commodities going berzek, page-40

"At the time you thought you bought in early"

Nope. Big Wilson had pushed the SP higher than my buy-in...I actually thought I had missed some of the ground floor opportunities.

"back then it was advanced to BFS. A lot further developed than we are today"

Well, yes and no. It was a BFS for an open-cut that was bound to run into huge opposition. Nobody thought Mt Lindsay was even close to production back in 2012...VMS was very much still a junior explorer stock being bought and sold on the DSO > tin story, where the DSO was clearly the first cab off the rank.

Today, we have an environmentally friendly underground mine being scoped, we have the ESG opportunities (which wasn't anywhere near the "thing" it is now back then), and we have a price and price outlook that is almost a magnitude better than it was then. I think the prospectivity of the asset is better than it's ever been.

"Management which affected sentiment. Of coarse you may have a better explanation which I'd love to hear"

Management is a factor, no doubt. But it's not the only factor. In business, as in life, it is always better to be lucky than good. And VMS has had the worst serving of misfortune of any stock I've followed in the last 20 years. The timing of the defeat of the court cases coincided perfectly with the decline following the greatest iron ore boom in history. The timing of the geo-politics that led to exorbitant shipping costs and the sharp decline-from-peak of the latest iron ore spike also coincided "perfectly" with our first shipment.

Now, of course management could have been better. But examine the two scenarios:

(1) IO prices stay elevated...management continues mining IO at record prices $200+ following first shipment;
(2) Management gets the IO to market 8 weeks earlier...gets in one or two shipments at a profit (remember, shipping costs and discount rates were already unfavourable well before our first shipment) and then pulls the plug immediately as IO plummets.

Which one of these scenarios has our SP sitting pretty, (1) the lucky manager, or (2) the competent manager?