Member Info for nero120

Absolutely. I bought it as a very on the silver price catching up to the gold price, primary silver miners like FR are highly leveraged. I'll probably hold the position for a while, not sure how soon the silver price will move but when it does it will rocket.

You lot can thank me for that, I sold some shares on Thursday to trade into some silver miners. Obvs meant that Condor would break out the moment I hit the sell button!!

Look at those producers fly: BTO +12%, YRI + 6.5%, FR +9.5%! These are billion dollar companies and they are rocketing higher now that the metals prices have been unleashed. Yet this is nothing compared to what the tiny juniors will do when the crowd arrives. Just a little more patience required.

Sorry, thought we were talking about the last day. Yes most gold equities have risen as the gold price appreciated over the past few months, some haven't though including Condor (and SOLG). I expect they will all catch up at some point. But look at some of the majors, Yamana have almost doubled over the last few months, up nearly 8% currently.

However that's nothing compared to what juniors will do when money starts to pile in...

Lets not get silly Seingred, CEY is up 0.3% (yes, I follow it). The other AIM goldie I follow, SOLG, is up 0.38%. In the green but barely.

Any investment capital that has moved into goldies, and I really don't think many have yet, has gone into majors. We're a long way away from institutional investment capital buying up juniors. It will happen eventually as the gold price continues upwards, but it will take time.

Relax everyone, Condor is well positioned for the coming bull market in gold. We need a bit of buying volume to clear out the MMs which appear to be holding us under 20p at the moment. News would help but I maintain that the macro picture is what will really set a fire under the share price.

"The end game is a high gold price north of $2000/oz, consolidated assets in Nicaragua with all mines built at peak production, and a final merger with one of the largest gold operators."

My thoughts exactly Diamond Dave, great post!

Slim, I empathise with your situation, and Mark is certainly guilty of the cardinal sin of attemping to predict price and timing at the same time, as we know he was sorely wrong in this regard. However, that doesn't make him a bad CEO, pretty much *everyone* gets price prediction wrong and in fact he's been criticised in the past for not "talking up" the share enough. It seems you really can't please all the people all of the time.

Mark should be fairly judged, and in fact you can bet he very much is by large experienced investors like JM and RB. RB has said many times that management and resource are the two most important factors in any gold company, so he must be pretty confident in Mark to have bought in with so much competition out there.

Absolutely criticise him for how he runs the company as this is what will return shareholder value at the end of the day, but I would say be fair and try not to be too resentful regarding his price predictions made in the past. In fact I think he's learned his lesson as he hasn't made a prediction like this in a while.

Seingred, I agree that the bear market is over now, and if I said we were still in a bear market recently then I was incorrect. Since late last year gold equities have been doing well thanks to the increasing gold price, unfortunately not Condor however compared to other junior explorers.

We are being held back, I believe, by a large amount of cheap shares held by MMs after the IIs selling out and PIs selling at the bottom now. Until we see some buying volume to buy up these cheap shares we'll continue to drift lower.

On the plus side, the lower we drift the more enticing a prospect Condor becomes, as deep pocketed investors and IIs start to reallocate to gold equities and see an easy multi bagger here as the bull market really gets going, and it's only just barely begun.

Isapension, judging by the quality of the "arguments" criticising Mark lately I'm not sure that certiain investors *are* aware that CEOs don't actually control share prices. There are valid criticisms that can be levelled at Mark, unfortunately not many here seem to be capable of articulating them.

As for him not caring about small investors, I would say that his actions over the years have demonstrated that he does care about how Condor is run, which includes all investors, the people of La India and other invested parties. That doesn't make him a saint and I can understand why the recent options grants rubbed salt into the wounds of the depressed share price due to two IIs selling out recently. Though I don't think he's getting rich at shareholders expense. £110k salary is hardly big bucks these days for any experienced professional based in London, and the options still have to be exercised which means more cash out of his pocket.

As long as senior management have plenty of skin in the game here I am willing to forgive him not voluntarily not taking up the remuneration he is entitled to. However, if he was hugely increasing those amounts throughout the bear market, that would have me concerned...

Slim can you email Mark and tell him to make the share price go up. I mean, that's how it works right? Why else would the share price be going down, must be Mark making it go down! Certainly it's not my fault for buying a gold explorer at the top of a bull market and holdiing through a bear market, certianly not! Must be the CEO, surely! Yes that's right because I'm smart!!

I'm not the one complaining about the CEO!! If you don't approve of his actions or remuneration package, then sell and give us all some peace! And you're wrong again as per usual, I just don't like to report my life story on the board unlike you seingred. FYI, no one cares.

Blimey. Well clearly you savvy investors have no faith in the CEO to act in the best interests of share holders so it's time you sold up and moved on. Good thing you did your due dilligence here before buying, I'm sure this was just a blip in your otherwise stirling investment history. Oh well can't win them all hey? Bye bye.

MC has the most incentive of anyone not to dilute and by any measure has done a great job keeping dilution as low as possible over the length of this bear market. But issuing equity is how gold explorers raise cash and in a bear market dilution is unavoidably going to be worse than in a bull market. Why is this news to people here?

Shall we moan about the sun going down tonight and other such blindingly obvious and unavoidable events?

You could make exactly the same argument for every one else chasing billionaire's money, and there's no shortage of demand for it these days.

So you expect a major shareholder to hoover up the 10 million shares to keep the share price from dropping (around 30p at the start of the year so say ~£2m), plus tap them for another few million quid when raising runds, all so your holding doesn't get diluted a bit? Wow delusional much?

Roth and Seingred, Condor has fallen because we've had two IIs dump nearly 10 million shares (nearly 15% of total shares) on the market since the beginning of the year. It's any wonder we haven't fallen further and the price has held in part because JM and RB significantly increased their holdings (JM had 3.7M as of 04/18, he now has 14M, RB had 5.3M and now has 6.5M). How's that for confidence?

This has clearly caused Condor's price to diverge from the gold equity market trend which gained on the back of the gold price increase. We would be a lot higher were it not for all this selling and the amount of shares now held by MMs as a result.

I disagree Seingred, the shareprice will rise with the rest of the gold equity space regardless, as money moves back into the sector. MC needs to show progress towards production and proving the resource whilst keeping dilution low, and once the sector is back in favour our share price will rocket along with others. It will rise more or less than others based on various fundamental factors, but right now fundamentals don't matter as numerous positive drilling news and derisking news have alluded to over this bear market.

Gold is a cyclical asset, by extension so are gold equities. Many people here badly need to step back and look at the bigger picture.

"A price of 22 p hardly infers much incentive really or management confidence in the future sp."

Well Seingred, the idea is that the employees use the options to buy the shares, the lower the price the more likely it is they will. Remember, most of them are not millionaires, they are salaried employees. The options are already with the exchange so the dilution has already occurred, unlike warrants, so you want the employees to buy the options and holding the shares incentivises them to work hard to make the company succeed - not only have they invested their time but now they have parted with cash to purchase the options. It's called having skin in the game.

When the IFC sold out they also lost over 2 million warrants, dilution is not always a foregone conclusion and the options still have to be exercised, clearly not all of them will. Personally I'd rather take the possible dilution if the staff feel incentivised to work hard to make the company successfull, than pinch pennies whilst I sit on my butt expecting others to make me money. But that's just me. :)

Interesting:

"Processing options at El Limon and La Libertad, new owners motivated to do a deal - In April, CNR announced positive metallurgical results from the open pit portion of the La India project in Nicaragua. Testwork was completed by B2Gold and was based on two 23kg samples at an average head grade of 12.1g/t. These returned average recoveries of 95.4% and confirmed that ore from La India was suitable for processing through B2s processing plants in Nicaragua. The PFS work suggested that the ore was amenable to standard CIL or CIP processing, but was relatively hard with a Bond Work Index of 17.5kWh/t -21.9kWh/t requiring a relatively fine grind with 80% passing 75 microns. B2Gold recently agreed to sell its Nicaraguan operations to Calibre Mining for US$100m. We believe that Calibre will be highly motivated to seek near mine ore sources to augment the Resources and Reserves, with Condor a clear target for such discussions, whether on the basis of a toll treatment or more close relationship."