Member Info for Old_GEC_ESL_boff

I diluted my RR holding down below 15% of my portfolio last June, when the price was 869. I bought back in (to about 30% concentration) at 1201 in early March, and plan to remain overweight until the results in late July, unless sea conditions change. I think what I'm doing is consistent with the captain's advice here.

I wanted to share the rollercoaster ride we had with Goodwin to further illustrate how choppy it can get and, for smaller stocks, how small investors can be capsized without warning.

My family had all invested in Goodwin as a Lord John Lee recommendation and seen extraordinary gains. In January 26 I took all my profits but the rest of the family remained on board, in one case Goodwin was 65% of one of my kid's entire portfolio. Once Iran went kinetic everything started to slide and we all ran for the safety of cash. On Friday 20 March we all sold out of Goodwin. By close on Monday 23 March the stock had lost 50% of the value from Friday's close. We were all very lucky to have banked our profits. It was pure luck. Lessons learnt include that AIM is the Wild West. I'm more comfortable with a large and somewhat diversified player like Rolls but the market still responds to every bit of bad news as if the company has just one division.

BAT? You have to be kidding. The best way to make a small fortune, if you start with a large one that is. BAT is being run like a hospice. Check out Holly K, chief undertaker. Then divest.

No Cev I'm out. When I hit "Post message" I did ask myself what I was doing. Like the (majority of) What Car? readers who apparently buy the mag after they've bought the car. I posted because I think the timescales involved for EEE to get to the next stages are extremely long term, relative to the horizons of most small investors. I have absolutely no clue where the sp will be in 12 or 24 months and it could be 100 just as much as 5. Investing in this stock felt like going for an evening of greyhound racing.

Won't post here again. Best of luck to those of you with faith.

I got out a week ago at 37. Since then, there's been an institutional placement priced at 40. I think the price of the placement is fairly irrelevant, since surely those investors agreed to posit a relatively small amount of long term cash in the expectation that, at the end of the rainbow (that means 2-3 years) there will be actual ore extracted, shipped and refined.

For the institutions this makes sense. They'll still be around.

For the army of small shorter term investors (which included me) it make zero sense to wait around. Come back in a year, or two, and buy in at 20-30 then.

Yesterday I ended my 2+ month adventure in Empire Metals, selling out completely at a fairly substantial loss.

It's been interesting, and I feel I've learnt a few things: mainly that mineral companies are entirely outside my experience and understanding. I won't be reinvesting in EEE.

My conclusion for EEE is that it ideally will sell the Ti rights to Rio Tinto or such like; someone who not only has extraction and refining arrangements in place, but is also in a position to manage the supply-side and help maintain a strong and stable market price for the refined metal. Without this kind of take-out, today's EEE shareholders are going to have to be incredibly patient, and I don't sense patience as the dominant characteristic of the current investors (not if they're anything like me).

In future I plan to stick to my investment knitting, which over the past couple of years has become the nuclear/ defence engineering. My three remaining UK holdings are:

Rolls Royce, Goodwin and MS International.

Each has substantially exceeded expectations, and I also see them all as sound but no longer meteoric longer term holds.

Best of luck to all on the EEE register. Please confine the rumbustious chat to this board and don't mess up the civilised boards for GDWN or MSI!!!

Best outcome...

in all honestly, while I'll wait around for years if necessary for EEE to develop the Ti discovery and maybe make some other, the best outcome would simply be for one of the 25 giant mining companies with market caps over $30bn or more to take EE out for $3bn+.

But not a penny less.

Https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2025/uk/from-aim-to-the-main-market-the-rise-of-the-market-move-up

I'm a former corporate financier. There are some things wrong with EEE's listing and base right now, but before addressing that let me just mention dilution which keeps being raised.

The central purpose of obtaining the MRE was to assist in the raising of project finance in order to build the very first tranche of the required extraction and ore transportation infrastructure. In all likelihood, the Australian government itself would be the best source of some or all of said financing, which I would expect to run to hundreds of millions of AUD. The value of EEE's rights are clear to potential creditors in the MRE. What's not yet clear is the plan for phase 1 extraction and getting the ore to an existing railhead or jetty for shipment to refinery. I would assume the company has made some progress here but again the creditors may be prepared to advance a little bit of the loan in order to fund this project planning and design work. From this point on, the discovery itself acts as an enormous security interest for lenders. It is simply not necessary for the company to issue any new shares to fund this work or the construction itself. So talk of dilution of the equity is, in my (former) professional opinion, is codswallop.

EEE's biggest equity-related problems are that it's unhelpful now for the company to remain on AIM (since many respectable investment funds can't or won't invest there); and that the company now really needs a base of stable long-term institutional shareholders to accompany its future growth and early maturity. This is no longer a speculative exploration play but its listing and its base trap EEE there. EEE needs its hand held by a major investment bank with a good resources team (I'd suggest HSBC personally) to transition to the main London market (or indeed to the ASX, for example). It likely needs some more investor-known leadership alongside the current team, not to replace them.

One last thing: This morning's suggestion of a take-private would be appalling and, at frankly any price, I would vote to reject and to fire the board. The company has a duty to delivery this discovery to the benefit of its existing shareholders, not to rip us off. That said, I've seen nothing from management suggesting this is their plan. Instead, management seem confused (ergo inexperienced) about why the share price remains stupendously volatile and why the MRE didn't take it over £1. A CFO experienced with growth on the main market might help to explain things to the rest of the team.

I'm only in EEE because I followed Cev over from Rolls.

He was right, again.

I'm very grateful, again.

I sold 4 blocks of RR on Monday at around 870 disposing of about 100,000 shares in total between 4 family members. We've all moved to about 15% RR in our portfolios and have diversified our risks away from a scary concentration. I still love Rolls as a long term investment but the event risk of, for example, getting just half of the SMR pot had become too great for the exposures we all had. The final push was the Motley Fool turning into a buyer.

It's been a great ride and I look forward to being a loyal smaller shareholder for years to come.

France only has a wealth tax on real property.

The fact the article was written by a former adviser to Jeremy Hunt goes some way to explaining why, 99% under the Tories, it has taken 8 years so far for the UK to progress to a medium-list of 4 candidates.

Notwithstanding, I'm closely following all the budget politicking and I doubt that a former civil servant like Smith will have any insight into Labour's plans. Miliband's funding seems to be there. Pressing ahead with the SMR competition and picking RR as 1 of the final 2 should be a no-brainer given Rolls' history with the technology and its recent wins in Europe.

BusterScrugs - I'm new on here and one of the main reasons for following the RR chat is for me to better understand some of the dramatic, weird spikes and troughs etc. So, if you don't mind, please could you explain to me in language that a simpleton would understand, what these 'stacked sell-limits' and and what you're talking about when you refer to 'closing auction'? I'd be really grateful.

What we really need is more high-quality, well-paid jobs in our nuclear industry. These are what's required to bring the brightest and best back into nuclear engineering.

I started out my engineering training in a GEC subsidiary. Eventually I got out of the industry because there was no pipeline of new business, the pay was appalling and I'd have had to wait for my boss to retire or die before I could move up. Back then I had a National Engineering Scholarship and got involved in all the IEE b/s, but I found if I wanted to incorporate computer science into my degree I'd lose my scholarship. The problem was, the scholarships were a bit of money designed to entice me into making the wrong career decision because they were linked to the dying parts of engineering not where the opportunity lay.

So what I'm saying is if your YGN group is to do something really really useful, it should campaign on behalf of its members with government and with the major employers eg RR to try to get a chunk of government funding to pay (say) £10k extra cash for 5 years to hundreds or even thousands of SMR-focussed young engineers. Miliband has the budget!! This is what the country needs and your group seems incredibly well positioned to promote something like that.