RE:April Corporate PresentationThe April presentation was updated a couple or 3 days ago and I actually found the presentation overall to be very positive! However, I too found it odd that the T Rowe holdings weren't updated to reflect the recent SEDAR filing so I asked myself why wouldn't they update this information when other items on that presentation page were updated? And so it seems that the lack of updating of the reduced T Rowe holdings was not an oversight. But why?
Now on the other hand they also didn't update the presentation slide to reflect that GMT Capital Corp (a hedge fund based in Atlanta) purchased purchased 6,461,100 VGCX shares in March which is quite important to note and something not mentioned in your post MVargas.
From the April 10th SEDAR filing..."As at March 31, 2023, certain managed accounts of GMT held an aggregate of 6,461,100 Common Shares representing approximately 10.01% of the issued and outstanding Common Shares." So why would a hedge fund buy over 10% of VGCX shares while T Rowe is signifcantly reducing their holdings? The fact that T Rowe did not completely exit VGCX suggests to me that they still have faith in VGCX but perhaps found alternate investment oportunity and were raising cash for redeployment elsewhere. Maybe they're spooked by gold recently hitting all time highs? Who knows?
I get a sense that VGCX management's vision is more long term than what T Rowe (and probably Van Eck) is interested in and so they're reducing their holdings. It's pretty clear from comments in the presentation that VGCX management sees a "District Scale" development in the future, especially with the Raven drill results (averaging 1.7 grams per ton versus Eagle at .65 grams per ton) and so I believe they're focused towards that end goal.
VGCX management knows what they have and likely aren't looking for a takeout at this time unless an offer reflects fair value for a District scale mining operation potential. There's a reason why VGCX owns about 12% of Banyan shares and that's to support their long term vision and not to corruptly prop up JM's wife's company Banyan like has been suggested on this board in the past.
JM has around 800,000 shares of VGCX and hasn't sold many shares except to raise cash to exercise options, etc, so why do you think that is? ...because he is looking long term....District scale which equates to double or more today's VGCX share price if he's right. And I think he is which of course doesn't align with short term traders' interests. You can bet that there are other mid and large cap gold producers out there watching VGCX very closely these days and if VGCX management can get this ship turned around, they will pounce. I believe I know the real reason for the significant miss in production in 2022 and the coneyor belt mishap was not it. I will post my thoughts on this in a separate post soon.
Now about the "Opportunistic Hedging" slide comments. Hedging can be a two edged sword and only hindsight will tell what edge side of the sword was correct. The previous hedging at $1430 seems rediculous now but at the time that it was necessary to protect against downside risk and to secure financing. The more recent hedging of 20,000 ounces at $1836 looks dumb now at $2,000 ounce gold but if gold were to drop to $1,500 no VGCX shareholders would be complaining. In the end, this latest 20,000 ounces hedge with gold at $2,000 an ounce is costing VGCX about $4 million a year or about 6.2 cents a share. If VGCX 2023 net earings come in at or more than $1.00 a share (as I suspect) this 6.2 cents becomes pretty insignificant. By comparison, the former hedge of 30,000 ounces at $1430 (had it not expired this April) at $2,000 an ounce was costing us about $17.1 million a year or 26.5 cents a share....big difference and so we should see about a .20 cents per share better result in 2023 on this one factor alone. So depending on how you look at things, I actually see this latest hedge as an "Opportunistic Hedge".
I expect some interesting shareprice volatility until we get better earnings visibilty in Q2. For those that don't see the developments in the presentation as quite positive considering what we went through in 2022 and don't see VGCX shareprice moving much higher from here in 2023, assuming gold prices stay around $2,000 or higher, then why not just sell your shares and find a better investment. For me, I'm looking past the short term noise and am quite looking forward to seeing VGCX earings improve considerably in the coming quarters.