the sleeping minow may grow into giant, page-11

"noticed it was mentioned in an article in the age 1 or two days ago"

may have already been posted...........

SIGNATURE METALS

Gold's march to record levels is set to fire up trade in the gold exploration stocks, the most leveraged of plays to periods of bullish investor sentiment towards the metal.

ASX-listed explorers with a west-African focus are flavour of the month. Its lightly picked over "greenstone" belts have been yielding more multi-million ounce discoveries in recent years than you can poke a stick at. And then there is the issue of the Australian gold sector producing more than its fair share of project failures in the last couple of years, let alone the almost complete absence of decent discoveries.

The reworked Signature Metals (ASX:SBL) is one of many Perth-based explorers looking to make it big in Africa.

Its main go is the Konongo gold project in Ghana's Ashanti gold belt. It was a producer in years gone by (1.6 million ounces at a more than handy grade of 11.8 grams of gold a tonne) and comes with a compliant resource of close to 1 million ounces across a number of deposits, as well as a mothballed treatment plant.

Signature wants to return the project to life as a 100,000 ounce-a-year producer and reckons its tenements have an "exploration potential" of 1.5-2.5 million ounces of gold. That's all very interesting for a stock that closed on Tuesday at 3.3 cents a share for a market capitalisation of about $25 million. But there is a lot of work to do. Exploration to confirm the upside has got off to a good start, yielding high-grade hits at the first of prospects targeted.

the age