@Scott that chart is a good visual representation on why I am not interested in investing currently.

Good company, Bad price.

I don’t use charts to invest but my target point is where the PE line is below the EPS line on that graph, which has been the norm for almost the entire period shown, so the current price is quite an aberration.

04-Feb-2026: Some good points you both make @Tom73 and @Scott - I was especially interested in Scott's chart of LYL's EPS vs SP (copied into this post below) and the correlation between the two up until recently when the LYL SP has surged despite them guiding for basically no growth to very little profit growth for FY2026 (see here: FY26-Outlook-and-Guidance-November-2025.PDF):

And I would add that they haven't announced a major contract win since that A$48m EPCM contract for the development of Perseus Mining’s (PRU's) Nyanzaga Gold Project in Tanzania that they announced in July 2025 (see here: Nyanzaga-Gold-EPCM-Contract-Award.PDF) other than what's listed in their "Resources - Major Project Status" overview slides in their AGM presentation in November and their FY25 Full Year Results Presentation in August, both shown below:

And nothing had changed between August and November, i.e. both slides have the same names in the same places. They are actually the same slides, just in two different presentations 3 months apart.

So, there is an argument that the market is expecting more than what LYL are going to deliver this month (in their H1 of FY26 results).

I agree with @Scott that LYL management is always conservative and they do try to underpromise and overdeliver, but there could still be too much expectation in their share price currently.

They have been rising on low volume, but there has been consistently more buyers than sellers, especially recently, so the price has predictably moved higher on most days.

Here's a snapshot of today's move, albeit it was a small 5 cent fall for a change:

The main thing to glean from that is that there is still low liquidity, as there almost always is with Lycopodium, with gaps between the price points (like a 15 cent gap between the two highest bids and the next two highest bids on the buy side) and that tends to mean large daily trading ranges (35 cent trading range today despite a -5 cent move) and on some days the daily share price moves can be quite large if they close near the high or low points of that daily trading range.

There are not too many brokers or analysts officially covering this company - Commsec says there are just 2 currently who both have a "Strong Buy" call on LYL, for what that's worth, down from 3 one month ago. They do not name the brokers.

Commsec is not exactly comprehensive with their broker coverage. However FNArena says there are zero brokers covering LYL, so perhaps Commsec is covering more brokers than FNArena is, or just different ones. I'm an FNArena subscriber so I can see behind that paywall, which is zero help in this case, except for their Historical Data graphs, examples below:

There's a drop-off in EPS, DPS, NPM, RoCE, RoIC, ROA, ROE and RoTC in 2025 compared to the 2024, as shown above, but hey, how many non-SaaS companies give you consistent Returns on Capital and ROE of around 30% or higher and a Return on Total Capital of circa 38% ?

Here's a thought: LYL have traditionally had a low PE ratio, as we've established, and part of the reason for that is that they often work in high risk parts of the world, so the market may well have been pricing in a risk discount despite the company's superb risk management that has protected them from any significant damage for all of these years despite working in West Africa and other risky places, and that's on top of the fact that they are EPC/EPCM/EPM contractors and are classed as an E&C (engineering and construction) company despite being capital light because they do NOT do the actual hands-on construction work themselves, so a triple wammy of (1) having lumpy revenue that is mostly one-off in nature, (2) working in an industry where plenty of companies have low profit margins or lose money and go broke, and (3) being a company that is known for intentionally taking on work for mining projects that are located in some of the world's riskiest countries.

If you looked at them like that, there's not much to like, except there's actually HEAPS to like when you dig a little deeper as we have, so my thoughts are: (I'm getting to it)...

What if some people in the market, some of that very small group of people who actually know this company exists and are following it, are realising TWO things; Firstly that Lycopodium have recently demonstrated once again that their strong risk management procedures do work for them really well, and they are willing to walk away from very large contracts (Reko Diq WOULD have been their largest contract EVER if they had continued through the bidding process and been awarded the contract by Barrick, and LYL were the odds-on favourites because they'd done all of the project studies for it) if either the risk is too high or if they believe that the project owners are not prepared to adequately compensate Lycopodium for the risk.

This is evidenced by LYL backing away from (walking away from the bidding process for) two very large EPM/EPCM contracts in the past 18 months, one in far western Pakistan (Reko Diq in Balochistan) and another large Barrick project, the Lumwana Copper Mine Expansion in Zambia. One year ago in this thread: LYL - On the rise again? @mikebrisy said: "CEO Peter De Leo, when questioned about the guidance downgrade attributed this to them not going ahead with two major Barrick projects. He explained that they weren't comfortable with the contractual terms from a risk perspective. That kind of decision is music to my ears, because it is the taking on of too much project risk which ultimately leads to this sector generating poor returns. I'd rather they take the hit on growth and avoid a couple of train wrecks any day." - Michael tuned in to their half year results earnings call in Feb 2025 before posting that here from his notes. Thanks again Mike!!

At the time we didn't know what those two projects were, but we certainly did know once Reko Diq dropped off Lycopodium's "Resources - Major Project Status" slides, such as the two examples I've already provided above from their FY25 full year results presso in August and their AGM Presso in November, which do not have ANY Barrick projects on them despite LYL doing FS studies for both projects as well as some FEED work for Reko Diq, and the massive Lumwana Copper Mine expansion in Zambia was never named on any of those slides because it never progressed past the FS (feasibility study) phase into FEED (Front-End Engineering Design), so Lumwana was part of that "40+ Studies" they mention below (Lycopodium had previously been announced as having been awarded the studies for Lumwana and also being the front-runner to be awarded the E&C contract for Lumwana) but Lumwana never made it any further than the study phase for LYL because Lycopodium chose to walk away from the bidding process for the big contract.

Here's the last Lycopodium presentation slide that mentions Barrick's Reko Diq project:

Source: Slide 23 of LYL's Investor Presentation accompanying their FY2024 Full Year Results on 21st August 2024.

You might notice how much busier they are today - as shown in the corresponding slides towards the top of this post from August and November 2025 compared to the smaller lists of projects they had back in August 2024 (in that slide above).

So we've got the company's excellent risk management proven to be working well with that newer evidence plus the fact that they have never had any sovereign risk issues that have hurt them, plus... and this here is the second thing of those TWO things I referred to about 6 paragraphs up ...we've also got their CEO & MD, Peter De Leo saying that the company has plenty of work available to them so they are able to pick and choose and take on projects that provide higher margins ("high value work"), and that's what they are doing.

@Scott said in this forum thread yesterday: "They certainly don't have any trouble finding work. They said this last year and were prioritising high value work. Their last annual report also said that their NPM% of 12% was well above their target of 10% - so they are already getting high value work and presumably have a high percentage of their people on billable work."

Makes perfect sense to me.

So my suggestion is that perhaps there are some people now realising that LYL are NOT so risky AND that LYL are actually more likely to INCREASE their profitability in the current environment than have their profit margins decline. And they therefore DESERVE to trade at a higher (P/E) multiple.

I'm not saying anything new here - it's been said before - I'm just trying to pull it together to explain why I think LYL CAN and probably (IMO) will go higher over the next 12 months.

Scott said yesterday (two posts up in this forum thread) at the end of his post: "The recent price growth and EPS are clear anomolies. I'm not a chartist. It shows that the narrative around the perceived value of the company has changed. Unless EPS jumps then we have either entered a new valuation era for the company or the price will revert to the long term relationship to EPS."

Yep, agreed, and my bet is on the new valuation era, in other words, a higher P/E than in prior years, because they ain't so risky and they are probably going to increase their profitability even further based on there being heaps of work for them and their ability to choose higher value work, so they SHOULD trade at a higher P/E multiple.

Especially when they were already SO profitable (see FNArena's metrics charts for LYL above), have so much alignment with shareholders due to having such massive insider ownership, have such a great capital management & M&A track record, with excellent and responsible management across all other areas of the business as well, a stable share count for over a decade, and a rock solid balance sheet with zero net debt (negligible debt with millions of dollars in the bank) so they actually can't go broke even if they ran out of work tomorrow, which they clearly won't.

There is just so much to like compared to so many other companies that trade on higher multiples.

Disclosure: LYL is my highest individual position, currently 14.51% of my combined share market investments. My next largest position is GNG at 11.43% (GNG have similar attributes to LYL but they work mostly in Australia; LYL+GNG together represent 25% of my sharemarket investments) and then it drops down to a 6.32% weighting to BC8 in my SMSF followed by CYL (5.98%) and ARB (5.97%). That's all based on todays (Wednesday Feb 4th, 2026's) closing share prices.

That's all in my real money portfolios. Here on SM, LYL is also the largest position in my Strawman.com play-money portfolio.