I have previously been caught with the Charters Towers bug...

I have previously been caught with the Charters Towers bug (about 8 years ago), made some, lost some. Learnt a lot. [eg.bought at 43 in 1994 and sold for 91, also held a small amount through receivership to this day]. Today's market cap is the equivalent of about 55 cents per share in 1994.

At that stage they were saying very similar things to now, ie. New technology, consolidation of tenements that has not previously been achieved, conceptual images of the resource zones. One million ounces mapped but more than 6 million achievable. I think they produced 50,000 ounces from small open pits.

There definately is a lot of gold there but for some reason they have not extracted it cost efficiently (prior to receivership or since). Maybe it is not possible. Beaconfield had the same problem and its grades were higher.

The thing that I could never understand is why when they discovered the Warrior Zone they didn't just follow the seam like the old timers. These new reefs need to be followed, as they increase in width & grade at depth. Drilling from the surface is very difficult. The best way to work narrow vien gold fields is with lots of cheap labour, something that is scare in Australia.

Your 'golden hope' is they can contain the ground water levels and then follow these veins effectively with the 'new technology' to a depth of 1000m where all surface veins may meet in a mother lode (like tree limbs going down to a thick trunk).

If you look at all the quarterly reports between June 1994 and 1996/7 you will see that the production plan to ramp up to 250,000 ounces per year (I still have them) was implemented in about 1995 but they never achieved it even though they were forgiven approximately $7m by QIDC/Suncorp after the court case.

Have a look at www.pierpont.com.au and do a search in the articles archive to see what he thinks of CTO. This has been a saga going on since 1973 when the Lynch family changed the name of a WA nickel boom explorer to Charter Towers mines.

Companies like Normandy & BHP have been over much of this ground also and dropped it.

Simply, there is gold, there is hope but it there profit?

Good luck,
noip