Member Info for pickedpeck

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.

Whilst these boards are full of ramper /shorter accusations which are usually nonsense these boards do have an effect.

AI based trading platforms incorporate 'social media' listening algorithms to judge investor sentiment. They 'listen' to bulletin boards, twitter/X, and anywhere else they can to add a investor sentiment factor into the trading algorithm.

So, posting here, on twitter, or wherever, about how miserable your investment is making you may well actually contribute to your investment getting worse. Really.

So whilst people posting negative sentiment constantly may not actually be shifters, they may be contributing actively to fooling the AI algorithms regarding investor sentiment.

Bear in mind what's public lags what's proprietary by a few years, but have a look at:

https://www.financemagnates.com/fintech/education-centre/pros-and-cons-of-ai-in-sentiment-trading-revolutionizing-investment-strategies/

I doubt notrex is a shorter, just a long term holder who is burnt and negative about the experience. If you bought at 100p (£20) or above on the basis of income, then you have seen both income and asset value reduce dramatically. Bound to leave you pi55ed off.

Its interesting that it seems a lot of the asset value erosion, and consequently the demand to slash dividend, was driven by bot based shorters like Voleon. Forward selling 5% of the equity in a crashing gas market created its own momentum and narrative. Well played to the shorters, they made money.

The real question for Johnny come latelys is what next? The gas market looks set to recover, the shorts will have to fold at some point against the gas market reversal. So forgetting the slightly limp buy backs, 5% of the free float will have to be bought back by the shorters. In theory that should reverse the drop from 75-90 (£15-18) that the shorts precipitated.

Gas price is depressed right now, spot price coming out of the El Nino winter of 23/24 is in the gutter.

However:

November 2024 Contract $2.993 and rising

https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/futures/NGX24

November 2025 Contract $3.884

https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/futures/NGX25?mod=quote_search

November 2026 $4.181

https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/futures/NGX26

All three futures are trending up sharply, so a six, eighteen, and thirty month gas market view looks a lot healthier for producers, and DEC forward hedges should be easy to achieve at a decent profit margin.

Also...

Net cash provided by operating activities

2023 : $ 410,132 2022 : $ 387,764 2021 : $ 320,182

But...

Free cash flow

2023 : $ 219,096 2022 : $ 217,727 2021 : $ 227,334

So cash generation from operations consistently up, but FCF not keeping pace due to increased interest payments, holding just about level.

Across the last 3 years the results for 2023 were obviously the strongest, with most indicators strongly up despite exceptional markets in 2022 and 2021.

I'm not a ramper, but I am also not irrationally negative either. In fairness to skier...

Adjusted EBITDA

2023 : $ 542,794 2022 : $ 502,954 2021 : $ 343,145

Revenue:

(Total revenue, inclusive of settled hedges)

2023 : $ 1,046,327 2022 : $ 1,023,547 2021 : $ 686,905

Gross margin

2023 : 52% 2022 : 49% 2021 : 50%

Voleon are the biggest shorters of DEC , its interesting what their website says about how they work:

'At Voleon, we approach investment management through the prism of machine learning, applying flexible statistical models to the problem of financial prediction. Rather than relying on human intuition to discern how the market works, machine learning employs statistical algorithms capable of detecting persistent effects across large swaths of data'

So basically they are technical analysis driven shorts. They don't have to know anything about the company other than its trending pattern was down, so bot sold it to push it further down. There is no actual business insight applied, and likely none whatsoever about the company activity.

https://voleon.com/

On the plus side it seems unlikely many posters here work for them... ;D

The buy back will get reapproved at the upcoming AGM on the 10th May. See the agenda item below. Clearly their statement and intent is for the buy back to proceed through the rest of the year and into next, claiming that it will stop when the approval expires is just silly.

Next xd 24th May for a payment on 28th June, we should see after that whether additional capital has been allocated to the buyback program.

The 5% pricing clause is interesting and explains the stop start a couple of weeks ago. Basically if there is a sharp rise they won't be able to buy shares for the next few days, but you would think that once the price stabilised they should play catch up, which they don't appear to be doing.

AGM Item 17 states:

'THAT the Company be generally and unconditionally authorised pursuant to section 701 of

the Act to make market purchases (within the meaning of section 693(4) of the Act) of any its

Shares on such terms and in such manner as the Directors shall from time to time determine,

provided that such power be limited:

to a maximum number of Shares with an aggregate nominal value of up to £951,368

(amounting to 4,756,842 Shares as at the date of the Notice) representing 10% of the

current issued share capital of the Company, such amount to be reduced by the nominal

amount of any Shares purchased pursuant to the authority in Resolution 18;

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:

- 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

- 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,

such authority shall expire at the conclusion of the next annual general meeting of the

Company or 30 June 2025 (if earlier), unless previously revoked, varied or renewed,

provided that if the Company has agreed before such expiry to purchase Shares where

these purchases will or may be executed (either wholly or in part) after the authority

terminates, the Company may complete such a purchase as if the authority conferred

hereby had not expired.'

3750 a day is just about a million shares in a year (3750x5x52 = 975,000). Given the current share price that would be just over £10m buy back, so I round numbers I guess we could assume £10m handed over to the broker. Of course that assumes the buy backs will continue for 52 weeks.

It will be interesting to see if the run rate increases after the next quarterly dividend based on the company handing over more cash to PH.

Only in Wales, gold mining with tractors. :)

Because as soon as the placing was announced the 'real' bid and offer dropped to the placing price without any volume of sells. We have been sat at the placing price (0.065p) plus a fraction of a penny to buy (0.00655-0.0668) since then. Despite a much larger than normal volume of trades since then the real bid and offer hasn't moved at all, the market makers have been obscuring this with self trades at 0.08 and 0.075 in the last few weeks.

There is no other explanation other than the offer shares are a stock overhang, unless you can see another reason for the above trading pattern.