Traders piled into the shares and options of Hycroft Mining Holding Corp. and AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. last week, well ahead of Tuesday’s surprise announcement that the movie theater operator was buying a stake in the gold miner.
Hycroft’s stock is up 361% in a little more than a week, from 33 cents on March 7 to $1.52 on Tuesday. An average of 190 million Hycroft shares have traded each day over the past week. That’s more than 800 times the average daily trading volume since the miner’s deal to go public through a blank-check merger in June 2020.
Meanwhile, call options for the gold miner to trade above $2.50 — a level it hadn’t closed above since mid-July — also saw a spike in interest in the past week.
To be sure, some of the moves in Hycroft stocks and call options could be attributed to a rise in gold, which has advanced 7% since its recent bottom on Jan. 6.
