Cracking drill targets boost Tasman share price by 125 per cent

This week’s batch of Runners is led by small mineral exploration stocks, with a disability support company with a bit of SaaS proving it can hold its own among the “dirt brigade”.

Tasman Resources (ASX:TAS)

125% up (from 0.4c to 0.9c)

Leaping on to the top of the Runners of the Week podium this week is mineral explorer Tasman Resources.

Tasman shot out of the blocks on Tuesday with a massive jump in volume to 18 million shares, after miniscule trading volumes of about 4000 shares traded hands on Monday.

The share price leapt from its 0.4c close on both Friday last week and this week’s Monday trading, to reach a new 52-week high of 0.9c on Tuesday, for a tasty 125 per cent gain.

ASX heavies hit the company with a speeding ticket on Tuesday afternoon after the massive spike in volumes.

Tasman responded to the ASX on Thursday, saying its geophysical consultants had confirmed a series of five drill targets from a second matching geophysical review at its Parkinson Dam gold project that sits west of the South Australian coastal town of Port Augusta.

In a further positive, a sixth target was identified from recently acquired, close-spaced gravity data, in addition to earlier aeromagnetic and resistivity data.

Tasman says the anomalies highlighted by the review warrant drilling for epithermal, porphyry and iron-oxide copper-gold-style targets.

Notably, the company appears to have a couple of cracking targets on its hands.

Its magnetic T1 target extends more than 5km in depth defined by gravity and magnetics data.

Target 2b contains a circular gravity feature at a depth of 700m and extends down to 1100m. The target sits directly below a previous drill hole that returned a stellar intersection of 21m running at 21 grams per tonne (g/t) gold and 83g/t silver.

Bridge SaaS (ASX: BGE)

94% up (from 1.9c to 3.7c)

Securing second spot in this week’s Runners list is software and disability support firm Bridge SaaS.

The disability care and support provider also offers  a mix of software-as-a-service (SaaS) customer relationship management software to the disability support industry and multiple government agencies.

Bridge has been radio silent this week with no news released to the market so far, however that didn’t hold back punters who ploughed into the stock on Thursday. Volumes of nearly 16 million shares were traded, pushing the price to a 3.7c high, seeing it almost double from last Friday’s 1.9c close.

The company received a knock on the door on Wednesday last week from the ASX’s best Pauline Hanson-impersonator, asking them to “please explain” their share price jump, after it ran from 2c to 2.8c on a serious volume of 16.7 million shares.

Bridge responded with “nothing to see here” and the price retreated back towards the 2c level.

In its last quarterly report the company said it is endeavouring to trim costs in its employment services division, which supplies its SaaS software to providers to the Federal Government’s National Disability Insurance Scheme and other notable government enterprises.

A notice provided to the market today unveils a substantial shareholder has been buying up this week, increasing its stake from 8.6 per cent of the company’s shares to a 12.76 per cent shareholding. It caught Bulls’ laser-focused eye and might help explain the price move for the week.

New Frontier Minerals (ASX : NFM)

Up 81% (from 1.1c to 2c)

Stepping on to the podium in third place is New Frontier Minerals, formerly known as Castillo Copper.

The company has switched its focus from a predominantly copper explorer in Australia and Africa to now adopting as its flagship project the Harts Range uranium, niobium and rare earths project in the Northern Territory.

New Frontier last Friday announced it had identified a 500m-long pegmatite target at its Big Jay prospect at Harts Range, with little initial reaction from market punters.

The share price started to gather steam on Monday touching a high of 1.6c.

Then came Tuesday’s news of a new geophysical program to identify drill targets that sent the company’s share price it to its highest point of 1.9c since its new moniker came into effect.

The news drove volumes and price hikes, with Monday’s turnover of 8.7 million shares followed by an even higher 10.3 million shares changing hands on Tuesday.

Encouragingly, there were continued high volumes of 9.5 million on Wednesday and Thursday’s tally of 8.2 million traded shares extended the price to a 2c peak for a more than 80 per cent run this week.

Identification of the large pegmatite target occurred during the company’s second reconnaissance visit, following its recent maiden dash to the site where it nabbed a series of rock chip samples that returned several eye-opening grades.

Assays returning 29.8 per cent niobium, 14.04 per cent uranium, more than 23 per cent tantalum and the valuable heavy rare earths duo of dysprosium grading at 1.63 per cent and terbium going 0.22 per cent indicates the company may be onto something at Harts Range.

Caption - Axel REE’s rock chip tray showing high grades of total rare earth oxides from recent drilling at the company’s flagship Caladão project in Brazil’s Lithium Valley region. Credit: File

Axel REE (ASX : AXL)

Up 64% (from 7c to 11.5c)

Missing out on a podium finish but having a darn good week anyway is Brazil-focused rare earth explorer Axel REE.

The company had traders sit up and take notice when it released news of impressive shallow rare earths hits of up to 7606 parts per million (ppm) of the high value magnetic rare earths at its flagship Caladão project in Brazil’s Lithium Valley region.

A whopping 32.1 million shares were traded on Wednesday as traders piled in, helping push the price to an 11.5c high to reach its highest point since August.

Thursday trading saw the healthy share volumes continue with a further 16 million shares exchanging on the day, as punters bought in, perhaps beginning to believe in the merits of the project with its latest results grading up to 28,321ppm total rare earths oxides.

Management believes it has a world-class project on its hands and with drilling identifying mineralisation across the entire 30-square kilometre zone drilled to date, representing less than 10 per cent of the total project ground, it is easy to understand why.

Three of the four Runners this week are from the small resources sector, which might be proving itself to be  the leader in the run-up to the festive season. 

Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: matt.birney@businessnews.com.au