Should I be buying lithium stock?
Hello steemit! So a quick background, I have a degree in automotive technology and electrical engineering, and know next to nothing about stock market trends!
I have worked in gold mines as an industrial diesel technician and now i repair locomotives, so i dont have a ton of financial background.
But! From my perspective, with all the demand for lithium batteries weather it is for an electric vehicle, cell phone, or house backup battery, i expect the value of a pound (ton?) of lithium to continue to rise.
I found a stock a few months back and made about a 30% return before I sold it, im wondering if i should get back in and see where it goes? Your thoughts?
For thoes interested the ticker was "hmglf" pure energy minerals, they are not in production yet but to me it looks like a good deal.
I'm also in Pure Energy, and interested in Lithium, and i do like it as a prospect and lithium as a major commodity of the future. Pure Energy is about to publish its feasibility study for their key project in Nevada, which I will be very interested in. The big factor with Pure Energy is whether their new extraction process (actually it's licenced from Tenova Bateman) is economical at a large scale. I sort of think it will be -- a lot of top junior lithium minors are considering it. Theoretically, it has huge advantages over the usual way that brine lithium is processed, which is in big evaporation ponds that are expensive, environmentally pretty terrible, and take a year or two to complete. The Tenova Bateman process is supposedly better in every way, with a processing time of eight hours instead of a year and a half, and it boasts a recovery rate of about 99.9% instead of the ~50% - 60% recovery rate of evaporation ponds. And it's environmental footprint is tiny -- brine is pumped out of a well, the salts are extracted, and the same water is dumped down the same hole eight hours later.
I do think Lithium is a very good bet. Pure Energy is a fine choice, especially if you want to bet on a transformative new process. Strictly speaking, though, i think there are other lithium juniors that are in a better position to make a mint from the high price of lithium. Right now, lithium prices are through the roof, and probably going to continue to climb, as demand grows for electric vehicles, and as battery storage becomes more common. If even 1% of the fleet of vehicles worldwide are transitioned to battery electric vehicles, the global supply of lithium will be strained. That is true, I believe, even with a pretty large amount of new mining capacity coming online in the next half decade in response to the meteoric rise in lithium prices of the last few years.
The safest pick, in my opinion, to benefit from lithium, is one that is already producing in good amounts. Prices are currently great, but who knows for sure what they will be in a few years when the current crop of juniors bring a lot of new product to market at the same time. The problem is, most of the world's current supply of lithium comes from three mining conglomerates, which are generally diversified enough that even though lithium has been a growing part of their profits, it is ultimately a small part. So the market leaders like SQM and Albemarle are not very focused on lithium.
A good pure play on lithium that is currently producing, though, is Orocobre. Orocobre has recently started production from their flagship brine property in Chile, and has recently announced that their production schedule is on target. Their stock OROCF still looks pretty cheap to me given that they are solidly producing.
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