I understand your position sirrobbo, and I've been known to get the sh*ts myself occasionally with the odd poster. The thing I have since learned though is that you can't out-Trump a Donald Trump. You'll just end up at his inane, ignorant level. At some point, someone has to chose to be the bigger person, even if the "other guy" doesn't seemingly deserve that niceness. I would suggest though that not every negative comment (like your subsequent query) is necessarily down-ramping just because it's negative. My previous post is almost all based on facts and ASX announcements, so even though it's pointedly negative to other stocks, neither is it down ramping. Although I'm sure people would accuse me of doing so if I went to their respective threads.
To answer your query, absolutely not. Let me start by saying that I was a banker. The emotive language of "such a huge loan" is misleading to a reader. A $20K personal loan can be "such a huge loan" for the wrong reason, while a $1billion loan can be adequately serviced for the right cashflow structure. The point you make of 75% geared towards the European steel industry needs to be put in context. If the company had advocated a battery focus, then ended up with steel off-takes, then you would have a valid point. But the company has said, from it's first iteration in it's current form (i.e. since Andrew and Robert and Co started), that it's always targeting existing demand that can be sold into the current graphite market "as is", not relying on "future" demand to justify a mine. It wasn't as sexy sounding as many of the other marketing presentations with big super-pit projections for Tesla batteries, but it's proven to be the right path.
The ROE is high for KNL, especially at our very low market cap, even with steel off-takes, so I want as much cheap debt funding as possible, because very $dollar of debt is an incrementally improving ROE for the remaining shareholders. If we did a 100% equity raise (ala SYR) it would be a horrible outcome for ROE for shareholders in a much larger register. Some day in the future, analysts will be writing about this very thing for SYR reports, and justifying a price target that is probably a little over half of what it currently is.
More than almost anything else (after capital protection), my focus is on ROE. Which is why I find it so amusing to read about "my super-pit is better than yours" arguments. Ultimately, as an investor, there is only one important metric, and that's how much return you get on your $1. So if you were to put $5,000 into each of the graphite companies, irrespective of how many shares that buys you, which one will make you the better investment return (note I'm ignoring the short term trading aspect of it, which is a whole other minefield).
Sirrobbo, I agree entirely that steel industry is not the most lucrative way to get a return on investment, but right now, there are SFA number of current battery off-takes (buying right now, today), and banks want to see what sales you have today. Banks don't ask developers to show them EOIs (expressions of interest), or marketing brochures, or projections showing how many apartments the development will have sold out by completion. They want to know how many apartments the developer has sold as at today. That's why genuine, western off-takes, for existing graphite demand, were so important as part of the finance picture. Those that didn't understand that (which is pretty much everyone else) has suffered in the finance department. We are dragging the chain a bit on our final approval, but we are on the right track.
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