Member Info for HarChris

For the most part the spread is far less than that on LSE and when it is that high you'd be stupid to try and day trade.

There is of course a 0.5% charge on the way in on the main indices and enough of a spread to call it ~1.5% rise to breakeven so somewhat comparable- either way trading is tough.

ValJu you were spot on earlier, not ish.

Ah that's good to know, thanks Mark. I'll have entered the 0.75% arena on a couple of occasions without noticing then haha although never a trade higher than that.

Chopsing, let's say you place £10k on a trade. After the fees that becomes ~ £9905. You then factor in that the spread will put you at about 0.5% disadvantage so you're immediately at around £9855.
A 2% rise from here takes your holding to £10050 but after the FX cost and fees that's about £9955.
A 3% rise from here takes your holding to £10150 and then after FX and fees gives you about £50 profit.

That's quite a trading handicap.

On HL the FX cost is 1% when buying and 1% selling (so if you've made a profit it's far more than 1% of the original outlay), it's pretty steep and why I stopped attempting to trade US miners.

'Expect volatility'

But I still thought initially we'd see markets turn bullish - that was a strange end to the day!

But yes for the exact operational performance (at least as of March 31st) we'll have to wait til the end of April. Fortune really stressed this time that guidance was conservative and you can tell he'd rather go this way and overshoot it to bring some sentiment back so I'm hopeful that my own rough estimates will be bettered.

Actually in this case I don't agree Lindon... Guidance for 2023 was shared with the market on 31st January. Compared with cost guidance due to the Rand we should be seeing cash costs around $24/kg and AISC < $34/kg. Load shedding is factored in and there's no major expansion plans this year so I'm confident to say that right now Bushveld is generating substantial cash and is set to turn a significant profit in 2023. As things stand.

That's not to say that things won't go wrong later this year, that's not to say that costs won't increase or that V falls, but for now we can say with virtual certainty the above is true because if things had got so bad so quickly that it wasn't true then we'd have been updated on whatever that particular incident was.

It's important to be as honest and balanced as possible - this time year me and Pdub would have been saying exactly the same thing, that BMN has returned to profitability. War had just broken out in Ukraine and V prices had risen considerably, especially in the US. It's therefore important to me to point out the reasons why this is different...

Last year involved a significant expansion project at Vanchem, attempting to take production from just ~1100mtV to an annual run rate of 2600mtV. This was never going to be an easy task and that's how it turned out, with issues that both lowered production in 2022 and increased costs well above guidance. On top of this load shedding hit South Africa like nothing it's ever seen before, causing further disruption and considerable operational loss, all something that could not have been foreseen back when the guidance was initially formed.

This year as I pointed out in my previous post there is zero major execution risk as there is no plant expansion happening in 2023 and, having missed guidance far too often now and unable to afford that happening again, load shedding is not only factored in but is heavily factored in.

Even with all of the above the loss in 2022 will have been relatively small as BMN started with just $15m and wasn't forced to refinance at any point... so whilst of course nothing in life is certain, the likelihood of a profitable year in 2023 is extremely high.

You should be looking to buy miners that are cashed up for at least the rest of 2023 and able to self- finance. If your main reason for buying is ‘this miner has lagged the rest’ then it’s a poor reason and the ‘lag’ will likely only get bigger.

I’ll answer that for Pdub.

No, it doesn’t look like they did turn a profit in 2022. Why? Well in a year of heavy expansion there were considerable issues with the Vanchem Kiln 3 refurb that took six months to iron out sadly. Additionally load shedding was unforeseen and dented operational performance.

This year there is no major expansion and the teething issues have been sorted so that risk is now null and void. Load shedding is foreseen and guidance is provided based on a worst case situation again in that regard.

So returning to today… the price of vanadium is well above the breakeven level so yes, barring some pretty extreme turn of events this year will see BMN return to profitability.

Agree with your post Pdub but just wanted to point out that 'IF all goes well including reduced load shedding and BMN produces 5000 mtV in 2023' then that brings down the AISC considerably, especially coupled with the dollar/rand rate, to closer to $30/kgV (which is what we are looking for long term). That brings profit (before tax) in your example closer to $75m than $50m.

Like you hint at no it's not normal for any company to be making profits even close to their mcap, this is a highly unusual combination of tough market conditions, lack of faith in numbers being delivered and far, far too much risk placed on (the very manageable) debt position.

For the time being we have no choice but to suck it up and do our best to ignore the posters gleeful over the share price action but we're very, very close to a turning point here and once the dam bursts it's no exaggeration to expect a share price multiples of where we are now by the end of the year, maybe even with a 0 after the 4.

Certainly agree it's unlikely to lead to bitcoin falling but tough to call whether or not the next bull run is about to start in the coming weeks/ months or whether there's significant volatility to come (with a weak uptrend).

I do agree though that it's probably the time for those sitting on the sidelines, across bitcoin, mining and other equities, to start thinking about deploying that capital.

I think I have a good grasp of what is likely to happen on a macro level but how bitcoin responds to that? Absolutely no idea!

You have to factor in that almost all small caps on AIM are experiencing the same thing, a heavily depressed share price, 2 year, 3 year, 5, sometimes even all time lows. That means there's a ton of shares to choose from when picking at the moment. Is BMN undervalued currently? Obviously. But is the average investor going to dump other stocks that are 30, 50, maybe even 90% down today to come and buy BMN? Probably not no. Is there a lot of new cash in the system ready to exploit these opportunities? Probably not.

So we need either broader market conditions to improve or a catalyst such as news on the Orion CLN, V prices revving up once again or some FOMO as we near the Q1 update. All those catalysts will come with time so it's a case of being patient and understanding that the share price is not 4.4p because BMN's long term fundamental value has dropped but simply because of the above and all the whilst every other AIM share price is equally (at least subjectively speaking) suffering there's not going to be a whole lot of attention given to BMN and its undervaluation.

Exactly what I've been saying the past 48 hours - .25 hike but with dovish commentary heavily suggestive of a pause as long as the data allows in the coming months - both bulls and bears content.

I hear you, just not sure we're close to the point where we catch up with that lag yet hence high CPI prints for a while longer and market volatility.

AB, unexpectedly high and persistent inflation showing through in the UK as you'll have seen... change your mind on US inflation 'coming down by itself'?

Meaningful revenues from electrolyte production are probably a year away and several years from full ramp up to 200MWh but for now Bushveld is far from being reasonably valued for its mining side alone, let alone anything added for future electrolyte revenue or its 25% ownership of Cellcube.

The ever increasing vrfb installation (mainly China and Rest of Asia) is still likely to benefit BMN over the next year however as the increase in demand for vanadium keeps V prices firm/rising.

Nice post Lindon and agree with you re battery assembly being the bottleneck. But why do you think there's been such a rush to build such electrolyte capacity if the battery assembly isn't anywhere close to matching that? One of the posters on here/telegram has been compiling the global electrolyte manufacturing progress and this year we'll be at ~7000MWh of capacity. And that doesn't account for the increase many of these plants are capable of in the future (such as BMN increasing from 200MWh to 800MWh).

Is it simply that E plants are relatively cheap to build compared to developeing a successful battery manufacturing company? But even so they aren't going to build these plants without confidence that there will be a buyer for their electrolyte in the very near future?

‘ Clsk have to get to Mara riots size and then you can really begin to compare what they are doing like for like. ’

Not when one is valued over 5 times higher. Obviously Mara should have the greater market cap of the two but the answer to which is the better investment today will be borne out by whichever of the two appreciates more from this level, not which is the bigger company in say six months time (it’s almost certainly going to be Mara still).

You tend to compare them as if they are valued more or less the same today in terms of market cap.