The Louvre, lithium and legal larceny – how to spot a heist on the ASX

The ladder. The smashed window. The stolen jewels. Dollar Bill expected to see a Bond villain, not a few men dressed in high-viz scooting past outside the famous Louvre Museum in Paris with backpacks stuffed full of priceless treasures. Yet there it was: four thieves, an electrically powered ladder on a truck, through a second-floor window into the Apollo Gallery and out again. It was all done in seven minutes flat and France’s crown jewels were gone. You have to admire the audacity.

And while replacing his spilt latte, Dollar Bill was thinking; there’s a markets lesson hiding here somewhere in this absurd tableau: value isn’t always guarded either in real life or in public markets. Sometimes it’s simply mispriced, misplaced or sitting behind the wrong window until someone turns up with a ladder perched at the right angle. In our corner of the world no one’s smashing glass, but every now and then an ASX junior (or a hungry mid-cap) walks away with an asset that starts off as a steal and ends up priceless.

Pilbara Minerals wrote the modern playbook. In late 2020 it bought neighbour Altura Lithium out of administration for roughly A$200 million. Back then lithium was barely on the radar and it looked like a tidy but uninspired clean-up job. Fast-forward a cycle and that “administration asset” became the Ngungaju plant - effectively Pilbara’s second engine - helping lift the company’s market cap beyond A$10 billion at the boom’s peak. A daylight robbery, only legal.

When lithium was reaching for the sky a few years ago, Pilbara Minerals made more money from its Pilbara lithium operations that year than Bunnings and about as much as Qantas which was the Aussie airline’s best year – go figure!

AIC Mines also pulled its own version of a heist shortly after, agreeing in 2021 to buy the Eloise copper mine from FMR for about A$27 million (cash, scrip and a small contingent). Since then, Eloise has hit guidance eight quarters in a row and thrown off some solid cash. The company’s FY25 production landed at 12,863 tonnes of copper in concentrate generating about A$79 million in operating cash before capex proving that sometimes the cleanest heists happen with a spreadsheet, not a shovel.

And more recently, the $3m Hillgrove gold-antimony asset picked up by Larvotto Resources just a few years ago was the subject of a takeover bid worth more than $700m from a big US player. Those scamps from The Louvre, who are likely now shopping for bids on France’s crown jewels – at least the two who weren’t caught - would take a return like that in a New York minute.

At the other end sits Northern Star’s merger with De Grey Mining. Here was a A$5 billion scrip deal that proves the inverse law. If you don’t spot mispriced ground early, you’ll pay for it later. Hemi began as an anonymous patch of dirt on the Pilbara plains of WA and proved its naysayers wrong when it banked about 10-million-ounces in resource from what is now the most famous example of “intrusion” related geology. The ladder by the wall was there for years at Hemi but most just walked straight past it.

Back in the small-cap trenches, Hawk Resources may have found a rung or two of its own. The company quietly picked up a little-loved scandium project in the West Musgrave region of Western Australia for less than the price of a field rig. It’s serious blue-sky stuff; early, thinly drilled but pretty much ignored for its scandium potential - until now. But the metal has since experienced a serious awakening thanks to alloy demand in aerospace and solid-oxide fuel cells. Incredibly scandium is selling for over US$3m a tonne. If metal markets keep leaning towards high-strength light alloys, in the years to come we may well look back at Hawk’s $5m acquisition of its Olympus scandium project as an outright heist – just without the ladder.

Caspin Resources could be another sleeper. If nickel prices wake up – and they should - the Yarabrook Hill ground it added via the deal it struck with Cassini in a 2019 deal looks to have come for a song. The company has already mapped a 4km long, 1km thick mafic- ultramafic body boasting significantly elevated mineralisation. Given the scale, outlaying just A$300,000 cash plus about 6.1 million options in return for an 80 per cent stake for this ground be a counter-cyclical masterstroke and a heist in the making.

And then there’s the new frontier in the critical minerals space: the United States. Dollar Bill was recently informed by several sources on the ground that the claims rooms dotted across California, Nevada, Arizona and Wyoming are literally teeming with Aussies. Apparently, it’s a virtual conga-line of convicts queuing out the doors driven by Washington’s critical minerals strategy and a permitting regime that, at least for exploration, runs on paperwork, not politics.

It’s probably not a bad idea to pitch a tent outside these claims halls and take a roll call of who’s in line.

And here’s a fun point. Under the US General Mining Law of 1872, a prospector can still “stake” a claim by planting posts – I kid you not – then mapping coordinates and filing a form with the Bureau of Land Management. But the real kicker is the cost which includes a processing fee of about US$25, a location fee of US$49 and an annual maintenance fee of US$200 per claim - it’s almost comical. Here is a one-hundred-and-fifty year-old law presenting a twenty-first-century opportunity for the price of a cheap night at the pub. It’s exactly the sort of reality that suits a nimble ASX junior with a good geologist and a fast pen. Dollar Bill, who thought he had an awesome hip and shoulders move in his rugby days, also loves the quaint nature of the physical pegging competition. Things are so much more civil in Australia with the majority of pegging done using a computer screen.

Every downturn sees a quiet land-rush as juniors peg the gaps majors drop. The smartest ones treat the Department of Mines and Petroleum like an art gallery catalogue: studying what’s been taken down and moving before the crowd notices the empty frame (and Dollar Bill apologises here to the Louvre security staff for the cheap pun).

But for now the US remains the scene of several potential heists – particularly in the critical minerals space. And there’s a bunch of ASX-listed names already on the ground over there worth keeping an eye on including American West Metals which is expanding copper exploration in Utah and Arizona. Jindalee Resources has its foot on the giant McDermitt lithium project on the Oregon–Nevada line, one of the country’s largest clay-hosted lithium resources.

Casting an eye further down the rung towards some smaller cap opportunities there’s Arizona Lithium with its Big Sandy project in Arizona which already has BLM approvals in place for an expanded exploration program and American Rare Earths, which is advancing Halleck Creek in Wyoming, pitched as a future US-domestic mine-to-magnet feed.

Ioneer’s Rhyolite Ridge in Nevada should also make the list now that it’s backed by a near-US$1 billion DOE loan.

For punters and professionals alike, the art is knowing the difference between slapstick and strategy. A true “steal” isn’t about luck; it’s about optionality, scale, proximity to infrastructure and a geological thesis that gives you more than one shot on goal – its a bit like the ladder, the scooters and the backpacks, all of which combined to confirm the heist at the Louvre.

And just like those Louvre rascals, you need conviction first, then the strategy and then the execution. When these three meet, you’ve got leverage no balance sheet can fake. Every cycle throws up a few of these chances. Some will fail quietly, but others will headline the next boom. The market, ever forgiving, lets new thieves try again every decade.

Which brings us, inevitably, back to Paris. The Louvre had fixed its window by Monday – possibly before the jewels were even halfway to Zurich, but markets never fix theirs. There’s always another pane unguarded, a commodity out of favour, a dataset gathering dust or a patch of ground too early for polite money. That’s where the real climbers work.

You see it in the opportunists now staking claims across the American desert, or juniors here picking up virtually untested critical-minerals ground or those hoovering up projects hosting unloved commodities for the price of a ute. These guys are better than thieves; they’re counter-cyclical collectors. They buy what no one else wants, hold it through the silence, and sell when the gallery floods back in.

The trick with spotting the next heist is recognising it before the alarms go off.

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