Why Silver Miners don't spike as does the metal

Especially when the metal price goes parabolic, silver miner investors grow wary and hardly pay anything more than a few days earlier, when silver broke above its short consolidation range.

Silvercrest to be acquired by Coeur Mining

SilverCrest Metals and Coeur Mining have reached a deal for Coeur Mining to acquire Silver Crest in an all shares deal.

Gold Miner Pulse - Friday March 13

With graphs last updated on Mar 13, 2019

The focus of this blog page is on the gold and silver miners from a tactical point of view: how do PM miners perform relative to the price of gold or silver. 

I like to 'isolate' this version from the thread of weekly updated blog pages. The abrupt reversion of the gold bull trend and the implosion of all 'white precious metals' indeed is a sudden discontinuity deserving its place in history.

Whereas on Friday, stock markets enjoyed a bear market rally after the corona virus frenzy caused a worldwide slide, precious metals continued their downward spiral. Miners were slaughtered. Not only they had been retreating with common stocks while precious metals upheld or even advanced, now miners again leverage down the precious metals decline. From 52 weeks high to fresh 52 weeks low in little over a fortnight.

Silver Miner ETF's - A Benchmark

Silver miners are barely significant when compared to the gold mining sector, Despite doubling, gold miners remain but a niche market. With two Silver Miner ETF's this tiny sector is very well covered.

Miners relative to precious metal prices: a tactical approach

Approach

The focus of this blog article is on gold and silver miners from a tactical point of view: how do PM miners perform relative to the price of gold or silver.  Since the start of the gold bull, did precious metal miners by far outperform the gold and silver they produce?

For nearly eight years they surely did. Gold miners shown are represented by the HUI, ticker symbol for the AMEX "basket of unhedged gold stocks". The graph below shows both the HUI index and gold bullion; further down the characteristics shown is the HUI/Gold ratio, giving an obvious idea on how cheap or expensive gold stocks are relative to bullion.

Miners' performance relative to precious metals

Abstract
The focus of this article is on the gold and silver miners from a tactical point of view: how do PM miners perform relative to the price of gold or silver. Data used are 2012 Jan 10.
Special attention is paid to the miners covered by the database 'Canadian gold and silver mining', for which a capital weighted index of gold- and silver miners is calculated. Aggregated performance is one thing, it's also very illustrative that miner and explorer performance has been diverging from outperforming the metals by a wide margin to losing ground completely.

Canadian gold and silver miner performance

Valuation data for a representative list of Canadian gold and silver miners and explorers are maintained on the Gold Miner Pulse site (GMP). On the dedicated ‘Gold Miner Pulse’ page of this blog the performance of the HUI unhedged gold miners index is shown relative to gold bullion. It doesn't look nice: nor over the short term nor over two years, even since the aftermath of the secular financial crisis. In another graph the performance disparity is illustrated among the gold and silver miners of the GMP database. Some lucky picks have been outperforming silver or gold by an impressive margin. Few laggards have lost tremendously despite gold and silver up considerably over the year. A disappointing majority of 61 precious metal miners are in the red since Nov 19 last year. Little individual miner information can be conveyed in one such graph. Therefore, I 'm going into detail to give an idea which miners were good picks and what are the investor's nightmares.

A first analysis in this sense was made in August (See: Stock picking matters).

Over three months later, the performance disparity has only grown, especially near the bottom of the list, though there have been few shifts among miners and explorers in the bottom quintile.

Van kwaad naar erger met de zilvermijnen.

Het achterblijven van zilvermijnen bij de explosieve stijging van de zilverprijs
Gemeten naar de verhouding tussen de koers van de GlobalX zilvermijnen ETF SIL en de zilverprijs, zakken zilvermijnen steeds verder weg. Dit proces zet zich door bij een versnelde stijging van de zilverprijs! Dit is hoogst ongewoon. Sinds het begin van de goud/zilver bull markt in 2000, gaf bijna elke rally van de edelmetalen aanleiding tot met een hefboom stijgende goud- en zilvermijnen. De weinige uitzonderingen komen op conto van een dalende aandelenmarkt bij stijgende goud- en zilverprijzen. De correlatie van edelmetaalmijnen met de S&P500, kan in dat geval roet in het eten gooien. Hiervan is momenteel echter evenmin sprake. 

Silver miners underperforming silver bullion?

As is demonstrated in several articles (1), gold mining majors don’t offer any leverage over gold bullion. Outperformance during gold rallies is largely undone by major swoons during gold retreats. The return for your bravery when investing in gold mining majors is merely additional volatility and underperformance over the long haul. But what about silver miners? Do we observe something similar?