Not so swashbuckling in my opinion, Barrick had a nice little portfolio of copper and gold assets in Australia and Tanzania that they sold 15-18 years ago to go back to being a low grade gold-only Nevada rock factory (admittedly that was while Bristow was still CEO of Randgold so he cant wear the blame for previous myopic decisions at Barrick).
They are going to have to acquire the assets and compete with everyone else to purchase the copper in the ground, and no-one is has been spending the money to find it, so its a lot of money chasing not much copper, and thats why new discoveries in decent jurisdictions (i.e. not Russia, China, the DRC, Pakistan, Chile, Peru, Bolivia, Mongolia) are important.
I can only assume that's why the US based Metals Acquisition Corp special purpose vehicle paid over $1Bn to acquire the CSA Cobar mine from Glencore, I note that MAC have been making noises about an dual US/ASX IPO this year, so thats going to require convincing seed capital/the market that CSA is actually worth $1Bn (admittedly it is a deep high grade long life mine in a decent jurisdiction) but it will be quite the test of the market, given everyone is talking about copper shortages, but no one want to stump up any money and find/buy the copper.
CNB Price at posting:
$1.09 Sentiment: Hold Disclosure: Held
(20min delay)