I bought into FYI more out of interest in a kaolin play in order to focus my mind on the kaolin game, because I find it difficult to expend effort researching a stock if I do not hold it. I soon exited FYI on the basis it was a story-line stock riding on the HPA subtheme of the battery materials theme, and that it may never exploit its Cadoux kaolin deposit.
30/08/21 Sell -36000 at $0.82 – brokerage $32.47
18/08/21 Buy 26000 at $0.80 – brokerage $22.88
02/08/21 Buy 10000 at $0.585– brokerage $19.95
I soon got out of FYI because to me it made no sense to own the Cadoux deposit when the crux of FYI was the process, not the ore. FYI could simply have bought similar or better feedstock from the likes of WAK (WA Kaolin). WAK used air-float beneficiation to get >99% pure kaolin without the killer nasty, sodium residue that is introduced by the Bayer Process. As an aside, WAK can now get >99.9% purity via air-float beneficiation, and I see it as a supplier of precursor feedstock to whomever wants to make HPA from kaolin. I am invested in WAK, and have a paper loss at the moment, so it is not one of my stellar punts.
Making alumina from kaolin is old hat, and the only reason earlier interest in doing so was to make industrial-grade (95% purity), and using the Bayer process using bauxite and caustic soda (sodium hydroxide) was much cheaper. The new-fangled HPA story has enlivened interest in alumina from kaolin, but I did not believe that FYI has any IP that other firms in the pack could not match.
I got the feeling FYI's main skill was in fabricating good stories to sell to investors and politicians with bags of tax-payers' money.
https://www.australianmining.com.au/high-grade-kaolin-a-priority-for-australia/. I could be wrong, but as a non-holder of FYI, I am not going to die in a ditch defending my suspicions.
Because my interest lies in a kaolin play, I have not followed Alpha HPA, which is a process story that is not tightly linked to kaolin. However, as soon as companies spruik messages like, “
At Alpha HPA, we are proud to be at the forefront of the global effort to decarbonise our world.”, my bullshit indicators involuntarily twitch. Then if one searches for the word “government”, and learns about tax-payers money granted to Alpha, the bullshit indicators twitch, and the word “carpetbagger” springs to mind. I would be very happy if my pessimistic suspicions are wrong.
