Mining Stocks
These, as you well know, are probably the most volatile securities on the planet. And you’ve just had a demonstration of how volatility can go both ways. Many have gone up by a factor of 10, or more, since the current bull market started in 2000. But on August 16th alone, the average stock went down about 10%. I’d say most stocks are off 40% from their previous highs. Many are asking themselves if the bull market is over. I’d say, almost certainly not. This is for several reasons:
1. We’re still in the Wall of Worry stage of the market. The Stealth stage ended in 2003, and the Mania stage hasn’t yet begun. The bulls and the bears are still fighting. Retrenchments like this happen. Bull markets naturally try to take as few investors along as possible; it simply wouldn’t do if everybody could make a living in the market. Who’d do the real work? But the market will continue to climb the Wall of Worry in my view. And we will have a Mania.
2. The public is still out of the gold market. I promise you that every market top I’ve witnessed in my life was accompanied by cocktail party chatter about the asset class in question. I have yet to have any indication the public has a clue that gold and other resources even exist. If this is a market top, it’s unique.
3. Extraneous factors, not fundamentals, caused the sell-off. In other words, gold went down simply because there was a bid for it, and sellers needed dollars to meet their obligations. All the other metals were in the same position. Hedge funds appear to have owned a lot of metals, simply because they offer a lot of leverage. And the stocks, which are always illiquid, were showing their usual leverage.
4. Governments all over the world are pumping hundreds of billions into the system. They’re doing that to ward off a credit collapse, and will almost certainly succeed. But all that extra purchasing media means higher inflation and brings us closer to the day that the foreign holders of $6 trillion will step up to the cashier and ask for their money back. The attention of the markets will soon shift to gold.
My guess, therefore, is that the ugliness for the mining stocks won’t last long. I don’t have any prediction about exactly when the golds will come back. But I think that by year-end, they’ll be heading strongly back toward new highs. I will say this: you want gold stocks, not copper, nickel, lead, zinc, or even silver.
Gold is the cheapest asset out there. Uranium remains my second favorite.
We saw the meltdown of the subprime market coming. And correctly anticipated the government’s response. But we didn’t, I think, adequately clock how ugly it would be for the juniors. Why not? The fact is that once you sell, you tend not to buy back in. And trading is a sucker’s game; the odds are greatly tilted against you by the bid/ask spreads, commissions and, most importantly, your own emotions. So we only like to sell when we think a particular company is going in the wrong direction.
Recall the recent tech boom. There were numerous brutal sell-offs on the way to the ultimate top in March 2000. We’ll have other sell-offs in this market as well on the way to the top.
Rest assured, we’re anxious to give an all-out sell on all these resource stocks. At that point, we hope to have found a market sector that’s as cheap as they were back in 2000. But that’s not yet, and probably not for a couple of years.
Hang tough. Buy more of the best of the best.
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