Roundtable Discussion; The Future of Mineral Sands. Watch the video here.
Many thanks Tony and Adonis for your asnwers. It might be that it is just a pragmatic step with strictly narrow remit to get the engineering work done as Tony says, but it would be good to understand better. Looks like I have some studying to do!...
Hi All, first post on PRE so be gentle(!)
I see today's news as a positive indication of support, but I don't understand how it fits with the declared strategy.
Website and business plans say: "The Problem: ...the issue lies in the monopoly over NdPr: currently, over 87% of the world’s production of NdPr is controlled by China... The Solution: Thanks to our Longonjo NdPr Project, we are positioned to provide industries with a supply chain of premier quality NdPr".
And today's announcement says they intend to go about this by putting their debt under the financial control of....China!
How does this fit with the strategy?
Indeed Kev. The question is whether FunnyInvestor is happy. I think he/she probably has a really bad hairstyle at the moment and is so frustrated they take it out on this board* As more hairdressers open up again FunnyInvestor will be happier with their hair and in life in general, and will find something else to do.
* This makes about as much sense as the things FunnyInvestor was saying.
Yes. The problem as stated by Mojapelo is that institutions know that if they wanted to build a ££ multimillion position in one go they could not possibly achieve the current (admittedly discounted) valuation - due to exchange size the price would spike whilst they're still trying to buy. I know some might see that as desirable(!) but clearly the institutions are saying it's a deal-breaker for them.
Mainly I agree with you Sanchez. Though would go as far as saying unclear that BMN would need to dilute to raise capital - they could buy back and reissue at market rate (or very small discount) to the institutional investor. My point was also that the question of changing market is unhelpful on its own (and even unhelpful to UK retail investors who would give up their AIM IHT advantages). But I regret I don't know the answer to the opening post - I don't know what actions can be forced by investors. Personally I'd get more excited to vote to get institutions involved than to change market. But maybe someone else knows the answer to the opening question...
Someone who knows legals can answer this. I have a related question though - do you think a move to main exchange on its own would encourage more accurate valuations? Isn't the main point about getting institutional investors on board? CEO says institutions don't like to do that outside of a placing and that the company is a victim of its own success in this sense - it hasn't needed to raise cash from the market since 2018 (still doesn't) and so hasn't provided such opportunities for institutions to get in.
Glad to be of help :-) If it's just cheap transaction cost you're after then Halifax's iWeb is also cheap and cheerful ( https://www.iweb-sharedealing.co.uk/ ) and has worked fine for me. Interactive Investor looks similarly cheap and deals with more markets (including Australia ASX which is handy if you're interesting in the mining sector), but I haven't used it myself as yet ( https://www.ii.co.uk/ ).
I realise I probably got my words a bit wrong about retail platforms - technically these things are all retail brokers as we're private investors not institutions. I think the correct phrase to describe the above platforms is 'execution only' services as they just make the trade and that's it. What the traditional professional brokers can add is an advisory service that can help you pick up good deals compared with the published bid and offer, but you pay for it in high fees. [ How high? Don't know yet! - planning to have some conversations soon... ]
Hi Bushcraft, have used both. Opinion: IG is a wonderful platform for what it does, but I think it's important to realise everything about it is designed to make you want to buy and sell frequently. It presents a mine of real-time ever-changing information for day traders / swing traders, and those tools are really helpful to you if that's what you want to do. But if your aim is medium/long-term investment then personally I find IG gets in the way of calm long-term thinking. I do find it fun to put a small portion of my portfolio in small speculative short-term trades so I use IG for those. But for serious long-term stuff like BMN I keep it well away from IG so that I don't get itchy fingers on the rapid Buy/Sell buttons :-) Just my own personality of course. Are you also looking at the more professional brokers at all (James Sharp etc) ? I haven't as yet but am starting to wonder about it - am starting to realise how much we lose to market makers from the retail platforms.
Wow that's really interesting - thanks Sanchez. The process is much more hands-on than I had imagined - I wrongly assumed that these days much of it would just be left to algorithms. Interesting to hear about how/when they take positions in things. I'm not someone who believes they are out to trick people but it is great to hear how it all works.
It will be the AIM version of Lefevre's Reminiscences of a Stock Operator :-D Here's an exerpt about the way that market makers worked in 1923:
"I slapped my tickets on the counter in front of the clerk and yelled, "Close Sugar!" before Dave had finished calling the price. So, of course, the house had to close my Sugar at the last quotation. What Dave called turned out to be 103 again. According to my dope Sugar should have broken 103 by now. The engine wasn't hitting right. I had the feeling that there was a trap in the neighborhood. At all events, the telegraph instrument was now going like mad and I noticed that Tom Burnham, the clerk, had left my tickets unmarked where I laid them, and was listening to the clicking as if he were waiting for something. So I yelled at him: "Hey, Tom, what in hell are you waiting for? Mark the price on these tickets 103! Get a gait on!
...
So Tom looked sulky, but came over and marked my tickets "Closed at 103" and shoved the seven of themover toward me. He sure had a sour face. Say, the distance from Tom's place to the cashier's cage "wasn't over eight feet. But I hadn't got to the cashier to get my money when Dave Wyman by the ticker yelled excitedly: "Gosh! Sugar, 108!" But it was too late; so I just laughed and called over to Tom, "It didn't work that time, did it, old boy?"
Of course, it was a put-up job. Henry Williams and I together were short six thousand shares of Sugar. That bucket shop had my margin and Henry's, and there may have been a lot of other Sugar shorts in the office; possibly eight or ten thousand shares in all. Suppose they had $20,000 in Sugar margins. That was enough to pay the shop tothimblerig the market on the New York Stock Exchange and wipe us out. In the old days whenever a bucket shop found itself loaded with too many bulls on a certain stock it was a common practice to get some broker to wash down the price of that particular stock far enough to wipe out all the customers that were long of it. This seldom cost the bucket shop more than a couple of points on a few hundred shares, and they made thousands of dollars."
Do you plan on creating a collection of short stories Numpty? I genuinely think there would be an audience for them.
P.S. I trust Aunt Beatrice had the wisdom to leave the inheritance to Mr Mortimer in AIM shares - exempt from inheritance tax.
Endion : I too was curious about how the 'vertically integrated' thing will work before electrolyte plant is ready but others here helped a bit with my understanding. As far as I've understood the UK joint venture set up for Invinity will likely outsource electrolyte production initially but it will establish a solid rental business model that BMN can later use, as the JV doing the outsourcing is part-owned by BMN. Others may have better/more up-to-date info now but that was my understanding.
General point: the reason I now understand the above and can present it as a positive point for BMN is precisely because I asked a critical question on here and got useful answers, for which I am very grateful to this group. Trevor asked in the same constructive spirit and hopefully will receive similarly constructive replies. I think pdub you and others can feel very proud of the research you've done and I really don't think you have to worry that critical questions might damage the price. For a quick shorting attack maybe this board and twitter can have a transient negative effect, but if an investor is really affected by a quick rant on a bulletin board then they're not a particularly serious or long-term investor anyway.
My sincere condolences too Faramog - I was wrapped up in the technical detail and didn't fully take in your mention of that at the end. These are tough times and grief only makes them tougher to navigate. At least the value of your BMN shares should soon be one less thing to worry about if the various pieces of excitement discussed here this weekend are anything to go by. All the best, Ev.
Thanks Faramog - yes I agree about the presentation as a tech company . There is a precedent for AIM companies that to straddle tech and natural-resources-for-tech, like Two Shields ( AIM: TSI ) [I'm not invested there] and they list as tech or financial sector, not mining. I think BMN can execute much better on vertical integration than others like TSI have done in the past. I am hopeful this change in primary sector will occur naturally as the strategy gets implemented - as we all believe (and with IES can directly see) that the BE side of the business will grow then at a certain point it will become weird to say that the main sector is mining. And yes of course I agree about holding :-) To your point "comparisons to Largo are in my opinion measuring chalk as cheese" I did fully agree, and so I expected that if you divide the BMN price by the LGO price and look at the 3 year graph of that, then the main features you would see would just be the various changes each of them have been making in their business, as the dominant effect of V price is factored out by that division. And yet this is not the case : decreases in V prices (large or small) consistently favour BMN - it's a very noticeable correlation. I thought this was intriguing :-)