Member Info for ShipwreckSheep

I wouldn't say it can't happen Richy.

It's the better mining jurisdiction, the scale of the resource could easily be as big or even bigger than MEI's eventually (even though I do agree with you that it's unlikely the Boland maiden MRE will be close to their tonnage), and if ISR tests look promising, Cobra would have something in the REE space that nobody else has yet, which in itself could spark huge interest given that it's the lowest-cost extraction method and, maybe more importantly, given that a lot of REE resources in Australia and other places sit within prime farm land, which means many clay-hosted resources that aren't amenable to ISR will have troubles to get mined irrespective of their grade.

Also let's not forget that 4 of the 10 biggest publicly listed REE miners in the world are Australia-based, and some of them only have resources that are expensive to mine and might well be looking for a low-cost high-scale ionic resource to add to their portfolio at the right time of development - if Lynas, Arafura, Iluka get interested, well, things would get very interesting very quickly.

Also add to that the fact that China in the past 2 weeks alone has provoked around Taiwan 2 times already with some of the biggest fighter plane "exercises". If this escalates and Chinese rare earths are suddenly off limits the way that Russian oil and gas was, massive boost to the entire sector without any doubt.

It's hard to find many negatives here at the moment, especially with funding sorted for the rest of the year according to the recent presentations, and with directors and related persons holding 40% of the outstanding shares. Expected upcoming news flow is also quite exciting imo with the rest of the reanalysis results and the ISR lab results likely to drop in the coming weeks.

It's quite funny really that we're still not at the market cap of early 2022, when the company very clearly has made enormous progress towards defining what looks like a pretty substantial resource.

Very interesting seeing Rupert elaborate on Boland shaping up to potentially become the lowest cost REE resource outside of China and shedding light on why they prioritise cost effectiveness over maximising grade in this longer podcast with Market Bull:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJZuuvEF5Fc

Since only the Stock Box interview is on that link, the Market Bull interview from Friday also quite interesting in understanding what news flow to expect over the next 4-6 weeks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWwKUbmacGE

Well, some people are just impossible to please, Rach, aren't they?

You spent time in several posts bringing up placing and the entire argument that it'll be easy to buy into Cobra cheaper after it - I had pointed out that several times placing had been at premium or minimal discount and SP ended higher on the day of the placing, which again looks to be happening.

Are you seriously arguing that budget of 700k for 5 months is insane when that 5 months have included a full drilling campaign and other activity? If you please point me to companies who drill for free, I'd love to hear about them. In addition, you only know that they have spent "up to 700k", I doubt they have used up all of the budget already, but who only raises funds when the bank balance reaches zero?

Again the placing has been done with the support of the original vendors of Wudinna who remain to show strong financial interest in the project. Management and BoD highly aligned with shareholders here with holding 30%+ of outstanding shares. Hard to give the benefit of the doubt to you by now, before it was "They'll raise in the not too distant future, might get in at big discount to current SP", now that they raised at pretty much par to the current SP and are fully funded for the year, a budget of ~1.5m£/yr for advancing a promising project seems to be worth criticising to you. When really Cobra has been hugely economical with the budget they work with for years and kept dilution to shareholders at bay with equity raises at premium or small discounts. Laughable, sadly, I was hoping you'd be factual, but you're just continuously negatively biased even on things there's zero reason for it. No one says it's all done, everybody knows there's de-risking of Boland to do, but criticising the raise of 600k£ for 2 hugely important drilling campaigns that will underpin the maiden MRE of Boland? That was the best move Cobra could have done, and I'm very happy to be fully funded through to the maiden resource estimate, as I think are the vast majority of shareholders.

Exactly, and it's been implemented without fuss, in a "hey guys, just to let you know, these results make us wanna do 2 AC drill campaigns within the next 6 months, and we're fully funded for it" way. What's not to love really? Except that it likely brings me to < 3% of outstanding shares when these get admitted, how sad.

"Not fussed with the placing"? I'm tbh absolutely delighted with the placing, 2.5% discount to SP and fully funded for rest of the year, yes please haha

The thing is, molokai, I haven't seen a single rare earths company say "The assets are worth x$" - Rupert has certainly switched to talking about the commercial side more, it's not like they ignore that side. But the way he does it is by comparing to https://meteoric.com.au/ , which, yes, has higher grades at Caldeira (but lower recoverability than Cobra), but it's similar style mineralisation, it's the same massive scale that we're looking at with Boland imo (Caldeira is 400 Mt+ resource), both companies also have a smaller gold resource in addition (Cobra 279k ounces, Meteoric 357k ounces). If ISR is a green light at Boland, margins will still be high with the grades observed.

So we'd have a massive-scale, high-profit-margin, environmentally-friendly REE resource in the country with - to my knowledge - the only 2 rare earths miners with multi-billion $ market caps outside of China. With one of them, Lynas, currently only having hard rock resource, so they might well want to diversify to have cost competitiveness at low REE prices too, similar to Cameco with uranium with their high-grade hard-rock resource and a very low grad, but high-margin ISR resource. And that's when things could get very interesting very fast. Because frankly when you look at the Meteoric project and the potential of Boland, profit margins might not look so different eventually if Boland is ISR suitable and Caldeira isn't, yet one has 233m£ market cap and the other 7m£.

There's lots and lots of de-risking to do, but I don't consider a scenario of multiple 100m£ market cap as unrealistic, IF (and for now that's a big IF) the actual scale coincides with Cobra's model, ISR is a go, and grades are consistently above 1000 ppm throughout that area. This alone would likely warrant a market cap of 100m£, then add into the scenario possible interest by Lynas or Iluka given geographical proximity, add into the scenario any escalation in China leading to a potentially massive bull market in rare earths, and sky is the limit (that last point definitely applies to all REE companies that can operate mostly independent of the China value chain)

Good to be confirmed, but was expected. However, the number of historic samples they sent to the lag for re-analysis is much higher than I thought, I thought it's only around 300. With over 1000, that hopefully goes a long way in derisking the scale of Boland (even if they should turn out lower grade as it's from drills that were before REE drills and hence didn't target rate earths at all). Pretty excited about that number of samples tbh, hopefully ANSTO is a bit faster with turnaround of the assays

I'd expect something in the next quarter or so to fill the coffers for the further work programme. Best guess is there's some flexibility with timing, but would think before Q3.

The thing with fundraises here is - which is quite different from the bulk of UK-listed juniors - the last raise was at a premium to SP, there've been other occasions when after raise the SP never even remotely fell to the raise price, as it is a very tightly held share after all, with 40% in the hands of the board and Andromeda Metals. So I wouldn't bet on any raise to give a cheap entry with Cobra, definitely not if trying to build any size in a position, especially if (and yes, that is still a considerable IF) the bench scale ISR tests return promising results; those are expected later this month or in May, as per p12 here: https://cobraplc.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/20024.03.25_bloand-results.pdf

Tbh my best guess is it'll be end of Q2. Why? The presentation shows the work programme until June, and it's usually been the case that the work programme shown was pretty in line with what was possible to achieve with the current budget. So let's see, not too concerned about any raises here, one positive of Cobra is how sanguine raises have been in terms of dilution - good to have one of the executive directors holding 10% of shares, aligns incentives to keep dilution at bay.

Is that how you do research though? You google "what mining tier is Brazil", open the first link, which most likely is the same I see, by "Spark Energy Minerals", a lithium explorer only operating in Brazil, that claims that Brazil is a Tier 1 jurisdiction (of course they would, it suits their agenda)? The source I linked you to is the independent mining jurisdiction survey and well, Brazil does come in 25th out of 62, which I'd call "investable", but certainly not Tier 1.

You can't really blame others for questioning your intentions and thinking they are disingenuous, if by your own admission you never looked into REE miners much before 27th March (which is what you seem to say with "Cobra came to my attention when it surged - from there I researched it and similar companies). Because if that is true - and it might not, but from what you wrote it seems likely - what you say later in your post, that others are "more knowledgeable than you on the share" is almost certainly also true about the entire REE industry. How much do you know about the industry? How offtake agreements are worked out? How the mining processes work? What type of deposit costs how much to mine? What grades are economical for different types of deposits? What is the value upside of potential ISR mining (and consequently what's the margin upside even with lower grades, same as Kazatomprom in uranium)? What's the outlook of NdPr compared to Tb and Dy? What are the main challenges of moving from REE exploring to producing (if it's clays, how stable are they, can you even operate heavy mining machinery on it, can it be reinstated to its initial state after, otherwise how will they gain permits when lots of it is on prime farmland)? What's capex needs for the different mining techniques? How about opex? If leeching is used, how acidic a solution do you need?

I doubt you can answer many of these questions. Yet, instead of asking questions and trying to learn more, you make statements like "What the company claims is disingenuous", "[A] is much better than [B]". I wish you all the best with your investments, but with that "talking yourself into thinking you know much about REE and are able to compare the complexities of REE projects without answering the above questions that go far beyond grade" approach, the likelihood of ending up with the wrong REE investment is likely close to 90%. Anyway, good luck.

Well, if you want to call 25th out of 62 jurisdictions "Tier 1", then yes, but that's what Brazil ranked in the most recent mining jurisdiction surveys - it definitely improved compared to years ago though, let's hope that continues and will be reflected in the equivalent end of 2023 release of the survey. (Source: https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/annual-survey-of-mining-companies-2022.pdf )

I never called it wild west, it's above average based on rankings, just not Tier 1 like South Australia, and that's not really my "impression", that's rankings.

Thanks for the info on RBW, but anyway, please let's stick to discussing Cobra on here mainly. The projects, jurisdictions, basket compositions, extraction techniques, as well as market caps are very different for the companies that you bring up and it's a very nice board to be on, one where news released by the company are discussed in an open way (there've been times any of the frequent posters - including me - were not cheering some choices management made; even though I now admit that they were right focusing on Boland and I was wrong when I thought they should have stuck to the Thompson exploration target), so it would be nice if the main focus can remain on the company the board is for. That's something that I find hard to understand about your posts tbh. You haven't posted on the RBW board once, you haven't posted on the PRE board once, yet you keep bringing them up here on a board that isn't about them, why is that? I'm always trying to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, but when you never discussed any Cobra news in an unbiased way and for the second time only through a "This other company with 10x the market cap of Cobra has higher NdPr grades [something that really really really isn't one of Cobra's focus points]", you do make it difficult to think that you are an angel who only wants to discuss research, rather than someone posting with a more sinister agenda in mind.

Rach, I'd say Brazil is a jurisdiction where you don't need to be scared the resource will be nationalised, but you do have a lot of shenanigans involved with local parties, be it getting drilling equipment to the right place, be it accounting practices that aren't always super transparent, any other things going on with local counterparts and consultants, look at miners present there, like SRB, like HMI, they all had their fair shares of troubles that are unimaginable in Australia. I'm not saying Brazil miners are uninvestable, they aren't, but it isn't a jurisdiction on par with Australia, Canada and the likes

More important are the other points to me when it comes to the comparables, all of RBW's deposits, including the one from today's RNS are hard rock, not IAC, and most definitely not potential ISR-suitable IAC. So it could be that RBW is a great investment too, very possible, I think a lot of REE explorers are undervalued right now, but it isn't a comparable to Cobra, it's a different style mineralisation, with different project requirements and costs, and a different set of REOs that are the focus (one LREO and the other HREO). To me the potential of a scalable ISR-mineable REE resource with a focus on the rarest REEs (which you also seem to see, as every other REE company you bring up has NdPr and little Tb and Dy) is just a completely different animal if it evolves that way, which is potential rather than guarantee, but great signs. Good luck, I hope that you'll join the group of Cobr investors at some point, I'd argue that at 7m pounds market cap with important results on scale and ISR potential possibly dropping soon with the lab results we wait for would be a good time to do so

it's not just that all the comparisons rach brings up have 10x the market cap, it's that in the end cobra will be the superior ree deposit by far if things go right

it's not all about grade, otherwise go tell kazatomprom their uranium grades are ****e, i bet they'll be impressed and stop mining even though they are the biggest producer and with higher margin than other majors too...all due to isr.

show me 1 other resource in a tier 1 jurisdiction that allows for isr mining in ree and has scale! that still needs derisking for cobra too, but it sure looks good.

i'm more than okay if cobra evolves into the kazatomprom of ree, with modest grades, but isr and hence huge margins and easy to get all the permits in place as super low environmental impact. i'd take that. and that's the chance here. no guarantee, ofc not, but no other ree explorer so far has that same chance, no other that i've seen has conditions suitable to isr.

Another deposit you reference in a high-risk jurisdiction, without citing anything but grade (how expensive is extraction, how feasible is it, e.g. is it prime farmland the clays are located at if it's IAC style? How stable are these clays when operating heavy machinery on it? That's 2 concerns that are not part of ISR-mineable resource). Also you again focus on NdPr. These are completely different projects and you're comparing apples and oranges - Cobra is low-cost, high-HREO concentration, ISR mining, in a Tier 1 jurisdiction, with management and related persons holding 40% of shares outstanding and a history of very economical budgeting. Compare it to other REE explorers with these same metrics. Hint: you won't find any others (+ your posts about any other REE company with completely different metrics does seem to be agenda driven given that it makes up most of your total 18 posts on LSE)

Well, we only just had pretty encouraging drill results and also stage 1 of the reanalysis results within the past 2 months, and know that more reanalysis samples are on the way and the ISR study. It's not that quiet really.

In other news, I managed to meet David Clarke on the weekend, very nice and enthusiastic guy, knowledgeable too ofc. It's great to have a company like Cobra, where management are not only heavily invested, but also very responsive (and I think anyone who ever reached out to Cobra via email will agree). That's worth a lot, compared to a wide range of miners on LSE, Cobra's management is a poster child for integrity, not only in investor engagement, but also in being invested themselves, and using funds economically and having an eye on keeping dilution to a minimum, it makes it easy as a long-term investment really imo. And no idea about you, but personally I'm very excited about the results so far this year and the news flow that we expect based on previous rns and presentations

What are you on about? Yes, the rig is hot stacked, but it was never the plan to have any action before Q3, and Q2 only started in case you haven't noticed, so there's 2.5 months time to get what's needed and the communication is, it's all on track to be ready for it in early Q3, as was always the plan.

Is it a big jump? When market cap is still bang in the middle of the market cap range of 2021 - 2023? When no helium had been found?

So that's the likely answer, maybe fair value was never the 30m£ market cap that it dropped to despite exploration success, and it's finally correcting back higher to reflect the fair value a bit more

To be honest, that one I don't care about anymore. It's been communicated several times now that the plan with the gold assets is to monetize them, and I do think it'll be possible to find a small-cap or mid-cap miner in the region that will acquire them for open-pit mining, especially if the gold M&A market that kicked off in the past year heats up. But is it possible to find a small-cap or mid-cap gold miner that pays a premium for the REE on top of the gold? I have my doubts about that, it might help in the negotiations, "Hey, you also have 40 Mt of REE at 700 ppm average overlaying the gold, which could come in handy if the REE market turns into a bull market either on green economy or China escalation dynamics", but I don't think a gold miner will pay extra for it in an M&A deal, it's at this point merely a factor to sweeten the deal for the gold assets.

Boland however, completely different scale, completely different economics (the acidity needed is much lower than for Clarke and Baggy Green REE, and ISR extraction seems likely possible), higher grades too. It did cost 6 months give or take, the shift away from the dual resource focus and the Thompson exploration target to a full focus on Boland, but as far as I'm concerned it was 100% the right decision.

I'd like to add, Rach, that with Cobr you have to look at the rest of the company too, because the gold resource, even though it is not high-grade, is economic grade, all of that gold sits at shallow depths and is suitable for open put mining, where economic grade is ~1g/t, see for instance this article, which has been written when gold price was still much lower in 2021 than it is now: https://stockhead.com.au/resources/making-the-grade-what-to-look-for-in-gold-and-silver-drilling-results/

So the gold resource is 279k ounces. No, definitely not huge. No, definitely not a company maker. But given it's shallow depths that lend themselves to open pit mining and in one of the Top 3 mining jurisdictions in the world, it's likely they'll manage to monetize it as gold M&A heats up even more with the gold price ATHs and rolls down to the juniors (while for now you mostly have megadeals only like the Newmont takeover of Newcrest).

So 279k ounces. It's of course a wide distribution of what's paid for an ounce in the ground in M&A deals, but the absolutely most conservative estimate I find for inferred resources is 20$: https://munknee.com/how-to-value-a-junior-miners-gold-in-the-ground/

Note that the comments on it are crowded with info that this does not apply anymore in a 2000$+ gold price world and that Inferred ounces were valued as high as 80 or even 100$. But let's stay conservative and use the 20$ number. Alright, so that would mean if a company acquires Cobra's gold resources, even at this conservative valuation, that's 5.58 million USD, so 4.42 million GBP at current FX rate. In all likelihood any such deal would be for a considerably higher price, and not 20$ per ounce, at least if we go by the info in that link, if anybody has more accurate info, would be much appreciated.

Alright, so then Cobra right now at the 1.05p SP has a market cap of almost exactly 7m£, lets use the 4.42m£ conservative estimate for the gold, why not. Then that means you can currently buy shares in Boland prospects for 7m - 4.42m £ = 2.58m£.

You can like other resources better for their higher grade, for their nearer-term production start, but do you really think that with the scale prospect that Boland has now, that isn't a buy at 2.58m£ valuation for Boland?

Keep in mind that 2.58m£ val for Boland assigns a very conservative estimate for the gold resource value, and essentially throws in the uranium prospects in the new tenement adjacent to the Yarranna uranium deposit ( https://www.isoenergy.ca/portfolio/australia/yarranna/ ) and the REE prospect in Tasmania that is adjacent to the Deep Leads / Rubble Mound REE deposit ( https://www.abxgroup.com.au/site/projects/mineral-resources ) entirely for free.

So from all the recovery rates I've seen on IAC-style rare earths projects, the ones in this RNS are at the higher end for pH3, and not quite sure where you found orange juice to be pH 4.2, it's closer to pH 2.5 - 3 from what I know, see for instance Table 1 in this scientific paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6898880/

Where things become much more expensive and environmentally more impactful is when pH 1 is needed in the acid leeching, I'm not quite sure why the RNS includes both recovery rates at pH4 vs pH3, but possible to show that a relatively small increase in acidity from 4 to 3 vastly improves recovery %, especially when looking at Zone 3 (which also seems to be highest MREO grades) and especially the 79% Tb and 67% Dy are exciting to me given that these are the most valuable REOs.

Also, please consider these are the very first recovery rates, one resource that Rupert compares initial results to is MEI, and look for instance at this RNS by MEI: https://wcsecure.weblink.com.au/pdf/MEI/02779218.pdf

Initial recovery rates for MEI were 32% Pr, 59% Nd, 21% Dy, 41% Tb, look at the increases in the RNS. Cobra again is known for focusing on metallurgy a lot (and some here would say they focus on it too much, Richy was one of the people being quite critical about the amount of metallurgy going on I think), so it is very likely that recovery rates will improve considerably as they understand the specifics of the resource better and better.

On your question if I think it's economic or not, there's work left to do and I think Rupert is the first one to be honest about that, you have many explorers who will always make it sound like "in 3 months we go mining", while both Rupert and David Clarke have been open in the interviews that the pilot project with first production would be 15-18 months from now still. If ISR works as extraction method, you can be absolutely sure that these grades are economical and that much lower grades would also be; of course there's no comparables in REE space, but the slide that compares the biggest companies in uranium and shows that profit margins are a lot better for Kazatomprom with 0.06% uranium grades with ISR vs Cameco that also has a high-grade hard rock resource of 8%+ grades: https://cobraplc.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/20024.03.25_bloand-results.pdf

You won't hear me say "This will DEFINITELY work", there's work to do, this was the first drill campaign that really targeted Boland in a systematic way. But it looks good, imo very good indeed, the scale and very low-cost extraction prospects are what makes this resource so exciting to me, well, paired with a market cap of 7m£, it's not at 70m£ like Pensana or 250m£ like MEI, the grades, hey, I'm not shouting from the rooftop about them, but from all I can tell, they look economic enough, and ofc REE prices would additionally go through the roof on any China/Taiwan escalation