Member Info for Happyhaddock

I've been manically busy these last few weeks so not had time to check in here. However this bulletin board seems the same old place, where as Hanc*ck plods forward at a pace that frustrates the eternal optimists and defies the eternal doom-mongers, the same old names fight the same old battles about matters of peripheral relevance.

However given that I've spent years claiming that I personally though our wealth may lie in our non-ferrous metals, it's good to see silver prices making a move that is hopefully large enough to be seen as more than just noise and volatility. Everybody here knows that predicting what silver prices will do is a mugs-game, but we also know that when it moves it can move in a way that defies all logic and reason so we can live in hope that this may finally be the start of the big move many have been endlessly predicting for years.

@wents - very true... it's just odd that their are so many folk here that dismiss such talk as negativity when making predictions of wild re-rates and who will only accept such a narrative after is has played out again, but never if offered as a warning in advance.

Plenty here always claim that what ever we are doing at the moment is the "most important thing" or a "game changer" when in reality it is just the next on the list of things to do. From my point of view the most important things is that we eventually tick everything off the to do list. We're not there yet but we are slowly reducing that to do list. Until we get there traders will continue to buy the rumour and sell the news adding to price volatility.

In autumn 2023, many here were claiming that we were certain to see a massive share price re-rate delivered by Hanc*ck getting native title approval. On the day of the Nyiyparli's meeting this bulletin board worked itself in to a fervent frenzy. Some hoped for good news over social media that same day. Many more argued that by the end of Nov.2023 Alien was certain to issue an RNS confirming native title clearance. These same people robustly dismissed suggestions that, even if approved without objection, a decision may take some time to be formally ratified and announced, or may not move the share price as they expected.

As it was we only had to wait until mid Dec.2023 to receive an RNS confirming native title approval, but by then some impatient folk had already lost their prior exuberance and given up waiting. Release of the news saw the narrative here immediately switch to calls for our DFS and mining permits. Our share price started the week that native title approval was announced at 0.32p, finished that week at 0.29p and ended the following week at 0.21p by which point this bulletin board was arguing over who was to blame for the fall, or trying to put a positive spin on the latest silver price forecast.

Over the years I've often highlighted how this risky sector is characterised by delays, uncertainty, losses and a regular need for more funding. It is made all the more volatile by the impatience of emotional traders "buying the rumour and selling the news". So regardless of today's excitement, might I repeat this old post encouraging everyone to recognise that although we typically fail to meet this bulletin board's hopes, this may say more about unrealistic expectation than it does about a lack of progress.

. . .

I think we all know this bulletin board's history of endlessly getting excited about how the "next news" is both imminent and will be transformational to the share price, only to find that neither turns out to be true. How often has "this time is different" been offered as justification. How often have we been told by some here that whatever we are doing at the moment is "the most important thing" or a "game changer" when, in reality it is just the next thing on a list of many things that need completing.

We are moving forward at a pace typical of the industry where each step is merely one of several important steps. Presumably at some point this latest topic of obsession will get resolved, after which folk will likely lose interest in it and become equally obsessed with the importance of whatever uncertainty needs resolving next.

It takes years of overcoming problems to put a mine in to production. So long as we keep plodding forward I'm content to wait and see how things turn out... all this over excitable impatience just seems to lead to more disappointment than is probably justified for a company that is, albeit slowly, moving closer to the finish line.

The silver space really does have some "characters" who pedal all manner of thinly veiled advertising material as if it were educational. I always find Mike Maloney entertaining if only for the fact he has a very large audience of more gullible folk who lap up his every word... However much as wildly emotional speculators can occasionally drive silver prices on crazy spikes I don't ever place much faith in Mike Maloney's wild claims.

I remember one of his more reckless proclamations from about 15 years ago when he claimed that within months everyone would be able to buy an average family house for about 500oz of silver.

"SUCH FUN!" as a character from my wife's favourite sit-com likes to say.

Nice to see some positive price action for a change, though it still has some way to go to prove itself a new trend rather than simply noise in the old trend. Nevertheless we've always had the potential for great things, we're all just waiting on our management to deliver on some of it.

@norm I tend not to focus on any specific metric, I just work on the principle that anything less than a one year chart shows noise, and that you need at least a five year chart to give a sense of direction.

On a five year chart today's movement is barely perceptible within the noise, even if it gives a psychological boost to those who look at SP charts every five minutes to see if they've become millionaires yet.

Undeniably it is better to see the price go up than down, but so far it feels like a move without meaning.

... been out all morning and just checked in to see a pleasant surprise with our SP... here's hoping we can deliver some positive news to justify and sustain it. Otherwise everyone here has seen many times before that the natural volatility in this market means that anything that falls a lot tends to bounce back a bit every now and then before returning to trend.

Looking on the bright side...

Any performance payment we may owe to Windfield upon putting Hanco*ck in to production is based upon the uplift in value . If iron ore prices fall to the point it would be loss making, maybe a clever lawyer could argue that Windfiled would owe us money to cover the drop in value and losses incurred by putting it into production . 😜

This bulletin board attracts a wide variety of people with conflicting views and opinions, both about Alien Metals and about each other. Some here have previously claimed to have invested their pensions in this, to be "topping up" almost every month or to regularly trade in and out of this. Some openly state how many shares they own or how much they have lost on them, whilst others question the motives and honesty behind any mentioning even the smallest detail about their own situation. Regardless of the reasons, some remain good humoured and pragmatic about falls in our share price whilst others get hostile and angry.

There is no reason that anybody should feel obligated to disclose anything about their own share holdings or personal finances in absolute terms and nothing to be gained in terms of folk boasting about their own wealth. Nevertheless it may help put different people's views and emotional responses in perspective if each were willing to share, in relative terms, what proportion of their own total wealth they have spent on shares in UFO.

I've said many times before that if UFO do well that I expect most here to make more money out of it than me, or if it does badly lose more money than me; Some because they seem much richer than me and have more beer money to gamble with, others because they seem to have been much bolder in committing a far greater fraction of their wealth to such a speculative junior explorer. I am however happy to take a fairly relaxed long term view about the small speculative punt I have taken here because of how little of my net-worth I risked on Alien's shares.

Put in context, whilst my holding in Alien metals is one of the larger positions in my shares portfolio, my shares portfolio is only a small fraction of my total savings/investments. That is to say I spent less on my holding in UFO than the free cash I have in my current account to cover routine expenses and unexpected bills. Similarly the value of the un-invested cash sitting idle in my stocks and shares account simply to leave me with the optionality of a little instant liquidity is greater than the value of shares I hold in UFO. Consequently although I am neither looking to increase nor decrease my share holding in UFO, I could more than double it without having to sell any other shares or move any cash to do so.

All shares come with an element of risk and it is said that you should never risk more than you can afford to lose on any junior explorer. I've not added meaningfully to my holding in UFO since summer 2020, having then seen it quickly spike to ridiculous prices before slowly falling all the way back to the level I first bought in at (more fool me for not selling at least some at the highs). Consequently it returns to only a little over 1% of my total savings, where I wondered if others may be willing to say what percentage of their own net worth they committed to buying shares in UFO?

I think two issues also to consider about AIM and the exploration sector we are all interested in are as follows;

Firstly people have much wilder expectations in terms of small AIM companies compared to large blue chips. Folk are happy if a large blue chip makes 5% capital gain whilst delivering a 3% dividend. Folk speculate in AIM listed explorers impatiently hoping for 10 baggers or 50 baggers... It is far harder for a small explorer to meet the expectations of its share holders, so there is always a far greater churn of unhappy speculators even for those that are doing well compared to their peers.

Secondly, much as commodity prices have generally been doing well of late, inflation has seen production cost for all producers going up a lot as well, so in many cases their margins have been shrinking. Small producer's margins tend to be tighter than large blue chip companies, so even those explorers that are making good discoveries might be having a harder time convincing the markets to take the risks of moving new finds on to become new mines.

Then, as others have said this has always been a difficult and risky sector noted for delays, losses and failures so folk really have to trust management so as to stay the course with them.

@Chris 2 - "So you don't think my warnings, predictions, red flags mean anything over the last 2 years?"

... on the contrary, I too have spent the last three years advising caution, pointing out that this is a sector noted for uncertainty, delays, losses and failures. Most of all I have advised folk to be wary of any who claim with absolute certainty to know what our future holds as there are no guarantees here; that you should not risk more than you can afford to lose.

Yourself and Max111 both typify polemic extremes where neither will acknowledge even the remote possibility of something other than their own opinion playing out.

Max might still be right, as might you, in terms of probability I'd say the odds were more in your favour than Max's, however I believe you are both wrong to present the outcome as a foregone and inevitable conclusion.

As I've said before, when I take a small speculative position in a junior explorer I mentally write it off as an immediate 100% loss, then just give it lots of time to see if I get lucky; basically the same way I treat a lottery ticket, though hopefully one where prior research and understanding can skew the odds a little more favourably than that of winning the lottery. If I'm right maybe once out of ten punts, then such are the gains I'd hope to cover my losses on the other nine. If I lose all ten times then so be it... I don't see any of this as investing, its gambling with small change.

Might the situation be that neither Max111 nor Chris2 actually know what the future holds. That both are arguing their polemic positions for reasons of ego and pride, as neither have the courage to admit we don't know how things will play out.

That despite some great potential in our assets, our future will be determined by the things we still don't know, not the few things we think we do know.

Different personalities will view unknowns as either an opportunity or a risk, where there's an awful lot of both surrounding UFO at the moment.

@Sinter - whist of little relevance to UFO, it is true, at least to the best of my knowledge, that the Titanic was never advertised to passengers in advance as being unsinkable. However, in the media frenzy at the time they lost contact with her, White Star Line did feel a need to put out a reassuring press statement;

The statement was signed by company Vice President P. A. S. Franklin and was as follows:

NEW YORK, April 15, 1912 (UP) "While we are not in direct communication with the Titanic, we are perfectly satisfied that the ship is unsinkable. That no more wireless messages are coming from the may be due to atmospheric conditions or something like that."

@Max111

Over the years many here have challenged you about your hostility towards those whose views differ from your own. They have also challenged you over what they perceive as incessant "ramping". To defend your actions you often claim that "Stating facts is not ramping!"

Many here may define ramping as selectively stating only those facts that support one side of an argument, or stating a barrage of facts that, whilst accurate, are of peripheral relevance and serve mainly to distract from other opinions. As such, might I make a few observations.

1) Even when discussing the past it is rare to have all the facts available to establish exactly what the "truth" was. We almost invariably have to deal with unknowns, estimates, inconsistencies and contradictions. So, when the available facts might not all support the same conclusion, they are best judged "en-masse", not in a selective "pick-n-mix" fashion.

2) Arguably when forecasting future unknowns there can be no such thing as facts about what hasn't happened yet; only opinion about which variables may be most influential on the outcome, along with speculative inferences about the future state of those variables.

3) Humans are fallible as they cannot allow for things they are unaware of not knowing. Company management, technical consultants, social-media commentators and members of this bulletin board all have to decide what information to include, omit or simplify when reporting to others. Their audience's subject knowledge, misunderstandings, hopes and fears then bias what of those remarks they deem relevant facts, missing facts, irrelevant facts, or subjective opinion.

I could delve deeper into this, but you may then accuse me of going off on a tangent in to esoteric areas of academic study of little interest to others such as Epistemology, Agnoiology and Agnotology. (Assuming your response may be intelligent and politely worded.)

However my point is best made by example, so consider the following;

It is a fact that the Vice President of the White Star Line publically declared his confidence in the Titanic being unsinkable. It is a fact that in the early twentieth century cigarettes were promoted as good for you and recommended by doctors. It is a fact that the press pays far more attention to America's latest GDP growth figures than to how older data is routinely revised down.

Bringing things back to Alien Metals. It is a fact that despite an excessive turnover of management, you declared your confidence in each new director appointed and every target they announced but failed to meet. It is a fact that even without such a target from our directors, you argued that we would definitely be mining and deriving profits from our iron ore before the end of 2021.

If we don't question what others present to us as facts and why, it is easier to have confidence in the conclusions we draw from those facts, but that doesn't mean our conclusions must then be correct.

...well, when it comes to the volatile and unpredictable world of junior explorers most people are wrong about most things most of the time.

However I'll readily acknowledge I'm glad to have been wrong about my assumption that todays "advanced news" of intentions would merely set a new floor for our SP pending a rise upon actual confirmation of facts.

So, I mustn't grumble when being wrong still prompted me to jump in and buy a load more at 2.35p when the markets opened this morning

The figure quoted was "AISC op-ex" costs of US$85/t

This is a somewhat unusual term where AISC cost and op-ex costs are usually different based upon a separation of additional legal/admin and finance costs not typically included in direct in op-ex costs. Typically speaking most base metal miners prefer to state C3 costs, where AISC is a term more often associated with precious metals.

I'm not claiming to know exactly what they do or do not mean by AISC op-ex costs or what is or isn't included. However, I'd be wary of assuming this is our minimum break-even cost. Given that we don't have a finance deal or JV in place yet, or at least haven't had the details of one formally confirmed, then I'm not sure how we'd know exactly what our finance costs are so as to arrive at a final value for a typical C3 or AISC bottom line.

As others have implied, we haven't actually got a definitive statement of something that has been completed, just a little bit more info on what they have been saying for some time that they hope to complete soon.

I'd been waiting on the sidelines for some weeks waiting to add to my holding here if we dipped any closer to 2p. When I read the RNS this morning I didn't expect to see big re-rate upwards, but that after an hour or two of early volatility and trading that the news might establish a floor in our share price where the expectations would be that the next news might be positive rather than negative.

On the assumption we wouldn't now go lower I did snatch a few more shares on the bell when the markets opened this morning, and got them at Friday's closing price which I was happy with. Only time will tell if I was right to assume this would set the current price as a floor pending good news.

Well we've all wanted news of this nature for some while.

Only time will tell how things work out, but getting control back without us incurring any up front re-purchase costs, only deferred payments later down the line should it become successful seems a decent deal.

Correction - non ferrous metals

Over the years I've often said that I think our real wealth lies in our non-precious metals and that these may deliver our first meaningful move up in share price.... odd perhaps given that it is our iron ore we have been focusing on and haven't been doing anything with our other projects.

However after years of a falling share price and and increasingly gloomy bulletin board, one brief mention in a PR interview of the possibility of looking for a JV for our battery metals along with a move up in the price of precious metals and this bulletin board is again awash with with wild hype and mania.

Whilst we have no more facts to act upon it does highlight what I've said before; that the silver space is one populated by emotional speculators who act upon the narrative, whilst the iron ore space is populated by fact driven investors who act upon hard facts and numerical data.

@Wents ... if Mystic Mog has anything more informative to say than this bulletin board do let us know.