Member Info for esduk

Nice to have you onboard here Velcro, it’s definitely an extremely compelling play for anyone with a long enough time horizon. Luckily we’ve learned patience on other shares! Most of the pull back to 20’s was about Sprott selling, the DFS delay and new Rio management meaning the takeover was less likely. As Rick Rule said about a year ago before the change in Rio’s management, he’d prefer a 50% chance at a 20-bagger over a Rio takeover and a 1-3 bagger.

They'd have trouble buying at 40p given the ask never got as low as that, even in November. Looks like they probably did a little front running in late November and early December in the 40's and were one of the reasons the SP recovered well after the Q3 results.

Seems US open has been kind to us again today, with a pick up in interest.

And I'm glad to see that we all seem to have used the filter button and no longer get caught up discussing false narratives.

Yeh, their first buy-in was December. To qualify, we have to have a market cap of in excess of $50m, which should certainly no longer be a problem for us. Apparently they have a sector cap for rare earths of 25% of the fund, but rare earths are only at 12.94% at present, so there's lots of room to go higher before the cap. If we get the right news in the next couple of months, this should create a virtuous circle of SP increases and ETF buying. Would imagine we would also start attracting some other funds given how much the diversity has already increased in just a few months.

Thanks for the additional info JK. Doing some more digging, it's very interesting. The ETF has reached $509m AUM in early February, after only crossing $100m AUM in October. Inflows in January of over $75m apparently. This could be very bullish for us going forward as more money piles into the critical minerals narrative and particularly if our market cap increases. We are currently just 0.17% of the fund, but hopefully that % will increase as well as the AUM figure.

The ETF focuses on minerals required for the clean energy transition, including:

Uranium (e.g., Kazatomprom, Cameco, Uranium Energy Corp)

Copper (e.g., Freeport-McMoRan, Southern Copper, Capstone Copper)

Lithium (e.g., Albemarle, PLS Group, Ganfeng Lithium)

Rare Earths/Other (e.g., Lynas, MP Materials, Nickel, Cobalt, Graphite)

The fund seeks to track the Nasdaq Sprott Critical Materials Index, which focuses on companies that derive at least 50% of their revenue from critical materials.

SG, my read is that if you say on 1st September that you will be in production (which is after commissioning) by end of year, it is a pretty poor show to not even have commissioned by early February. As I mentioned earlier, this isn't the first plant they have had to commission and the scale is exactly the same.

So I haven't checked Morningstar for a while to see what has been going on with Mkango's institutional ownership, but just did, with some interesting results:

Previously (about 3-4 months ago), the only invested fund was Konwave Transition Metals who had about 4m shares. It looks like they have since sold three quarters of them and now sit at just under a million. Likely explains the big selling we have seen.

On the other hand, you can now see that Sprott's Critical Minerals ETF now holds over a million shares, which is a new and encouraging development.

This puts them second, behind Empire Life Small Cap Equity, who have 1.23m shares and are also a new holder. There are also a number of smaller funds with less than 200k shares.

So we have a potential explanation for some of the big selling we have had and encouragingly we have broadened our institutional investor base to other funds and market leading ETF's like Sprott (owned by legendary billionaire resources investor Eric Sprott). We need to see more of this, building on these relatively small holdings, and some better coms should definitely help.

Interesting to note Code, thanks. Looks like SCAP have narrowed their spread to 2p, so currently sitting on both the advertised bid and advertised ask.

They're back, maybe they went for a quick tea break...

Let's see, there's still a way to go before that level. Interesting that Marex have removed their bid and ask volumes at 9.35am. They're not leaving the UK market too are they?

It's a good read SG, thanks for the reminder. We should definitely have a busy 8 weeks here.

I would say though that the German plant production target for Q1 mentioned in the Q3 results was already a delay to the original "production by the end of the year" target we had previously had in the Q2 results. They are not hitting their milestones at the moment, which may be understandable given the complexity of what they are doing, but is also frustrating, given that they should have learned from the Tyseley roll out, which was pretty delayed itself in the end.

I of course remain extremely bullish, but we should be calling out the missing of targets and the guys should get more realistic in setting them or better in communicating with the market in terms of updates. Missed targets and no communication is not a recipe for good SP performance.

I see from the price action and L2 movements that we might have had a similar big sell off the bat this morning, but hopefully we copy yesterday and get the rise later this morning and when the US comes online.

SG, I don’t think it was EXIM speculation personally, that was probably confined to this BB. Looking back at yesterday’s trades there seems to have been another delayed reported sell of £180k yesterday lunchtime. We didn’t see buying in that kind of volume post the BB speculation on EXIM which would suggest to me that they are probably unrelated.

Anyway, I think we all agree that we would like some actual company news to drive the SP higher, rather than just macro and speculation.

Thanks ajc, I knew that we were originally reliant on some Chinese equipment but wasn’t sure about the extent of it. You can see why trying to source this stuff in the US might not be the easiest / quickest, it’s pretty specialised. At least we have a fully commissioned example at Tyseley and another soon to be commissioned at our German plant.

Monte, looks like there was a £165k sell shortly after open that knocked us down, only reported after close.

It took quite a lot of powder there to finally get Winterfloods off the ask at 58p. Oh well, just going to have relearn some patience. On the plus side at least my silver miners are having more of a USAR kind of day than a Mkango one.

Code, tells us that we have savvy buyers here, which is something that’s been apparent for a few weeks now here. In a way I’d prefer they just got on with it and paid up for the shares, but having patient capital onboard is probably a better thing in the long run. You don’t tend to get speculative traders buying in such a patient fashion.

I was assuming they would probably set up an SPV or some sort of new legal entity to administer Project Vault, particularly given all the different partner organisations. Anyway, I think it’s a relatively safe bet that the meeting wasn’t about Hypromag USA, and if we find out later that it was we can be pleasantly surprised.

It took me more than two reads MrsR! I had also originally read the reference to facility as an actual physical facility i.e. processing plant, but it is most likely referring to the financing / loan facility.

Yeh but perhaps the entity (new or otherwise) that is coordinating Project Vault is registered there. It’s one of the most common States to register US businesses due to favourable tax and regulatory environment.

Nice tick up in the bid just before US open. Whether it’s related to the EU news or just US interest more generally, I’m not sure.