approval just received, page-34

Just my two bobs worth!

I take it that the environmental approval was a precursor to signing-off on any off-take agreement. There was no logical reason why the directors would need to call a trading halt for today's announcement. Pre-open and 20 minutes to read a one page announcement would have sufficed.

I think that the directors thought that they could announce the environmental approval and off-take agreement jointly, but soon realised that they could not achieve both by market open on Tuesday. Should this be the case, they decided to squeeze in the environmental approval before market close.

I think the last paragraph says it all:

Off take agreements are at a very mature stage. Atlas’ iron ore marketing team is currently working to finalise off take agreements and we expect to disclose those arrangements very shortly.

Also, judging by the daily trading vols, it's pretty obvious that AGO has its fair share of day traders and this could explain why the true value of the announcement was not reflected in the sp. I bet some T+3s were getting hot under the collar when the trading halt was called. Mind you, it's very difficult to get any real value when an announcement is made so close to the bell.

Good luck to all holders - should head north very quickly on any hint of a positive change in market sentiment.