Copper and gold explorer LinQ Minerals believes it can grow its massive bounty

• LinQ Minerals has been a bright light amid the small-cap gloom, up 85% in 2026
• The explorer hosts one of the largest gold and copper resource bases among ASX juniors, with 3.7Moz gold and 1.2Mt copper at its Gilmore project in NSW’s Macquarie Arc
• New CEO and executive director Harrison Donner says the plan is to drill aggressively to grow that resource base in the next 12-18 months

Sentiment for small caps has been rough in 2026, but those with compelling stories to tell have been able to bypass weakness in the broader market.

That’s certainly the case with $75 million-capped gold and copper explorer LinQ Minerals (ASX:LNQ), which has enjoyed an 85% gain across the year to date.

A $10 million IPO in late 2025, the Clive Donner-chaired junior has an important differentiator from the hundreds of early stage explorers on the market.

In its Gilmore project in New South Wales, the company is sitting on one of the largest endowments of gold and copper held anywhere outside the majors, 3.7Moz of the precious metal and 1.2Mt of copper near major mines owned by Evolution Mining (ASX:EVN) in the state’s fertile Macquarie Arc. All up, its tenement package takes in 40km of continuous copper and gold strike.

While gold prices have been volatile in the past year, the value of that copper in the ground has soared, with prices sustainably above US$14,000/t for several months.

CEO and executive director Harrison Donner believes the company can make the resource much bigger through a 30,000m drill program currently under way, while blue sky has already been demonstrated with drilling at the Monza prospect.

Not yet part of the Gilmore resource, maiden drilling at Monza returned 5m at 5.36% copper equivalent and 24m at 0.94% CuEq within a broader intercept of 208m at 0.61% CuEq, with more thick intersections from follow-up results.

“It’s a very long piece of real estate we’ve got. We’ve got nearly 600km2 of tenure, a 60km north-south trend and 40km of that 60km is mineralised with copper and gold,” Harry Donner said.

“We feel that we could get this resource a lot bigger with more drilling and that’s really extension drilling to the existing resources and new discovery drilling.

“Historically, this belt’s had a lot of shallow air core drilling to get a handle of the geochemical signatures and what minerals are kicking around close to surface as a pathfinder.

“We’ve got this 40-kilometre strike. A lot of it is untested at depth.”

Getting the timing right

Gidginbung, the Gilmore project’s largest known deposit, was last in operation in the mid-1990s when gold was fetching just A$460/oz.

Today gold is paying more than A$5900/oz. How the times have changed.

In the current metal price environment, drilling is now well supported.

On top of the $10m IPO raise, LinQ completed a $15.4m institutional placement in January.

Donner said the funding is there to turn the rigs aggressively over the next 12-18 months. And many opportunities remain untapped.

Announced yesterday, the first drill hole into a target 1km south of the historic Gidginbung pit picked up high-sulphidation epithermal mineralisation from 321-570m down hole, 800m south of the previously known limit of similar mineralisation at the deposit.

Porphyry mineralisation similar to the Dam copper-gold deposit 1.6km to the north from from from 570-750.3m at the end of the hole.

“Hole GBRCD021 is exciting and could be a significant breakthrough discovery for LinQ as it pursues an aggressive drilling campaign to prove that the Gilmore Project has the potential to be the next major economic mining centre in the Macquarie Arc,” technical director John Holliday said.

“It is possible that LinQ has discovered the core part of a large HSE-porphyry system for which Gidginbung and the Dam are smaller components. In geologic terms, this is potentially a big mineralised system.”

3 company makers in 1

LinQ has split up the geological opportunities along three zones – a Northern Zone, Central Zone and Southern Zone.

The “Yiddah Northern Zone” contains a ‘very large’ copper-gold-molybdenum system with strike running over more than 2km of strike.

Drill spacing is nominally 200-300m and up to 600m along strike, suggesting there’s plenty of unknown potential to fill in between what are thick multi-element historical drill hits.

The Southern Zone, which includes the historically mined Gidginbung and The Dam, is part of a +6km long strike zone along a North-West Arc Transfer structure the company has compared to Cadia, Australia’s largest gold-copper porphyry system.

Only one drill hole has been completed 1km south of Gidginbung, while high-grade supergene gold has been discovered in past drill holes at MagH1, high-grade epithermal gold as strong as 25m at 8.9g/t Au and 0.16% Cu at Fields and a separate porphyry discovery was made at Woolshed, untested since 1995.

Between those are the Central Zone, a 17km trend of porphyry copper gold targets including three significant resources at Mandamah, Culingerai and Estoril, with 10 advanced targets including Monza along the extensive strike area.

Donner says the three zones could be not one, but three ‘potentially company-making assets’.

“There’s a brownfields project in the south which previously sat on a mining lease. We’re on exploration licences now. It’s got all the boxes to tick with development potential,” he said.

“We’ve got fantastic infrastructure running straight through our project, road, rail, power and water and we’re sandwiched between two towns which have a good local workforce and airstrips, all the local trades required to get a mine up and running.

“Everything’s there ready to go. We want to spend the next 12-18 months drilling out this belt because we feel that we could get this copper and gold endowment a lot bigger with more drilling.”

The plan ahead

While it has a substantial gold bounty, the addition of a massive endowment of copper is a fillip for LinQ as it seeks to stand out in a crowded junior mining market.

“Copper is getting very difficult to find. I think the average open pit grade for a copper mine now is 0.4% – our overall grade for our resource is higher than that on an equivalent basis,” Donner said.

“So grades are diminishing, opex is going up, the large players’ all-in costs are increasing, they’re having to go deeper underground, and that’s going to set a floor price for copper.

“I think they’re two very good commodities to have coming out of the ground together (and) gold is sometimes looked at as a natural hedge.”

There is street cred on the LinQ team as well. Notably, technical director John Holliday was part of the team that discovered Cadia-Ridgway with Newcrest, along with the Marsden copper-gold porphyry deposit held by Evolution next door to its Cowal gold mine.

With plans to grow its resource base further, Donner says LinQ’s focus will be well and truly on drill success in the months ahead.

“We’ve got a second rig coming to site this month and we plan on keeping a second rig on the project for a while to ramp up the exploration drilling,” Donner said.

“There will be quite a lot of consistent news flow coming through to the market over the next 12 months.”

More drilling could help link up many of the targets in the Central Zone, with the drill rig currently in the Southern Zone picking up that promising mineralised interval.

“It’s had very limited exploration drilling in and around that whole zone for the last 20-30 years,” Donner said.

“We’ve now got a drill rig positioned a kilometre south of that gold project and what we’re chasing there is either a continuation of that epithermal system or a porphyry system.

“We’re currently sitting at 750 metres depth on that hole and we’re still drilling.”

Assays are expected to take 6-8 weeks, with another three 200-300m-spaced holes up to 1000m deep planned at the Gidginbung South target.

At Stockhead, we tell it like it is. While LinQ Minerals is a Stockhead advertiser, it did not sponsor this article.

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