the australian newspaper

The Eagle has landed
By Robin Bromby
September 17, 2003
SOME slow off the mark day traders would have been licking their wounds last night after the Eagle Bay Resources bubble burst.



It was a one-day wonder: up 210 per cent on Monday and then down 50 per cent yesterday.

It must have left some investors holding the bag, especially those who had bought on Monday at up to 18c and then were locked in by a trading halt.

When Eagle Bay put its pin into the bubble with its reply to the stock exchange query, most – but not all – of the hot air flowed straight out again.

If you'd bought at the Friday close price of 5.8c you're still ahead at yesterday's 9c finish.

It was all about a copper-gold discovery near Whyalla, South Australia.

Punters plunged in after a Melbourne newspaper said the deposit was worth $3 billion – but how it came to that conclusion remains a mystery given that Eagle Bay has not publicly ascribed a value.

Eagle director Tony Rechner told the stock exchange neither he nor anyone else from the company had spoken to the newspaper, even though it said that he had put the $3 billion figure on it.

But Mr Rechner did talk to the local papers in that part of South Australia where the discovery had been made.

And the reference to Olympic Dam, the huge WMC Resources copper-gold-uranium mine, has a special resonance in that state.

The Whyalla News quotes Mr Rechner as saying the site had the potential to be as big as the Olympic Dam mine near Roxby Downs. "It is only a matter of time before the true value of this project is revealed," Mr Rechner is quoted as saying by that newspaper.

The Transcontinental, a newspaper based in Port Augusta, told its readers that the find "has been described as an indication of a deposit potentially bigger than the deposits found at Olympic Dam" – although no source is offered for this claim.

Mr Rechner is quoted in the report as saying only that the find was more than a flash in the pan and that exploration would take time.

However, he did invoke the magic name, according to the newspaper.

"The computer imaging technology used to identify the potential mine . . . was designed using Olympic Dam as a case study and that makes our initial data extremely reliable," he is quoted as saying.

But Northern Regional Development Board chief executive Andrew Eastick put his view to The Transcontinental: "As I understand it, they dug one hole and found some interesting mineralisation . . . that's well short of being a mine."