Member Info for Happyhaddock

@Suthy - I'm with you on this one, I know my own timing stinks so prefer to work on an approach of doing my research, finding a company I like the long term prospects of, deciding a price I am happy to buy in at, and if that price comes around I buy in and then watch from the sidelines whilst the passage of time does it's thing. From my point of view the main thing is always to be clear about what are hard numerical facts you can base valuations upon, and what is inference driven sentiment. Whilst sentiment can be a stronger mover of share prices at times, it is fickle and can't be relied upon over the long term.

The very reason I started frequenting Bulletin boards was to try and get a better understanding of the psychology and sometimes irrational short term sentiment of other investors in the hope I may get better at judging the volatile ups and downs in a share price. However I still find judging probabilities around long term fundamentals a more profitable approach that better suits my skills, and where I have always been happy with my annual profits.

I've nothing to gain by arguing. I've stated my position and there's no compulsion for anyone to listen to me if they don't find my point of view helpful, though clearly there are those on this board that do appreciate my point of view.

At the end of the day everyone will do what they think is best for themselves; those with the highest expectations are the ones most likely to be disappointed by reality, those with more cautious expectations are the ones most likely to see them exceeded.

@lucky... there may be "disingenuous posters calling it up or down to suit their trading position" but I've stated I'm not one of them and that I've never sold a share in ECR.

You may not believe me, which may say more about you than me, but that is beside the point. The vast majority of my posts across the various junior explorers I hold shares in are all about providing balance and countering the excessive over optimism that can be found on most companies bulletin boards with crowds cheering each other on to ever more ambitious hopes that leads naive investors to false expectations about the magnitude and speed of possible moves in a share price.

I wouldn't be invested here if I didn't believe in the company's long term prospects, but I have found it wise not to get carried away by what others here say given that, on average, statistics show that about three quarters of private investors lose money trading equities.

I stand by what I said that ECR is selling a great story that I am happy to have invested in to, but it does have a heck of long way to go before it becomes a profitable gold miner with umpteen opportunities for things to go wrong along the way. That's not a criticism of ECR, just a reflection of what the exploration sector is. I think statistically only about one in two thousand gold explorers actually make it to becoming a mine, but they all have a CEO putting forward reasons as to why they are going to be the next big thing.

@lucky - I've never sold any ECR shares, only added a few because of my belief in what the company are doing.

However I do believe that folk on most bulletin boards get too excited and spin out great stories leading them to expect too much too soon from their favoured company.

People here are acting as if it's now pretty much a given that this is going to become a profitable gold mine in the near future and that the share price can only go up.

Buying more than one drill rig leads us to infer confident management, talk of more exploration licenses leads us to infer confident management, buying land leads us to infer confident management, running lots of drill campaigns leads us to infer confident management, gold showing up in most of our drills results leads us to infer we will find a major deposit (or more than one?), talk of turning away possible JV's leads us to infer there are many and better potential partners out there to fund future work for us.

All of these are positive assumptions to help create a story to market a tiny early stage junior explorer with a reasonable bank balance for its size. Our CEO is "talking the talk" whilst spending that money at a fair rate and creating a positive buzz by doing so, meaning that at some point we won't have such a good bank balance and will be reliant upon the strength of that story to raise more funds.

None of the above is a certain route to a JORC compliant resource, or a bankable feasibility study, or a billion dollar bank balance needed to guarantee building and operating a profitable gold mine. That's all many years down the line with a lot more questions to be answered and a lot more work to do before then, but many seem to be assuming it is now guaranteed that this is all part of our near future.

All I'm saying is that whilst the probability of success seems to be growing as we promote ourselves with a great story about doing all the right things, lets not get ahead of ourselves.

It's a case of the old cliche of selling a narrative.

Folk are spinning a great story around ECR, and IF, I repeat "IF" it comes true then all us folk here will become very rich. However a narrative or story tends to be very separate from hard facts, being largely built upon assumptions and inferences.

So far we seem to be doing lots of positive things and the geology keeps giving us hints of positive things which makes it easy to sustain the narrative. However if we strip back to only the known facts, then the story isn't quite the same one.

I'm a LTH and happy to wait this out and see how the story unfolds, but this comes with no guarantees, you don't get the big rewards without the associated risks.

Just a small punt in WSBN ... its got a great narrative that folk seem to like and enough plays that it is not wholly reliant upon just one story... of course what will count is drill results, if the ground is barren people will drop the story quick enough, but that's the risk with all explorers.

When I first looked at it, it was only at 2p but I felt UFO at 0.1p was a better play and so that's where I put my money (and I have so far done better with UFO than I would have done buying WSBN at 2p) , since then I've watched WSBN run up to about 20p and back down to where I bought in at about 9p.

@Dip666 - I think we're of a similar mindset ... do the research, find something you are comfortable and confident about, decide the price you are happy to buy in at in terms of tipping the balance of probabilities in your favour (nothing is ever certain), wait for that price to come around then having purchased just let the passage of time work in your favour.

Myself I finally added another company to my portfolio last month after more than 12months of watching and waiting for its share price to drop to a sensible buy in price (half its recent peak); it is another very risky junior at the start of its adventure but with great potential if the geology plays ball and delivers all it is hinting at. If it doesn't then so be it, you don't win them all, in fact with junior explorers you should expect to win very few. Yet just one or two winners can be more than enough to carry the losses on a portfolio full of losers, where so far I'm fortunate to not have too many losers in my portfolio leading to a healthy bottom line.

OK so I'll do my usual wet blanket thing here... silver prices fluctuate a lot all the time, clearly we all want to see the price going up rather than down, but judged in the context of range trading within about $23/oz and $29/oz silver isn't doing anything different today than it has been doing for the last 12-14months.

@Dip666 - although the basics of the lassonde curve are things anybody dabbling in mining stocks should already know, I think that video is certainly one of the better explanations of it I've come across for those thinking of entering the sector.

I also appreciate you stressing the timeframes. The last year has been a hard battle to get some folk here to accept that you can be optimistic without preaching that we'll all be millionaires by tea time. Investing in junior explorers is largely about disappointingly long waits and not going the direction you want to, but having the patience to still be around when things do go right as they can change very quickly. Jumping in and out to catch only the rises is a brilliant theory, but one that loses most people large amounts of cash through assuming they actually are skilled enough to do just that.

"All lths that have topped up in last 10 months are now underwater im like 30pc down.. its annoying and frustrating more than anything but its not the end of the world as the prospects outweigh the negatives."

Much as I get the general sentiment it's not strictly true, many will only be down on the extra shares they topped up with. Myself I'd assumed we wouldn't drop much below 1.5p so topped up a little just below that, I'm down almost 50% on those few shares, but my overall average still leaves me in decent multi-bag territory. (I've always said my timing stinks as a trader, that's why I see myself more as a long term value investor)

However I appreciate many will be down overall, but for those that recognise the prices on AIM rarely reflect underlying value and go up and down in a volatile fashion, then I assume we're all here because we are willing to wait out any drops in price.

"Really losing confidence with this share. It's getting smashed to pieces"

I always find statements like this odd in so much as the times you can be most confident of making gains are when the SP is on its knees at unjustifiable lows, the time to lose confidence (and not buy in) is when the SP is spiking to unrealistic highs that seem unjustified like last year's 3p

Other than that AIM shares are all volatile, junior explorers all the more so... I'm assuming all we have to do is be patient and wait, where even without action from UFO the SP should go up again at some point, a price rise that is all the more likely given the work the company has been doing to improve its prospects.

It's perfectly normal for even the best of junior explorers to go through drops of 50% or more and have bad years, just ride them out as part of the process.

Somebody aught to tell Phil that doing what you said you'd do really isn't SGZ's way ... he'll start confusing, maybe even frightening those of us long timers used to Richard Gray's old press statements.

At this rate people might even start believing what our new CEO says!

BB - I think I've said before that I always wanted a different job for every day of my life and over the years I've done a heck of a lot of stuff - but more than anything I hate internal office politics and pointless one-upmanship which is why I've spent the last couple of decades self employed.

My last formal employment with a salary and a boss was a bit of a joke; technically I didn't apply for the post, they effectively head hunted me. I spent the interview explaining why I didn't really want the job and why I didn't think I would suit the position (or more particularly the organisation), they kept arguing otherwise.

Long and the short of it was that they offered me a significant salary well above the advertised rate to get me to say yes, then one year later effectively fired me for the very reasons I said I wouldn't be suitable - namely much as I got on with my immediate line manager who was happy with my results, surprised and disappointed to see me go, from day one I'd always told senior management I'd no interest in their red tape and delusions of grandeur, if they wanted me to get the job done I'd do that, if they wanted me to jump through pointless hoops that inconvenienced me and compromised my work just to make others look good then we weren't going to get on!

God knows why they employed me in the first place, but the reasons we parted company were clear!

Well much as we haven't yet had that outstanding RNS that is going to propel our SP much higher, we just keep getting messages that say ECR seems to have no doubts it is moving forward; that all us investors have to do is sit back and wait patiently until such a point as the markets finally decide to acknowledge the progress we are making.

Hopefully today may see a little move up, but I'm not expecting anything significant just yet.

@BB getting $30/t for selling for a big one off payment and leaving others with the hassle of actually mining would be one heck of deal, I'd be surprised if we achieved anywhere close to that figure.

I know folks consider me overly cautious, but I'm still working on a possibility that total profits from mining this in or after 2023 may not be much more than $30/t. I hope I'm wrong to do so, but I'm allowing for small producers costs probably being over $100/t by the time we are mining and allowing for ore prices to possibly be under $150/t (it was only a few weeks ago that high grade DSO got down close to $130/t and at the start of the pandemic was at $80/t) . This really is a situation where the profitability of such a venture for UFO is more dependent upon external factors than our own efforts, something which may sway things in favour of taking a modest but know profit on a one off payment if offered over doing things our selves.

The big producers costs will always be low enough to make great profits on any plausible iron ore price, smaller producers only enjoyed such a luxury with ore prices well north of $150/t.

@smiller - any option that helps shave money off potential transportation costs (likely to be greater than our excavation costs) is well worth looking at... hopefully we'll get to read a scoping study at some point that puts a lot of projected numbers for different options down on paper for us to compare.

For the time being I'm getting the impression our CEO favours going it alone and subcontracting out excavation and haulage. We'll see if that is still the favoured approach once a scoping study has processed some hard data.

@Haych I'd expect the potential size and value of Brockman to be of possible interest as a JV to some of the bigger players, but that unknown is some way down the road yet. We still haven't got any drill data for it, so that hasn't really got started yet , let alone being close to any conclusion. It could however make a big difference to our share price sometime from now.

The smaller Hanc**k may or may not suit a JV. Though this wouldn't necessarily speed up a route to production, it may give a faster boost to our share price at the cost of a smaller long term return.

We've not been told anything definite by our CEO but it's looking as if the small Sirius extension part of our smaller Hanc**k license may be the fist to go into production as our own tiny independently run venture. Until we get an MRE and scoping study we won't have any idea about how profitable they expect it to be. However, I'm guessing based upon some very rough calculations of my own, that by 2023 when it is likely to go into production it is probable that it may add no more than 2p to our share price. Many will see this as very pessimistic both in terms of timescale and price rise given the wild predictions I've seen posted here. After all it was not long ago that there were calls here saying we'd definitely be producing iron by the end of 2021 and have reached a double digit share price because of it; I hope nobody still thinks this looks probable?

Myself I'm more focused on the crazy reactions the market can have to news about precious metals.... if the Sirius extension does nothing more than provide funds for exploration at EH I'll be content.

@smiller - whilst I'd hope progress with our iron may nudge our SP a little along the way and agree that it is our main focus for the remainder of this year, I'm not expecting to see our first iron actually go into production until 2023, so I'm reckoning on another year or more of the crazy price fluctuations and volatile sentiment that goes with being an explorer rather than a miner... but I do expect to see a much stronger company come out the other end of the process.

2025 is a key date for me personally when I'd expect to be liquidating some assets, but there are no reasons UFO's progress should fit my own personal timetable. I merely hope that in 2025 when I look at UFO it has grown considerably but that I still feel it has as much potential upside again to justify me selling something else rather than UFO.

@napth - I've always been positive about UFO - that's why it's my largest equity holding ... it is just that in the face of the wild unerring enthusiasm and outrageous predictions some here make, my pragmatically moderated optimism ends up sounding frankly bearish.

I do think there's money to be made from our iron, just not as much money or as quickly as others believe.

As I've said before EH is my main interest in UFO as it is a real wild card in terms of what it may surprise us with, but that there are no guarantees.

@BB "I’d comfortably say before Christmas. Which year I won’t say."

That sounds like one of my lines... I'm optimistic there's a lot more at EH than we so far know about, but also aware of how long it can take to fully drill large tenements to actually define what is down there.... there's a reason the successful experts talk about needing to give juniors at least 5-10 years to genuinely profit from a good investment.