In the Corporate Money corner are the usual suspects: BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and a few other global giants, which control the lion’s share of mineral production.

In the Smart Money corner are impatient entrepreneurs who long for a return of the boom that made them rich and who are now determined to be first cab off the rank when the next boom starts.

What makes the two teams playing in the mining world equivalent of a tug-of-war is that Corporate Money sees the future as grim, and a time to close mines and mothball expansion projects. They are members of the “glass half-empty club”

The Smart Money team is from the “glass half-full club”, reckoning that all the bad news about commodity price falls and investors squirreling their cash away in bank accounts and German “bunds” is out in the market and there’s only one way ahead, and that’s up.

Leading players on the Smart Money team are some of the investment world’s better known “old bulls”, who have come together in a new company seeking to raise £20 million in London through a new company called Praetorian Investments.

Richard Lockwood, Malcolm Burne, Mark Hohnen and Andrew Ferguson have a century (or three) of experience between them in knowing how to structure mining deals, and when it is time to extract profits.

Ferguson is best known today as chief executive of the well-connected, Chinese-controlled, investment vehicle, APAC, which has had a big say in the running of a number ASX-listed companies, including the iron ore miner, Mt Gibson.

Hohnen is from a Perth dynasty that traces its mining roots back to a time when his father was a senior geologist with a Rio Tinto predecessor company, making a pile in the 1950s uranium boom, a trick young Mark continued with his role in Kalahari Minerals.

Burne, with deep roots in the mining finance (and journalism) worlds was the key man behind the London stockbroking business, Ambrian, and Lockwood was the key man behind another London business, New City Investments.

Praetorian, which has taken as its name a Roman Army term for the chaps who guarded the general (or, his tent, to be more accurate), is a classic cash-box investment vehicle which aims to pick winners in the mining sector, with management believing that now is a good time to do a spot of bottom fishing, or bargain hunting to use a different term for the same thing.

As a team, Lockwood, Burne, Hohnen and Ferguson, make a very interesting collection of egos. Each, on his own, has considerable achievements to talk about. Whether the egos can work as a team will be fascinating to watch.

More interestingly will be to see which team, Corporate or Smart, has got the timing right, because it seems unlikely that both can be right.

Either Corporate is reading the gloom correctly, and now is a time to sell, mothball, and take capital off the table, or Smart is right, and now is a time to put money on the table, acquire what look like bargains, and hope that the bargains do not turn out to be falling knives.

It is, of course, entirely possible that both sides are reading events correctly, but they are operating at opposite ends of the same playing field.

The established miners are exposed to negative forces, such as slowing China and Europe operating in reverse gear, while the born-again gang at Praetorian see a mountain of unallocated capital looking for an investment that offers a better than the 0% return (or less) available from banks and the bond market.

It’s the difference of view which makes the developing game of Smart Money v Corporate Money so interesting to watch, because there is a fortune to be made if the right decisions are made.

Who does Dryblower reckon is calling the shots correctly in the game?

Well, with apologies for being a fence-sitter, but it does seem likely that both have a chance of emerging as winners.

The Corporate Money might succeed by avoiding making heavy commitments to projects that need a hungry China today, and the Smart Money might succeed because it only needs a hungry China in a few years, when the next generation of mines will be required.

Let the game commence.

This article first appeared in ILN's sister publication MiningNews.net.