Member Info for Happyhaddock

JV provide a degree of certainty by de-risking things but also limit the potential upside. I don't see a JV as an absolute black/white thing, it will be the terms that matter.

At the end of the day investment decision should be calm, emotionless and based upon fact.... until we get any new facts, one way or the other, we are too much at risk of having nothing but emotion to react upon, hence it is probably best not to react at all.

I fully agree that the issue of trust lies solely in what the newly raised cash is to be used for.

I know it is not what private investors will want to hear, and would clearly love an immediate, open and honest explanation for the reasons and timing of the recent placement. However we must remain aware that there are all manner of legalities regarding how/when/what information a CEO can release. I'd be very surprised if we learn much from any media interview this weekend.

To stay the course as along term investor you have to have faith in the geology and believe in the BOD's past track record.... that trust is entirely dependent upon the time frame over which you judge that track record. Is being annoyed about a short term lack of clarity the same as doubting projects they have completed with prior companies, or what they have so far achieved within this one?

@Forza74 - obviously you are entitled to your own opinions but interpretation is a subjective thing.

To my mind the phrase "fully funded" used in the context of junior explorers is, and always has been, a somewhat open-ended one implying only that they have the funds to pay for the plans they have so far announced. I never take it to mean another placement isn't going to happen as exploration work is costly and is inevitably a reactive process that can't all be planned in detail on day one. If the new money gets spend to complete the plans previously announced then yes I will feel cheated, if it pays for additional work/equipment/licenses not previously mentioned then I don't see it as contradicting the statement of "Fully Funded" . So we'll just have to wait and see what the extra money is used for.

As for results being "imminent" developing a mine right from early stage exploration takes many, many years and at the moment such is the demand from a surging exploration sector (combined with covid and other issues) labs are all backed up with work delayed by many months, so in what way is not getting results within a few weeks outside of the context of "imminent"?

Investing in junior miners is a long term, slow-haul process with many bumps in the road where even the best companies go through periods of significant retracement. In a few years time the past few days activity will probably be both forgotten and hopefully irrelevant in terms of the future share price.

This may not be a view that others agree with, but I believe that if you are to invest in any junior explorer you have to accept that it is an unwritten rule that placements can drop at any time.

Phrases like "fully funded" are pretty meaningless when there will always be more expenses and more to be gained from further exploration., consequently I always expect to be reading RNS's about new placements. I do believe that good communication is important and can help with expectations but it is also an area where whatever a CEO does there will be critics.

I am invested in one explorer where shareholders constantly moan about the CEO making "non-news" RNS's where he comes out to issue another apology that they are still delayed and he still doesn't have the news/info share holders are waiting on.

I am invested in another where the CEO is criticised for making all sorts of "positive" promises to try keep shareholders interested but is lambasted when he can't/doesn't fulfil them bang on time.

In another the CEO is criticised simply for saying nothing when he has nothing to say as people read far too much into silences.

Simply put investors tend to be impatient and want everything now - I largely blame the internet. I've said before I wonder how modern/young investors would fair if they had to go back to the days of researching a company by going to the library to look up old newspaper articles, or by writing to the company for a prospectus, and where trading on the "latest" prices meant reading in the morning paper yesterday's close price.

Investing in AIM is a risky and speculative business where as they say "yer pays yer money and takes yer choice!"

There are probably plenty of folk here who, like me, are invested in various other junior explorers.

Some will be folk with a long term history and interest in the sector that goes back decades but I suspect many more will be recent "converts" to this sector possibly alerted to precious metals by such recent things as the reddit silver squeeze
movement.

I'm fortunate to have been here long enough to have first bought in to ECR at well below 2p, so even having averaged up I'm still not showing any kind of loss (though I'm way down on where things were a short while ago) . It is however worth mentioning to those new to this sector who may be feeling nervous about recent developments that history shows it typically takes at least five years for a junior explorer to either go big or go nowhere at all, and within that time frame it is common to expect at least one or two retracements of at least 50% along with various placements to keep generating funds.

You can chase small percentage profits by trading in and out of short term movements , but the folks who eventually get to talk about their x100 baggers (or more) are the ones with faith to get in early and then show patience.

Will ECR be one of those companies.. in truth I don't know, nobody does yet, but I'm here because I believe it could be and that it is doubtful that todays activities will even be remembered or relevant to the share price in a few years time.

Only yesterday I posted on another junior miners board words to the following effect:-

"placements are not inherently good or bad, it all depends upon whether you trust the board to have a clear plan which will use the money raised to grow the mkt cap enough to compensate for the extra shares created...
You can still get fat eating a thinner slice of a much larger pie!"

The gut reaction of private investors is to always to see placements as a bad thing ... I'll simply say that I used the drop in price to buy more.

I suppose the other argument is that technically dilution isn't a "good" or "bad" thing it is entirely dependent upon if you view the company having a good use and clear plan in how the use the money raised to grow the value of the company enough to offset the increase in shares.

A thinner slice of a much bigger pie can still make you fat ... it's just rare for markets to respond this way to share dilution.

@ Bugerov - I was thinking just the same thing .. maybe folk have some pre conceived ideas about how the relative values of the Canadian dollar and UK pound are heading?.

I'm not going to object to the price of my investment going up, I'd have more faith in it holding that price increase if I could see how the value had gone up.

Don't mistake not selling silver to the retail buying public as being the same as not having that silver...

I'm not saying there isn't a global silver crisis, but it is a market of sleight of hand and misdirection where nobody wants you to see the strings, let alone who is pulling them.

I suspect the issue at the moment is more one of processing large ingots down to small retail products fast enough to meet demand... the real fun and games will start when the whole supply chain of large ingots falls over and there really isn't any more silver to process.

any move in the right direction is a small positive, but most of the time the ups and downs are just the normal noise of day to day trading that cancel one another out as things go nowhere, of course you can always ask how much every move back down is a deliberate play to cancel an up, as opposed to a natural balancing of supply and demand.

I think to infer anything from a price move it needs to be of a few dollars an ounce where I'm not expecting any meaningful activity until the second half of 2021.

@smiller - yeah I agree in terms of about the only "early exit" I'd be happy making would be a small top slice to remove my initial investment if I could do so without significantly denting my overall holding...

Things were clearly getting ahead of themselves when we last spiked at about 3p, and with hindsight selling out and buying back at a much lower entry would have been very profitable, but over the long haul I can see prevailing economic conditions being very supportive for UFO for a good few years yet, and with a little luck by the time these change enough to justify selling up the mkt cap may (hopefully?) be above £1bn... the real question of course is what (if anything?) £1bn will actually be worth in a few years time or if the world will be operating on an entirely different and new form of currency?

@smiller there is some truth to the fact exits are harder to plan than entries, but I personally feel (and some may view me as wrong for it) that people make mistakes in basing exit strategies around achieving certain share prices.

I prefer to work on the ideas of having a set of conditions that lead me to invest, if I decided something was worth entering in the first place then I won't leave until those prevailing conditions have changed... you always hope the price has gone up a lot before the conditions change enough to warrant selling out but you can't be right all of the time.

In the case of UFO more of my reasons for investing are external macro-economic factors than those directly pertaining to UFO itself.

OMI was one I bought into at 3p and averaged up to 5p and where I'm now happy just to sit on the holding I've got as it does it's thing.

As for banks and bullion companies , the more I read about Basel III the more I am inclined to "join the dots" and see the second half of 2021 as an "interesting time"... I'll merely present the following few points and see if others join them together in the same I way I have in terms of the conclusions they may or may not arise at.

2008-2011 - A major global financial crisis as banks "screw up" over huge quantities of questionable mortgage loans and the authorities decide there needs to be some sort of financial regulation to stop this happening again leading to the first Basel agreements... though in reality the problems aren't fixed they are just concealed long enough to give those in power long enough to plan and execute their exit strategies.

2015-2018 central banks start re-patriating their own bullion reserves back into their own bullion vaults further triggering an increase in central bank bullion purchase to grow their nations holdings, this after years of central bank disinterest in bullion.

2019 The global economy looks ever more unstable with growing talk of a need for some sort of reset to deal with excess debt and deficit spending.

2020 covid becomes the scape goat to justify hitherto intolerable measure to print seemingly all fiat currencies into oblivion, this coincides with the popular growth of unbacked crypto-currencies and the talk of a need for state issued digital currency and what governments could back these with to get the population to accept and use them.

2021 the latest round of Basel agreements due to become law in the middle of this year sees new rules coming into play that render unallocated "paper" bullion as much less useful to banks whilst increasing the potential value of fully allocated bullion... whilst over the last few months in the run up to these changes the "spot" price of bullion has been hammered down despite a massive increase in demand and widespread physical shortages as the LBME and COMEX suddenly become sort of physical delivery mechanism after years of being little more than paper shuffling system .

What happens next? I have my theories which I don't really want to believe as they could easily be dismissed as suitable only for the tinfoil hat wearing types... however in uncertain times governments are far more willing to do extreme things and the public for more willing to accept them.

I think one of the best quotes I've heard recently is that "there has never been a worse time in history to be certain about anything...!" hence a need to prepare for everything.

well a little bit of good news and a little rise in SP. Hopefully this is the way things can continue to progress but time will tell...

this share has a tendency to move erratically on speculation about future expectations rather than current fact, so little would surprise me in the short term.

Longer term over the next 5+ years I'm still very confident but suspect it will be the second half of 2021 before we are likely to see any meaningful and sustained increase in the SP, but would gladly be proved wrong should things happen here much sooner!

@solstace - some useful info there

Sure you'd expect that the tailings and spoil heaps would be somewhat lower than what the old mines once produced, but it does suggest that those extraordinary figures in yesterday's RNS (140g/ton Au and 20,000g/ton) are roughly double what was generated several decades ago which isn't so so massively removed from what the mine was once producing.

I'll throw my hat in the ring and say somewhere between a little and a lot, which is as close I'd care to estimate with any degree of certainty,

If you want an actual number then the safest bet when making wild predictions about volatile short term stock price moves that go both up and down a lot is to guess it won't have changed, so lets stay still at 0.95p at the end of the month

@sanboy - I may owe you a partial apology, as having gone back and re-read this mornings RNS I seem to have conflated different parts of the statements about drilling... (I think I was somewhat blown away by the figures for the tailings being presented with no context)

You are correct that we have the permits for the area we are trialing the lightweight core rig and it is elsewhere we are still seeking permits to begin proper drilling.

@sanboy - I suppose it depends on how you define a coring rig and if you see it as a proper drill likely to deliver enough performance?

if you do then yes the RNS does cover "drilling" if you read it more cautiously they are testing a lightweight piece of equipment to see how effective it is going to be , would be great if they can get some meaningful data from it.

Whilst they will probably have taken and tested samples form various parts of different spoil heaps, good scientific practice would be to test each individually to give an idea of variation or uniformity across the heaps. This is what will enable you to gauge how reliable any estimates based upon individual data points from these samples will be.

If you look at the way miners report drill results, they always report the "highlights" from the best intersections of the best drill holes, and I'm sure that these 140g/t Au and 20,000g/t Ag are no different, just the best highlights rather than in any way being representative... it's just with drill results they tend to give you an indication of how much drilling was done to find these highlights. In isolation the data quoted about the quality of our tailings and spoil heaps is statistically meaningless, but highly valuable in promotional terms.

@sanboy technically drilling hasn't started we merely have a drill on site awaiting permits to use it. I don't want to play Devil's advocate but many junior miners are way behind their schedules awaiting permits for various things.... I'll not name the company, but one I'm invested in is still waiting on "imminent" permits when work was announced to start way back in November.

However I accept and agree with your point that for all of us long term investors, (or even those who have only just bought in) then the overall tone of the RNS is positive and good news.