Permanent impairment of precious metal miners to the price of the metal

Miners not only fail to hold on to the elevated precious metal prices, over the long haul they gradually are lagging more and more. Since this holds for the majority of miners, both large caps and smaller miners, you cannot diversify away any specific mining risk.

Consequently all mining ETF’s lag precious metal ETF’s.: GDX and GDXJ lag GLD. On the silver front SIL lags SLV; though this trend took longer to confirm. 

Only few success stories in the mining realm outperform the metal and even among these market timing is paramount.

The Miners Performance Page splits our miners list in five quintile sections. There is no July update, therefore I show the top quintile below:

Top quintile: the 20% best miners on the GoldMinerPulse list. TSX quotes are mentioned and the performance is in CAD. It may look less rosy in USD.

Twelve miners are up more than 100% since the start of observations (19 Nov 2010) or since they entered the stock market. The list is quite dynamic and exits can mean either one of these:

1. A successful explorer, small or mid-tier miner being acquired at a decent price,
2. A mining company experiencing some drawback merging with a more successful peer,
3. A miner which got itself into trouble selling off some assets in an attempt to stay afloat,
4. An outright bankruptcy: the Great Basin Gold and Allied Nevada are some examples of the last few years.

Streamers and Royalty companies

Other top quintile observations