This shouldn't be confusing. Most startups fail. This we can all...

This shouldn't be confusing. Most startups fail. This we can all agree on (any anyone disagrees, do yourself a favour and look this up - most mining startups etc on the ASX or elsewhere fail, some make it and those ones provide huge returns for shareoholders - if most of them succeeded we'd all just invest in a heap of them and become billionaires).

At some point between starting out and failing, there's a point where it's obvious failure is going to occur, and at some point between startup and failure being obvious, there's a time where it's almost but not completely certain.

We can argue about exactly where AGY is on that process, but any unhinged lunatic other than gcar can see that AGY has come to the point where it is showing an extremely high risk of failure. It is covered in red flags.

A fresh startup has a presumed average risk profile. Remember a couple of years ago when we were all bouncing around in excitement about AGY because we hadn't yet realised JZ's carrots were fake etc? Whether or not the carrot actually is fake or reachable, many companies go through that phase. If it had been a success, further price increases would follow. Unfortunately, AGY has ticked many failure boxes - they can't make the technology work and after this many years it's probable they never can. Even by their own figures based on the assumption of working out what they've been unable to work out for years, AGY's technology is very high cost, higher than many peers, and the lithium sector has become extremely competitive due to massive investment in new production and overestimates of lithium demand.

In short, obviously a fresh start up is going to be more attractive than a company which is showing all the signs of never getting anywhere. AGY may be further down their path than others, but most paths lead to failure so it's better to invest in a company closer to the beginning of a path with higher chance of success, than further down a path of a much higher chance of failure.