Some of my thoughts below, not meant disrespectfully, just...

Some of my thoughts below, not meant disrespectfully, just noticed you were prompting for a bit of discussion from others.

I’ve mentioned it before but it appears very likely to me that it was the news about Tesla switching to LFP for all standard range vehicles which made the headlines on 20 October via US outlets, which was then reflected in steep falls in QPM and nearly all other nickel stocks on the ASX on 21 October and then beyond for QPM. So fundamentally and rightly or wrongly, something changed at this point in enough people’s understanding of the QPM investment case to trigger the start of the retrace.

Many would have invested in QPM for some indirect exposure to Tesla, given its offtake partner LGES has NCM battery supply agreements with Tesla.
Then suddenly a big chunk of the future market for NCM batteries in standard range EV’s was ‘seemingly’ gone. QPM is just a pre production micro cap company looking to supply to that NCM market. It would have been unfathomable for it not to suffer retracement/correction after this, and for it not to continue retracing until confidence returns in the market for QPM. There were some nice progress announcements, ie being carbon negative, HPA licensing, Hydrogen supply etc.. but nothing that would be major catalysts for significant confidence to return.

I noticed you called out the HnS pattern that looked to be forming on 21 October, once the price had dropped from 27c to 24.5. So just after the pattern had taken shape. What you didn’t do is post just prior to, or during the run up the right shoulder, to say that because we’ve now seen a left shoulder at 27, followed by a head at 28, we are now going to see a right shoulder at 27 to form a HnS pattern and then a prolonged retracement. That would have been some pretty convincing commentary.

I would argue that it was a complete coincidence that QPM happened to be at 27 cents at the time this news dropped and that it turned out to be the peak of a right shoulder that subsequently formed the HnS. If that Tesla news hadn’t hit, I suspect QPM probably would have traded sideways or even a little higher from that point, before pulling back to a mid-low 20’s base, given, in my view, it broke out to the high 20’s on not much other than a rising nickel price and hype. If the news had hit just a little earlier, no right shoulder would have formed and no HnS pattern, but no doubt we’d have still seen a similar retracement to what has played out.

So you and other chartists here correctly forecast a retracement of some kind, but in my view, only after the retracement was triggered by a fundamental cause. I think any astute investor paying attention to fundamentals or technicals for QPM specifically could have predicted a retracement too. I say only “of some kind” because several different price targets have since been suggested in the 22-12 cent range.

In my view the pattern has since been promoted as kind of revelatory, the sign of a major TA shift in the stock, almost as if the subsequent retracement happened ONLY because the HnS pattern formed. I feel like this is why there’s so much discontent on this thread lately, because it comes across as a little ignorant to make this suggestion with absolutely no consideration given to fundamentals.

I would argue that had a certain piece of news come just a bit earlier than it did, the pattern very likely never would have formed to begin with. That is, it formed only because of the news and only had a chance to start to form at all, because the news wasn’t known earlier.

There’s likely several more fundamental reasons why the retrace gathered more and more momentum, including overall market concerns about inflation, pandemic etc and for QPM specifically, concern about DFS delays and capital cost increases and whether nickel/cobalt was actually the right space to be in anymore. I’m sure a lot of the money taken out of QPM (by EV exposure hunting investors) went straight into lithium stocks which just continued to surge relentlessly. Some way into the already steep retracement the resolution was passed about a CR below $300M market cap which likely prompted further sell offs. I highly doubt a company like QPM would have set a 16c raise price when the SP was at 27c and allowed its price to be manipulated all the way down to that, surely that’s completely illegal. They’d have set it solely based on where it was trading shortly prior. Maybe the very low dips were driven late in the piece by those brokers/institutions who were eventually aware of the price and plan specifics.

All the while there was discussion going on here too, about the infamous 17c target, which no doubt added to the strong downward price pressure that existed already. You’ve got an already falling stock with chartists saying they predicted just this and promoting a HnS theory as the explanation, and it all starts looking reasonable to many readers and spurs further selling.

On a micro cap stock, with much fewer dominoes to fall, it doesn’t take much to influence further upward or downward trends. Anyone whose view is that a website, with individual pages for individual companies containing threads with thousands of views daily, would not have an impact on the price of a micro cap stock, is very misguided in my opinion. There’s probably somewhere between only say 4,000 to 8,000 shareholders in total for QPM. I would bet that because it’s a more speculative type of stock and subject to dramatic swings, a surprisingly high proportion of those holders very actively read online forums for information and predictions about the company to protect their capital more closely, and the threads here on hotcopper are the best available at the individual stock level.

For a micro cap stock especially, you just need to google “(insert stock ticker) asx” and it’s a near guarantee that the hotcopper page is in the top 3-5 search results for that company. Many people absolutely have agendas posting here, especially when because on micro cap stocks particularly, it absolutely can have an impact on the price. Hotcopper became popular for this exact reason. To deny any potential for people’s TA posts here (especially those with large followings) to impact price over enough time is denying reality. Then to wonder why other investors get so agitated by it, is also a bit naive. Those who have built a large following on the forums here, probably deservedly so, are surely aware people will act on their analysis and of course they know they will, people often tell them exactly that. Therefore it will agitate people when the TA analysis by popular posters is forecasting weakness, nobody ever likes seeing their profits dwindling or losses increasing.

All that said, there have been signs that confidence is starting to return in QPM now, particularly with the $250M funding announcement which came a bit out of the blue from a source few were probably expecting at least before others. NAÏF seems definitely on the cards and debt funding appears very likely too, with strong interest said to exist from several domestic and overseas financiers. The MD made national news meeting the South Korean president. The nickel price has been breaking past $21,000 USD per tonne to set 10 year highs. Tesla have been securing long term supplies of the stuff. QPM was announced as a project of Qld state gvernement significance. DFS is just a few months away.
The market seems to be realising that nickel is truly irreplaceable in the EV future and it’s not a question of if QPM will be a part of it, but when.

The share price has traded ‘reasonably’ comfortably above the CR price since it was completed, it’s possible it will keep a lid on the price for a bit longer as they are often used as a proxy for a fair value at a point in time, whether rightly or wrongly. I’m not sure there’s any fundamental reason why it should fall below this given it hasn’t already, other than market wide weakness.

So when the fundamentals for QPM appear stronger than ever, to predict a fall below the CR price would mean many long term investors selling out to take profits now (when they didn’t do so already well above 20) and/or many people who bought in the 20’s and above, taking quite heavy losses...other than a market wide correction, why would such selling occur when fundamentally things appear very good for QPM?

I think a lot of the money that possibly went into lithium will come back into QPM and nickel stocks soon enough. This stock traded well above 20c for several months and looks cheap now. Assuming no overall market slump, I feel anything below CR price is out of the question now and the more likely result is trading back into the mid 20’s, possibly after a bit longer in this 17-20 range.