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:

Despite their general positive correlation with broad indices, the mining sector has held up very well despite a dismal couple of weeks for stocks in general. Gold approaching $1700 might have something to do with it, but even such industrial mineral sectors like base metals, rare earths and uranium have been stronger than the Dow, DAX and FTSE.dex, vs. the S&P500 over the last month.

GDX, the gold miners’ ETF, is up 7%, while the S&P is down 6%, a 13% outperformance for the miners:

Even downtrodden uranium stocks have caught a bid this summer:

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SITE TIP: Peruse & compare our mineral sub-sector indices here, and see which have been the strongest.

We’ll be adding hundreds more companies in the coming weeks, with full resource and financial data.

Our unique mining indexes are also coming, along with new visuals, improved valuation metrics and watch lists.

We have just launched new visual aids to help show the following for each company:

• Valuation rankings (many of these, based on mineral values and financials)
• Relative values of each property
• Relative values of each mineral
• Distribution of the class of mineral resource

We’ve also added charts for each property, showing the distributions of mineral values and resource categories.

See the new charts on company pages, like Goldcorp’s new pages.

And on the property pages, like Goldcorp’s Pensaquito page.

Coming soon we’re launching our own mining stock indexes and comparative charts, so you can see how well each company compares to a basket of similar stocks, all mining stocks or simply the S&P500.

We were skeptical at first, but Twitter is actually a great way to keep people up to date on developments and features.

It turns out a lot of you are already on there.

This is us (well, Ana):  http://twitter.com/MiningAlmanac

Phew! This was buggy, but we sorted it out. Now when you click on a company name in the “List View” you get a stock chart, trading info and news. When you click on a company from any other tab (Basic Data, Financial Data, Resource Data, etc) you get taken to their website.