Ann: Trading Halt, page-52

If anybody is paying attention, I utterly concur with you Salpetie. Roger is completely credible and conscientious, and he and his team are doing their absolute professional best. Mineral exploration is a high cost, appalling odds gamble at the best of times, and all you can ask is that people conducting it on your behalf put most of the money into the ground, spending it on intelligent, well-targeted drilling and on all of the preparatory work that identifies and sets up those targets. You cannot fault Antipa on any of these counts. They are spending their money as it should be spent.


Re Williams comments:

As far as blaming anyone else (eg. the Antipa management) for one's own share market folly and financial loss is concerned, that is just silly. None of us have anybody to blame for our own dire financial loss at the mineral exploration end of the share market but ourselves. It's not an 'investment'. It's a high risk/high reward gamble, and the odds are crap. And complaining: 'Somebody else did this to me. I was lied to and was misled by the management' is a very unhealthy, if momentarily comforting, mentally-enfeebling self-delusion. It's not just true. Far healthier to admit: 'I was greedy and ignorant, and looking for a fast buck - but too lazy, ignorant, stupid or blindly optimistic to identify the risks that I was taking and count up the variables that might be stacked against me' (I am not insulting anyone else here; I am simply describing myself). And once you admit that, you realise that you are not actually just a powerless victim, it is an entirely self-inflicted wound. And then you can come away with a clear and honest picture of how you got burnt, and maybe avoid repeating the same mistake in the future.

But all that aside, if you ask me, all that has actually gone wrong here (and in all my other my gold stocks and the emasculated capital raising abilities of my mining industry clients) is that the current Battery Metals/Li Ni Cu Co rage in the market has sucked up all of the hot speculative money that would have otherwise have gone into gold stocks. And it may continue to do this for a very long time. A very different speculative share market to the one in which I first bought into Antipa 8 years ago!

Nonetheless, a fundamentally profitable gold deposit can still be mined in WA, and a dividend can still be paid. And if Antipa can add significant ounces to the already-profitable bottom line they have sketched out at Minyari, and if they then proceed to production, the market will recognise this.

And beyond that, if they can jag a new discovery at Tetris or at one of those three good-looking IGO JV targets, the market is always hot for a new discovery. Especially if it comes up Battery-metals copper credits in addition to the gold.


So the show's not over yet. Far from it!

Oh, and thanks again for the surface images and interpretation Salpetie. October will tell.