Member Info for Happyhaddock

As has already been said nobody here can actually "know" why the SP went down, we can only speculate. However there is an old saying that you "buy the rumour and sell the news"

Native title was talked about endlessly in advance, the date of the meeting was widely known and this bulletin board couldn't have done more to sign post it it had they hired a marching band. In the run up to the RNS our share price nearly doubled so it may well be that we had the "re-rate" others were predicting and that all the traders that bought in expecting the news then took their profit rather than sit and wait for the next news.

The following may warrant posting again given how my comments were previously received when referenced by others across various LSE boards.

I've long been sceptical about claims of "bullish rampers" driving up share prices, or of "de-ramping trolls" driving them down. Nevertheless when prices don't behave as expected, some will throw accusations at others before admitting their own expectations were unrealistic. So let us look at a few facts.

It seems logical to assume that those who chose to hold shares in a company will think more favourably about its prospects than those who chose not to. Statistics show that active traders typically underperform passive market trackers, and that roughly three quarters lose money trading on line. A related statistic shows that with the growth of on-line share dealing, the average time an equity is held as an "investment" steadily fell from over a decade to just a few months.

The narratives of LSE bulletin boards tend to be dominated by a minority of a company's most opinionated shareholders who constantly post about their hopes to the upside whilst fiercely contesting any talk of risk and uncertainty. Yet if prices actually adhered to their endless narratives predicting imminent growth, how do so many lose money?

Based upon the numbers who do post on this board, we presumably have a far greater quantity of silent shareholders who don't. Our share price moves up or down with minimal correlation to the often polarised comments written here. This suggests that this board has little influence on that silent majority's beliefs or actions; that most either don't read it or that they give little credibility to things written by strangers on the internet.

Our management continue to strive to make progress in a volatile sector noted for delays, losses and failures, one where fickle investor sentiment is influenced by broader macro-economic factors beyond our control. I remain a patient long term share holder here, but the above gives no clues about how our share price may behave over the coming weeks or months.

So does any of the above matter? No single investor can move a share's price but we can ground our own expectations in knowledge of how the sector typically behaves rather than the opinions of strangers. If a speculative share holding outperforms your expectations you should have no complaints. If it repeatedly fails to meet your expectations at what point do you question if your own expectations have been realistic? Or at least ask yourself if you have allowed enough time to fulfil a realistic expectation?

I don't dispute that there may be one or two who naively think that those who dominate the narrative with their barrage of propaganda do actually move a share's price up or down. However, if there are complaints, I'd suggest they mostly relate to prices not moving to meet the wild short term forecasts some make here, not complaints that prices do move to meet them.

... but don't you realise our assets are located in Australia where everything is upside-down compared to here in the UK ... you just need to turn the chart the other way up and everything looks rosy.

Seems appropriate to re-post this from only a few days ago:

I'm always amazed at the importance people place on their own priorities, assumptions and time frames - its as if they haven't yet spent enough time around this sector to realise they don't mater one iota to the markets.

Things will progress at their own pace, one which is typically much slower and more erratic than many can cope with. News will be released at whatever point there are new facts to inform the markets of. In the interim lots of emotional folk on bulletin boards will try to read significance into the smallest and most trivial of details... Excitable expectations don't move things along any quicker nor do they make impatient predictions or nervous fears any more likely to come true, they just increase frustrations and the likelihood of being disappointed.

I'm sure many folk here would be much calmer if they just accepted that not knowing some things is a natural part of this uncertain and speculative market and that much of what they focus on not knowing is short term noise of little bearing to the bigger picture. If we wait long enough we will both get to know all those things we want to know as well as see how fallible human beings can be and how irrelevant our own beliefs are to how things turn out.

...should we all club together for a wholesale order of new tinfoil hats or do people here already have their own?

Given that I've been going on for some time about how AISC tend to be more than FOB costs and that we still don't have enough info to know what Hanc*ck's AISC may be, it would have been nice to get a bit more detail about how native title agreements have affected these as the following statement from today's RNS doesn't really offer any clarity:

"The Company will make various payments on meeting certain licencing and production hurdles, with annual administration payments "

However a royalty payment of less than 1% is something we can put numbers to and isn't going to be unduly restrictive so can be taken as some good news on that front.

One more thing ticked off the to do list - cue much excitable impatience as folk now obsess about the next.

Nevertheless some much needed good news as we keep moving towards the finishing line.

Current discussions about native title remind me a lot of discussions held on this bulletin board in mid 2022 about a potential funding deal for Hanc*ck with AA.

Initially everybody got caught up in excitable expectations and thought it was an immediate certainty, dismissing talks of such things typically taking a long time and involving lawyers. Slowly people accepted it hadn't happened as quickly as they first hoped and gradually switched to suggesting it must be sorted soon with undue focus on a two month due diligence period that, so far as we know, is yet to be triggered. 18 months later people aren't talking about AA funding anywhere near as often having realised the deal may be conditional on other factors that this bulletin board completely overlooked at the time.

I don't profess to know when we may hear anything about native title, I'd simply re-iterate a statement I've made several times before, that things will most likely move when we least expect them to, and that the only cause of disappointment is expectation.

I assume news will be released only when there is news to release, not before and not after.

I'm always amazed at the importance people place on their own priorities, assumptions and time frames - its as if they haven't yet spent enough time around this sector to realise they don't mater one iota to the markets.

Things will progress at their own pace, one which is typically much slower than many can cope with. News will be released at whatever point there are new facts to inform the markets of. In the interim lots of excitable folk on bulletin boards will try to read significance into the smallest and most trivial of details... Excitable expectations don't move things along any quicker or make impatient predictions any more likely to come true, they just increase the likelihood of being disappointed.

I'm sure many folk here would be much calmer if they just accepted that not knowing some things is a natural part of this uncertain and speculative market and that much of what they focus on not knowing is short term noise of little bearing to the bigger picture. If we wait long enough we will both get to know all those things we want to know as well as see how irrelevant our own beliefs are to how things turn out.

Whilst we all know there is a difference between what folk want and what they get, we do know that in the past there have been complaints that UFO have failed to regulate private investors' "expectations" or maybe exploited their unrealistic expectations.

Even if all they have to say is that they have no news to report at the current moment and don't yet have any info on a subject of popular speculation, there are times an RNS simply acknowledging investor expectations could be seen as beneficial PR.

Apologies folk, this must be getting boring to read so I'll leave it there, for if I don't I'm sure max could keep this going indefinitely.

@Max111 - you may not recognise the difference, but failing to ramp a share to high heaven isn't the same as de-ramping it. Not that either has any impact upon the actual share price.

Denying the existence of uncertainty does not remove the risk or assure a positive outcome in the way your actions would imply you believe.

I'm not disputing the facts you quote, only their relevance in terms of drawing the conclusions you imply can be drawn from them... How does Fenix's current profitability dispute my claim that Hanc*ck's future profitability remains unknown as both our revenue and total expenses will vary with several costs and prices whose future values we do not yet know?

@max111 - lots of iron ore companies showed huge profits and cash balances in 2022 on the back of iron ore prices exceeding $200/t in 2021. Sadly we weren't mining then

I'm sure Hanc*ck would make us lots of cash with ore prices above $200/t and would probably still makes us a useful profit at current prices of $130/t... here's hoping these are representative of the sort of prices we achieve when we finally start mining.

@max111 I think you are getting mixed up over C1 and C3 costs

I'm not disputing what their C1 margin is (effectively the margin above FOB costs), I'm looking to find out how big that margin is after allowing for C3 costs. (the margin above AISC)

@max111 (and with apologies to everybody else fed up of the sense of deja-vu that comes with reading the comments of anybody trying to challenge max111)

Whilst I will acknowledge you have quoted the most recent quarterly data, where as I was referring to their last full year accounts, that doesn't mean I was making up my own figures. The differences do however show how quickly things can change in the volatile iron ore market, and how older data may not be a useful guide as to how things may be months, let alone, years ahead.

Furthermore given that I was trying to highlight that AISC tend to be greater than FOB costs and that at the moment Hanc*ck's future AISC remain unknown, I'm not sure that showing that Fenix's FOB costs are currently lower than they used to be really addresses the point I was making?

Do you have any current C3 costs for Fenix to show both what their AISC are now, how they might have changed since issuing their last accounts or how these may relate to Hanc*ck's AISC?

@max - as I've said many times before I built my main position in UFO back when the mkt cap was around £2m with the intention of waiting until 2025 before reviewing UFO's performance - I'm not looking to top up or buy back in as my position is already larger than I'd usually permit myself for a small speculative junior explorer. As I've said before I'd only be looking to significantly increase my share holding in UFO in the unlikely event I get a surprise windfall like a large lottery win. I appreciate such an approach is different to your own but, but people who have a different approach to your own aren't all lying about what they are doing.

As for your other points - these are all old ground that's well trodden but as you frequently like to accuse others of failing to answer your questions I'll address them again.

Shipping costs for Fenix out of port Geraldton may be high but we don't yet know what our shipping costs will be until we know where we are shipping to and what size vessels we will be using. They could be cheaper than Fenix , they might not be - we don't know, hence referring to to Hanc*ck's AISC as unknown.

Fenix's strip ratio is much higher than our own but that doesn't affect additional costs above FOB costs, it's already factored into them where the last time we discussed this it looked likely to save us about $2/t compared to Fenix's FOB costs, but owning their own haulage company probably saves them something on what we may likely be spending - either way our FOB costs are very similar and are not the area of uncertainty.

The big unknowns affecting our AISC are the financing and royalty costs about which we don't yet know anything - they may be trivial they may not be, neither of us know.

As for short term hedging, yes it can smooth out a lot of short term volatility but you can only hedge at prices the markets is willing to offer you - that changes all the time. At the the moment iron ore prices are decent meaning we could hedge out some way in to the future at decent prices. Only a few months back you couldn't even hedge in to the start of 2024 for above $100/t ... the odd thing about hedging to avoid volatility is that the futures prices offered to hedge at are more volatile than the daily spot prices of ore.

@bobsson - whilst our FOB costs may be estimated at around $60/t AISC tend to be higher: Fenix whom we are so often compared to last reported FOB costs of $62/t with a further $43/t of additional expenses, and many other smaller producers have total costs around $100/t. As yet we have not been given any indication of what sort of additional costs we may be facing for consultancy, financing or royalty fees etc.

As for iron ore costs, just in the time we've been advancing Hanc*ck they've spanned from $80/t to $230/t and over the last decade they hit a low of around $40/t. I've seen future long term forecasts spanning from below $55/t to above $100/t ...

In short anybody that claims to be certain of where this market is going and the profits we will make is probably deluding themselves... That doesn't mean I am bearish on iron ore ore bullish ... just pragmatic about the fact there a heck of a lot of unknowns still in Hanc*k's future.

I'll be the first to admit that I've always maintained that UFO's real wealth may lie in the long term potential of our non-ferrous metals as I feel that small producer's costs can be relatively high in comparison to the very volatile prices of iron ore.

However worse than management that pursue a path you may not agree with are those that keep changing their minds to chase what ever is fashionable; cryptos, cannabis oils, lithium or whatever else is flavour of the month and which they may have no knowledge of.

UFO have made the decision and put in place management to pursue iron ore as they feel it is a short term (relatively speaking in an industry where everything takes a lot of time) route to help fund more long term projects. Probably better we now stick with what we are doing and hope iron ore prices stay at current levels for a few years as EH is unlikely to be a quick or cheap project to put in to production ... after all if EH were faster and cheaper to get running than Hanc*ck the conversation would be the other way around with iron ore fans complaining about why we weren't pursuing Hanc*ck first!

In anything of this nature you are speculating on what is going to be doing well in the future as nothing can be put into production at the snap of your fingers but everything costs lost of money and takes lots of time.

Odd to think that US GDP is roughly $25tr a year and that in the last six months since suspending their debt ceiling they have borrowed and spent roughly $2.5tr. Yet a 10% boost in spending only results in a 5% growth in GDP.

@Cygnus - never discount just how much inflation and deficit spending can boost apparent GDP growth in nominal cash values - strip out the extra money governments borrow to boost an economy, and then calculate backwards to allow for inflationary price rises and the quantity of goods and services being produced may show quite a decline.