Ann: 24M Joint Development Agreement, page-188

I don't believe this is the case here @Jstash. The usual practice is for the terms of a capital raise (e.g. price, amount and timing) are first agreed between the company and their broker(s), and then a Trading Halt is announced. Following this the capital raise is presented to soph investors by the broker. I'll also add that those not as close to the detail, may not be aware that Volt's Chairman will be adding circa ~$780,000 to the company's balance sheet as committed from capital raises completed earlier in the year (as per announcements), which would likely take Volt's cash balance to >~$1m per my estimations. So there is some runway, but of course as capital is the lifeblood of all small-cap companies, additional funds would be likely required in future. In comparison to some of the raise amounts being done in the small cap space lately, Volt's raises have been very small in 2022 ($2.5m in March + $2m in June).

On the price action over the week, my observation is that this was a case of "buy the rumor, sell the fact" and a reasonable involvement from short term traders. Some posters on here have even admitted to this being their trading strategy, in retrospect a good trading decision. An increase in buying over the weeks leading up to the news, from both traders and investors alike had seen the price move up from it's ~2c support/resistance zone to reach it's next key resistance zone of ~3 to 3.2c. When the news arrived (on both occasions this week), there was an initial move up, but as the run did not keep pushing through, selling / profit taking started. Compounding this, traders who may have paid up high, would have likely sold at B/E or had stop losses triggered, which created more momentum to the downside. The price appears to have stabilized at around 2.3c. It will be interesting to see, after this news is fully digested how the market responds next. It's difficult to make any predictions, but it does appear oversold.

It's not been uncommon in current market conditions for "good news" to be sold down, and a couple of companies that come to mind are EUR (Merger with NASDAQ Corp) and QPM (investment and offtake with GM).

The news itself is actually quite significant and should be pleasing to investors + shareholders. Both a Joint Development Agreement and a Graphite Supply MOU executed with 24M Tech in the same week is a big step forward for Volt. The Graphite supply MOU in particular now opens up the pathway for Volt to become a qualified supplier for 24M's customers and partners. Most notably, Volkswagen Group, FREYR, Kyocera and FujiFilm corporation are huge players in the lithium-ion battery space. There is still work to be done, but it looks like there's been plenty going on to qualify the product to date, and when this qualification process is complete it is likely to lead to binding offtake agreements with 24M and/or their licensees. All it will take is one of these companies e.g. Volkswagen or Freyr to commit to an offtake and this would be of material impact to Volt.

The fact 24M is evaluating an investment in Volt Energy Materials is also very telling. They would have had to sign off on this detail within the announcement, so it would be representative of their thinking and future strategic aspirations.

On a separate note, the topic of the sovereign risk with the Ukraine asset has been discussed widely on social media, and is a personal choice in terms of one's investment strategy and risk appetite, which I respect. It is interesting however, that 24M and by extension it's commercial partners are prepared to execute agreements with Volt and look beyond the current situation in Ukraine. At some point, the conflict will need to be resolved, it cannot last forever.

Glancing across at a few ASX graphite peers, those with Binding offtakes agreements include SYR, MNS, WKT, EV1 and TON. Those with non-binding agreements include RNU, TLG, BKT, SVM and EGR. It's roughly a 50-50 split. Hopefully Volt can join the binding offtake group soon.

Finally, after catching up on all the discussions, it would be nice to see an end to the antagonism and personal attacks between some posters on this forum. Share your opinions by all means, but some of respect for each other would go a long way.

GL