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ALS.TO - Altius Minerals


Guest Dazel

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Goldfinger.....at the time the market was pricing in a huge equity component (for nlrc) to their valuations on NLRC alone. They were

partnered with the who's who of the european investment community in the biggest private equity financings of alltime. Yes, I would say they got caught up and then caught by the financial crisis. The truth is if that did not happen we would have never got involved in Altius.. as we would not have invested in that valuation or anything close to it.

That is why 0.

If anything the process scared the crap out of them...they could have deployed way more capital as they were loaded with cash in 2009. They were aggressive in IRC and the buy back but conservative by holding lots of cash. They have no debt which to us may be "too conservative"...we would not be upset to see them issues long term debt at these rates and buy back another 10% of the float. Why? it's the best investment they could make right now. so the long answer is no I am not worried...if anything they are too conservative here. I would assume they would be in a quiet period before earnigs in the next couple of weeks. But I would expect buy backs if we are trading at these levels at that point.

 

Altius is the only secured creditor of NLRC so they were not that stupid...they get paid first...I do not know if there is any cash left at NLRC...but I am assuming their is some...Altius should get it...if nothing happens...the entire invesment has been written off to 0...so any money recovered would be a bonus.

 

 

 

If Brian Dalton can put something together even with SNC Lavalin..it would be extremely positive and the market values the whole company at less than it's cash and liquid investments right now  so it really would be something if he could pull it off.

like we said an "out of the money" call option.

Dazel

 

Thanks Dazel. Thinking in the same lines as you but always informative to be the devil's advocate!

I believe they will be much bigger soon too!

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I dont know that slightly reaks of talking your book.  Though the fact that Dazel's calculation is based on prices falling by 50% is quite interesting.

 

Those projects are not from private enterprise, those are government planning projects. I have a feeling that the more they try to slow down the economy the more they will try to compensate with projects of that kind so as to support poorer parts of the population (real estate projects), continue the development of the infrastructure for the future and provide construction/engineering jobs.

It is always better for Alderon to be in a context of very high iron ore demand so that chinese steel makes or miners feel the need to get supply from everywhere in the world: it acts as catalyst for quicker/bigger/better financing deals.

Believe it or not I saw other reports stating the fact that copper inventories have been cut in half recently and there is under-supply of copper at the moment also, like this one http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-15/copper-users-in-china-plunder-stockpiles-as-goldman-forecasts-record-rally.html

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http://www.gurufocus.com/news/136687/monish-pabrai-postmortem-on-his-best-ever-investment--teck-cominco-tck

 

This will add to our/my confirmational bias re commodities.

 

"One of the things I believe will happen is that we'll probably see the rise of at least 100 brand new cities if not more, over the next 20 or 30 years which will each have at least 5 million people. When you are going to build out 100 New Yorks in a 30-year period, you can't do that without steel. ...

 

There are some specific chemistry nuances with met coal. Metallurgical coal and iron ore are both chokepoints. Most of the iron ore going to China comes from two countries, Brazil and Australia, and little bit from India. They're the chokepoint in terms of China's ability to get iron ore. Metallurgical coal is the same way. "

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Commodities are interesting. They seem to follow economic threads to a degree but also appear to be slightly decoupled...

 

Either way I like them and plan on holding them for a while.

 

You do not have a BRIC every generation! Other than that, there are true cycles of undersupply-oversupply in commodities that last for a decade or two. The crisis of 2007-2009 caused lots of projects to be dropped (NRLC is an example) at the wrong time.

I am only trying to capture a more detailed view of what is really happening in China for example than just listening to Chanos and followers or Rogers and followers: both talk their book. Chanos while smart and accurate in many ways sounds very arrogant and biased to me when it comes to that particular area. Buffett confirmed in a recent interview that he thought China will have many more successes. Who knows how deep this current crisis will be, but take the money and run seem a bit simplistic to me. What the central bank of Australia described or biaggio just mentioned look much more accurate and reasonable.

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Guest Dazel

 

This Grantham piece has been passed around....for those interested in Altius and Alderon you should play close attention to the iron ore discussion...page 6 in particular.

 

Through GMO research they have come up with probability that prices would return to their downward 100 year trend...after the spikes over the last number of years...

 

iron ore has the highest probability of not returning to its down trend at a "1 and 2.2 million chance!!!"

 

He explains that he would not believe even a "1 and 1 million chance" but he has to believe it because he did it!

 

iron ore was $150 back in 1900...now it is back to $175 in 2011.

 

Dazel.

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Pretty unsignificant buyback tough. 200k$ compared with 330M Market cap.

 

BeerBaron

 

Indeed, but daily volume is very low and Altius is limited to buying only 9.2K shares per day as per their buyback program.

 

I wish it was more, but as long as they opportunistically deploy capital well, even small sums, I'm happy.

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