I am not surprised that the PLS SP is barely above water – any prospective or current shareholder looking at this forum would become noticeably depressed at the standard of debate, and suspicious about the quality of the company. Even the best of you have unravelled around the edges over the past 24 hours. Hundreds of posts over the past two days were either pointless or made matters worse.
Note for Moderators - are any other stock forums as bad as this one?
At the risk of being hammered by 99% of you, may I suggest a few improvements? I am sure many of you will tell me that Hot Copper can already do some of the things I suggest – in that case
WHY ARE YOU NOT USING THEM????
Suggestion No 1: More specific headings encourage readers to read or bypass, and the thread quickly ends.
I cannot stand the aimless threads with Subjects like “Trading” and “Lithium”. This is a stock market forum and the company explores for Lithium, so headings like these are much too vague (the "duh" reaction). This makes it difficult to “separate the Lithium from the ore” (the grade in this forum is in the same ballpark as Pilgangoora’s: 1-2%).
As an example, I posted “AllEnergy Conference Melbourne 4-5 October – batteries” on 12 September. Only 191 have read it so far, nobody replied, and no rating, so it looks like a lousy post. I think it was successful because 191 were interested in the subject and were unaware of the conference. Everybody else saw the heading and were either not interested or were interested but already knew about it. Result – thread died very quickly.
As another (bad) example, the “GLC & off takes” thread started with what seemed to be an incorrect interpretation of a GLC statement, and is now going through a discussion of spelling and grammatical errors in a completely unrelated document.
Don’t be afraid to start a new thread.
Suggestion No 2: Include a general clue in the Subject.
Most of the PLS posts may be split into:
- Mining (grades, drilling, camps, crushers, transport)
- Company-specific (people, places, DFS)
- Stock Market (shorting, ramping, options expiry)
- Lithium Market
- Electric Vehicles
- Other uses of Li (phones, games, cameras, etc.)
- General (whatever does not fit in other categories)
There are such great pearls of wisdom in the forum threads, but how does one find them? With the “GLC & off takes” thread, why not start a new subject like “General: the [Mainlink] document needs a good editor”? It diverts that stuff out of the main thread for the half-dozen who could give a rats to “discuss”.
Suggestion No 3: Create some FAQ sheets or Fact Sheets out of the pearls of wisdom.
I note with interest how often ozblue, SuperNinja, et al. are forced to repeat themselves – often for the benefit of beginners, but sometimes for the deaf. Many topics covered are highly educational, such as:
- brine vs hard rock production cost;
- share dilution vs borrowing;
- how shorting is done and what it attempts to achieve;
- discussion of Regal, UBS and PBs;
- rate of growth of Li consumption;
- SuperNinja’s four reports on his China visit;
- The PLS tenement visit by Anush;
- cost of transport from mine to processing location;
- development of Li batteries and alternatives (the quote from the Vanadium expert seems worth recording).
The thought occurs that some of the regularly repeated posts could be reformatted and edited to create FAQs or Fact Sheets. Any that are uncontroversial could be marked as such, and any that Happy Cats and others dispute could have a paw print (cat dropping?) watermark. In other words, a form of paw pee(r) review.
The original author could be the owner, and would be the person to respond to a relevant query by attaching the FAQ/Fact Sheet to the reply, or updating as new information appears. That reduces the time wasted by the experts on repetitive posts to the likes of me, and frees them up for more useful activities.
Now watch the horde descend on me!!!!!! No, I am not a school teacher or an expert in the share market – I am a retired electrical engineer (power industry) and into my fifth year as Secretary of a cricket club. The egos of cricket players are quite large, so I should be able to “stroke” some of yours without being scratched too much.
(20min delay)