and stranded project and more to the point they avoided walking their shareholders into the twin shit storms that hit the mining sector from late 2021, of rampantly rising costs and frozen capital markets. It wasn't that obvious what was approaching when they did the deal, but it became obvious soon after. And what followed has been like a wrecking ball smashing through so many mining companies (can you believe Spartan with Never Never and a near new 2.5mtpa plant had to raise at 10 cents and hand over some royalties to boot??). So Roger Steinepreis - who was Apollo chair - and Nick Castledon - who was MD - should take a bow for being wise custodians of their shareholders investments.

The collapse of nickel and lithium has already taken a lot of the heat out of the cost pressures that were impacting gold miners. Now if this is indeed a turning in the capital markets we may finally see a surge of cash into the sector which may even see those increased flows feeding into share prices. With any luck Spartan should be one of the companies best positioned to benefit from any tidal change.