I am not sure you are looking at the right price driver here....

I am not sure you are looking at the right price driver here. CXO does not make LiCO3. It makes spodumene, the step before LiCO3. The spod prices have been falling pretty relentlessly for over a year. This is the last month:



Here is the last year:



And here are the current positions for a collection of Li chemicals compared over various time ranges:



The spodumene pricing fall is pretty much the entire story, and until these graphs start pointing up the entire Li mining sector will continue to be hammered, IMO. The interesting detail is how CXO has stayed relatively flat since the CR while others have fallen further. This suggests that the drop embedded in the CR was what the funds believed was going to be pretty much the drop yet to come for the others before prices were expected to lift. It may be that CXO is more-or-less at the bottom and will stay here until a general recovery ensues. China is an economic mess ATM and probably going to get a lot worse, so the interesting thing will be the extent to which that impending collapse is built into the current SP or not. Also we are starting to see slight divergences in the Li sector possibly due to the different mixes of chemicals they produce or focus on different parts of the production cycle - eg Spod versus LiCO3 vs LiOH vs Battery recycling (eg, NMT) vs explorer vs miner, so at least we are starting to see a tiny bit of maturity creeping into how the funds view the various companies in the sector. Not a lot but at least they no longer seem to think that everyone is a Spod miner.