Ok, not bad. You haven't addressed every point I offered though, so I'll fire off a few ideas:
BHP were likely not targeting cobalt at the time, they already have nickel-cobalt in the form of Nickel West / Olympic Dam and probably a few others. They might be interested again in Ardea at some point or, S32 which is the more specialist metals company these days.
I recently asked the board of a Lithium company what they thought of Cobalt, they are of the opinion that if it stays over 20/usd a lb it will be attractive to substitute, it or reduce it's use in batteries by using nickel, up to 2/3s less in some cases.
It's still important there in NMC / NCA batteries of course. Aluminium based batteries might be coming soon, which will replace lead-acid, which doesn't seem like a big deal except it removes another battery type where Lithium may have been utilised. When you're looking for premium Li-ion batteries that need more range etc. Cobalt really comes into play.
Nomura - or in reality Instinet, is an equity trading arm of Nomura, they are certainly accumulating a stake, but may not be in it for the longer term.
DRC probably holds much, much more in terms of resources, but with constant violence, killings, raising taxes on commodities, and essentially experiencing a refugee crisis, it doesn't exactly cry out for investment, or prove attractive to new investment.
50% of the world's cobalt production doesn't go into military as far as I can tell. Super-alloys are used in jet engines etc. but there are lots of civilian users of super-alloys also. Just as batteries are used by defense for radios etc. and moble applications, the main market is civilian.
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Retaining magnetic properties at high temperature is interesting, but think about it, it really has very limited applications, most electric motors don't operate in those kids of environments, as other components will fail first long before the magnets can. There is an opportunity to dislodge other rare-earth metals from magnets like neodymium which are expensive and less common.
You're right, this isn't a pure cobalt play, it's an advantage in one sense, as you're hopefully hedged by things like gold/zinc/nickel and maybe some copper; but a disadvantage in another, as it's a more confusing investment for some. Nickel prices will go up along with zinc gradually, but nickel seems to have limited uses, usually not in huge quantity and there is loads of it around.
What you didn't address:
a) Time-frame (in our case time-frame for market cap growth). Will it be 1 or 5 years to really reach fruition
for investors like ourselves. Do we want to wait 4-5 years for great returns, I do note the number of super funds invested...
b) Competition. I know for a fact there is some serious competition on the way now. It may attract a lot more investment/market cap.
ARL is not a direct comparison to CLQ, for a couple of reasons.
1: It's much bigger, which is a good thing, a much, much larger resource. This might give it higher valuations.
2: CLQ have some I.P. in the form of water treatment also, which they're now selling. Ardea has no such I.P. (Their presentations / documentation is also pretty shmick compared to Ardea's, but that's by-the-by).
So, my feel is ARL is going to be a very good investment, worth a bare minimum of 50M+ market cap, probably a lot more for the databases etc. right now and the market is only valuing it at $35.5M right now, without even looking at the resources. However, can ARL become an overnight success in terms of investment, that's a bit of an unknown.
People challenge their investments, when they are thinking of switching their portfolio around, that's probably what's happening there. It is healthy to look at the positives and negatives and weigh them up regularly, as things change and we are all trying to arrive at the 'right' answer, or best investment for our capital.
(20min delay)