Greatland Gold (LON: GGP) (OTCPK: GRLGF) is up 5% this morning but that's not really the remarkable thing about it. Rather, that's that Greatland is London's fourth most traded stock this morning. Which for something running around a $400 million market capitalisation is more than a little odd. One explanation for the is that this is measuring trade not by value of shares traded but by volume. So, given the pennies price of GGP the total market value of the trade is well down the list even as shares traded are around the 7 million pieces level and that's this early in the trading day.
However, the real reason for the large volume is that Greatland Gold is simply one of those stocks which have caught the imagination of the trading - not investing but trading - community. Junior miners - which means those not producing anything yet - have long been a place to take risk and to hope for significant price movements. Gold miners similarly have long captured traders' imaginations. If we think of “trading” as being somewhere between “betting” or speculation and “investing” - which is a pretty good set of definitions - then a junior gold miner with an interesting deposit to exploit is where we'd expect such activity to be happening. A rather circular argument but one with a great deal of truth to it all the same.
Greatland Gold share price from London Stock Exchange
Note what happens with a junior miner though. The gold price is up 20% over recent months which isn't what has been happening at GGP at all. That's because the real determinant of the Greatland Gold share price is whether gold will ever be mined at all. If so, then how much? The price of the gold once produced coming a very distant third to those first two questions.
As we've noted before about Greatland Gold there's not in fact much excitement about that Havieron deposit. We get updates on this bit of drilling or that bit of exploration. But none of this news is transformative, they're all pretty much details. We know there's gold at Havieron. We know the 70% partner, Newcrest, is getting on with matters. The next thing that might change the GGP price is something actually happening. Although that doesn't seem to stop an awful lot of trading in Greatland.
