American stock markets indexes keep posting historic highs: Dow 22K, S&P above 2500, Nasdaq Comp near 6600 about 30% higher than its Y2K bubble peak... joined by the cryptocurrencies also inflating into bubble territory.
Meanwhile there is little or no interest for precious metals. Gold ends off the Thursday low, yet still down 0.26% for the week. Palladium has been volatile for the week, yet ends on a weak spot, down 1.5%. Nevertheless, the $934 Thursday close was a fresh 16+ year high. The current Platinum-Palladium price inversion had not been seen since autumn 2001 either. Silver and Platinum are the first to post a timid weekly gain. Candidly, Rhodium has risen to the second most expensive precious metal (bid now at $1125). During summer 2016 Rhodium was the notorious laggard, sliding to $585 (barely more than half its current price) shortly after gold peaked in August 2016.
Against the backdrop of precious metal weakness, the stock market ghost rally extends into the precious metal mining space. The HUI is up 2.85% over the week, making HUI/Gold firm to 0.159. You find the usual updates on the
gold miner pulse page. This doesn't however make miners overvalued, but the extreme negative residuals of the HUI relative to its HUI/Gold regression estimate makes place for an almost market neutral reading (-12).
Weekly advances for the miner ETF's are within narrow boundaries: from +2.7% (GDX) to +3.0% (SIL). Our narrow (14 components)
contributor driven explorer and junior miner spreadsheet has beaten the market this week, adding 5% to a long term advance of 14.76%. Advances outnumber declines 11 to 3 on the list, with a few double digit gains making the difference. Despite correcting on Friday, the 9.8% weekly advance of Ivanhoe Mines is quite influential, given the excellent long term advance, hence high weight. Pretium confirms its uptrend. The highest percentage rallies have been for Continental Gold and Argonaut Gold. However those two picks still have some work to do before breaking even.
The list has been weeded out from about 20 picks to 14. Now I've got an 'incubator list' of possible explorer picks for which I would appreciate any comments, critics and/or appraisals:
Auryn Resources (AUG.TO)
Aurania Resources Ltd (ARU.V)
ASA Gold & Precious Metals (ASA)
Evrim Resources Corp. (EVM.V)
Gold Standard Ventures (GSV.V)
Corvus Gold Inc. (KOR.TO)
Midland Exploration Inc. (MD.V)
Nighthawk Gold Corp. (NHK.TO)
NOVO Resources Corp. (NVO.V) - the inevitable, yet it got very expensive by now...
TerraX Minerals (TXR.V)