RE:RE:short activityWell Kegman, slide #33 of the September Investor Presentation
Victoria Gold Corp. | Corporate Presentation (vgcx.com) does show 2024 gold production inching closer to 200K ounces with 2025 production being the peak year at about 219K ounces. Cash flows are also projected to be much better ($40M better than 2023) in 2024, 2025 and 2026 but of course are subject to gold price and AISC. It appears that a $1700 US gold price was used as the base case and an AISC of $1,117 US. So if gold were to go to $2100 US or higher in 2024, imagine what that would do to AISC, cash flows, and the share price!
Regarding our largest shareholder GMT Capital, I see that SEDAR is showing they filed a report on Sep 8th declaring that they sold 241,000 VGCX share in August which equates to .52% of the shares they hold. They further declared that this leaves them with 6,315,500 shares as of Aug 31st or 9.49% of the outstanding shares of VGCX. It appears the sale of 241,000 shares or .52% was to merely get their holdings back down below the 10% SEC reporting threshold. The filing also indicates that of the 241,000 shares sold, that 145,600 shares were from "Managed Accounts" and so I suspect the remaining 96,000 shares were from Thomas Claugus private holdings.
Here's some excerpts from the filing:
"During the month of August 2023, certain of GMT's hedge fund and private client managed accounts ("managed accounts") disposed of an aggregate of 241,100 Common Shares."
"Since the last report filed by GMT under Part 4 in respect of Victoria Gold: (i) the number of Common Shares held by managed accounts of GMT has decreased by 145,600 Common Shares; and (ii) the percentage of the issued and outstanding Common Shares held by managed accounts of GMT has decreased by approximately 0.52%."
"
As at August 31, 2023, certain managed accounts of GMT held an aggregate of 6,315,500 Common Shares representing approximately 9.49% of the issued and outstanding Common Shares. GMT specifically disclaims any beneficial ownership of the Common Shares held by its managed accounts, but as investment manager of its managed accounts GMT has exclusive power to exercise investment control or direction over the Common Shares."
Further, based on the FINTEL website
VGCX Victoria Gold Corp Stock - Share Price, Short Interest, Short Squeeze, Borrow Rates (TSE) (fintel.io), there are about 450,000 VGCX shares available for shorting and over the past 7 days the available shares drops to about 60,000 during the day and are returned by end of day so someone is obviously borrowing the shares for shorting on a daily basis, however it seems they didn't borrow the shares today YET so perhaps the share price is getting too low and risky to short at this price? This does go to show how with VGCX trading under 400K shares a day, how easy it would be to control and short the shares which is exactly what I believe is happening. To me this explains a lot about why the share price is at this rediculous low price and why the novice retail investors need to be aware of this and not spooked into selling their shares at these beat down prices!
Another concern that seems to be weighing on the minds of retail shareholder's is VGCX debt but how concerned should they be? If you look at slide #16 of the VGCX Presentation and in particular the "Balance Sheet - June 30, 2023" area they show $260M CAD debt but $28M CAD in cash and $228M CAD in gold inventory
(based on cost rather than market value) this essentially implies that the cash and inventory covers the total debt amount. Of course it's not quite that simple but must be considered when looking at the oveal debt situation. So what is the market pricing in for the ~ 170K ounces of production this year, the existing already built infrastructure, gold in the ground, promising exploration targets like Raven, etc? The answer is next to nothing which is frankly rediculous!
So when I look at all the facts, it seems I can only come to one logical conclusion. Being that the current shareprice has been intentionally and almost criminally manipulated to these price levels and is no where near reflecting the true value of VGCX. The 2023 Technical Report is calling for an average of 200K ounces produced over 8 years (from 2023 to 2031) yet the market is whacking the stock because VGCX can only produce between 160 to 180K ounces this year! Have faith everyone, VGCX will get there. I highly doubt JM, who already owns over 865,000 shares would continue to hold his shares and add more along with other insiders if they were at all concerned about meeting the 200K target in the near term.
My opnion only - please DYODD.
HB77