The Moly Boom

You know the old maxim? When the shoeshine boy (or the cab driver) starts giving you stock tips it's time to get out of the market?

For those who missed this year's uranium and nickel boom, there is still molybdenum. Scarce, hard to substitute, and subject to new export curbs in China, the silvery metal has freak resistance to heat, cold, and corrosion. Hedge funds view it as a leveraged play on the next looming energy crunch.

Plain "moly" to mining men, the metal gives Canary Wharf that shifting glow of blues, whites and reds as the day changes, and prevents London pollution and salt sea breezes wrecking the sheen.

It is the emerging "wonder metal" of the oil, gas, nuclear, coal, and desalination industries, needed for catalysts to remove sulphur.

No, I have no crystal ball here and I'll agree that the analysis in the piece looks viable. But when you see little known metals being puffed as great investments, time to look out I would think. The latter part of the piece sounds very like a puff for a new share issue.

Several of the people I deal with are Moly traders and almost all of them won't take material into stock at the moment. They'll do a pass through (material from producer to end user) but not pile it up in the warehouse thinking that it'll keep on going up. Russian metal that a decade ago we were paying $11 a kg for is now $80 and more.

Now to talk my own book. Anyone interested in becoming the (near) monopoly supplier of scandium to the market? The Russian stocks are near exhaustion, global demand is a multiple of global production and all we need is a mere £ 5 million to build the extraction plant. Could we just pool everyone's credit cards?