This post has been inspired by some of the speculation I read in this thread yesterday. Share price manipulation is the favoured catcall of stock forums, but when it relates to a world class deposit of an in-demand resource, and timed at a critical stage of project development, there's reason enough to merit investigating.
Most of these random analysis amount to nothing, but the results seemed interesting enough this time to warrant sharing. I've waited until after close of trade for the week (it was 90% completed last night), lest I be accused of ramping. Make of this data what you will. Also a quick disclaimer: all data was manually entered without a keypad, so if I've hit a wrong a number anywhere, it wasn't intentional.
There are a lot of recent similarities with the trading we saw leading up to the 25c institutional placement to Cantor, but there were a number of external factors at play at that time. Primarily the US market correction and the global lithium ETF breaking its uptrend for the first time in 2 years. I've used a standard 20-day VWAP starting from the first day of "suspicious" trading:
There are few interesting things in the table above, but the main one for me is the 1-day VWAP moving from 32.7c, down to 24.8c and back up to 31.8c all in the space of 21 trading days. By the time the placement was announced at "reasonable" ~10% discount to the 20-day VWAP, Cantor was ahead 20% (A$3m) on their initial investment.
The past 20 trading days have been much more interesting, with the Dow Jones and Lithium ETF both rising (2.7% and 3.4%, respectively) at the same time as AVZ falling 31.2%, and amidst a number of stellar announcements from the Company (assays, met test) and expected/overdue announcements relating to the completion of due diligence and investment/offtake decisions from both Tinci and BNBT, as well as the second round of assay results that are now 2 weeks late:
I've never been one to focus on daily share price movements, but if you stand back and look at the broader picture, there does seem to be a number of signs pointing to a major announcement due next week. Either way, I'll be continuing to hold as I have for the past 20 months.
AVZ Price at posting:
15.5¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held