The mining companies that are right for today’s market

Eric Coffin, long-time editor of the Hard Rock Analyst group of publications, has seen the all-time highs in the junior mining space, and the current three-year bear market has taught him to adjust his expectations.

He says the companies that he follows that have performed recently all had a specific event—a bigger resource number, a new economic study or even a discovery—that prompted the market to rerate the stock.

Coffin says that, as always, it is about solid management and good projects, but it’s no longer about who has the biggest copper or goldresource, it’s about which company has a resource that makes sense. In this interview with The Gold Report he suggests some companies with resources that not only make sense but could make even more sense to larger companies.

The Gold Report: At the subscriber investment summit in Toronto in March 2015, you had a talk titled “Life in a Zero Yield World.” What is wrong with that world?

Eric Coffin: A zero yield world is the result of four or five years of central banks essentially buying the hell out of the bond market, which is what the European Central Bank (ECB) is doing right now. And buying those bonds, also known as quantitative easing (QE), drives down yields.

QE has helped the U.S. and will probably help the European economies but it creates a lot of distortions. We tend to see a lot of money driven into high-risk areas, like heavily leveraged commodity and exchange-traded funds (ETF) bets and things like art and collectibles, because there are these large money pools that can raise capital at close to zero rates, and that tends to make people take greater risks.

How that ends remains to be seen, but central bankers realize that they need to start weaning economies off of QE because when you generate that much risk capital and start creating that many distortions, it quite often doesn’t end well.

[“source-resourceinvestor.com”]