Member Info for Happyhaddock

@forza --- AIM is all about hype and sentiment, it will continue to move ECR up and down just as it moves other AIM shares on a day to day basis.

There are fundamentals under there that will eventually come in to play, but that is not the same as saying there are certainties or guarantees. We all have to decide if we believe the potential rewards outweigh the potential risks whilst trying to ignore the hype and short term sentiment that confuses such judgement.

@smiller - as it stands at the moment EH is tiny and largely a trifling sideline to UFO's iron projects. However if you look at the sort of tonnage of a "worthwhile" silver deposit, the grades we already know are there and the way silver prices are precited to be going, it isn't difficult to imagine a successful series of drill campaigns at EH leading to it being worth more than our iron.

Sure at this point it is a speculative punt on an unknown future, and on its own possibly not reason to invest in UFO at todays share price. However the way I see it is that the iron provides enough de-risking that EH is effectively a "free" punt or wild card that interests me more, plus there always our silver project in South America.

@stap - here's hoping the overtime won't be needed.

Just remember the worst of companies on AIM can multi-bag for the wrong reason and then crash back just as quickly. Similarly the best of companies can crash for the wrong reason only to go on and then multi-bag.

I've held OMI for some time and seen it head into and out of multi-bag profits for me more than once. Some will encourage you take small profits when they are available. Myself I believe most miss out on the big profits because they are afraid of losing the small ones.

I am happy the potential long term benefits outweigh the long term risks and so I just keep holding, waiting and hoping. However I accept that the wait for really big gains may be years rather than weeks or months, and have to accept it might never come.

@smiller - it certainly wouldn't be the first time a major has walked out on a deal only for a project to deliver the goods and then attract in a different partner at a much higher price.

It would be nice if we could add copper (or gold) to our list of commodities... though as I've said before my primary reason for being here is to drill EH to look like swiss cheese, something I'm hoping our iron will fund over the next few years, whereas I know many view the iron as the big prize in its own right.

@smiller - with regard to your third point, I think the very nature of exploration and the potential delays and unknows makes working across several project simultaneously a good idea. Providing the BOD can actually juggle all the balls, it ensures they aren't being paid to twiddle their thumbs whilst we wait for any one hold up.

@Stap - As many have said AIM is a place where it is easy to get spanked by the market even if you know what you are doing. If you are unfamiliar with junior miners then take it that they are one of, if not the highest risk/reward sectors you can speculate in. As a whole, the sector loses a small fortune year after year but people are still attracted to it by the tiny minority of companies that make inordinate gains. (Think of it as the opposite of Russian roulette where most chambers of the gun are loaded with a bullet to wipe you out, and you can count simply not shooting yourself as a sign of success))

Statistics also show that on average about three quarters of private investors lose money trading the wider markets (probably much more than this if investing in the exploration sector). There are many more new/young investors showing up over the last 12-18months and when the markets as a whole are doing well and constantly setting new highs it is easy to fool yourself that you are successful because you have made a profit. Until you have ridden out a tough bear market you have no measure of what kind of investor you are.

The best education anybody could get in how to invest (or how not to invest) is to actually lose their own cash ... it hurts and your learn fast from it. If you are new to this I would suggest working out how much you are willing to pay for a good financial education and then only invest that. If you come out the other end with any of that cash remaining think of it as perk. If you lose it all then you will have gone in expecting that.

OMI is certainly one of the safer and more advanced of the "tiddler" explorers but anybody that tells you it a sure home run is failing to understand the inherent risk.

You need to do a lot of research to be sure you understand the risk and that you judge the potential reward to be worth that risk. Just as importantly you need to understand the timescales and inherent volatility of of explorers. If you don't appreciate this even the best of the best will scare you witless into selling out at the wrong time.

Well whilst it is good to know that Alien still have faith and believe in the potential of Donvan2, I doubt this was the RNS most here would have been waiting/wanting to hear.

However exploration is a slow process, whether that be paper work and admin to get permission to do anything, the actual physical work in the filed, or the analytical work afterwards.

We all know we just have to be patient, ignore the day to day and focus on where we may be in a year or two from now, not that knowing this actually makes the waiting any easier.

I've always looked at it the other way around; that is to say motives are only relevant if you start acting upon other people's views without question.

If you assume most of what is said is idle chit-chat and always verify the few points you intend acting upon, then you naturally filter out poor advice regardless of where it is coming from. After all well meaning people can still be misinformed, jut as devious people may occasionally offer good advice.

I don't see any one single factor, group or business making a huge difference to the silver price, but it may well be a case of slowly growing demand from many places combined with dwindling supply building pressure over the coming years until we reach the point of the proverbial "straw that breaks the camels back". Plus we have to recognize that many industrial users benefit from keeping prices low so they won't do anything that drives up prices until it becomes a matter of last resort simply to ensure supply.

When that happens I haven't a clue. I do however believe that the timescale that this may happen over will be long enough for many of the reddit crowd who are there to make quick buck, rather than because they really understand what their own movement is about , may well have lost interest and moved on.

Owning silver may at some future unknown point prove to be a phenomenal investment, but I think the better reason to own both silver and gold is more as a form of long term insurance. I've held my "insurance policy" for more than a decade and intend to keep holding it over the coming decades.

Price difference between gold and silver is very much a case of centuries of huge demand for gold and comparatively minimal current demand for silver. Gold has always been held as a store of wealth by everybody from central banks down so there are tons of bars and ingots stored all over the world.

Silver pretty much fell out of favour as a monetary metal and so the huge stores of silver were mostly sold out and were consumed by industry. The planet's industries now consume more silver than it mines, and this just as there is a hint of monetary interest returning to the metal. Monetary interest will never (in my opinion) get any where near close to what it was when it formed the coinage of pretty much every country on the planet. However it doesn't have to return to those levels, as even a small percentage of that interest will push prices so far off the chart we won't know what to do with ourselves.

As I've said before, I've read that a company like Apple could take its free cash , and without needing any loan or additional raise, purchase the entire planet's silver mining industry.... so if they decide that silver may get difficult to source for their electronic gadgets how much might they try to buy, and how might their competitors respond, and what sort of reaction might that provoke in investors in the silver space?

It's easy to be bullish on silver, but we must counter that by recognising how long things have been this way without absolute chaos being unleashed.

There's a lot of silver about but little of the "scrap" is economic to recycle at current prices. Thirty years from now it may be more economic to "mine" old rubbish dumps for dead electronics than go drilling fresh rock to look for virgin silver.

As prices rise there will always be bits of jewellery or old cutlery that finds it's way in to the melting pot and back to market but realistically in terms of above ground available supplies I'd say silver is probably already rarer than gold, simply because so much of that which is mined gets consumed in tiny amounts and ends up in landfill.

I think we all can tell a tale or two about the yanks and the things they say.

I never forget visiting Durham cathedral and over hearing two holiday makers from the US arguing about if it was or wasn't more than one hundred years old and why they hadn't built it closer to the railway station to make it easier for tourists to walk to.

Shushhh! don't mention the share price ... you'll frighten it.

It's being brave and trying a move in an unfamiliar direction.

Juts to add one thing that perhaps has only been hinted at obliquely rather than directly stated... having a lot of cash in the bank offers us some protection against having our arm twisted over a cheeky JV offer.

Our CEO has repeatedly implied possible partners are knocking at his door and that he has kept some at arms length because he doesn't like the terms they are offering. Whether he is right or wrong to do this is another question entirely but without the extra placing and option to just keep funding lots more drilling on our own we may have ended up having to accept a poor JV.

whether it says more about me than the company I don't know? ...

However being invested in various junior explorers it is interesting to note as a causal observation (more than detailed statistical analysis), that the average OMI trade seems more than most others explorers. At the minute almost all the trades in OMI are for reasonable four figure sums, whereas with many other explorers I am used to seeing a lot of trades go through for fifty quid here and a couple of hundred quid there.

It really suggests, to me at least, that compared to others OMI is starting to be viewed as more "investible" rather than a speculative punt by a lot of rainbow chasing "pocket money traders".... Of course it could be merely coincidence and we may see a spurt of trades for just an odd ten quid go through.

@jwoz - all junior explorers are sentiment driven and as we know sentiment is fickle. The fundamentals here look strong over the long term, but worriers can easily talk themselves out of good investments adding to short term volatility.

It is always possible that the SP could move up or down erratically for no obvious reason other than sentiment, as is the possibility of future placements to raise funds which is why folk do worry. However I agree the positives about the future should be the stronger narrative at the moment as we are well funded and in better shape than most explorers.

@silverhorse - I possibly shouldn't laugh - but the irony of some of your posts amuse me... you are encouraged to show a little patience and then you immediately talk about August as if a few weeks down the road is showing patience.

I may be viewed as a doddery old codger who would benefit from a little of the enthusiasm and self confidence of youth, but you need to be tolerant of timescales measured in years when dealing with developing mineral exploration projects; -

...Otherwise you are not "investing" in them, merely "trading" changes in sentiment.... though that is not to say a few skilled individuals don't make a lot of money out of trading them, and possibly more than I may make out of them as a long term investments. Equally though many more lose a lot realising they don't know how to trade short term, or more particularly that they are too emotionally involved to buy and sell when the facts suggest they should.

but they sed I got to stay ere for extra lessons cos I was "special" - is you sayin it might be a different kind of "special" to what i first fought?

Fair point napth - GGP does benefit from having the simpler task of shipping ore a couple or hours down the road rather than building an entire new processing plant, that said excavating a mine is still a fair engineering/development project in it's own right even if it is being driven at near warp speed compared to many other new mines.

Okay folks, raise your hand if you ain't 'ere any more!