TSX Venture Exchange slips, Feb. 19-23

Cobalt 27 Capital jumped $1.86 to $13.32 per share. The company has acquired a 1.75% net smelter return royalty on production from the Dumont nickel-cobalt project in Quebec. The fully permitted and construction-ready nickel sulphide project could produce by 2020. Dumont has proven and probable reserves of 1.18 billion tonnes ore containing 6.9 billion lb. nickel and 278 million lb. cobalt, and an estimated 33-year mine life. RNC Minerals Corp. holds the operating interest in the project.

Shares of Standard Lithium surged 46¢ to $2.43. The company closed a $21.6-million, bought-deal private placement on Feb. 16, and is exploring its Bristol Dry Lake lithium project in the Mojave region of San Bernardino County, California. Standard Lithium is also evaluating resources at its brine leases in the Smackover Formation in southern Arkansas.

Novo Resources posted a 36¢ gain to $3.66. The last press release the company issued was on Feb. 14, in which it announced it was starting work at Comet Well, a farm-in and joint venture it has with two Pilbara-based prospectors. The company also updated investors on its Purdy’s Reward project, a farm-in and joint venture with Artemis Resources. Both Comet Well and Purdy’s Reward are part of Novo’s Karratha gold project in Western Australia. Novo said it has started diamond drilling and trenching at Comet Well and noted that more bulk-sample results from Purdy’s Reward have helped it plan for follow-up work. Scout diamond core drilling has started along a 2.5 km long, 500-metre wide, northeast-trending corridor from areas drilled last year at Purdy’s Reward to an “intensely prospected area” called the Powerline showing on the Comet Well tenements. The drill program is designed to evaluate the position, thickness and dip of gold-bearing conglomerates that sub-crop along the corridor. Novo plans to drill vertical scout holes along the corridor on a 200-metre grid, and more tightly spaced holes in trenching areas to better understand subsurface geology before bulk sampling begins.

At the end of 2017, Novo collected samples of around 6 tonnes from trenches at Purdy’s Reward. The samples were collected after recognizing the mineralization’s extreme nugget nature, occurring mostly near the base of the conglomerate sequence. Novo says one of these bulk samples will be the first through the new SGS plant. “Five- to 15-tonne bulk samples are clearly necessary to get a better handle on gold grades, and we are now in a position to collect these, having recently secured a test plant at SGS, capable of processing such large volumes of material,” Quinton Hennigh, Novo’s chairman and president, said in a news release. “Over the coming months, we anticipate collecting numerous bulk samples at Comet Well and Purdy’s Reward to begin to assess grade and continuity of this deposit.”