Objet : January 2024 has been both frustrating and exciting all in one - GENM
- Our team continues to move the Marathon Palladium-Copper Project forward in the face of a challenging stock market for all commodity companies and significantly lower metal prices relative to this time last year. While frustrating, as miners, we have been through this before, and know that tough times never last.
- The pace that we were receiving permits slowed before the holidays and has yet to pick up pace again, but we still expect to receive a number of permits this quarter.
- The palladium market was whipsawed at year-end when the United Kingdom sanctioned Russian metal imports causing market participants to fear sanctions on nickel would, by extension, affect palladium mine supply. It is believed this led some market participants to cover a portion of what has been a historically large net short position in palladium. Once this short covering subsided, Pd prices retreated in January and continue to hover at multi-year lows.
- The copper market has been rocked by the closure of Cobre Panama and by Anglo American’s announcement it was curtailing production at Los Bronces in Chile, placing one processing plant on care and maintenance.
- On January 29, Amplify ETFs announced the closing of its acquisition of ETF Managers Group (“ETFMG”) ETF assets, adding over $3.7 billion of AUM across 14 ETFs, mostly all-thematic ETFs. Out of the 14 ETFs acquired, Amplify acquired a Precious Metals ETF, and is now sponsoring the “Prime Junior Silver Miners ETF” which trades on the NYSE under “SIIJ”. The ETF has been rebranded to “Amplify Junior Silver Miners ETF”
Why is this important? Amplify changed the ETF benchmark to the Nasdaq Metals Focus Silver Miners Index and rebalanced the portfolio from the prior ETFMG methodology – which previously benchmarked Solactive’s Prime Junior Silver Miners & Explorers Index. Accordingly, there was extreme momentum & volatility in certain Canadian gold and silver equities, including GENM.
Why would this type of change affect GENM? SILJ tracks the performance of companies engaged in the silver mining industry that derive the most of their revenues from silver mining, global silver production, or exploration and development activities related to new silver production, targeting small cap silver miners, for the most part. Canadian equities comprise 67% of SILJ’s allocation with a metals’ allocation of Silver 46%, Gold 33%, Diversified 10%, Copper 5% and 5% other PMs. GENM is included in the Nasdaq Metals Focus Silver Miners Index and as of January 31, 2024,
SILJ has reported that it acquired 8.65M GENM shares.
- The addition of GENM to the SILJ ETF largely explains the significant increase in our share price for January as well as the dramatically improved trading volumes. In addition, we believe that improving sentiment around palladium, given the recently announced constraints to Russian mine supply, likely created a more supportive trading environment.
- Finally, a quick note on one of our investments, Moon River Capital, which purchased the Davidson Property from Generation Mining in 2023 and in which Generation now holds 9,000,000 shares valued at approximately $11.7 million. On January 29, 2024, Moon River issued a news release disclosing assays from 41 samples of mineralization from the Davidson Molybdenum Deposit, near Smithers, B.C., contained significant amounts of Rare Earth Elements, tungsten and gallium. To Moon River’s and GENM’s knowledge, assays for REEs and gallium have not been previously undertaken on this deposit, and tungsten was not included in the National Instrument 43-101 Technical Report for the Davidson Project Resources Update released on September 13, 2023. The samples were chosen to represent a composite cross-section of the deposit and were taken from drill core and pulps produced by past operators of the Davidson Project. Check them out at https://moonrivermoly.com or reach out to that team at info@moonrivermoly.com.
Should you wish to chat regarding GENM, Jamie and I are both available. Please reach out to arrange a time to speak.
jlevy@genmining.com awilkinson@genmining.com