Member Info for Happyhaddock

@silverhorse - I'd love to see the SP do a moonshot tomorrow as much as the next guy, after all we're all here to make a profit. However the fact I'd love to see it happen doesn't mean it is a realistic thing to expect.

All junior explorers are high risk and UFO is not the certainty many here make out. Nevertheless it is, in my opinion, one of the best on AIM and one where I believe the potential long term rewards outweigh the short term risks... but to benefit from long term rewards you do have to be in it for the long term, where as I've said before, I've already been here a few years having set 2025 as my first date for properly evaluating UFO's progress.

I'll leave all the excitable cheering from the sidelines to the impatient youngsters for whom six months seems a long time and a few years indistinguishable from an eternity.

@Dip666 - a voice of calm common sense among a lot of over-excitement...

This board manages to maintain heated debate day after day even if the arguments are fundamentally about the fact there's nothing new happened since that last heated debate.

This is a sector that usually moves slowly and we are heading in the right direction, however if we want to see big price gains let's just patiently sit back and allow time for that to happen.

Good things come to those who wait.

Well it's times like this that the brave jump in to either make or lose a fortune whilst the timid bail out to run for the hills.

Would I build a new position here today ... probably not ... however given how high my average is and how big the percentage loss I'm looking at, selling up hardly seems worth it, whilst very little additional expenditure could radically drop my average price which IF things turn around could prove quite lucrative.

I'm watching things closely and I'm sorely tempted in spite of the obvious risks.

I've been invested here for a few years and have periodically added more as prices have fallen as the geology looks great and I keep questioning how the mkt cap can be so low...

Of course we all know the answer to that has been management, or arguably the lack of it.

I'm still convinced this is going to be a hugely profitable and valuable mine for somebody in the future. The issue being how far in the future and will that somebody still be us? The cheaper we get the more attractive we look to a major with deep pockets and an eye for a bargain.

I'm hopeful that our new management can turn things around for if they can't make a profit out of what we've got then they probably shouldn't be here. However they've a big financial mess to sort out and I find myself asking is this finally the lowest low to buy more at, or must things get worse before they can get better?

Oh the joys of speculating in the junior end of exploration and mining!

isn't it just the foreign storage that is VAT free?

@Tiggrr - I've used Atkinson's for years - decent prices and more importantly a totally reliable service which I've not always had from some of the other dealers recommended here.

Though to echo what has been said, premiums and taxes on physical silver means it's not something to invest in hoping to make quick profit on a quick trade. You'll need a decent up-tick in prices just to get back to being able to break even should you intend to sell back to the dealer. Every internet guru and expert has their opinion on how high prices are going in the future, so you'll have to decide for yourself who to trust, though it's hard to find folk who don't believe prices are going up.

Further to my comments about the relative average production costs of gold to silver and a request for more info I've tried to find some more recent data. It's a little like comparing apples to oranges as different reports focus on different things so you can't get a true like for like comparison of statistics compiled using exactly the same methods, however;

The most comprehensive fairly recent data I can find for global average production costs for gold comes from 2021 data from the world gold council who claim on average it costs $1050 to produce an ounce of gold.

The best fairly recent data I can find for global average production costs for silver comes from a 2021 report from the silver institute. They claim the average global production costs for an ounce of silver is about $11. It should be noted though that this organisation represents the larger primary silver producers so they acknowledge their data won't be fully representative of many of the smaller primary miners, or secondary producers. A vast amount of silver is produced as a by product of mining something else which leads to various ways such companies account for its cost of production. If you include all the extra silver that is nominally considered to have no specific production costs of its own, or whose production costs are merged or hidden within the costs of bulk mining something else then these would arguably lower that $11/oz figure quite significantly rather than raise it. In contrast the smaller less economic primary producers, whilst raising the average costs, probably don't contribute enough silver to make a big difference to the global average. So that figure of $11/oz is simply what it claims to be, the average of the big primary producers.

a ratio of $1050:$11 breaks down to a baseline gold to silver price ratio of about 95:1.

I'll leave others to make of that ratio what they will. Perhaps the biggest reason to view it as a starting point for gauging spot prices and not an end point is the fact that whilst the gold market is currently at least an order of magnitude larger than the silver, huge amounts of demand for gold can be met simply through moving exiting inventories from vault to vault as supplies grow. We all know that industrial consumption of silver now exceeds new production and so pre-existing silver inventories are dwindling reducing their ability to meet demand.

Predicting future spot prices is a subjective art and not an exact science and requires a greater understanding of a huge range of factors than anybody here (myself included) is likely to have. Whether prices for physical metal will separate further from paper spot prices is another discussion altogether. Personally I think there is no fundamental reason that silver prices should reflect or respond to gold prices anymore. Though I do recognise the strong historical links are a major psychological factor that will keep them tied in many people's minds for some time.

@normbeef , the ratio at which gold and silver are dug out of the ground is often quoted by silver bugs to explain why they think silver prices should be many times higher but isn't itself a directly connected statistic in terms of price. It may be a flippant analogy but the fact there are hundreds more bicycles made each year than unicycles doesn't make the unicycles hundreds of times more valuable.

I don't have any more recent info than from 2013, when I believe the silver:gold production ratio was closer to 10:1. However, back then the calculations apparently showed that the average gold mine employee produced about 75 times less gold for their days labour than the average employee of a silver mine produced silver.

Metal prices are not just a function of the overall amount of metal excavated, but the amount of effort that has to go in to that excavation. As I say I don't have up to date info but I suspect the average costs globally of mining an ounce of gold is currently around $1200 whilst the average cost of mining an ounce of silver is around $20. IF, and those figures are only guesses, those prices are correct that would suggest that with similar demand the gold:silver ratio should be about 60:1. The fact that it is not suggests that demand for gold is such that buyers are willing to pay a bigger premium above production costs to obtain it.

@ normbeef... difficult to disagree with the timeline you propose or how easily it could change, the only proviso being that it is almost unheard of for any company to jump straight in to mining at full production capacity from day one.

UFO have previously stated they expect to need 12months from starting mining to iron out teething problems and ramp up to full production targets. They have said though that they are hopeful of being able to pay off all initial cap-ex from the more modest revenues during this ramp up year which would be quite an impressive achievement.

@napth - not everyone is as impatient as you. Before the advent of internet based share trading the average time an equity was held as an investment was over a decade, now the average is merely a few months where almost everyone has become a trader. Statistics also show that almost all private investors now underperform market indexes and about three quarters actually lose money trading in and out of stocks.

Warren Buffet has done alright out of working on the principle that the best time to plan on holding an equity is forever, and I'm happy to stick to my plan of investing for the long term as it's one most come around to in the end.

Another bit of positive news to keep nudging the fundamentals forward.

As for the SP. I was of the view that if we could recapture the 3p high by autumn 2021 then we may have been able to retain some of the momentum and achieve some more steady growth, other wise we were likely in for a long period of price stagnation before another crazy move.

My heart tells me that there has been, and remains the potential for, too much good news for the SP to keep languishing here. Nevertheless my head tells me we are very much a momentum stock and that we are in a catch 22 situation where our price isn't rising because people are holding off buying more until the price starts rising. We are going to need some big surprise to shock folk back in to buying and yet we are all expecting such great news it gets harder and harder for good news to surprise and sustain an improvement in sentiment and momentum rather than just producing a momentary blip.

We all know that in such uncertain times it is foolish to try make short term predictions. However, myself I built my main position when the price was round a tenth of penny and stopped buying UFO in late summer 2020 when the price started to look unjustifiably high. UFO remains my largest equity position where I remain happy to hold that position and trust that over the long term fundamentals will lift this price considerably. However until I see some evidence that sentiment has returned, it remains a share I'll leave patiently in the bottom drawer without adding to or selling. After all, as I've said before 2025 has always been my date for judging UFO's success, so I don't mind waiting.

I think the biggest problem here is with the time scales and expectations of many who post on bulletin boards, they just aren't aligned with the speed at which mineral exploration projects progress.

If you invest in a sector where rapid projects are measured in years and larger slower projects in decades, worrying about what may or may not change next week or month just doesn't seem all that relevant. If you want more instant gratification there are plenty of tech stocks to choose from.

Otherwise just put UFO in the bottom drawer and give the company some time to make measurable progress. In the roughly three years since BBG joined he has turned the company around and increased our share price about ten fold. I've enjoyed most of that price gain and remain invested here because I believe he can do the same again over the next few years.

I'm not expecting big moves over the next few weeks or months but in the grand scheme of things that doesn't matter. Nor do I expect to be able to reliably predict when our share price will move, I'm just content to wait until it does.

Like you Max I've been a silver bug for over a decade and in that time I've got used to endless calls that the price has finally "broken out" but the price is still way lower than about a decade ago. It has spent roughly the last 18months trading between $22/oz and $28/oz and for the time being we are still in that range.

It was only a short while ago I was told on this board I must be blind if I couldn't see silver had broken out, only for the price to then reverse and drop to bounce back off $22/oz.

Silver's price is very erratic and volatile and we all know what it is capable of on a big upswing. However, much as things do look interesting now for precious metals, I'll stand by comments that breakouts in silver aren't things that can be reliably called at the time... you just take a position and wait patiently hoping that one day you'll be able to look back and smile. I hope you are right and I'm sure at some point you will be, but it seems too soon to say this is that time.

After all if I can misquote ... "This board has reliably predicted at least eighty five of the last two breakouts in silver's price."

steady progress... nothing to set the share price on fire but I'd prefer lots of little incremental nudges forward from actual good news than the wild and erratic ups and downs that comes from speculating about great news that may or may not be around the corner.

That said, as folk know I'm more interested in EH + environs than our iron, licenses which I'm sure will contribute far more to our volatility than the iron, so I'm not expecting any major moves in the SP until we get some "big facts" about the EH drill holes.

only speculating but a Phillip Hall runs a business in Aus to do with separating ores into component metals...

@ Chris2 - I'm all for trying to offer balanced discussion that considers downside potential as all to often most bulletin boards are dominated by the most enthusiastic of shareholders. I've also faced my share of abuse from a small minority accusing me of "de-ramping" when suggesting that some here may be being a bit to over optimistic in their hopes.

What must be a year ago now I suggested to you that whilst there will always be one or two that will attack anyone who says anything negative, most will be more grudgingly tolerant of a cautious view if expressed politely without any sense of triumphalism in other people being wrong or losing money. Whilst you've cut out the expletives the underlying tone of your posts still appears to be one of mocking others for their investment choices.

There are those here whose short term hopes and expectations for UFO appear overly optimistic to me, but none of us know what the future holds so they might be right. Junior explorers are all volatile playthings for traders which only adds to their short term volatility, but I'm here because I believe the potential long term rewards outweigh the short term risks and uncertainties.

UFO's share price is multiples of what I first bought in at and I expect that in a few years it will be multiples of what it is now. I also believe that whatever share price it does or doesn't reach in the future will not be affected by comments written here, so I don't pay too much attention to post be they positive or negative. Rather I focus on our slowly and steadily improving fundamentals.

I don't object to people raising negative points or even posing questions that prompt people to consider downsides. Furthermore you can't please all of the people all of the time, but the fact that most here seem to instinctively reject most of what you say suggests that if you wish your concerns to be taken seriously you may have to reconsider the manner in which you express them. Conversely, given the only sporadic correlation between our short term price moves and the comments written here, I do wonder why some folk seem so desperate for their own posts to be validated by other people agreeing with them, so perhaps you post intentionally hoping that others will dislike what you have written?

Are you suggesting these companies directly hold shares in ECR or merely that they administer nominee accounts for private investors, some of whom are wealthy and have bought enough shares to have to submit TR1s?

You can imply a lot about how a company expects the markets to react to news when they release the RNS on a Friday afternoon.

In response to the question about short term price predictions I'd repeat something I said at the end of 2021.

"Last spring I challenged a chorus of passionate suggestions that we'd end 2021 with a double digit share price through having begun mining iron ore. Since then I've been accused of de-ramping whenever I've cautioned against similarly impatient predictions. The only thing I will claim with confidence about price moves over the next six months is that when forecasts are conflicted many predictions will likely be wrong. I'm guessing that we may have to endure the disconnect between good news and price stagnation for a little longer but, in a volatile sector powered as much by emotion as reason, share prices can erratically overshoot one way or the other without warning."

In short I am sceptical of anybody that claims to know or understand how short term volatility will move our price. However in the long term fundamentals eventually start to dominate fickle emotions, and as our fundamentals keep improving then it seems reasonable to assume our share price should be much higher in a few years than it is now. If our share price periodically dips en-route then then I can live with that as I view myself as an investor rather than a short term trader.

Well our CEO has been telling us for about 18months that we were on the verge of getting started in Mexico and that the money was there to start as soon as the paper work and permits cleared.

More and more UFO starts to feel like a diversified portfolio of active junior exploration projects all under one ticker, so it sure looks as if Bill is going to be busy on our behalf over the coming months.