The following conditions, which are met at present, are very often seen prior to run-ups in gold shares:

1) Gold:XAU ratio is high
2) Falling long-term interest rates decrease attractiveness of bonds.
3) Weakening economic statistics (industrial production, shipping, employment, etc).
4) Negative real interest rates (some inflation measures are higher than borrowing costs).

For more, see John Hussman’s essay, Going for the Gold.

Our gold indices (gold producers index and gold explorers index) have each been lagging the metal, and in the case of gold producers, steadily declining over the last 12 months. Investor sentiment is neutral at best on precious metals right now, so the sector is as attractive as it has been for some time.

The biggest issue in my mind is the recent strength in the dollar, which had dismal sentiment readings for several months, but is now looking attractive again as credit stress creeps back into the picture (remember the great dollar rally of 2008-early 2009).

Our screener and database has North American mining stocks all but covered, with the exception of a few very small companies, but until now we’ve not added many Australian stocks.  That’s rapidly changing, and we now have full resource, production and financial data on 83 ASX-listed companies with hundreds more to come.

The latest additions are listed below. To see their data and compare them to one another, either use the filters in our stock screener to search for ASX-listed stocks, or search for them here by ticker or name.

Timberline Resources

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.

How do you like it? We thought it best to just throw the datagrid right up here so that everyone can see what we’re about: the best mining stock database and screener on the ‘net.