Big line of West Australia’s Delta Lithium trades at 23pc premium
West Australian explorer Delta Lithium delivered some aftermarket excitement on Monday evening, as brokers crossed a line worth 11 per cent of the company at a hefty premium.
Delta Lithium executive chairman David Flanagan.
A parcel of 60 million shares in Delta, worth $56 million, changed hands just after market close. Canaccord Genuity was the broker with the highest volume in the stock for the day.
The stock changed hands at 92.5¢ apiece, which was a 23 per cent premium to the 75¢ last close.
The identity of the buyer and the seller wasn’t known. Delta’s two biggest shareholders are Japanese giant Idemitsu at 14.9 per cent and Waratah Capital Advisors at 10.3 per cent.
As for the buyer, it is unlikely to imagine a fund manager coughing up a premium that big. It’s likely to be a strategically minded investor, who has weighed Delta’s flagship project Mt Isa and is happy to cop the premium.
Delta’s register includes Hancock Prospecting and Mineral Resources, according to a presentation made by the company at Diggers and Dealers.
The company’s shares are up 66 per cent this year, but are recovering from a 16 per cent-plus fall in the past month. Delta, previously called Red Dirt and TNT Mines, was traditionally a gold explorer. But it made a serendipitous move into lithium about two years ago. In September 2021, it paid $11 million to buy a gold-copper asset at Mt Ida and stumbled on lithium potential in the seller’s data. Early drilling found spodumene rich pegmatites.
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