I find keeping busy helps me from over thinking my investment strategy and without wanting to boost your ego too much Nord, its nice to see that I agree with all you say about EAR.
I am no TA wizz, but I averaged down today, even after going through my every growing watch list of gold stocks that are battered and bruised (E/V of $70m seems pretty good to me). The risk/reward for me stacked up even when there are some very good stocks on sale (for varying reasons).
The trend I have seen over the past few months is,
NST/RRL/EVN - relatively untouched.
SMB/WGX - hammered, but... for different reasons.
SAR - bit of a stand out.
RMS/SLR - started to get really beaten up.
GCY - also hammered
Yet... the smaller end of town are holding up very very well, perhaps because they have less far to fall?
EAR - It has 800+ of reserves, albeit, only 400k are highly profitable right now (but going through the recent quarterly again, they already have another 2-3 deposits that will, within 12 months, most likely add to the mine plan), the plant is already there, with just a 5-6 month period to get it into production. As you have said, low capex, plus... low pre-production, which I feel the likes of CMM have not informed the market about.
EAR is pretty much geographically, in the centre of the NST, SAR etc etc. I am still surprised that EAR has not had an offer. While I know this gets bandied about on HC every day, well.... EAR just seems ripe for the picking. I wonder if the likes of SLR would have a tilt at EAR? Their $105m in cash would at last be used for something! NST literally paid over 100% higher than the current share price for their 20% now.
Anyway, at the current AUD gold price, with the plant being fed with 2g/t gold for 4 years, it won't be until 2021 (6 months to get into production, then 4 years of high grade), that EAR needs to decide whether to proceed with stage 2, with all of the capex paid for in just year 1. Once EAR has sufficient cash to undertake the sort of drilling campaigns that MOY and GCY are undertaking, I am fairly confident that plant will have more than enough feed. Probably all a moot point by then though as EAR will be owned by someone else.
EAR Price at posting:
16.0¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
