$6 nickel was touch and go. $4.75 nickel is just downright ridiculous. Thankfully we're NOT at full production yet. Nickel at these prices will barely cover the cost of raw production, let alone begin to cover our overhead or mine development costs. We are certainly not alone, a lot of mines will be running negative at these costs. It's just really unfortunate that it's happening at a critical time when we need some healthy initial cash flow from full production. If we had a year or two of production cash flow in the bank, we could weather this far easier... shut operations down, crawl in to the bunker and use cash flow to cover overhead costs. Unfortunately this option isn't available to us currently; our debtors want their money.

I put $4.75 nickel in to my spreadsheet and the thing went all red. With the financing adding to cash flow, we'll survive negative operations for a while, but that means that the nickel price pop has to be significant in order to stage a mid 2009 recovery.

Great company, great resource, great management... at the mercy of things they cannot control. We wait and see with fingers crossed.