Forget rare earths, graphite, lithium - the stock market’s flavour of the month for March is something else.
There is a crop growing in northern NSW, sometimes hazily referred to as “the weed”, which virtually doubled the value of a bauxite company last week.
Queensland Bauxite Ltd (ASX code QBL) is a mining junior which believes it is sitting on a large deposit in North Queensland and is just waiting for the state government to give it the go-ahead for the trial mining needed to complete its feasibility studies.
QBL has only done enough drilling to indicate a bit under two million tonnes of bauxite, but the blue-sky hope is that it has 30m tonnes in a shallow deposit, beside the main highway and less than 25km from the nearest deepwater port.
The company, which has some $6m in cash, reckons the mine – if it goes ahead – will need only $5m in capital investment, and will have one of the lowest production costs of any bauxite mine.
Further down the track it hopes to develop a second bauxite project in the Nullamana region of Inverell.
But the Queensland Government has been dragging its feet on granting environmental approvals for the Queensland project. If the directors and others exercise all their options, QLB will have a billion shares issued, so perhaps it is not surprising that they have only been worth around seven-tenths of a cent each.
Until Wednesday last week, when QBL announced that it was taking a 55 per cent stake in a private company, Medical Cannabis Ltd. Cannabis is the new stock market darling, so 48 hours later QBL shares were 1.5 cents.
Andrew Kavasilas, who founded Medical Cannabis Ltd, has been researching and growing cannabis in association with Southern Cross University since 2001.
The company already has a seed bank and import licences. Its subsidiary, Vitahemp, aims to produce Australia’s first legal hemp seed food products, and is busily growing the “weed” at Tabulam.
Medical Cannabis aims to float on the stock market in due course. The Punter hopes when it does, QLB will make a killing, because when profit-taking cut the QLB share price to 1.2c on Friday, he bought 100,000 shares.