“We saw the lithium industry this year was still not very well understood,” President James Bradford said in an interview. “Investors were buying these companies with really poor assets because they had a slick management team. It seemed to us like people weren’t valuing the high-quality projects properly.”
The Vivid Energy Fund is short companies that focus on direct lithium extraction, such as Vancouver-based Standard Lithium Ltd., which has plunged 61% this year. Standard was the subject of a short-selling report in February by Hindenberg Research that expressed skepticism about its technology.
Direct lithium extraction is a method used to accelerate the lithium production process, one of the technologies that dozens of companies are pursuing to lower costs. It sounds “amazing on paper” but in reality has lots of problems, including impurities, Bradford said.
By contrast, Bradford sees value in lithium companies…
