External News & Commentary, page-2349

Don't pay attention to all the noise. Only look at the facts, The largest shareholder is buying more. A board member is buying more. The far left are now saying they will sue the BLM (threats are meaningless...), in their mind even based on what they are seeing the mine will get approved otherwise why bother with saying that. The board are well aware that the extremists try to litigate to slow or stop progress, they have done so much engineering work and ground work (with reason), i also suspect the delays with the BLM have been to make sure the approval process is sound (not rushed like they did with Thacker pass for GM), and that any litigation after approval does not make it to court, but is instead settled or thrown out by a judge (once presented with the process/work undertaken to get the desired outcome) before it even gets to that stage. SSW are expanding the JV not exiting from it (again i don't know where that speculation of them exiting has come from - does anyone have any hard evidence of this?), if you watched the SSW battery day late last year they were very bullish on lithium and proud of their involvement in RR and what it will mean for their share holders in free cash flow, ongoing for the next few decades. They are paying INR more $USD (probably this year) to execute an option on the JV (as noted in the SSW battery day slides), so there are no current signs of them pulling out or trying to operate in bad faith (which a some have suggested/speculated). So far both sides of the JV have operated in good faith (within the JV) and it should continue. Respectfully - i do not agree with comments made that SSW is not a good partner to have. Mining is always boom an bust, its very hard to manage, sometimes the best thing to do is to go into care and maintenance (or care of maintenance), and ride it out using what stock pile you have. Often large layoffs are needed to ride that part of the wave thru to the other side. Pulling the trigger on that is what every good operator does, they don't pay 1000s of people to just stand around while it isn't economical to cut/produce/add to stock piles. My opinion is without SSW INR would have probably shut down a while ago, I feel there are a lot of intangibles and experience needed to get a mine of this size off paper to reality and people on the outside always get nervous near the end of the admin stage, but so much good work has been done. NFA but what my opinion is from what I'm seeing by the TA - the whipsawing at this low volume is normal, (noting with the scale of price change over the last 8 or so years I'm using a log scale), I noted late last year it looked like the bottoming process was starting, the curved saw tooth pattern looks like we may be forming a cup and handle pattern and could be around 63% thru forming the pattern, with the handle coinciding around the time of BML ROD. Until there is anything of substance, not the BS that will always be in the media, i don't see why there should be a lack of optimism for this year. I am looking forward to the year playing out. I hope others are too.