Member Info for Happyhaddock

I've said before that I have four criteria a junior explorer must fulfil for me to risk all the inherent uncertainties and consider it worthy of a small speculative punt.

1) Its market capitalisation must be below a sensible estimate of what its assets are currently worth.

2) I must be able to see clear ways that its net present value can be improved over the next 5years.

The above two points indicate potential, but I also want a good chance to realise that potential.

3) I want to see evidence that over the last 5years a company has advanced from where it used to be.

4)My final point is one that comes down to gut feeling about timing more than objective reasoning; that is I want a sense that market sentiment is at a low but starting to pick up. Sadly, if you buy when the narrative is clearly very positive you risk over-paying and losing money, but simply buying when a company is very out of favour doesn't stop it from falling further.

With differing degrees of confidence Alien Metals met all four of these criteria when, in Spring 2020, I took a small punt on the potential of our non ferrous metals. Since then it has been on quite a turbulent and volatile journey.

Currently I feel Alien's potential meets the first two of the above criteria. Furthermore, much as unrealistic short term expectations have left some very angry about the rate of progress we have made, I am willing to give UFO a "weak" pass in terms of having met criteria 3. Even if dilution has stopped the share price reflecting gains in mkt cap I do think that administrative advances with our iron ore, and especially the unification of the wider Pinderi Hills area all under our single ownership, make our portfolio better than five years ago.

Point 4 is the hardest for me to currently feel comfortable about. Whatever the truth, our transient management give the impression that they are not fully focused on their work at Alien Metals, a view compounded by prior progress being delivered largely by directors who left to go elsewhere some time ago. Narratives can change overnight, but whilst the price is screaming buy, I don't currently feel that management are actively doing enough to get the markets behind UFO again.

Many speculators currently seem despondent that Alien has not met their expectations, a situation that often indicates an approaching nadir in sentiment and possible turning point. Should that be the case I still hold my small speculative position here, but I am not rushing to add to that just yet.

I've long said that 2025 would be the first year I start to review our progress, so hopefully the next twelve months will deliver enough good news for me to feel UFO was worth the punt and for me to then feel happy to take the risk of significantly adding to my holding.

@Bishop - and yet in the past you have accused me of de-ramping for putting forward cautious views when everyone else was championing how quickly our share price might reach 5p or 10p.

@yayay - you need to get in to snail racing, much lower outlay and much more exciting than speculating in UFO,

As somebody that deals a fair bit in metal casting I've usually a reasonably good gut feeling for the scrap value of things thrown back in the melting pot ... I can't help but feel we are reaching a point where our £5m mkt cap is looking low compared to even a fire-sale liquidation price of our assets.

That is not to say we can't be driven lower, but somebody somewhere down the line is going to make lot out of UFO, pitty I can't feel confident about it being us small shareholders.

@nrom - perhaps I was mistaken, I took your comment about shares sold to be and admission that they were your own shares that had sold.

So you are still as daft and deluded as the rest of us in holding out for the increasingly unlikely?

@norm - is that you completely sold out or are you still holding some in vain glorious hope?

Well the potential of UFO was never in doubt and the webinar highlighted it again, the issue remains the ability of the management to deliver on any of it.

As most suspected the management talked a lot and said little where for what was theoretically a marketing exercise it had the feel of somebody presenting their holiday snaps in an old folks home.. nothing about the tone felt upbeat.

Perhaps the most notable admission, for me at least, was the fact of spending years talking about how Hanc*ck would help fund exploration of the rest of ground, the tone now seems to have changed to one where a deal on EH will help fund everything else. That along with the mention that the prior Hanc*ck JV essentially fell through because it wouldn't have been profitable given the fluctuating iron ore prices.

These are two points I've essentially been making myself for the last few years

Personally I'll be disappointed if Maxine the tea lady doesn't show her face at the webinar, UFO have given so many other folk a say about how we should be run over recent years it's only fair that she should have her turn - you never know she might actually have some good idea of what's going on as there are very few folk in any business that chat daily to all the staff in a company from the most senior to the most lowly, as well as chat to most of the visitors to a company.

We all know that any important or market critical news has to be disclosed by RNS, so we shouldn't expect to really learn anything new from the webinar, all they can really do is talk around and about stuff we theoretically already know.

The only hope that those claiming that the webinar was delayed to talk about a signed JV now have is if an RNS is released in the next few hours immediately prior to the morning's webinar... Not impossible but given this company's track record would you bet upon it?

New MTL shares just cleared my Halifax account, but yet to see the cash payment.

BREAKING NEWS

Broker paid to promote UFO claims it is worth more than its current share price.

Does anybody know of any broker that has ever claimed any company is worth less than its current share price?

Thanks for the info. - I'm with Halifax so it seems I'm not alone in waiting.

Just a quick query with folk here, various RNS suggest to allow up to 14days for the issuance of new shares in MTL and payments to reach CNR investors which will take us to about the end of January, but I've also seen mention of folk already selling their new MTL shares.

Can I assume that most here are in the same boat as me and seeing their trading accounts listing CNR shares as voided and valueless, but haven't yet received payment for these? Or is everybody else already seeing the new shares and the extra cash payment in their trading accounts?

Just a quick query with folk here, various RNS suggest to allow 14days for the issuance of new shares in MTL and payments to reach investors which will take us to about the end of January, but I've also seen mention elsewhere of folk already selling their new MTL shares.

Can I assume that most here are in the same boat as me and seeing their trading accounts listing CNR shares as voided and valueless, but haven't yet received payment for these? Or are others already seeing the new shares and the extra cash payment in their trading accounts?

@yayay - you may want to check your last comment, I think you may have one too few exclamation marks, or at least be missing a pretty little picture of a rocket.

Even if the promised "trial run" of material does go through straight after the site visit this isn't the same as instantly becoming a commercial producer. The very use of the word "trial" implies expectations that systems may have to be tweaked and optimised to achieve the desired outcomes. Day by day we are moving ever closer to the goal of generating revenue but a lot of folk here seem to be placing undue importance on the 16th Jan as being the day our share price will shoot to the moon.

Lots of reasons for patient optimism here but also a lot of impatient folk setting themselves up for short term disappointment.

Whilst I know that I attract a lot of flack when I talk about unrealistic investor expectations, but was it ever that likely that any management team could have got Hanc*ck into production within the timescales being promoted?

The important question in my own mind is whether our BOD were complicit in promoting unrealistic timescales as part of a marketing and fund raising strategy, of if they were ignorant and genuinely believed they could move things along so quickly. Neither paint a good picture of our management but I'd rather the former as that implies that deals may still be being done in the background and good news may emerge. The latter would pretty much prove all the naysayers and critics here correct and sound the death-nell for UFO.

Either way if you keep your expectations realistic and understand how the junior exploration space usually operates you can avoid being drawn in by any hype. Little comfort to those that have lost money I know, but experience is a great teacher.

@Imp - obviously different people adopt different strategies but going all in on one share, selling it when it is expensive so as to buy back more when it is cheap sounds closer to value investing than the momentum trading I was describing.

Either way it is a very bold and punchy strategy to take with a junior explorer, so here's hoping it pays off for you.

The notion of "being trapped" in a share is strange psychological phenomena. People can buy or sell when ever they want.

The fact people may already be seeing a paper loss doesn't prevent them from selling, whilst holding if expecting further falls in price is simply committing to bigger paper losses.

I don't deny that some people think in weird ways, this irrational thinking is the very thing that allows companies share prices to dislocate from sensible estimates of current value.

However being underwater only amounts to being trapped if that's the way you decide to think. If you are underwater and expect the price to go up you hold, if you are underwater (by however large an amount) and expect the price to go down you sell and put the cash somewhere else you expect it to make gains.

I think there is a natural tendency to assume that good news must lift the share price and bad news suppress it, but that presumes that share prices must always reflect an accurate measure of a company's value.

Junior explorers are, as we all know, valued based upon assumptions about what their assets may be worth in the future, discounted against the time and risks of not actually achieving that future valuation. Much as some may promote favoured models for reaching valuations, this is all far more subjective than most will admit.

We issued a lot of good news in short space of time and our mkt cap did go up a lot, since then its gone down a bit, suggesting that, in the short term at least, markets didn't think it was worth the mkt cap we had reached. Those who agree will sell, those who think the markets are wrong will buy. Those who are short term traders will have no interest in the company's long term potential and will simple chase momentum.

Clearly if OMI succeed we should be worth many multiples of what we are currently valued at, the question is how many think they can get a better return elsewhere whilst waiting on that success, and how many think success is sufficiently imminent to want to hold through any price volatility?

Personally I'm happy to hold, but I do think that markets are starting to expect and price in good news, which may limit the magnitude of any short term price gains.