Worst quarter since 2013-Q2 is ending with a recovery rally

Precious metals have been weakening all summer and the slide aggravated in September. We probably have seen the bottom on Monday. The last week of September, precious metals have been recovering.

Agnico Eagle and Kirkland Lake will merge

Negotiations between the two partners have been ongoing for some time, but the news was revealed only last week. Agnico Eagle CEO Sean Boyd discussed the benefits of his company’s proposed merger with Kirkland Lake Gold.

Contributor driven miner and explorer list

The contributor driven miner and explorer list goes back nearly a decade, but only few of the original contributor picks have been maintained throughout that period.

The bull consensus on Gold is clear

The ultimate gold panel: The bull consensus is clear

Gold Stock Analyst Investor Day

Gold StockAnalyst (GSA) is the market's most respected and successful source of insight and guidance for gold stock investors. The title of GSA's flagship newsletter — GSA Top10 — also sums up its unique investment approach that has an amazing — and verified track — record. Future results cannot be guaranteed, but we promise the GSA Top10 is unlike any stock research you've ever seen.

GSA has been founded by John Doody, an Economics Professor for almost two decades. Doody became interested in gold due to an innate distrust of politicians and concern over their habit of debasing the currency via inflationary economic policies. Other than the Top10 list, John Doody also publishes a full coverage GSA_PRO list covering a universe of about 60 gold miners and developers (near producers). Pure exploration is out of scope. Since 2012, there equally is a Top5 silver miners list (only 5 since there are fewer to choose from).

Global mine production of gold and silver

While explaining very long wave patterns in precious metal prices, it is often stated that "low prices are the cure for low prices". The underlying rationale is that low prices impose marginal mine production to close down thereby diminishing global output.  Resulting high prices would then allow mining companies to ramp up production by bringing on line mines and ore layers that were not profitable at the much lower precious metal prices.  These simplifications are tending to overlook the essential.

Worldwide mine production of gold and silver

A commonly stated explanation for low (or high) precious metal prices is that "low prices are the cure for low prices". The underlying rationale is that low prices impose marginal mine production to close down thereby diminishing global output.  High prices would then allow mining companies to ramp up production by bringing on line mines and ore layers that were not profitable at the much lower precious metal prices.  These are simplifications, tending to overlook the essential.

Canadian gold and silver miner performance: an update

Back in November 2010 as I started monitoring the Canadian gold and silver miner performance, I used the mining stocks covered by the GoldMinerPulse database. This source contains resource and reserve information on nearly 100 gold or silver miners, explorers and developers. It has become subscription based from this year onward: as such our 'miner universe' will gradually diverge.

Global mine production of precious metals

On April 27, 2016 a new article on this subject was published:
Worldwide mine production of Gold and Silver
A commonly stated explanation for low (or high) precious metal prices is that "low prices are the cure for low prices".

Three year slide for precious metal miners

Buying pressure wanes on broad stock markets, having rallied to new highs only some days after the latest pull-back. Precious metals have been oscillating. On this last full trading day of 2014, gold regained $1200, while silver gained 2.9% to close at $16.27. The Gold to silver ratio still stands at 73.7, barely below its recent multi-year high.

Anatomy of a gold miner bear market

Last two years, we've witnessed a plunge of precious metal prices from before Christmas leading to the New Year. The relentless gold bear raids from mid April onwards, lead to a multi year low for gold on June 28 and the following recovery completely was wiped out with gold equalling the June 28 low on Thursday Dec 19. It seems the gold bear has gotten ahead of itself.

Much the same accounts for the miners, which ceased to leverage down precious metal prices last week and were vigorously reviving, despite meager gains for the metals. Over the short trading week leading to Friday Dec 27, gold added a timid 0.86% on the Comex close to end at $1213.80, while -after its major plunge- silver added 3.43% closing at 20.08. The HUI index of major gold and silver miners added 4.23% with the HUI/Gold ratio now up to 0.1633, hovering above its decade low.

Depressive June ending with a manic gold miner recovery rally

Precious metal investors have been watching in disbelief how gold tumbled through all resistance levels eventually bottoming well below $1200 in European trading and during the NYMEX morning session, yesterday June 28. The recovery rally however was written in the stars:

• On Thursday, precious metal miners followed the stock market recovery, ignoring the continuing plunge of the yellow metal;
• While gold continued the last stage in its race to the bottom, silver upheld well on Thursday and both platinum and palladium reverted course and started recovering; the proverbial "bridge too far" for gold bears...

Miners relative to precious metal prices - an update

The focus of this blog 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.
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.

The hard life of a mining investor

Mining Shares versus Precious Metals

The precious metal side

Investing in precious metal bullion is relatively easy: you have only two (or three including platinum) metals to choose from. Coins or bars makes little difference: the premium is higher the smaller the item.
Precious metals investing in the larger sense may turn out to be more difficult or treacherous.

QE expectations kick-start precious metals rally

Weak employment data spur the expectation on the FED initiating QE3 rather soon, which in turn prevented the stock market from collapsing on the bad news. The S&P ultimately closes with a 0.4% gain.

The expectation of further liquidity injection really kick-started precious metals. Gold had eased to below $1700 but leaped over 2% within minutes. By 4:45 pm gold is up 2.06% to $1736.3. A similar story for silver quoting at $33.67 up nearly 3%. PGM's lag, with Pt adding 0.5% and Pd up 1.25%.

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.

Climbing the wall of worry

Gold and Silver Miner weakness has been with us for too long. On the "gold miner pulse" blog page, you find continuous (at least weekly) updates on how major precious metal miners are priced relative to gold. For that purpose the HUI/Gold ratio is used. By mid May, it bottomed below 0.25, a value not seen since the very October 2008 market bottom. In the previous posting, The Slump in Precious Metal Miners you read it in detail.

The slump in precious metal miners

Havoc during the financial crisis 

Before the 2008 financial crisis and as late as March 08, when gold peaked above $1000 for the first time ever, the popular HUI index of unhedged gold miners quoted above 500. The ratio HUI/Gold had been in a trading range between 0.4 and 0.6 for several years. This seemed to be a dynamic equilibrium. Forced liquidations during the financial crisis caused a near 30% retreat for gold, bringing the price down to around $725 (not counting intraday lows). This meant carnage for the gold miners, which fell off a cliff, with the HUI plunging from 515 (March 14) to 152 (Oct 27). The HUI/Gold ratio plunged from 0.51 to 0.21 between those two dates.

Miners continue their downward spiral

Precious metals miners are unable to change momentum: despite a recovery of both the gold and silver price on Maudy Thursday (April 5), both our GMP-list based indices continued their slide, with a third consecutive low for the gold miners index. The silver miners index also sets down a fresh low, however the previous one dates back to Dec 28, 2011. No better news for the equal weight index – which is a decent proxy for the junior performance – with equally a fresh low since Dec 28, 2011.

With the cap-weighted gold miners index now at 723, the index has shed 27.7% since it started off on November 19, 2010. Over the same time frame, gold is up 21.6%. The silver miners index lost 19.4% over this time frame, however silver rose 30.8%. (See also the graphs on the blogpage in http://gwyde.blogspot.com/p/gold-miner-pulse.html)

The situation hasn’t improved at all in 2012: with gold still up 4.1% year-to-date (despite repeated sell-offs) and silver up 13.9%, the gold miners index lost 11.2% and even the silver miners index is down 4.5%.

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.