share price move, page-60

Hi @funkyg,

A good discussion. It is true that China's buying up Cobalt, but it's more likely that it wants to secure supply for it's aspirations of becoming the world leader in EV than to make money in the short-term. 20,000 tonnes isn't much in the scheme of things. It's a lot now, but when battery production doubles and doubles again and doubles again it's a drop in the ocean.

China's well documented plan is to lock up cobalt supply to ensure that they can produce the best batteries - this we can see in their many recent acquisitions of cobalt producers and near producers.

I think the most interesting recent move is the Chinese placement in Clean Teq. Shows that China is very interested in not just short-term cobalt supply, but also medium and long term supply. Thus I think Super Ninja's advice to avoid explorers/juniors is misplaced. The cobalt price will go up and down, but the overall trend is highly likely to be up, and prices will likely be much higher than what is needed to support Mt Thirsty.

A: From all the activity in the sector (by following where big money is flowing) we can be fairly sure that Cobalt will be in high demand.

B: From what we know about current producers and near term producers, and projected demand, we can be fairly sure that the cobalt market will be very tight, keeping prices high.

What we don't know is which way the cards will fall in terms of which juniors prove viable/get large backers/off-takes and make it to production.

I'm betting on Thirsty because it has a strategic advantage (very low CAPEX) that the market does not yet understand (because they haven't publicised it yet, or even re-launched the project). Thirsty at $65Mil will be developed much faster that a mine costing $600Mil +, and this is very important.

Let's see what happens,

Solarbat