by Adam Hamilton
Zeal LLC
The smaller gold-mining and exploration stocks have enjoyed an amazing year, soaring with gold’s new bull market. Many have more than doubled since mid-January, and some have more than tripled at best in that short span. Are such spectacular gains fundamentally-justified, or merely the result of ephemeral sentiment that could vanish anytime? The gold juniors’ recently-reported Q1’16 results offer great insights.
The junior gold miners and explorers play a critical role in the world gold market. They bear the major costs and risks associated with discovering and sometimes developing new economically-viable gold deposits. They painstakingly find the new gold reserves to offset the constant depletion of the world’s existing gold mines, acting as the headwaters feeding the global mined-gold-supply pipeline vital to this industry.