Wickenden's Two Penny Worth.
As you'll all know I stopped posting some months ago. Before that I felt the stock needed all the help it could get to build up a broader and more solid base. It now has that base but in the interests of a modicum of stability I thought I'd note one or two points.
First I'm going to note that the reason I, and surely most of us, are in this stock are because of the possibility of a huge orebody with high numbers.
Figures for gold in the order of a quarter ounce per ton are not definitive but numbers have come up for several years now, from the earlier copper based fire assays ( not consistent enough for a resource assay method unfortunately ), through the Knelson concentrator tests, through the bulk leach tests which produced metal on the table at the AGM and through the Auric fire assay results. Look back through this stuff. All these have suggested gold values around 7 ppm are quite realistically possible. More exciting still has been that Platinum values seem to be between the same and double the value of the gold.
Different methods and different people working on them.
I took my own samples with permission and can confirm that I recovered slightly more Pt than Au despite using a low temperature collector.
As I say.....nothing definitive.....but enough indications that any self
respecting investor needed a bit of it.
So while there are no guarantees the evidence suggests that the new fire assay simply doesn't get much of the value out of the dirt.
This is nothing new. The Emperor mine in Fiji still doesn't have a fire assay that works but makes a fortune.
The new assay does one important thing however. Because it is consistent and is at least pulling out something respectable it will give institutional Metals Analysts something to prop up their decisions to their bosses.
I spoke to one of these guys last week, and asked if he had traded IPM at all. He said his position was far too large to do such a thing, and admitted that he really didn't follow IPM that closely at all......it was simply a long term bet based on the evidence. I feel certain he will have IPM as a Hold. A great pal of mine has a position well into the institutional scale and he told me earlier tonight he is holding for sure, and I am sure he is being truthful...he had no idea I would mention this in a post here. Interestingly he made his biggest kill holding on to a stock when everyone else got out, insisting that the bigger picture was OK.
Ron Struthers has alluded to new extraction methods being experimented with by Bateman. I have heard about success with one method which would be great if it came through. It is cheap, very simple and has been recognized for a long time. The numbers I don't know about, or even whether that particular method is still on the cards. Perhaps it would do the company a lot of good if they were more open about the both the warts on the one hand and the possibilities on the other. The website would be ideal for this. I am sure people would feel happier even if things weren't all perfect as long as they knew what was going on, and I suggest you press the company for this. We saw this with the August 4th PR which although of a delay gave a bit of a picture of what was happening and caused an uptick. No certainties here. What I am trying to get across is that the possibilities are greater than ever.
To clarify my own position, and as I told several posters here on email when asked, I sold three quarters of my stock some weeks ago as it was more than I should have been risking and I needed more confidence in a good upcoming PR.
I was ready to buy right up to the last minute as my long term view on the dirts remains the same, but couldn't quite find that confidence in the short term.
So basically it makes no difference to me what the stock does Monday because a small loss on a downtick would be more than offset by the buying opportunity for my other three quarters on the bigger picture.
I would however like to see reasonable stability hence this post.
Good luck to you all
John. |
