Peak climbs mountain with uranium-rutile move

This week’s Runner of the Week is Peak Minerals. After closing at 0.2c last Friday, Peak sprinted out of the blocks Monday morning with its price doubling at 0.4c for a quick-fire 100 per cent gain before being hit with a speeding ticket from ASX’s compliance storm troopers.

The ASX rolled-out its best Pauline Hanson impersonator, asking Peak to “please explain” the rapid rise in the share price.

After a pause in trading allowing for Peak to reply to the ASX’s query, the share price continued its rapid momentum, touching a high of 0.6c for the day on massive volumes of more than 196 million shares, compared to less than 97,000 on the previous Friday.

Tuesday brought a 52-week high for Peak of 0.7c resulting in a 250 per cent hike in the space of two days, lifting the junior miner to the top of the Bulls N’ Bears Runners of the Week podium.

In response to the ASX Peak pointed to its October 15^th announcement of the successful completion of the acquisition of an 80 per cent interest in the prospective Kitongo and Lolo uranium projects and the Minta rutile project in the West African nation of Cameroon.

It said the pair of uranium projects cover a total area of about 2400 square kilometres with the Minta rutile project spread across a huge 8800 sq km area and the acquisitions followed reconnaissance site visits by two company heavyweights.

Landing in second place this week is Yandal Resources, which captured the market’s attention with a thick drill intersection of 78m grading 1.2 grams per tonne gold from 96m and notably it was still mineralised at the end of the hole begging the question, how much further could it go ?  That hole included a higher grade 5m slice going 3.2g/t gold from 102m.

Punters piled into the shares on Monday, pushing last week’s 10c closing price to a high of 22c on healthy volumes of 6.9 million shares.

On Tuesday it fared even better, touching a 26c high on volumes of 5.3 million and on Wednesday reached its peak for the week at 26.5c with 1.2 million shares changing hands, representing a weekly boost of a handy 165 per cent.

Management says it also recorded a 14m hit running 1.8g/t gold from 63m, including 3m grading 4.9g/t from 64m.

The company has named the emerging discovery Siona and notably, it remains open at depth and along strike.

It now eagerly awaits the remaining assays to see if the promising initial results can be replicated throughout the full drill program.

Silver-gold miner Argent Minerals got a leg-up from the silver price which jumped nearly six per cent this month to hit nearly US$35 (AU$52.70). It also tabled two of its own positive news pieces released earlier in October, revealing further polymetallic mineralisation discoveries at its different project sites.

The positive silver narrative got traders keen to acquire the company’s shares, one of the few silver juniors with prospective assets locally.

With the share price gaining momentum in the first two trading days of the week on volumes exceeding 50 million shares on both days, things really heated-up Wednesday when 81 million shares changed hands, forcing the price to touch a high for the week of 3.6c.

The 100 per cent leap in the price put the junior miner on the Runners podium in third spot.

Argent reported earlier this month rock-chips from its Trunkey Creek gold project in NSW returned grades of 24g/t, 15.1g/t and 12.6g/t gold and followed up last week with news of thick mineralised intersections from its Kempfield project.

Kempfield, sitting about 9km north-west of Trunkey, returned assays of 47m at 10.18g/t silver and 0.3 per cent copper-lead-zinc combined from 1m and an additional 28m hit running 13.39g/t silver and 0.69 per cent combined copper-lead-zinc from surface.

Here at Runners we love to see consistent solid performance and that has been the case the past two weeks for smart-device company TZ Limited.

The company didn’t quite make the podium the past two weeks, however this week’s gain of 63 per cent after a solid 85 per cent move last week, made it difficult to ignore.

Its share price boost was kicked along by news on Monday of a proposed complementary acquisition.

TZ says it is acquiring property-tech company Keyvision, a provider of property tenant apps catering to the residential, retail, commercial and retirement sectors, for an upfront $2.5 million. That payment will be followed by instalment payments over a four-year period capped at $7.5 million and paid depending on annual revenue targets achieved.

TZ’s shares closed out the week ending October 11^th at 2.7c and then notched up a consistent performance of constantly rising prices since then.

Every day over the last two weeks TZ managed to touch an even higher price than the day before and reached an 8c high on Wednesday.

There are definitive signs starting to emerge of improving sentiment across all sectors of the small-cap space, with some heady runs happening alongside more steady upward price moves.

Maybe oil companies will be next if anyone is still taking notice of Donald Trump and his headline policy of “drill baby drill”.

Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: matt.birney@businessnews.com.au