are us banks shorting ozzie goldies - (boa), page-63

Rabbit, commentary courtesy of Apataki from the PRU thread (copied below) explains some of it. Newcrest's CEO selling his company's shares isn't a good look and the market doesn't like Barrick's takeover of Equinox - why is the world's major gold producer diversifying into copper instead of more gold?

There's a lot of profit-taking finally happening in silver taking the gold price with it today. The silver-gold ratio has probably peaked and this always takes gold stocks down too in the short-term. We've all seen this happen before.

Rowingboat

"Some possible explanations for poor gold stock performance: share buyers are tapped out and will respond these days only to some hyper-story; costs (especially diesel) have gone up for Australian producers and receipts down with the soaring dollar; many people are not interested in gold stocks; or there have been so many gold screw-ups (think the former Bendigo Mining, think the former Ballarat Goldfields) that investors are super-wary of gold stories.

On Wednesday, we had Range River Gold (RNG) call in the administrators. In its December quarterly, the company had predicted it would produce between 7000oz and 10,000oz in the March quarter -- albeit at an average cash cost of $1000, which didn't leave much left over for the bottom line, with that cost coming down to $800 in the June quarter.

This sort of thing doesn't help the gold stocks generally. And even the successful producers have had a pretty unimpressive record of returns to shareholders in the form of dividends. The former Lihir Gold comes to mind in that regard. Compare that with Homestake Mining in the US during the Great Depression: it no doubt was a saviour to many shareholders by paying good dividends from its gold mining all through those dark days".