stockwatch Chuck Fipke's Metalex Ventures Ltd. (MTX), a perennial three-center that struggled to a 12-cent high to start 2021, is taking advantage of its best run in nearly six years. Metalex, down one-half cent to 8.5 cents on 45,000 shares today, has been sprucing up a balance sheet that showed a teetering current account imbalance of over $4-million at the end of October. The company has taken care of much of that debt, settling the $2.75-million that it owed Mr. Fipke by issuing 32.35 million shares at 8.5 cents.
Over the past month Metalex has also been lurching toward its goal of raising $3-million, having sold 18 million flow-through shares at 8.5 cents and 5.4 million regular shares at seven cents, although it has taken three tranches to bring in that $1.9-million. (The company initially wanted just $1.2-million in mid-December, but less than a week later, Mr. Fipke, chairman and majority owner, more than doubled his target.)
Further, Mr. Fipke says that because of the interest investors were showing in the placement, "the company has, for the foreseeable future, abandoned any plans to roll back its stock." The future was not as easily read, perhaps, in early December, when Mr. Fipke said that Metalex was proposing to consolidate its stock by an unspecified ratio while it continued "reviewing financing options."
As it turned out, the best financing option was to tout its long-suffering Quebec diamond hunt as a developing metals prospect. While gold was the headline act that got Metalex's stock running, Mr. Fipke also added scandium to his new pitch. One of the three gold anomalies that Metalex staked based on "anomalous concentrations and physical amounts of gold" -- a bit, in other words -- was "also accompanied by the most anomalous scandium result in the data set" -- a throwaway line that in the absence of data, suggests there was just a sniff of the metal scattered about the area.
Mr. Fipke is sticking with diamonds, as just a day after Metalex promoted gold and scandium, it acquired a new-to-it gem prospect in South Africa. That Viljoenshof project is just 30 kilometres from Kimberley, so it has been well explored previously. Indeed, De Beers discovered two kimberlite pipes, two dikes and two other bodies with undetermined geometry. None of the finds caught its interest, so De Beers let the project go. Fifty years later, it tried to reclaim the project, but a new group beat it to the punch and has now granted Metalex an option to earn a majority interest in Viljoenshof.
While the news about gold and scandium got Metalex trading, it was the Viljoenshof news that followed a day later that finally got the stock moving higher. Nevertheless, despite the market's continuing enthusiasm for a Chuck Fipke diamond adventure, he has said nothing about the project since then. Further, the $1.53-million in flow-through cash Metalex has just raised must be spent in Canada, leaving just the $380,000 in hard dollars as eligible to be spent in South Africa