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3bear have you heard there is a new gold report today on gold's outlook from Bank of America's commodity desk. The report is titled " Gold is now the ultimate asset". I goes on to ask if gold can replace the US Treasury and concludes that gold is now a safer investment than Treasuries. Nice timing B of A.

This is the same bank that has "advised" Centamin's board to recommend the low ball opportunist Anglogold offer.

Have a good weekend.

3bear I respectfully disagree that the Centamin share price is now capped by the Anglogold offer. The Centamin price will remain dynamic and reflect moves in the gold price and sentiment towards CEY's merits based on latest information and rising interest and sentiment.

Sentiment always follows price and I would argue that on a day where we have seen excellent Q3 results and now new ATH for gold both in asian trading of $2685.50 and in the last hour an further push up in LBMA trading to $2689.20.

Mr Market could start pushing the CEY price up in the vacuum left 160p-200p last traded on the day of the slab slide RNS. Gold is also $780 higher today than when CEY last closed above 160p four years ago.

On top of excellent Centamin Q3 we also have a new all time high spot gold traded in Asia this morning at $2686.50. A reminder that macroeconomic factors will potentially play an important part in the success or failure of this bid on current terms.

A lot of hedge fund buying of Centamin shares over the last five weeks are opportunistic carpetbaggers effectively buying call options.

Vince Lanci of Arcadia Economics posits that gold could rise another $100 as investors position themselves ahead of the BRICS summit 22/10-24/10. The gold price today is now $180 above the close prior to the bid.

I should add that I agree with the points you made on 8/10 about how to advance, de-risk and monetise Centamin as an indep company.

On your point about considering a JV with the Saudis for the development of EDX I would also like to ask the Saudis for exploration rights on their half of the Nubian shield.

My main worry is that if the takeover fails has Horgan burnt his boats ? Is it possible that Horgan and Jerrard can be reborn as motivated servants of the shareholders best interests before their own?

Who benefits from this takeover proposal ? Anglogold certainly knows that they would be getting a plum Tier 1 gold asset in Sukari with 10years of reserves and resource plus other Egypt licences and the Doropo option. I commend their audacity.

But why are Centamin's management recommending this low ball bid just as the gold price bull market is accelerating ? Centamin is not struggling. Indeed the clouds of the last four years are clearling. Centamin is not Goldcorp or Detour which were wounded animals and needed to be culled. indeed I expect tomorrow's Q3 figures to confirm a company getting back on track after the slab slide overhang. Tomorrow's Q3 could be the best since Q2 2020.

Adam Hamilton of 321Gold says the sweet spot to leverage a gold price bull run is with the mid cap miners. Of course the big name major miners will move first e.g Agnico , Newmont, Barrick and indeed Anglogold. But the nimble and flexible midcaps will ultimately rise more in percentage terms.

Anglogold were able to mount their bid thanks to their first mover position as a major. But now the bid has taken Centamin to where it closed on the RNS announcing the slab slide you could argue it is also a signal that mid caps were undervalued and largely ignored by the market. The bid has put the spotlight on Centamin's merits.

So why has the Centamin board recommended this bid ? My theory is that they see it as an ideal off-ramp for their involvement and investment . Bob Moriarity says there are two types of mine executives : those that mine for the benefit of shareholders and those who mine the shareholders.

Goldgnome recently wrote on here that he felt the Centamin management are "bound up in process" . I would agree but I would go further. I believe the CE and CFO see themselves as employees operating within LSE regulations and have no entrepreneurial desire or share Sami El Raghy's vision to grow the company organically. Perhaps that explains the executive performance bonus plan put in place soon after Horgan joined that gave awards up to 125% of salary by meeting the metrics they set. Notably there were no metrics for earnings per share, dividend growth or return on capital employed.

Note how in 2021 the Executive directors received 57% bonuses despite the massive impact of the slab slide and cut to production and halving of the dividend. Since then the dividend has dropped to the level of 2016.

Have our directors recommended this bid so they can get a tax free (Jersey domicile) exit on their several millions of share options and either move on to the next gig or join the Anglogold executive office in London ?

Centamin is well placed to thrive on it's own. The City were unimpressed at the HY report by yet more delay on a Doropo decision and the low dividend.

Finally other events may well boost gold in the next few weeks with BRICS summit and US election.

For those of us who bought our own shares surely we could do better.

Expect more volatility and selling pressure through this week on gold futures (and therefore impact gold mine stock prices) as number one gold buyer China is on a week long public holiday 1/10-7/10. In addition on Friday 4/10, there is the latest US Non farm payroll report . Doubtless the cartel banks would like to try and inject some fear, doubt and uncertainty into gold's recent impressive upward momentum.

But what is becoming clear is that the traditional bag holder for the banks Comex "wash and rinse" cycle, the hedge funds, are now buying the gold price pullbacks. This is not what the cartel wants.

So let's say we get a healthy $135 pullback from last weeks high to $2550 that will likely be a buy signal for central banks in the physical markets and by hedge funds on Comex futures. But the cartel cannot unleash their waterfall short selling anymore because now aggressive shorting will be met by a determined cohort of sovereign physical buyers: China, India Turkey etc. That underlying bid feeds support on pullbacks on the Comex futures. Which in turn puts the cartel banks scrambling for physical to meet rising demand for delivery from their paper market. Control of the gold market is moving from West to East.

Added to that the cartel banks can no longer rely on gold ETF redemptions to source physical for their short positions. Since June gold ETF's demand has increased which locks up more physical in an already tight market.

So this week the cartel may have control but the upcoming October BRICS meeting and the US election in 5 weeks are both potentially bullish the gold price.

It's been a while. My Centamin holding has become my largest shareholding over the last year as I have rotated out of other fully priced sectors into what I perceived to be undervalued and under owned CEY. My reasoning was that I anticipated that gold would eventually breakout of its 3.5 year range and that would ignite interest and positive sentiment in gold mine stocks. We got the gold breakout on 1/3/24 running up $350 to a new ATH. But we got no leveraged play on the gold price with Centamin merely getting out of the basement.

The spark that was missing was sentiment. Price always leads sentiment. So it is ironic that a low ball offer from Anglogold has perhaps finally lit the PM sentiment spark in our spurned sector. Finally some investors are noting how undervalued PM stocks are.

Today we have pushed on to a new gold ATH. That could potentially extend tomorrow if the Shanghai Futures traders who hold near record open interest long positions can drive their SFE gold futures contract above it's 3 month consolidation resistance at 585 CNY. If they can close the week breaking above there with volume it potentially opens the way for the next measured move in gold to $3,000 p. oz.

Less than 1% of US investors have any gold exposure and it is undoubtedly lower than that in the UK. With the takeover of Randgold and Acacia and the exit of Russian miners the LSE is left with a tiny pool of producer gold shares to invest in just as we are entering what many experts believe will be a very challenging run to year end on the macro front.

The start of Fed rate cuts next week ; the BRICS update on their gold backed transfer currency in October and the US election. All are potentially powerful gold positive events.

Anglogold may have got the Centamin board onside but they don't control sentiment and macro developments and these could have a part to play both in the gold price and in the awakened sentiment and interest in Centamin shares. Interesting times.

Just a few days to go until that particular problem is solved:
I read a translated report on Google Finance, 19/3/22, that confirmed the retirement of "Centamin's Cairo Office head" Youssef El Raghy and the appointment of Air Hassouna starting from April.

Have a very good weekend.

Horgan and Gerrard got 59% bonuses for 2020 plus very generous share options. The year's performance highlights were flat production and the pit wall slab slide. The share price set a record high(on gold's rally) but closed the year 123.70p, unchanged from Horgan's appointment.

Today Horgan presented a bullish outlook (albeit jam 2023-25) and described last year as a good year of resetting Sukari and W.Af prospects. No mention was made of the woeful share price performance over the last 15 months below 120p and below the price when he joined the company. In an interview in late 2019, after he sold Toro, Horgan said the beauty of running a private company is you didn't have to worry about the share price. But as CEO of Centamin plc he doesn't talk up the value of gold or the share price.

Am I alone in expecting that Horgan and Gerrard will be awarded a higher salary bonus for 2021 ? But will they dare to award themselves more share options after cutting the dividend.

The choice : more corporate executive entitlement or steer a course of shared contribution and risk with long suffering loyal shareholders?

An interesting question about Directors shares in the webcast.
An investor asked : How many shares have the Board purchased ?

Martin Horgan replied "the Board own about 1.5m shares between them".

By my estimate the current Board (of 9 directors) have bought a total of 811,405 shares. The only way you can get to 1.5m "owned" is to conflate Directors shares purchased with those share options of Mr Gerrard that have vested. This important point was not clarified.

In my view much of corporate entitlement is put in place so that over time it is accepted as the norm. A new CEO has the opportunity to not only reset production but also the very nature of the ethos of the business. A key indicator is how the new CEO views the share and the shareholders. Does he demonstrate alignment with shareholders as a significant investor or by embedding a corporate entitlement culture ?

Pardey did not buy any shares instead he acumulated 2.3 million share options. His CFO Gerrard, still in post, has only bought 30,000 shares yet has acquired 1.38m share options including those passed to a family trust. In his first 11 months in charge Horgan received total share options of 1.24m shares. To date he has bought a total of 41,405 shares.

Ideally I want Horgan to show me that he is indeed an entrepreneur who leads by example and aligns himself with all shareholders. That is what he did with Toro.

In 2019 Horgan sold Toro for $305m company he started from scratch and took from exploration to production and sale. I am glad that he and his backers did very well out of it. A risk taking entrepreneur is exactly what Centamin needs as its CEO.

Previous CEO's Harry Michael and Josef El Raghy bought 1m shares when they stepped up. I hoped that Pardey was the anomaly CEO who arranged his entitlements while presiding over declining sales, profits and yield.

I want to see Horgan lead. A good sign of that would be a significant share purchase by him and Gerrard, and confirmation of the end of the entitlement culture of share options of reward with no risk. Gold companied that prioritise entitlement value extraction for executives like Goldcorp and Detour end up as takeover losers.

I want Horgan to show us he will make Centamin a winner by adding value and ending the entitlement with no risk culture.

Gad to see you back mrtibbles

Something to ponder: When US CPI was last at 7.5% the Fed funds rate hit 15%. Yet today the Fed is likely to proclaim a 0.25% lift off from a zero rate as evidence that they are taking the fight to inflation. Yet the CPI is likely to be even worse next month when the war price spikes of fuel and foodstuffs are included.

The Fed cannot get out of the trap they set. Tackle inflation and stock, bond and property markets break. Or pay lip service to Interest rate rises in the hope that investors and consumers can be conned that inflation is temporary and lower than actual.

So where should investors invest to at least retain their capital ? By holding physical gold, silver and PM mine shares. As Rick Rule has noted 99.5% of US investors don't have any PM exposure...yet.

I am hoping that the market and the algos will now start to look forward. A new Centamin offering hope and progress and an end of the barren years.

5 years of uncertainty and missed targets have weighed on the share price like an anchor. Having 1.2billion shares in issue doesn't help. We have a high volatility beta stock with big liquidity. Those attributes suit share punters of CFDs, the shorters and spreadbetters. Centamin management need to start nurturing and adding long term loyal shareholders. With the Sukari reset now in place management needs an action plan to build the share price and encourage shareholder loyalty.

To help build a large and loyal share register I would like to see:

1) The CEO and CFO buy at least 200k shares each to align their capital risk with long-suffering loyal shareholders. If not, what are our Executive Directors investing their own capital in as all other asset bubbles burst ?

2) End the Pardey started Executive Share Option Plan. Over 4 years he demonstrated his 3m share options were unmerited and extracted shareholder value at a time of declining production and rising costs.nual awards. N.B. our well compensated Executive Directors can still earn up to 125% of salary as an annual bonus.
I would argue that Centamin has too many shares in issue. Set a good example Executive Directors.

3) Consider a share consolidation plan to reduce the 1.2 bn shares in issue. Previous talk of using spare cash for share buy backs in the future would be better used to buy or develop new mines.
If the 1.2bn shares are all electronic nominee shares the costs consolidation should be minimal. I suggest a reduction to 600m shares total (a 1 for 2 shares held) or even better to 400m shares (1 for 3 shares held). That way you lift the share price out of poundland and it becomes rarer and there would be fewer available for lending to derivatives markets. In addition it would open the stock to more N.American institutional investors who have minimum prices for investments. Finally the underused TSX listing could bring in new investors.

Finally in all interviews going forward Horgan needs to promote the merits of gold vs depreciating fiat currencies as a store of value and talk up the share price. Its long overdue.

Cowichan I salute your relentless ferreting and demands for transparency. A company that is led by insecure people and a weak strategy generally has poor sentiment and a low settled state share price. Both have been confirmed with Centamin. However, I am now hopeful that with the new management we are finally moving on to a vigorous value added confident Centamin.

UPshunt by only getting in to Centamin in the last year you've cannily avoided years of angst that we have had to endure and you hopefully got a good price. Well done, I think your timing may turn out to be impeccable.

I haven't posted for a while as I (patiently) waited the 18 month gold price consolidation to end. Despite the large daily volatility in March I am now hopeful that gold now can hold support at the prior $1820-$1850 resistance. Both Centamin and the Fed have important updates tomorrow. Gold is already sensing that the Fed won't be able to raise interest rates in a meaningful way against inflation well above the official US CPI of 7.5%.

I believe that Centamin is now in a position to start to report real progress from each quarter going forward and finally offer its long suffering investors real progress after 4 barren years where the company has used the "strong" dividend as a fig leaf for the company's relative lack of progress.

With reference to Cowichan's question of 11/3 " how does everyone think about Centamin's super sized dividend policy?"

Firstly, I should define a dividend yield. The annual dividend per share divided by the share price. If a company's dividend yield has been steadily increasing this could be because they are increasing the dividend, because the share price is declining or both.

Centamin's dividend peaked in 2017-2018 and for 2019, 2020, 2021 has settled around 10c p.a. So the dividend yield rises because the 10c is divided into a relatively low share price. Centamin's dividend yield actually reflects a weak share price because of lack of added value to the business 2016-2022 to date. My research shows that since January 2016 all of the rival companies share prices have risen and held on to significant gains over the 6 year period. That reflects new mines being built, new investments, acquisitions and takeovers.

Centamin's dividend yield is the highest for negative reasons. Over 6 years the Centamin share price has risen 64% from 62.65p 22/1/16 to 102.68p on 11/3//22 when I analysed the competition. Over the same 6 year period :
CEY +64%
B2Gold +438%
Endeavour +356%
Newmont +285%
Kinross +280%
Agnico Eagle +125%
Barrick +109%

Consider if Centamin management in 2016 had invested the large 2017 dividend payment in emerging miners at the bottom of the cycle like B2Gold. Or if instead of sticking religiously to organic growth Centamin borrowed at the gold cycle low and with cheap credit like Endeavour. How might Centamin's comparatives look now ?

If Centamin had been able to make B2Gold's 2016-2022 progress the Centamin shareprice today would be around 276p. Match Endeavour's progress and Centamin could have a 223p price rather than being still stuck in pound land.

In conclusion, it is not the dividend that is too high it is that since 2016-17 production peak Centamin has reported no quantifiable progress that adds value for investors. The solar farm coming on stream at cost of $36m in June with resulting diesel cost savings of more than $1m p. month is the first real evidence of delivered added value and the share price will start to respond to such progress.

I wish you a speedy recovery and return.

1. Mark Bankes 289,000 shares (incl. buy 29,000 30/12/21)
2. James Rutherford 250,000
3. Ibrahim Fawzy 140,000
4. Martin Horgan 41,405
5. Ross Gerrard 30,000
6. Catherine Farrow 30,000
7. Marna Cloete 15,000
7. Sally Eyre 15,000
9. Hendrik Faul 0

Exec. Directors total Share Options
Ross Gerrard 1,380,000 (includes 420,000 transferred to family Trust 5/6/19)
Martin Horgan 1,240,000

What is the Executive Director strategy here ? Avoidance of risk of their own capital and rely on generous share options which conveniently get reported in the financial media as the "Directors shareholding" rather than shares bought and shares options granted.

Gerrard has been Finance Director for more than 5 years but appears to have only purchased 30,000 shares with his own money. Horgan's purchases to date would suggest the Pardey/Gerrard model of risk free share options is still the strategy. Yet the optics are terrible. The best N.American precious metals public company directors all make sure they lead and set a reassuring example. To date Horgan and Gerrard fail on this metric.

The difference in risk of own capital between the top 3 Non-Exec Directors and the Exec Directors is striking. The three Non-Exec Director have bought a total of 679,000 shares. That is 10x the total purchases made by the two Executive Directors of 71,405 shares.

How will Horgan and Gerrard persuade new institutional investors to take a significant stake in Centamin if the two Exec. Directors continue to take negligible capital risk in the company they run ?

After all it's not as if these highly paid Directors can't afford to buy a significant holding. On top of that the shares have just closed out the year at the cheapest price for 5 years.

Happy New Year to you.

A fair proportion of today's volume is accounted for by the quarterly re-balancing of constituent holdings of the gold mine stock ETF's GDX and GDXJ which took place today. Centamin is a constituent of both.

GDX second lowest low of the year 28.91 on Wed 15/12 could have signalled the climax sell-off for gold miners. Because the algos have been positive to gold and miners ever since the Fed glide path was announced.

Today is the last stock option expiry for US stocks for the year and probably the end of US tax loss selling. That sets up the possibility for some sort of Santa rally bounce in to the end of the year.

Mr Tibbles you asked what I thought of the update of 8/12. In a word : underwhelmed. Yes it's good R&R has increased but the algos homed in on the negative development the rise in AISC.

But this is a problem affecting all the PM mines as noted by Agnico Eagle's CEO Sean Boyd last week. He said that gold will have to rise 20% to address this lag caused by the paper gold market selling.

When announcing the rise in forecast AISC Horgan should have underlined the paradox. We are the only industry not allowed to pass on the cost of inflation because another entity controls the price of gold.

2021 has been really tough for all medium and long term gold stock holders precisely because the market manipulations are done in such a way to try to keep investors invested in stocks and bonds and they have shut off the warning signal that a rising gold price gives.

As such it is imperative that new management show leadership and alignment with shareholders by buying a meaningful holding of stock in their own company. It is the fist requirement of Rick Rule's checklist of mining companies to invest in. It is worth noting that Horgan sold Toro for $305 million in 2019 and let's assume he received 10%. How much has he invested in Centamin ? Just 41,405 shares for cost GBP 46,113.

Another shrewd PM investor Bob Moriarity looks at whether the company management are entrepreneurs taking equal risk with investors in the venture or are they entitled Executive employees keen to maximise their security and benefits ?

On that score I did not like the way Horgan received the equivalent of 1% of the company in share option in his first 11 months in office. Nor could I understand how both he and CFO Jerrard received a 59% salary bonus for 2020. Looking at the benchmarks for the bonus you'll note that there is nothing in it that constitutes increased shareholder value like : conclude court case disputes; JV or sell in W.Africa or advance a mine plan.

With real inflation above 5% and the US 10 yr T at 1.5% what has Jerrard done to retain our capital against inflation since 2016 ? What percentage of our cash holdings are held in bullion (price rise +72% since 17/12/15).

Centamin are producing real money at a time of historic fiat devaluation. The company didn't borrow to grow like peers B2Gold or Endeavour 2013-2021 and we have been left behind as a result of organic growth only approach. Now we have rising AISC, huge costs to clear waste and silence on what's holding back the gold price.

It's time that Martin Horgan made a substantial share purchase and starting talking about the gold price problem. This feels like 16/12/15 repeat. Gold price bottomed $1045 that day and FOMC raised the US Int Rate for first time in 7 years. Form then Centamin rose x3 in 6 months. We could repeat that in 2022. Bu weakness and hold on.

Gold and gold miners usually show weakness through this week and then turn after the FOMC meeting (14-15 Dec).