Eric Sprott's highest-conviction stock

Memories of the Bre-X gold mining fraud in the 1990s may have put off some investors from looking at juniors in Indonesia.

Not so with Eric Sprott.

The hedge fund manager with Sprott Asset Management Inc. told Seeking Alpha that his highest-conviction stock now is junior mining explorer East Asia Minerals Corp. . The company is invested in joint ventures on several prospective gold properties in that country.

"It has a gold prospect called Miwah that could potentially have an extremely large gold resource in place, possibly multiples of our current 10-million-ounce estimate," says Mr. Sprott, who runs Sprott Hedge and Sprott Bull/Bear RSP.

"We tend to focus on the gold producers, but once in a while we come across an opportunity like East Asia which can't be passed up," said Mr. Sprott, who is also chief executive officer of Sprott Inc.

"Gold deposits of consequence are very hard to find today, and it's rare for an exploration company to return such compelling drill intercepts so early on in their exploration efforts. "There are few companies in the gold space that we know of that have a project like Miwah."

According to Bloomberg, Sprott Asset Management was the miner's largest shareholder with an 18-per-cent stake as of Dec. 31, 2009.