Monument Valuation For those of you who think that Mengapur is the problem, I was a shareholder before Mengapur was even on Monument's radar screen. I therefore can confirm that Monument's valuation was terrible even then. It was trading just slightly higher than it is today, and still had the purchase price of Mengapur on the balance sheet as cash! At that point the theory was that it was being so poorly valued because of the short life of the resources, despite that $60 Million out of the less than $90 Million market cap was in cash. Just a FYI.
Bob Baldock has made no secret that he wants to start developing Mengapur before paying a dividend. As such, what is happening to Monument is no different from why the entire precious metals mining sector has been destroyed, just as the prices of gold and silver were skyrocketing the last few years: the higher prices encouraged miners to expand production; from then on, everything took a lot of time and $ before one penny was made in extra production: exploration, 43-101, permitting, construction, mining (increasingly expensive during the past few years) testing, early production, expansion, full production. Up to the last step investors punished the related stocks mercilessly, essentially giving very little credit for progress toward greater production (or expanded resources for that matter), but taking a big chunk of the companies' market cap for every investment and dilution the companies made. Similarly, Monument is trading as if there is a 100% chance that Mengapur will be a failure! One reason for slight optimism is that Monument just increased capacity and production without counting on Mengapur! I would feel even better if the updated 43-101 shows a good increase in mine life.