Member Info for mattlilly

The first UT of the day was at 7.46...up 8%...

Since then the SP has fallen 10%...driven by Autotrades...

There has been very little buying or selling by PIs or other investors...

Of the first 148 trades, only 19 of them were non AT trades...

And five of those were by what looks like one plucky investor buying 500k at an average of 3.76 (currently 3.86...)

Apart from the fact that rapidly falling or rising shares are fuelled by PIs not wanting to miss out, there is one fundamental underlying factor that is relevant to SOLG...

Liquidity...or lack of it...

People on here and elsewhere keep talking about "the market this and the market that..."

"The market" is neithe heavily selling nor heavily buying shares...

The average daily volume on Solgold is c0.1%...yes NOUGHT POINT ONE per cent of the total shares in issue...

That tells me that nobody is selling and nobody is buying and as I have said earlier, the vast majority of daily trades are AT trades...NOT private investors...NOT institutions..

Indeed I estimate that over the last few months, leaving out the exceptional move in late December, NOUGHT POINT NOUGHT TWO (0.02)% of total shares in issue are traded on an averag daily basis.

So why is nobody buying...? Either because they are fully invested or for fear of losing even more money. They want to see news or a rising share price before stepping back in. If it falls further they may simply chuck the towel in.

But they're not>

Why?

Because they know or at least believe that Cascabel alone is worth way more than the current share price and they are either waiting for 'the market' to recognise that or for the inevitable bidding war for one of the best unmined Tier 1 prospects on the planet.

And why aren't they buying?

Because they are fully invested and they fear the SP will fall further if they buy more and it hurts too much already.

I would venture a bet that virtually nobody is running a profit at the moment on a holding of any meaningful size.

But here's the thing...liquidity in share markets is a double sided coin.

I know from my own experience as an AIM GFD with shareholder responsibility that when there is litlle or no liquidity couple with little or no news, the SP drifts steadily lower and lower...

And even 'insiders' at SOLG acknowledge that AT trades are manipulating the market, steadily dragging it lower...

Why?

At face value it looks stupid...the daily value of their hundreds of trades is immaterial and they must be steadily losing money so it can only be to keep the SP low, which clearly wouldn't be difficult for one or more prospective bidders...

But 20/27 December shows the other side of the coin.

Because of poor liquidity, when good news arrives, the SP will be marked up and PIs (and maybe institutions) will climb back in, driving the price up in a market where the only sellers will be tired investors or short term traders.

So trust me...this hurts right now...but we all still believe we are on the verge of a life changing event...

GLA

Between mid September and late October the SP almost halved, from 14+ to sub 8...

No-one who has been here for any length of time could be unaware of Berry Street Capital's animosity towards SOLG's Board of Directors, culminating in an Open Letter to shareholders.

OK so some of what they said was fair enough but this was a fund with only c1% of the shares which eventually went bust due to apparent incompetence. It was a fund set up primarily for very wealthy investors but eventually it had to be liquidated.

The key thing is, howver, that in any normal cisrcumstances the fund managers or a reciver would contact Solgold and, working with one or two MMs, work the sale carefully through the market to minimise damage to the SP.

Instead BSC dumoed their SOLG shares directly into the market, creating a protracted overhang in what looks suspiciously like a fit of pique.

IMO the SP would have been much lower if Scott hadn't stepped in to buy shares and stabilise the price.

But one thing that these two 'events' have in common is that private investors almost certainly panicked and sold as the share price was dropping, thereby exacerbating the fall. That might have been a smart move for some if they are back in at a much lower cost, but I'm sure MMs will have gleefully hit one Stop Loss after another on the way down...

The final 'event' is the share price rise from 20 to 27 December.

I've already written about that yesterday and I believe it was triggered by the very positive AGM results after investors had feared the worst.

So what conclusions can we draw.

PIs often invest in shares based on hype, a tip, seeing a share price rise rapidly, rumour of such as takeovers, mates recommendations or whatever.

But when those things don't materialise they have to ask themselves two questions:

Do I sell or hold

And if I hold, what do I actually KNOW about this company.

And the fact is that we only really know what is in the public domain. The rest is speculation and rumour.

But what a PI should ALWAYS do BEFORE they buy a share is to research in detail and be absolutely clear why they are buying a share and what their expectations are. If those expectations are unrealised and or do not materialise they have one of three decisions to make:

Do I sell

Do I hold

Do I buy more

Instead many shareholders are driven by one or both of FOMO or FOLO.

And then when things go wrong they are afflicted by the 'British disease'...look for anyone to blame except themselves.

And of course the Company has let them down...

But why have I linked these events?

In the first, the share price fell from 36 to 13.76. This was the major reason why the SP has been so deflated for the last several months.

So what happened?

After Darryl became CEO he stopped almost everything to focus on Cascabel. Porvenir was to be the 'next cab off the rank'

This is the opening statement of his Linked In profile:

"Darryl Cuzzubbo is a Chief Executive Officer and Director with over 30 years of experience in roles across a variety of commodities and geographies in both the resources and manufacturing sectors."

What do you notice is missing...? Mining exploration and development...

I am in no doubt that Darryl was appointed to Project Direct the construction of the Alpala mine. PFS2 was completed in April 2022 and the focus then was DFS. But it was Ingo's role to raise the funds, so why did he leave? Because he knew that Alpala could not be funded without massive equity dilution.

But before that, SOLG needed funds. Ingo and Ayten worked on a 'plain vanilla' equity issue but Darryl and Nick wanted to cut out BHP and NCM and they were persuaded by Barclays that they could do a 'cashbox' issue.

This very publicly failed; Ingo and Ayten resigned and the share price started to plummet...it took 6 months to recover after Scott came in.

But meanwhile Darryl had made another massive gaffe.

Sangha had a royalty funding lined up with Osisko but Cuzzubbo once again thought he could do better. Privately he went to FNV to see if he could get a better deal.

This was an act of self sabotage. He was fired and Scott took over and the SP started to recover until it became clear that the merger would take much longer to complete.

Nevertheless it recovered eventually to 22p.

As it became clear that there was much more work to do and a takeover might take longer than we wished, but especially as the copper price drifted from $4.30 to $3.60 and gold from $2085 to $1810, the SOLG SP drifted down again to stabilise around 14/15p, where it would have stayed or even advanced as metals prices stabilised, until the next major 'event' happened...

So finally lets consider our won position as ordinary investor. And OK I understand that our holding at 2.2 million may be much more than most 'ordinary investors' can afford, but SOLG at pur average cost represents 35% of our total investments and I increased our holding by almost 30% on Tuesday.

I'm sure most investors on here are sensible. Occasionally we might get carried away by hype, or a tip we've read somewhere...and sometimes we get lucky with a multibagger, but others we sell and write off a significant loss.

I did this with EVR and POLY and several others over the last 40 years.

But we've also had big wins such as SOLG twice before and ATYM. Those gains are more than funding our commitment to SOLG now.

And believe me I am every bit as frustrated as you. But there is no point being angry, because I am responsible for my own decisions.

Every morning I wake up and check for the RNS that could be life changing.

Because I have been so bullish about Solgold since Scott and Sangha took over, I have been sucked in by such as the media articles. I believed the merger could and should have been completed quicker and that a quick takeover would happen early in 2023.

I was wrong.

And then Lasso announced his intention to step down. As you know I am a great believer in macro factors and although at first I had bought more, I slashed our holding to 200k because markets hate uncertainty. I've steadily rebuilt it since to a 10p average but that's still a 33% loss.

I believe very strongly in taking responsibility for my own decisions and, wher necessary, cutting and running.

But not here...and not now...when we are so close...

Markets especdially in the US are driven by FOMO...Fear of Missing Out...(I would add a variant...FOLO...Fear of Losing Out...)

So just reflect on what happened between mid June and late September 2022; mid September and late October 2023; and 20/27 December 2023.

Those three 'events' show me very clear lessons:

tbc

AROK I'm in absolutely no doubt that the SP is being managed. I can't remember ever seeing even an AIM share with such a vast proportion of AT trades and SOLG has a full listing. And every time there is weakness it is pushed down unless PIs buy shares...e.g. on Tuesday...7.10 to 7.92...

The second priority has clearfly become what I've called PFS3.

PFS2 was announced in April 2022 with a DFS to follow, but Scott knocked that on the head in November 2022 after Darryl was sacked for incompetence and Scott took over.

In September 2023 he made clear that the PFS would be massively revised to produce a better, quicker, cheaper mine design, building on Keith Marshalls suggestion that the rich ore be mined from the top to fund the later block cave from cashflow.

Even under Marshall this produced a payback in 4/5 years. I epxect a lower CAPEX, more metal and better revenues in the revised PFS which is imminent. I believe it will leave people in no doubt that Cascabel is a Tier 1 mine.

The third priority, given the need to set up datarooms, etc; to produce the optimum possibility of a bidding war or a knockout bid and/or the best possible monetisation, together with a revised PFS was to strictly manage cash.

Just imagine how worried you would be right now if September's cash balance had been $2m instead of $22m...

So as with the merger, PFS£ has taken more time than they or we would have wanted, but trust me it is imminent. Scott is being pushed hard by Sangha et al but, as with much he has done so far he is taking a professional approach.

I expect PFS3 to spike the SP simply because of its arrival, let alone what it contains

I expect 'insiders' to buy shares that they haven't been able to since 14 December

I expect further announcements about tailings, railway, pipeline, exploitation agreement, green energy proposals and maybe even at least one or two announcements about the 90+ 'outside' projects (which, remember includes Bramaderos), including possibly at least one J/V.

Not all at once, that would miss the opportunity, but although Nick was guilty of overhyping, he was good at keeping the market fed with even tidbits of news.

What I would LIKE in addition would be an auction of the former CGP Solgold shares to the highest bidder, starting, say at 20p. This alone would make clear who was seriously interested and would ignite takeover fever.

In my final post I will consider the position of us ordinary investors

This morning I've read some of the most sensible comments for some time.

And please don't berate me for being optimistic...its the way I'm made.

But I'm not stupid either. OK I've made some unsound investing decisions in my time, but this is not one.

It is entirely understandable that we are frustrated and/or impatient.

Obviously really good news would help the SP but, given the crystal clear communications we have had over the last several months, we know what we can expect.

Scott made it abundantly clear that previous management had been incompetent. The best example was the snail like progress on the merger which led to SOLG having to produce a fresh Prospectus from January because nobody noticed that they had to get the merger completed before the MD&A was completedm because of the change of finacial information.

So it is no wonder that Nick merely scraped in at the AGM and Twigger and Clare are gone, together with much of the management.

And we now have a skeleton staff, which together with other measures has seen the operational monthly cashflow fall from c$3 million to c! million.

And yes the other main casualty has been the drilling programme which would of course have produced probably positive RNSs from time to time to support the SP.

But Scott has been abundantly clear on three priorities:

a thorough going Strategic Review aimed at producing the monetisation event(s) that would produce the optimum returns for shareholders. In this he is convincing because he, Sangha and the former Cornerstone shareholders have huge skin in the game and have thrown their lot in with Solgold despite twice before turning down takeover bids, in defence of which they claimed their shares were worth between $12.50 and $20...

But the merger was completed at c$4 a share. And none of them has sold a single share. Indeed Sangha, Scott and others have bought more shares.

The unavoidable conclusion of the Strategic Review has been that SOLG will seek to sell the whole company to the highest bidder or at worst Cascabel; together with separate exercises in monetising the other 90+projects, including Porvenir.

And yes I also have made the mistake of thinking the bidding would start much sooner than this, but in retrospect we cannot ignore the macro factors:

Mining stocks in general have had a bad year. Just look at the correlation between SOLG SP and GDXJ for example; or even Newmont.

There is no doubt we face a massive global copper shortage but in real terms copper has underperformed although it still rmeains above the PFS1/2 assumptions of $3.70.

SOLG is a gold play and the forecasts of such as Goldman of $3000 have not come to pass but at $2034 it is 56% above the previous assumptions.

To be continued...

The second priorityt

But there's still $168 BILLION of metal in the ground...even only 1% of that is $1.68 billion, or £1.33bn or 44p/share...and thats just Cascabel...At 1% of metal in the ground, Porvenir alone is worth the current MCap...

Oh dear paddy...nobody's buying and nobody's selling in any size...

At least 80% of trades every day are done by Autobots...

Everybody;s waiting and/or watching and as I;ve said before, when there's no liquidity share prices just drift down...

PFS3 will change all that...no later than a week roday...

Don't worry, its not going to happen...BBG is confusing PFS2 (completed April 2022) with PFS3, started by Scott late 2023...

Hi RICHR...

The Strategic Review is done and PFS3 is "imminent". This will be accompanied by a Technical report and news on the pipeline, tailings and railway. It would be great if we had the final agreement at the same time.

PFSs aren't an overnight affair...the last one took 15 months...

In the meantimne the company is on 'care and maintenance' with a monthly operational cashflow spend of c$1m...

Https://latam-news.co/news/latin-americas-peace-premium

I apologise for pointing out your obvious error, which led to the negative supposition that PFS3 might not arrive before 31 March...

Enjoy the green boxes...

And until then, don't worry about the daily moves because the Autobots are doing 'the Grand Old Duke of York', day after day after day...

Thats what happens in a thinly traded stock, but the liquidity will be boosted significantly after PFS3 arrives because everyone will have to take a position, one way or the other...:

How to revalue the shares based on the revised construstion model and economic case and

Speculation on who will bid and when, given that there will be no reason to hold back on buying one of the world's greatest new copper gold projects...

As Mike Henry of Barrick said, publicly...

"We know about Solgold..."

And they have moved their strategy from gold projects to include copper/gold projects...

"Copper is the new gold..."

His statement is totally wrong:

"It doesn't state early in the first part of Q1. It states early Q1 in 2024."

And looking at the thinness of the market, with the vast majority of trades being Autobots, if you're thinking of investing I wouldn't leave it too late because starting with the first 200k, my 489k (and anyone else who followed) took the SP up 12% with a 7.92 close...

And in three full trading days from 19 December the SP rose 65% at its highest...I guess a lot of people who had been holding back panick bought because of FOMO...

We've waited 16 months for material good news so nobody knows how much the price will pop when it arrives...

How is "EARLY IN THE FIRST QUARTER of 2024" ambiguous...?

Why did I increase our holding by almost 30%?

I was waiting for a price close to 7p

Why?

PFS3 and the pattern of trading since 21 December

PFS3 is imminent

This was the ACTUAL statement on 19 December:

"Phased Approach Pre-Feasibility Study...Expected to be released EARLY IN THE FIRST QUARTER of 2024

That means by 15 February...

IMO, Insiders will buy more as soon as the RNS hits as they have been in a closed period since before the AGM...because of the possible arrival of PFS3 within 31 days

Also we are overdue news about the pipeline and the rail line

And on 22 January, Scott said:

"The phased approach pre-feasibility study for the Company's 100% owned Cascabel Project located in northern Ecuador is nearing completion. The phased approach is expected to demonstrate a lower risk path for Cascabel, with several project optimizations expected compared to the 2022 Cascabel PFS, including lower capital costs."

NEARING COMPLETION...17 days ago...

But then I looked at the pattern of trading that took the SP from 7.2 to 11.6 in just 4.1/2 trading days...

And my conclusion was that investors had held back from buying, or even opened shorts leading up to the AGM, to hedge against the possibility of some or all of the Board being fired...and indeed Twigger and Clare stepping down in late November can only have increased investors' nervousness...

The AGM was timed for one of the quietest periods of the year.

There was a surge of buying on 14 December, the day Scott sent out issued an RNS including the above key Cascabel update.

I suspect this was buying informed by knowledge of the majority of the voting results, which would show strong support for all the Directors except Nick Mather and the 'Reminder' would have been directed at PIs, to make sure he sneeked over the line.

The AGM was on 20 December 'Brisbane Time', so results would have been known before the London Market opened and we saw a further surge of buying on 20/21 December, but...

The weeks before and after Christmas are prettydead week (hence the AGM date).Many investors and fund managers wouldn't have been back at their desks unti 27 December and we saw another surge of buying 27/28 December (24 million shares), which took the SP as high as 11.6p.

Indeed on 27 December, trading volume increased 5 fold on TSX

After that, traders and weak holders would have taken the opportunity to cash in and the lack of news since has probably seen some PIs especially, disppointed at the lack of follow through, slowly selling...

So...I expect the SP to start to climb a couple of days before the PFS3. Markets are notoriously leaky.

I also expect Insiders and Institutions to buy immediately on release, together with PIs who have held back or didn't believe it would arrive by then... (just read today's posts).

So it is reasonable to expect a price surge and then we will be looking for follow through.

Resistance is at 8p, 9p, 11p then

Mr Magoo...'the market's doesnt think anything..

Theres no meaningful buying or selling. I bought 489k the other day and the price went from 7.10 to 7.92.

The daily volumes are pitiful and totally dominated by Autobots. My buys represented 2p% of the days volume.

We are all waiting...the ignorant are waiting for something...the rest of us are fully invested and waiting for PFS3 and or the first bid.

Cheers

Cash is being burnt without apparent reason...only $1m a mon th

company strategy unknown/missing,...crystal clear...the company is up for sale

exploration stopped...to preserve cash

Ecuador in turmoil...not any more just ask Darren

employees stealing from the company...years ago...$4 million

high turnover of CEOs and executives...stabilised by Scott with a 'skeleton staff to conserve cash.

All focus on the PFS3 (pkus of course they have to produce MD&A next week)