Member Info for Hogsnipe

China: Thanks for the feedback. I confess I had to look up Dragonfly Doji - very interesting reasoning behind it - and yes I'd agree the open/close/high/low wre extremely tight yesterday, so the pattern is as you say - Dragonfly Doji. If it is an accurate predictor that buyers are returning (and it seems that way so far today) - let's look forward to a Good Friday!

Theorist: Yes, it's odd that the link should be so strong - there are actually only 10 companies in the Mining 350 Index:
Anglo American, Antofagasta, BHP Group, Centamin, Fresnillo, Glencore, Hochschild, P etra Diamonds, Polymetal and Rio Tinto PLC. Of these, only Glencore, Hochschild and Polymetal have much involvement in RE mining.
It's quite possible that, during the last 3 months absence of hard news about investment/grants/fundraising from Pensana, the market makers may have turned to pricing PRE against the Mining 350 Index movements as a reasonable course of action?
Having said that, PRE has gained very significantly in the last week or two of trading (even though the ups and down still somewhat reflect the Mining Index) - there has to be a separate cause for this acceleration - probably the Liberum and Sunday Times buy signals coupled with the rumours of ATF and Cop26 annoucements being imminent, as well as the favourable Humber freeport and the £840M EV supply chain govt investment spend. Definitely not disappointing - most welcome!

This is a test post to see if LSE Chat will allow links to IMGUR graphics. I've put up on IMGUR a viewable chart of how the PRE SP has varied compared to the FTSE Mining 350 Index, from Aug 22 2021 to date.
If LSE don't filter it you should be able to view the chart it here:
https://imgur.com/a/TVAyacH
Notice how the two lines move in close correspondence with each other. Even recent PRE changes follow the ups and downs of the FTSE 350 Index although the PRE moves are more amplified. All we need now is a couple of reliable forecasts for the Mining Index over the next 3 months and we might get a fair idea of where the PRE SP is going

Chancellor Rishi Sunak has confirmed Humber, Teesside and Thames will see the first tax sites established as part of the freeports package "“The first tax sites will be in Humber, Teesside and Thames, and those freeports will be able to begin initial operations from November".

See here:
https://todayuknews.com/business/first-three-freeports-given-the-go-ahead-to-start-operations/

Port director, Simon Bird, chairs the steering company, with ABP having put together and funded the bid in order to meet the timeframe. He said: “It is fantastic news, great news for the Humber. “We have the company Pensana, having already announced its intention to develop a rare earths processing complex, confident in the delivery of a freeport.

“They can see the benefits freeport will bring, and that’s the Humber winning over other sites in the UK because they had the belief. We landed a very compelling bid in front of the government, and I couldn’t be more delighted. A lot of work has gone into this opportunity, and the private and public sector really got after it, to really maximise it, and I can assure everyone we are doing just that".

On the £230 million Global Britain Investment Fund pot for the offshore wind manufacturing sector, RenewableUK chief executive Dan McGrail said: “It’s great to see the Chancellor backing the growth of our world-leading offshore wind industry in the run-up to COP26 with this funding which will help to increase UK manufacturing in this sector even further. It builds on the support ministers have provided to upgrade UK ports to turn them into offshore wind manufacturing hubs and new centres of excellence as part of the Prime Minister’s green industrial revolution.".

Joe666: regarding "Hate to burst any bubbles here but cut and pasting science blurb doesn’t make you a chemical engineer." - my bubble's OK thank you - my first degree was applied chemistry and for 16 years I worked for the Central Electricity Generating Board as an engineer... perhaps you meant this for DP?

As a diversion from worrying about PRE takeovers, have a look here:
https://cen.acs.org/analytical-chemistry/separations/Protein-unlock-new-sources-rare-earth-elements/99/web/2021/10

Earlier posts talked about the potential to recycle Nd and Pr from coal-fired power station fuel ash heaps and ponds, of which there is no shortage in UK. This required a complex ionic liquid solvent extraction process, but a couple of US universities have developed a more efficient, more selective and more environmentally friendly technique. The active agent is lanmodulin - a protein found in naturally-occurring methane-digesting bacteria - how eco can you get?. Initial trials show that this protein is amazingly efficient at binding with Nd and Pr and lends itself well to a contiuous column extraction process, and can be easily tweaked to separate light from heavy rare earth metals, and even to separate Nd from Pr, each at very high purity. The columns can be flushed and re-used for many cycles as can the acidic carrier solution.

Starting with an acidic leach of fuels ash containing about 0.1% mixed RE metals content, only a few cycles produced separated metals recovering 80% of all RE metals from the leach, each with >99% purity.

The simplicity of this approach, the ability to run it as a continuous extraction process, and the low environmental/re-use emphasis should certainly attract Pensana to look deeper into it.

Dumbpunter: Good point - but I don't agree that all the nominee account holdings in PRE are all armchair investors. I believe the collapse of PRE SP since June has allowed undeclared corporate financials to build up substantial new PRE holdings at an artificially low price. There are now 21million more PRE shares held in the top 5 nominee account than there were in July - that's over 10% of the register. And that's just the increase - who knows how many shares they started with?

Off topic - Bacanora - you're right, it does illustrate how difficult it can be to organise nominee holders to fight for better takeover terms. However, I was astonished to read how fast the Chinese are buying out western miners like Bacanora to build their lithium supply chains - "We are in the midst of a global battery (for which read lithium) arms race, [in] which the US is presently a bystander.” And Britain was late to arrive. Worldwide, 181 (battery) gigafactories are due to be open by 2030, of which 88 were already up and running in 2020, and 136 of these are in China, which has been opening them at the rate of almost one a week. Continental Europe can muster 16 and the US 10"
If China plans to similarly commandeer rare earths supply chains, Boris needs to get the Govt off it's fat a*se pronto.

Dumbpunter: RE "AFAIK there has never been TR1 on PRE because there no outside interest in this share whatsoever. Its the founders, Angola and an army of armchair investors.".
For once, I hope you are right - if as you say, PRE has no corporate investors, then you have to accept that your "army of armchair investors" = the nominee accounts. As of today, the total in Nominee Accounts (or is that the PRE Barmy Army?) is 125M shares. That's 56.2% of issued shares.
Roll on the takeover matey - the Barmy Army's in the driving seat and calling the shots.

Astro999 - you didn't get any response to your "maybe they'll get funding from China..." idea.
There's a recent article here which says China is very much in the business not just funding, but buying up foreign RE miners/producers outright - even in US and Canada. PRE could well be within China's sights:

https://investorintel.com/markets/uranium-energy/uranium-energy-intel/biden-the-chinese-raw-material-hunt-and-the-massive-monazite-results-of-appia-rare-earths-uranium/

Here's the gist:
Chinese companies continue to seek out and lock up more of the raw materials that will drive the future. In just the last few days, Zijin Mining Group Co., Ltd. launched a C$960 million takeover bid for Canadian domiciled Neo Lithium Corp. (TSXV: NLC | OTCQX: NTTHF), while Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Limited (CATL), the world’s largest battery supplier and ironically already part owner of Neo Lithium, signed a battery supply deal with U.S. commercial EV maker, Electric Last Mile Solutions Inc. (NASDAQ: ELMS). Three weeks ago CATL made a C$377 million takeover bid for Canada’s Millennial Lithium Corp. (TSXV: ML). Zijin is no stranger to taking out Canadian mining companies having previously acquired Nevsun Resources (C$1.86 billion), Guyana Goldfields (C$323 million), and Continental Gold (C$1.4 billion), and those were just some of its Canadian targets.
Appia is a Canadian publicly-listed company in the uranium and rare earth element sectors and is currently in its largest exploration and diamond drilling program in the Company’s history, focusing on delineating high grade critical rare earth elements. If the grades in this season’s drill holes match the world class grades previously announced things could get very interesting very quickly. The Company is well funded to complete this season’s drilling with plans to prepare an NI 43-101 report following the conclusion of the current exploration program later this year. With 107.6 million shares outstanding, the current market cap for Appia stands at roughly $82 million. That’s chump change given what some of these Chinese companies are throwing around for quality assets.

So if that's the case for Appia - it's also got to be true for Pensana as soon as FEED and finance details become known.

DP: why don't you just check your facts first?
Easy enough - go here: https://pensana.co.uk/shareholder-information/
Get your calculator out and compare these holdings with Jul 1st holdings and you will find all the large nominee accounts are holding substantially more shares now:

JIM NOMINEES LIMITED now holds 38,192,658 - a 31.6% increase over Jul 1 holding
PERSHING NOMINEES LIMITED now holds 35,554,820 - a 25.5% increase over Jul 1 holding
VIDACOS NOMINEES LIMITED now holds 27,454,452 - a 17.1% increase over Jul 1 holding

Even the smaller HARGREAVES LANSDOWN (NOMINEES) LIMITED holding is now 5,390,038 - a 10.8% increase.

Tony: looking at the early ADVFN USA PRE trading today it seems to be solid buying. Fingers crossed....

A little while ago I found a high correlation of PRE SP with the FTSE350 Mining Index - it remains pretty high at +90%
All boats rise with the tide they say - so the FTSE350 MI, which today is up 12% since the Oct 7 low - should also pull up PRE.
The effect of rising supply uncertainty and prices for REs is also helping to boost the SPs of most RE companies in the last 2 weeks - RBW by 9.7%, MKA by 7.6% and LYNAS by 13.9%.
But PRE is up by much more than any of these - a whopping 47.5% gain since Oct 7 is quite astonishing in the absence of any real news. The FTSE350 MI rise and general uptick of RE prices and commodities indices should have taken PRE SP to just 87p or so. So why the huge jump to 105p?

Could be Cop26 in the offing, could be a hatching takeover bid - but my bet is on a simpler cause - I think there's a significant PRE RNS or annoucement in the immediate offing and there's a leak somewhere.....

Of course we might all be wrong - what if it's nothing more than yet another cycle of pump and dump?

Theorist: Thank you for spending the time to reply at length. You're right that there are many problems just looking at a day's worth of trades - particularlywith lags and order splitting. I'm reminded of Donald Rumsfeld's 'known unknowns and unknown unknowns', etc. You're also correct to say you'd need to collect quite a lot of sensitive and private data to be authoritative on the causes of share pricing movements.
However, since you mention the spread as a significant issue - have a look at the PRE spreads on Oct 14. They went from .6p at 10:48am to 6.6p just one hour later. When it was .6p (indicating high liquidity) O buyers piled in with a block of 16 buys for 20,000 shares. At 10 seconds to noon, a block of 12 consecutive AT sells drove the spread to the day's max at 6.6 with 40,000 shares sold.. I know MM's have to make their money on the spread, but I still find the "blockiness" of trading in PRE very odd, and the wild swings in liquidity too.
I do think a lot of PRE SP ups and downs have their roots in the current doldrum stage of PRE development, with ongoing absence of news or investment results.
While the cat's away - the mice will play.

Theorist/NBerzins: You have to agree that 14 Oct PRE trading breaks the recent pattern of daily small volume/low trading.
So, here's some basic Oct 14 trading stats for you:
258 trades and 0.75M buys+sells vol (we'll ignore all the ? trades)
Overall Buy/Sell ratio 100% - even Steven. AT Buy/Sell ratio is negative sentiment at 66%. O Buy/Sell ratio is positive sentiment at 120%
138 AT trades - 75 sell/63 buy. 109 O trades - 25 sell/84 buy .
75 AT sell trades were 75% of all sell trades - but at 160K, only 33% of sell vol
63 AT buy trades were 42% of all buy trades - but at 104K, only 27% of buy vol
25 O sell trades were 25% of all sell trades - but at 235K, 66% of sell vol
84 O buy trades were 57% of all buy trades - but at 277K, 73% of buy vol

So on the face of it AT trades accounted for only 22% of the day's Buy+Sell vol, but more than half the total number of trades. Whereas, O trades accounted for 78% of the Buy+Sell vol with less than half the total number of trades.

You can see that the 75 AT sells moved only 160K shares, but the 25 O sells moved 235K
Also that the 63 AT buys moved only 104K, but the 84 O buys moved 277K
Average AT sell size 2125 Average AT buy size 1654
Average O sell size 9384 Average O buy size 3306

Now, if we were working on the premise that PRE AT trading is somehow aimed at triggering O traders to buy and sell their PRE shares, then these AT sell trades are triggering 4 times their vol in O sells, but AT buy trades are triggering only 2 times their vol in O buys - which looks a lot like someone building a stake.

So, if that's not the case - can either of you offer some other interesting theories to explain 14 Oct trades, or is it all just chaos....?

Theorist :...or you could just download the PDF free from numerous academic sources and use the £40 odd you just saved to buy 50 shares in Pensana?

Wow!! - 600+ pages ....tell you what.... I'll read yours - if you'll read mine:
https://research-api.cbs.dk/ws/portalfiles/portal/58450606/Tania_velasquez.pdf
"Chaos Theory and the Science of Fractals, and their Application in Risk Management "
Tania Velasquéz, Copenhagen Business School

Have a look at the masses of AT trade sells over on ADVFN PRE - boy these guys are trying so hard to sell the SP down this afternoon - but the fundamentals seem to be holding up the offer price very well. Pretty substantial volume both sides today too - but the buying goes on - feel the pain shorters....

DP: some support for your views here, but in the longer run they see Pesnana, Raindow, Mkango as a fortunate sign the supply issues will be tackled:

https://www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/companies/news/963192/today-s-market-view---adriatic-metals-anglo-asian-mining-atalya-mining-and-more-963192.html

Extract follows:
NdPr Rare Earth Oxide (China) US$94,021/t vs US$93,480/t - Risk of substitution unless production ramps up.

Industry leaders fear that soaring rare earth prices may trigger a roll out of alternative technologies and minerals for EVs and wind turbines. Neo Performance Materials’ CEO Karayannopoulos has warned ‘that the industry should be very careful not to kill the goose that laid the golden egg.’
Automakers contributing 50% of global sales have stated they are limiting rare earth use. Roskill forecast rare earth demand to increase 22% pa until 2030, with $6bn of investment needed for new supply.
Conclusion: Automotive manufacturers are programmed to cut costs and thrift wherever possible. The problem as Tesla discovered is that powering motors without permanent magnets impacts performance and range. Rare earth prices have been expensive enough for some years to encourage substitution but the reality is that it rarely works as well as using the key rare earth oxides.
The greater risk is from a simple lack of availability but fortunately a new breed of REE processes and processors are coming closer to fruition such as Rainbow Rare Earths*, Mkango*, Pensana and others. *SP Angel act as financial advisor / nomad and broker.

Here's an interesting overview of RE supply issues in the pipeline:
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Tech-industry-braces-for-skyrocketing-rare-earth-prices

China: have you seen what's happening to aluminium prices right now - up 25% since Sep 1? China produces more than 50% of the world's aluminium and some major Chinese producers have already had to scale back output. Aluminium broke the $3000 level this week for the first time since 2008 - and forward pricing is steadily escalating for the next 6 months.

Lag times for RE pricing/supply are probably longer, but the scramble to beat future supply shortages must surely already be underway and that's going to drive up prices pretty soon I'd have thought. Nd and Pr are already +70% on the last year, and the current market tightening is only just feeding through.

China is now 3 months into much the same sort of energy crisis as the UK - but for different reasons. A major drought has badly hit China's hydroelectric generation output at the same time as coal prices have rocketed, doubling in the last year. This is compounded by a combination of state control of electricity pricing, and country-wide state-imposed environmental targets for the amount of power used per unit of economic output (energy intensity).

Every province in China is now ranked by the Chinese government as red, yellow or white. White means the province is meeting its target for cutting its energy intensity, yellow means the province is cutting but not meeting its target, and red means they are actually increasing, not cutting energy intensity. These targets have real teeth - red provinces are now ordered to use less electricity for the remainder of 2021 - they are effectively having their output rationed.

Metal producers are particularly badly hit - they face a cut in production of 40%, and other industries in the yellow provinces 10 to 20%. China's steel production for the last Q 21 for example will be down 9%, cement 29% and aluminium 7%.

All of the light rare earth miners/refiners are in red provinces in the north, and all of the heavy RE miners are in red provinces in the south, so they face similar output restrictions in future unless they too improve their energy intensity. This may be one of the drivers for the recent plan to consolidate all of the 6 major RE companies in China into 2 mega-corps - one in the north and one in the south.

We can expect to see China RE supply hit by both shortages and price hikes in the short and medium term. China does have RE stockpiles, but these are primarily in the lower value RE's, not ND and Pr. They also plan a huge green switch to EVs in the next decade which will mop up home production and stocks of Nd and Pr.

All of which builds strong upward pressure on Nd Pr prices. Every price increase strengthens Pensana's business and economic case. Time is close to running out for HMG to get its finger out and secure the UK's RE supply chain.