Thanks for the comment on the board Buzz. It’s an interesting point of discussion about when the move in the PM stocks began and really comes down to which segment and stage of the gold and silver equities one is talking about.

I put out a piece on Substack back in April pointing out that the PM bull market really kicked off after Gold made it’s Major Low at $1045.40 back in December of 2015, and the PM stocks bottomed on January 19th, 2016. We’ve never seen GDX or GDXJ make lower lows than back at that point, and then the slow climb up began with the first leg of the “baby bull” back in that 7-month rally from Jan-Aug of 2016, then consolidated for the 2nd half of 2016 through the fall of 2018.

However, the next big wave of the bull market, at least in the gold stocks began in October of 2018 and overall the gold stocks were rallying for 2019 into 2020 and in a bull market, but it was interrupted by the Pandemic Crash starting on Feb 28th and through March and April of 2020, which hit all markets across-the-board, and reset everything in a sense.

However for PMs, again that spring Pandemic Crash of 2020 was actually an interruption of the next leg higher of this bull market, and that leg had started about a year and half earlier (it’s just that many investors only hanging out in the junior pre-revenue drillplays weren’t noticing the moves up in the quality producers during that time frame).

I remember posting about this leg underway over at Ceo.ca in a number of posts in late 2018 and throughout 2019 and distinctly remember one user there sarcastically chiding on my posts “We’re in a bull market @excelsior? Who knew?” and then laughing at that assertion.

In return, I posted a number of charts showing that yes ding-dong, gold and gold stocks and even some silver stocks had been rallying for while, and of course he went radio silent after that with no snarky comeback, because “documentation beats conversation.”

Again we surely were NOT in a bear market, where the gold equity EFTs or quality producers were making lower lows, and they never came close to threatening the Major Lows from January of 2016…. Bear markets require that the pricing action is in a sustained down trend that makes new lower lows and keeps making them. That was not at all what we were seeing from late 2018 – early 2020.

Despite that fact, we still continue to hear many revisionists of history claiming that whole time period was a bear market in sector… That’s simply not true.

What is more likely true is that it may have been in a bear market IN THEIR PORTFOLIO if they were in dead-end cash-starved drill plays, but the sector leadership was rallying from late 2018 through the pandemic crash for a couple of months, and then V-bottomed up back to where it was before the crash and then blasted even higher up to August of 2020. You could easily make the case in the quality gold stocks that they were in a nearly 2-year bull leg from October of 2018 through August of 2020.

Had the Pandemic Crash not happened, and we’d seen a continuation of the moves that had started 18 months prior, people would be looking at this bull market more clearly, but that period of the dramatic crash rightly throws a lot of people off if they don’t critically look at the charts for years prior to that market shock.

This is also why we keep hearing the disinformation that we’ve only had two 6-7 month bull cycles in 2016 and 2020. I wonder what they are smoking to have that limited perspective? Clearly they weren’t positioned in producers in late 2018 or 2019 or prior to the spring of 2020 crash, or they’d have been making money and wouldn’t say such silly things.

Again, that is simply not true that we’ve only seen two 6-month rallies, but that is still what many so-called “experts” believe and parrot back in interviews. For the really for savvy investors that were buying into the lows in the fall of 2018 based on the technical set up at that time (like many of us were here on this site) and that held through the March/April 2020 whipsaw, than again they had about a 2-year bull leg. I never hear anybody discussing that fact…. because it is more convenient for them to brush away those point, since they likely had misallocated to only pre-revenue companies during that period and didn’t participate in it. Rather than admit they missed it, they delete it from memory.

Even this more recent next leg higher in the bull cycle actually started at that false breakdown in Sept-Nov of 2022, and the quality equities have been rallying higher since then.

Then we had new daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly all-time highs in Nov-Dec of 2023, which was the breakout signal that the next leg of the bull market had kicked off, and yet we still keep hearing that the breakout didn’t begin until the Feb 29th leap day move into March of 2024, but that is because most were not really paying attention to the technical signals and bells ringing in Nov/Dec of 2023 that the breakout had just occurred.

Then there is even another layer of people obsessed with gold breaking out versus US equities and the inflation-adjusted gold price, that believe the PM bull market just started a couple of months ago in March of 2025, and have proclaimed the bull market just got started. (huh?) Look, I get that they mean in “real terms” against other sectors, but that is totally not required for any asset class to be in a bull market, so that is a very nuanced point of view that only some people hold to.

Then there is a whole other camp that believe that since their juniors finally got financed and started moving higher with gusto in May that the bull market just got started last month. There were speakers and investors at the May Metals Investor Forum in Vancouver proclaiming that “Finally, the bull market in gold stocks just got started!” (I was shaking my head in the audience because this bull market did NOT just get started and has been running for many years now).

If more investors would just pull up some longer-dated charts they’d clearly see that GDX, GDXJ, and GOEX all bottomed and started the bull market a decade ago. We are nowhere close to “The First Inning” of this bull market, but we’ll probably hear that hundreds of more times throughout the ongoing bull market.

Oh… by the way…. Santacruz Silver (SCZ.V) was up another 22% just today, building upon the rally from Monday.

I’ve had so many investors tell me it was a garbage stock when I told them it has been my biggest position for most of 2025.

Then when I mentioned Santacruz Silver actually had the most torque of any silver producer back in that 2020 run coming out of the pandemic, crushing the results of the rest of the silver producers, and periodically rallies 100-300% over and over again, they’d look back at me like I told them their grandmother just died or something. Look, I’m not investing to get married to the stock, nor do I care if they have a Tier 1 deposit or the A-team running it. I’m here to make money, and I’ve made the most money position-trading Santacruz Silver for the last decade, compared to any other silver stock I’ve owned (and I currently hold 20 of them). It is far from perfect, but I go into why that lack of perfection gives it an absurd valuation compared to their mid-tier silver producing peers, and it is still trading with Price to Earnings P/E ratio under 2. Haha!

You gotta love these inefficient markets!

https://cdn-ceo-ca.s3.amazonaws.com/1k4003s-Santacruz%20Silver%20-%207%20year%20chart.JPG

Hi Buzz. Yeah, that is true that certain juniors have had a disproportionate amount of selling and pain, and according to Terry Lynch from Power Nickel they’ve seen some real games being played on the short-side in the juniors in particular. They have that “Save Canadian Mining” effort where Eric Sprott is involved, to try and get regulators in Canada to do something about it and reinstate the uptick rule.

To your point, the big volume increases as of late does show more participation and more capital coming into the sector, and hopefully it swamps the shorts. That may have been what was happening earlier this week and yesterday in stocks like Santacruz and Americas Gold and Silver.

Cheers!