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Hi Ladies and Gents

Here is something to cheer you up a bit although there aint anything new in it LOL

This article is from today’s “The Age” paper

Cheers

Confucius Said: Obama is going to fix everything





At last there are good reasons for industry optimism.

Murchison Metals (MMX)
ANDREW "Twiggy" Forrest was the first to tip that the iron ore market might well have bottomed. Then BHP's Marius Kloppers waded in, saying that spot prices had recovered to within 10-15 per cent of ongoing record contract prices because Chinese steelmakers had largely depleted stockpiles.

For a resources sector looking for something to believe in, it was just the tonic that our iron ore producers and iron hopefuls needed. That's why, after shunning the sector for the past six months, investors decided it was time to tickle up the share prices of the iron ore stocks last week.

Whether the optimism of Twiggy and MK proves to have been well founded remains to be seen. But for stocks like Murchison Metals (ASX:MMX), the return of some optimism in the sector is just what the doctor ordered.

After touching $4.90 a share last year, Murchison has been bumping along at 50 cents a share in recent times. The new optimism has seen a mild recovery in the share price to Friday's closing price of 57 cents a share.

Murchison's Jack Hills iron ore project in Western Australia's mid-west has just got a whole lot bigger too. There is now close to 100 million tonnes of direct shipping iron ore (DSO, 58 per cent iron) and about 1 billion tonnes of magnetite ore; what Murchison likes to call beneficiation feed (BFO, 34 per cent iron).

That would not mean all that much if it were not for Jack Hills being a joint venture with Japanese trading giant Mitsubishi, and the presence of the mighty Korean steel group POSCO on the Murchison share register with a 12.2 per cent stake. Those guys are there because of Jack Hills' potential to become a serious challenge to the current dominance of the Pilbara iron ore producers (BHP, Rio Tinto and Fortescue) on the strength of the BFO resource.

According to the project's metallurgy consultant, the Jack Hills BFO resource is "one of the best magnetite ore bodies currently under development in Australia".

With Murchison's market cap of "only" $240 million and the presence of Mitsubishi and POSCO, you've got to wonder if the sell-off in the stock from the peak of $4.90 a share has been overdone.