John Kaiser on ATCpub/na/7575
TGR: Nice. Heading in a different direction, the hottest play in the junior market is the Yukon. That area play has gotten more coverage than anything else since Kinross took out Underworld Resources earlier this year. What are some companies you like in the Yukon?
JK: Well, the one that I've been following since it hit
.60 last year is
ATAC Resources Ltd. (TSX.V:ATC). This is a classic toiling-geologist company, which had flatlined in the
.15-–
.30 range for years. ATAC specialized in generating projects in the Yukon, farming them out and never getting lucky. But then its Rau Project started to click a couple of years ago. This is a property that's been expanded to cover more than 100 km. of carbonate rocks that bear a striking similarity to the host rocks in Nevada's Carlin Trend.
The company found several zones of gold mineralization that it had treated as a sediment-hosted gold system. This year, at the far end of the belt, it made the Osiris discovery through old-fashioned prospecting and systematic exploration. Here ATAC has a geological setting that is a dead ringer for the host of the Carlin-style mineralization; it's even gone from calling this a sediment-hosted gold system to a Carlin-style hosted gold system. The company has published just one drill hole so far, but the footprint is enormous. The stock has gone to from
.60–$6; ATAC now has a rather extraordinary market cap of $600M. There are no ounces in the ground yet, but this is the type of story that could be a real home run. If it discovered a Carlin-style system in the Yukon with the same sort of 50–100 Moz. gold endowment, a stock like that, pardon the expression, could go to the moon. Now, because the company has 100 million shares out, it's not like the old days where the moon was really high.
But a stock like this could go to $30 or even $50 if drilling confirms that Osiris is a multimillion-ounce discovery and that the entire belt is prospective for similar gold hot spots.