Member Info for pickedpeck

Fulmar - I think you may need to visualise the mine a bit better.

Have a look at the Trial Mining Campaign 2 picture on https://horizonteminerals.com/uk/en/gallery/ . It shows the open pit (complete with one digger and one truck) and the heaps of raw material removed from the hole piled around the mini mine. The full scale mine will be simply a much bigger version of this, the raw nickel containing laterite ores are just below the surface.

These heaps of ore are the raw material laterite feed for the nickel extraction process. Once that material has been processed, there are RKEF process diagrams in Horizonte presentations and elsewhere, it is separated into concentrate and tailings. The concentrate contains the Nickel, the tailings are mostly waste rock and ash **** from the process.

Horizonte are planning to retain the tailings for land restoration after the mine (area) is exhausted, but it is very unlikely they would ever reprocess the tailings for further nickel extraction as concentrations would be extremely low.

Diamond mines, gold mines and others often reprocess historic tailings as older processes were not very good at extracting the minerals and a lot of material is left in them. For a new mine to process tailings seems odd as by definition tailings have been processed once already.

Fulmar - tailings is the left over waste normally from a previous deep mine. Often tailings are resorted using more modern techniques to extract minerals that were missed by historical process.

Araguaia is a completely different prospect. Firstly it is a greenfield mine, so no tailings exist from previous operations. However it is a shallow pit mine where the raw material will be removed by nothing more sophisticated than a digger and loaded onto mine trucks. No deep shaft, lifts, water or gas management, no tunnel collapses, low risk. Getting the raw ore out of the ground and to the process plant should not be excessively capital intensive.

Where nickel mines, not just ours, need considerable capex is in the ore processing and benefication plant. For Araguaia that is intended to be a Rotary Kiln Electric Furnace (RKEF). That needs a major electricity source, coking coal transportation, water supply and various other expensive set up items before it can produce the first ounce of nickel.

Basically you could probably get at our ore with little more than a garden spade and a determined worker, but to do anything with it you need a damned expensive oven.

Nice but... Volume was only 216,000 shares. Need an extra zero or two volume wise to get excited

The other massive difference between sirous and HZM is the nature of the mine and material, market dynamics aside.
Araguaia will be an open pit rather than a mile deep shaft and horizontal seam. The capital cost for the material extraction is tiny in comparison. However nickel ore needs processing on site in order to be viably trabsported, so there needs to be an onsite furnace and enrichment processing plant. That's where a lot of capex is needed whether you go for rotary kiln or acid leaching. What that does mean is the the caoex is very low risk, no deep shafts, no complexity, and well understood and proven tech for processing.

Seriously, just been having a read of the EUA board. What a **** show that is. I think if I had to extract any meaning from any of that lot I would probably just give up, sell, and go and find something more sensible.

Typo, auto correct, or possibly just fat thumbs. Mkt cap was what I meant, mot cap is the fetching hat I wear when I take the car down the garage once a year.

We may pass them in share price and mot cap in the next 12 months, but will we ever get close in the number of message board posts? Over 500 posts today on EUA, 15 here so far.

On the BCN thing, the takeover seems to be at a reasonably high percentage of the stated NPV, I'd be happy if someone floated a bid for HZM tomorrow at the same percentage of the NPVs here. I admit I haven't watched closely where the BCN NPV came from though.

Bwana, same period share.com went to ii, mine included so ii jump was from multiple sources.

The trades are coming from somewhere, hard to believe it is just PIs but at the end of the day it is almost impossible to tell.

John,
If you want to buy volvo mine trucks for your open pit mine, but don't necessarily want to pay cash up front, the best credit would be from EKN, the Swedish government backed export credit agency. They will give you favourable terms which would likely beat any other credit deal you may get elsewhere. Their gain is backing Swedish exports / jobs / tax revenue, Volvo's gain is stronger export markets, the customer (HZM) gain is cheaply financed volvo trucks.
A few months ago HZM announced the ECAs they were doing deals with as part of the debt finance. EKN was one, there were I think two other European ones most likely linked to the furnace and processing equipment.
It seems unlikely that you'd agree finance with an ECA in isolation, but arranging deals with multiple ECAs, 5 banks, multiple off takers and then balancing out the equation with a cornerstone investor underpinning thr final number with equity plus some sort of market offer could be a little complicated, especially with regards to your very moderate security on the deal.

CIBC were a new large entrant after the Feb placings. It would be interesting to see how their holding has trended over the last 6 months. Two days running where 1m dumped but still stayed just about blue. Going to burn through their firepower pretty quick at that rate.

The finance deal slipped from Q2 to Q3, I can't imagine a legitimate circumstance where Q3 means 23:59 on the 30th of September, so I don't think we realistically have 20 plus trading days to find out.

I genuinely think it could drop any day now, with the most likely time frame the next two weeks, every day passing making the next one more probable.

If they are I would like them to post something about the items the fund raise has been used for, not least to disprove my theory from the weekend that it was just used to suppress on over heating share price.

Forgot to say...

It would explain the growth in the nominee accounts, and also explain why the company updated the significant shareholders ahead of when they needed to. It covers them in case of any future accusations of wrong doing.

The fact the range is being held pretty tightly to around 6.5p now suggests finance completion is imminent, I'd bet on the next two weeks. I'd hope on completion the recent liquidity dries up giving us a bit of a spike in the share price regardless of thr strike price.

TDT,

The other potential explanation beyond Canaccord is the new shares issued earlier this year went to non sticky hands. I have no idea why any investor would buy at 7.5p only to drip feed then to the market at a discount, but it seems to be so.

We have all been assuming the cornerstone would be some organisation already known like Glencore, Teck, or Orion. What if the cornerstone participated in the previous offer and is drip feeding the stock in to lower the strike price of the larger equity raise? CIBC are showing in the latest update as 59.5m shares, a new holding presumably grabbed from the last offer. That's enough of a war chest to use to keep the price depressed.

How about this for a wild assed theory...

HZM have CIBC as a cornerstone lined up but haven't closed the debt part of the finance and need cash to burn through 2021. CIBC agree to take a big chunk of new equity at 7.5p so long as they get to act as the cornerstone with a 6.5p strike price. They use the smaller chunk of equity from the first raise to suppress the price and stop a runaway share price ahead of the final finance package being confirmed, knowing the losses on the first holding will be recovered when they get their 6.5p block as cornerstone. HZM agree as they felt the share price was overheating and threatening to derail the full finance package. On a longer (year) view 6.5p would have been seen as a good price, 12 months ago the share price was swinging in that range and only really sustained a higher price post January.
An even more cynical view, given Horizonte seem to have not noticeably ordered the long lead items promised from the last raise, would be that the entire purpose of the last raise was to stop the share price over heating and derailing the full finance package. Its possible the cornerstone set an upper limit on the market price range in order to underpin the deal. Without major capital expense Horizonte didn't really need the cash, £22m in the bank at the interims, they haven't spent the £18m raised at all yet.

Or perhaps I am just cynical on Saturdays.

Significant shareholders were updated on the company website on 30th June, presumably from the register. Canaccord still held the same number of shares as the last update, as did Teck and Glencore.

There is the statement

'In terms of AIM Rules published May 2010 and insofar as it is aware, at 30 June 2021, 19% of the Company’s AIM securities were not in public hands'

I can't remember the previous figure, but didn't think it was that high but could wrong.

Hi Macanman,

None of the known major holders (Teck, Glencore, Canaccord, board members) have sold any shares, there have been no announcements over the significant holdings. There are a number of PIs with very large (by AIM standards) holdings, well into the millions. For example Craigieboy, wasarunner, and I have about 60m shares between us, any sales from one of us would not be notifiable. That's just here, just short of about 50% of the company is held in broker nominee accounts like iii, HL, and barclays etc.

Private investor confidence took a big knock when the company raised at 7.5p against a recent market share price of 9p plus. It took a second knock when the finance deal was delayed until Q3. Those two issues I believe are enough to have prompted some PIs already sitting on 100% plus gains from the rise to date (even now) to cash out and take opportunities elsewhere. This is the orphan period of a junior miner investment where early movers cash out their gains whilst a new wave of longer term investors sit on the sidelines waiting for the derisking event news, happy to miss out on some of the gains in order to avoid risk.

And risk there is, the finance is an absolute monster of a deal to complete for a junior miner. Its hard to believe at first, and even second viewing, that a company this size can raise that much cash. However there are signs that the deal is not impossible, for me Orion stumping up $25m against a future royalty was the big one, most notably the NPV. The assets are simply too valuable to be left undeveloped.

A few hardy souls sit the orphan period out, the three named above for example, believing that the ultimate returns are so large they dwarf alternate investments. A few new entrants see the risk from this point as minimal and are ploughing in whilst others are scared and leaving.

After that essy, say hi to BBN. We were both heavily invested in Amerisur, in some ways a similar play.

Lme still in the 19000 area, but Shanghai briquettes price up over $1,000 a ton on the week @$22.5k now.

This rise against the tide seems interesting, I've been wondering if there would be a tell before the finance was announced.

It's not the company today, almost the entire Ftse is red. When the whole market moves down the trackers automatically have to sell HSBC too, there is a mechanical tie to the index. In order for HSBC to break away from that tie there needs to be prolonged and sustained buying pressure, but it seems most are seeing HSBC as a hold for recovery rather than buy to cause it.
It's an interesting mechanical trap these tracker funds have HSBA in.

Hands up if you are secretly a HZM employee...??? Come on, at least one of you definitely will be...

More likely they have been following our chat on here and wanted to join in.

Wasa, I believe originally they were prospecting for gold when they happened across a huge pile of nickel and switched exploration horses.

https://www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/companies/amp/news/5886

https://www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/companies/news/930/horizonte-minerals-releases-more-results-from-tangara--1442.html

Didn't start switching to nickel until 2010... https://horizonteminerals.com/news/2010-02-11_exploration_update.pdf

Sadly they wrote off both their gold projects in 2012 (Tangara) and 2013 (Falcao) as Araguaia became the main focus of the company. Mad markets around that time. I guess it was a reasonable decision as the price of gold was falling off a cliff at the time, but nickel followed not long after.

Or maybe you were thinking of this faulty news story from last year, amazing it hasn't been corrected.
https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/news/horizonte-minerals-gold-boorara-gold/