Member Info for Happyhaddock

Just found the relevant paragraph from the constitution

10.2. Upon the written request of Shareholders entitled to exercise 30 per cent or more of the voting rights in

respect of the matter for which the meeting is requested the Directors shall convene a meeting of

Shareholders

@smiller - simply put I don't know what % of shares are needed to force an EGM. I often see the figure of 5% bandied about but I don't know if that is a universally applicable law for all the UK stock market or just a general recommendation. Furthermore I don't know what impact the fact we trade on AIM whilst technically not being a UK registered company has.

I am sure that somewhere Alien Metals must have a constitution outlining such shareholders right, but if so it is not something easily found by a quick scan of their web-site.

@smiller - different members of the BOD will have different views on what constitutes a meaningful amount of shares, obviously crossing the threshold for a TR1 would be a milestone for an individual or institution, but I suppose the "crunch point" is holding enough shares to force/demand an EGM.

Such things can be a double edged sword in that they may not get the answers or resolve the issues you want addressing, but will probably spook markets enough to further distress the share price.

I suppose the best outcome in such a "sub-optimal" situation is for the BOD to recognise that there is enough shareholder dissatisfaction amongst a large enough number of share-holders as to make their lives difficult if they chose to, so as to then have the BOD voluntarily address concerns.

@norm - I wish you well in your endeavour to hold the BOD to account, though as wents has said I fear you may come away from the AGM even more frustrated than you went in and none the wiser on the matters you'd want addressing.

Whilst there are rare exceptions, by and large the only way share holders get satisfaction is if they own a sufficiently large percentage of the company to be legally entitled to demand attention. Beyond that all you can usually do at an AGM is embarrass the BOD in front of the rest of the audience by asking questions they'd rather not answer, but that is only worthwhile if a vast majority of other shareholders are physically present in the room to witness any awkward responses or attempts to wriggle out of responding.

Isn't the announcement of the AGM the point at which somebody on LSE usually pipes up to say - "they're bound to have something positive up their sleeves to talk about at the AGM, so look out for some good news in the coming weeks!"

... or is it the case that even our most optimistic of perma-bulls can't bring themselves to make that call and suggest we may actually see one of the much talked about JVs before mid December?

... I just dug a hole in the back garden because I needed some earth to fill in another hole.

In the simplest of terms RNS can be divided in to good news and bad news. In turn good news can be sub-divided into verifiable and actionable "accomplishments" or "positive narrative" that merely hints at the sort of accomplishments that may be in the pipeline.

I'm not sure any of today's news is sufficient of an accomplishment or surprise to make me want to open my wallet and add to my position in GWMO, but it does give confidence to keep holding the shares I already have as a long term speculative punt.

As I've said before I treat junior explorers as purely speculative punts on a par with lottery tickets. I mentally write them off as a total loss on the day I buy the shares and then just leave them to do what they will as even those that succeed tend to go through huge lows and take much , much longer to progress than you ever expect.

If there is any secret it is the initial assessment of the "odds" of success compared to the buy in price. If somebody offers you the chance of a x500 return on something with a 100:1 chance of success it is worth a little flutter but you don't re-mortgage the house for something that has a 99% chance of failure.

@smiller - as I've said before - whilst it is little comfort to those who feel they have been duped by management in to losing money , you need to think of their role as being one of promoting even the slimmest or most distant potential of the company to keep drawing in the cash needed to survive.

Think of it this way - every time they dupe a new and over enthusiastic speculator in to paying more for shares than they might arguably be worth, they benefit all us existing share holders by minimising dilution.

The wiser speculators get the more cautious they become about buying more on hype, and the harder management have to work to find a new promotional angle to bring in the next round of cash.

To copy and paste something else I've shared before;

You need to learn when, or even if, other explorers achieve their stated goals and just how common failure is in this slow moving yet volatile sector. You must then look for reasons why a specific business may become the exception. This is done by analysing their communications to separate verifiable and actionable accomplishments from distracting superlatives and promotional aspirations. That is to say the uncertainties that determine the balance of potential reward against probable risk are best understood before spending your money so as not to be left angry and surprised should your hopes not be quickly fulfilled.

I know folks here don't like to accept the idea of having had unrealistic expectations and find it easier to blame management for their losses. Now I am not suggesting that we should hold our management up as an example of how well things can be done, only that when critising their lack of progress we do so in the context of how poorly most other companies typically do and how long most take to progress projects. That, whilst acknowledging that each project is different, we at least reflect upon sector averages rather than cherry pick examples of other companies that support one side of the argument or the other in terms of in terms of finding faster or slower projects.

Just at the end of last week the Australian news channel (ABC) put out a report describing the wide range of problems hampering progress in the Australian mining sector which included the following statistic;

"The Minerals Council of Australia (MCA) released a report earlier this year that found 80 per cent of planned mining projects would probably be discarded due to a range of factors, including higher labour, energy and transport costs, higher royalties, and red tape."

At the same time I read a statistic comparing how long mine projects typically take to come to fruition where it was suggested that 16years is the average in Australia, four years faster than the US where it takes on average 20years to get a project up and running. (Zambia was the longest averaging 35years to bring a project to fruition)

I know many wanted and expected to see things up and running some time ago, but in the grand scheme of things there's nothing about Alien's lack of progress that stands out yet as unusually slow.... this is just what you should expect from early stage junior exploration companies.

@smiller - obviously we can debate this ad-infinitum to the point things start to feel like personal attacks when in reality there are simply many different subjective opinions regarding matters on which we don't have all the objective facts. I will however answer the question you pose ...

"What's stopping us getting a bank loan now and getting it going?"

Ultimately we have to convince a bank that Hanc*ck is going to be profitable enough to cover all it's operational overheads, meet its additional administrative costs, royalties and the performance uplift payment whilst maintaining enough of a safety buffer in our margins to be totally secure in its ability to service both interest and capital on that loan. Based upon the limited data our management have provided us private investors and the volatility and general trends in iron ore prices I am not sure such a case can be made. I could easily envisage circumstances where the annual interest due on such a loan would exceed our slim profits. Or put another way if such a case was easily made I'd imagine that we'd have already taken out such a loan rather than be chasing potential partners.

Those that view Hanc*ck as a great project may disagree with me, but I've long maintained that I personally feel our wealth lies in our non ferrous metals, and that our iron our has been a risky distraction from those.

@smiller - whilst using Fenix as a barometer as to how things should be done is your prerogative, we don't and can't know all that went on behind the scenes when advancing their project to fruition. However of the few things we do know, we can be certain that Fenix didn't have a potentially sizeable performance uplift payment to Windfield Metals hanging over them. Plus we do know that at the time Fenix were trying to get their project started DSO iron ore was pushing over $200/t and as such the world was fighting to throw money in to the iron ore business.

Had Alien been trying to get Hanc*ck over the finishing line under similar circumstances I am sure our management would have found it faster and easier to secure a deal. Alas they are not the circumstances we face.

I agree that the revolving door policy of our ever changing Board of directors isn't a good sign, but that itself may be an indication that our supposed flagship project at Hanc*ck isn't all that others are making it out to be. If there was an easy slam-dunk to be scored would we struggle to find somebody willing to take the shot?

@smiller - obviously everybody is entitled to their own opinions, which in the absence of full facts will inevitably be subjective, but I don't see any evidence of deliberately working slowly.

I've always maintained that the profit margins of small iron ore miners are fickle and at the whim of changing commodity prices, so I've never been convinced that Hanc*ck is quite the opportunity others make out. Even if by mining standards it is simpler than most projects to get started we don't have the cash to go it alone, we have to convince others to loan us that cash or partner with us. We have to do that in the face of some very ambiguous statements about possible performance uplift payments to Windfield Metals, which depending upon the small print of the contract could render any deal quite unappealing.

One can only imagine that our management have had to be more open with potential partners and their lawyers, but that itself my be the source of the delay. Us as private investors are pretty much always in the dark so we may well be unaware of any one of many possible reasons for the continued delays.

Some other junior explorers put together deals faster, many don't, without far more information that we will probably never know we cannot say if our management are handling the specific circumstances we face better or worse than other management teams. All we can say is that in less than five years we have gone from not having any active iron ore projects, to having defined an MRE for DSO, obtained the various permits and licenses needed to start extracting that ore and are now looking to find a way to fund that extraction. By the standards of the mining industry some might say we are moving quite quickly.

@wents - I agree with pretty much everything you say, the one comment I don't fully agree with is "this management is crap". Sure nobody is going to cite them as an example of how to do things well, and it could be said they have acted in the best interest of the company rather than the shareholders, but as you yourself have pointed out their achievements (or lack of achievements) have been typical of AIM and this sector. It is easy to claim that any other management team would have done a much better job, but statistics for the junior exploration sector don't support such a notion; the norm is for most exploration companies to slowly fail under the burden of delay and dilution. It may look as if we are heading that way, but unlike several others we aren't dead yet.

Our management have strung along excitable speculators for several years and raised several million pounds at much higher share prices than would other wise been the case. Had they not done so we may have already failed and would certainly have been much more diluted by now... that's little comfort to those excitable speculators who bought in to the hype at much higher prices and now feel duped having lost money, but as you yourself have said "... you only put in money that you can lose in it's entirety, that's the nature of the beast."

@norm - none of what you say is untrue, but pick a dozen junior explorers at random and most would exhibit a similar story with similar complaints on their respective bulletin boards, so to my mind they are predictable reasons for not buying shares in the first place more than they are unexpected surprises. Junior explorers just aren't a place for certainty and transparency.

If you look through the early history of many of the the global majors in the mining sector, most went through similar periods before making it big, but vast numbers of now long forgotten juniors that went bust years ago went bust because of similar issues.... its just what happens in this sector which is why I always maintain it is for speculating with small change you can afford to lose, more than it is for investing in.

The few shares I hold in UFO have sat doing nothing in the bottom drawer for several years and I'm content for them to stay there a while longer so as to see how this ends.

I've long been sceptical of the value others see in Hanc*ck and have previously mentioned the possibility that a prohibitively large performance uplift payment possibly due to Windfield may be the reason progress keep getting endlessly delayed. I've no way of knowing if this is the case and would be gladly proved wrong, but the long term potential of our non ferrous metals is why I continue to hold a small speculative position here and haven't sold the shares I do have.

@norm - you may or may not be correct, as I've said many time before the most likely outcome from day one was always a slow drawn out failure. However there's little to be gained from writing off UFO when we still don't know the outcome.

Those who don't like the odds or to gamble should stay clear of all junior explorers. Like me you've said you've been here a long while and bought in around the current share price so probably aren't facing large losses, just a degree of frustration having not taken the large profits that were available when we were above 3p.

At the end of the day we all have a simple choice, sell and move on or wait it out to see if this ever comes good, either way we all learn from such experiences. However, my own expectations for UFO haven't changed over the last few years something which I can hopefully attribute to trying to keep them grounded and realistic at the time I bought in.

I'd like to re-post this as a lot seems as relevant here as when first written about another company.

Some might cynically say that a junior exploration company's board of directors is only there to raise enough cash to keep paying their own salaries. Those directors might say they are there to keep the markets interested so they can keep raising the funds needed to survive. This isn't easy in a sector routinely noted for delays and over-spends, where most projects fail and where even those that succeed can seemingly drift in limbo for years.

Without lying to the markets or concealing truths, management continuously try to distract from set-backs, frequent dilution and impatient market participants who sell up. Good marketing repeatedly highlights the potential a company has by hinting at even distant links to topical ideas or remote chances of near term good news. All this is presented using caveats and words like "hope", "target", "prospective" or "estimate" that provide wriggle room should they later be accused of promoting unrealistic expectations. In other words, when championing reasons to be optimistic, directors may be legally forbidden from leading us up the garden path, but they can step to one side whilst informally encouraging others to excitably run ahead on their own.

I've seen many private investors accuse junior exploration companies of incompetence, misleading markets, or deliberately mis-managing things so that their assets can be taken private "on the cheap" by its creditors. Such critics are often emotional individuals who, in the absence of hard facts and full numerical data, rushed to buy the herd's enthusiasm for a good story. Then without waiting to either prove or disprove that story, they make losses selling in to the herd's impatience. Such people need to recognise that almost all explorer's PR translates as "...we still can't confirm any details, but please don't lose interest in our latest narrative".

If your money and purchases have been minimising the share's price decline then the directors marketing has succeeded. Consequently every speculator needs the ability to buy, hold or sell shares without being distracted by a company's PR, rumours or the emotions of other investors.

You need to understand what is usual for this volatile sector in terms of when, or even if, companies achieve their stated goals and that failure is common. You must then look for reasons why a specific business may become an exception rather than the norm. This is done by analysing their communications to separate definite and actionable facts from distracting superlatives and promotional aspirations so as to judge prices in terms of potential upside reward against possible downside risk. Such things are far better studied and understood before spending your money rather than afterwards, and yet people still seem angry and surprised when management fail to meet speculator's hopes.

Well that interview was another excellent piece of PR that highlights so many of the positives about Alien that have kept us all waiting here for so long.

Sadly there was nothing there that gave any further clarity about exactly when any of our potential may be realised or how much longer we will have to keep waiting; not that you would expect any new or market sensitive information to be revealed in such an interview.

I still maintain that the long term potential of our non ferrous metals makes UFO worth a small speculative punt, more so than our iron ore. That said this remains a case of leaving my UFO shares in the bottom drawer rather than them being something I expect to deliver imminent returns.

However. I've often said that this will move when we least expect it and so I live in hope that one day I'll be pleasantly surprised to be proved wrong in expressing such caution! For the last four years I've said 2025 will be my first date for reviewing our progress so lets see what next year brings us?

The best definition of democracy I ever heard was; "it is the willingness to abide by the decisions of idiots whenever they outnumber the rational and well informed."

Almost every democratic election I have ever encountered has been more or less a choice of which foot to shoot yourself in; a choice where the best outcome would be if none of the candidates were allowed power. Sadly the notion of keeping politicians out of politics is never one that goes down well with the political parties that make the rules!

All we can hope for is that good education one day helps enough people realise they are mostly being lied to and lead around by the nose by those looking to exploit them. That the rare few with a genuine desire to help are more often as not ignorant of the consequences of their actions to the point they can be as much of a threat as those deliberately acting against you.

@Talking Sense - I hope you are right when you say we will know in 4weeks time - the other company I mentioned didn't have a four week clause , they had initially agreed to a 60day clause but by mutual agreement kept extending it.

Much as I like to take small speculative positions in junior explorers I suppose I'm just a little cynical about talk. In a sector noted for delays, dilution and disappointment the only RNSs I tend to value are those describing what has already been accomplished rather than those describing aspirations and what people hope to accomplish.