I agree, the discussion should be collaborative, not a debate where each person chooses a side and unconditionally commits to trying to convince everyone else of their chosen position, if necessary lying and when clearly wrong, trying to deny it or obfuscating what was previously said. Most people here choose the latter and unfortunately that’s true of most people in most walks of life, science/academia included (I used to work as a scientist myself).
In no realistic way does the company have 31 quarters of funding, that’s just an absolutely absurd claim to make. Maybe if they shut down all operations and dropped all staff but the board and sat around one candle in the office they might last 31 quarters (I’m only barely exaggerating and it’s closer to the truth than claiming this company could realistically last that long in any meaningful way).
You need to go through the figures yourself to draw your own conclusion, the figures are all provided by company announcements of course. At the current rate of cash burn all funds will be exhausted around the end of Q3 or so, we can probably all agree on that to within a few months.
You say some expenses might have been one offs, and sure, that’s true, and it’s entirely likely there will be new one off expenses in the next quarter or two which we can’t easily or accurately predict, and of course we can’t even exactly predict the precise cost of the regular overheads etc so of course we can’t know the exact cash burn even a month in advance, but if you go through the figures yourself rather than just looking at the completely and utterly absurd 31 quarters of funds claim, you can clearly see that funds will be exhausted before the end of this year, most likely something around the end of Q3. Yes, that’s my estimate, others may think it’s closer to the end of the year, you may argue funds could expire earlier than my estimate especially if they needs extra funds for something related to getting the plant working (reasonably likely, let’s face it, there have obviously been serious problems and fixing it could well be expensive), but no financially literate person could possibly go through the figures and honestly say the company could make it to the end of this year without external funds unless they mothballed all operations and went into hibernation. It’s worth noting that if they did such a thing the share price would utterly collapse, no reasonable person would disagree but I can’t for a moment see them doing that, so it is fair to say that unless the 2,000TPA plant swings into production more quickly than we can realistically expect or the company digs up a giant gold nugget while excavating pond sites, they are going to need external funds by the end of the year and if they don’t get funds any other way (the second most likely would be an offtake deal/strategic partnership, but again, given no success in production to date the deal wouldn’t be great even if the permit does come very soon, and we still don’t know when it’s coming), we’re going to see a CR trading halt this quarter or next.
For sure, it’s possible that something completely unlikely might happen. Terrorists might destroy most of the lithium production in Asia sending prices skyrocketing while AGY discovers the production hold up was a saboteur working at the plant, or AGY might unearth a giant pile of diamonds while excavating an expansion to the bakery, but when investing it makes sense not to put too much weight on extremely unlikely possibilities, and investors are crazy if they take absurd statements like 31 quarters of funding seriously without looking at the figures and seeing that they are completely and utterly divorced from any grounding in reality. Even in academia it’s very common for people to deliberately misrepresent data, when it comes to company announcements, you make your own analysis or you get burned. There is a massive discrepancy between 31 quarters and less than three quarters, a cursory look at the financials with any basic attempt to calculate likely future cash burn will quickly show which is correct.
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