Roundtable Discussion; The Future of Mineral Sands. Watch the video here.
FireAnt: plenty of these shares in stable hands. The year end accounts shows nearly 40m shares tightly held. I reckon the number is higher. Nice to see a new drill program which will look for new mineralisation. Getting a new ore body would be further good news.
The whole argument of miners, cyclical movement etc will be dismantled in next few years, Atleast for ARB. Because the clear intention is to go into different applications of blockchain, and my own expectation is that some of these threads won’t be as cyclical as say bitcoin or ZCash. In that sense it will cease to be a mining pureplay. The cash has been raised, the point is do investors believe they will deploy effectively. I do.
Comparing say gold or copper to bitcoin is pointless imho. Commodities don’t have fixed supply. Mining cos can change inventory, mine the marginal stuff, high grade etc based on price fluctuation. There’s a lag between price and money going into discovery. It’s that lag in which price inflates and then goes down again as supply catches up.
Bitcoin on the other hand has fixed supply as we know. If chinese miners shut down, that’s more coin proportionately mined by ARB etc. Why would institutions announce their plans before they buy in? Note ARB speaks of investing in Fintech, DeFi and other coin/s mining where ROI is solid. It’s somewhat irrelevant whether ARB mines bitcoin or ether or ZCash. They are agile and have a 5/10/20 year perspective. Being patient and doing nothing, is all that’s needed. Unfortunately that’s tough for most people.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4429201-palantir-and-bitcoin?mail_subject=must-read-alibaba-shares-keep-dropping-keep-buying&utm_campaign=nl-must-read&utm_content=link-7&utm_medium=email&utm_source=seeking_alpha
Apologies if already posted. Some interesting views and also some FUD unravelling amongst comments. Today was supposedly the last day for tax returns in the US. Could this have impacted markets?
Fireant: spot on. The term “the company” and “the group” are mixed up. At some point things will be clarified. Given where Cu is this year, happy to wait.
https://www.soluna.io/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/soluna_primer_v1.0_20180712.pdf
Fire ant: this isn’t AIM listed. But agree with comments. Let the froth settle and let market digest data.
Musey: It may be a question of choosing perspective. With Cu nearer 2/lb, and ops barely off the ground, initial ramp up costs, Pere was on the verge of collapse with share holders getting zilch. To see it resurrected, that too in a buoyant Cu Au Ag market is amazing for LTHs like myself. Gati put his own money in, so did the PE guys. No such thing as a free lunch but if we all make money here, no one will complain.Plenty more to the story here once market digests the figures. DYOR.
Solid numbers. The footnote numbers (1,2,3 etc) which should be superscript, appear merged on Apple devices. 2.65 all in costs give over $2/lb PROFIT. This is a producing mine so things are getting interesting. DYOR. Good luck all
Hope people read through the annual accounts. Few nuggets there. For ex: we hold 10% of the data co GPU-One. And note HIVE paid GPU in shares for one of their subs. The HIVE RNS states they paid 400,000 shares to a minority holder in GPU. I reckon that was ARB. Just musings. As always DYOR.
What about the explorer value? 250 sq km in the same belt, with visible mineralisation and previous drill results (when owned by other companies)? There are plenty of juniors valued at 10/20 m just based on few drill holes in greenfield. Note that any ore extracted and processed from land outside the existing mine footprint is NOT subject to streaming from Wheaton.
Mara hold about 500m usd in cash and cash equivalent (ie bitcoin). We hold about 115m usd (£46m cash and about 940 bitcoin, give or take). So on these metrics they are much bigger. But where it gets interesting is how both companies will leverage growth in next 12 months. It’s all about ROI and I expect ARB to beat the other miners here, hands down. And the other threads to growth are important to sustain investor interest, because the world and his dog expects BTC to peak and then drop by 2022. Please DYOR.
Just wasted 20 minutes of my time looking at FinnCap report on ARB. It’s quite amateurish, doesn’t make allowance for any of the other dots emerging (non bitcoin mining prospects, Pluto investment, ePIC machines potentially being non bitcoin, energy production possibility, exploiting negative tariffs etc). In short not worth your time. As always DYOR.
Stnz: hash rate is due to upgrade from 1.075EH to 1.645, over the three month period April-June. In other words a 53% increase in capacity by end of Q2. I’ve said before that expanding hash capacity over H1 is smarter than expanding H2 or 2022, because the network is due large additions at that point.
I haven’t read through posting history, hence apologies if already posted. New appointment VP Development Justin Nolan to the team.
Justin is leading the development of Argo’s mining facility in Dicken’s County, Texas. Prior to joining Argo, he was the CEO and founder of the Helios project, which Argo acquired in 2021. Justin also worked as the Senior Development Manager at the Howard Hughes Corporation’s and before that, he founded BuildingBlok, an online construction management startup, that was acquired by the Contractor’s Register in 2014.
Things always look easier in hindsight. On two crucial occasions the copper price collapsed. June 2017 when the roadshow happened and raise was being finalised (could be wrong about the year). Secondly the Covid related collapse in 2020. When Covid hit markets, Minto had just begun production and was scaling up. Essentially Gati injecting his own cash in, saved the company from closure. Of course the equity has been taken at lower prices. And the numbers reported are opaque, market doesn’t like lack of transparency. The asset is majority owned by the private consortium, but PERE does the accounting/reporting. Pere has the voting shares but the PE lot have representation in the Minto Joint Advisory committee. All a bit convoluted which is why we sit at 5m mcap. Element of luck in all investments. Will LTH eventually get lucky here is the big question...
This is an integrated explorer, developer and producer. As explorer, we have seen (what in my view are) solid results. However the results haven’t been put into geological context. I m no geo myself, but here is my two pence. Mineralisation increases as we go from east to west and as we go from south to north. Put another way, highest quality (sulphide) and grade mineralisation is in the Minto North deposit historically. We have got land packages to the north north west of Minto (as well as south south east, along the trend).
The orebodies are disrupted and lie horizontally from what i recollect. The mineralisation is in the form of shallow lenses, bit like a stack of pancakes. This is why the drill intervals going vertically only hit few meters of mineralisation. However the deposits are spread out over large areas. This is what made open pit a good prospect historically.
The value of measured and indicated resources needs mention. At 1.4% grade Cu over a 21 million tonne contained ore, Thats 2.89 billion USD worth of Cu, at todays price (4.47/lb). This is before consideration to the gold and silver contained. This isn’t some copper that sits in undeveloped explorer territory in a dodgy jurisdiction. Its a producing mine mill complex.
The 2019 annual report for Minto (link below) mentions a gold grade of 0.86g/t and Silver of 5.84g/t. Remember both these have streams with Wheaton, at uber cheap prices but last year the gold price on the stream agreement, got negotiated to 75% of prevailing, for first 11,000 ounces. No reason that cant happen again imo.
More importantly for the economics, the recovery rates matter. Look at page 13 of the annual report. Staggering recoveries of 95% for Copper (sulphides have higher recoveries than oxides) and the gold is not too shabby either at 76% recovery.
https://emr-ftp.gov.yk.ca/emrweb/COMM/major-mines/minto/mml-minto-2019-annual-report.pdf
The full year AISC back in 2016 was in the region of $1.08/lb (segmental reporting of Minto by capstone-annual accounts 2016-still available on their website). Of course it was an exceptional year with over 40,000 ounces of Gold produced, over 20,000 tonnes of Cu etc. Minto North contributed. Even if one takes the 1.75/lb AISC that broker suggests, there is huge cash profit here if/when production hits full tilt. Going forwards, its my belief that open pit is being reconsidered in efforts to scale up production (may not happen this year but will be examined as part of mine economics in the study). The private equity guys (and gals!) were happy to support 77% of the asset. They have continued ploughing money in. So have the directors. Neither would throw good money after bad imho. So all one has to do is buy in and wait patiently. Not that patience has been in short supply. Many long suffering investors here will remind us of how long we have waited. Over 5 years if one starts at the birth of Pere as an entity from the old CAF. Just my two pence. Ple
I would add this for any investment: not to go “all in” at one price point, but to buy in regular amounts. This allows one to tame the greed fear element, gives one time to read up and examine more deeply the prospects/sector etc. It also gives opportunity to buy lower if/when the chance arises. Being in the red in an investment or being in profit, both offer false emotions: one of fear/anxiety and the other of greed/further upside. Keeping current price aside and examining longer term prospects is key. Weekends and times when market is closed is the best time to do this, to avoid impulsive decisions. Again just my two pence, plenty here who have huge experience of investing in general and I benefit from reading some great posts, positive and negative is mere opinion.
Clever use of words such as “gamble”, “place our bets” etc. Fact: traditional banks are now considering offering fiat loans to crypto holders, with crypto as collateral, ie recognising it as an “asset” against which they lend. Admittedly they will safeguard themselves with conservative valuations (unlike lending 100% against say your property, which we all know will only go up and up and up in value...). Fact: ARB is diversifying and the recent cash raises are funding this growth. Diversifying includes mining other coins, entering DeFi and Web 3.0 projects and further miners added to our existing capacity. Also the 320 acre land package: what will it be used for? It will facilitate energy production (solar) which buffers grid variability in supply/demand. This means low rates for the power. Secondly the use of immersion rigs with much better efficiencies than existing air cooled machines. All in all plenty of upside even considering what we know, never mind what’s in the pipeline. Of course one has to read up on sector, on the interface of crypto mining and energy producers/providers (BC Hydro, nuclear etc all looking to leverage their 24/7 production by going into mining). The energy space is huge and crypto miners have a crucial role to play in it. It’s a win win situation, with miners having flexibility to shut down when needed (unlike domestic or other industry), and if we produce our own solar power in the day time, that improves stable power supply. The aspect of ARB going into solar is sheer conjecture at this point, but being investors (rather than gamblers), we are allowed speculation. If one is unsure about bitcoin, DeFi, Web 3.0 having a future, then yes this is a gamble, and more reading is required.
Navier’s engineering team designed and built one of the preeminent miner hosting facilities in the USA— a “25MW design that scales to 400MW. This design provides for optimal cooling of ASIC and GPU miners at outside ambient temperatures over 100F, with PUE’s in the 1.05-1.07 range.” : Kentucky facility designed by Navier. That is a staggeringly efficient Power Usage Efficiency. Studies on data centres have shown the average PUE to be in the 1.6 range. DYOR.