The S&P/TSX Venture Composite Index (INDEXTSI:JX) trended down last week, closing at 616.18.
New data shows that the Canadian economy lost 6,400 jobs in July, well off the median estimate for a gain of 25,000 positions. According to Statistics Canada, the unemployment rate rose for the third month in a row and now sits at 5.5 percent.
Against that backdrop, a variety of TSXV-listed resource stocks made moves over the last five days. Read on to find out which companies rose the most during the period and what was affecting their share prices.
Weekly gain: 200 percent; market cap: C$15.17 million; current share price: C$0.12
Aston Bay Holdings is a copper and gold company that owns a portfolio of projects in North America, including the Buckingham gold project in Virginia, US, and the Storm copper project in Nunavut, Canada. Storm is currently under option to American West Metals (ASX:AW1,OTCQB:AWMLF), which can earn up to an 80 percent interest in the property and is actively exploring it this year.
Last Wednesday (August 2), Aston Bay and American West announced what they are calling a major discovery at Storm — drilling at a blind gravity target intercepted significant copper sulfide mineralization.
“Discovery of sedimentary hosted copper has been the true goal for all explorers at Storm … Finally, the quest has succeeded, and we have definitive proof of a new sediment hosted copper system,” Aston Bay CEO Thomas Ullrich said. He continued, “… Not only have we hit a significant mineralized interval, but presence of chalcocite in the latest hole provides a vector to more copper-rich mineralization within this very large gravity anomaly.”
In anticipation of that news, Aston Bay was in a trading halt that lasted from before markets opened last Monday (July 31) until Wednesday (August 2). The company’s share price shot up to C$0.105 by the end of that day, and it continued climbing to hit a weekly high of C$0.12 on Friday (August 4