Asx Scouts Fossick For Paydirt
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday July 14, 1994
PERTH: The Diggers and Dealers bash has been providing a fascinating insight into the working of the mining boards for three seemingly brave staffers from the Australian Stock Exchange's surveillance division in Sydney
The ASX - which fires off regular queries to little mining companies asking why their share prices have jumped or dived - is on the spot to catch all the gossip.
Led by manager Mr Jim Berry, the three officers' trip to the Golden Mile has found them deeply emerged in what must be one of Australia's most fertile breeding grounds for scarce information.
Mr Berry says Diggers and Dealers is an ideal chance to give him and his staff an understanding of what makes the wheels turn at the lower end of the market.
Keen to show they also have initiative, the officers used the forum to show off their latest computer-based surveillance techniques to interested delegates.
Mr Berry says the response has been positive and his helpers have made no complaints of assault or abuse from anti-regulatory punters who have fallen victim to the singing syrup.
"A regulator can't shut himself off and sit in his ivory tower. He needs to know what is going on," he said.
But have the corporate policemen picked up anything untoward on their new-found outback beat?
"I have overheard something but I'm not going to tell you. It was relating to their attitude to how they acted in the market," Mr Berry said.
"I just smiled and walked away. I don't know who they were, although I could have found out - it was non-specific and, therefore, of no real importance."
Mr Berry does not believe the exchange's surveillance division will make an impact on the workings of business at this level and it needs to accept that.
"It has always been done that way and I dare say it always will be - they are trying to get projects off the ground and it is a high-risk area," he said.
"We have to accept that this is the way business is done at a certain level."
Mr Berry's public appreciation of the junior resource industry's plight will no doubt lower the blood pressure of a few conference attendees who might not have been keen to welcome the regulators to their annual bash.
But while Mr Berry's attitude towards Diggers & Dealers encompassed all things diplomatic, the same could not be said for one of the late-night female entertainers collectively known as Diggerettes.
The efforts of one digger, obviously keen to use more than one of his senses to appreciate these delicately built waitresses, earned him a solid right hook and brought a tray of glasses crashing to the floor of the old town hall.
But the fracas barely raised an eyebrow with delegates skirting the glass on their way to replenish supplies.
After all, this is the town where things rarely change.
© 1994 Sydney Morning Herald