Member Info for RWT2

I would caution buying more right now as I think for small cap stocks with large private investor shareholder base, many of them will follow Simon Thomson in Investors Chronicle so after he publishes an article, there's quite often a short term spike which fades away over the next few weeks.

My tuppence worth on why share price might not move as much as you'd like:
1 - Small cap oil/gas/mining stocks have a long and glorious track record of not delivering.
2 - Chariot have a track record of not delivering. I was one of the unfortunate sods who thought their Namibia drilling campaign of a few years ago would come good - it didn't!
3 - They operate in a continent which most investors would regard as exceptionally high risk.
4 - It's all a promise of jam tomorrow and who knows what will happen tomorrow. Believable future scenarios include one in which Vladimir Putin is not in power for very much longer- what impact will that have on gas prices. Who knows?
5 - Hydrogen may not be all that it's cracked up to be so very little value may come from that venture - again, it's hugely speculative so very high risk.
6 - The environmental lobby will still be churning away and may make finance for projects to extract hydrocarbons expensive or difficult to come by. Probably more problematic for small cap stocks like this one.
7 - Equipment and material lead times are being pushed out - maybe people don't believe the timescales being touted to bring the assets on line.
8, 9, 10 etc. etc.

Nigh on every RNS concerning one of our portfolio companies highlights that ANIC's investment is now worth many multiples of the original investment value and yet the market response is almost invariably to shrug it's shoulders and walk on by. I guess that should probably tell us something.

Thanks...OK, next stupid question. Is there any other activity related to H2 or other fingers in other pies which would likely prompt significant share price movement in the intervening period (all else being equal and on the assumption of no weird existential events)?

Hi - can someone shortcut the process and tell me when the Anchois Field would likely go live if all goes to plan? You'd think I'd research these things before investing, but hey ho, given current environment I've gone for the shooting fish in a barrel approach and picked a few gas exploration and production companies to invest in...one shot hit Chariot.

I've not seen anything implying cultured meat or precision fermentation would undercut traditional producers. i thought best case scenario was we were looking at price parity. Food industry in general is very low margin. Race to the bottom will not make us millionaires.

If you follow Jim Mellon on LinkedIn you might have noted he liked a post by a guy called Alexandre de Vaivre commenting on the horrible decline in share price of Beyond Meat. The poster attributes this to the lack of "good" IP. Some of the follow up comments are interesting / sobering / food for thought that really it's not about the defendable IP, it's more the fact that these are food companies and will be valued as such and won't be valued as tech companies. Oatly for example have lots of defendable IP but have been hit with the exact same decline having lost something in the region of 80-90% of value since listing. Hard not to draw parallels....but given Jim liked this post he's clearly drawing perpendiculars rather than parallels!

See link for short interview with SuperMeat CEO:

https://video.foxbusiness.com/v/6311611159112#sp=show-clips

Statement that "in the next couple of months we will have some interesting surprises to share......"

My point was the dairy industry is not dead and far from it but Our Wise and Infallible Leader claims the dairy industry will be extinct by 2030. We are supposed to take this statement with a pinch of salt and simultaneously believe other statements like Liberation Labs will take over the precision fermentation world. There's some 1984-esque double think going on there. Only pointing this out as this is becoming about my dullest holding!

...you should ask yourself why projects like this receive £21M of UK government funding:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn4zd7nv86zo

I may be reading more into this than is really there - just guys moaning and they don't specifically mention Energean, but an interesting thread appeared on my LinkedIn feed suggesting not is well on board an FPSO in disputed waters off Israel under threat of Hezbollah attack. Allegedly guys aren't getting paid and the work is a shambles. I assume ours is the only one out there right now? Just a heads up.

More to the point, my slightly unconventional opinion generates some debate and was the title of this thread not looking for that?

In the words of Maximus Decimus Meridius "Are you not entertained?"

I find this holding interesting and it's an interesting social study in bias, which I might occasionally point out. My holding is meaningful enough for what I want if the company achieves it's potential.

You say you trust JM and others say this would be reason enough to trust a tiny startup company to build a nigh on half billion dollar facility. You ignore that this would be a massively risky strategy and that it is enormously more likely that much of the work would go to an established player who has a track record in design, build and project management of similar facilities.

Fair enough, they may valued on the same metrics as a construction company then....

Joking aside, I still have my doubts. Upside Foods raised something like $400M to build there multi-million lb throughput facility. You really think they will entrust the design and build to a £1M startup. That'd be a huge project risk and they will not do that. They will go to the likes of a GEA group. If this tech becomes big, then established players like GEA will launch products to address the market need - it is not clever IP and they could do it in short time. They have the skills and experience that customers would look for for building out such high value facilities.

My holding is modest too - only about 1 - 1.5% of overall portfolio. If I get a 10x increase in 10 years it'll be nice but not hugely meaningful. If I get 20x - 50x then it'll start knocking a few years off my retirement. If it does not a lot or even drops to zero, then big whoop.

I don't actually like the shift in that focus!

Jim Mellon is on record as saying he wants to buy into companies with clever and defendable IP hence the focus on cultured meat rather than plant based products. I don't know too much (OK, anything!) about Liberation Labs but from what I understand they plan to manufacture precision fermentation tanks more suited to the needs of our industry, rather than the needs of pharma. I don't think, but may be way off the mark, that this is particularly clever or defendable IP. It's metal bashing and they will be valued as an industrial engineering company supplying to the low margin food sector. I work for an industrial engineering company supplying process equipment mostly to the food sector. We are not millionaires and we have lots of competitors. Margins are wafer thin because there are not many barriers to doing what we do. Take the likes of GEA group who are pretty massive in Europe in this general sector. They have lots of fingers in lots of pies across food and chemicals etc. Their performance has been choppy and certainly not stratospheric. If Liberation Labs amount to much at all, there is no reason to believe they would be valued on metrics any different to the likes of GEA.

The Edison report reminded me that BlueNalu expected regluatory approval nigh on a year ago now and are still working there way through that process. I think we were also told fish would be easier to get approval (certainly in US) - I don't recall the detail of why, but we were definitely told that. I think this just reinforces this will be a very slow burner with lots of delays. We'll get lots of optimistic statements on the way, but I would treat most of these with a pinch of salt as the rest of the market seems to do anyway. Almost irrespective of what announcement is made either within ANIC or outside, the effect on share is trivial or transient. Go to sleep for 5 years!

So if you don't believe government reports, how about Tyson Foods Sustainability report i.e. one of the biggest conventional meat producers on the planet whose survival would be under threat in the next few years if some of the comments on here are to be believed:

https://www.tysonsustainability.com/downloads/Tyson_2021_Sustainability_Report.pdf

Product innovation manages a couple of paragraphs on page 21 (with nothing directly about cultured meat) and the infograph on page 7 shows that alternative proteins are only of moderate importance to the business and slightly less than moderate importance to Tyson's stakeholders.

Why would you place more credence on statements from a business startup shouting about how they are going to shake up the status quo? That would seem like wishful thinking. Of course they are going to shout about what they are doing, but for the vast majority of companies that unfortunately doesn't translate into successful businesses.

Also, even if you believe that conventional meat is on the way out, Tyson alone have spent $100M in 2021 financing alternatives - that's probably more than ANIC, so if anyone reaps the rewards in whatever the alternative is, it's at least as likely to be Tyson as it will be ANIC.

Well for one, the UK Food Strategy published a couple of months is very clear they expect conventional farming to be at the forefront. Full document is here:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1082026/government-food-strategy.pdf

Example extract to demonstrate the point is on page 10, objective 1 which states:

"We will support farmers to broadly maintain levels of domestic production through productivity gain and our new farming schemes. We will enable growth in key sectors, including horticulture and seafood, making the most of post-Brexit opportunities"

There is no reason to believe conventional farming is going down the pan any time soon.

I'm not sure what your point was about Wales and UBI. Is that Universal Basic Income? For what it's worth (though not sure of the relevance), I think Universal Basic Income is a fantastic idea!!!

My guess....it will last several millennia!