I would agree that the endless handwringing, venting (and troll-feeding) cannot go on here forever. As someone who has been reasonably hardline and forthright in my assessments of FFX, there does come a point where we all need to recognise that the upper decks are sufficiently clear, accept the revised situation we find ourselves in, show some restraint and pragmatism, and again refocus if we are serious about ever seeing some satisfactory returns.
We are investors not problemsolvers to troubleshoot or guesstimate on every aspect of the business, or devise all sorts of scenarios for them on the basis of information and extrapolations we simply do not possess and should not reasonably expect to possess. And this goes as much for the upramper/optimists as it does for the pessimist trolls. The leadership is gone, the reasons poorly communicated (as is the FFX style of late), yet we cannot interrogate or bill them individually for their mistakes now because exacting a pound of flesh is not how the system we live within works.
Our biggest issue in terms of sentiment today is a lack of trust and confidence, and the remaining board would be wise to think about that before making the appointments necessary to bring the board & management back to full strength. Fix that and maybe we’ll all shut up and give them a chance to recover and deliver. Instead of a lineup of suits in Perth doing webinars, imo we need a reliable mining company executive with deep operational experience relocated to Mali with his or her boots on the ground for at least the next year to actually do the job of running a mine and being fully accountable for it. Gold-mining is not an outsourcing type of gig and we need someone there in the dust, “in the arena”, with our interests in seeing a profitable, tightly cost-controlled operation uppermost in their minds.
In addition to recovering lost production and restoring fiscal responsibility & stability, I think whoever now takes charge needs to alter the overall tone and take some visible strides in the area of investor communications. Cut all the fluff. It may mean we hear things we don’t like, or that are less finessed, or we are told at times to gracefully back off a bit to give incoming management the opportunity to get this project back on track. We don’t need investment demand creators - we need delivery on promises.
I do not intend to see my whole investment disappear in a haze of unrelenting bitterness and anger, replenished daily by the ‘always-have-the-last-word’ trolls and the pond scum of the securities markets who feed off of the years of hard work that our individual investment funds here represent. Maybe we should all stop giving them fuel.
