Daily Round-Up: Silver at Six-year Low, Juniors Release Drill Results

Difficulties continue in the resource space. The gold price was sitting at $1,125.60 per ounce as of 2:11 p.m. EST on Wednesday, and according to Kitco, earlier in the day September silver futures dropped 3.9 percent to hit $14.04 per ounce. That’s their lowest level since August 2009. Meanwhile, the palladium price hit a five-year low Tuesday. 
Analysts are citing market volatility as the cause of those price problems. Georgette Boele, a strategist at ABN Amro Bank, told Bloomberg, “in the current environment, there is quite a lot of volatility, not only in the gold market but also in the equity and interest rate markets.” Rich Ross of Evercore ISI also commented on market volatility in an interview with CNBC. He said, “[g]old does well when the dollar is weak and fear is high. We’ve recently seen volatility come off, fear has subsided and dollar has firmed. All of which provides headwinds for gold and reinforces this key failure in the downtrend.”

Regions of potential

That said, some regions are doing better than others during this challenging period. Behre Dolbear just released its annual “Where to Invest in Mining” report, which outlines political risk in the global mining industry. Maintaining its top spot from last year, the report ranks Canada as the best country to invest in. Australia, the US, Chile and Mexico round out the five top countries to invest in.

Canadian companies make progress

The Behre Dolbear assessment of Canada’s promise rang true on Wednesday, with a slew of Canadian mining companies releasing news. For instance, Vancouver-based NexGen Energy (TSXV:NXE) reported drill results from its Rook I uranium property, located in Saskatchewan’s Athabasca Basin. All six drill holes from the Arrow zone returned significant mineralization and off-scale radioactivity.
Garret Ainsworth, the company’s vice president of exploration and development, stated, “[t]hese latest results from our Arrow zone continue to impress us with four of the six reported drill holes encountering >61,000 cps radioactivity associated with dense accumulations of massive pitchblende. Of note, hole AR-15-54c1 drilled at a dip of -62° through the sub-vertical A2 high grade core zone, and returned 42 m of mineralization including 9.4 m of off-scale in the A2 shear demonstrating the high grade cores within Arrow continue to prove up well.”

For its part, Seabridge Gold (TSX:SEA,NYSE:SA) “confirmed a substantial expansion” of the Deep Kerr deposit, located at its British Columbia-based KSM project. One highlight is hole K-15-49, which intercepted 483 meters grading 0.43 g/t gold and 0.56 percent copper, including a 250-meter interval grading 0.49 g/t gold and 0.7 percent copper.
Meanwhile, Asiamet Resources (TSXV:ARS) announced that recent drilling completed as a part of a resource evaluation program at its flagship Beruang Kanan copper project in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, has revealed a high-grade copper zone within the current resource envelope. The company discovered 1 meter at 2.96 percent copper from 6 meters depth, including 2 meters at 9.26 percent copper.
 
Securities Disclosure: I, Morag McGreevey, hold no direct investment interest in any company mentioned in this article.