A short week of trading.It is always good to get through the first week of trading in 2024. I hope everyone had a great Christmas and brought in the New Year with a bang. There was a tremendous fireworks display across the lake on New Year's Eve, one of the biggest private displays I have ever seen.
Tocvan traded only 88,000 shares for the short week and closed yesterday at $0.38 with only 31,000 shares passing hands. Not much to talk about as the company has been pretty quiet over the holidays, but now that Christmas break is over, crews are busy cutting roads and preparing drilling surfaces for an intense 10,000 m drill program. Perhaps even as high as 20,000 m depending on market conditions and the ability of Tocvan to raise capital.
What is nice about Pilar, gold mineralization starts at the surface, so infill drilling will happen rapidly, with results being returned in batches. I don't know, but I suspect there might be more than one drill rig turning. This will quickly lead to the calculation of a maiden resource, then the fun begins.
I am anxious to get the drills turning on several new targets that have been identified at the surface within the new land acquisition. I am also excited to see the results of the UAV Lidar survey and how potentially large these new targets really are. The Lidar survey will provide Tocvan with a guidance map of where to drill, and how large the find can potentially be, both at the surface and below. The compact nature of Pilar's main zone, where drilling has already returned 116.9 metres of 1.2 grams per tonne gold and seven g/t silver in drill hole JES-22-59, makes this area perfect for the development of an open pit mine.
The most successful open pit mines generally have mineralization that starts at the surface, thus reducing the cost of stripping large amounts of land to get to the mineralized zone. This inturn, increases the profitability of the overall operation.
Trading volume has been light over the last few weeks, and I suspect people who are selling are not because there has been any fundamental change at Tocvan, but more for reasons such as getting impatient, taking a tax loss or just plain need the cash. There are virtually no shares short in Tocvan (3,373 shares as of December 15, 2023), indicating most people believe this is going to be a substantive play and don't want to get caught in a short squeeze. Also the light volume is another good indication of a strong shareholder base with not many people wanting to sell in case the price begins to move rapidly upwards with any significant news.
That is the fun part about trading stocks, anything can happen when you least expect it.
I just topped up my TFSA for 2024, so I have a little bit more buying power to pick up cheap shares. I would dare to say that Tocvan is about as cheap as it is going to get, given what is about to happen over the next several months, let's see how much support there is over the coming weeks.