Batero falls on the drill

Batero Gold’s (BAT-V) impressive market run over the last 12 months has hit a bit of a snag.

The company’s shares have fallen 28% since releasing its latest drill results on July 27. In Toronto on July 28 its shares closed at $2.68 on 1.04 million shares traded.

While the company labeled the results “strong”, clearly the market was expecting something more than highlight intercepts of 31.3 metres grading 2.85 grams gold and .03% copper; 23.3 metres grading 3.73 grams gold and .02% copper or even 43 metres grading 0.7 grams gold and .08% copper.

Those assays may be the envy of some other juniors, but it is a testament to the market fervor that was whipped up over the company’s Batero-Quinchia gold-copper project that they would cause such a precipitous drop.

Batero-Quinchia sits in Colombia’s Risaralda Department. Anticipation around the project really began to heat up in February of this year when the company released highlight assays from the project of 591.50 metres grading 0.72 grams gold and 0.13% copper and 398.85 metres grading 0.46 grams gold and 0.09 % copper.

Such results helped drive the company’s share price up to a 52-week high of $6.30 on March 4.

And while the latest results may not have grabbed the markets imagination the way past results have, the company is still buoyed by the fact that the most recent drill program led to the discovery of three new zones of mineralization and extended the La Cumbre porphyry zone.

The reported assays came from 16 holes for 6,810.98 metres. On July 23 Batero announced it had finished the 40,000 metres of drilling called for in phases one and two of trilling and that would enter into a third phase of 12,500 metres.

The third phase is made up of 5 drills testing and filling-in the remaining untested areas from the Matecana zone in the south to La Cumbre, Manzanillo, La Lenguita, and Dos Quebradas in the north.

Results from the latest round of drilling will go into its first published NI-43-101 compliant resource estimate which is due out by the end of the year.

Batero says that all mineralized zones encountered to date are part of a large, regional mineralizing system that covers more than 3 sq. km.

The core of mineralization extends over 2-km from La Cumbre through to the El Centro Zone, which is made up of the Manzanillo, La Lenguita, and El Cedral targets.

And with its new discovery at Matecana, roughly 800 metres south east of La Cumbre, the north to south strike length could wind up being extended to nearly 3-km.