I emailed Jerko about this a few days ago.
For whatever reason, he is being secretive with the market about what's happening. Obviously the 24 hour continuous trials which we were told in an annoucement were successful must have produced some amount of product. You can be cynical/pessimistic and assume this is because the quantity wasn't impressive and he doesn't want to create market backlash and is waiting for production to increase before saying anything. Alternatively you can be optimistic and say it's looking good and he is waiting for anticipation to build while the story grows so he can smash the market with great news along the lines of 'we have produced xx tonnes during the trials, we have commenced continuous production and are currently producing at a rate of xx per day and increasing', to totally burn the shorts to oblivion and get some real market impact.
Which is the case? I don't know, but on this point he basically responded to my question with 'The updates have stopped and I'm not going to tell the market anything until there is something material which I have to report'. I have been very critical of Jerko (even a little snide in direct communication with him) but I don't think he would be stupid enough to suddenly stop giving reports if the news was terrible, because when he does go back to reporting (and eventually he does need to say something), the market would punish AGY harshly. Either way, if you suddenly and unexpectedly stop reporting, when you do report something, the market reaction is probably going to be significant, so it is a strategically poor decision to do this if the situation is bad, and arguably a good decision if the situation is good. Having said that, he is known to put the Jerk into Jerko and demonstrate enough arrogance that he thinks the market won't hold it against him if he smugly overpromises and then disappoints, so there are no guarantees.
Unfortunately at this point all we can do is read the tea leaves and try to read between the lines while we wait. All we have to go on is that as of three weeks ago 24 hour continuous trials had been "successfully completed". I think it's safe to assume that successful completion actually did occur, and that wouldn't have been possible without a reasonable amount of production compared to previous quantities, so it seems unlikely he is in radio silence to avoid breaking any bad news to us, which seems to mean the most likely situation is sitting on good news until great news can be released for the sake of making a big impact. It certainly will be interesting to see the point at which it is decided the market needs to be told. Technically they don't really need to inform us of anything until the next quarterly operations report at the end of October, but I'm pretty sure we'll get something before then, and the market will get very nervous if we don't. I think there would also inevitably be leaky ship issues before then if they said nothing - some of the staff, even the guy sweeping the floor will know something.
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