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JFC people. Stablecoins are not "ponzi schemes" as they are designed to track the price of an underlying asset, they do not pay anything out to old holders as new holders buy in. Therefore, Tether is not a ponzi scheme, but it is a FRAUD. Tether claim to have 1 to 1 backing of USD for each USDT token, but no one knows what the hell they actually have as THEY'VE NEVER ONCE SUBMITTED TO AN INDEPENDENT, VERIFIABLE AUDIT. If that doesn't scream SCAM to you then I've got a bunch of FTT tokens to sell you.
As for Tether Gold (XAUT), just have a look at their site https://gold.tether.to/ and you tell me if it seems legit. And again, NO INDEPENDENT AUDIT. Who knows how much gold they have in reserve, if any. Why in god's (or should that be gold's?) name would I own a (probably fraudulent) digital token gold substitute when I can own ACTUAL GOLD?! Sometimes living in clown world really gets under my skin, but only in clown world would people not understand that the entire point of gold as a safe haven asset is that it has NO COUNTER PARTY, so when you accept a gold substitute (such as XAUT) you are foregoing the entire reason for holding gold in the first place! And also, the entire point of crypto coins were that using cryptographically signed transactions and distributed ledgers would do away with the requirement to trust centralised institutions. And then some bright spark came up with stable coins (backed by the assets of a fricking CENTRALISED INSTITUTION!!) and the idiots, not seeing the complete contradiction, flocked to buy it.
As for MC's comments, he said cryptos were a speculative asset, and he's absolutely right. If tether gold wanted to fund the mine and get paid in gold then at the very least it proves that Condor's assets have real value that will hopefully be realised during the sales process. Regardless, many have tried to "digitise" gold (goldmoney, glint, kinesis, etc) so XAUT is not new, but utilising a blockchain is pointless since you are necessarily trusting a centralised institution, so you're just incurring additional transaction cost for no benefit. Russia and China are committed to developing an alternative digital reserve currency to rival the dollar that will be "backed" by commodities and/or other physical assets, but note that a digital currency is not the same thing as a crypto currency, and their currency will be for trade settlements between nations only. I see no benefit to holding digital gold if you're looking to preserve your wealth.
Most crypto proponents fail to understand crypto, money and it seems, gold as well. They are simply speculators looking to get rich quick off the latest thing. Maybe they will, but more likely they will not.
Awax perhaps if we'd not been delayed with the resettlement issues then this would have been feasible, but in this market I'm starting to think selling is the safer play. The world is coming unglued (as well as the markets) and I'm not sure I want to be in a risky, illiquid stock such as Condor over the coming years. There is no guarantee the market would even reward us us if we made it to production (it hasn't yet for all the progress made, so it's not certain that would change), and it would be a long while before we'd see any dividends.
Personally I think JM has read the tea leaves and has called time. Mark got Condor to a point where we have an economic, derisked asset with lots of upside. It took longer than hoped but he did it, all credit to him. I think Jim weighed up committing more years to going into production in very risky and unstable markets verses selling now for a decent profit, and chose the latter. If they manage to sell for 50p+ then I'd accept that, put the rest down to experience, and hunker down for the approaching storm...
DD I think even good blue chip divi stocks will get hammered as markets continue to tank. I think taking a year out on the sidelines then looking to accumulate said strong divi stocks from next year onwards is a decent strategy. I don't think the dev will pivot like MSM keep telling us, inflation hasn't peaked IMO.
Honestly DD, I have no idea, there are just so many variables. I'd be "happy" if I could sell my holding for anything over an average of 50p - which is such a shame given the potential that we had here. Even if the asset is sold, how much of the cash will be distributed as a dividend? Will there be enough liquidity to sell any remaining shares for a decent price? In fact, if a company buys the asset for cash + shares that might actually be better assuming the company's shares have a more liquid market than Condor's.
Again, just so many unknowns at the moment. I'm also starting to worry about the markets in general this year, things look like they're going south pretty rapidly. I'll be in no hurry to re-invest if I can successfully offload my Condor shares.
AAZ closing price on 4th Jan 2022 was 107
AAZ closing price on 30th Dec 2022 was 97.6
But whatever, personally I don't give a **** about your trading account and have no idea why you come on here to talk about it. In fact, with all these gains you (supposedly) make, why do you waste time with a dog of a share like Condor when you could be lying on a beach somewhere given all your mad gainz?
Condor is down 47% on the year, having suffered due to incredibly badly timed sanctions and the resulting fallout, despite finally getting the BFS out (with environmental permits all granted so basically derisked). Disappointing that we are where we are, but you're calling MC a charlatan?!
Well tbh I would say SBF is a charlatan so you must be implying that MC is another SBF? I suppose you could have sold out of Condor in early 2022 at around 30p and bought into cryptos (as certain posters on here were constantly pushing cough SEINGRED), and you'd now be down even more than if you'd just kept your money here. So do we really think MC and JM will do an SBF after encouraging long term investors to put money directly into the company so they can screw us and walk away with whatever funds they raise from an asset sale?! Personally I don't think so.
2022 was a crap year for most PM equity investments, here's a selection:
Condor: -47%
Calibre: -25%
Equinox: -46%
B2Gold: +4%
Newmont: -15%
Barrick: +1%
GDX: -5%
GDXJ: -9%
Oh what look at that - Equinox Gold down the same as Condor, whose top shareholders include Ross Beaty, Eric Sprott, Van Eck, ect. Are the Equinox management team charlatans also? I guess they must be according to the whining girls on this board. Let's look at the main indices:
FTSE100: -1% (largely thanks to GBP weakness)
Dow: -9%
S&P: -18%
Nasdaq: -30%
What about seingred's precious cryptos:
Bitcoin: -57%
Ethereum: -58%
Shocking. And good old PMs (which I hope you all own a decent amount of):
Gold: +1%
Silver: +2%
So for the rational people (still) here, let's hope we get some good luck and MC and JM manage to sell the company for $120-240m, and we get a nice dividend to walk away with. Condor was a high risk bet, we all knew this. It clearly didn't pay off in the way we'd all hoped for various reasons, though personally I don't include "fraud" as one of those reasons.
Good luck and good fortune to all in 2023.
EL actually they will take their gold price predictions from mainstream investment bank analysts.
https://capex.com/en/overview/gold-price-prediction
But in general, a falling dollar and stubbornly high inflation are strong tailwinds for the gold price. Expect it to challenge $2k again during the year.
The EGM to approve the proposed subdivision of shares is on Wednesday at 11 a.m. If the motion passes then the open offer goes ahead with new shares added on the 23rd.
Hopefully we'll also get news as to how much was raised in the open offer, some good news would be welcome before Christmas.
We are entering the end game folks, let's hope the western world can hold things together long enough to get the asset/company sold for a decent price and we can all close the book on our time here. Good luck to us!
DDD, indeed. MC has said that Hannam are conducting the sales process in two stages or "rounds", so I expect we will be notified via RNS at some point in Q1 2023 that round 1 of the process has concluded and round 2 has started. We may also be told that there were x number of participants in round 1, and possibly a minimum offer price (at a guess) to put a floor under the process.
That sounds reasonable squeaky, from a perspective where you trust the board to act in shareholders best interests (which I also share). I suppose to summarise the risks now:
1. Sale process drags on after 6 months and company needs to raise additional funds
2. No acceptable price for the asset is offered (for whatever reason, e.g asset is not valued by the market or a market event occurs causing potential buyers to withdraw interest, etc) and the sales process ends without a sale, leaving the company short of funds and with no clear path forward
3. Board is looking to screw the shareholders (i.e. a conspiracy) and will take the funds received via the open offer for themselves (somehow). Note that both the chairman and CEO are major shareholders as well as Nic officials connected to the Ortega government.
Personally I don't and never have had an impression that MC (or JM) was out to screw anyone, much easier ways to do that than busting a nut as a gold junior for 11 years over a gold bear market. I trust they will do their best to reach an acceptable sale but the main risk in my mind is market conditions. Hopefully they can remain stable over 3 to 6 months at least.
I missed this piece of info in the open offer RNS:
"The equity markets have been difficult of late and the impact of US Sanctions as notified on 27 October 2022 has delayed financing. A prior offer of equity financing was subsequently withdrawn whilst the Company rejected a secured debt facility."
I assume they're talking about financing the mine build here (as opposed to just financing ongoing operations)? So Condor had an acceptable offer of equity financing that was withdrawn due to concerns about the sanctions, and also an offer for a secured debt facility that the board decided to reject (for whatever reason). Interesting. So it shows that there are possibilities to move forward here but the crappy timing of the sanctions rattled the market. Hopefully these concerns will have abated a little after seeing Calibre recover so as not to derail the sales process.
f7ash Condor are now at the point where the mine is derisked and construction ready, so either we have to commence build ourselves or sell it to someone who will. The government and the local community want the mine built asap. Any deliberate delaying by the company will risk the gov revoking our permits and/or losing support of the local community. If the board and shareholders want to see a return on their investment then it's in their interest to either raise the funds to build or sell the asset.
The board say that raising funds to build will result in excessive dilution, as well as the fact that it is a significant risk to take on the build ourselves when we have no experience in this area and any delay or issue will likely require additional debt/dilution. They think the best option is to go for a sale. MC has stated that Hannam is running a proper sales process with a timetable (suggesting a process of maximum 6 months duration). 70+ potential buyers have been contacted by Hannam and an information memo, financial model and mine schedules have been prepared. There is a round 1 and round 2 of preferred bidders, and we should receive continual updates throughout Q1.
One way or the other, we should know fairly soon whether the sales process is bearing fruit.