Member Info for HarChris

The TGR share price averaged 100p in its first year of trading on the markets in 2021. At that time mgmt had announced the planned acquisition of Suni Resources but with plenty more hurdles to jump over before that was to make it over the line.

Operational difficulties started early in 2022 with Storm Ana the first of five tropical storms causing disruption and highlighting the potential risks going forward operating in such a natural disaster prone area. Much of 2022 was spent improving infrastructure at Vatomina so as the company could be as best placed as possible to ride out future serious adverse weather events as well as other work such as building the new road connecting Sahamamy project to National Highway 2 and Vatomina project

Despite all these challenges and low initial production/sales figures the TGR share price still averaged 50p a share over the year with sector-wide sentiment remaining fairly high.

 Now fast forward to today. With TGR’s lack of debt and having survived the recent headwinds without a liquidity crisis that would have forced TGR into raising at such an inopportune time TGR are now able to prudently ramp up operations towards the ~25k tpa target run rate by the end of this year. The lower prices and softening graphite sentiment is bringing significant challenges to graphite peers that are either pre production or unable to operate / ramp up self-sufficiently like TGR, increasing the chance of a deficit steadily bubbling away in the background as EV growth continues globally. 

Once the spotlight turns back on the sector TGR will have increased operational size many times over and will be throwing off cash. They’ll have demonstrated their low-cost expansion strategy and be visibly identifiable as the second largest graphite producer Ex China with the assets in place across two jurisdictions to increase operational size many times over from the new 30ktpa capacity base (80ktpa next target).

I personally see the recent bumps in the road as nothing but typical teething problems that have each been addressed in what is an ambitious growth journey and so have increased by holding by ~50% over the last 7-10 days following the recent share price slump as I’m sure we’ll all look back and remember this as the last big opportunity to accumulate before the steady climb back to and beyond ATHs.

I agree with Stokey's 18:57 post, we'll find out what the market thinks the odds are next week, not this week. Any buying pressure wouldn't likely to really kick in til ~48 hours prior to the 31st.

What do you mean lose the case? If you mean be forced to pay the original stated figure of £134.6m then novacyt would be toast, obviously. I would put the chance of that actually happening at close to zero though so really your question can't be answered very easily because we don't know what losing would look like exactly in financial terms.

Imo a scenario that more or less wiped out Novacyt's cash position is possible but very unlikely with some sort of middle ground reached the most likely outcome and the outcome where Novacyt win and receive compensation but not the full £81.5m counterclaim being the second most likely outcome.

Basically an investment prior to resolution depends on your own personal risk appetite with the added possibility that an agreement is reached between now and June 2024.

The shares will have been issued by now almost certainly although we won’t know 100% til there’s an official Total Voting Rights rns.

Too late for what? Buying and selling is what makes a market, I’m sure if investors truly did sell because of the ‘concerns’ then they’ll buy back when those ‘concerns’ are addressed.

TGR are slowly but surely dealing with all the uncertainty but that’ll only mean more digging for new ‘concerns’ by those with an ulterior motive.

True but we're also heading towards the halving so the price needs to be double what it was before keeping everything else equal... it's a tall ask for projected profits to come even close to Nov'21 but those that have increased their hash rate enormously will stand in good stead and for those that haven't it's goodbye Charlie.

The last point is why I don't think we'll ever see anything like what we saw in 2021 with the miners. Back then what we had was a sector previously unheard of and gaining attention at lightning speed that suddenly saw extrapolated profits and forward PEs that were off the scale. You had bitcoin increasing at a pace that hash rate simply couldn't come close to matching.

This time around we'd need to see around $200K in very short order to be back at the same price to hash rate ratio of November 2021, basically it's rather unlikely although that's not to say there aren't life changing sums of money to be made still.

For Argo all eyes are on that next difficulty adjustment. I'm seeing an expected 5% rise in 3 days time to a new all time high which compounded with a 12% fall in BTC price will put Argo's cash position under extreme pressure, especially if they've already allocated all of the placing money for debt repayments.

Hash rate is now ~140% higher than it was in November 2021 when bitcoin reached its all time high of ~$68k, no wonder there isn't much profit being made.

Ha well when you were at £100m Novacyt was on the verge of touching £1B mcap - that was 2020 madness for you!

None of us can say for sure why the revenue has been so poor since covid but it's certainly been disheartening and why the newly installed CEO from 2021 left just a year later.

I'd keep it simple if I was you Davand. You appear to really rate the suite of products Yourgene has and believe the potential was there to grow into a £100m+ company. What yourgene has now is a similar business in novacyt to synergise with, with no debt and up to £50m of cash to grow this newly merged entity. And you also have the man you thoroughly dislike, Lyn Rees, with less control than he had before and unlikely to last in the position if he doesn't hit the ground running.

That should look an enticing proposition from where you're standing.

I'm not sure it was as stressful back then. Your average bitcoin investor would have simply been sticking twenty quid on so after such a fall they'd have close to a score, max.

It'll be in more recent times that many ordinary people have risked large percentages of their personal wealth and hence what happens from about $20K onwards is what matters most.

Nobody sensible thinks bitcoin is going to zero but for miners it's essential that there's a crazy, hyped bull period every few years so as to secure funding for whatever is to come over the following two or three years and to give breathing space re halving.

Sans bull run the grim reaper will slowly come for many of the miners, starting with Argo and then knocking on the door of the next highest geared company.

Everyone of us on this side of the aisle will have been confident that this would go through without any gazumping. Would probably have gone through 20% lower even with the blessing of the Yourgene board.

It's the sad reality of needing to return to the market for cash in this environment - any liquidity issues after the deeply discounted December placing would have been curtains.

Do share how you think a company with ~£55m debt and no cash just switches to concentrating on Ethereum?

I've got more chance of setting up a venture like that than Argo does of pivoting.

What would Argo's fleet that's collaterized against the most recent Galaxy loan be worth if brand new? And then what given that the machines are second hand. $45m new, $20m in current state?

'In addition, in the first half of 2023, companies in the liquid flow industry chain such as Shanghai Electric, Xinxin Vanadium and Titanium, China Shipping Energy Storage, Jiangsu Linyuan, Liquid Flow Energy Storage Technology, and Shaanxi Construction Engineering New Energy have successively announced production expansions, with a total planned production capacity exceeding 12.2GW.'

At an average duration of 4.1 hours that gives 50GWh,

(i) Management appear to have seen enough to expect MTD soon, be it in this cohort or the next and (ii) they've also said they would not go beyond C7 anyway and would choose a biologically significant dose so putting (i) and (ii) together the chance that we actually end up seeing an eighth cohort is slim to none.

At this stage I'd start thinking about what's in the best interest of Galaxy as very soon I'd imagine Argo are going to be completely beholden to them.

Marc you can say that again. In fact the V price has been far from depressed for the past few years, it's actually been well above the long term average, the issue for BMN (and Largo) has been operational, has been internal. Who knows what the average realised sales price was for 2022? Well it was $41.4/kgV, that's pretty damn good, that should be bringing in a healthy profit.

This year average sales price won't be too far off what it was last year... so whilst even higher V prices would be well received obviously what's more important is BMN bringing down their own costs to a level that sees them profitable without relying on the vanadium market dynamics to align in their favour.

Fun little game of good cop bad cop.