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.

We launched in beta last March with 400 stocks (almost all Canadian) and only provided their company-wide resource totals. Now we list 1625 stocks from Canada, the US, UK and Australia and break down their resource and production numbers by property. That’s many thousands of properties, and soon we’ll load all of them into a google map.

The specialized new indexes we’ve been talking about are all done as well — they’ll be loaded up within a couple of weeks. One thing that these reveal is the HUGE performance discrepancy between large-cap and small-cap miners since the 2008 crash. Everything fell in the crash, but it seems that most small explorers never recovered — their stocks just went down and stayed down, whereas the majors rebounded to all-time highs.

This makes small-cap resource stocks the biggest bargain ever relative to metals prices and large miners. The caviat of course is that these companies need constant financing to stay alive and prove out their resources, and checks have been hard to get. Those among you who can afford to bankroll some drilling can get a lot of stock for your money and probably dictate your own terms.

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.

Here’s the list of companies who’s resource, production and financial data we’ve just updated and put online in the past few days, bringing the running total to 550. We are also revealing full property-by-property tonnage & grade and production data for all companies later this week.