Member Info for moneyhawk

Craig, I think you’ve forgotten about the placing in November which upset quite a few here. News of that placing said:
“The proceeds of the Placing will be used towards the completion of the chrome and PGM transaction at the Company's Inyoni Operations as announced on 24 October and 5 November 2019 “

It’ll be interesting to see how the USA responds to this. On one hand trump wants cheap oil, and Saudi Arabia has basically done what he’s been asking for. On the other hand, cheap oil is going to hit the US hard, Texas especially.

Brom, I still think that clause allows some discretion on what and when to report, as a material ‘discovery’ could reasonably be taken as when we’ve completed all the tests and analysis to confirm it as a discovery, not at first signs of oil while drilling. But sure DW knows the rules and he’ll comply with them. Just saying if we don’t get a step by step progress report, I don’t see it as an issue to be concerned about.

Whenever the first news on the drilling comes, I hope we don’t see a repeat of the winx news flow. Perhaps DW has learnt a lesson from that, and no news on oil shows will be reported until they have a good idea on whether we’ve hit a viable target.

Personally I don’t really buy into the idea that they have to report everything immediately, especially while drilling is underway. And in the current climate I’d much rather see them hold off, with maybe first substantive news being to say which targets are going to be flow tested.

Yes it does seem vanadium has been pushed down the list of priorities. For a while it looked like the implementation was being planned around getting vanadium produced as soon as possible. The plan was zinc concentrate plus vanadium in phase one, followed by zinc metal plus lead in later phases.

It’s all changed with the decision to get copper into production into production first, to be followed by cobalt, which is an unexpected bonus not in the original plan.

Good news o the spud, just 30 days to go until we know if we have something worth flow testing. Going by the winx example, we're not going to flow test anything if its unlikely to flow, so that news is going to be very significant. Good luck all :)

Jonah, yes I do remember that interview. Can’t remember when it was, but I think the indication LC gave was that the zinc circuit could be switched between zinc and copper with minimal time required. But it’s not really that clear if we’ve done this, and just choosing to produce copper instead of zinc, or if Glencore had left the copper refinery with everything in working order and we’ve just switched it back on with little progress towards zinc production.

Although we must have done something in the plant to be extracting copper out of the tailings Glencore had discarded.

The PGM production target of 60,000oz a year does seem achievable, which is 5,000oz a month. And according to the 6 month update we exceeded 5,000 oz in November (5,001 oz? lol), so it looks possible that we can hit this target.

And the focus does seem to have shifted towards copper. Very little mention of zinc and whats happening, and unless I missed it, no mention of vanadium which LC couldn't shut up about until the price fell.

As for the cost of Kabwe tailings though, we haven't actually paid anything for them. Our costs for them have been to do with developing the plant to process the tailings and buying the (currently worthless) stake in BMR. Our 'cost' for the actual tailings will come further down the line in the form of paying BMR a royalty when we do get around to processing the tailings.

The significant cost associated with Kabwe hasn't been for the tailings, but has been for buying Sable. This is now producing copper, and apparently from tailings that came with Sable from Glencore. So not really such a bad deal? But whats happening with the Kabwe tailings does remain a bit of a mystery. Is zinc and vanadium recovery on hold until the prices pick up?

12.06 - yes with the benefit of hindsight DW appears to have raised at exactly the right time. Always easy to criticise placings, but ultimately we will need the cash and DW had to make a choice of raising then or gambling that we would definitely have a higher sp in the near future.

Agree topcatz, this market has gone crazy, it’s like people think a zombie apocalypse is on the way.

Best thing to do at the moment seems to be stick with your current position, in or out. This could well go lower, but may not, who knows.

But think when it all settles down we should be ok here. We know that our costs per pgm oz are far lower than for a traditional miner, so we can still produce PGMs profitability at much lower prices than today. But so far PGM prices don’t seem to be falling that much, and palladium in particular is still over 30% up on the start of the year. So looking a bit more positive than the market falls suggest.

Everything is irrational today. FTSE100 down over 3%, pretty much all stocks down. Take a look at SLP, down nearly 15%, and we were all saying how good they looked just a few days ago!

Kalan, Glencore put Sable into care and maintenance because of a tax dispute with the Zam government as I understand it. I believe that glencores version is that they were owed $200m in tax refunds, so closed some operations and canceled planned investment in zambia as leverage in that dispute. I don't think it had anything to do with Glencore not seeing the plant itself as profitable.

It would be good to know what the current situation is for the Kabwe tailings. It has been suggested several times that we do need fresh RoM ore to mix, although previous talk from LC has suggested this just adds and isn’t an absolute requirement.

But if it is for whatever reason, then I do wonder if the delay is anything to do with GLR. There would be other sources, but is CB a stumbling block preventing us getting other sources of ore in the hope he can get GLR producing at star zinc?

Yes difficult to predict what’s going to happen with the short term sp (here and everywhere else).

This virus situation could get a lot worse globally and could see a lot more falls until the impact is known.

On the other hand, a vaccine could be discovered at any time and it’ll be panic over with stocks across the board recovering sharply.

Yes certainly is complex. Started off with us agreeing a minority stake in a pretty unambitious small BMR project. But has turned into us gaining full control for next to nothing and also buying glencores refinery next door to create a much larger project. Clever dealings from JLP or sheer incompetence from BMR is a matter of debate though!

SLP news today shows an II buying a sizeable stake there. Not directly relevant to us, but shows there is some confidence in the market for PGM prices holding up.

Re palladium and gold price, car sales and production in China has pretty much come to a standstill with the virus outbreak. This is bound to have some knock on effect on palladium demand in the short term, and the price will follow according to demand. But will be just that, short term, hopefully.

And a good reason why we’re on the right strategy with working towards multiple metals in our portfolio. We may not benefit as greatly from a spike in price of one metal, but we won’t be as affected by a fall in price either.

JLPp- interesting point about a closed period, assume he’s taken advice on that. Although what the interims will contain has pretty much been covered in the 6month update we’ve had. The interims will just give a bit more info about the financials and cash balances etc.

I also calculated SLPs 6E figure per oz to be $1024. It comes from comes from:
SLP 4E revenue of $50.96m + 'by products' revenue of $3.376m = $54.336m revenue for 6E PGMs

Revenue per 6E oz therefore = $54.336m / 53,062 oz (6E production) = $1024 per oz (not including the $4.7m of sales adjustments)

There’s always the sell button if you don’t think this is a good investment. Looks like there’s plenty of buyers around today that will take your shares (if you are holding any at the moment)