ASX Today, page-18140

@kn0way, I cannot speak for @dfs1 but when I learnt of his history with PLS yesterday, it did strike a chord with me.

I have been open and honest about my history with LTR on the forum, so it is all there for you to read but you would have to sift through too many posts to find everything.

i fell into LTR around 2007/8 when it was a gold explorer in Africa. I say fell because it was purely off the back of reading a mining magazine article which was interviewing one of the grandfathers of Australian mining and he tipped Tim Goyder to be a future star of the industry. I am medical by background and time poor, so I figured why not follow someone who probably knows what he is doing. I had a strong long term belief in materials, precious metals and energy.

I have a high risk tolerance and my first child had just been just diagnosed autism. I wasn't sure, at the time he was diagnosed, whether he would ever speak and what quality of life he would have. I thought I needed to ensure I could always provide for him, even in my afterlife, so I borrowed a lot of money and spread it over gold, rare earths, iron, uranium, platinum and oil stocks (I think the thought of peak oil was sprouted sometime around then). My wife, although Chinese and quite conservative by nature, has never really tried to put the brakes on me (but I do hear her voice in my head even though she isn't speaking). My first purchase in LTR was over 30c back in 2007/8.

To cut a long story short, eventually my portfolio virtually went to zero. I held some very good stocks which subsequently flew, like FMG, but I traded very badly, often selling the winners and holding the losers. I was many years buying and selling too early on most of the stocks. Never traded LTR, see below.

I did average down with LTR to about 8c but then stopped buying, except for participating in capital raises, which there were a few, even one at 0.8c I think.

The only thing that kept us afloat at the time was my high paying job but I worked very long and hard days (that eventually has caught up with me but not a story for here) to pay off my debts My shares were worth virtually nothing sometime early last decade and I had a lot of carried forward losses from the shares I had traded. The losses became so painful that I completely stopped looking at the market, I'd say for approximately 5 years.

The lowest point for me was when my bank called me in for a meeting one day with my wife, sometime around 2017. They had been pressuring me for sometime to take over my investment portfolio. I was reluctant to go in as I knew they were going to hang shit on me and I was embarrassed. I sat there with my wife, banker, and about 4 other people from the investment team he'd brought along. One of the investment advisors said he'd virtually never seen anytging like it. I think "reckless" was the term he used and he said no matter how long I lived, I would never write off all my losses. I'll never forget the look on my wife's face, I felt so ashamed and like a complete loser, something I never wanted to be.

I did allow the bank to sell some of my portfolio but I never allowed them to sell LTR, mainly due to the Tim Goyder factor.

I started getting really interested in LTR again when I noticed the price start to move off the floor and that's when I started taking a closer look at the lithium projects.

Posts on here by @anatol and others helped but I also spoke with TG and DR to get my head around the KV project, underground mining, Mica etc. Slowly my confidence grew in the project. At the same time, we sold our family home to move in with my mother-in-law to help care for her. This allowed us to dump alot of money into our SMSF under the bring forward rule and most of this went into LTR either by way of direct purchases or by purchasing the shares held in our family trust, which also wrote off all the carried forward losses in the trust the bankers said I would never do in a lifetime. I bought between 6 and 12c, all the way back down to 6c during early covid and then all the way back up to 12c again.

I missed the cap raise we had just above 20c, as I felt I had more then enough shares already (plus I had virtually drained our bank accounts and I didn't want to borrow to purchase anymore given my earlier failures), but my confidence keeps growing in the story and the project and I last bought around $1.45.

Am I a little crazy? Clearly. I don't like to give advice to anyone as the path to where I am now has not been easy and clearly the outcome could have been very different. I accept it could still end very badly (I'd say that is very very unlikely now but with my history I never say never) and I wrestle frequently whether I should offload some shares, which I still haven't done and where the craziness comes in I think.

However, I'd love to see the look on that same banker's face now if he saw my portfolio. Unfortunately, as it is with bankers, they move around a lot and I don't know where he is now.

Anyway, more a story of luck then anything. Those 15 people who follow me can stop now.

GLTAH
G