Just a quick post on this sunny Friday afternoon in August…

Check out this divergence over the last three months between our gold producers index and platinum group index, as the gold price has risen to meet platinum. If this spread returns to more normal levels through a rise in platinum, we could see that index catch up.

Tip: compare any group of our mining stock indices here.

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:

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:

In what has been a sideways market for most commodities, prices of titanium dioxide (TiO2 aka rutile) have doubled in private trading this year. Contracts are being settled in excess of $2500 per metric ton, up from $700 last year and $400 a few years ago. This pure white powder is favored as a color base for paints, pigments, plastics and high-quality paper, and supplies are very tight.

There are very few primary titanium producers or explorers, but two small-caps stand out in our database: White Mountain Titanium (WMTM on the OTCBB), with an advanced-stage exploration project in Chile, and Sierra Rutile (SRX on AIM), with a producing mine in Sierra Leone.

Their stock prices have reflected the situation in the rutile market, as they have defied the malaise that has effected many resource stocks lately:

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Site Tip:  To search for just companies that focus on a particular mineral, or for which a single mineral accounts for the majority of their resource value, simply select “main mineral” in the drop-down filter on the filters page:

This classic indicator is flashing the strongest buy signal for gold stocks since early 2009, when they were just starting to recover from the 2008 crash.

Here’s the chart:

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Site Tip: to find the cheapest gold stocks, start with two lists in our Editor’s Picks section (updated daily).

1) Solid Gold Miners: these stocks are producing gold already, earning money (!) and are cheap relative to their cash flows.

2) Value Gold or Silver: this list includes companies exploring or developing properties that are not yet producing. Companies must have 43-101 or JORC compliant resource estimates in the indicated category or better, not have too much debt relative to equity, and be cheap relative to their resources.

Click on any company in a list to see more details and investigate further.

Happy prospecting!

It’s odd: despite gold’s steady rise from 1100 to 1500+ over the last 12 months, many gold producers are actually lower than in Spring 2010, as evidenced in our Gold Producers Index (5-year view here):

Profits are up very nicely in recent years due to leverage on the gold price, but the shares have been a big disappointment, as investors seem to be directing their enthusiasm into the metals themselves. This means that even at historically high stock prices, precious metal miners are trading at normal multiples to assets and earnings.

This makes sense if you believe that we have reached the top of this commodity cycle, because value investors know that you don’t pay premium multiples near the top (though you do near the bottom, when earnings are likely to grow). On the other hand, if you believe this bull still has legs, now is probably not a bad time to add to positions, as there seems to be a fair amount of apathy towards PM producers at the moment, so an uptick in sentiment could bring nice results.

Note that the above does not apply to gold explorers, which have done quite nicely since early 2010, though they only have been digesting that move so far in 2011.

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!

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.