I agree in our discussion today we touched on this very point...

I agree in our discussion today we touched on this very point and I said to JP the market didn't go up today because the finance isn't sorted yet, its that simple, and it wont rebound until it is.

JP conceded that point to me. I think to be fair both he and Daniel are so excited about the opportunities that can come out of this announcement they are looking at it through a much different lens ( certainly a longer term lens) to what the jo average punter / investor like myself is or maybe how the market as a whole is looking at it. And this is the rub , it is up each of us now on how we interpret their enthusiasm for this announcement.

For me it is pretty binary ;

1. You are either going to go this is going to be game changing in terms of finalizing a favorable offtake / financing for Stg 1 and possibly Stg 2 to come and they just need some more time now and its worth trusting them to get it over the line on the stg 1 finance . If that happens stg 2 and later present as great upside.
2. Or you see it as mere puffery, an mou means nothing , yada yada yada and the outlook here is dire if Glencore don't proceed.

I have been a holder of this stock since 2018 , what has kept me here through all the ups and downs is the HMW asset ( near 9.0 M tonnes Lithiumcarbonate equivalent as an M&I resource that will probably reserve out around 5 M tonnes with little impurities which with even 60,000 tonnes of annual production still exceeds 80 years mine life) is worth far far more than $ 140 M AUD , our current mkt cap. Which by the way is $ 28/ tonne for something that sells at around $16 /17,000 USD per tonne as of today which is 0.1 of 1 % of its value. That is insane............ when viewed through that lens the reward relative to the risk has to be to the upside here unless Mgt completely cock it up. But even then they can simply stop everything related to burn and find a development partner and it should yield in my view far more than our mkt cap, that I have no doubt.

For me this hypothesis of a substnatially higher asset value is yet to be unlocked has been shaken and rattled over the last few months especially with the ATM announcement but after today I felt that mgt can at least see a way to getting stg 1 funding done without a complete anus horribilus dilution to come. It's a judgement call each of us has to make individually.

the MOU may help with that, but until the export license is granted they can't really "fully explore a plethora of alternatives outside of local market options for the chloride," right?

Whilst open to interpretation my view is this comment is not correct. This was actually a specific question by another learned gentlemen in the crowd. They can indeed proceed now to explore fully their options and this is exactly what JP said and given he mentioned Jimenez is enroute to China, not unlikely that maybe that has already started.( interpret that how you will) . They key thing is the government has indicated that ability will be well in place by the time they have production ready for market in 2025. The MOU is effectively a govt commitment that it will come to be and I would think this is a pretty solid footing to discuss commercial sales/offtakes/financing etc with 3rd parties.