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High for the day...
42,806 bought at 7.84 at 10.52...quote was 7.60/7.90.
I'm firmly bid 7.5612 for 400k...
Being bought in Canada...up o.59 at 7.67...
Sorry Energy Transition Minerals Ltd
Hard to understand why Kobold don't just buy this...MCap £5.8m. How much would they have to pay, thereby gaining 100% of Disko...
Or are they waiting for JAY to sell everything else off...
(Or for that matter Greenland Minerals to get a working foothold back into Greenland...)
With the PFS due some time next week, I wouldn't want to be out over the weekend...
Wow! Im bid full price at 7.21 plus for 700,000...
What does that tell you...?
Ridiculous overreaction to what is essentially not bad news...other than how did nobody know...
Does this put Dundas back in play...?
Now up 8% from 'the bottom'...thanks to Baron...steady buying being followed by the AT trades...lets see
Haven't heard from schlemiel for ages and now I see this daft post:
"Cascabel is huge and ready for development. With BHP and Newcrest on board one would think SOLG would be able to monetise its stake but it seems the mgt is more concerned with feathering their own nest than creating equity value"
Mate...with 20%, creating equity value feathers their nest far more than what you think they're doing...
600 million shares at 40p would be a £200 million gain between them from here...
Just need follow through now...
Looks like this has triggered some steady careful buying...
A sensible read...
'Is it possible to master emotions when trading?'
https://twitter.com/baroninvestment/status/1755492272483823736/photo/1
Love Terry
"Wonder where the bottom is for Solgold, just came up on my radar at 52 week lows, now below 7p"
"Wow one of my first ever small cap picks"
"Not looked at it for some time, was a bit surprised to see it here myself!"
"Bouncing, I suspect from ATL. If it can gain momentum @baroninvestment
is correct, might be a decent recovery play"
The first UT of the day was at 7.46...up 8%...
Since then the SP has fallen 10%...driven by Autotrades...
There has been very little buying or selling by PIs or other investors...
Of the first 148 trades, only 19 of them were non AT trades...
And five of those were by what looks like one plucky investor buying 500k at an average of 3.76 (currently 3.86...)
Apart from the fact that rapidly falling or rising shares are fuelled by PIs not wanting to miss out, there is one fundamental underlying factor that is relevant to SOLG...
Liquidity...or lack of it...
People on here and elsewhere keep talking about "the market this and the market that..."
"The market" is neithe heavily selling nor heavily buying shares...
The average daily volume on Solgold is c0.1%...yes NOUGHT POINT ONE per cent of the total shares in issue...
That tells me that nobody is selling and nobody is buying and as I have said earlier, the vast majority of daily trades are AT trades...NOT private investors...NOT institutions..
Indeed I estimate that over the last few months, leaving out the exceptional move in late December, NOUGHT POINT NOUGHT TWO (0.02)% of total shares in issue are traded on an averag daily basis.
So why is nobody buying...? Either because they are fully invested or for fear of losing even more money. They want to see news or a rising share price before stepping back in. If it falls further they may simply chuck the towel in.
But they're not>
Why?
Because they know or at least believe that Cascabel alone is worth way more than the current share price and they are either waiting for 'the market' to recognise that or for the inevitable bidding war for one of the best unmined Tier 1 prospects on the planet.
And why aren't they buying?
Because they are fully invested and they fear the SP will fall further if they buy more and it hurts too much already.
I would venture a bet that virtually nobody is running a profit at the moment on a holding of any meaningful size.
But here's the thing...liquidity in share markets is a double sided coin.
I know from my own experience as an AIM GFD with shareholder responsibility that when there is litlle or no liquidity couple with little or no news, the SP drifts steadily lower and lower...
And even 'insiders' at SOLG acknowledge that AT trades are manipulating the market, steadily dragging it lower...
Why?
At face value it looks stupid...the daily value of their hundreds of trades is immaterial and they must be steadily losing money so it can only be to keep the SP low, which clearly wouldn't be difficult for one or more prospective bidders...
But 20/27 December shows the other side of the coin.
Because of poor liquidity, when good news arrives, the SP will be marked up and PIs (and maybe institutions) will climb back in, driving the price up in a market where the only sellers will be tired investors or short term traders.
So trust me...this hurts right now...but we all still believe we are on the verge of a life changing event...
GLA
Between mid September and late October the SP almost halved, from 14+ to sub 8...
No-one who has been here for any length of time could be unaware of Berry Street Capital's animosity towards SOLG's Board of Directors, culminating in an Open Letter to shareholders.
OK so some of what they said was fair enough but this was a fund with only c1% of the shares which eventually went bust due to apparent incompetence. It was a fund set up primarily for very wealthy investors but eventually it had to be liquidated.
The key thing is, howver, that in any normal cisrcumstances the fund managers or a reciver would contact Solgold and, working with one or two MMs, work the sale carefully through the market to minimise damage to the SP.
Instead BSC dumoed their SOLG shares directly into the market, creating a protracted overhang in what looks suspiciously like a fit of pique.
IMO the SP would have been much lower if Scott hadn't stepped in to buy shares and stabilise the price.
But one thing that these two 'events' have in common is that private investors almost certainly panicked and sold as the share price was dropping, thereby exacerbating the fall. That might have been a smart move for some if they are back in at a much lower cost, but I'm sure MMs will have gleefully hit one Stop Loss after another on the way down...
The final 'event' is the share price rise from 20 to 27 December.
I've already written about that yesterday and I believe it was triggered by the very positive AGM results after investors had feared the worst.
So what conclusions can we draw.
PIs often invest in shares based on hype, a tip, seeing a share price rise rapidly, rumour of such as takeovers, mates recommendations or whatever.
But when those things don't materialise they have to ask themselves two questions:
Do I sell or hold
And if I hold, what do I actually KNOW about this company.
And the fact is that we only really know what is in the public domain. The rest is speculation and rumour.
But what a PI should ALWAYS do BEFORE they buy a share is to research in detail and be absolutely clear why they are buying a share and what their expectations are. If those expectations are unrealised and or do not materialise they have one of three decisions to make:
Do I sell
Do I hold
Do I buy more
Instead many shareholders are driven by one or both of FOMO or FOLO.
And then when things go wrong they are afflicted by the 'British disease'...look for anyone to blame except themselves.
And of course the Company has let them down...
But why have I linked these events?
In the first, the share price fell from 36 to 13.76. This was the major reason why the SP has been so deflated for the last several months.
So what happened?
After Darryl became CEO he stopped almost everything to focus on Cascabel. Porvenir was to be the 'next cab off the rank'
This is the opening statement of his Linked In profile:
"Darryl Cuzzubbo is a Chief Executive Officer and Director with over 30 years of experience in roles across a variety of commodities and geographies in both the resources and manufacturing sectors."
What do you notice is missing...? Mining exploration and development...
I am in no doubt that Darryl was appointed to Project Direct the construction of the Alpala mine. PFS2 was completed in April 2022 and the focus then was DFS. But it was Ingo's role to raise the funds, so why did he leave? Because he knew that Alpala could not be funded without massive equity dilution.
But before that, SOLG needed funds. Ingo and Ayten worked on a 'plain vanilla' equity issue but Darryl and Nick wanted to cut out BHP and NCM and they were persuaded by Barclays that they could do a 'cashbox' issue.
This very publicly failed; Ingo and Ayten resigned and the share price started to plummet...it took 6 months to recover after Scott came in.
But meanwhile Darryl had made another massive gaffe.
Sangha had a royalty funding lined up with Osisko but Cuzzubbo once again thought he could do better. Privately he went to FNV to see if he could get a better deal.
This was an act of self sabotage. He was fired and Scott took over and the SP started to recover until it became clear that the merger would take much longer to complete.
Nevertheless it recovered eventually to 22p.
As it became clear that there was much more work to do and a takeover might take longer than we wished, but especially as the copper price drifted from $4.30 to $3.60 and gold from $2085 to $1810, the SOLG SP drifted down again to stabilise around 14/15p, where it would have stayed or even advanced as metals prices stabilised, until the next major 'event' happened...
So finally lets consider our won position as ordinary investor. And OK I understand that our holding at 2.2 million may be much more than most 'ordinary investors' can afford, but SOLG at pur average cost represents 35% of our total investments and I increased our holding by almost 30% on Tuesday.
I'm sure most investors on here are sensible. Occasionally we might get carried away by hype, or a tip we've read somewhere...and sometimes we get lucky with a multibagger, but others we sell and write off a significant loss.
I did this with EVR and POLY and several others over the last 40 years.
But we've also had big wins such as SOLG twice before and ATYM. Those gains are more than funding our commitment to SOLG now.
And believe me I am every bit as frustrated as you. But there is no point being angry, because I am responsible for my own decisions.
Every morning I wake up and check for the RNS that could be life changing.
Because I have been so bullish about Solgold since Scott and Sangha took over, I have been sucked in by such as the media articles. I believed the merger could and should have been completed quicker and that a quick takeover would happen early in 2023.
I was wrong.
And then Lasso announced his intention to step down. As you know I am a great believer in macro factors and although at first I had bought more, I slashed our holding to 200k because markets hate uncertainty. I've steadily rebuilt it since to a 10p average but that's still a 33% loss.
I believe very strongly in taking responsibility for my own decisions and, wher necessary, cutting and running.
But not here...and not now...when we are so close...
Markets especdially in the US are driven by FOMO...Fear of Missing Out...(I would add a variant...FOLO...Fear of Losing Out...)
So just reflect on what happened between mid June and late September 2022; mid September and late October 2023; and 20/27 December 2023.
Those three 'events' show me very clear lessons:
tbc
AROK I'm in absolutely no doubt that the SP is being managed. I can't remember ever seeing even an AIM share with such a vast proportion of AT trades and SOLG has a full listing. And every time there is weakness it is pushed down unless PIs buy shares...e.g. on Tuesday...7.10 to 7.92...
The second priority has clearfly become what I've called PFS3.
PFS2 was announced in April 2022 with a DFS to follow, but Scott knocked that on the head in November 2022 after Darryl was sacked for incompetence and Scott took over.
In September 2023 he made clear that the PFS would be massively revised to produce a better, quicker, cheaper mine design, building on Keith Marshalls suggestion that the rich ore be mined from the top to fund the later block cave from cashflow.
Even under Marshall this produced a payback in 4/5 years. I epxect a lower CAPEX, more metal and better revenues in the revised PFS which is imminent. I believe it will leave people in no doubt that Cascabel is a Tier 1 mine.
The third priority, given the need to set up datarooms, etc; to produce the optimum possibility of a bidding war or a knockout bid and/or the best possible monetisation, together with a revised PFS was to strictly manage cash.
Just imagine how worried you would be right now if September's cash balance had been $2m instead of $22m...
So as with the merger, PFS£ has taken more time than they or we would have wanted, but trust me it is imminent. Scott is being pushed hard by Sangha et al but, as with much he has done so far he is taking a professional approach.
I expect PFS3 to spike the SP simply because of its arrival, let alone what it contains
I expect 'insiders' to buy shares that they haven't been able to since 14 December
I expect further announcements about tailings, railway, pipeline, exploitation agreement, green energy proposals and maybe even at least one or two announcements about the 90+ 'outside' projects (which, remember includes Bramaderos), including possibly at least one J/V.
Not all at once, that would miss the opportunity, but although Nick was guilty of overhyping, he was good at keeping the market fed with even tidbits of news.
What I would LIKE in addition would be an auction of the former CGP Solgold shares to the highest bidder, starting, say at 20p. This alone would make clear who was seriously interested and would ignite takeover fever.
In my final post I will consider the position of us ordinary investors