Spectacular rise dominates day Paul GarveyThursday, 5 October...

Spectacular rise dominates day

Paul Garvey
Thursday, 5 October 2006

SOMETIMES it's hard for a mining minnow to get noticed on the equities market, particularly when resource stocks are enjoying a day as positive as this one. But for one such junior, which has received very little attention in its recent history, October 5 was the day it arrived in the spotlight.


So light has interest been in West Perth-based PacMag – formerly known as Pacific Magnesium – that just 2 million of its 101 million shares on issue had been traded over the past month while its share price bounced between 18c and 21c.

Yet today, as the company unveiled a 64% increase in the contained copper resource at its Ann Mason project in Nevada, taking the contained in situ copper content of the deposit to 3.2 million tones (worth a cool $US25 billion at today's copper prices), PacMag shares fairly exploded.

After opening at 18.5c, PacMag went on a phenomenal run all the way up to an intraday high of 47c – representing a total gain of 154% – before settling back down to finish the day at 41c for a gain of "only" 124.3%.

Over the course of the day, some 18.7 million PacMag shares traded hands; to put that in context, before today just 21 million PacMag shares had been traded in total over the past six months.

Whether PacMag's screaming arrival in the market's line of sight is just a blip or the start of something bigger remains to be seen, but either way there'll be plenty of traders making toasts to PacMag when they put their feet up this evening.

PacMag's performance was a dramatic highlight to a day in which mining stocks put aside a bad night for commodity markets to post a generally positive run that saw much of yesterday's pain erased.