re: Diving deeper on Standard Lithium?

I don't view it as near as much of a "slam dunk" as I did a few months ago. The Lanxess Q3 call, and the continued lack of JV news, really shook my resolve here. I sold the majority of my position in the $11-12 range a week or two ago and am holding on for dear life to my remaining shares to get long term cap gains treatment in Q1 2022. Hopefully though we get good news by then and I never sell those and even buy some shares back as the clarity on the company's future would be better at that point.

I always think back to the quote "Bulls make money, bears make money, pigs get slaughtered." Were we pigs holding on from the cost basis of <$3 that most of us have here? If you have long term cap gains on some of your shares here, I think taking some risk off the table is appropriate given the uncertainty imho. We may even see a return to the $10-11 range next week as traders chase a "short squeeze" (even though I don't think the short interest is high enough to cause that here, more like a mythical short squeeze that traders buy into regardless). So I sold enough shares that no matter what happens to the rest of them I made money and am just riding profits. I was way overallocated to this stock looking back and will never let that happen again with any stock as it's just too stressful. I was able to push my retirement forward by 5-10 years though from the gains here, so perhaps that was worth the stress!

If I had still had my full stack of shares, I might have panic sold everything in the crash on Thursday, but with my smaller position I was just able to laugh at it all off. You have to position size appropriately in these speculative stocks so you can be fearless long term as that's where the real money is made. A good chunk of my cash will go into VGT and SSIT.L as my index fund allocation going forward, but waiting for the market to crash before I do that (my overall bearish sentiment on the market was another reason to lighten my load here).

Looking back, you could have gotten similar returns by having your $ in other lithium stocks like LAC or LLKKF or other junior miners, so my advice is to spread your bets out and ride the lithium bull thesis from a diversified angle. I do have a small position in CYDVF as well. But the downside here, if the JV with Lanxess is off (not saying it is but just throwing it out as a hypothetical) would be severe to say the least. If you had told us back in March that we'd be in November with no JV news, many of us would've guessed the stock would've been sub $2. Without the huge rising tide of the lithium bull market, frankly we might have been there.

I do think SLI's tech will prove out over the long run, but Lanxess is clearly a poor partner. If SLI is to be nimble going forward, they need to convert the Lanxess relationship to be more like Tetra like in nature so they can respond more quickly to the market.

For my speculative allocation in my portfolio, I'm mainly diversifying into ORGN/NVVE/ASTS/SABS/HUMA/CYDVF/BRPHF at the moment. I hate biotechs but SABS probably has the most near term upside along with BRPHF (NASDAQ uplisting in Q1 2022 and Bitgo acquisition) amongst those picks. ASTS might have a dip in early December from delayed launch news, so I would not buy into that one for a few weeks yet here...