THE CALANDRA REPORT: Subscribe
SAN FRANCISCO -- THE
NUGT (
NYSE:NUGT,
Stock Forum) levered gold miner basket is rising another 17 percent today.
The NUGT rose twice that number last week. The
Direxion family of 2x, 3x and other levered funds will experience splits or consolidations in another two weeks. The NUGT is an artificial electronic trading fund (ETF) that triples price action on gold juniors. It will consolidate 1 for 10 shares later this month.
If the gold miners and prospectors continue their August rebound, and NUGT reaches $10 a share from almost $8 today, the new nominal price will be $100. I own it, and my purchases of the elastic NUGT are now profitable after a span of about four or five months.
Those looking for price action at a lower multiple might look at Central Fund CEF (
AMX:CEF,
Stock Forum) and CEF.A in USA and Canada, respectively), which is up almost 4 percent compared with a 2 percent gain in the GLD ETF (
NYSE:GLD,
Stock Forum) as we report this. CEF, mentioned here and a core holding for us, has about 40 percent of its repository metal up there in eastern Canada in silver and the rest in gold, thus the increased price action.
As for individual equities,
Endeavour Silver (
NYSE: EXK,
Stock Forum) (
TSX:T.EDR,
Stock Forum) and Great Panther (
AMX:GPL,
Stock Forum), neighbours in Mexico, get the percentage prize these days. They swing big, down and up. I think Endeavour is up 10 percent today.
Endeavour founder and CEO
Bradford Cooke is a member of the
TCR family. He tells me,
"Up 19% in two days (through Friday and another 10 percent for a 30 percent total). We do get seriously oversold from time to time because 1) our stock and options traded on NYSE attract the hedge funds and therefore shorts, and 2) we are one of the few silver stocks traded by CIBC’s High Frequency Trading system which boosts our liquidity and therefore attracts speculators." (We here at home own both GPL and EXK and have for many years.)
IVANPLATS (TSX:T.IVP, Stock Forum): Here are two nuggets from the South Africa and DRC (Congo) developer of platinum, copper, zinc and gold mines. They are from today's financial summary for the second quarter of 2013, and they ring true with my previous experience with IVP (in Canada) and its managers:
1. Excavation of the first mine-access decline at Kamoa (DRC) is expected to begin early next year. (I recall being at the beginning of the first decline at Oyu Tolgoi, when only a handful of investors were following
Ivanhoe Mines; this past week, O.T. was named one of the world's 10 largest copper-gold deposits. It is now called Turquoise Hill.)
The decline would provide access to the high-grade, near-surface copper resources that would be targeted for the planned first phase of production, using the room-and-pillar mining method.
2.
South African business leader Cyril Ramaphosa resigned from Ivanplats' Board of Directors in May after more than a decade of service. This is in line with his decision to review his business interests following his election as Deputy President of South Africa's ruling party, the African National Congress, in December 2012. (I recall Ivanplats founder Robert M. Friedland and Mr. Ramaphosa attending a ceremony 10 years ago at Platreef, the flat-reef platinum and nickel project Mr. Friedland has been developing for 22 years in South Africa. It was hot. Most of the white guys, including me, were in suits. The refreshments afterwards, lemonade and such, were to die for.)
We here at home have owned Ivanplats for 10 years. I have been purchasing more this spring and summer at ever-lower prices.
Also in Africa: Mark O'Dea's
True Gold Mining (TSX:V.TGM, Stock Forum) chose a hot day in the market to release decent gold assays from its Karma project in Burkina Faso. I met Mark two weeks ago. True Gold (TGM in Canada) shares are up 12 percent today Monday.
The thrust comes in part from a potent press release. CEO Dwayne Melrose, Mr. O'Dea (executive chairman) and others from Mr. O'Dea's Oxygen Capital Corp. know the prose buttons to push.
The team, also behind
Pilot Gold (
TSX:T.PLG,
Stock Forum) (one of our TCR 8), is bold enough to report that its Rambo target at Karma supports a goal to "identify and potentially add open-pittable oxide gold mineralization within the ... Burkina Faso, West Africa, project." That is fine. Let us hope the writers at True Gold are as quick to explain when internal goals are not met on this ongoing project.
Right now, knowing Mr. O'Dea's history since he won a geology (exploration drilling) contest some 11 or 12 years ago at Red Lake in Canada, a contest that more or less launched his successful career (Fronteer among others in Nevada), I have every reason to believe True Gold and Pilot Gold (PLG in Canada) will live up to their failures and their successes,
igualmente.
Solid promotional language based on actual assays, (which in this case were core drilling of previously reverse-circulation data), is what got Andy Smith's
Canaco in trouble with longtime fund holders ... that was
Magambazi on the east side of the Africa continent. Canaco is now East Africa Metals (
TSX:V.EAM,
Stock Forum).
Promotion is great when stocks are cheap and the language is based on tangible goals. Declining to own up to disappointment is not so great. In fact, it sucketh. Not in this case, mind you. I just want to be the first to know when a project previously identified as potentially open-pittable oxide gold is no longer such. I would expect nothing less from a company named True Gold. (We own shares of Pilot Gold but not, as yet, True Gold.)
MORE: Xtra-Gold (
TSX:T.XTG,
Stock Forum) in Africa reported a slight (nil) profit on its Q2 income statement due to alluvial gold subcontracting in Ghana. In Q2, XTG (in Canada) showed recovery of gold with a value of $558,980 from the company’s Kwabeng properties.
Overall Xtra-Gold reports net income of $82,484 during the three months ended June 30, 2013 compared to a net loss of $2,804,931 during the three months ended June 30, 2012. Few folks out there know this is the second subcontracted alluvial gold operation that Xtra-Gold has performed. The first one threw more than $2 million to the bottom line, as I recall. I own the shares.
That is it. Except to remind anyone in Toronto and Ontario that I will be speaking at
Cambridge House's conference in the Blue Jay city in early September. See
www.cambridgehouse.com.
THE CALANDRA REPORT: Subscribe