Mineral Sands Prices on the Move - * Article, page-4

@BaliHai thx for posting, advertising and clicks are always part of these puff piece sites, but every bit of bullish helps. Pleasantly surprised to hear new Bruce call it how it is. The posters getting chubby on other min sand stocks because someone, somewhere, bought a teaspoon of product on the spot market for a ridiculous amount is hilarious. Especially developer stocks, where prices in 2-4 years when the first ship is loaded has nothing to do with today's short term price spikes.

Griffin is a bit more restrained in his optimism.
“You always hear about people doing the odd trade at $1700 or $1800 but I think the bulk of the volume is probably still being done in the sort of $1400 mark,” he said. “There’s a reasonable expectation that the big producers will be able to push more price increases through this year – so it feels like prices are heading back up around $1500.

So much devil in the detail with min sands, easy to run with a headline when reality can be very different (why are silica sands companies even mentioned in this article?). Take Astron for example. ILU, who has been mining in the Murray Basin for many years, assumes zero revenue from primary ilmenite (sulphate ilm) because the chrome contamination is too difficult and expensive to remove (multiple chrome-spinels requiring more than one simple roasting separation process). Maybe Astron can physically separate out enough chrome to make a saleable product, maybe for a profit, maybe not, but it wont be easy or cheap.

My interest was tweaked by Franpower's speculation of improvement in recoveries at TB, always a long read but usually a few nuggets to be found. New Bruce upped the LTR Ilm from 400k to 500k per year in his last presso, which I took to mean skimming more higher TiO2 Ti-mag into the LTR stream but with a commensurate drop in LTR TiO2 grade from 53% to 50% (my calcs). Point with chloride slag product is that a few percent drop in TiO2 grade doesn;t matter that much of the pig iron comes out at spec and pays for the whole smelting process anyway. 500ktpa @ 50% TiO2 is 250ktpa TiO2 units worth of high-grade chloride slag pigment feed, nothing to be sneezed. Especially when you can argue LTR Ilm is a by-product of Zr production (because TB really is a Zr deposit).

We all wanted the share price to pop yesterday, and I feel for those without enough capital to wear the opportunity cost, but as Paul Keating once said "I wanna do you slowly"....

Good luck