Resources Rising Stars: Four up-and-comers under $100m ready to shine

• Resources Rising Stars Conference on the Gold Coast brings junior resources companies to investor eyes
• Experts say investors are starting to welcome more risk, increasing investments in the small end of town
• Here are four companies capped below $100m that deserve your attention

With a name like Resources Rising Stars, you’d expect more than a few junior companies in the line-up, and Read Corporate has certainly delivered.

Over 50 companies are in attendance, offering a great variety of stocks ranging from $1.2bn Develop Global (ASX:DVP) all the way to $8.17m Pursuit Minerals (ASX:PUR).

And after years of conservatism, market experts are starting to see a swing into small caps who have been left behind as rate hikes sent investors looking for safer options.

With the reserve bank in cutting mode and market confidence returning, junior stocks are starting to see some love.

“Every week we see our clients moving more into the small opportunities in the market, as opposed to your banks, your coals, your wallets, your stable stocks,” Bell Direct senior analyst Grady Wulff said at the Resources Rising Stars Conference.

“Undervaluations are the key to look for in the small to mid-cap space. That’s exactly where a lot of our miners here play into.”

With that in mind, here are four ASX junior explorers with plenty of room to grow.

Indiana Resources (ASX:IDA)

Indiana Resources is a gold and base metals explorer with assets in the Central Gawler Craton of South Australia, a premier mining district sandwiched between the historic gold mining centres of Tunkillia and Tarcoola.

IDA’s flagship Minos gold project sits within over 5713km2 of company tenure, straddling the 50km-long Lake Labyrinth Shear Zone.

Indiana is gearing up to test an initial 5km section of the shear zone, investigating a handful of high-priority gold targets with 5000 metres of air core drilling.

Earlier this month the company polished off 5500m of reverse circulation and 1150m of diamond core drilling at the Minos prospect, following up on some broad, high-grade gold hits.

IDA’s earlier efforts at Minos were worth taking a second look at, grading up to 21m at 8.43 g/t gold from 176m and 2m at 25.85 g/t gold from 351m.

In July, Alto Metals veteran Matthew Bowles took up the managing director mantle, having successfully led his former company to a takeover by Brightstar Resources (ASX:BTR) to the tune of $44.4m.

“The key thing that sets us apart is that we’re so well-funded, with over $37 million in cash,” Bowles told Stockhead at the Resources Rising Stars Conference.

“Our exploration programs are focusing on unlocking the real value that we have in the Lake Shear Zone. We’ve got over 5000 square kilometres, fantastic deposits out there, heavily underexplored and that’s why the opportunity is there.

“There’s a lot more than just the Minos prospect here. The opportunity to make new gold discoveries is unbelievable.”

Indiana is well funded when it comes to junior resources companies, cashed up from the settlement of a long-running dispute with the Government of Tanzania over its expropriation of the Ntaka Hill nickel project.

US$90m has been received to date, supporting a $37m cash position after a $60m capital return to IDA shareholders, though arbitration action remains in train after Tanzania failed to remove a tax assessment as per the stipulations of the settlement deed.

Maronan Metals (ASX:MMA)

Maronan Metals is a little further along its development journey at the Maronan lead-silver and copper-gold project in the North-West minerals province of Queensland.

The company has already applied for a mineral development lease, a stepping stone toward a pre-feasibility study and mining lease, and inked a non-binding toll treating agreement with Austral Resources.

Maronan’s total resource sits at about 114.5Moz of silver, 2Mt of lead, 271,000 tonnes of copper and 649,000 ounces of gold.

Of that larger resource, MMA has zeroed-in on a starter zone within the silver-lead mineralised body of about 12.2Mt at 5% lead and 112g/t silver and converted about a third of that into the higher-confidence indicated category, representing 5.3Mt grading 5.2% lead and 116g/t silver.

MMA expects to deliver a scoping study for Maronan by the first quarter of financial year 2026, aiming to be mine-ready by the time a predicted silver shortage materialises and well-funded to develop its gold and copper resource into similar supply gaps.

“We have extensively built on the historical geological data set inherited at IPO, adding more than 27,000m of drilling across three years,” Maronan Metals managing director Richard Carlton said.

“Our team continues to cost-effectively move the Maronan deposit closer towards development and has established an excellent platform for updating mining studies and associated project economics.”

Legacy Minerals Holdings (ASX:LGM)

Over in New South Wales, Legacy Minerals is mainly focused on two projects at present – the advanced, brownfield Drake copper-gold project, and the 5500km2 Thomson project, which LEG reckons has belt-scale potential.

The company is also engaged in joint ventures covering $28.5m in funding across several projects, partnering with Newmont, Sirius Resources, Earth AI and Helix Resources.

LEG recently updated the JORC resource and produced a scoping study for the Drake project, which contains 800,000 ounces of gold and 35Moz of silver.

Using a base case gold price of $4250 per ounce, the scoping study promises total gold production of about 172,000 ounces over a 5.5-year mine life, offering a net present value (8%) of $290.4 million and an internal rate of return of 112%.

Over at Thomson, LEG is drilling the first holes into a handful of promising geophysical targets, on the hunt for an intrusion-related gold-copper system.

Management reckons the geology at Thomson is similar to that of the Paterson Province in WA, home to Greatland Resources (ASX:GGP) 7Moz Havieron deposit.

LEG believes they could have another Hemi (11.2Moz) or Winu (8Moz) on their hands.

They’re not the only ones who reckon the project has some legs – Joshua Pitt’s Red Hill Minerals (ASX:RHI) recently snapped up a historical 1.5% smelter royalty for $220,000 from Eastern Metals Pty Ltd, a royalty LEG can buy back for $6 million at any stage.

Pursuit Minerals (ASX:PUR)

Rounding out our list of rising stars, Pursuit Minerals steps outside the precious metal theme with its Rio Grande Sur lithium project in Argentina.

The project covers 5 tenements and 92.6km2 in the Lithium Triangle, one of the richest lithium provinces in the world.

Rio Grande Sur is well-advanced, with a lithium brine resource of 1.104Mt LCE at 505.8mg/L Li and the first lithium carbonate samples of 99.5% purity dispatched to potential partners.

Pursuit is in the midst of producing a detailed feasibility study for a 5000-tonne-per-year lithium carbonate operation and expects to wrap up the final stage of the study in the final quarter of this calendar year.

The company intends to build up to 12,500tpa in the second stage of development at Rio Grande Sur, once customer demand and the lithium market itself recovers to projected levels.

In the meantime, PUR is also exploring strategic gold, silver, and copper acquisitions in Argentina.

“We’ve gone through a real transformational journey over the past two years where we’ve brought in our lithium asset. While the lithium market has obviously turned, we’ve continually added value to the project, and our pilot plant has produced its first lithium carbonate,” Pursuit Minerals managing director and CEO Aaron Revelle told Stockhead at the Resources Rising Stars Conference.

“We’re very happy with where the project sits. We don’t have to do much further work to it at this stage, where we can now start looking at offtake agreements and strategic partnerships.

“The mining sector in Argentina has really opened up, there are some really significant projects available that wouldn’t have been five years ago.

“We think this is an opportunity worth investing in, and we’re positioning Pursuit as an Argentinian pure-play.”

At Stockhead, we tell it like it is. While Maronan Metals, Pursuit Minerals, Legacy Minerals and Indiana Resources are Stockhead advertisers, they did not sponsor this article.