This article is from the Australian Newspaper today. With the...

This article is from the Australian Newspaper today. With the ZFX bid at $1:10 it has put a concrete floor in AGM's share price. When the bid expires next Thursday (unless it is extended) and the floor is removed, ZFX can continue to purchase shares, but it could be at a much lower price.

Nickel's mystery slowing

DOWN, down, down those nickel miners go.

Why, why, why the punters demand to know.

But there's no need to get poetic, this is all very serious.

For many years, when the resources boom was constantly shifting up gears, nickel appeared as the place to be in. Well before uranium, eons before gold and a generation before phosphate, nickel was used to throw the best parties.

Now the free alcohol might have run out, and the lights may be turned down low, but the nickel party - you would think - would continue to run as long as China keeps running at double-digit growth rates.

Sure, the US might have gone home early, because it wanted to prepare itself for a case of the recession blues, but there was no need to call the cops.

But it seemed like the sharemarket was expecting the nickel party to get raided some time soon, by the way everyone was running away at 100kph on Tuesday.

Minara Resources...down a massive 10 per cent on no news at all.

Mincor? Off 7.5 per cent for no apparent reason at all.

Sally Malay shares shed about the same amount and Western Areas fell by nearly 6 per cent, despite announcing that it had stumbled upon some high-grade nickel ore at the Mt Alexander joint-venture project it shares with BHP Billiton.

A quick glance at the spot nickel price and the mystery as to why punters are dropping nickel stocks deepens even further.

The 60-day nickel price graph shows that, although the spot nickel price is still well below the record high achieved in May last year, there has been something of a resurgence for the metal over the past two months.

Indeed, nickel is at about the same level as it was in mid-September last year and Daily Assay can't find any word about the place that the price is about to fall through the floor any time soon.

Some would say it’s “interesting days” on the market, not only for the banking sector.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23357653-15023,00.html