You're coming at this from the wrong angle. Your assumption:...

You're coming at this from the wrong angle. Your assumption: Management does whatever it can for the benefit of the shareholders. The truth: people in general do whatever they can to further their own objectives. What happened was there was an artificial bubble in the stock, look at JAT, Bitcoin, American housing, so on and so forth. All bubbles follow the same pattern, slow to start, increase, FOMO, top, slight drop, 'return to normal upwards trend', fall off a cliff, decrease overtime, hit bottom, slowly increase inline with initial prebubble growth pattern.

The interesting question is why was there a bubble, as it requires a large number of people to be overly optimistic about the prospects for a considerable period of time. 

This begs the next question, who stands to gain?

Well, given the raise was at 20c, anyone with a large stake in EUC at that time stood to gain. Or anyone who knew it was a bubble at the time (I'm thinking of the rampers in this forum).

If you're a large shareholder (or even a director), you can't be seen to be influencing the price of the stock, so you tell your army of brokers to get the momentum moving, which they do using their clients  money (extra degree of separation) and they also come and ramp here on Hot Copper.

The SP goes up and up and the general public catches on. The price only needs to hold for as long as it takes to raise $20m. After that the brokers can get their clients out of the stock (at a profit as they're the ones propagating the bubble), while the general public absorbs the losses due to the hype. The brokers and their accounts (cough Shimmer) leave the HC thread, because now the $20m is raised, the SP is irrelevant in the short term to the long term holders (ie directors). They get to work with their new found warchest and over time the weakhands sell out, releasing shares back into the market at a discount where the brokers can accumulate at dirt cheap levels. (As  the stock isn't a dud, mining exploration takes time and as Tolga said, 'If I'd seen the site prior to going public, I would have been able to raise the full amount privately'.

There are no announcements in the mean time, because there is no incentive to facilitate an upwards price movement. The longer no announcements come out, the more accumulation to be done for the brokers and their clients at cheap prices.

But what about the guys in at 20c you say? Surely tolga's reputation is shot?

These guys are hard core, they know the value and did a shit tonne of due diligence before parting ways with the $20m. You think they don't know information the market doesn't? Kidding yourself. These guys went to site, did the rounds and saw all the cobalt there. Remember, the company doesn't have to release anything that could be seen as speculative to the market, which is an easy way of hiding behind unpublished information, because without assays anything is speculative. They put this $20m in expecting to wait 2/3 years to get a return, they also don't care about the ST stock price.

In the mean time you see the directors of the company and the rampers (Shimmer/ccdchi) eating Oysters and drinking wine together, happy as Larry.

Job well done.

The upside for LT holders is that these guys genuinely believe they're onto big things and they're bait and switch with the cap raise got them the money to capitalise on it.

Sit back and enjoy the ride, but don't expect the company to have your interests at heart, they don't and it's a naive perception to hold. If you're a retail investor in this game, you're simply trying to piggy back on the back of winners, or find a way to capitalise on the price manipulation of the companies (i.e. ST/Day trading)

TB