It has been an unusually rough week for the dual listed lithium high-flyer Patriot Battery Metals (writes Barry Fitzgerald on MiningNews).
The Canadian-Australian listed stock has been the best-performed lithium stock in the year to date, but not this week.
Its ASX-listed CDIs took a 11.5% hit on Tuesday to finish at $1.50, and the Toronto-listed shares followed suit with a 15% dive to C$13.21.
While still up massively for the year-to-date, Patriot's return to earth for a time was a result of disappointment with latest drilling results from its Corvette lithium project in the James Bay region of Quebec.
The disappointment was misplaced, but shorts in the stock nevertheless had their way. Softer spot lithium prices did not help, even if prices remain at dream levels.
To date, Patriot's high-flyer status has been due to spectacular drilling results from the CV5 spodumene-bearing pegmatite at Corvette.
It is the one that drew in Pilbara Minerals' chief executive Ken Brinsden after he moved on from the company last year.
Brinsden had planned to take a long sabbatical after making a success of Pilbara but instead jumped at the opportunity to become non-executive chairman of Patriot.
"It is one of the world's great discoveries in lithium raw materials of the last decade," Brinsden said in December.
This is going to be one of the big hard rock projects globally and we are really just at the start. Again, think 2015/2016 with Pilbara Minerals."
Based on CV5 results, no one doubts him.
And, as Brinsden mentioned back in December, CV5 was just the start of the story "because the whole trend has outcropping pegmatites with spodumene".
The latest drill results were from the 2022 discovery, the CV13 pegmatite cluster which lies 4.3km along trend to the southwest of CV5.
Results included 22.6m at 1.56% lithium from 29.3m, 22.4m at 1.28% from 3.1m, 15.6m at 1.5% from 2.8m, and 18.8m at 2.09% from 23.8m.
At any other project, the results would have been a cause for celebration.
The mineralisation is shallow and high-grade, and could well indicate an initial 40-50mt resource away from Corvette's lakes that could shape up into a starter pit/ direct shipping opportunity while the bigger story at CV5 unfolds.
But the market has got used to expecting 156m at 2.12% lithium-type hits (including a high grade zone of 25m at 5.04%) that CV5 has returned. So down came the high-flyer on the CV13 results, with shorts in the stock thinking how smart they've been.
Their joy is unlikely to last long.
Exploration at Corvette is in its infancy and a new batch of results from extension drilling of the high-grade zone at CV5 are just around the corner.
And, remembering that the results from CV13 would have been celebrated at any other project, Brinsden will be relaxed as ever with his call that Patriot is on to one the world's great discoveries in lithium of the last decade.
In its commentary on the "disappointing'' CV13 results, Patriot noted that the cluster was interpreted to be part of a much larger pegmatite system, "potentially extending from the most easterly identified CV4 cluster, and continuing westerly through the CV5 and CV8-12 clusters, a distance of approximately 15km.''
"The scale of LCT pegmatite present along this trend suggests a deeply rooted and common ‘plumbing' system and source of the lithium mineralised bodies discovered to date.''
The implication is that Corvette is on the freakish side of things. No wonder then that Patriot is the subject of on-going ownership speculation.
Chris Ellison's Mineral Resources is said to have been soaking up stock but there is no substantial shareholding notice just yet. The idea is that Corvette would juice up any spin-off by MinRes of its WA lithium interests.
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