With respect, the short action is tiny. The percentages is 0.05%...

With respect, the short action is tiny. The percentages is 0.05% or 123k of shares. When the shorts are basically unchanged for a month and represent under one day's average trading volume, they are not the cause.

The problems are however pretty easy to see:

• News flow has dried up. ASX announcements during February: Zero. Nothing on financing/loans, nothing on further offtakes, nothing on JV's, nothing on Lake Johnston. Nothing on HPMSM updates. Nothing on site improvements at Butcherbird. Nothing on the fairly wide area of tenements held. Nothing. The market would appear to be interpreting the lack of news as problems arising in the items that might have created news.
• With E25's current cost structure, the price of Manganese needs to be improve.
• After a small increase of perhaps 8c the 2Feb Fastmarket reported Manganese price, it stalled for the rest of February creating the impression it might be about to turn down and test new lows (Fastmarkets weekly reporting comes out after the Friday ASX close).
• The market doesn't believe the strong EBITDA projects E25 has plans around are going to happen (or if the are commenced some sort of "unexpected" problem will occur)
• The market has been in risk-off mode around battery metals.

Regarding price, the Saturday 2Mar update (Oz time) was up about 2%. This increases the chances Manganese is in an increasing price phase not retesting low's.

In the battery metals (lithium) space, the price is showing signs of turning. As that sector is far more widely watched, the turn in price is more quickly reflected in improved company pricing. Several lithium companies with projects with good financials but insufficient capital to progress them had good gains last week indicating some change in sentiment that may wash through to E25 over the coming weeks (hopefully).