So as stated before I attended the tin conference this morning and below are some notes that I captured, unfortunately my wife was going in for a colonoscopy today so I got there a bit late and left early, my notes are below.
♣ Room must have contained about 50 to 75 people, mostly in suits and I suspect a lot of people in the Tin Industry, eg. traders, investors, analysts. I checked with the organisers and the presentations will hopefully be sent out or accessible on the website and if and when I get them I will post copies on here.
♣ The guy from Reuters spent a lot of time talking about how bad Trump was in the long term for global commodities, but probably ok in the short term. He talked about various commodities and by his own admission did not say much about tin. Takeaways were that Aluminium is becoming a tight commodity, more than 60% of Nickel goes into Steel, and Electric Vehicle sales haven't been as good as everybody expected.
♣ Next up was a guy from the International Tin Association and unsurprisingly he was very bullish on the long term outlook for Tin though they are forecasting prices to drop slightly in 2019 before accelerating in 2020/21. They are forecasting Myanmar production to decline approximately 25% from 2018 to 2022 and decline about 20% from Indonesia. In the same time frame the big increasers will be China, Africa and Australia. Something else of interest was the comment that a third of all tin consumed is from recycled sources. Good presentation with lots of good slides but went through them really quickly.
♣ LME spokesman had a lot of information and some key points were, Tin is one of the less speculative metals on the LME, volatility is reaching historical lows, Long term tin trades are increasing, stocks are up since January but still very low compared to other metals. They are planning to introduce a proposal on responsible sourcing with an emphasis on Tin and Cobalt, watch this space for details. Finally he showed an awesome report that I think BananaMan and MikeZ could have some fun with called the Commitment of Traders Report which is on their website. I think this is the link below
https://www.lme.com/en-GB/Market-Data/Reports-and-data/Commitments-of-traders/Tin
♣ Next up was a guy from MetalsX who started off with some crap joke about sex that was completely inappropriate for the audience, and then he proceeded to big note MetalsX as being the only Tin game in town and on a list of all the other Tin players in Australia did not acknowledge Granville and really downplayed Taronga. He did show some good stuff about how using modelling they have expanded their reserves, which I think is promising for us with Taronga and Mt Cobalt and possibly even Granville.
♣ Next up was Peter who basically spoke to the slides very polished and professional and with authority and as the presentations were short and sharp and questions were not taken from the floor for any of the presenters, I cannot really add much other than what has been stated earlier on this thread. I would say that Peter looked really confident and the compere certainly seemed impressed, the body language around the room looked like a lot of people were very interested. When he finished his presentation he sat down at the front so I didn't get a chance to meet him, which was a pity.
♣ The last presentation I got to see was from Kasbah resources (KAS) who have the second largest reserve in the world which is based in Morroco which they described as being more like Spain than Africa. The presentation was very polished and they seem to have some pretty big investors which if the financing comes off could be a big money spinner as their market cap is even smaller than ours.
In Summary
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I am glad I went along, I am very happy with my investment in Tin and I am very happy with my investment in AusTin, I thought KAS looked like an interesting speculative punt, although I do not have any more funds available. When the presentations are made available I will share them.
ps, Note to Blister, I didn't get to ask the direct question about Indonesia but you can see from the ITA presentation that they are forecasting Indonesian production to decline quite severely in the next few years.
DISCLOSURE - On the tram on the way home I sold a parcel of less than 5% of my ANW shares to realise a profit of 130% and reinvested the proceeds to buy a small parcel of KAS shares (If KAS goes under I will only have lost a small amount)
