Member Info for taufour

jimbo "costs in Rand go up when the USD is weaker but to counter this the weak dollar usually causes a lift in commodity (inc vanadium) prices" that makes good sense thank you and explains the stance of BMN.

Thanks for explaining that, fatbanker, it is helpful ... except that I still don't understand the reply given in the call:

"...so for us in a way, if you are losing a bit on one side, you are also gaining on the other side..." what does that actually mean in the context of BMN's currency positions? One side of what?

Here is the original question (27m40):

"The strong rand, or weak dollar, whichever way you look at it, is a big reason for costs rising at the moment, and can you just remind me whether you have currency hedging in place, and if not, are there any plans to do so?"

Here again is the reply:

"We do not do currency hedging, simply because our sales are predominantly US, the majority of them, and our costs are predominantly Rand, so for us in a way, if you are losing a bit on one side, you are also gaining on the other side. So, in short, we are not hedging."

Can anyone make sense of that?

I found this bit of the call at 33m44, in response to a query about currency hedging, hard to understand:

"We do not do currency hedging, simply because our sales are predominantly US, the majority of them, and our costs are predominantly Rand, so for us in a way, if you are losing a bit on one side, you are also gaining on the other side. So, in short, we are not hedging."

Help please?

Hi dbb, "How far back does your cronjob go, have you a link? I've been noticing these £10.01k trades for around a year now, the MM's seem to use them to pin the price back when they run out of ammo. This morning they opened with a few just after the Bell and put them in at strategic times in the day."

The list for BMN since June 5th last year is at http://luku.org/list/BMN.txt

Putting aside the fact that it is hard to believe the MMs would have such an odd stratagem, there appear to have been 182 trades since last June having values between £10,005 and £10,015 - including a spectacular snowstorm of 11 such trades on the morning of July 6th:

2020-07-06 07:06:07.070 --:--:-- (GBX) 14.3 69972 10,006.0 Off-Book AIMX
2020-07-06 07:07:42.983 --:--:-- (GBX) 14.3 69972 10,006.0 Off-Book AIMX
2020-07-06 07:07:43.770 --:--:-- (GBX) 14.3 69972 10,006.0 Off-Book AIMX
2020-07-06 07:09:51.230 --:--:-- (GBX) 14.28 70070 10,006.0 Off-Book AIMX
2020-07-06 07:09:51.633 --:--:-- (GBX) 14.28 70070 10,006.0 Off-Book AIMX
2020-07-06 07:14:12.500 --:--:-- (GBX) 14.088 71025 10,006.0 Off-Book AIMX
2020-07-06 07:20:31.583 --:--:-- (GBX) 14.115 70889 10,005.98 Off-Book AIMX
2020-07-06 07:21:18.350 --:--:-- (GBX) 14.115 70889 10,005.98 Off-Book AIMX
2020-07-06 07:22:03.933 --:--:-- (GBX) 14.125 70838 10,005.87 Off-Book AIMX
2020-07-06 07:25:38.073 --:--:-- (GBX) 14.115 70889 10,005.98 Off-Book AIMX
2020-07-06 08:27:42.717 --:--:-- (GBX) 14 71471 10,005.94 Off-Book AIMX

Is that suspicious or what??

Hi. "Those pesky £10.01k trades have showed up again pushing us down. Had a few this morning and a few this afternoon."

Interesting. I hadn't noticed these. (Assuming you mean trades with value around £10,010 ... and presumably they are PI sales of exactly £10k after commission and levy)

Here is a list of BMN trades with value between £10,005 and £10,015 going back to the beginning of April

2021-04-01 15:16:40.683 --:--:-- (GBX) 16.83 59,489 10,012.0 Off-Book AIMX
2021-04-01 15:17:18.063 --:--:-- (GBX) 16.83 59,489 10,012.0 Off-Book AIMX
2021-04-01 15:17:47.443 --:--:-- (GBX) 16.83 59,489 10,012.0 Off-Book AIMX
2021-04-01 15:18:10.077 --:--:-- (GBX) 16.83 59,489 10,012.0 Off-Book AIMX
2021-04-01 15:18:41.560 --:--:-- (GBX) 16.83 59,489 10,012.0 Off-Book AIMX
2021-04-01 15:19:07.663 --:--:-- (GBX) 16.83 59,489 10,012.0 Off-Book AIMX
2021-04-06 07:07:26.767 --:--:-- (GBX) 16.87 59,347 10,011.84 Off-Book AIMX
2021-04-07 10:58:32.680 --:--:-- (GBX) 18.15 55,124 10,005.01 Off-Book AIMX
2021-04-15 10:20:55.403 --:--:-- (GBX) 16.325 61,321 10,010.65 Off-Book AIMX P
2021-04-20 07:52:23.060 --:--:-- (GBX) 15.165 65,981 10,006.02 Off-Book AIMX P
2021-04-20 07:52:39.060 --:--:-- (GBX) 15.15 66,046 10,005.97 Off-Book AIMX P
2021-04-20 13:29:34.177 --:--:-- (GBX) 14.9 67,155 10,006.09 Off-Book AIMX P
2021-04-21 13:29:28.387 --:--:-- (GBX) 15.82 63,243 10,005.04 Off-Book AIMX P
2021-04-22 08:02:13.307 --:--:-- (GBX) 16.3 61,386 10,005.92 Off-Book AIMX P
2021-04-22 08:03:01.650 --:--:-- (GBX) 16.3 61,386 10,005.92 Off-Book AIMX P
2021-05-06 15:08:11.597 --:--:-- (GBX) 16.55 60,459 10,005.96 Off-Book AIMX P AIMX
2021-05-07 13:49:13.193 --:--:-- (GBX) 16.49 60,686 10,007.12 Off-Book AIMX P AIMX
2021-05-11 14:30:32.657 --:--:-- (GBX) 17.6 56,878 10,010.53 Off-Book AIMX P AIMX
2021-05-12 07:15:00.573 --:--:-- (GBX) 17.25 58,032 10,010.52 Off-Book AIMX P AIMX
2021-05-12 07:16:34.833 --:--:-- (GBX) 17.25 58,032 10,010.52 Off-Book AIMX P AIMX
2021-05-12 07:28:46.303 --:--:-- (GBX) 17.21 58,167 10,010.54 Off-Book AIMX P AIMX
2021-05-12 08:24:36.170 --:--:-- (GBX) 17.2 58,191 10,008.85 Off-Book AIMX P AIMX
2021-05-12 11:18:05.070 --:--:-- (GBX) 17.325 57,772 10,009.0 Off-Book AIMX P AIMX
2021-05-12 11:44:52.190 --:--:-- (GBX) 17.325 57,778 10,010.04 Off-Book AIMX P AIMX

There have indeed been far more than the normal amount of these trades today ... but it's still only 6 trades ... gotta say that it's a bit hard to believe that these are to any significant extent responsible for "pushing us down" as you suggest!

HL sell=16.91 buy=16.90 at the moment

"I see another 1.5 mill shares ..." Probably a forum poster, they do troll coversion therapy

The MMs gotta be reading this blog, they are being so kind as to provide a perfect illustration of what I was talking about over the weekend.

All morning so far, the quoted spread has been 15.80/16.30 with sold/bought 2,797/611,369

whereas the merest glance at the psychedelic plot makes it clear that the actual spread is 16.20/16.30 with sold/bought 355,371/258,480

Hi. Continuing from discussion a few weeks ago ... MM quotes are sometimes (may be often) misleadingly skewed and lead to wrong estimates of what is a buy and what is a sell.

"In ideal market conditions, the ask and bid lines form a gently undulating envelope, within which trades snake along in two bands, an upper band and a lower band. So how about, instead of using MM quotes to draw ask and bid lines, simply trying to discern the two bands directly, and drawing lines along the top of the upper band and the bottom of the lower band ... Someone please tell me if this is lunacy. I'm thinking of giving it a try."

Well I have given it a try ... http://luku.org/bmn/

Hopefully its estimate of the sell/buy ratio, for mid frequency shares like this one, may be useful and at least sometimes more realistic than what is generally quoted.

Hello BBN. "Upon announcement of the strike on 7th Sept 2018, the share price lost c. 15% over the next 5 days or so. However, by the time we reached the day before the end of the strike (20th Sept 2018), the share price was sitting 16.6% higher than it was the day before the strike was announced, even though nobody yet knew when it would be resolved. The reason for this being a sizeable rise in vanadium prices over the same period of time."

I couldn't resist digging out some archives and here is a 5-week picture of BMN from 27th Aug to 28th Sep 2018, http://luku.org/xi/BMN/scctxfhv/

Are you saying that the slight dip around 7th Sep was a strike?

Well I would never have guessed.

Hi. "... pi's still chase the bid and sell. Many could end up missing the big move here while the savvy and deep pocketed load up."

If this means that over time there is a gradual transfer of shares from the less savvy to the more savvy, I think it is a good thing.

The quoted spread for the last couple of hours (since 08:30 this morning) has been 8.00 / 8.20

Looking at actual trades, it appears that the real spread has been about 8.00 / 8.10

Because of the disparity, almost all trades this morning have been labelled sells, whereas in reality I think trading has been reasonably balanced between buy/sell

There is a real need for an information service that can look at recent trading and give an estimate of the real spread based on that.

Would anyone be interested in helping to fill in the following little table?

......Resources....Production...Cost
BMN...........A..........B............C
Glencore....D..........E............F
Largo.........G..........H............I

I ask not only because I would be interested in knowing the answers (and I could of course go ahead and try to find them by myself, yes I have heard of the phrase "DYOR") but also because I think it is not as easy to find the answers as it should or could be, and it would be enlightening for us all to find out what is clearly the case and what is less clear, and it would make this share more welcoming to prospective investors if this kind of information were more readily available.

It could be the case that one or more columns (or rows) of this table are impossible to fill in fairly, because of incomparable differences in the underlying context, and if so, that is an important point which should be made.

Along the way, there are many important things to learn about, for example the difference between resources and reserves (and which would be better to measure in a table like this) and why resources might be measured in V2O5 while production might be measured in V.

Inevitably, the result will be seen as a severe oversimplification. But some oversimplifications can be helpful. The Economist magazine is very good at producing oversimplified tables of this kind which make experts throw up their hands in horror but which nevertheless contribute genuinely to the discussion.

Good evening all. A couple of weeks ago there was mention of undue disparity in the "Bought/Sold" numbers so in the spirit of having a bit of fun I set a cron job going every evening. Here is what it has output so far (omitting the lines which say "zero" on non-working days):

BMN/210325-1930.bs Vol. Sold 614,811 Sold Value 103.44k Vol. Bought 6,253,070 Bought Value 1m
BMN/210326-1930.bs Vol. Sold 752,934 Sold Value 124.23k Vol. Bought 7,815,984 Bought Value 1m
BMN/210329-1930.bs Vol. Sold 2,113,752 Sold Value 335.03k Vol. Bought 3,636,947 Bought Value 576.46k
BMN/210330-1930.bs Vol. Sold 2,267,726 Sold Value 354.90k Vol. Bought 2,308,632 Bought Value 361.30k
BMN/210331-1930.bs Vol. Sold 1,633,598 Sold Value 253.21k Vol. Bought 2,884,771 Bought Value 447.14k
BMN/210401-1930.bs Vol. Sold 4,350,850 Sold Value 735.29k Vol. Bought 5,376,680 Bought Value 908.66k
BMN/210406-1930.bs Vol. Sold 8,109,806 Sold Value 1m Vol. Bought 8,914,217 Bought Value 2m
BMN/210407-1930.bs Vol. Sold 3,951,999 Sold Value 711.36k Vol. Bought 4,760,069 Bought Value 856.81k
BMN/210408-1930.bs Vol. Sold 2,391,095 Sold Value 423.22k Vol. Bought 1,890,689 Bought Value 334.65k
BMN/210409-1930.bs Vol. Sold 4,054,814 Sold Value 705.54k Vol. Bought 1,697,550 Bought Value 295.37k

It looks as though around March 25th/26th there was indeed substantial disparity, but usually it is reasonably balanced.

The cron job is literally a one-liner and if anyone is interested they are most welcome. If anyone wonders whether the '.bs' suffix means what it sounds like .... well no comment.

Thank you alfa JD LS faramog for these helpful replies ... which illuminate ... but there is quite a lot of unclarity in the information sources.

Yesterday, when trying to figure things out before posting here, I started with 'Lionel's big picture' in the Bushveld Perspective website, and here is what it says about production and resources:

"Presently, BMN produces 3400 mtV (metric tonnes of vanadium) per year, and has short-term (3-5 year) plans to triple this to more than 8400 mtV. This can be compared with a total global production in 2019 of around 110,000 mtV. Growth is also expected to be accompanied by a lower production cost.

The extent of BMN's primary vanadium resource is vast: the as-yet untapped Mokopane has an estimated contained vanadium resource of more than 2,000,000 tonnes (contained V2O5).

Importantly, the particular geology of the Bushveld complex means that a vanadium resource of similar concentration and extent is unlikely to exist elsewhere.

More specifically, BMN's quoted resources are as follows:

Bushveld Vametco 187 million tonnes of ore at 0.78% = 1,450 kilotonnes of contained V2O5
Bushveld Brits 67 million tonnes of ore at 0.58% = 372 kilotonnes of contained V2O5
Bushveld Mokopane 297.2 million tonnes of ore at 0.68% = 2,028 kilotonnes of contained V2O5
This corresponds to a total of 2028+1450+372 = 3,850 kilotonnes (3.85 MegaTonnes) of contained V2O5."

Reporting production in terms of mtV, and resources in terms of contained V2O5, seems like a recipe for confusion. There does not seem to be any explanation, either here or anywhere else in the article, of the relationship between vanadium and the oxide.

Hello Alfacomp. "...and that we are fully funded to get to 6,800 Tonnes of Vanadium per year, making us the largest primary producer in the world."

I had thought Largo was bigger ... presumably the numbers I had in mind are wrong or are referring to something that does not directly feed into the correct comparison, please could you or someone set me straight, thanks

I was going from https://www.vanadiumprice.com/largo-resources-the-vanadium-producer-is-looking-for-more-revenue-streams/

"According to the 2020 production guidance, Largo should produce 11,750-12,500 tonnes (25.9-27.6 million lb) of V2O5, at a cash cost of $2.6-2.8/lb and a total cash cost of $3.2-3.4/lb"

is that way out? Perhaps V2O5 is the wrong thing to measure

4 interesting details from proactive investors interview with FM 1st April, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pcv5rjDiOJc

(1) This year expecting to grow production 20% from last year's 3,600t [i.e. to 4,300t]

(2) Currently funded to grow production to 6,800t pa

(3) Beyond that, remaining committed to increasing production to 8,400t pa

(4) "As we grow our production base we similarly expect that our costs per unit will be dropping on account of the fixed cost dilution that comes with that."

Would anyone like to estimate a number for the cost reduction?
TIA

platform=HL
request=125 shares, ok
request=126 shares, online quote not available

Consistently over several minutes

Hello Harchris. "Sure if you spend your days working out whether every single trade is either a buy or sell that's different, but I can't imagine that's how you're really spending your Thursday?"

Well ...that is why we have computers! Which can chug along day and night doing this, the only cost being a small amount of (hopefully green) electricity.

Looking at MM quotes is only one way of estimating what is a buy and what is a sell.

Another way is looking at actual trade data. If there are two discernible undulating bands, these may give a more reliable indication of buy/sell, or at least provide an alternative narrative to the MM quotes. This kind of pattern recognition should be well suited to software.