Tag Archives: junior miners

The Comex Is A Complete Joke

Financial Markets, Gold, Market Manipulation, Precious Metals, , ,

Comex gold contracts were brought to life in 1974. Correspondence between senior officials in, and advisors to, the Nixon Administration discussed the need to create an “investment” vehicle to “capture” institutional investment money directed into gold in order to prevent the rapid rise in gold after Nixon closed the gold window. If you are curious, the letters are posted in the GATA archive (GATA.org).  For instance:  LINK.

Since the introduction of paper gold, the Comex – gold and silver trading – has evolved into what can only be described as a caricature of a “market.” The open interest in gold contracts is nearly 10x the amount of physical gold reportedly held in Comex vaults; it’s 60x the amount of “registered” gold, or the gold designated as available for delivery.

Total open interest on the Comex as of last Thursday is 787k contracts representing 2,459 tons of paper gold.  Global annual physical gold production is around 2,700 tons.  The net short position of the Commercial trader category per the current COT report – “commercials” are primarily the banks which make markets on the Comex – is 134k contracts, or 418 tons of paper gold.

That the open interest in paper gold contracts is nearly equivalent to  the amount of actual gold produced yearly by gold mines is an absolute joke. The purpose of the Comex, period, is to give the western Central Banks – primarily the Fed – the ability to control the price of gold.  Based on the preliminary o/i report for Friday, the paper gold interest has spiked up to approximately 800,000 contracts.

But the good news is that rapid escalation of open interest in paper gold on the Comex is evidence that the banks are losing their ability to keep a lid on the rising gold price.  Bill Powers invited me onto this Mining Stock Education podcast to discuss this issue, my outlook for the price of gold in 2020 plus some of my favorite mining stocks:

A few of the stocks I follow, recommend in my Mining Stock Journal and invest in myself have doubled or more since the May 2019. Several more are poised for big gains in 2020. You can learn more about  Investment Research Dynamics newsletters by following these links ( a minimum subscription period beyond the 1st month is not required):  Short Seller’s Journal subscription information   Mining Stock Journal subscription information

NOTE:   I do not receive compensation from any mining stock companies and I do not accept any precious metals industry sponsors.  My research and my views are my own and I invest my own money in many of the stocks I present.

With More Money Printing Coming (“QE”) Gold, Silver And Miners Will Soar

Financial Markets, Gold, Market Manipulation, Precious Metals, U.S. Economy, , , ,

It would be difficult to find a chart with a  more bullish set-up than that of GDX unless it was a chart of the imminent move higher in the U.S. dollar money supply:

The Fed was unable to move the Fed funds rate within 50% of the long term average “normalized” level. It was also unable to unwind little more than 20% of the money it printed under Bernanke and Yellen, despite Bernanke’s insistence that the $4.5 trillion printed and injected into the banking system was “temporary.”  Not only was the first series of QE operations not temporary, the Fed is preparing to re-start its printing press.

I believe we are very close to a major shift in investor sentiment, as investors lose faith in the Central Banks’ ability to control the markets with monetary policy. As you can see from the chart above, we experienced just a “whiff” of the type action we can expect in the precious metals sector as reality ushers in true price discovery in the markets.

I can tell the sentiment is not getting frothy in the precious metals sector when several people, subscribers and others, have expressed disappointment in the rate of return for the mining stocks. From May 30th thru the start of Labor Day weekend, gold rose 15.3% and silver climbed 32.3%. Over the same period of time, GDX rose 43.7%. Call me old fashioned, but I can remember when 43.7% over a two or three year period of time was considered a great return on stocks (this was before the tech bubble).

Where I really see disappointment expressed is with the junior exploration micro-cap stocks. Although some have been stuck in mud, many have doubled or tripled. One example is Discovery Metals (AYYBF, DSV.V), which ran from 17 cents to as high as 52 cents this summer. Based on today’s closing price, it’s more than doubled since May 30th. Many of the other stocks I feature in my  Mining Stock Journal newsletter provided double-digit percentage returns this summer and some have doubled or tripled.

I believe the pullback in the sector this month is a necessary and healthy technical correction, with some help from the price management squad, that will lead to higher highs sometime between now and year-end. Certainly investor sentiment, from the metrics I see daily, are far from exuberant, which is bullish.

 

Mining Stock Daily’s 2019 Outlook For Precious Metals

Financial Markets, Gold, Precious Metals, , ,

A quiet bull market in mining stocks is underway. The GDX ETF closed trading on New Year’s Eve up 2.37%. Through Monday, the GDX has risen 20% since hitting a 52-week low close of $17.57 on September 11, 2018. In popular parlance, GDX is now in a “bull market.”

We expect that a significant bull move will occur and a significant amount of capital will pull out of “risk assets” and move into physical gold and silver for wealth preservation/flight-to-safety.

Click on the image below to hear the short and sweet 2019 inaugural Mining Stock Daily Podcast:

Mining Stock Daily is produced by Clear Creek Digital and the Mining Stock Journal.

Mining Stock Daily: Western Copper & Gold Is Undervalued

Financial Markets, Gold, Precious Metals, , ,

The Mining Stock Daily, a collaboration between ClearCreekDigital and Investment Research Dynamics, interviewed the CEO, Paul West-Sells, to learn more about Western Copper & Gold (WRN on both the NYSE and TSX). But first, here’s background on WRN:

Western Copper & Gold is advancing the Casino Project, a world-class copper-gold porphyry deposit, in the Yukon. The deposit contains 4.5 billion lbs of copper and 8.9 million ounces of gold reserve and 5.4 billion lbs and 9 million ozs of inferred resource.

Western Copper was a spin-off from Western Silver after Glamis Gold acquired Western Silver in May 2006 (three months later Goldcorp acquired Glamis). WRN acquired the old Lumina Resources in September 2006 for Lumina’s three copper properties, one of which was Casino. WRN spun-off the other two properties.

WRN only has 106.4 million fully-diluted shares outstanding (including options/warrants), which is remarkable for company that has been developing a massive copper-gold project for 11 years. Insiders own 8% of the stock. A small group of high net worth private investors who have made a lot of money on companies run by WRN Executive Chairman, Dale Corman, own 48% of the stock and institutional/retail own the remaining 44%.

WRN raised $32 million in 2012 selling a Net Smelter Return royalty to Orion Capital. That NSR was sold to Osisko in June 2017 when Osisko acquired a portfolio of royalty assets from Orion.

With a market cap of US$70 million (fully-diluted basis), WRN is extraordinarily undervalued on a risk-return basis. This is especially true considering the recent wave of copper-gold porphyry project M&A activity. Recall that Newcrest invested approximately US$14 million for a 19.9% stake in Azucar’s El Cobre, which valued that early-stage copper-gold project at US$74 million. In 2017, Goldcorp paid US$185 million for Exeter’s Caspice copper-gold project high up in the Chilean Andes.

There have been several other transactions in the copper-gold space, including Zijin’s (Chinese company) acquisition of Nevsun for $1.41 billion (September 2018) for the Timok copper-gold project in Serbia and the recently closed sale of the Malmyzh copper-gold project (Freeport, EMX Royalty) to Russian Copper Company for US$200 million.

WRN’s project is not as large or as high-quality as Malmyzh, but it’s several years closer to being converted into an operating mine. At this juncture, with the current price of copper and gold, the “asset value” of WRN, based on the roster of comparable transactions, is at least US$140 million. I would not be surprised to see one of the companies with projects near Casino make bid a for WRN at some point in next 6-12 months. There’s also a list of other potential acquirers, including RioTinto, BHP and Freeport.

Click on the graphic below to hear Trevor Hall’s interview with WRN’s Paul West-Sells (you can also download the interview on your favorite app by clicking here: MSD platforms):

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The analysis above on WRN is from the November 8th issue of the Mining Stock Journal. To learn more about this newsletter, click here: Mining Stock Journal information

Gold And Silver Are Extremely Undervalued

Financial Markets, Gold, Housing Market, Market Manipulation, Precious Metals, U.S. Economy, , , , , , ,

Patrick Vierra of Singapore Bullion invited me to discuss precious metals, the stock market and the fiat currency-fueled asset bubbles that will blow-up sooner or later.  I explain why investing in gold requires a long term perspective on investing and wealth preservation, why gold and mining stocks are extremely undervalued right now and why the world wants out of the U.S. dollar.

Singapore Bullion is Singapore-based bullion dealer and bullion storage facility with a wide-array of products and services – the podcast is ad-free:

01:37 Gold – A Long Term Perspective
08:14 Was 2015 the bottom for gold price?
13:14 Gold – One of the Best Performing Assets
14:45 Bullion vs Mining Stocks
17:10 Gold is very undervalued right now
19:20 The COMEX cycle that impacts the gold price
21:47 Silver will outperform gold
25:00 How overvalued are the stock markets
30:11 How every U.S pension funds will ‘blow up’
32:40 The ratio of paper to physical gold
35:01 Housing bubble rearing its head again
39:51 “Trump loves debt!”
41:09 Fed rate hike to prick the housing bubble?
45:25 The world wants out of the dollar

You can learn more about my research and stock idea newsletters here:

MINING STOCK JOURNAL                                     SHORT SELLER’S JOURNAL

The Mining Stock Journal is twice per month, every other Thursday evening. The Short Seller’s Journal is weekly, every Sunday evening. The last mining stock purchase recommendation (May 17th issue) is up 10.5% in the last five trading days. It’s going higher – a lot higher.  My Short Seller’s Journal subscribers have been raking in the profits in my homebuilder short ideas.

U.S. Gold Corp: Home Run Potential In The Cortez Trend

Financial Markets, Gold, Precious Metals, , , ,

Some geologists believe that the Cortez Trend could be bigger than the famed Carlin Trend.  U.S. Gold has a project that sits about 10 miles south of Barrick’s mammoth Cortex Hills gold mine. I’ve spent about five hours with the CEO and co-founder – in person and on the phone – and over two hours in person with the head geologist understanding why USAU’s Keystone Project has potential to be the next big gold discovery in Nevada.

I published a report on Seeking Alpha that reflects specifically the wealth of information I learned about Keystone from Dave Mathewson, who is considered one of the leading experts on Nevada’s geology:

For Mathewson, the key to starting the hunt for a deposit is to find areas with the “right host rocks.” With Keystone, it has “rocks, system and geological characteristics – nothing is missing.” The “scout holes” drilled by the Company were used to identify the “stratigraphy,” which shows the geological layering of the rock formation and can help identify gold-bearing formations. According to Mathewson, the stratigraphy of Keystone looks almost exactly like Barrick’s Cortez Hills property stratigraphy – but even better.

 You can read the rest of this report from Seeking Alpha here:   US Gold – Home Run Potential

I first presented U.S. Gold to my Mining Stock Journal subscribers in mid-November at $1.45. It has traded as high as $3 since then. The latest pullback in price is a great entry point. The Mining Stock Journal has had several home run stocks since it’s inception. You can learn more about this newsletter here:   Mining Stock Journal information.

Novo Resources Is Not Worth $600 Million

Financial Markets, Gold, Precious Metals, , , ,

Novo is not worth the $544 million market cap based on Friday’s close using fully-diluted shares.   Novo might eventually be worth $600 million or even more.  But that reality is several years away.  I have been recommending selling to my Mining Stock Journal subscribers for several months.  I don’t just ideas to buy, I help my subscribers avoid stocks that are overvalued, for whatever reason.

Novo Resources is a Vancouver-based junior mining exploration company that is in the early stages of exploring its Karratha gold project in Australia. It also has another gold project, Beatons Creek, in Australia and a property in Nevada. Novo had an extraordinary run in price starting in early July, when it ran from 63 cents (US$) to US$7 by the early October. At its peak valuation, its market cap was $1.39 billion. The stock began to head south after hitting $7. It plunged nearly 29% today (Dec 21) after releasing its latest exploration update.

Seeking Alpha published my analysis if Novo – you can read the rest of it here:  Novo Is Not Worth $600 million

Click on this image to learn more about the Mining Stock Journal:

Analyzing Gold & Silver Stocks: Avoid Barrick

Financial Markets, Gold, Precious Metals, , , ,

Lior Gantz of the Wealth Research Group invited me onto this show to review Barrick Gold as an investment.  It was an interesting proposition because I was not given advance notice in order to prepare notes or review Barrick’s financials.  The exercise forced me to focus on an overview of my reservations about the quality of Barrick as an investment and point to the critical financial metrics I review when doing a “drive-by” analysis of a prospective mining stock investment.

Investing in the largest mining companies is like investing in IBM instead of the promising emerging technology stocks during the 1990’s technology revolution. The best geologists at the big companies, after they’ve reached a level of financial security, leave to develop new gold and silver projects that are often overlooked or rejected by the big companies. These are the types of investment opportunities that offer the best upside in the sector and these are the opportunities that present in the Mining Stock Journal. In the last 8 weeks two of the companies presented in the Mining Stock Journal have agreed to be acquired (Exeter Resources and Mariana Resources).

Forget GDXJ – Follow The Real Money Into Gold, Silver And Juniors

Financial Markets, Gold, Market Manipulation, Precious Metals, U.S. Economy, , , ,

Silver Doctors / The News Doctors invited me onto their weekly SD Bullion Metals and Markets show to discuss why both the technicals and fundamentals are setting up for an unexpected rally into the summer in gold, silver and the mining shares, specifically the juniors.

Subsequent to our recording, the weekly Commitment of Traders report released Friday showed that the bullion banks continue to cover their net short positions in both gold and silver rather aggressively and the hedge funds are unloading long positions and piling into the short side.  Historically, this has been a set-up for big moves higher in the sector.  The hedge funds chase momentum and they are almost never right in the precious metals sector.  When they pile into short positions, like they are now, it’s always a valid contrarian indicator.  We also discuss why the “summer doldrums” in the precious metals sector is no longer a valid seasonal play.

Another contrarian indicator is the negative sentiment connected to the GDXJ ETF.  Adam Hamilton wrote a non-compelling critique of GDXJ and made the assertion that GDXJ was diverting the flow of capital away from junior companies that deserve to get funding. The problem with this analysis is that retail investor buying of junior mining stocks on the secondary market is not a source of capital for junior mining companies. The secondary trading of stocks is not a source of capital for any stock, for that matter.  ETFs are a “derivative” of the secondary trading market and thus are also not a source of capital for companies.

Junior mining stocks get their capital from new share issuance or from direct investment by strategic investors.  If Hamilton bothered to call on the companies themselves rather than take quarterly filings and throw numbers into a spreadsheet as his primary tool of analysis, he would discover that many junior exploration CEO’s would tell him that they are getting a lot interest from strategic investors. Furthermore, many junior mining companies with investment-worthy stories are having no problem raising capital  through primary share-issuance, notwithstanding the recent turmoil connected to GDXJ. GDXJ is a derivative security. Derivatives are a source of fees for their issuer/sponsors, not a capital raising conduit for companies.

The Mining Stock Journal focuses on the emerging junior exploration mining companies that are seeing an elevated level of investment interest from sophisticated private investment funds and from strategic investors.  These are the stocks that offer the greatest upside-potential in the junior segment of the sector – not the larger-cap, developed companies in the GDXJ Trust.  The latest issue features a company with a potentially prolific gold property that is in negotiations with a strategic investor.  Two juniors featured in the Mining Stock Journal were acquired recently.  Looking at companies one-by-one, not en masse, is how you find the potential home run stocks.  You can learn more about investing in these opportunities here:  Mining Stock Journal information.

Here’s the download for the latest SD Bullion weekly show:  MP3 download  and here’s the podcast:

Phenomenal movement lately with one of your stock picks, Dave, and I have no doubt it’s still in the first inning of what will be a very long game. Superb. Thank you! – subscriber “Mark”

Full Metal (Gold And Silver) Price Manipulation

Financial Markets, Gold, Market Manipulation, Precious Metals, U.S. Economy, , , , ,

I’m not sure of the significance of 20 minutes past the hour, and I’m sure it has some sympbolic meaning to the gold manipulation cabal, but for the last week the price of gold has been getting slammed with an avalanche of Comex confetti at regular intervals at 20 minutes past the hour.

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THAT is not the graph of a market that is allowed to trade freely.   But notice how gold bounces back sharply from every take-down attempt.  This is especially significant given that this is one of the slowest seasonal periods of the year for the buyers of physical gold and silver.

This morning (Tuesday morning) was particularly blatant.  Gold had traded steadily higher overnight from $1344 (December futures basis) to $1364 just after the Comex floor opened for business (8:20 a.m. EST/6:20 a.m. MST).

Whenever the elitists start to lose control of gold, they roll out one of their Fed stool pigeons to threaten the world with a 25 basis point (one quarter of one percent) rate hike at the next FOMC meeting (September).   Today’s park bench popcorn scavenger was NY Fed President, Bill Dudley, who stated on Fox Business that a rate hike in September is “possible.”  I guess that means September’s meeting is a “live meeting” – a phrase Dudley and SF Fed Prez, John  Williams, propagated the mainstream media propaganda meat grinder with in May – LINK .

But gold shrugged off Dudley’s empty, Straw-man threats and closed today respectably up about $5 from the close of yesterday’s afternoon “access market” trading session.  I still believe that gold could see $1500 by Halloween despite the Comex B-52 paper bombs being dropped religiously on the market.  And we are just one economic, political or societal catastrophe from gold making a rapid run toward $2,000.

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Buy every manipulated sell-off in gold and silver.  It’s the true “TINA” idea.

A lot of readers have asked me if it’s too late to buy mining stocks at this point. I refer them to a long-term graph of GDXJ so they can see where the junior miners have been relative to the level at which they bottomed. It’s a prototypical chart of a market that is in the early stages of a massive move higher. The key is to identify the exploration companies that have a high probability of hitting the proverbial pot of gold. The last 5-years caused a lot of damage to the junior sector, but there’s a lot of companies with “a pulse” that have been revived, albeit significantly undervalued from a risk/return standpoint.

My Mining Stock Journal is focused on finding companies that are currently overlooked by the mainstream mining stock analysts and newsletters. As an example, I presented a stock idea in mid-April that is up over 280%. It recently doubled in price shortly after a major newsletter service poo-poo’d the idea. I draw on several seasoned veteran contacts plus 15 years of experience researching and investing in this sector. You can access the MSJ – a bi-weekly report – here:   Mining Stock Journal.

I just received your August 4 Stock Journal and before getting to your suggestion and half way through your guidelines for picking stocks I wanted to write this first. I have attempted to find those obscure companies and must say it is most difficult. Upon reflection I should have just waited on your bi-weekly report because your picks have been awesome. – “Jim”