The increasing tendency for gold and silver to behave like safe-haven currencies instead of cyclical commodities has been a godsend for miners lately. On average, mining stocks have a higher correlation with broad stock indices like the S&P500 and FTSE than with metals prices, but when enthusiasm and demand for precious metals is at a fever pitch, as in the late 1970s to 1980, it seems that miners begin to distinguish themselves. I should note that the opposite is seems to be true at the other extreme – witness the 60% decline of the XAU Gold & Silver index from 1995-2000, while the S&P500 tripled.

Here’s a three-month view of our Base Metal Producer index vs. our Gold Producer index (you can play with more index comparisons here):

This month has not been kind to industrial resource stocks, since the broader commodity complex has been hit hard by traders anxious to unwind risk. For some perspective on how much unwinding has taken place, West Texas oil briefly traded under $80 this week, down from $114 this spring and $100 just three weeks ago:

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Dr. Copper is holding up a bit better, but is still down 14%:

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Not surprisingly, our Movers lists of best performing stocks over the past month are now dominated by precious metals companies. Here’s a snapshot, but you can see the whole list here and filter it by country or time frame:

We’ve made 15 new mining indices showing the 5-year performance of stocks in various mineral groups and industry sub-sectors. Take a look and see what patterns you can discover: http://miningalmanac.com/indexes

It’s very easy to us to create new indices based on almost any criteria (market cap range, mineral, country, exchange, etc), so let us know if you have any special requests. Index component companies are listed below each chart, and you can click through to compare them all in the datagrid.

BTW, did you know that iron ore explorers and rare earth stocks have been the hottest sectors over the last 12 months, or that the diamond and uranium sectors remain closer to their 2008/2009 lows than their 2006 highs? Neither did we until we graphed them.

Indices update every night from 23:00-24:00 UTC using daily closing prices.

Check out our new company pages. Along with several visual improvements, we’ve added a Value Report Card on each company’s main page, showing at a glance how the stock ranks on key value investing metrics. See below at upper right:

We’ve reached our original goal of providing full resource, production, property and financial data on over 1500 mining stocks worldwide, all for free and easily accessed with our advanced stock screener.