Member Info for ShipwreckSheep

That's what puzzles me a bit, Boland. I thought that it would make it into the updated MRE either as indicated resource or at least as exploration target, given that they had prioritized drilling there over drilling Thompson (the official exploration target from the January MRE).

Nice expansion on the REE front, doubling resource in 8 months can't be frowned upon, but why no Boland exploration target at least? I would have hoped for a presentation to be released with the RNS as well to explain, maybe we get one in the next few days, but given that they had more time than expected to get the MRE numbers back for the RNS, bit surprised that a presentation wasn't released with it.

Well, if MEI has a resource "ten time the Wudinna resource" and has a market cap of 400m+, I'll still choose Wudinna at 6m, as in comparison it seems way more undervalued ;)

Disclaimer: I know this comparison doesn't work so straightaway, and I'm sure so do you - can't really say "A 6m market cap company should just walk away from its asset because it doesn't have the same resource size as a 400m market cap company" imo, otherwise we'd only have BHP, Newmont, and Glencore listed at all in the mining sector. The question we'll have to see about is the economics of the project, can it be mined profitably, yes or no, and the graphs and presentation by Rupert on the back of the Boland results were quite encouraging in that sense as far as I am concerned, but without an economic scoping study in place yet, there can no doubt be different opinions on it and that's fine.

I think the communication was that they have kept some budget for additional drilling of the paleochannel, so might get some more drilling before raise for (mostly) 2024 work program, but let's see how they time it. My take is that likely they'll do gold and REE resource update together, for me - as I had talked about before - the REE one is the more exciting one, also to learn in some more detail what size they consider the paleochannel exploration target that now will be in addition to Thompson.

Would also expect Rupert to comment soon on progress with metallurgical optimisation as you point out, as it is crucial for what they show in the corporate presentation from last quarter for Q4, the economic scoping study.

Unknowns: how are strategic discussions with Andromeda going, since the equity research note some months ago mentioned that a simplification of the JV structure is being discussed (or similar), but frankly, given the 75/25 ownership structure is in the clear and confirmed by both of them by now, it's all fine, as Andromeda is now paying its share of the exploration costs anyway.

Nothing at all against some critical discourse, I think people who read my posts late last year and early this year have seen that i'm not always just blindly positive about the company and am sometimes also critical about things they do. But then by all means he should also reply to posts that challenge the info in his posts that "all lithium stocks are so on fire", as you can easily see from looking at the stocks i just mentioned (and we're all UK-based investors i imagine who invest in London-listed stocks) is...well...alternative facts.

So yeah, critical discourse, great. But just disruptive (and often personal) posts without reacting to posts that have a different opinion, that has little value - and yeah, that goes for both sides of these posts, there's no need to make personal attacks

LC, he has answered your questions in the past, basically doesn't think there's sufficient high-grade gold zones (less than he had expected when the Wudinna project was brought on board) and for REE, he's just incredibly bearish about REE miners overall, while last year he had rare earths as one of his top 2 focus metals on his Twitter, he removed it completely and basically went the other extreme calling it worthless a few times. When he was bullish on REE last year, he was excited about Cobr's exploration, comparing it to AR3 (Australian Rare Earths) himself, and Cobr is still on a very similar path to AR3 in terms of grade/leachability/potential resource size/jurisdiction. I asked him why he thinks Cobr will only go down more in the past, I also mentioned that AR3 (who don't have any gold, so we can even remove gold from the discussion entirely here) has a market cap of 20m+ GBP and had one of 40m+ GBP earlier this year, compared to a market cap of < 7m GBP at Cobr currently, but he chose not to comment on that question and go off topic on lithium.

Then some weeks ago he mentioned something along the lines "Cobr only going down, look at Artemis Resources (ARV), lithium potential, doing so amazingly well, all lithium stocks are going through the roof", well, have a look at LON: ARV (hint, it's down close to 80% from last October's peak, great that it jumped a bit off the lows, but that's what he mentions as prime example of a London-listed company that has partial focus on lithium?).

I've also pointed out that of the 3 London-listed explorers/miner with lithium in their name (LON: ALL, LON: BHL, LON: ZNWD), they are all down a lot from their peaks as well, ALL is down from over 50p in Nov to less than 25p now, BHL is down from close to 11p in Oct to less than 4p now, ZNWD the only one who did have a decent start to the year, but has also come back a lot from this year's peak above 15p to less than 10p currently (and it was close to 30p in 2021, so you decide if that had really had such amazing performance). He did not react to any of that in the replies and rather pointed out a handful of Australian-only listed lithium companies that have had big spikes. Cool, I'm glad for them, but London-listed ones did not, in fact quite the opposite as i've just repeated too.

I've also asked what he thinks it achieves to go on about lithium lithium lithium, Cobra needs lithium and need to drop that on a retail investor forum repeatedly, thereby if anything just manipulating sentiment negatively, rather than trying to discuss it with the company itself if he has a great project to bring into the company, given that he had dinner with Rupert a month ago, again, no explanation why he thought it's worth writing a long range of arguably off-topic posts to retail investors who don't make management decisions for the company.

Check slide 21 here: cobraplc.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Cobra-Resources-May-2023-update.pdf

It doesn't yet have the additional drilling in there, as that was only added to the plan after the recent paleochannel results, but the completed items have been close to schedule, so would think the resource updates will be done soon

Updated gold resource should be imminent, will be another piece in the puzzle and great to have for the upcoming economic scoping study, but probably no fireworks in itself. I expect the REE resource update to be at a separate time, will be interesting how much is added there and what size they put down for the exploration target for the paleochannel sites, potential fireworks there. Then the scoping study in Q4.

Yeah, I agree with you, there's something there that seems scalable and easily extractable, my preference is for the team to keep their heads down, add more to the resource, optimise parameters for commercial extraction, and be economical with the budget, all of which Rupert seems to be good at. He explained his ideas very well in the Aim-on-Air interview some months ago, well worth relistening - the idea is to get the "easy" resource to revenue-generation stage and then go for the IOCG targets for potentially very big upsides. Which seems like the reasonable thing to do for a public company with a given budget, no point in stretching too thin and focus on 10 projects, but none of them really.

That said, I can respect it if Ken's view differs from ours and if he thinks a lithium project is what the company would be best served with - all I'm asking him to do is not to bark up the wrong tree, as going on and on about it here has exactly zero effect in trying to make that happen.

Is it groundhog day already after yet another 3 weeks?

Same as last time:

1) Nobody here would mind a lithium project to be added if it's cheap and prospective.

2) Nobody here would be able to make that happen, this is a retail investor board, not the board of directors of Cobra. But since you've been on the latter, you have their number, call them and discuss.

3) If you really respect Rupert's skill as a mine builder and operator and have the company's best interest at heart as you keep claiming, as a shareholder with prior involvement in the company, use the right channels/platforms to try to "influence to change direction" if that's what you want (it's your good right to believe these things, nobody is arguing about that). But if it's always just hollow words addressed to the wrong audience that cannot implement potential changes that you wish for, one has to question your motives, as all you seem to do is (either by intention or accident) trying to influence opinion negatively in a phase that is tricky for London-listed mining companies in general. If you really have the company's and its shareholders' best interest at heart, lobbying for a lithium project with the RIGHT addressees (the BoD) could make sense, lobbying for it with the WRONG addressees (a discussion board of retail investors) every 2 weeks and acting like REE is pointless when as recently as 5 months ago you listed it as one of your main mining project interests on your Twitter intro doesn't make sense and if anything just contributes to what you claim you want to avoid, i.e. the company reducing in value.

Well, I'd say with a company that mainly still has a retail investor base, it doesn't help to keep going on about it not having performed recently, as at best it does nothing and at worst you keep newly interested investors from buying if that's the first post they read. Why flip-flop between "this is so undervalued" and "I should never have bought and thought this will do wonders for me within 6 months"?

I'd say there's 3 obvious share price drivers:

1) overall mining sentiment: look at GDXJ for broad junior miner sentiment, it's not been great for over a year now, but these things come and go in waves

2) rare earths prices: as mentioned in a post recently, plotting the SP against a rough calculated basket price of the jorc resource looks like its going a long way in explaining the SP, in fact the correlation of the daily prices of the 2 variables since start of 2023 is 60% (I chose this point as it's the timing of the maiden resource). Again, if you don't believe rare earths prices will do better again, I'd like to understand why you invested in Cobr at all given you started investing in it when the focus was already REE?

3) Idiosyncratic progress the company makes: maiden resource, scaleable paleochannel, prudent approach to spending, improving communication, none of these things are going away. Yes, it's favtor 1) and 2) that are currently in the driver seat, but it'd take a huge pessimist to believe that sentiment in the broader mining space and sentiment in rare earths will stay appalling like this forever.

If you decide to sell because you need the cash, that's absolutely fair, life is more than junior mining investments, but please be sure to consider the location in mining sentiment cycles that we are in right now (it's not Cobr-specific, go on almost any board). I hope you and everybody else stay invested and that we all reap the rewards when factors 1) and 2) turn around and turn the focus on the (mostly!) great work the company is doing

Next year is too soon for mining, Michael. With a scoping study scheduled for Q4, that'll be an important step in getting there, but there'll still be a PFS and then a DFS before mining can (hopefully) start. More derisking to do.

There's enough to be encouraged by or even excited about with the Boland results (and the Thompson and Anderson targets), enough resource expansion potential there, but that's what the focus still needs to be right now, expand the resource, do infill drilling, optimize metallurgy, PFS/FS, and then it's time to get these out of the ground

Whether or not it will depends mostly on broader markets and sentiment in mining, but the latest results are very encouraging with a view to resource development. What I liked about the email answer from the company (some posts below) is that they write they "retained some budget for further drilling [at Boland]" and worth keeping in mind that now with the 75% ownership reached, only 75% of the drilling expenses are to be covered by Cobra, not 100% anymore as during the earn-in years.

If we can get some more Boland drilling done with the remaining budget before a new funding round, that'd be really good and yet again a sign that the company is economical with the funds they have. So yeah, let's get that gold MRE update and soon REE one as well and get more drilling done while also working on metallurgical optimisation and then Q4 probably new funding (for 2024 work program, time for infill drilling and proving up more Boland and possibly Thompson & Anderson), get the scoping study out of the way and work towards PFS. If you re-listen to the interview Aim-on-Air did some months ago this streamlined transition from explorer to developer/miner is what Rupert had always planned and the Boland results might just enable him to go down that route.

Let's see what else we get on the way there, the JV situation is still not too clear, other than it now being a 75%/25% structure, personally I hope that we manage to get 100% of Wudinna for now and then possibly look for a bigger JV partner - Andromeda looked like a great one to have when they were a 500m GBP market cap company, but they're now below 100m GBP market cap and seem fully focused on developing their kaolin project rather than anything else. Hopefully we get some clarity on that front soon, but in the end there's 2 scenarios for the start and both are okay: (a) the JV is formalised and 25% remains with Andromeda, or (b) Cobra becomes 100% owner of Wudinna and Andromeda gets Cobr shares for their part of the project (as long as they do not get them at a discount)

"Thanks for your email re Thompson. Cobra intended to execute some drilling at Thompson; however, when they drilled the Boland prospect, they were so encouraged by what they saw that they drilled some extra metres at Boland and retained some budget for further drilling based on the outcomes of results at the expense of the budgeted Thompson drilling.

The key thing to understand here is the economic viability of clay hosted REEs is more dependent upon low mining and processing costs - a consequence of mineralogy rather than grade - rather than simply pursuing more volume at this stage. There are several companies pursuing scalable saprolite clay hosted REEs across Australia with metallurgical challenges ahead. Cobra believes they can define something unique with the right credentials to overcome the capital constraints associated with aggressive REE leaching.

Ionic REE mineralisation that can be desorbed (rather than leached) should accelerate the commercial pathway due to the economic and other advantages of mining this type of geological setting. In light of this, it was more immediately valuable to focus budget on palaeo-channel rather than on resource growth. Thompson and Anderson will be tested in due course.

Rupert has recorded a presentation which also touches on this – https://cobraplc.com/investors/#presentations.

"

Michael, too early to talk about mining, but we'll get the first strategic step towards it with the scoping study in Q4, and then onwards to PFS and FS, all of these will be value drivers if positive, as these steps will de-risk the project

To point out positive developments in their PR/IR approach as well: News were posted on Twitter shortly after the RNS and before market opened, so that's progress on the communications front, not yet A+ in that category, but...one day.

https://twitter.com/Cobra_Resources/status/1671045142311063552

I suppose so BCB, still hope it's something he'll elaborate on much more, and soon, cause on the Thompson target we had a size estimate from the company on (and a big one at that) and if it's the case that Boland/Bradman are an even bigger-sized target, then here's the perfect chance to spell that out for existing and potential future shareholders.

I like the grades, I like the "highly scalable" part in the RNS, but in the end, need some idea how it compares to Thompson in the metrics that matter, Mt and %MREO.

Solid set of results, I hope he does explain in much more detail in an interview though why they decided to move the Thompson infill drilling (81-233 Mt exploration target after all) to a future drilling campaign. I'm surprised by this, given that (a) the RNS from 30th March listed it as one of the goals of the AC drilling which was "underway" at the time, and (b) with an REE resource update planned soon, I would have thought that infill drilling of an established exploration target should be high priority.

But I expect them to have a good reason to have focused on Boland and Bradman fully instead, I suppose that must mean that these new exploration targets are just as many Mt as Thompson or even more!?

Doubt it has much to do with Cobra, fairview. Most of it is REE prices since last year. It's not that easy to fully track, but looking at value of the metals in the ground using the basket composition of the jorc resource (REE only for now, ignoring gold), the value was more than double in Jun 2022. So makes sense for the SP to reflect that.

Which it also does just as much for other London-listed REE companies: Mkango down 56% over the past year, Pensana down 61%, Rainbow down 32%, Cobr down 43%. Hasn't been the year for REE, but it's not Cobra-specific. I'm not in a rush personally, and if you believe in the green metals story unfolding, I don't see why you would be. As long as the company keeps its head down and does what's in its control to keep SP as good as possible, can't really blame them for mining stock sentiment being tough during the past months and rare earths being much cheaper than a year ago at the moment (just like other industrial metals). If you believe this is a temporary slump in industrial metals, this SP is an opportunity if anything

Hopefully Cobra will put the note on the Media subpage, just like the previous 2 equity research pieces by Shard Capital.

No target price, from what I understand Shard Capital have started covering Cobra a while ago, but not yet assigned a target price, similar to their not from 9th January that is also available on the Cobra website if you scroll down here: https://cobraplc.com/media/

I can't link to it, but it's quite positive about the drilling results so far and point out the near-term value drivers: The rest of the AC holes, Updated Gold Resource, Updated REE Resource. They've also been positive about some of the REE hits at existing sites with an REE resource (Baggy Green, Clarke) being 100s of meters outside the current resource. Not too much else in the note, e.g. nothing on JV, but tone of the note was quite encouraging.