Gold Is On The Path To $3000 As Investors In The West Start To Join The Gold Bull Market
Featured companies in this report are our top picks from the best major gold miner, exceptional gold mine developers and gold explorers with great projects.
It didn’t take long for gold to figure out that something ain’t adding up with the Fed cutting rates by a half-point on Wednesday. Their head of public relations, Chairman Powell, went with the Goldilocks messaging that everything is just right with the economy and jobs market.
The immediate question is if everything is fine, why go with a half-point cut. Everything is not fine, the jobs market is on very shaky ground as I have been noting in reports that full-time jobs are declining while part-time jobs are increasing. This has put workers in a tough spot as they lose higher paying full-time jobs to take on lower paying part-time jobs.
Massive revisions to the jobs numbers by the BLS is confirming that it is getting very painful for workers. If the full-time jobs market is in trouble, so is the economy. Which gets to the heart of the matter, the Fed cut by a half-point to try to prevent a hard landing and do their best to orchestrate a soft landing. Regardless of the smoke and mirrors messaging of the Fed.
Another factor that had to impact the Fed’s decision is that the lunatic politicians in Washington are fighting over funding the government and threatening a government shutdown just before the election. Obviously they will come to terms to continue spending like drunken sailors, but their sabre rattling could cause some economic concerns.
Most likely, the Fed’s timing was affected by the next meeting not being until after the election. So they probably wanted to bite the bullet, just in case bad economic numbers are released before the next meeting. This would give them some wiggle room to avoid a cut between meetings. If poor numbers come out, they can get the word out that they will cut by a half-point again at the November meeting.
With the trends in the jobs market and by extension the economy, it seems highly likely that more troublesome numbers will come out between here and the end of the year and well into 2025. Which will keep the Fed on an aggressive interest rate cutting cycle.
They will try their hardest to avoid a hard landing as the next president takes office, and that president will do their best to go on a wild spending spree. The Death Spiral of Debt, massive spending by the next president, and economic slowdown will force the Fed to move back toward the Free Money Era.
Additionally, the debt crisis, economic slowdown and government spending will mean that there will be a huge supply of debt that pays interest in a dropping US dollar. Which will cause the Fed to start increasing their balance sheet, ultimately to levels multiples of its current amount.
The US dollar is set up for a dramatic correction. Prior to the Fed cutting it was making a series of lower highs and lower lows. During the past week it looks to be propped up and ready to fall.
Meanwhile gold is performing like a champ. It has been on a beautiful trend of higher highs and higher lows, with each new high creating a new record high. Friday was a powerful day as it made a strong move to a new record high over $2600. Everything is lining up for gold to make a run at $3000 before the end of the year or in early 2025 at the latest.
By far the best play in the gold bull market are the high-quality gold stocks. The action in gold is bringing generalist investors to gold, they will soon realize that there are some spectacular opportunities in gold miners that are firing on all cylinders, in developers with much needed gold mines of the future and in explorers with important discoveries.
Top Gold Stock Picks
Agnico Eagle
Agnico Eagle is one of the Big 3 gold miners, they are significantly outperforming the other two on the important key metrics and in stock performance. Both Barrick and Newmont are well off their all-time highs, Agnico Eagle is at its all-time high and significantly outperforming the bullish action in gold. They’ve had three consecutive quarters of record free cash flow and on a path to keep that streak going in the third quarter of 2024. In the second quarter of 2024, gold had its highest average price for a quarter and Agnico Eagle reported a half-billion dollars in free cash flow. It looks like gold will average a couple hundred dollars more in the average price for a quarter during the third quarter of 2024, so Agnico Eagle is set up to blow it out of the park. Other key metrics they are doing much better on than Barrick and Newmont is increasing their production, while producing gold for less per ounce and executing on plans to bring their costs down. For investors that want torque to the gold bull action, with less risk and lots of blue skies ahead, Agnico Eagle is an ideal candidate.
Alamos Gold
Alamos Gold is another gold miner that is outperforming their peers. They are smaller than Agnico Eagle, but they are also fantastic mine operators. In the third quarter of 2024, they had record free cash flow. They produce gold well below the average cost per ounce of the gold miners. In addition to being a great gold mine operator, they also made timely acquisitions when gold was much lower. Those purchases are bearing fruit and will enable them to increase their production and also bring their average cost of production to below $1000 per ounce. They certainly aren’t as well known as Newmont, Agnico Eagle and Barrick amongst generalist investors, but they are making new all-time highs in their stock price and that is the kind of thing that will catch generalist investors’ attention. Considering their impressive performance on all the important metrics, they are also an ideal candidate for investors that want torque to gold with less risk and plenty of wind behind their back.
Amex Exploration (sponsor, see disclosure below)
Amex Exploration recently put out a resource estimate with 1.6 million ounces of gold and a very promising margin between the cutoff grade and the average grade. The market was obviously looking for a much higher number than 1.6 million ounces of gold and the stock got punished. What several seem to have lost sight of is that they constrained the resource to what could make it through a preliminary economic assessment. Often when juniors produce a resource estimate, they have a lot of hopium in them and then take many years to have economics wrapped around them. When constrained to what is realistic, the resources are not so rosy. I’ve seen that kind of a situation happen many times with juniors. Amex Exploration went with a constrained resource that has the potential to pass the preliminary economic assessment (PEA) test. They are on schedule to produce the PEA within the next couple of months. Their Perron project is an exceptional gold project with a series of deposits that are all in close proximity to each other, with remarkable continuity of the high-grade gold, and it is in Quebec which is one of the best mining jurisdictions worldwide. The potential for it to become a future mine is assisted by it being very close to a mining town, so close that one can drive to it on a paved road and have cell phone coverage. The gold mining industry needs many more high-quality gold mine development projects and it is very hard to find ones of Perron’s quality.
Borealis Mining (sponsor, see disclosure below)
Borealis Mining just began trading in early August, 2024, during my 30-year career in mining, I have never seen a private company so well prepared for success as a public junior gold company as Borealis Mining. For me, it all starts with the project and the Borealis Mine has a rare combination of exceptional exploration potential, and a permitted gold mine in Nevada. The merits of the project enabled them to put together a who’s who of mining executives on their board of directors while a private company. Additionally, they have two famous mining company investors in Eric Sprott and Rob McEwen that joined the shareholder registry while Borealis Mining was a private company. The project was owned by Waterton, who Borealis was able to buy it from for less than $200k of cash and a big chunk of stock. The timing was perfect because it was during the recent bear market for gold stocks and Waterton is in the process of closing their resource fund. A few months before Borealis Mining went public, management presented the project to Rob McEwen, and he decided that he wanted to buy all of Waterton’s stock position. A price was agreed upon and closed, so now Rob McEwen is the largest shareholder of Borealis Mining, owning approximately 16% of the issued shares. Almost always, a newly listed junior is under pressure when it starts trading because the private company shareholders sell when it goes public as they got in at very low prices. Borealis Mining has bucked that trend significantly due to the quality of the project, board of directors that much larger mining companies would like to have, a highly talented operations team and a shareholder registry that includes mining investing legends. Their first important news release as a public company was that they poured gold from residual leaching, they can do more of that because they have a stacked leach pad with a significant amount of it never having been leached. Plus, they have a stockpile ready for crushing that can then be stacked on the leach pad and go through their ADR plant to produce gold bars. They have also completed drilling for both oxide zones and sulphide zones, with assays pending. Their immediate goals are to produce more gold bars and also drill for new discoveries of oxide and sulphide deposits. They have the mining permits, mining infrastructure and wide open gold exploration targets in Nevada. Stay tuned for more news as they have the rare combination of a target rich gold project that is underexplored and ability to produce gold giving them many catalysts to grow the company in the short-term and for years into the future.
Goliath Resources
Goliath Resources is my highest conviction gold discovery pick. Their Surebet gold discovery is at the southern tip of the Golden Triangle of British Columbia. They have drilled into a series of stacked gold zones. What stands out the most for me is the progression of visible gold they have hit with their drilling over the past few drilling seasons. At the top of the system, they first started seeing sporadic fine grained visible gold. As they moved deeper into the system they saw a transition to abundant fine grained visible gold and coarse grained visible gold. During the 2023 drilling season, 33% of their drill holes had visible gold and in 2024 they announced that 66% of the holes hit visible gold so far. One of the holes in the 2024 drilling campaign had the highest amount of visible gold ever seen in the drill core and they are also seeing beautiful specimens of coarse visible gold. One sample that stands out to me was from around 1000 metres from the Surebet discovery, the team was preparing the Jackpot target for drilling and they found a sample of remarkable leaf gold. Drilling will be below that sample and I can’t wait to see what it comes back with. At the beginning of the drilling season the plan was to drill 15k metres, but due to the early and ongoing successes, demand to fund additional drilling has been very strong and enabled an increase to the drilling campaign to 36k metres. To put that into context, at the recent mining conferences in Colorado, over half the explorers emphasized that funding their work is very challenging. That certainly isn’t the case for Goliath Resources. In recent private placements a new institutional investor from Singapore took part, Rob McEwen increased his position for his third investment, Crescat took part and Larry Childress made his initial investment in the company. They have 8 drill rigs pounding away with drill holes, and the geologists are busy monitoring the drilling, logging core, cutting core, preparing samples to go to the lab and keeping their eyes wide open for visible gold. This puts Goliath Resources into a position to be announcing assay results for several months. This year’s drilling is their best campaign so far at the Surebet discovery and they should have plenty of great news to report starting soon.
i-80 Gold (sponsor, see disclosure below)
i-80 Gold is my highest conviction gold stock turnaround pick. They are a Nevada focused gold developer with several high-quality deposits that are all noted for being big and high-grade. Plus, they have two processing facilities to use to recover the gold and base metals that they have on their projects. Recently, they announced that Ewan Downie would be relinquishing his position as CEO to make way for Richard Young. Ewan Downie is highly respected in the mining business due to the successes he has had running, Wolfden Resources, Premier Gold and i-80 Gold. He grew Wolfden from a tiny junior that made an important discovery and then was bought out. Prior to the takeover of Wolfden, they spun out Premier Gold to shareholders. Premier Gold made the discovery of the Greenstone mine that Equinox bought them out for and built it into one of Canada’s biggest new gold mines. In the takeover of Premier Gold, they spun out the Nevada gold projects inside of Premier Gold to create i-80 Gold. Since i-80 Gold started trading a few years ago, they added great projects and processing facilities, plus enhanced their various deposits with consistent exceptional drill results. Now, the company has the foundational assets to transform into an important Nevada gold mining company. Ewan Downie’s expertise is in deal making to acquire undervalued assets then enhance them with drilling. But, the company has grown to the point that it needs a mine builder and operator in the CEO position. Richard Young has Nevada specific mining experience as he held operational positions at Barrick’s Goldstrike Mine, which is one of the largest gold mines in all of North America. He was also the founder and CEO of Teranga Gold, which started as a single asset producer, then became a low-cost mid-tier that was bought out by Endeavor Mining in 2021 for C$2.1 billion. At this stage of i-80 Gold’s transition from a developer into a producer, Richard Young is a great selection for the job. Last week, I did an interview with both Richard Young and Ewan Downie. It was immediately evident how impressed Richard is with the group of assets that Ewan had compiled to launch i-80 Gold into being a big Nevada mining company. Ewan was equally impressed with Richard’s experience and skills to grow the company. I was also impressed that they will continue to work together, Ewan doing what he does best which is exploration and Richard focused on making i-80 Gold the next great Nevada mining company.
Juggernaut Exploration (sponsor, see disclosure below)
Juggernaut Exploration has two high-quality exploration projects, including claims right beside my highest conviction gold discovery pick Goliath Resources. The 2023 drilling season was their initial drilling season and the early results are strikingly similar to the early days of Goliath Resources’ initial discovery at nearby Surebet. They had a chance to do additional drilling this year on that project and their VMS target as well. I’m looking forward to their drilling results at both projects to see if they can keep advancing their project near Surebet. And I’m also very intrigued by their VMS project as they are targeting the guts of a big geophysical anomaly that they just touched the edges of in their 2023 drilling campaign.
McEwen Mining
McEwen Mining is a gold miner with guidance to produce between 130-150k gold equivalent ounces, plus has approximately a 50% interest in one of the top 10 undeveloped copper projects worldwide. To put their Los Azules project into context, this summer, BHP and Lundin Mining made a C$4.5 billion takeover offer for Filo Corp.’s Filo Del Sol copper development project. Los Azules is bigger, higher grade and also is in the lowest cost quartile for all undeveloped copper projects. Making it much easier to build and operate is that Filo Del Sol is high in the Andes at an elevation that is the same as base camp Everest, while Los Azules is a few thousand metres lower in elevation. Most of the investor attention on McEwen Mining is for the Los Azules copper project, but I think their gold mining story is very strong as well and getting practically zero investor attention. Rob McEwen is well aware of how transformational drilling can be for a gold miner because he saw it happen during his tenure running Goldcorp. They were a struggling gold miner that drilled deep below their mine workings to discover the bonanza-grade portion of their Red Lake mine. When they were mining that bonanza-grade part of the system, Goldcorp was one of the lowest cost gold miners in the sector, mining extreme high-grade gold and thus generated remarkable free cash flow. It made them one of the best performing gold mining stocks. Their drilling has been mainly focused on increasing production and bringing down costs. But, I think they have incredible exploration potential that could transform them into a Goldcorp kind of success story. Few are giving them much credit to transform the company's gold mining operations. I think that is a mistake, which is why I did a video last week digging deeper into their recent drill results from the Fox Complex. If I had to describe the project I would say it is an exploration guy’s dream project. It has many mineralized lenses all striking in the same direction and dipping in the same direction. I didn’t count them all but there has to be 100 of them. They are found in close proximity to the Destor-Porcupine fault and there is a secondary fault called A-1 that dips underneath the series of mineralized lenses. I would love to see them project the A-1 fault to depth and the series of lenses and drill the depth potential. With the vast amount of mineralized lenses all striking and dipping in the same direction and with the A-1 fault as the likely suspect for the conduit of the gold mineralizing fluids that brought the gold to the lenses is very exciting. It is pretty overwhelming to see so many mineralized lenses with their orientations as it suggests a very big, high-grade, powerful gold mineralizing source. In addition to the north of the A-1 fault and to the south of the Destor-Porcupine fault, in the Black Fox Exploration Horizon, they have nice drill hits of high-grade gold. They have many catalysts for growth, the gold price will improve the financial performance at their current gold mines, the drilling to increase production will also help, as will their efforts to bring down costs of gold production, plus the shareholders get a top 10 undeveloped copper project as a kicker.
NevGold Corp. (sponsor, see disclosure below)
NevGold has an oxide gold deposit in Idaho with 1.2 million ounces of gold at a grade similar to many current oxide gold mines, and it is open to get bigger. They also have a big land position in a part of Nevada that is seeing a lot of work by major gold miners. It has past production and is underexplored. They recently did a financing that put in place the funding to drill their Nutmeg Mountain gold project in Idaho and their Nevada gold project. In addition, they acquired a highly prospective copper porphyry project in Idaho not far from Hercules Metals discovery that got nearly a C$30 million investment from Barrick shortly after they announced their discovery hole. Since then there has been a staking rush with a lot of the ground being staked by major mining companies. It is a highly prospective region for copper porphyry exploration and Nevgold has a strategic land position based on similar geology to Hercules Metals’ discovery. The recent funding will help them get their Zeus project to the drill ready stage. I’m impressed with all their projects, but the one that stands out the most to me at this point is Nutmeg Mountain. Not only because of the oxide gold resource, but mainly because of the potential that there could be a cluster of gold rich epithermal veins below that brought the gold into the oxide deposits. Finding gold rich epithermal veins is not easy but can be extremely rewarding as Hishikari is one of the great gold mines throughout the world and it is a gold rich epithermal vein mine. I can’t wait to see them drill underneath the oxide deposits at the Nutmeg Mountain project, and will also be watching closely for what comes out of drilling at their Nevada project and further work at their Zeus copper porphyry project. For a junior exploration company, they have a lot on the go and I like their chances to see them bear fruit.
SilverCrest Metals
SilverCrest has one of the best new gold and silver mines that has been built during the past few years, anywhere in the world. It has low costs and is high-grade, making it a very profitable gold and silver mine. They started commercial production owing $100 million and due to the high profit margin they have been able to pay off all the debt, and then build up a war chest that includes cash, gold and silver bullion that exceeds that debt they had to bring it into full commercial production. Their mining at Las Chispas has only been on a few of the known epithermal veins on the property, and they are open to increase their resources, plus they have a cluster of epithermal veins to keep growing their resources as they are pretty much untouched. In clusters of epithermal veins, there are often blind veins that don’t come to the surface that can be even higher grade than the ones that are exposed at the surface. They have many veins that do come to the surface that need plenty of drilling. The bottom line is they have a series of epithermal veins that will keep adding to the mine life at Las Chispas for many years into the future. I can see them as being a takeover target by bigger miners focused on highly profitable gold and silver mines, or also as an acquirer of others.
All the best,
Allan Barry Laboucan
Disclosure
Amex Exploration is a sponsor of Rocks And Stocks News, content creation about them is for the benefit of the company. Sponsors also benefit readers of the reports as it makes content creation possible for no charge to readers. Borealis Mining is a sponsor of Rocks And Stocks News, content creation about them is for the benefit of the company. Sponsors also benefit readers of the reports as it makes content creation possible for no charge to readers. Allan Barry Laboucan is a shareholder of Borealis Mining and is a consultant to the company. Allan Barry Laboucan is a shareholder of Goliath Resources and also owns warrants to purchase additional shares. i-80 Gold is a sponsor of Rocks And Stocks News, content creation about them is for the benefit of the company. Sponsors also benefit readers of the reports as it makes content creation possible for no charge to readers. Amex Exploration is a sponsor of Rocks And Stocks News, content creation about them is for the benefit of the company. Sponsors also benefit readers of the reports as it makes content creation possible for no charge to readers. Juggernaut Exploration is a sponsor of Rocks And Stocks News, content creation about them is for the benefit of the company. Sponsors also benefit readers of the reports as it makes content creation possible for no charge to readers. NevGold Corp. is a sponsor of Rocks And Stocks News, content creation about them is for the benefit of the company. Sponsors also benefit readers of the reports as it makes content creation possible for no charge to readers.
Rocks And Stocks News does not make buying or selling recommendations. The reports are for information purposes only. Sponsors pay a fee to Rocks And Stocks News for content creation. The business model of Rocks And Stocks News is to fund research and reporting on the sector, picks and sponsors through corporate sponsorship. We are thankful to sponsors for enabling commentary free of charge to readers and viewers of the reports. When reporting on sponsors it is on behalf of the sponsors discussed in the portion of the report mentioning the sponsor. Before making any investment decision it is important for you to speak with your financial advisors to consider your risk profile. It is also important to do your homework. To help in that process, Rocks And Stocks News means to be a gateway by doing reports and interviews of management of sponsors and picks. The reports and interviews should not be considered investment advice. Allan Barry Laboucan is the founder and owner of Rocks And Stocks News, he has worked in the mining sector since 1993 and has been reporting on the sector since 2005. He has worked with and been mentored by very talented geoscientists in geology, geochemistry and geophysics. He uses the skills he has picked up during his career to assess sponsors and picks in the reports. Whether a company is a pick or a sponsor they go through the same filter and are reported on when important news is made that Allan Barry Laboucan wants to discuss on the Rocks And Stocks News platform. He may own shares in sponsors and picks for investment purposes which he discloses when discussing them in the reports.
