I understand the substantial frustration and anger in this forum comprising many veteran investors and speculators of BLK stocks. I have entered into the fray the past six months or so and currently down around 40% on my investments. So, I understand how you all feel. However, I have been through quite a bit in 2013-2014 when we had the first wave of the gold miners bear market. That was a horror run for even the best performing stocks like NST and RRL.
What I have noticed is the increasing angst about the ability for BLK to stay solvent and liquid in the current climate. The operational profitability seems to be terrible in the past year and even the June quarterly report has extinguished the hope and excitement from the March quarterly report that seemed positive and that the worst was over. Despite this, just want to remind everyone that the company has $23m in cash and bullion and $32m in debt, and their net debt position has come down quite markedly over the past half year. Sure, they do have almost $10m of liabilities to repay for the September quarterly and around $20m to repay by end of year, they are doing ok. I would have been more worried if they were burning cash at $5-10m over the June quarter but they generated $2m positive cash and bullion over the quarter where the AISC was $1 509/oz. While not too assuring a result, but it really could have been worse.
Their production is currently around 18-22koz per quarter so even with a high AISC, they are not burning cash that deeply. If you want a comparison, check out DRM and RED over the past 2 years, or RMS in 2013-2015. I actually think that BLK might not be that bad since they have some cash buffer right now. They are burning that buffer possibly, and their gold grades have not been much to write home about.
I hope that people here do not lose sight of the bigger picture and also think about how a number of struggling gold miners had to go through some tough times to get better. The management is indeed sub-par in their performance, but with some luck, they may be learning to deal with it and emerge better. I am not seeing this through rosy glasses, but I speak from experience having gone through the hard yards with DRM 2016 to now, NST 2013 to 2017, PRU 2012 to now, RED 2017 to now, RMS 2013 to now, RRL 2014 to 2017, RSG 2014 to now, SBM 2013 to 2018, SLR 2013 to 2016 and TGZ 2014 to now. You can have a look at how those companies fared in the period. I also held a lot of other gold producers but thought I might give you the above list to place things into perspective.
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