As the Financial Year draws to a close, most investors and...

As the Financial Year draws to a close, most investors and traders exposed to RED over the past 12 months or so will find themselves sitting on either taxable profits or unrealised gains (or maybe a bit of each).

But that's history and our task is now to work out what the RED business (and its share-price) will do from now on.

On the positive side, another couple of brokers recently slightly increased their forecast gold prices for the next couple of years and in doing so, increased their future price targets for a number of Australian gold stocks. RED seems to have been one of the "beneficiaries" of these upward revision by brokers.

On the negative side, Van Eck seems to have been reducing its holdings in a range of Australian gold stock (sometimes by as much as 5-10% of the shares they held).

But they don't seem to have sold down their holding in the enlarged RED (though their last Substantial Shareholder Notice was a week ago and anything may have happened since then).

Sometimes when a new CEO takes over a business, he/she does a big "clean up" of the "mistakes" of previous management (quite often to the detriment of the share-price). But I can't see this happening for RED. If it did, half Board (the former RED ones) would look bad for running a lousy business and the other half (the SLR ones) would look bad for spending so much to buy a lousy business.

My own feeling is that management will consolidate things for a bit but then start to push up the share-price to support future take-over initiatives. Maybe they'll initially dampen enthusiasm and deliver a couple of solid Quarterly results (under-promise/over-deliver) to support an increasing share-price. I really can't see the current management being content with the assets they have now. I'm sure it won't be long before they fire up the spreadsheets they're no doubt running on other listed gold stocks.

Just on that aspect, the recent "investment" undertaken by Ramelius to buy what is really a "blocking stake" in Spartan looks exactly like SLR initially did with RED. Interestingly, until Ramelius disclosed its hand, rumours were flying around the west of our nation that RED might be launching a bid for Spartan.

2024/25 may well prove to be another interesting year.