7 @ 7:00 « BullMarketRun.ca

November 28, 2018

7 @ 7:00

Check back for the next Daniel’s Den and visit the BMR comments section throughout the day for updates and helpful information!

1. Gold has traded between $1,211 and $1,216 so far today…as of 7:00 am Pacific, bullion is off $2 an ounce at $1,213…Gold is hovering near a 2-week low as the dollar remains buoyant ahead of an important speech later today by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell that is expected to offer fresh clues on the central bank’s monetary policy…Wall Street will be looking for any softening of tone from remarks the central bank chief made in October indicating the Fed wasn’t close to halting rate hikes…the Fed is likely to hike short-term rates in December, but the road from there is suddenly rather unclear…the Fed and Powell specifically are coming under increasing attack from President Trump for continuing to hike interest rates…fresh economic data just out showed that sales of new U.S. single-family homes tumbled to a more than a 2.5-year low in October amid sharp declines in all 4 regions, further evidence that higher mortgage rates have been hurting the housing market…Silver is unchanged at $14.13…Copper and Nickel are up slightly at $2.83 and $4.87, respectively…Zinc is flat at $1.14 while Cobalt remains steady at $25.06…Crude Oil has slipped 38 cents to $51.18 on a rise in U.S. Crude inventories…the U.S. Dollar Index, meanwhile, is up slightly at 97.42…Nickel ore output in the Philippines, the 2nd-biggest supplier to China after Indonesia, fell 1% in the first 9 months of 2018 from a year earlier to 22.2 million dry metric tonnes, according to the latest government data…11 of the Philippines’ 29 Nickel mines had no output during the period due to suspended operations or because they were under maintenance status…

2. Budgets for Gold exploration from across the world have jumped considerably this year despite lackluster prices, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence…the mining industry saw Gold exploration budgets increase 20% to $4.86 billion in 2018 from $4.05 billion in 2017…the report, dedicated to all nonferrous metals, pointed out that Gold has been doing better than other metals, accounting for nearly 50% of the total nonferrous exploration budget…“The global nonferrous exploration budget increased 19% year on year to $10.1 billion,” S&P Global said, adding that junior exploration miners’ budgets were up 35%…drilling activity around the globe surged in October, with almost all metrics improving over the previous month to reach highs of 6,291 drill holes reported from 315 projects…in a discovery-driven market, that’s a good sign going forward…

Primary Gold projects reported the most results last month with October matching a 9-month high of 163 separate projects as you can see in the above table…however, the largest month-over-month increases came from other commodities, with Copper, Nickel and specialty metals projects all setting new highs…projects targeting Silver and Platinum group metals were the only ones with lower numbers in October after both reached 11-month highs in September…

3. The high-grade Gold hits keep coming for iMetal Resources (IMR, TSX-V) in a grassroots discovery at its Gowganda West Property in northern Ontario, ignited in part by a massive clear-cutting and logging operation that’s exposing previously hidden outcrop over increasingly broad areas…IMR’s 100 sq. km package is contiguous to soon-to-be Pan American Silver’s (PAAS, TSX) 4-million ounce Juby deposit (defined by Tahoe which Pan American is acquiring) and 15 km west of Canada Cobalt’s (CCW, TSX-V) Castle mine and property where CCW appears to be in the midst of its own Gold discovery in drilling east of the mine (update from CCW expected shortly)…in its latest surface discovery announced this morning, IMR has found a highly mineralized new area of outcrop on the northern part of its property in Kirkland Lake-style Timiskaming sediments and green carbonate mafic rocks…Zone 1 South, as it’s called, strikes north-south, is open to strike and may be structurally linked with Zone 1 approximately 200 m to the north near the Pan American/Juby boundary…all 14 chip samples taken from this new area of outcrop (50 m wide and at least 60 m in length before it disappears under cover) ran in Gold with assays as high as 39.3 g/t Au, 16.5 g/t and 11.5 g/t…9 of the 14 samples assayed better than 2 g/t Au…this area is several kilometres north of Zones 3A, 3B and 3C where IMR has discovered high-grade Gold and Copper in outcrop that’s exposed intermittently over a 2.4-km-long structural corridor…Gary Grabowski, iMetal’s advisory board member who served as district geologist for Ontario’s Ministry of Northern Development and Mines for more than 35 years, commented: “Gowganda in general has been very under-explored and offers potential for Kirkland Lake-style mineralization and deposits”…IMR is preparing for first-ever drilling which is expected to commence in December…to the east, CCW has already reported world class Cobalt grades from underground drilling at the past producing Castle mine…geologically, it appears the Nipissing diabase “heat engine” at Castle mobilized Silver and Cobalt (plus some Nickel and Gold) – those metals are mostly within the diabase at the mine – from a major Archean source in an under-explored area just to the east where a CCW drill program continues…the key takeaway is that the Gowganda area is a very strong candidate for the next grassroots Gold discovery in Canada…

4. President Trump told The Washington Post yesterday that he’s “not even a little bit happy” with his appointment of Jerome Powell as chair of the Federal Reserve… Trump added that he thinks the U.S. central bank is “way off-base with what they’re doing”…although Powell has become a repeated target of Trump’s ire, it’s historically unusual for Presidents to openly criticize the head of the Federal Reserve…the Fed has been raising interest rates as the U.S. economy picks up, but Trump argues these rate hikes are hurting the U.S. economy…the Post also said he blamed the Fed for the recent stock market weakness and General Motors’ plans to close plants and cut more than 14,000 jobs…“I’m doing deals and I’m not being accommodated by the Fed,” Trump told the Post…“They’re making a mistake because I have a gut and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me”…

5. Canada’s central bank’s recent bullishness with regard to interest rate hikes now appears almost absurd with stock market jitters, bankruptcies on the increase, auto sector layoffs and – most importantly – prices for Canadian heavy Crude at massive differentials to WTI which is costing the Canadian economy $100 million or more per day according to some estimates (the price we’re paying for a lack of pipeline capacity which is the biggest self-inflicted wound in Canadian economic history, all in the name of “saving the planet”)…considered a sure thing by many economists only a couple of weeks ago, doubts are beginning to emerge about whether the central bank will hike in January without a rebound in slumping prices for Canadian heavy Crude…in reports over the past 24 hours, Toronto-Dominion Bank and Bank of Montreal have put asterisks on their calls for a move, while swaps trading suggests investors are also paring bets…should weakness persist, “we would expect the Bank of Canada to hold off on raising its policy interest rate until there is further stabilization in Oil prices,” Toronto-Dominion Bank economists Omar Abdelrahman and Brian DePratto wrote in a research note the other day…

6. The Dow is up 107 points as of 7:00 am Pacific…the Federal Reserve has issued a cautionary note about risks to financial stability, saying trade tensions, geopolitical uncertainty and a buildup in corporate debt among firms with weak balance sheets pose strong threats…in Toronto, the TSX is up 42 points through the first 30 minutes of trading…Royal Bank of Canada reported a forecast-beating 17% jump in 4th-quarter earnings, helped by growth in its retail banking and wealth management divisions…Canada’s biggest lender by market value posted earnings per share of $2.20 in the 3 months to October 31, ahead of a consensus analyst forecast of $2.12…the Venture, trying to snap out of very oversold conditions, is up 3 points at 589…a strong band of support, going back to early 2016, stretches from about 575 to 560…

7. NERD – how’s that for a stock symbol?…after successfully closing its $4.7 million IPO at 35 cents on Monday, Nerds On Site (NERD, CSE) commenced trading on the Canadian Securities Exchange this morning…“This is a major milestone for the company but also a first step in a series of planned steps in growing the size and footprint of Nerds On Site in Canada and United States”, stated NERD CEO Charlie Regan…with a lean and scalable business model which does not require the traditional brick-and-mortar approach, the company says it’s well-positioned to quickly penetrate the highly fragmented information technology (IT) service marketplace in the U.S., valued at over $360 billion (U.S.) annually…Nerds On Site is primarily targeting the small-and medium-sized business marketplace which currently does not have a clear national leader in the United States…