POG Morning all. It is 6 am in White Rock and time to add my own thoughts to this lunatic blog. Now that the smoke is clearing over the April debacle it is easier to see what happened. The price of gold was sustained for years by the build-up of holdings in publicly-traded gold vehicles, who converted investors' money into real ounces. Unfortunately the companies did not think to build in any stops, so when confidence turned negative there was nothing to stop those same investors from panicking and demanding liquidation of their holdings. This created a short but vicious cycle of selling pressure driving down the price of gold thus creating more selling pressure. The trigger events were public comments by people like Soros and the real need for Cyprus to raise cash and thus sell some of its gold reserves. It now appears that this cycle is spent and gold can resume climbing the so-called "wall of worry" that leads to greener pastures for us all. The memory of the fall will persist for some time, but barring mass selling by any Gordon Browns out there, gold will slowly recover. The number of pessimistic comments in the media is a bullish sign.
Those of us unlucky enough to have held Iamgold shares through this were also further hurt by events in Mali. However words and actions by Iamgold NEO's show that they had no clue about the forces in play behind the POG and were utterly unprepared for the depth of this correction. For example they are almost all underwater with regard to their insider buying and stock options. They had no gold hedges in place. They talked publicly about $2500/ounce as if it was imminent. They made near-term financial predictions for the company based on $1700/ounce. And worst of all, they bought a massive undeveloped low-grade deposit that is not even economical at today's prices. Such was their confidence they even paid for it in cash at a price that was in retrospect far higher than they would pay now. Too make it worse, they bought it in a mining-friendly and political stable jurisdiction, as they love to point out, but neglected to consider the environmental cost of having to move lake and river to access the ore. They need only have looked at the Taseko experience in BC to find out what can happen in that situation.
As a result of the above it is easy to have little confidence in the management team at Iamgold. I urge the BoD to get a grip and make some changes, to show that they realize that they have made mistakes and want to make amends instead.