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Shorting is a dangerous game though, you can lose multiples quickly if you get it wrong and it's very hard to buy the market off. Something will give eventually, but at least one group of ii has it wrong shorters or JAM
They would be mad if they did. The gas market is now moving pretty quickly against them.
Nov 24 futures holding above $3 now, a 50% forecast rise from today's spot price.
Same goes for a sharp fall too BTW. Likely there will be some tomorrow.
Weird how they don't play catch up on quantity given missed days.
See my post at 16:59 yesterday. The buy backs are being done under contract by Peel Hunt. The BB authority has rules, a section of which is in the post yesterday. Basically the buy backs will only happen within 5% if the five day average, so if there is a sharp rise then buy backs pause.
You can argue the rights or wrongs of kt separately, but that's how it is set up.
I'd like to know who the partner is too, and why we are not being told. What's the big secret? George looked pretty shifty in that video, like he was trying to explain to his wife why he had been away for a business trip with a close female friend. He is cheating on Clogau!
Still doesn't explain it though, especially now the Azure cat is out of the bag. Why is whoever they are getting the option from selling it? Why wouldn't you wander the landscape to see if you can see pegmatite out crops?
I had a look on Google earth, it's quite easy to tie in the Azure landscape into a SW to NE surface geological pattern. It's a barren spot so you can see surface geology pretty well. Have a look at Roebourne, WA.
Hmm. Its a 'why?', not so much the why buy it, but why were they able to buy it. The Azure guy basically said you can wander round and spot pegmatite outcrops with visible spodumene. If the plot that Alba is potentially buying into has the same geological features why hasn't someone already snapped it up? Azure is valued in the billions now, surely they should be doing an epic land grab of every bit of similar landbank they could find in the area?
In the video posted by Ocelot at about 10:20 there is a map with the pegmatite outcrops marked in red. The look to be running more or less East West through the block, with nothing really recorded in the NW corner. Alba's block is NW of this!
You would assume they would at least have a geologist wander over the landscape before committing to the purchase, its only common sense. But if you were selling wouldn't you have already done the same?
Nice dashboard for the US listing:
https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/NYSE-DEC/
There is a mechanism in the BB agreement where a sharp sustained rise over 5 days means buybacks pause.
From the AGM papers:
'17.2 by the condition that the Company does not pay less (exclusive of expenses) for each
Share than the nominal value of such Share and the maximum price which may be paid
for a Share (exclusive of expenses) is the higher of:
17.2.1 5% over the average market value of the Shares for the five Business Days
immediately preceding the date on which the Company agrees to buy the Shares
concerned, based on the share price published in the Daily Official List of the
London Stock Exchange plc; and
17.2.2 an amount equal to the higher of the price of the last independent trade and the
highest current independent purchase bid at the time on the trading venue where
the purchase is carried out, '
17.2.1 means when there are a couple of positive trading days then buy backs pause. What's not clear to me is why they then don't seem to play catch up in quantity.
Futures interesting and seem to be indicating some market change.
2024 more or less flat vs when I posted a week ago, 1c down but rising this morning (US time).
2025 and 2026 both up on the week, only a few cents but moving. 1m /3m charts for both look healthy.
Currently $4.23 for Nov 2026 deliveries.
PS - I would have voted against this if it had come up at AGM, in fact I will vote at the next AGM to deny the directors the opportunity to make acquisitions. It must have been on their mind at the last raise, hence the wording.
Option 3 is not out of the question here , sadly.
Oi, Fishy, what's your alternative then? Share issue is the only way junior miners can make progress. Can you suggest an alternative or have you just had a bit much wasabi and its made you snotty?
I'll save you some time:
Option 1. Don't do share issues. Run out of the company's finite cash. Don't reopen mine, go out of business and lose 100% of share equity and everyone loses their investment.
Option 2. Do share issues. Spend cash on reopening the mine. Increase enterprise value faster than equity issue dilutes it. Make everyone lots of money in the long run. Share price goes up.
Option 3. Try option 2 but fail due to bad luck, distractions, or incompetence, or some combination thereof.
In the absence of other news you have to wonder whether this latest little jump is about results being leaked, they will be known inside the company now. Three weeks until we know.
Notrex, you're obviously unhappy to be in this share, you dot see the price rising let alone recovering, so why haven't you sold? It's a serious question, you plainly don't trust the management team at all, and have pretty much no hope for the prospects.
Genuinely curious about why you have not sold and moved on?
Patience. Gas prices will recover by the end of the year and the sector will move as a result. I think / hope we should be thumb twiddling until then. You might see movement around xd, if the shorts see no more downward pressure then they may start closing but who knows.
Either way, this time next year Rodney...
I think both are fair comments except the timing is off. At the time of all but one of those announcements the share price had already dropped by around 50% or more, and the business operating environment had change considerably. The exec can't drop hints either, they have to either say something outright or not, no clues.
Where I think they could be held with feet to fire a bit is the US market listing hokey cokey, where we are, no we're not, yes we are confused a few.
Options are an interesting reward as they always come with an exercise price above the current one. They only become valuable if the share price far exceeds the option price. I know its weird but options are pretty universal as part of exec pay packages these days because they are a tax efficient way of incentivising company leaders. I've been given options in the last three companies I have worked for, only a small fraction of them ever landed cash in my pocket because of claw backs on leaving, rules on M&A etc despite solid performance. Options are seen by many as magic money beans that may never turn into anything at all so I don't go too hard on them in that regard.
Also as Joe Public exec pay exists in a different world, especially in the US. The payouts in share incentives seem large, but in terms of exec pay they are pretty small.
For example Ben Sullivan getting 9,600 shares, or about £100,000 seems ridiculous, but he will have had hard performance criteria written into his contract to get that. Also we should bear in mind graduates in US O&G companies start on over $100,000p.a. , a corporate lawyer earns probably a lot more than ten times that. No matter what you think about it as a shareholder it is what it is, that's the pay for that kind of character. I know I have hired some.
I know it is easy to blame to exec for the share price issue, but all they really control is the business operating performance. The share price is driven against other factors which the exec do not control, not least market sentiment which is obviously fickle in the extreme. Oil & Gas bad has been a recent narrative, so too stocks on the London Exchanges, so too has been any company with significant debt levels against high interest rates. DEC tacking all these boxes mean they were a sitting duck for the shorts.
I'd argue the operating performance in the environment they find themselves in has been better than just good, but you would have to find peer group companies to make the comparison with to be completely fair.
Notrex,
I understand where you're coming from, but I can also see where Rusty was between a rock and a hard place. I the same circumstances I would likely have done the same thing, it is hard to see what else they could have done. Given they only have a certain amount of FCF deciding to utilise to protect future years by paying down debt is the right choice.
The issue with interest rates is that it normally drives long term commodity inflation. What happened here was that the two moved in opposite directions, at the same time as finance costs went through the roof gas (and wider commodities) prices fell off a cliff. One of my other main investments literally went bust because of this effect, so I know exactly what feeling burned is like.
I actually think against that backdrop the company performance has been pretty good, in fact exceptional regarding emissions and effectively closing down the Congress inquiry. Maintaining FCF is no easy trick, it isn't a given that DEC couldn't have made worse choices and disappeared completely.
Clued, we are all here to make money, shorts and longs are taking risk to do so.
I really do object to AI driven shorts as you may tell. AIs are good at trends, not fundamentals. They analyse what they see as correlating factors inflexibly, humans can adjust correlations when circumstances change.
We are right now in the midst of AI vs human investment wars, the AIs have been given the big Guns of ii deposits so human insight and intuition is currently the losing side.
Whilst skiers posts are simplistic most of his content is more or less right. The earnings potential and discount to NAV here is very high and shouts loud to that human intuition, whilst the bots see spot gas price negative sentiment, a high risk factor and other indicators which lead them to sell us down.
Notrex, that's a negative reading of very positive results. In fairness all the business indicators are strongly up, EBITDA in particular near doubling in three years is not marginally up.
The biggest negative in the result is that FCF is effectively flat despite all the other performance improvements, undoubtedly impacted by the rise in interest rates which is beyond company control. That limits the company's room for manoeuvre so a shift to paying down debt to improve FCF is definitely the right way to go in my view.