Ann: Galan Secures Glencore Agreement For Offtake & Financing, page-358

Very true - especially about hindsight, but there is always a balance when it comes to criticism. Junior miners with little-to-no institutional shareholders face little reckoning except at AGM time when the rem. report vote happens. They can say one thing for months, then go and do quite the opposite. Message boards like these offer some small way to publicly critique company decisions, however minor, and in some cases even help to drive change. I saw that recently with the Karoon rem. report getting voted down; yes, it was activist institutional shareholders running a public campaign but the normally quiet KAR HotCopper threads lit up with activity too, and holders got a 26% first strike against management - an impressive feat when one considers that the three big proxy advisor firms had said they would all vote in line with the board.

So in my view, however small and insignificant it might appear, I think discussing and critiquing management decisions on predominantly retail-held stocks on HC and X is probably the only real way that shareholders can hold otherwise comfortable management teams to account and try and get some sort of action. In Galan's case, they couldn't control the lithium price downturn but there's other hard-but-necessary actions they could have taken - such as slowing the pace of construction (where contracts allowed) and planning out their expenditure more wisely, which would most likely have resulted in less share price pressure than what has eventuated. If that conversation doesn't happen here, where does it happen? Who gets motivated to ring up the company and apply the pressure? So while there's always pointless whinging on any social media forum, sometimes there's quite a lot of good that can come from these places too. It's a shame Galan management weren't more alive to the criticism they've been receiving from various corners.