Ann: $20M Placement to Rapidly Advance Quinchia Gold Project, page-68

The latest from Next investors. Seems even they were blind-sided by LCL's cap raising. Believe it or not

The gold price has been creeping up again over the last month so we are going to be covering our gold investments over the next few weeks - LCL, TMR and TTM.

LCL are rapidly drilling out their large gold porphyry system in Colombia but went into trading halt early in the week to complete a cap raise - we thought LCL still had at least $5 million in the bank AND potentially another $8M coming from options exercise in a few weeks on the 16th of August so we were surprised to see a cap raise announced so soon.

We were predicting LCL would need to raise cash around November/December this year - ideally at a higher share price AFTER the 16c options overhang was removed allowing the share price to run from a few more big drill results coming in - also noting that most small cap companies look to shore up their cash balance just before the capital markets effectively shut down for 3 months around the Christmas holidays.

Cap raisings are a part of early stage investing and we do expect them - but it’s frustrating to get blindsided by a cap raise like this - we called LCL management and expressed our concerns, especially given that we had just written commentary on LCL the day before about their latest drilling results announcement.

On a positive note - LCL does now have a total of $24M in the bank (according to their announcement), with $8M potentially coming from the August 16th options and with institutional money now on the register we hope LCL can start its march upwards once the options are exercised.

LCL now joins a couple of other companies where we hold large positions that have raised decent amounts of cash to execute their plans over the medium term - EXR with $36M, PRL with $18M, VUL with $120M - so it’s now over to the company management to spend the money wisely and deliver some of those coveted investment milestones… we will be watching every step of the way.

Before we summarise what happened this week across our portfolios a big thanks to everyone who applied for the equities analyst role with Next Investors - we will respond to all enquiries shortly.

If you are interested to join the Next Investors team as a small cap equities analyst its not too late - please reply to this email and we will send you more information on the role.

while we wait for next piece of news

Los Cerros Ltd (ASX:LCL) delivered more outstanding drill results from its large near surface gold discovery in Colombia.

LCL released assay results from two more holes, continuing to grow the size of the discovery, and demonstrating shallow, high grade gold is present.

We are looking forward to a resource estimate by Christmas, taking into account all the impressive drill results LCL has been posting.

When we featured the drill results on Tuesday, we were not expecting the company would go into a trading halt for a capital raise just 24 hours later.

On Friday morning, LCL confirmed it had raised $20M at 16c per share, bringing in half of that from a number of North American gold funds.

You can read our views on the raise here: LCL Raises $20M at 16c - Five Drill Rigs on Site

You can read all about its latest drill results here: New Assay Results for LCL’s Giant Porphyry System

(OK this is the last time we promise…)