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.

The entire minerals sector has performed very well in July, with precious metals stocks finally catching a bid, but industrial materials stocks have been the best performers of the year.

Here’s a chart of some of the strongest indices since the 2008 crash (pink: rare earths; purple: heavy minerals; blue: base metal producers; green: coal):

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Site tip: To compare indices in a single chart like this, go to http://miningalmanac.com/indices and select “compare” or just go to http://miningalmanac.com/indices/compare.

You can also compare any individual stock to the indices (or the gold price) by going to its pages and clicking on the “charts” tab:

Bargain hunters should be thrilled, since there are some real values appearing in the market again. Many small stocks have retraced their entire 2010 rally, even as gold hovers over $1500 and silver holds $35. With the dollar still in the doldrums, commodity prices levitating, and interest rates near zero, something has to give.

A bit of fear has crept into the markets as a whole since May, but resource equities have been hit particularly hard, and the losses have been magnified for juniors and explorers.

Our gold explorers index, for instance, is down over 20% in 2011:

Site Tip: The best place to see which companies have become cheap is the Editor’s Picks section.
The lists refresh daily, taking into account the latest stock and metal prices.

Our uranium index closed the week down (only) 20% after traders smelled opportunity in their decimated share prices. Buy when there’s blood in the streets, right?

Follow the daily chart here: http://miningalmanac.com/uranium-index

Chart of our uranium index:

http://miningalmanac.com/uranium-index

Our 1-day movers list is also dominated by uranium stocks falling on heavy volume:

http://miningalmanac.com/movers/volume

http://miningalmanac.com/movers/losers

Phew! We’ve been working ’round the clock to get this website out of beta, and have just today assembled version 1.0 of the full site. You can finally play with our maps and fascinating niche mining indices, and explore our lists of stocks grouped by mineral and category. See the Picks tab for pre-filtered stocks that pass a battery of financial strength and value tests. We’re also running a “map of the month” on the front page, and of course every company’s properties are mapped on their respective pages.

Plus, we just topped 1700 stocks, which pretty much exhausts the US, Canadian, UK and Australian listings.

Enjoy!

Lots going on these days as the new version of this site is about to go live in 1 week! Some of the new features:

• Google maps of every property (over 9000 now!)

• 17 special mining indices & charts

• Dozens of lists of companies by mineral and other categories

• Editor’s Picks of value stocks in various categories (best exploration, best gold producers, best base metals, etc)

• Improved value ratios & graphics

• Sponsor profiles

• A whole new, easy-to-use layout for the entire site

We’re looking forward to seeing lots of you in person at PDAC, on the expo floor or better yet over cocktails!

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.

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.

After you make a search in our database and generate a list of companies with their data, you can email a snapshot of what you’ve found. Just click the SHARE button, the little envelope above the grid to the left. Send the email to someone else who might have an interest or to yourself (while we’re in beta we don’t yet offer free accounts that let you save watch-lists, so this is a work-around).

The snapshot is taken of whatever you see in the grid, so if you want to send the resources data, make sure you are on the Resources tab when you click SHARE. If you want both resources and financials, for example, just send two emails. We don’t save the emails and will never spam.

Anyway, soon you’ll be able to create a free account and save your results here so you can come right back to them in the dynamic grid, but the email function will always be there.