Venture continues upward with heavy volumes

A dipping gold price helped lead to a mixed week for the S&P-TSX Venture composite index, but three days of gains outpaced two days of losses to have the board end up 55.71 points at 1878.23.

Volume was especially high, averaging just under 180 million trades daily. The strong activity resulted in both more highs and more lows than the week before, with 114 Venture-listed companies hitting new 52-week highs while 76 reached new lows.

Rare Earth Elements continue to be one of the hottest games in town with REE-focused companies leading the volume and value gain charts.

Great Western Minerals saw the most activity with 29.5 million shares traded. The company, with REE projects in Canada, the United States and South Africa, closed a $35 million financing. In the offering, the company issued 106 million units at 33¢ each, brining its total shares issued to around 350 million with a further 100 million warrants and options outstanding. The company started and ended the week at 42¢ but hit a 52-week high of 47.5¢ in between.

Pele Mountain Resources climbed 14¢ or 82% to 31¢ on 12.8 million shares traded. The company named Dr. Anthony Mariano, with a 50-year career specializing in REEs, to its advisory board. Pele Mountain is developing its Eco Ridge uranium-REE project near Elliot Lake, Ontario. Matamec Explorations jumped 15¢ or 60% to end at 40¢ on 8.3 million trades as the company announced improved rare earth leaching recoveries. Samples from the company’s Zeus project in Quebec showed leach recoveries of 89.2% for whole rock martial, while the heavy rare earth yield was 85.6%.

Rare Element Resources was the strong leader in absolute gains, up $2.70 or 35% to end the week at $10.35. The company hit a 52-week high of $13.88 before settling down somewhat, while it was trading at under $2 in July. The company is developing its Bear Lodge REE-gold project in northeast Wyoming at a time when the US is looking to secure domestic supplies of the strategic metals.

The other big gainer of the week was Antares Minerals, which saw a jump of $2.37 or 53% to $6.86 after a friendly takeover bid by First Quantum. The copper major put in a bid of $6.35 per share worth $460 million to secure Antares’ Haquira copper project in Peru. Haquira is located next to Xstrata’s Las Bambas copper-gold project, and is one of the world’s major undeveloped copper deposits with 3.7 million measured and indicated tonnes of contained copper equivalent and a further 2.4 million inferred tonnes of copper equivalent. Antares was trading at a 52-week low of $1.25 in December.

Finlay Minerals, meanwhile, saw a remarkable 227% gain, jumping 34¢ to end at 49¢ on 950,000 shares traded. The company released no news in the week, but the following Monday Finlay stated that it had “discovered porphyry intrusive related copper-molybdenum and volcanic hosted copper mineralization” as part of a 2,000-metre drill program on its wholly-owned Silver Hope project in British Columbia. The company expects assay results from the drilling in four to six weeks.