also sensible to not burn through the ore body whilst spodumene prices languish, having a big stockpile of fines ready to sell into periods of high spodumene prices sounds like a better strategy than just selling as much as we can as quickly as we can regardless of market price.
Interesting that Albermarle have announced they won’t participate in the LME futures market - perhaps they fear that it will be manipulated disadvantageously or polluted by too much low quality Chinese product, or simply that they can secure better prices outside of it given the environment of demand for secure high quality output? There certainly seems to be risk of a two tier market with high quality advanced block purchasing/off-takes vs the rest which isn’t so secure or high quality and thus might be unrepresentatively cheap. However a functional futures market should match prices better to demand, the problem being constraints at chemical and battery manufacturing stages dictating raw material demand for some time and those same major battery and chemical players not necessarily needing to participate in a market because they’ve already secured offtakes... all very circular but what I’m wondering is whether the lithium sector is mature or diverse enough yet to allow for an exchange?
AJM Price at posting:
10.5¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
