ATC = CARLIN Price: $1.97
Shares outstanding: 92.9 million (105M f-d)
Market capitalization: $183 million
Current price: $2.27
ATAC Resources (ATC-V)
ATAC is developing the Rackla project, Canada’s only Carlin-type gold district in the mountains of the Yukon. The rocks are comparable in lithology, mineralization and age to the Nevada trend that has produced more than 50 million ounces of gold. Rackla is a vast 1,700-square-kilometre property but the 30-kilometre Nadaleen Trend in the east is where much of the high-grade gold has been found in recent years. The latest intercepts included 61.29 metres of 2.75 g/t Au in the Orion zone at Nadaleen. ATAC also has the PEA-stage Tiger deposit in the Rau trend on the western part of the property. ATAC has consistently returned intercepts that are off-the-charts rich for the Yukon, including 38.8 metres of 17.11 g/t Au (2010) and 30.79 metres of 9.5 g/t (2014). The gold is rich but the exploration is expensive — some of the sites with the most gold are on mountaintops and require helicopters to visit and drill. ATAC shares have powerful leverage to gold and reached $10 a share in the summer of 2011 — a fact that puts the 26% move since Dec. 21 into perspective. Also in 2016, ATAC released an updated PEA for Tiger with better economics, including significant boosts in NPV, recovered gold and mine life. The stock has made a round trip from 30 cents at the start of the year, to almost a dollar at the end of July, to the current 43.5 cents. The Yukon’s White Gold district gets much of the attention these days. But Strategic Metals CEO Doug Eaton (Strategic owns 8.3% of ATC shares) reckons that in 100 years, the Nadaleen trend where ATAC has a dominant land position will have produced more gold than the Klondike trend that hosts the White Gold district. And Eaton probably knows as much about Yukon geology as anybody.