Bullish Sign? - Bounced off 200 EMA, page-3486

Back to nickel, and feel free to again listen to the song at . The lyrics of our version should be:

Put another nickel mine
In that place called Honeymoon
All I want is contracts new
And profit, profit, profit…

When one reads about metals and their ores, journalists often do not distinguish grades, although grade interchangeability may be so limited as to make the aggregate of them meaningless. Beef is meat, pork is meat, but the export market for pork to meat-importing Muslim countries is effectively impossible, and so it is for lithium and nickel in respect to the total market relative to the expanding electric battery market.

Nickel has different uses, and the intended use at each end of its usage spectrum are unrelated markets. The market for Indonesian laterite nickel is not the same market for the refined 99.8% pure nickel in powder or briquette form, and now the nickel sulphate form, that BHP exports via Fremantle from its Kwinana refinery (see https://www.bhp.com/our-businesses/minerals-australia/nickel-west/). It is economically difficult to get those products from laterite ores, and the processes create serious ecological problems that end users are increasingly wary of.

For battery-grade ethical nickel, BHP is well placed. BHP's  acquisitions of Norilsk Nickel's interests (https://www.australianmining.com.au...-russian-major-to-expand-wa-nickel-portfolio/) means BHP is likely to expand nickel mining in WA, and the related crushing, concentrating, smelting and refining that BHP now has in place. Those facilities also toll process, so they process ore that BHP does not mine. This is potentially good for the likes of NWH.

If you read the bit about nickel in https://unauthorised investment adv...opper-play-that-could-have-the-next-degrussa/, you will realise that the journalist has not distinguished between nickel for stainless steel and nickel for high-quality batteries. I was not able to make that link active, so you should search for it if you want to read it, but words about nickel are:

Nickel has been going great guns, up 37 per cent since the COVID-19 market bottom in March. “We’ve seen a lot of strength in nickel, now over $US15,000 a tonne,” Le Page said. “Interestingly, if you look at the China nickel supply, there’s a lot more coming from nickel pig iron imports (NPI) from Indonesia. That increased from about 354,000 to 540,000 tonnes this financial year. So I think while the market is temporarily in surplus, the medium-term outlook looks pretty strong. So that bodes well for our nickel players here, of which there are very few to invest in.”

The first six words of the above paragraph were a link that did not copy as a link. The information complements what I wrote about ethical battery-grade nickel. To find the piece search for https://unauthorised investment adv...elp-australia-become-a-leading-nickel-player/