I witnessed my wife's portfolio plummet in June this year after Goldman Sachs issued their calculated yet error-riddled note. At the time I suspected that something was very wrong but how much money were we prepared to potentially lose if we ignored the market reaction? It was a lesson harshly learned.
Before you panic and press the 'Sell' button on your lithium stocks, may I suggest that your immediate steps should be to move with caution. There will undoubtedly also be other players entering the 'supply and demand' discussion but click the following links to discover that not all is doom and gloom. And many of the alternative viewpoints that lithium specialists raised in June, and which also proved to be true, still hold. This situation is a tough one so please be careful and do not take this post as financial advice.
Click to read the IG Australia article that the headline below is based upon.
Another repudiation of the latest GS report is in the Midas Letter by James West. This US-based investing blog did a great job of predicting the failure of the GS June report as James West was never in any doubt that
Goldman Sachs was only looking after its own interests and those of its biggest customers. According to the new James West article,
GS is currently acting as a manager, or co-manager, of a pending underwriting for CATL; has received compensation for investment banking services in the past 12 months from LG Energy Solution; and expects to receive or intends to seek compensation for investment banking services in the next 3 months from CATL, LG Energy Solution, Samsung SDI Co and SK Innovation.
You can read the earlier article on the June report, called 'Goldman Sachs Battery Metals Call: A History of Manipulation' here.
The new Midas Letter focussing on the errors in this week's report is called
"Goldman Sachs Statements on Lithium Prices Depart from Reality".A fine rebuttal of the June report from Goldman Sachs was published in Seeking Alpha. It found some extraordinary errors of logic in the June GS report
and can be read here.BTW, we should all know by now that
GS also invests in stocks that it advises on. Exactly
20 days ago Goldman Sachs Corp increased its holdings in Lithium Americas Corp (LAC) by 48.11% to 375,524 shares.
Click here for more detail about Goldman Sachs LAC shares.
We know that Goldman Sachs is also holding lithium stocks in Livent, Albemarle and SQM. I wonder how many other critical minerals stocks they are invested in? But
there is no conflict of interest apparently.
Goldman Sachs has undergone
multiple charges of stock price manipulation over the years, and
often as a consequence of issuing inaccurate research reports. The shit usually appears to stick but
GS are just too big, too wealthy and too well-connected for it to matter.
Take a brief look at Wikipedia if you doubt any of this.James West, in his Midas Letter, bluntly asserted the following in June this year:
"As to Goldman’s motivation to proclaim the end of a bull market despite supply and demand metrics screaming otherwise, it is obvious that
these financial thugs, who are really not exceedingly smart, misplaced a short bet on the sector and now needed to cover the short and end the strategy because it was obviously wrong.
Will we ever see a day when institutionalized criminal behaviour is called out by mainstream financial media instead of just parroting the manipulation?
"Rolling Stone magazine has often provided some of the best coverage of the Goldman Sachs ethos. "The Great American Bubble Machine" (July 9th 2009) states "(that)
from tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression - and they're about to do it again". In another of several memorable articles referenced in the footnotes of Wikipedia link cited above, the company becomes a
“great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”
(20min delay)