Member Info for ShipwreckSheep

You have seen increased interest, haven't you? 1.15 to 1.60 in less than a month, so roughly a 40% SP rise in that period, not too shabby.

Also, gotta be careful there with expecting increased interests, as (1) drilling results very rarely move SP all that much, (2) it's been known for a while that drilling results will be due soon, so the expectations from the drilling results should be priced in by now, (3) while you (and I as well for that matter) are focusing on the positive outlook and expect/hope for good drilling results, which could drive more buying action, there might also be current holders who are not too happy with their investment here (for reasons that I also have discussed a lot over the past months) and who think "Drilling results due soon, it had a decent rally, and if the results are mediocre SP might fall back again, maybe I should sell my stocks now". So the "increased interest" could always be a double-edged sword, but the move we've seen since late March has been very encouraging imo, 40% rise since then doesn't reflect "low interest by investors" in my eyes at least.

gold5, the 3.5p SP was early 2021, right? so if I remember correctly, around 300m share outstanding, so somewhere just north of 10m£ market cap. Whereas now 3.5p SP would be 18m£ market cap. Don't get me wrong, I think we'll get there and then some over time, but we should keep in mind that it's an explorer still and that a share price x now is very different from a share price x 3 years ago in terms of enterprise value.

Of course just my opinion, but 1) Sub 2p already looks cheap, and 2) I don't think drilling results matter that much (unless it's initial discoveries or absolute gamechanger drillholes), as long as they show the REE and gold are still there. I know I've been writing about AR3 multiple times this year now, but for them as well, what was needed for a proper re-rate was JORC resource expansion. Which we will get for gold in a couple of months or so and for REE most likely also later this year.

AR3 another 30% higher on ASX this night and have a market cap of equivalent to over 40m GBP now...just saying. Let's go that path too, Cobra!

Because it's only 7% up in the past 5 days? Yeah...truly horrible..

The similarities to AR3 (Australian Rare Earths) definitely don't hurt there. When another South Australian REE explorer with similar profile is up 170% in the past 5 days on a resource expansion, that should have an effect on Cobr too, and it's good to see that it has. AR3 market cap now 58.5m AUD, so 31.6m GBP and they have no gold, so 7.5m GBP market cap in Cobr seems somewhat cheap now.

Sure, the exploration work of Cobr is 6-12 months lagged to AR3's, but them being a potential glimpse of the future is extremely encouraging (conditional on them being able to clarify a bunch of aspects that I wrote about in a previous post to give us investors more peace of mind).

I've compared Cobr to Australian Rare Earths (ASX: AR3) before when Rupert & Co released the maiden REE resource, pointing out how similar the deposits seem in terms of location (both South Australia, even if AR3's Koppamurra is not in the Gawler Craton region), in terms of initial REE resources (both IAC-type REE resources that remain open in all directions), in terms of grades (AR3's resource is just over 800 ppm, slightly higher than Cobr, but let's keep in mind that Cobr's maiden REE resource is primarily the product of drill hole results that were targeting gold and where the REE find was a complete surprise initially, so most likely Wudinna will also be similar to the AR3 grades), and in terms of project type (both single-project companies, for the time being anyway).

The similarities seemed so striking to me that at times after our maiden resource I said that to me Cobr seems to follow the AR3 path, just with a 6-12 month lag (as AR3 found their REE deposit earlier, and focus on it entirely, due to them not having a dual resource like we do). Not sure if any of you have followed the AR3 story much, but with their latest updates, ASX market seems to have woken up to them most likely having a similar REE resource as the ones that made China dominant in the REE space for so long - Ionic clay deposits & province-size; their SP has more than doubled in the past 5 days now.

I'm not claiming Cobr has the same deposit parameters as AR3 does, nobody can know that for sure yet. But there are enough similarities to AR3 as pointed out above for this to make me feel quite positive about the outlook for Wudinna REE.

Leaving the article on the AR3 SP move here for context:
https://www.dhakatribune.com/financial-markets/2023/04/11/australian-rare-earths-ar3-up-56-on-ionic-clay-rare-earths-deposit

Let's see, it's rare that an RNS of drilling results causes massive moves in any junior miner when it's not the initial hit (like the REE results last year) or something that seems like a complete game-changer.

In my opinion any information that de-risks the investment here would do more for the share price at the moment than some drilling results (and I'd be very happy to be wrong here and get some absolute blockbuster drilling results): Time to tie up some uncertainty factors here, (1) the 75% earn-in status and plans the company has in regards to JV (either with Andromeda or another mid-cap in case Andromeda decide to focus fully on their kaolin project), (2) what's the funding situation like, given that they had communicated the Feb 2022 raise sees them through the entire 2022 work programme and then have raised additional equity in Oct 2022, I'd hope there's still plenty of budget left for at least another quarter or two, but would help to hear about it, (3) one of the big questions (how much gold can be added to the resource in the first JORC update since 2019) will be answered most likely in June, (4) is there an offtake agreement in the making, as that is crucial for REE without a futures market for it, and other juniors like AR3 have chosen that route. If they clarify all these points, communicate well on all channels, keep their heads down to drive forward the project, and ideally secure grants again from either regional or central Australian government, that'd be all that's needed, really no magic needed. Of course it'd also help if investor sentiment in mining in general and also in AIM would pick up a bit, but those are out of Cobra's control.

Just stumbled across this...something I had considered possible within the next few years if the Taiwan situation escalates, but seeing China "weaponizing" its REE dominance as early as this year would come as a surprise. Should be bullish REE oxide prices:

https://www.asiafinancial.com/china-contemplating-export-ban-on-rare-earth-magnets-nikkei

Thanks for your take, Richy - I want to point out that I see enough positives about Cobra, otherwise I wouldn't be invested, but the news flow in Q4 '22 and Q1 '23 was...well...just not there apart from the REE maiden resource.

Just on your AIM vs Main Market point: I don't think this is a real factor if you refer to the "20% per year raise" limit there. That's something I actually asked the company and the rule is that 20% per year raise limit is *without a prospectus*, so since the Oct issuance was with a prospectus, that didn't count towards it. Also, I respectfully disagree with you there if that was the point you were actually making, I believe the exploration budget would be decent with good communication (even more important when there's little news flow) & if management/board would invest their own money, also outside of equity raises (yes, I know David Clarke holds a lot, but did he buy any of these? from what I understand he got those awarded over time as a party of the Wudinna agreement).

On REE, well, we have a different opinion there, it was REE that sent the share price up from sub 2 to > 3 last year and the Thompson target is quite exciting imo given that all the REE work is the result of just over a year, but the focus must be on getting this into the resource, get the gold resource updated and then focus on getting these developed and once there's a revenue stream, there'll be enough time to focus on IOCGs, the copper project, and exploration of the 100% owned tenements. But there's too many side stories lately, like the 75%/JV situation, like the delays, like the raise before the earn-in milestone at a time when before it was said that "2022 work program is fully funded", like the communication issues (listen to 7:16 to 7:49 here, now, is it 3-6 months? or is it 12-24 months? this all needs to be a lot clearer to existing and potential new investors: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3AoPGGH1cxVAOX03CogZBP) and they need to be clarified finally to restore market confidence.

Yep, which is why I won't be buying more until there are more shares outstanding and there's several others here that are in that situation (BCB as well close to 3% from previous comments i think). Just makes it more important that the company makes any effort it can to attract new investors, right?

Of course I have, I hold around 15m shares here, I've asked about the 75% earn-in several times and voiced my concern about how the milestone RNS of the maiden REE resource was almost not at all communicated through social media or any of the interview platforms (Proactive, InvestorMeetsCompany). Obviously, since I have an interest in the company doing things well, because it matters, and it matters to do so in a timely way, at least I don't want the next raise to be at a SP this low, the Oct one already felt at a very low price at the time, and I doubt that any other holder can want that (not only because it'd mean the exploration budget for H2 would be much lower than it'd otherwise be)

One other thing that raised more questions than it delivered answers imo was when Rupert said in an interview "over the next 12-24 months he wants to double gold resources and triple REE resources".

I mean, it's the first gold MRE update since 2019 and the resource is 211k ounces now, so personally I would hope that the resource that's supposed to be updated in June will already more than double that number with all of Clarke being added to the resource and the current drilling campaign. Not in 12-24 months.

And "triple the REE resource"? With resource being 21 Mt and the Thompson exploration target being signalled as 81-233 Mt (keep in mind, ALL the REE work so far took only a bit more than 12 months), again, I would have hoped that they bring all of that exploration target into the resource this year and potentially even with this AC campaign. Not in 12-24 months.

I found him mentioning "24 months" for those targets quite unsettling tbh.

There's a lot of positives about Cobra, and I've pointed them out extensively over the past year or so, but the roadmap must be: 1) Clear up the situation around this earn-in threshold and funding, being vague about that isn't a good idea, 2) Giving a work program is great, but gotta get back to delivering on time, 3) When there's big updates, communicate them well (the fact that for the REE maiden resource it took half a day for even a tweet and no big interview is still painful), 4) start talking about when you plan to move to scoping study/PFS/DFS/Decision to mine stage, the last gold resource update is from 2019, there'll be another one now, there should be more focus on when and how to mine that, not "maybe in 24 months, we'll be able to double the gold resource versus the 2019 resource", 24 months from now, we'd be 6 years in from finding and defining the initial resource, there needs to be a lot more progress by then than doubling a 211k resource.

@fairview, on "I can't understand the price": There's definitely a few factors. Take the raise in Feb 2022 and the company presentation right after that stated "fully funded 2022 work program" and marked I think Jul or Auf 2022 as estimation of when they reach the 75% earn in threshold (which, again, is only a function of exploration spending). Yet there have been no clear comments from Rupert or the company since on that front, in fact in the long interview with Liam on Youtube that has been posted here last month, Rupert said "we're close to reaching the threshold". Now that doesn't add up, does it? If the company had a "fully funded 2022 work program" after the Feb raise and has still not spent the amount on exploration that they had planned to have spent by mid-2022 according to the presentation of the 2022 work program, then what's the conclusion here? At the start of Q4 2022, my conclusion had been "Okay, great, they have spent below budget and that's why the threshold hasn't been reached yet". But that's not it, cause they did a raise in Oct 2022, despite claiming 2022 work program was fully funded and despite not having spent on exploration what was pencilled in for Jul/Aug 2022 (the earn-in threshold) by that point. So imo the million dollar question is: If the threshold has not been reached yet (according to Rupert's interview a month ago), while they said 2022 program was fully funded, why was the raise in Oct necessary? What has the money from the Feb 2022 raise been spent on if not exploration when the clear communication was: This funding gets us smoothly to the earn-in threshold and beyond? I don't understand why Rupert hasn't addressed this at all, it makes no sense to me.

Then the comment in a broker note in Q4 that they are emphasising work on "strategic partnerships" - which read like an offtake agreement for the REE was in the pipeline. If that's the case, still no news on that front since then.

Then if you check the latest presentation from 9th Jan, H1 work plan on page 13, the plan was to start the RC & AC drilling campaign in mid-Feb, in reality they started on 16th March, another 1-month delay for something they made the plan for only 2 months ago? Not ideal for restoring confidence after pretty substantial delays with the Q4 work plan & this time the reason can't be the "unseasonably wet spring", so what is it this time?

The drilling results from the Q4 campaign were also not that exciting, but fine, there were issues with the weather during that campaign and it was cut short, but i doubt that the Q4 drill results on their own made many people jump in.

The fact that there hasn't been a gold resource update in 4 years before the one planned for June is also not ideal, at this progression speed, when will we get to PFS & DFS stage?

There's a lot of aspects there that explain the SP. Wudinna seems great, the outlook is potentially very positive, but it's time to deliver results again like they did in H1 2022!

Hard to say what happens, TheItalian. Last Feb-Apr we saw a combination of decent re-analysis REE results, a rallying gold price, and news being released in line with the work schedule, and SP rallied from 1.30ish (end of 2021) to over 3 and that was despite dilution from raise in Feb 2022.

So it seems clear this can move quickly. If you want to bet that on any similar rally (say we get news about an offtake agreement or amazing drilling results from the March campaign) SP will "just fall back down soon anyway", you can do so. If you want to bet that you can get the position size on that you want to hold in one go (at a time when likely everybody will want to increase if you wait for "the event that changes the game"), good luck. Personally I prefer to have skin in the game over trying to call the timing on SP sustainable takeoff to (hopefully) new heights

Ben, what makes you say "Bigger resource but shrinking business"?

Since you bring up SP in late 2018, there were less than 100m shares outstanding and market cap was <1m GBP. There's now over 500m shares outstanding and market cap is 7.5m GBP. Unfortunately you're right that SP is at a lowish point again and that therefore the value of our shares (I also mainly bought in 2020 and 2021) hasn't increased, but the value of the company sure did, so hardly shrinking business.

You do bring up the point of dilution, which, well, I'm also not too happy with if I look at end of Oct 2020 (outstanding shares 187m) vs now (outstanding shares 515m)...but the positive thing is there's not a whole lot of warrants and director options outstanding at this point at least, and some dilution will always be part of the game with mining exploration companies.

Well, to be fair, they seem to have learned from that and stopped putting the very detailed timelines on the RNS releases. And there's not that many items outstanding from the newsflow indicated in the Nov RNS - the maiden REE resource we had, the drilling results from the RC drilling we had, and for the gold resource they have essentially communicated that it will be updated after the longer March/April drilling campaign given that the Oct one was cut short due to the unusually wet spring in South Australia, which seemed like a sensible thing to do. The EM survey in itself, I'd expect that to mainly inform what targets to focus on in the March/April campaign, so seems fine to release that when they announce that drilling is starting.

The one that really stands out to me is: Why no word about the 75% earn-in threshold? In the presentation from 14th March, on page 5, they have mentioned "Forecast achievement of 75% earn-in milestone" for mid-July 2022. That was the presentation of the 2022 work programme, which they said after the Feb 2022 equity raise is "fully funded". So essentially it was indicated that the threshold will be reached with the funds raised in Feb 2022. To sit here now a year after that date, and after another equity raise that happened in Oct, makes me wonder "How can there not have been news about this by now?" given that the threshold is really only a function of spending.

The most logical conclusion to me is: They did reach the threshold, and gave notice about it to Andromeda, who were given the opportunity to review the books to confirm the threshold has been reached. But how is that taking months? It would have been great for Rupert to address this given the information had been covered in both the work programme presentation and RNS "expected timelines", he could simply have said "According to our calculations we have reached the threshold in the Oct drilling, and we gave notice about it to our partner Andromeda, who are given the chance to review the numbers currently". Or if for whatever reason he could have said "Contrary to plan, we have not reached the threshold yet due to [XYZ]". Initially the reason why they did not reach the threshold in mid-July, as had been expected in that presentation from March, was because they had completed field work up to August below budget, which was great news at the time, but given they deemed another equity raise necessary since in Oct '22, that argument doesn't really flow anymore for why there hasn't been news on this.

I hope we get an update on this soon. It doesn't make much sense to hold back the news. Sure, there's likely negotiations with Andromeda about how to structure a JV, whether to consolidate on the company level rather than project level by getting the remaining 25% of Wudinna from them (while they get shares), but that could be done in 2 steps, they could tell us now "75% milestone reached!" and then update on the JV plans from here on out after negotiations.

TallChap, of course they should not forget about the gold in investor presentations. However, it'd have been very strange for them to shift the main focus there in the past months' presentations, when results on the REE front have been outstanding in terms of hit rate / footprint extension / recoverability, and there wasn't that much to report on the gold front due to the 2022 work programme, it's not really possible to market the gold side of the company across all PR channels without the update to the gold resource being ready. So after the next drilling campaign & the gold resource update, yeah, absolutely, but now? With what message? "We still have the gold resource that was defined in 2019"? If anything, shifting focus from REE to gold without news to report from the gold front yet would almost devalue the significance of the REE part of the project, which...fundamentally...has been exciting.

Fully agree though, a somewhat longer presentation with a clearer focus on Value/Outlook/Corporate Plans rather than the technical side of ph range, presented to a larger audience like InvestorMeetsCompany, would be helpful to attract new investors. I'm not sure why, over the past months it seemed a bit like moving away from that focus, let's keep in mind that the "Corporate Update Presentation" from 26th May had information on basket value of the REE footprint & peer benchmarking slides in it - and it's still beyond me why they would have removed these from the presentations, when really the maiden resource release would have been a great opportunity to go on and on and on about value and how much potential value there could be added relatively quickly with the Thompson exploration target. All fingers crossed for them doing a proper corporate update presentation soon and spend a bit more time and thought on how to attract new investors in addition to the existing investor base, because frankly - yeah, it's likely half a year or so until then - but nobody can want the next raise to be at 1.50 again and there's no reason why it should have to be there, it doesn't take sensationalism or unnecessary ramping, the results are there, and on the technical/exploration side, Cobra have come such a long way over the past 12 months, now it takes getting that information out there better as well, good old proper PR.

LordChaos, yeah, the gold MRE update will almost definitely be after the next drilling campaign, RNS 5Dec22: "A drill rig has been booked for late February to complete a larger ~3,000m RC programme. This will provide significantly more data than originally scoped to feed into an updated gold resource and to test additional priority targets"

If by "the magic 750k oz" you refer to the resource level at which former unit holders are entitled to additional rewards, this won't be relevant for quite some time yet. Why? "The third option shall vest on the announcement of a JORC-compliant Indicated Mineral Resource for the Wudinna Gold Project of not less than 750,000 ounces of gold."

So the resource must be Indicated. Currently of the 211k gold resource, only 18k are Indicated, 193k are Inferred, i.e. for that "magic number" to be reached, there's more to do than "just" adding 539k oz of gold, all of the ounces would also have to be moved from Inferred to Indicated, which requires infill drilling.

"[...] the share price can only rise over the next 6-12 months". You should think so with a cost-efficient dual resource when comparable REE-only (!) deposits (that are admittedly slightly further ahead on the exploration timeline, but not much) are valued at more than double the market cap, in particular ASX: AR3 at 18m GBP market cap (32.37m AUD).

But, what the past week has once again shown, is how important it would be to do a better job with attracting new investors. The maiden REE resource is a big milestone reached after almost a year of focus on REE exploration/definition. It would have deserved to be presented in a well-executed manner, RNS in the morning, and at the same time posting it in all social media channels, etc. As someone after the resource release has mentioned, it took 5 hours until any Tweet was posted by Cobra. It took days until they put the resource into the "Mineral Resources" subpage of the website. And if you click on Projects -> Wudinna Project on the website (keep in mind, this is the ONLY section that they really have to keep up to date given the copper project doesn't have exploration work done yet), you still have "fully funded 2022 work program" as a next step? A reference to "expects to complete A$5M farm-in to earn 75% in mid-2022"? No mention of the "20 Mt REE resource + 80-230 Mt exploration target" in there, as it simply has not been updated even 10 days after? It's just sad when I imagine that potential new investors read about the maiden resource, decided to have a closer look at the website, and just had to conclude "They clearly haven't bothered to update the main section of their website in essentially a year...maybe not then". What would have also helped is Andromeda maybe also posting about the JORC resource, I mean, they still own 35% of the project, one should think that this could have been better coordinated, but no mention from Andromeda at all, no release, no Tweet, no nothing.

No idea, it shouldn't be too much to ask to handle communications around a milestone release like this better in my opinion. Another thing is: they put the basket mix of TREO of the JORC resource into the release, makes sense. But it's not a secret how difficult REE resources are to compare, and the main question was not addressed at all, cause to investors the main question surely is: What does that mean for value? I've asked the company months ago to please include information on the current market price of a kg of the REE basket when they release the resource so that we can all better look at potential value; enough other REE companies do this, it shouldn't be hard. Maybe I'm alone with this, I'd rather hear about this in detail than about pH value optimisation. The latter is important, no doubt, I'm glad they do it, but how many people will invest because the company tells us "the best pH range to target in the saprolite is 6-7"? [x] kt of REE at [y]$/kg, that info would surely attract more people