Greetings zog,yes there's nothing like a dose of sovereign risk...

Greetings zog,

yes there's nothing like a dose of sovereign risk to set the teeth on edge.

Hopefully Simberi is out of the way enough to avoid the political turmoil until things settle down. My concern- I would imagine shared by many others across many companies- is that decisions may be made in the medium term that are unhelpful. As for the short term mess- who knows. But for now, all the activity looks to be centred on PM and on the bright side any time politicians spend squabbling keeps them away from passing legislation.

At some stage I imagine the Aus government will try and give a gentle tap on the shoulder (though the words "Australian", "government" and "diplomacy" rarely sit well together. International incompetence is one of the few areas of government that seems to enjoy bipartisan support)

Pleased to see that a 7.1 earthquake had no effect on infrastructure. ALD have been rather quiet regarding announcements since the ball mill fix; it's always good to see the work "unabated" used close to the word "production".

As for the price of gold *sigh* a 5% drop in a day does rather dent one's short term confidence but even many ardent gold bugs have been predicting a pull back.

So where would I like to see things go (given the usual caveats of wishes vs horses):

1) I'd like to see ALD meet production targets for at least 2 quarters with an annualised rate of >150koz.

2) I'd like to see the spread between cost and gold price hold at $500 or better.

3) As a consequence I'd like to see solid cash on hand and a stronger feeling that we were moving away from the cost and closer to the benefit side of the equation for current infrastructure spending.

These I hold as being "within our control" to some degree; obviously PoG enters into it but ALD have been promising $850/oz for some time and it would be nice for them to achieve that.

On the speculative side:

4) I'd love to see an upgrade of the Gold Ridge resource. There were noises about this in August but the exploration side has been fairly quiet since (and the Ann Rept was a bit underwhelming in this regard).

Hopefully we'll have some solid outputs in the next round of updates. On a pure numbers basis- and I know there's more to life than just the raw figures- this stock has some reasonable upside. The dream is that they start pulling in >50mill year in profit. We'll see.