Member Info for Happyhaddock

Following the "bonanza" RNS about EH we saw increased trading volumes, much excitement and new names arriving on this bulletin board. However over the last twelve months we've seen similar responses to good news have no lasting impact upon our share price. So was anything different about the moves up and down of the last few days?

Historic data showed the old EH silver mine averaged over 2,000g/t driven by nuggets and veins at crazy grades peaking above 30,000g/t. Portable XRF data had already hinted that at least some of the new holes drilled might deliver similar bonanza silver grades. As such the excellent content of the RNS should not have been a total surprise to existing shareholders.

Some here excitedly talked about us immediately challenging the 3p price peak of mid Oct. 2020. Consequently I thought it curious to look back in time to see what was then driving sentiment in UFO. The following points are taken from a summary RNS issued mid Oct2020 to "justify" the extreme price growth.

Recent field work at Hamersley Iron Ore projects completed with 95 samples taken and more detailed mapping completed

Ongoing work to secure drill permits to carry out maiden drill programs on the San Celso and Los Campos Silver projects in Mexico

Negotiations with Capstone Mining for a Joint Venture on the Donovan 2 Copper Gold project in Mexico continuing

Finalisation of trenching program on the Elizabeth Hill Silver project

Acquiring and processing new data set for new permit ELA 47/4422 surrounding Elizabeth Hill Silver project for exploration planning

Over a period of six months in 2020 UFO increased in price forty-fold, much of that in early October. The fervour and belief back then was undeniable, but were the above points enough to rationally justify such a move? Wider macro economic conditions back then were driving an uptrend in the whole sector, but most juniors did not increase in price anywhere near as much as UFO. The potential of a JV was arguably our biggest news at the time, yet the start of discussions had been announced weeks earlier and remained unresolved in mid October.

I'm not sure I've any great insight to offer about fluctuating sentiment beyond noting it rarely correlates to fundamentals. We may try to logically calculate what a company should be worth now or in the future. However we are really speculating on what will or will not trigger changes in the fickle emotions of other investors, and how their patience or impatience affects the timing, duration and magnitude of any resultant price moves.

Previously our share price has moved massively on modest news, but also failed to move on big news. So whilst many seek to justify their latest near term price predictions, understanding why prices usually fail to move as most predict may be more useful.

Consequently I predict our price will shoot up when we least expect it and so I will patiently hold until UFO's improving fundamentals actually benefits u

"...we would dig just 400,000 cubic metres. for around 677 tonnes of rock.. potentially containing 4000g/t Silver "

@norm not sure if I'm misunderstanding your maths or what you are trying to say, but if 400,000 cubic metres of rock had a mass of 677tonnes it would float on water.

For the sake of keeping the maths simple assume a rock density of about 2.5tonnes per cubic metre (actually likely to be closer to 2.7) that gives a weight of your 400,000 cubic metres of one million tonnes...

IF, and for the time being it remains an IF, the grades pan out as you postulate across all that volume then that totals enough silver to be comparable to major mines but in a much smaller package that should be far cheaper to get out of the ground.

"Has a monetary figure been put on EH as to to what's in the ground yet?"

@ratboy... the 3m oz of silver remaining of the old JORC at EH, at current prices, is worth a little over $60m (less whatever it would cost to actually get it out the ground). So in the grand scheme of things not a lot. However most of us, including our CEO, are working on the fact EH is much bigger.

Most of the big silver mines tend to be working on over 100m oz, but on grades in the low hundreds of g/t so EH is a radically different proposition. IF, and until we actually get drill data to prove it things remain an IF, drill results prove EH's stunning grades extend well beyond the tiny resource previously defined things get very interesting very quickly.

"HH said his estimate was in the Ftse 100.....".

@5x5 - the value of EH obviously depends upon the volume and grades. At the minute we've an old definition of a small volume with some insane grades. Two of the four new holes have backed up what we already knew with just one new hole outside of the old resource suggesting things may continue a little further than previously defined. However we all know we are exploring and waiting on results from over a much wider area.

I'm not suggesting that the whole area will come back with the same insane grades (nor am I saying it is impossible) it's just that for a bit of fun normbeef and I were running some numbers to see where things might be IF (a very big IF at this moment) these grades continued over the full exploration area and at depth; - that's when the valuations reach pretty insane levels where you have to start counting the digits just to make sense of how big the numbers are.

At this early stage in exploration thinking about such high valuations is just idle day dreaming but if you do believe that these crazy grades spread a decent way outside the old resource definition (which I've long suspected) then valuations really could get crazy to levels it would be just silly to mention here.

Just run the calculations for yourself based upon different assumptions if you want to get some idea of what may be possible and how such valuations compare to other companies in other sectors or exchanges.

As you say hydrogen, for me the key part is the remaining drills that are well outside of the previous resource.

They are the ones that will show if we are likely to be growing our resource beyond what we already know about.

@norm - if you try very hard to be very cautious you can just about get some more modestly acceptable numbers out of the calculations. ;-)

If you do just run the numbers at face value for fun to see what comes out, as you say things do get silly and you find yourself looking further and further up the FTSE100 list to find anything of comparable mkt cap.

Still we've a lot more work yet to conclusively prove how big EH actually is and how consistent those grades are, so lets just see what happens as things progress.

UFO's share price has caused a lot of folk a lot of grief over the last year ... but it's not uncommon for the price of junior explorers to spend more than 95% of their time doing nothing and then brief moments doing something wild.

In the grand scheme of things today's price move may be modest and so far is nothing like a "wild" move, but for me at least, the move up amounts to more than I initially paid to buy in, so has made a pleasing difference to my bottom line.

With time we'll see where sentiment takes us, but I'm sure if folk have the patience to stay here for the long haul many more may get to experience daily moves equal to their initial buy in price.

@norm - I toyed with all sorts of numbers to do with EH before investing here (both cautious and some bullish numbers) when the mkt cap was just £2m and concluded I needed to make it my largest equity holding.

We've a long way still to go and there are still risks, but I've always maintained that whilst DSO may be a first source of income for UFO our real wealth will be from our silver.

given that all these grades are near enough from at surface, makes you wonder what's at depth?

Well we've all been expecting superb results from EH ... I think we can call these the superb results we were expecting!

Obviously nobody likes seeing the SP slide, but having the emotional fortitude to deal with it depends primarily on your own expectations. The more unrealistic and impatient your own expectations the more unexpected and unsettling today's price may be.

If you believe in the long term potential of the company and bought with realistic expectations of the timescales and risks involved with junior explorers, then pulling back from the 3p spike to overshoot the other way is probably no big surprise. The good, the bad and the ugly of the sector more than doubled in SP in 2020 and then halved in 2021 as things settled back. UFO thirty bagged in 2020 but significantly improved its fundamentals in 2021 meaning it is unlikely to settle all the way back to where it started from even if it does bounce off a depressing low.

As I've said before, in my opinion UFO has always been a long term play. It's not risk free but I do believe the potential rewards outweigh the potential risk for the patient shareholder. Nothing about the company's fundamentals has declined over the last week or two, so I'm still happy to keep holding to see where we are in a few years.

No doubt though I will continue to be accused of de-ramping should I continue to caution against the exuberant short term predictions that have lead some to expect too much too soon from UFO.

@Paul Q - I hope this is the start of great things, however folk on this board routinely predict every small move as the start of a new trend driven by improving sentiment, but they haven't much of a history of success despite their confident claims.

I don't know what glasses allow you to see in to the future, but to reliably call something a true change in sentiment you need to look back on many months of past data to prove it. Without that we are all just guessing whether or not this may be a long awaited change or just a normal fluctuation. It's easy to get distracted by hourly, daily or even weekly price charts. Monthly and annual charts are where you can see more meaningful trends. Regardless I'll continue to patiently hold as I do believe current prices for both silver and UFO offer good value based upon their potential.

Nice to see a bit of a rise in silver prices these last few days, but for the time being we are still well within the $22 - $28 range per ounce we've been trapped in for the best part of 18months. As such we probably can't call this as any kind of exciting break until things are actually much higher.

Silver has had too many false dawns for me to call this as more than typical volatility, but us silver bugs can live in hope.

Another fairly long term holder here sitting on significant paper losses at current share price.

Every time ROCK drills holes they come back with copper suggesting we are drilling in the right place, but never enough to suggest they've actually found something significant. Though no two locations are the same in terms of economic feasibility, generally speaking you need a grade around 2% to get excited and at least 0.5% to likely make a mine economic.

Today's data/grades adds to the likely tonnage of copper underground but does little to boost hopes that it might one day be worth removing it from the ground.

@Turbo - obviously people try to plan ahead, my point was merely that today's prices and costs may not be that relevant in terms of making mid to long term predictions in a volatile market.

"So the $131.5/t might be referring to FOB and the $134/t as CFR (including freight to Chinese port of Qingdao).

Bulk Carrier Freight Rates of Iron Ore to Qingdao are currently $8.85/t"

@Max111 - as the names imply "wet" and "dry" prices typically refer to separate prices depending upon moisture content of a bulk product. If material is supplied wet it will lose weight when dried and therefore the tonnage will drop.

Ordinarily a wet price per ton should therefore be lower than a dry price, however in the example you quote there is likely to be an additional price premium on the wet price based upon an additional profit margin for the "convenience" of a customer being able to buy at port side as needed rather than order in advance and wait to be shipped to them. I don't think FOB and CFR accounts for the quoted difference.

Also in terms of bulk carrier rates, the link you quote gives capesize prices. Based upon our target production rates it may take us up to two months production to fill a capesize. Given that the scoping study predicted a lower rate of production during our first ramp-up year we may be looking at a longer period of production to generate enough to fill one capesize. Until we actually have an off take arrangement with a customer we won't know how frequently they will want deliveries or what/how the port may charge for interim storage. However it may be wise to allow for the possibility of initially using smaller vessels for more frequent deliveries, perhaps something like a panamax?

Obviously we are a year or two away from planned production , so projecting future profit margins and income streams based upon current prices may be a little premature given the fluctuating ore prices and energy/shipping costs. Plus we'll have initial cap-ex to pay off before the iron ore is truly generating a surplus profit . Nobody knows what state the markets will be in 18months from now, however the above factors I've mentioned may change the bottom line of your calculations even using today's prices.

"I buy tonnes of Tin per month and when I say there isn’t any believe me it’s far worse situation I’ve known in 30 years"

Not quite in the situation of buying tons of tin per month, but for more than a couple of decades my business has been involved in casting low melt alloys meaning I'm very familiar with routinely buying ingots of tin. I'll second the fact that tin is experiencing some strange market action at the moment.

I'd been looking for a tin explorer/miner to invest in and this kind of happened for me simply as a consequence of having been invested here in OMI for the last few years.

"Patience". Once, its advocates were saying Q4 2021. Then 2022. Now I notice that the talk is of 2023. Anyone for 2024?"

... I've always said that 2025 is my own target date for re-assessing UFO, though that's not to say we can't make some more progress before then. It is however good to see some of the excessive exuberance of this bulletin board settle down and other folk start to recognise exploration is a slow process, and one that is currently out of favour with the wider markets.

@napth - I am not sure why you seem so insecure as to be threatened by people whose opinions differ from your own, nor why you seek to undermine my views when many on this board have come to echo the pragmatic caution I have been advocating for the last year? After all, UFO wouldn't be my largest equity holding if I thought the long term risk/reward ratio wasn't favourable.

Over the last month I am aware of you writing almost a dozen posts about me, yet over the same period I've totaled only 8 posts on this UFO bulletin board. In spite of, or maybe because of my caution, the best received of my comments gained 19 recommendations, whilst they averaged 9 per post. Regardless of your views about me, and acknowledging that popularity does not have to equate to being right, it is still indicative that others here value what I have to say. LSE indicates that over this period you have made more than 40 posts which were notionally about UFO. I won't waste my time trawling through your posting history to tally how many were actually about other people or calculate exactly how many recommendations your comments averaged. Others can do so if they wish.

Over the last month you have both claimed to be topping-up and selling shares in UFO. Seemingly on the whims of your fickle emotions you have berated people whose cheerleading you had previously supported, as well as agreed with those you had previously attacked for being negative. Over the last year you have seemingly drawn out several personal vendettas which extend to trying to discredit those that that don't value your opinion enough to engage in protracted squabbling. Just yesterday you repeatedly insulted someone else who hasn't posted here for quite a while. Your impulsive and often unprovoked belittling of others surely comprise a significant number of posts.

You seem to enjoy spending time trawling through other people's posting history on various bulletin boards looking for anything that you can present as incriminating. I'm not sure what radical scandal you feel can be uncovered in my own posting history? At worst, the comments of mine you have previously reposted did nothing more than illustrate the consistency of my opinion that investing in explorers, even the good ones, has downside risks and requires a lot of patience. Given that broadly speaking the exploration sector has done badly over the last year that I have been advising caution, these are views I remain happy to stand by and defend.

It is not my place to define what constitutes an unhealthy problem, however might the time and energy you spend trying to belittle various people here on LSE be more productively employed? Many individuals have challenged the hostile bullying that sadly characterises this board, suggesting it is clearly not just me that has noticed this. So ask yourself, whose reputation actually suffers the most if your own behaviour begins to look ever more inconsistent and disproportionate?

Well that's been somewhat of a mixed start to the year; a few days in which precious metals and some of the major producers are down (some a lot) but where a few of the smaller explorers have seen quite a bit of excited buying leading to price rises.

So, nice as it is to see UFO making a small move in the right direction for a change, I think we'll need to see some much larger and more prolonged price moves before we can confidently claim the junior space is back in favour again. It has an awful lot of lost ground to recover and is known for volatility where many a small fluctuation has mistakenly been called as the start of a new trend in a new direction.

I may yet be proved wrong and I'll be patiently holding regardless, however I'm still expecting the period of price stagnation to continue a bit longer until sentiment returns enough for prices to start responding to good news.