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The assumption is that Rhodium is priced way too high now and will fall straight back to 2000 at some point soon, however one really needs to look at what a fair value would be, this is going to be a function of scarcity and usefulness, if something is useful it is going to need a price that makes it worthwhile to mine given the available grades, Rhodium now is at the point where it is needed but it is too rare to quickly bring on more supply, consider this table of how much of each element is in the earths crust and how value of each much 1,000 tons of average rock would contain

earths crust ratio
ppm spot gram px $ per 1000 ton
gold 0.003 1,895.00 60.93 182.80
silver 0.075 27.62 0.888 66.61
tin 2.3 13.45 0.030 68.18
copper 60 4.78 0.011 632.11
nickel 80 8.00 0.018 1,410.56
cobalt 25 20.00 0.044 1,102.00
plat 0.0035 1,191.00 38.30 134.04
rhod 0.0004 25,500 819.94 327.97
iridium 0.0003 6,300 202.57 60.77
palladium 0.006 2,835 91.16 546.95
uranium 2.5 30 0.066 165.30

As you can see from the last column the prices of each element tend to correspond to the parts per million in the earths crust with Tin and Iridium being the stand out cheap elements as priced by the market and copper, nickel and cobalt being expensive, I think for copper the fact that all the high grades have been already mined and the fact that we are now mining grades 10 times lower than 50 years ago mean maybe copper is not so bad, but in general Rhodium even at these prices are not crazy and tin is a screaming buy along with Iridium .....

Also worth bearing in mind that most of the gold and a lot of the silver ever mined is still around in vaults but the Rhodium Iridium and Tin all have basically zero stock piles or warehouse inventory ...

to get some perspective just look at where metals prices were 2 years ago at the end of May, the shares were trading at 110 and since then we have also banked some serious cashflow ... rhodium 2,840 , pd 1360, pt 790, iridium 1480 and lowly ru 260 .... if you had been told the current spot you would think the shares would be over 10 quid ....

Marsfontein was 90m * 45m at surface so this really could be a big one !

The share price has not moved but in the long term this will be a great deal for them, they will have acquired for very little cost a decent volume of high grade oxide tailings in a very safe jurisdiction that will probably give them 5-10k ton copper and 20k+ oz gold a year from a 20-30m usd heap leach operation , maybe 20-25% of carry will end up with the jv partner but this will be an excellent outcome and a great use of the jlp expertise ...

perfect , I bought cares a couple of weeks ago as Cyprus is a great story for copper, I also have Chesterfield, Cyprus is full of tailings dumps that have been there for 5000 years in some cases, it is the perfect place for JLP to operate ....

The sandfire quarterly update shows that the Botswana project is 100% full steam ahead, also with 100k copper in the ground at the highest grades they have the A4 will be the first resource out the ground, the royalty on that will be a very quick 20m usd at current prices and then they will bank 2m usd a year on the T3 , and none of these royalties are priced into the balance sheet ...

It is also well worth having a look at how advanced the cupric canyon project on the doorstep is , high grade undergound and very close completion of 60k pa production, it is a big project and will prove the value of all the other ground mtr have an interest in ...

https://www.khoemacau.com

What is most interesting about palladium is that Nor Nickels q1 results just came out revealed that although the mine closures significantly reduced nickel and copper production the long lag in smelting processes and use of chlorine leaching residues have meant that they actually had large increases palladium production over the first quarter with palladium production up 40% quarter over quarter, so the markets have been tight despite this big increase when we assumed there was a supply shock in the other direction, to me this indicates that pricing is not a short term blip and indeed we may actually see a fall in supply the future as the smelting is such a long process ....

Hi
Looking into this new Vulcan Plant and trying to see what the impact is when it is operating, I see at the moment they are mining 18% chrome and recovering 62% of it so we have 6.8% chrome in the tails and this will reduce to 2.7% if they get to 85% recovery , so from 4 million tons of tails they should be able to get another 400k tons of 42% chrome product, the only reference I see to operating cost is about $5 per ton , so is that per ton of tails or per ton of product ? Do they make a 50% margin on the $100 sales after $50 shipping costs or is it 95% ?? seems the ebitda impact will be 20m usd a year to 40m ? not bad for a 50m spend ....

https://www.polity.org.za/article/decision-soon-on-pgm-process-that-can-save-a-medupi-power-station-worth-of-power-2020-10-26

From about minute 7 on this interview this guy talks about how much working capital can be released from smelting yourself, this is before pricing doubled so a plant can be paid for from a 1 month reduction in smelting time or time to get paid ...

https://www.sharesmagazine.co.uk/video/tharisa-ths-phoevos-pouroulis-ceo

Interesting to watch this video which I don't know if it has been posted here yet, I see now they are talking about battery metals and technology as being a focus for them, this started me wondering if they are going to start to try extract the Copper, Nickel and Cobalt which are present in the reefs they mine but have not been economic in the past, I note that one selling point of these Kell smelters is that they can refine previously lost Cobalt and other metals.

Another point of these smelters which ties in nicely to the recent disappointment in the cash level at quarter end is that looking at the Tharisa accounts we see that the shipping the ores for refining to larger PGM producers mean that there is a huge delay in getting paid and when prices rise first receivables explode and then only 4-5 months later when Tharisa is paid does the cash rise, at year end we had 150m usd+ in receivables and inventory and this is before the huge hike in prices, this number is going to explode, One sales pitch of the Kell smelter is that it turns the ore into saleable metal fast, so we can probably completely finance the smelter from the quicker turnaround in revenue by cutting out the smelter from the chain, I am sure that by reducing the terms of trade by a couple of months the smelter will be fully paid for !

The last point I would like to add is an amazing property of the metal Iridium which it would seem that no other metal posesses, that special property is that its price never goes down, for over a year every day the price has either gone up or stayed the same, all the way from 1500 usd to 6250 , only up, yes this metal has a special gravity defying property that no other element can match ....

I have all three THS , SYP and JLP but the cheapest is THS and I have the most of those 150k+ now and growing ....

Would also be nice to get a little update in the quarterlies on what they are planning round the smelting/refining plans, what they expect the kit to cost and how much it should add to the bottom line , hopefully they have funded it with cashflow over this quarter ...

sorry my error, it just broke through 2000 not 1000 in December , the JM price table was reverting to platinum ... , only a triple ..

I would agree that the hot mess under the ground in Norilsk is only going to get worse and worse with massive plant having been built on a melting ice cream, plus they have a government that are happy to slap massive fines on them whenever there is a problem, I can see trouble there for years

On a much more interesting note, it is pretty amazing to see Iridium now fixing at 6150 , incredible to think that it only first broke through 1000 usd last December, so at the end of the last qtr, the 6000+ oz we produce a year are now worth 6 times as much .....

Whichever way you look at it with current prices so high they are going to be making serious money, the market is heavily discounting a collapse back to the old pricing structure but it is worth bearing in mind that we were for many years in an oversupplied situation where prices represented the cost of production of marginal mines, the assumption is that we return to this situation quickly, however there is very little capex going on and what there is seems focussed on reducing cost rather than ramping production, so this may be the new normal, if one looks at the iron ore market we have bhp and rio digging massive volumes out in a tight market at a production cost of 10-15 usd a ton and selling it at 170 usd a ton, and this is one of the most abundant elements on earth, the ability to make 50-75% ebitda margins as we are currently enjoying is by no means a freak of nature but given the unique mineral endowment that South Africa enjoys it should be the normal state of things ...

be up to the 60p IPO price in no time ...

yes , tbtt , had a look at Eastplats, looks like a half done SLP type project , they seem to be just sending the PGM concentrate to impala so have no idea how valuable it is or what production will be, there is no guidance on this front only the number of tons of conc they are producing, however if they are cashflow positive just about on just the chrome then it could be a good business and fund the re-opening of the long life mine , If you want to look at a similar business but with a different commodity that long term could do very well then take a look at Kenmare, Mining mineral sands in Mozambique

What these guys need to do is get Netflix involved to do a program/series about the most polluted city in the world and how they are involved in cleaning it up, it is well worth spending a small part of these windfall profits on doing some good in the Kabwe community and getting some recognition as being a leader in taking toxic tailings dumps and cleaning them up while removing valuable metals, having a good ESG story as well as a cheap stock will turbo charge the stock, it is not worth getting involved in these highly toxic tailings piles unless you are really going to help provide a solution to the problem, this Kabwe situation could end up being a horrible outcome or an ESG badge of honour , it is Flint on steroids ...

Freazzle Interactive brokers is the cheapest proper broker and offers a ton of international markets to trade, the user interface is a bit horrible though ...

After JSBs recent post I had a look around and found the documentary I think you saw about Norilsk in the apple store "A moon of Nickel and ice" It really was fascinating, it spends some time with the repair engineers at Norilsk "the mining intelligentsia" as they like to think of themselves, it will be these guys jobs to down their vodka bottles for a while to fix this huge problem in this dystopian mine providing half the worlds palladium, highly recommended film that will make anyone feel grateful about how lucky they are ...