Acorn’s Squire finds a diamond in the rough of Aussie gold play

• The gold price slump this year has seen investors move from developers back to producers

• Acorn’s Rick Squire says emerging developer Waratah is one exception

• He also named a couple of opportunities in other commodities

While gold is trading roughly where it was 12 months ago, its wild fluctuations in 2026 have not been good for the smaller end of the market.

Gold is now around US$4000 an ounce after briefly rising to around US$5600/oz in late January.

Acorn Capital portfolio manager Rick Squire said gold explorers and developers were largely ignored in 2024 in favour of cash-generating producers, though the money started to trickle down last year.

“In January this year, when the gold price went to US$5400, you started to see a couple of these explorers actually starting to get off the ground for the first time since about 2021,” he said during a panel discussion at IMARC in Sydney last week.

“But when gold then fell from US$5400 to US$4000, it completely changed the game, and what’s happened is it’s then rotated back towards the producers.”

Squire said very few developers gained ground in the September quarter.

“It rotated back towards more like the market in 2024, so that’s how we’re thinking about where’s the momentum,” he said. 

Squire concedes the best market opportunities in gold continue to likely be in producers in the near term.

One exception is Waratah Minerals (ASX:WTM).

“We have a bit of exposure in Waratah, which we think is a really exciting discovery in New South Wales and just near Newmont’s Cadia,” Squire said. 

“So, there’ll be the odd explorer, or we call that an advanced explorer/early developer because they’ve got 11 drill rigs on site, so it’s not a small company.

“There’ll be a few exceptions like that, but outside of that, we think it’s more a game for the larger end.”

Spur emerges

This week, Waratah released the hotly anticipated maiden resource for the Spur and Consols Gold Zones at the Spur project, just 14 months on from its discovery. 

The indicated and inferred resource stands at 82.9 million tonnes at 1.2g/t gold for 3.1 million ounces, covering 2km of the 6km-long Spur corridor.

The all-in discovery cost was just $14.62 an ounce.

Waratah also announced an exploration target of 287-350Mt at 0.6-0.9g/t gold for 5.1-10.4Moz of gold.

The number of drill rigs on site has increased to 12, with 50,000m of drilling planned over the next six months alone.

“Our immediate objective is to grow the resource towards 5Moz of gold while continuing to test the broader potential of the Spur Gold Corridor,” Waratah managing director Peter Duerden said. 

“With a technical team of approximately 50 people on the project, 12 rigs operating and ongoing technical studies, we are moving quickly to define the scale of this gold system. 

“This maiden resource represents the foundation from which we intend to build a significantly larger gold resource.”

Notable mentions

Meanwhile, Squire mentioned a couple of other stocks during the panel discussion.

He warned mineral sands was “a really good sector to lose money in”, but Acorn has a substantial stake in PTR Minerals (ASX:PTR) and its Rosewood titanium project in South Australia.

“They’ve got a really interesting project, and we thought it was rutile and it’s not – it’s more a leucoxene project but it’s a really high-grade deposit that they’ve got in terms of the leucoxene,” Squire said.

“Then it’s a matter of finding a market – in mineral sands, you don’t want a product where you can only sell it to one off-taker and that’s the big problem, so if they can find a couple of different buyers for the product, then it could actually go because it’s in a really good location. 

“It’s close to infrastructure, they can get it to market, really high-grade product that they’ve drilled out close to surface, so at its core, it’s got all the ideal characteristics.”

In copper, Squire pointed to the underperformance of developer FireFly Metals (ASX:FFM), though Acorn is not a shareholder.

“You have a look at FireFly’s performance this year. It just went totally sideways through the year, and that’s when copper prices were going up,” he said.

Unlike gold, the sector rotated out of producers and developers and into explorers like Solstice Minerals and Midas Minerals.

“So, [FireFly] missed that uplift that you would intuitively have thought was there,” Squire said.

He added that the recent pullback presented good value and could make FireFly a takeover target.

“Maybe it’s not for a BHP or the like, but there’ll be a lot of mid-sized producers who’ll be very happy with something that can do 40,000 or 50,000 tonnes for a long time,” he said.

“We’re big shareholders in Solstice and Midas, so I wish it was those two, but in 12 months, I think it’s more likely to be FireFly that could get taken out.”

At Stockhead we tell it like it is. While Waratah Minerals and PTR Minerals are Stockhead advertisers, they did not sponsor this article.

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