Hard assets such as gold and uranium are drawing a grizzled group of investors, and they are upgrading their knowledge of commodities each cycle.
At the San Francisco Hard Assets Show going on right now, almost 2,000 common folk came to town to hear about the woes of a mining industry strapped for cash to find and produce rare metals and other commodities.
“Oh yeh,” bottom-fishing editor John Kaiser quipped as we admired the Mega-Uranium tote bags piled onto the giveaway tables, “we’re in a bull market. Maybe that’s why none of us doubled our money shorting all of these companies.”
Of some 1,600 mining companies Kaiser and his investor service track, about half have shares selling for less than 10 cents. Most of the companies are headquartered in Canada.
Still, the rising price of gold, and the shrinking availability of gold and silver coins worldwide, continue to draw garage-loft investors to commodities conferences. Their interest comes even as securities of mining companies are shedding two-thirds of their value, and more.
“We’re holding our own,” Richard Ziock of Carlsbad, California, told me as he and his wife, Angela, waited for a badge to enter the downtown conference. I had seen Ziock nearly a year ago, at the Phoenix Metals Show in Arizona, and here he was, a retiree, still making the rounds.
Timothy Wood, the South African writer and editor who runs some of these hard asset shows around North America for International Investment Conferences, told me attendance at the San Francisco session is about half what it was last year at this time. That’s the wimpy economy working its mojo.
Still, Wood says the audience is becoming more sophisticated than in the past. So Tim is designing panels and speaker topics that address thorny issues facing our un-manicured geologists, surveyors and miners working the planet for gold, diamonds, rhodium, uranium, silver and so on.
Like how companies short on cash can find money in the marketplace. Start by praying. “Your typical company is not going to be raising money right now,” Brent Cook, a geologist, told us all. Those lucky enough, or conservative enough, to have some cash stored for a rainy day – Argentina miner Exeter Resource (TSX: V.XRC, Stock Forum) and its $29 million horde were mentioned several times at the show – will live, but just barely, to see another heyday for junior exploration companies, Cook said.
For our attendees Dick and Angela Ziock, times when it looks garsh-darn awful for corporations are a time of great opportunity for garage-loft investors. Thus, they applauded when Al Korelin, a longtime radio talk host, forecast from his podium, “I think you are going to see price appreciation skyrocket.”
Right at that moment, sitting where I was on Al’s panel and facing the audience, I could see several hundred people, maybe more, nod their heads, as if to mouth that old cliché, “From your mouth, Al, to God’s ears. We pray for the Melt-UP.”
That is it for now. The second issue of Ticker Trax By Thom Calandra is on its way to paying subscribers -- our subculture, so to speak. We will have in the new service what might become the planet’s best short-sale candidate, plus more from the best and the brightest across the planet, starting up north.
On The Ticker Trax
Ticker Trax By Thom Calandra will explore planet Earth for those few stakes that offer the prospect of excellent, in some cases cosmic, returns. It is for those who are entirely at ease with stratospheric levels of risk. (Please click here for charter sign-up.)
As we complete our investment research, we fully hope and expect, but cannot and do not promise, stratospheric returns. (Please see inaugural issue of Ticker Trax.) I believe there is a case to be made for individual securities that represent small and mid-sized companies in life sciences, mining, agriculture and energy. Precious and some base metals also get my attention.
HOLDINGS: Thom’s cosmos of holdings is listed for free Stockhouse members on www.Stockhouse.com under the “portfolio setting” for user TCALANDRA. He and his family also own recently minted gold coins. For more ThomWatch, please click here.
THOM’S STORY: Thom Calandra helped his audience find value in a quagmire of investment choices. He also settled a valid complaint with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission in 2005. Thom co-founded CBS MarketWatch, MarketWatch.com and FT MarketWatch in Europe. As the voice of Thom Calandra's StockWatch and The Calandra Report, Thom fancied $300-ounce gold before that metal became an investment rage. Thom visited bioscience companies, metals mines and scores of thin-crust pie joints across the planet in a search for profit, fashion and pizze de trippa gorgonzola. Thom's novel PABLO BY NUMBERS was completed in summer 2008.
