Several factors. AUT started with a bang because:1) Following...

Several factors.
AUT started with a bang because:
1) Following COVID-19 takeoff in Feb /March, the POG began climbing. For a while, gold was king and gold companies all started raising funds in a big way. This culminated in August with the POG over UJS$2000. Gold stocks were good.
2) AUT had a deposit with high grades that were comparable to BGL, also a highly valued company. Furthermore, some of the Board were from BGL.
3) AUT began with 1Moz of Canadian validated resources that only need to be validated against the JORC 2012 standard in order to become claimable on the ASX. Unsurprisingly, AUT was able to do this pretty quickly.

Then a slow decline with the usual ups and downs began.
4) Drilling for new resources had to be planned and contracted. New targets defined, drill rigs mobilised, allowing for the Canadian off-season. In other words a hiatus of interesting news.
5) COVID has slowed down drilling activity and also impacted the assay labs. Along with increased gold exploration this has lead to longer lead times for drilling assays to come back.
6) Since August 2020, the POG has been declining and the decline has accelerated since the start of 2021. Gold has lost its shine.
7) The market started to realise that finding another 1 Moz was going to take time. The market is an impatient beast.
8) Traders are always around but they look for companies with near-term upward results or those with high volatility. AUT is no longer meeting this profile.
9) With the fall in SP, people look more closely at valuations and question it more closely. AUT was valued highly but delivery of new resource against the valuation is going to be slow (I think). After all, it takes other companies quite some time to put together a 1Moz resource and even BGL has taken several years, high grade notwithstanding.

These are my thoughts, but I am interested to hear other views too.