I have attached article 'Dryblower: a simple guide to finding...

I have attached article 'Dryblower: a simple guide to finding the next Azure'(www. miningnews.net) which director Dermot referred to in the previous post, but it disappeared.

So I made it as 'copy and paste'.

Dryblower: a simple guide to finding the next Azure
17 December 2023
Lithium has crashed and burned. We know that. But Dryblower has spotted clues pointing to a
recovery, and more importantly, a simple guide to identifying the next Azure Minerals, this year's stock market star with its 1500% share price rise.
The first, and most obvious sign that lithium is likely to recover in the New Year, is a recent kick in the tail of graphs which track the performance of the usual suspects.
Pilbara Minerals, for example, rose by 5% last week, taking its rise for the past four weeks to 10%, an increase which might be a surprise to investors swamped by negative news such the 82% fall in the price of the metal over the last 12-months.
Liontown Resources has done better, up 14% from a Wednesday low of A$1.27 to a close last week at $1.45, still well short of its $3.20 high, but a promising bounce which occurred as economic news flowed out of the Dubai climate conference.
It was the final communique from delegates in Dubai which lit a small fire in the renewable energy sector with a plan to triple spending on renewables by 2030, helping copper rise by US10c a pound and aluminium by $33 a tonne.
It was harder to pin a price on lithium with its multiple categories and opaque trading behind China's bamboo curtain, but help with pricing was found in a report from Macquarie Bank.
At the first glance the bank's analysis of global lithium miners and refiners seemed to be presenting a negative view which noted the collapse of profits in the Chinese lithium industry and another fall in the spodumene price to $1380 a tonne, down $530/t in a month.
But, included in the Macquarie report, was a table showing the estimated lithium carbonate production costs for Chinese producers at that spodumene price of $1380/t.
The companies with the lowest production costs were those using lithium from South American brine.
The highest cost producers were those using African spodumene.
Details aside, what the bank evaluation shows is that high cost lithium producers, as always happens in a crash of any commodity, are in trouble while low-cost producers are well placed to ride out the cycle as rivals are driven out of business and demand picks up.
Those share price rises in the final days of last week certainly appear to be signalling an expectation of a New Year recovery.
Enter Wilsons Stockbroking, a boutique Australian investment bank which often surprises with research which goes beyond the ordinary.
This time, Wilsons has taken a look at the popular marketing ploy of "outcropping pegmatites" which novice investors interpret as a buy signal when the reality is that a surface expression is not necessarily a guide to what lies below.
One of ‘Blower's pet hates is the reporting of surface rock-chip samples, something corporate
regulators ought to consider banning because it tells an investor nothing about what's beneath the surface, or whether the sample was transported at some time in the past to the area being tested.
Drilling, as professionals know, is the only tried and tested way of "seeing" beneath the regolith (surface cover) and to test that Wilsons has analysed 40,000 WA drill holes collected over 10 years to confirm "intercept length" which it says is a "critical early indicator".
From that start Wilsons then applies its own 50/50 rule which broadly says a 50-metre intercept is "significantly more likely to result in a total resource of more than 50 million tonnes".
Azure, for example, has reported multiple true width intercepts of more than 100m assaying up to 1.6% lithium which is why it has a current (world-class) exploration target of between 55-105Mt at between 1% and 1.5% lithium - and a high share price to match.
In Wilsons words: "All WA (lithium) deposits reviewed with a maximum mineralised intercept of below 50m in their first year of drilling, have ended up with a less than 50Mt resource size".
"The average size of resources which in their first year saw intercepts in excess of 50m is 115Mt and, the average size of resources which in their first year saw intercepts all less than 50m is 23Mt."
The broker backed up its 50/50 law with a broad empirical test, pointing out that pegmatites are typically formed by cooling volcanic fluids, with most pegmatites thought to form from the last fluid fraction of a large crystallising magma body.
If there isn't yet a pegmatite called "the last drop" it's a fair bet that there soon will be.