The Australian All Ordinaries fell 1.9% to 4,982 points today, with the materials and energy sectors dropping 2.2% and 3.3%, respectively, on the back of broadly weaker commodity pricing.
The session followed discouraging cues from Wall Street and was perhaps most dramatically coloured by a brutal sell-off in oil Friday, when West Texas Intermediate slumped over 3% to US$35.62 a barrel.
MARKET ACTION
Shares in diversified explorer Eclipse Metals (ASX:EPM) closed 20% higher today at A$0.006, representing a doubling in value since late October.
Company activity since that time has been largely characterised by progress developing promising uranium assets in the Northern Territory, including the Liverpool project, where tantalisingly strong uranium readings in preliminary exploration work at the Devil’s Elbow uranium-gold-palladium prospect have supported a decision to expand control over this highly prized exploration region.
The expansion area – known as Devil’s Elbow Central – is immediately east of Devil’s Elbow, which has produced rock chips grading up to 7,620 ppm uranium and radioactive volcanic boulder sAMPles reading values as high as 3,3000 ppm uranium.
Previous shallow trenching at Devil’s Elbow has yielded high-grade uranium assays including 3.2% U3O8, 3.7% U3O8, 4.40% U3O8 and 5.8% U3O8 as well as 38.1g/t gold and 28.02g/t palladium.
This site is only 41 kilometres from the worked-out Nabarlek uranium mine which produced 12,000 tonnes of uranium oxide from 568,402 tonnes of ore with a grade of 1.95% U3O8.
The broader Liverpool project area lies in the sought-after Alligator Rivers Uranium field, which neighbours operations run by senior uranium explorers such as Rio Tinto and Cameco Australia, the latter of which has been instrumental in establishing Devil’s Elbow’s prospectivity.
BLUE CHIPS
Major miners
BHP Billiton (ASX:BHP) down 3.3% to $16.63
Fortescue Metals Group (ASX:FMG) down 2.7% to $1.79
Newcrest (ASX:NCM) up 4.2% to $12.75
Rio Tinto (ASX:RIO) down 1.8% to $42.26
Energy or Oil and Gas
Oil Search (ASX:OSH) down 5.3% to $5.87
Santos (ASX:STO) down 4.7% to $3.34
Woodside Petroleum (ASX:WPL) down 2.5% to $26.36
Big 4 banks
ANZ Bank (ASX:ANZ) down 2.0% to $25.68
Commonwealth Bank (ASX:CBA) down 2.0% to $77.39
National Australia Bank (ASX:NAB) down 2.2% to $27.97
Westpac (ASX:WBC) down 2.5% to $30.69
Other banks, financials and industrials
AMP (ASX:AMP) down 2.2% to $5.46
Bank of Queensland (ASX:BOQ) down 2.2% to $13.05
Bendigo and Adelaide Bank (ASX:BEN) down 1.9% to $10.72
Macquarie Group (ASX:MQG) down 3.6% to $78.07
Suncorp (ASX:SUN) down 9.7% to $11.78
Telstra (ASX:TLS) down 0.2% to $5.19
Retailers
JB Hi-FI (ASX:JBH) down 0.8% to $17.90
Wesfarmers (ASX:WES) down 1.8% to $37.19
Woolworths (ASX:WOW) down 1.8% to $22.60
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