Gold miner bear market starting its fifth year

As we start a new year, it's time to make an update on the situation of gold and silver miners, using the approach you also find in the 'gold miner pulse' blog page and/or the miner performance page. Those pages have been updated with fresh information as of Dec 31st, 2015.
Several more detailed articles, using a similar approach, have been published (a good read for the more long term perspective):

1. Miners relative to precious metals: a tactical approach; (July 2, 2012)
2. Miners relative to precious metals: An update on 2012 (Jan 13, 2013)
3. Anatomy of a gold miner bear market (Dec 30, 2013)
4. Three year slide of precious metal miners (Dec 31, 2014)

During 2011-13 and even over the long haul, the relative performance of mining majors to the precious metals they produce had been disappointing for major gold miners, even while the metals were in a solid uptrend.  See: Gold miners: three decades for naught or Decades of underperformance

This blog article has a time perspective covering years or decades, but is also monitoring whether the trends observed are persisting.