All because the company, which is yet to make a profit, formalised ties with battery guru Jeff Dahn who has a research partnership with Tesla and the US Government gave its support to the company through a $US5 million grant.

Morgans has a price target of $2.37, well below its price today when it was trading as high as $3.61, a rise of 82 cents, and held a market value of more than $1.2 billion.

In a year the stock has added $1 billion to the collective wealth of its shareholders.

Morgans analyst Max Vickerson said the stock was trading on sentiment rather than fundamentals.

“That (the two announcements) does seem to be the trigger although the share price was ticking up pretty steadily even before those announcements,” he said.

“I think there is a broader interest in the thematic at the moment but those two announcements certainly did a good job of pushing it higher than it was.

“Anything that connects the Novonix name with Tesla seems to be pretty good for short term reaction.”

The election of Joe Biden as US President also boosted the stock because of his likely push to decarbonize the economy and usher in a better market for electric vehicles, which could potentially use batteries in which Novonix has had a significant input.

Novonix isn’t alone in generating huge price gains in the sector. Battery technology junior Redflow received what is glibly referred to as a speeding ticket from the ASX recently because of the almost doubling of its share price since the start of the month.

The ASX asked why it had happened and the Brisbane-based Redflow effectively shrugged its shoulders by saying there was nothing it was aware of that could explain the jump. More than 30 million of its shares traded in one day recently, about three times its previous peak in the past year.

Redflow’s shares were up 31 per cent for the day 11 cents.

Exploration company Hammer Metals has also jumped 200 per cent in a week after it announced a gold-copper discovery near Mt Isa. After the announcement, more than 200 million of its shares were traded in one day and the company is now sitting above 9 cents a share.

Hammer said its Trafalgar prospect had discovered significant intercepts including 55 metres grading 1.12 per cent copper and .3 grams per tonne of gold

The company told the market that the prospect was part of an extensive copper-gold soil anomaly that stretches for 2.7km over which there had been little exploration.

Hammer managing director David Thomas said the results were a “fantastic” start to the second drilling program.

“To intercept a broad zone of significant sulphide mineralisation containing both copper and gold with two, wide-spaced holes is extremely encouraging,” he said.