IKN

Take physic, pomp

Capstone Mining (CS.to) hedges

News this morning from Capstone (CS.to) is that it’s hedged itself to the eyeballs in order not to go Chapter 11 in 2016. There are several angles to this news:
1) CS.to now says its price fixed 90% of its 4q15 copper sales at U$2.13/lb. I’d dearly like to know how it managed to do that when in its 4q15 audited financials it claimed an adjusted 4q15 price of U$2.26/lb. I mean, I know that copper sold at U$2.30/lb or so in the first weeks of 4q15, but a 13c/lb difference on just 10% of non-priced copper? That sounds weird. Sure would like to see the details on that little deal.
2) Let’s be clear about the quality of assets at Capstone too, because there’s a crystal clear message here: CS.to has been shopping them around but clearly no takers, nobody wants to buy Santo Domingo, nobody wants to buy Cozamin, nobody wants to buy Minto. And whole we’re here, CS must have been offered a particularly shitty silver stream deal from April 2017 onward to have refused.
3) Darren “drop the” Pylot tells us today that “…our first priority is to reduce our debt risk...”. This is the very same Darren Pylot that stuffed the company full of the very debt now strangling it financially. No sign of a change at the top, though. Ask yourself why.
But for me the real story, the bottom line is that sooner or later these blown-out corporations have to stop pretending and putting on brave faces and admit the obvious, the issue that we’ve been covering in the case of CS.to at IKN for many moons in pieces such as…
this dated August 18th 2015
this dated November 27th 2016
this dated January 18th 2016
And that issue can be condensed down to one simple phrase, one of the favoured messages here at IKN:
LOOK AT THE BALANCE SHEET
You cannot ignore the disaster area of this company’s financials. The IR department and the CEO and the paid pushers in the sell side studios can rah-rah all they like, it’s pure bullshit when the talking stops and the money gets counted. Capstone, though far from being the only example, has been killed as a company by awful management decisions that start at the very top of the organization. The people running the company today do not deserve to be in charge, period.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

Hello, you are not in a chatroom, you are in my living room. Opposing views and criticisms welcome, insults or urinating on furniture unwelcome. Please refrain from swearing if possible, it is not needed.