Do you know AGY does actually put out announcements? Do you read...

Do you know AGY does actually put out announcements? Do you read them?

If what they are saying is true, and in this respect I'll tentatively take them at face value, there is a fundamental problem with the filtration system which has not been solved and is a bottleneck in the production process. At least that's what they are saying. They never gave an excuse for the pilot plant not working, but the 2KTPA plant doesn't work any better and that's the problem they said they had. If that's not it, they're lying. We literally saw them use a new type of filter cloth without it significantly increasing the production rate. Literally, unambiguously, we have already seen this.

Assuming they are being honest, it's highly likely that if they do ever solve this bottleneck, another one will be found somewhere between the current production rate and nameplate, which may or may not be easier to solve.

I do agree with you that it would be nice to have them explicitly, unambiguously, bluntly state this rather than saying it but using colourful wording and decoy strategies which leave investors confused, as is demonstrated quite clearly in the posts by many members here. The very obvious reason they are playing it the way they are rather than by giving explicit information is that it would cause panic and destroy the share price - even the people who do understand what's going on tend to feel better if it's sugar coated in nonsense, just like your boss will react better to you lying about traffic problems rather than saying "I just couldn't be bothered getting here in time because I don't care that much about my job" even though he knows perfectly well what the truth is. But, clearly many investors are easily fooled by hiding the truth in a pile of flowery, meaningless, hopeful language.

If they were to give an absolute, blunt, no nonsense update tomorrow, we all know it would crash the price. If not, they'd obviously do it.

We all (should) know by now that the pilot plant was obviously a failure, but they didn't bluntly say it because they'd have struggled to get funding for the 2KTPA plant. If they'd been blunt about the situation with the 2KTPA plant they couldn't have managed the recent ATL deal. They obviously knew more than six months ago how bad the filtration system issue was, they likely knew before commissioning even started. They possibly were hoping they'd figure something out or come up with some idea while constructing the plant, or perhaps they just sort of hoped a scaled up version would work, or they had some idea when they abandoned the pilot plant but it didn't work when they actually tried it, we can only guess about that, but no doubt they knew how bad it was early in the commissioning phase, but of course they didn't want to bluntly say it and crash the price.

Pablo doing the Macarena is more or less what they've been doing for the last 18 months or so. It's a silly carrot dangle dance in most of the announcements, and they already play that game more than enough. When they were committed to monthly updates it wore thin when their repetitive nonsense attracted more resentment than optimism.

This is the nature of the game and the duty each of us has to ourselves is to understand it and act accordingly, not just get sucked in like wide-eyed naive victims. Their job is to keep the share price as high as possible regardless of what's going on, our job is to look after our own capital, think critically and evaluate realistically not over-optimistically.

And yep, you have to wonder what all 200 of them are doing. We know many have their snouts in the trough, a few will be baking scones and croissants and one or two probably dust the gym equipment once in a while but there seems to be a large number on the payroll for the amount of work required over the last year.