Good afternoon
Macron beats Trump with his testosterone-driven handshake, as reported by Bloomberg. So he sort of "grabbed" the guy by his .... hands! Very funny...
UK-growth pretty slack, while US labor maket numbers point to continued, strong job creation.
Metals are well supported today, while gold is very quiet.
An interesting game between Tansania and Acacia is developing. The African state accuses ACA to have understated it´s exports of concentrate by up to 10x, to cheat the state on a 5% royalty. I think this is pretty unprobable - but the dispute is on big time, and the country has halted all concentrate exports. Since this story first came up, the stock had already taken a hammering - yesterday and today, it fell by another 40%. I am not an expert on ACA, but I hink the stock is worth to have a very good look at. These things are never eaten as hot as they are cooked - and the story sounds completely ridicilous to me. Once again - country risks are very realö these days, and mining gold in countries like Australia, Canada or the US is certainly a huge advantage! Barrick owns 64% of Acacia.
Prairie Mining - the company is making progress on the approval process for it´s Lublin-based thermal coal asset. The application for a mining lease will now get started in the s econd half of this year. PDZ is - once again - pointing out very strong local and provincial suppoprt for it´s project, which would create thousands of jobs in an area, which is fully "infrastructured" and used to mining for a very long time. Perhaps more market relevant is, that Golbal Mining came out with a very positive research report on PDZ, valuing this thing at 3$ down the track. They point out, that it´s very difficult to properly valuing them at this point, especially, as a substantial amount of equity has to be raised down the track. They have used 300 mill$ in fresh equity at 50ct - I personally think, that tehy will need at least 400 mill - but that they will raise it in stages and at higher prices. In August or so, I would expect the feasibility study for Jan Karski to be announced, done in conjunction with THE Chinese shaft-building company. I would not eb surprised to see slightly lower costs than stated in the scoping study. IF PDZ would sell debiensko ( as recently speculated in the Polish press ) for say 100 Mill US$ - which would be rather cheap - the equity needs would fall top say 250 Mill US$ ( and debt of 250-300 US in debt ). Big numbers - but not unusual for new mining developements. The theretical NPV8 of PDZ would be about 3.50 A$ in such a scenario....Great story well managed by Ben Stoikovich!
Have a nice evening
WS