I am VERY happy to be out, I can assure you HH. Not even...

I am VERY happy to be out, I can assure you HH. Not even securing finance and building the sand pit has been able to move the price in the last 12 months. Commodities - with the exception of that stuff that makes HB Pencils - remain about as popular as pork at a Jewish wedding.

As for your theory about one of the Big 3 doing the cut and run....well, you never know exactly what is going on inside an investment firm. Look at the bloke who took a cornerstone holding in Valeant Pharma. Everyone hailed him a guru at the time because he was a smart operator. But as fund redemption requests hit in the wake of the billing/revenues scandal, his "long term" commitment can be forced to change very quickly. Same when Bury (The Big Short) took his bearish bet on US housing.....the pressure started to mount big time for him to liquidate (although he survived thanks to legal action).

So...just because Appian, Greenstone and/or other PE firms/Fund Managers thought AVB was a fantastic opportunity 1-2 years ago, doesn't mean their "long term" commitment to the company is irrevocable. Go ask CKA management what happened to their share price after Blackrock & Passport went from cornerstone investors to forced liquidators of millions of shares. It only takes some disgruntled/impatient investors to start agitating for their money; or for the internal Bean Counters at the private equity firm to tweak their commodity forecasts; or we find that Appian/Greenstone's investment has been a leveraged play (borrowed funds); or China does indeed turn pear-shaped (those WMP bonds look to be a potential CDO/RMBS disaster all over again) and suddenly an AVB "cornerstone" investor can become a millstone around the share price quicker than it takes Tony to do a capital raising.

Add to that, the wave of off-screen sellers who will potentially bail out at 8c, and it is easy to why it is always useful to stress-test one's investments in speculative, unprofitable mining plays. AVB is - STILL - anything but a no-brainer. The longer cu prices stay low, AVB remains vulnerable to "black-swan" downside every bit as much as the more rose-coloured outcomes that the perma-Bulls advocate.

In "normal" times, AVB would be entering a sweetspot - a producing small scale start up operation with zero debt and nice cash flows. But the world remains a volatile and uncertain place not least the Cinese wobbles, and the deflationary environment that plagues many parts of the world, not to mention Brazil's internal problems. All these things are making it difficult for the share price to budge and the longer the bearish sentiment remains around weak global outlook, the more vulnerable AVB's Mum & Dad investors/punters/speculators remain to seeing their "baby" get taken out by Private hands at dirt cheap prices.

Coop