The freaky thing of nowadays markets is that when they press down share prices to highly undervalued levels for a prolonged period of time, like we are now experiencing, the smaller shareholders (me included) get nervous and extremely critical towards management. When the market gets highly overvalued, which we may experience in 2012, you will not hear a soul. In my opinion shareholders should be heard by management all the time in good and bad times, so there is nothing wrong with us becoming critical, either now or in the future

Meanwhile the company is going through an organic growth process, that by nature is not gradual and which requires continuous attention by management. For them the share price may be even completely irrelevant, because they think in terms of long-term value and expansion plans. True, they do have to deal with regular financing, but they see this probably less as an issue than we shareholders do.

For me personally, I think that management has been pro-active enough to recognize the growth potential of the company in time and hire someone like Stephen Altmann, who has the experience and connections to deal on behalf of the company with external parties that either want to take a small or major interest in the company or take over the entire company.

The recent decision to bring the company into safer waters by upgrading the production capacity and revenue stream of the company seems like a logical step, which may fit well in a longer term strategic plan to defend shareholders interest. The timing was a bit painful for us, but we have seen that many juniors and majors have done the same thing over the last weeks, possibly after delaying access to the capital market for a considerable time due to the extraordinary evolution of the second part of 2008.

I think the company is very well positioned to face the next 1-2 years and to become one of the bellweathers of the PM mining industry. As to Altmann, I do not know him, but given his background and experience he should be the right person to defend the interest of the shareholders of ECU towards any approaches towards ECU from outside.

Lets not forget that we are at the lower end of the valuation channel for the entire sector right now, not just for ECU, but for all PM mining companies. Undervaluation for this particular sector has probably never been as extreme as it is right now. Once money starts flowing into the sector, which i expect to start happening anytime now, things may change rapidly and transparency will come back as to which companies have value and which don't, particularly as the distortionist short sellers have to flee. That's why I am sure that after all the fundamentals will rule the game again and the recent placement will soon lose its effect on the share price.