Member Info for Happyhaddock

Much as making predictions and projections based upon another company's performance is entertaining, let's not forget no two company's are the same.

Circumstances have changed a lot over the last year or two, and may well be very different in another year or two again. It wasn't long ago people here on this board were confidently predicting we'd be in production by the end of this year and much richer because of it.

BBG recently said that the average time of their peers to progress from MRE to a producing DSO mine was 20 months. These aren't "average circumstances" as we all know everything has been taking longer than expected as external factors beyond our control keep changing radically.

Much as I've faith in BBG to make this work for us, it might be worth allowing for the fact it may be later than summer 2023 before we are up and running given that we still don't have our MRE that has been tantalisingly close for some time now.

As for share price, we can hope various milestones along the road to becoming a producer lift our price along the way, but I'd be surprised if we mirror the timing and magnitude of the moves of Fenix, all the more so as they were fortunate to go into production during somewhat of a mania for iron ore when prices were flying and everyone wanted in on the action... will that still be the case 12months from now? It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to assume going in to production with the Sirius extension should lift us above the recent 3p high, much above that may be very dependent upon circumstances beyond our control or advancing some of other projects to generate additional price gain.

I don't doubt our iron ore will be good for UFO, but by how much and how soon, well we'll just have to be patient to find out.... whilst unlikely, it may still be silver that has the first big impact upon our share price given the emotional way its followers react to the slightest of news.

Much as I am a silver bug and appreciate seeing the price rise today, I am also wary of ascribing much significance to such moves as for the last decade or more I have been reading/watching near weekly reports of experts proclaiming the next big move is finally upon us.

Let us keep in mind how much silver has moved up and down over the last twelve months. Todays move of approx $0.5 is just noise within recent volatility of about $5 or $6... until we are above $30 or below $22 I'd be reluctant to ascribe any great significance to such price action. Pressure is undoubtedly building and silver will eventually break out at some point in the future, but it will torture anyone who tries to predict when.

Nevertheless it's nice to see UFO perk up a little when silver prices do.

Ah but remember the best of "summer weather" always occurs in autumn... here's hoping the prophetic lawn mower sees a bit more action yet before the long nights draw in.

Although the focus here today has been on where iron ore prices may or may not be in a couple of years time, equally as important is where bulk shipping costs may be at that time.

Capesize freight costs have been going through the roof like nobodies business of late... weekly changes have been exceeding what many might consider excessive annual cost rises...

Profit margins are in the difference between sale price and cost of actually getting a product to a customer to sell it to them... all parts of that future calculation remain huge unknows for UFO the time being, so I'd not base any calculations about UFO's future iron ore profits based upon current operating costs or profit margins of companies like Rio Tinto or BHP.

I'm usually the first to encourage a cautious approach that considers all possibilities, so until we know our partners have formally committed to continuing there is always the possibility they won't.

However on the up side you'd have to ask what more they might want the drill results to show? How big a resource might they actually want/expect to stay committed? Precious metals might have been going through a rough patch the last year or so but if they walk away from us now it will almost certainly cost them a lot more should they want to come back again later at a time precious metals are doing much better and we've grown the resource even larger.

As Dip has said they key point is that any future business model allows for varying predictions both for sale price and also extraction/shipping costs.

This will work as a business if the extremes of fluctuation simply change the amount of profit we may be making. It fails if such fluctuations push things to the point of making losses.

We can all make our guesses and predictions but we have employed professional consultants to do this sort of thing for us because they (hopefully) know much more than we do.

As I've said many times before, this is a slow waiting game both in terms of physical field work and paper work, but we seem to be doing all the right things, so lets just wait and see what comes out of our MRE and scoping study once they are finally completed.

@silverhorse - finding a suitable analogy for the current economic outlook isn't easy, the one the springs to mind is a firework... it's spectacular to watch it go up but you know that at some point soon it will explode and fall back to earth.

Precious metals probably won't do well on the way up nor in the explosion, but should do very well in the aftermath. I think anybody that makes any confident predictions about what will be good or bad about the financial future at the moment is deluding themselves but I've "placed my bets" and we'll see what happens.

Well if any offence was caused by mis-assumption then I apologise, though I stand by my statement that what you said could be equally true of any and all here;

That those who are naturally dishonest tend to be more likely to assume the worst of others, those who are honest tend to give others the benefit of the doubt.

@lyndon69 - it's fairly simple if you don't trust me then ignore what I have to say, it's of no great concern of mine if a stranger on the internet doesn't believe me. After all everything you have implied about me could be just as true about you or anybody else posting here.

Long and the short of it is that various studies have shown that the most mistrustful people tend to be those who are themselves dishonest. That open and honest people are far less likely to conceive of such things or imagine others may behave in such a way.

So let me ask you, if you wanted to create an alternative, additional or false identity that others would accept and which would "slip under their radar" as unremarkable without arising suspicion, in what way would it resemble me?

@smiller - several months go when this pumper/dumper site last got mentioned I tried a few experiments in terms of my own posts, experiments which I commented upon at the time.

I moved up their list for UFO most on a day when I posted nothing at all simply because others above me who had gone longer without posting moved down the list, and I also moved up significantly on a day I purposefully avoided talking about UFO and limited my posts to some eccentric discussion about the etymology of some obscure vocabulary others had used. You can talk up the share, talk it down, or talk about something else altogether that site doesn't differentiate for all it's claims about natural language processing and sentiment analysis.

Calling it a lazy algorithm is probable over selling it, it is as you say, little more than a post counter that weights in favour of how recent posts are. It makes little effort to take into account what is written.... it's a clickbait website of no useful purpose

@wentsland - there's nothing wrong with questioning things as you do, I've long encouraged folk to think for themselves rather than be lead around like sheep.

I also learned long ago that when your own lifestyle is one others consider to be somewhat eccentric, then there are those who struggle to accept you at face value and cynically assume you must be lying to achieve some devious ulterior motive... I leaned to deal with that years ago so its "water off a duck's back" as the saying goes, so don't worry about upsetting me.

I've stated several times that I started frequenting LSE bulletin boards because I find other investors' psychology fascinating, but if you don't want to believe that then that's your choice to make. (UFO tends to have the most irrationally passionate yet distracted investors of all the companies I'm invested in such that there's probably an academic paper to be written just about threads like this one.)... but anyway;

If you chose to believe I'm some evil agent of the dark web here to brainwash everyone then so be it.

If you choose to believe I'm some sad lonely old **** with too much time on my hands then so be it.

If you choose to think I'm some malfunctioning AI chat-bot then I'd actually find that quite amusing.

At the end of the day you can think of me whatever you want, up until you started this thread I hadn't thought of you at all.

@Steveiom. - Much as I share the sentiment that we should make good money from our iron ore, extraction costs are only one factor, in many cases the shipping costs to get the ore from your own hole in the ground to an actual customer, or at least a major port can be more than the costs of getting the ore out of the ground. $20/t extraction costs for the big boys may prove trivial to smaller producers having to spend as much as $80/t to move the ore once they've got it out of the ground.

We aren't too far from transport infrastructure or the nearest port so I'm hoping shipping costs aren't going to be too much of a burden on us, plus I doubt UFO would be pursuing this if it wasn't likely to be profitable. However, until we've got a lot more by way of financial modelling from some sort of feasibility study we are guessing that there is a shed load of profit to be had from this ore.

Well as is ever the case here differences of opinion turn to personal attacks, but putting that aside;

The latest proactive article seems to be the first time I've actually seen UFO put forward some sort of timescale for production of our iron, which in combination with today's "discussion" on this board about future iron ore prices has pretty much repeated the content of a post I made some months ago talking about how little of use could be gained from trying to predict how selling our iron ore might possibly impact upon our share price in the future.

A few months ago my cautious tone was largely dismissed for suggesting it would be sensible to allow as much as a two year window before we might actually be producing, and similarly a few months ago in the same post I also suggested that there were wildly varying predictions about where iron ore prices may be by then. That if you allowed for likely increases in production costs our iron ore may range from being uneconomic to extract in the most bearish of cases, though to extremely profitable in the most bullish of cases, most likely working out somewhere between such extremes, but that we were dealing with too many future unknows to actually "calculate" anything meaningful. I'd also posted just in the last few days about allowing plenty of time for admin and paper work to move forward with mining permits.

Nice to see such topics being more widely accepted and discussed here now, as with info from UFO themselves it may curtail some of the wild calls about just how soon everything may come good for UFO.

We've along way to go, exploration is a slow risky process involving many future unknowns, but we do seem to be doing the right things and making progress.

clearly you can find "experts" making all sorts of contradictory forecasts for the future which can support any argument you wish to make, all we can talk about with certainty is the past, where high grade DSO has dropped in price by about 25% in the last 30 days down to approx $160/t, but is still massively up on a year ago.

@Max - not so much to disagree with you, more to provide balance and expand upon your point, but there is somewhat of a "battle" going on in China to drive down pollution and their steel industry is bearing much of the brunt of this, so it has been hitting demand and prices for iron ore.

... the plus side as you say is that DSO is seen as less polluting to refine as it is much more iron and much less impurities so that may act in our favour even if overall demand is being held back.... it will be an interesting one to watch play out, especially in terms of how China's economy fairs overall and whether the high levels of demand for steel in China over recent years continues.

@silverhorse - Iron is one of the most abundant metals in the earths crust and so it hard to go anywhere and not find at least some iron ore, so yes there is plenty of it in the UK... the question is more what local legislation and geography makes economic to mine.

The industrial revolution that made England the power house of the world was built on mining iron and coal from UK soil, but today nobody in the UK wants the disruption and environmental impact of heavy mining industry on their doorstep... whereas places like Australia are so much bigger that not only do they not have the problems with complaining neighbours, they also have economies of scale when mining seriously huge holes in the ground with seriously huge equipment.

Although no longer surprised by it, I still find it odd that when we put out good news about silver we tend to hold most, if not all, of any price gains we make, yet when we put out good news about iron we blip up and almost invariably end up lower than where se started. I myself am more interested in our silver projects but that doesn't mean I'm ignorant of the potential for our iron.

I know we are too small to attract any attention from institutional investors and fund mangers so we are entirely at the mercy of impatient and fickle private investor sentiment... but the markets do seem to be sending a message that its not our iron they are interested in.

Market sentiment swings to and fro so will presumably return at some point, but will we have to be making demonstrable profits from iron before enough start to care about how much iron we actually seem to have?

@Dip666 - very true, whilst this remains an unknown it may eventually turn out to be a trivial matter.

There is every reason to assume an Australian silver mine may present different problems to a Cornish tin mine. In fact given that I might claim to be more familiar with the history of the Cornish tin mining industry than the Australian silver mining industry I'd guess the average UK tin mine is deeper than EH, which may (or may not) ease the process of getting the water out....

We'll just have to wait and see what happens on this front, but it's not a matter that should be forgotten.

I'm surprised this post hasn't attracted more attention as it another "unknown" UFO will have to deal with going forward, though it may not be the company's immediate priority in light of the current attention on iron ore.

However, keeping water out of mines has long been a major determining factor in terms of where/how mines can be built where the advances in pumping technology over the last few hundred years have increased the possibilities regarding what is mineable.

It might not be what other people consider good news, but I liked the fact that when pushed for a date for when this first JORC for Sirius might be completed, Bill had the courage and honesty to simply say that they would do this in as timely a fashion as possible. That with circumstances and delays as they are it would be unrealistic to actually put an exact date on things.

The more investors can keep their expectations and timescales realistic the less likely folk are to get frustrated going forward.