Gold and silver haven’t made any progress for over a month now, and stocks in general have been in the doldrums, but precious metal producers have been earning money hand over fist, and their stocks have found some much-deserved traction.

From our index comparison page, here is a chart showing the outperfomance of gold producers (green) and silver producers (lavender) when compared to base metal producers (blue), which are more sensitive to economic downturns.

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Checking out the Solid Gold Miners list in Editors’ Picks, I see that even big miners like Newmont, Kinross, Newcrest, IAMGOLD, Centerra, Barrick and African Barrick are trading at 15x operating cash flow or less, even with their stocks way up. Going by 2011 cash flow, these figures are going to look even better, particularly for miners with a heavy silver component, as silver is much higher this year than last.