Member Info for Happyhaddock

Whilst there's little that all this bulletin board will agree on I'd hope few would disagree with this very broad brush summary;

1)Sentiment is generally against the whole exploration sector at the moment.

2)Whilst we have much still to do, Alien's assets hold great potential.

3)Rightly or wrongly markets currently seem to price us based on an assumption that we aren't going to realise that potential any time soon.

4)IF, and it remains an if, we can change market sentiment our SP should go up.

5) IF, and it remains an even bigger if, we do realise even a fraction of our potential then our SP should go up a lot.

All junior explorers are a speculative gamble, but the lower the mkt.cap you can buy in at the better your odds. However, that doesn't alter the fact that statistically most explorers lose money year after year, good explorers can still get unlucky and fail completely, whilst bad explorers can still get lucky and make a fortune.

Much as management is one of, if not, the most important things to a small junior explorer almost beyond good assets, and it would be good news to finally appoint a new CEO, I do question if it will have the immediate impact many here suggest.

Any company can lose one CEO, losing two may be deemed unlucky, but to lose three in short order certainly poses big questions about what is going on behind the scenes. To restore credibility I don't think we merely need to recruit a competent CEO, we now need to show that we can retain one.

Welcoming a new CEO might not be enough, we may need to prove they intend getting comfortable in the big chair. If they simply walk in the front door and out the back door then all our credibility will be blown. I do think the markets will now want to wait and watch to see a new CEO make good progress before deeming their arrival good news.

I understand that in a market deprived of company specific facts that people will cling to any comment about hopes and expectations... but in truth these timings are things over which, what is left of our BOD, have no control and where previous CEO's estimates have proved very unreliable.

Surely it is simpler to work on the fact that we don't know when all the paperwork we still need will clear. In the most absolute of terms it isn't a fact that it will all clear. However, I will admit that I'm working on the assumption that Hanc*ck will eventually cross the finishing line, and that the unknowns are when rather than if.

The fact that some here were predicting that we would definitely be mining iron ore before the end of 2021 and have been steadily rolling their prediction forward a little at a time ever since suggests how unreliable everybody's understanding of timings actually is .

This post of mine from early in 2021 was accused of "miserable pessimism."

Although a hopeful and patient long term share holder here, I cautiously regulate my expectations by playing Devil's advocate and considering issues others may prefer to overlook;

Many here believe that the iron ore in our Sirius extension could be our first source of revenue. I've heard folk here say that DSO is "quick and cheap to bring to market" with vocal calls that we will "definitely be producing before the end of 2021 to capitalise on current high prices". Clearly a word like "quick" is not an absolute term defining an actual timescale. So how realistic is it to expect production this year?

Our first drill results for the Sirius extension are overdue because of extensive laboratory delays. Plus we are told we need further results after these before being able to work on an MRE. This MRE is not a final destination, just one important mile post on a long road to production. As such I would like to mention subsequent mile posts others haven't yet commented upon, where the following is written from a position of known ignorance, leading me to be cautious.

I assume our current exploration license for Hanc*ck/Sirius doesn't cover any mining. I doubt that applications for all the necessary permits, environmental and heritage approvals will have begun before completing some sort of preliminary economic assessment or similar study in to its viability; paper exercises which are presumably dependent upon having first completed the MRE. I don't know the full procedural details of mining license applications in Australia and what little I do know is inferred from exploration licenses. However, once the application process can begin I imagine there may be many months of patiently waiting to get all the paperwork signed off: Depending upon how development is to be financed, negotiations with potential partners may also slow things down. I also guess that agreeing terms with the government may be only one step in the permitting process; that there may be opportunities for public scrutiny during which various local parties could raise objections which may require plans to be amended if upheld.

The above is written from a perspective of things which may be unknowable at the current moment. What I can say is that whilst central America is a very different jurisdiction, everyone here knows how long we have been waiting for permits to drill a few small holes in Mexico. So how long might it take to get all the permits to dig some bigger ones in Australia?

I work on the principle that even at the best of times "red-tape" slows all businesses with minerals exploration typically coming to fruition years after the impatient have given up waiting and sold in frustration. This is why 2025 is my first date for reviewing our progress, not because I actually expect it to take this long, but because it always takes much longer than expected.

Put another way ...

At the start of the covid pandemic in February 2020 the price of silver crashed, then went on a major bull run from March 2020, regaining its loses by mid May 2020 and hitting a massive high in early August 2020 before falling back over the autumn.

Our share price didn't start moving up until late June or early July 2020, spiking in mid Oct 2020 before falling back.

If we look at what was happening in late June then we'd just announced that exploration was to start in South America, where as mentioned the Capstone JV not formally confirmed until early September 2020.

Can silver speculators get overly enthusiastic and in moments of wild irrational mania move the share price of even distantly connected stocks... Yes! Is that the same as proving a direct causal link between the price of silver and our own share price ... well that's a different matter.

The share price of small junior explorers moves far more on positive news from their own management about their own projects, and much as I'd like UFO to put out positive news about progress at EH, it's our iron ore that is the current focus of attention (or at least it is nominally the focus of attention of what management we have).

Well I've said all along that I felt that whilst we may be targeting iron ore for first revenue, that our real long term wealth may lie in non ferrous metals.

Still people's attention on this bulletin board is very fickle, and whilst silver is flavour of the moment it wouldn't surprise me if all those who this week are claiming that silver will cause us to rocket will next week be championing something else. After all, at the moment we aren't actually doing anything with our silver its just sitting under ground and it doesn't seem it was too long ago that folk here were excited that lithium was going to make this company and we haven't even found any of that!

@bitethebull ... sounds a lovely place to live ... in fact it sounds somewhat like where I live...

Large seven bedroom Victorian seaside villa next door to a lighthouse in a friendly peaceful village community with wide expanses of beaches, easy walking distance to several nature reserves popular with bird watchers from all over the country and with great views over both the adjacent islands and the more distant snow capped peaks. Yet 5minutes walk the other way and you can be at the railway station and less than a half hour ride into the city for the museums, galleries, clubs, shops or whatever else you may want from a city without being forced to actually live in one.

And all this at prices that southerners would consider pocket money because we are in the North!

It is often said that the time to buy is when others have capitulated and sentiment has reached it lowest.

Some time ago, I think when the SP was around 0.6p, people here were arguing about whether or not shareholders had capitulated or if the price could still go lower? The view I expressed back then was that people arguing and complaining about how low the price had fallen was not a sign of capitulation. Real capitulation would be evidenced by nobody bothering to say anything good or bad about the company at all. That I'd view this bulletin board falling silent for days on end as a sign of capitulation.

Make of it what you will but people here are still arguing about this company's future.

@yayay - i hear you and yet to add to the irony, this money the government owes me is to be used, at least in part, to ...

wait for it...

settle problems with a national insurance bill that it has taken me four years to get them to accurately calculate... so at whatever point i do receive this money from the government i am only going to have to pay a chunk of it back to them, albeit to a different office using different paperwork!

perhaps the biggest irony is that it has been me telling them that they have under calculated what i owe for national insurance and i simply want to give them more of my money so as to avoid them chasing me later in the future once they finally realise how they had ****ed things up! since 2019 hmrc have been telling me that my national insurance bill was covered by an overpayment in a year in which i paid no tax at all!

you can imagine the problems i have had in terms of the government not having a department or forms for people complaining that they need to pay more! on top of this this there's another tax payment i have made which the government acknowledge receiving but have added to my records as a general credit rather than using to settle the bill it was intended to pay. consequently as well as me pursuing them over an extra payment i believe i do owe them, they are also pursuing me over a different payment they believe i still owe them simply because they won't associate the payment i have already made with the bill that needs paying ... so you can imagine how that is further complicating the whole situation.

sometimes i envy people with employers with hr and payroll depts. that deal with all this, unlike the self -employed that have to personally deal with all the above on their own.

Whilst it has no bearing on anything I think the following rant is pretty much a metaphor for much of life today.

I am owed about twenty grand by the government where they have my bank details on record and where I was expecting a bank transfer to settle the matter. At about the point I was beginning to wonder why I hadn't received the transfer I get a form through the post asking if I want the money transferring straight to the bank account they have on record for me or a cheque sending through the post. I fill in the form asking for the bank transfer and send it straight back.

At about the point I am again wondering why I haven't received the bank transfer I get a cheque through the post. Consequently I drive to the bank to pay this in, where my bank records then credit me with a "pending transaction". A few days later I go on line to verify that the cheque has cleared where my bank highlights a cancellation as the cheque couldn't be processed. When I contact my bank to ask why, they could tell me nothing more than that there were "irregularities" with the cheque and I should get back in touch with the issuer.

Consequently I get back in touch with the government department that owed me the money and to cut a long story short I am back to square one.

They don't know why their cheque was rejected and they wanted me to fill in another form to verify the bank details they had already been given, details that I was able to confirm were accurate over the phone without needing more paperwork, and details they had refused to use in the first place which is what lead to the problems with them issuing a bounced cheque. Consequently I am back to the stage of waiting and wondering why I haven't yet received the promised bank transfer and if I am actually going to get more paperwork or a cheque through the post at some point in the future.

And these are the people we trust to run the country. I wouldn't trust them to run a bath without over complicating the process with layers of unneeded paperwork!

Well ... on the one hand unexpected , on the other we are a junior explorer so the possibility of a placing should never be ignored.

Short term its unlikely to help the share price, but spent in the right way it doesn't have to be bad news to the more patient long term shareholders.

@ smiller I think I heard Rick Rule suggest in an interview not too long ago that financing at around 15% was typically a good deal for junior explorers looking to develop. Whilst I suppose each project is judged on it's own merit with no standard deals out there, I suspect our management would bite the hand off anybody offering to loan the cash at 5% interest....

"I prefer to analyse everything in detail without preconceived bias rather than be cherry picking good or bad parts of an interview or RNS - I like to consider information and data with an open mind to make assumptions rather than feed desired outcomes."

Very sensible advice, something most claim to do, but which very few actually achieve as so few can objectively distance themselves from personal biases they may often be unaware of even having... I think this bulletin board is a prime example with a variety people seemingly unable, or at least unwilling, to acknowledge their own biases .

As a general rule in such an uncertain sector I work on the assumption that if I think I am sure of what's going to happen I've probably misunderstood something and then go look for evidence that the opposite is also a possibility; This tends to minimise the importance I place on what I'd like to see happen.

To put another perspective on the situation.

Markets went crazy in late 2020 and our share price spiked to levels that were just plain silly. This left our management trapped between a rock and hard place with two choices.

1)They publicly sate that we were massively over valued by a factor at least ten, maybe twenty because people's expectations were delusional and there's no way that we'd be deriving income from our iron ore before 2024 and possibly later. They'd then have to watch our SP crater within hours.

2)They take advantage of the high SP and the ability to raise more capital at advantageous prices and simply let the markets slowly work things out for themselves over the next few years, keeping the SP as high as they could and punters interested in the near horizon with a few non binding suggestions of when they hoped different things might be achieved by.

Personally I said all along that I didn't think we'd have begun practical work on site before late 2023 or see revenue before 2024 and that 2025 was my first date for reviewing our progress. As such I have refrained from buying any more shares over the last few years. So on that basis we're still more or less within the loose time frame I had in mind.

The question is whether you consider it to have been good or bad management to have kept private investors interested in paying elevated prices to buy each new placement they have offered to fund us getting us this far? I suppose the answer depends upon if you were one of those paying the elevated prices.

People speculate in junior explorers driven by narrative, hope and aspiration, but you make money by doing your best to ignore the narrative, hope and aspiration and by making choices based solely on the limited number of facts about the company that are available at any moment in time, judged against raw statistical data bout what is normal or common for the sector.

Given the general response of any company hoping to benefit from interest rate cuts, I'm suspecting that the news just out about US inflation is the dominant factor in falling share prices and widening spreads in the mining sector.

Seems the stock exchange itself is still showing 0.18p so perhaps it's my broker?

My own broker is currently showing our share price has just dropped down to 0.16p.

Do we attribute this drop in share price as a market response to the interview, or simple volatility and mere coincidence as the interview seemed fairly upbeat and confident.

A competent but predictable PR interview... It highlighted all the positives we already know about, but didn't address the uncertainties we all want to known about... though we can't, of course, expect to learn anything new from a media interview as important news has to released first via RNS.

So, in short, people here can't agree on whether an up lift payment will or won't become due, whilst those that do think one will become due can't agree on how it will be calculated and whether that payment may be trivial or significant.

So isn't arguing about if a statement is ambiguous an answer of itself? Where as I said previously I always work on the the principle it is better to be prepared for the worst case scenario than be surprised by it.

@tango, whilst I hope you are correct, none of us have access to the small print of the contract detailing the 90% purchase of the Hammersley tenements. Sadly the wording of the RNS about this includes just enough ambiguity for it not to be totally clear if the uplift payment becomes due if we decide to mine ourselves or not... go back and re-read it from the point of view of a lawyer wanting to argue one side of the argument or the other. I'd say either side could read it to mean what they wanted it to.

I always work on the the principle it is better to be prepared for the worst than be surprised by it, and I hope the actual contract of sale was more tightly worded than the RNS such that there can be no legal ambiguity.