The exhibit hall at the Silver Summit in San Francisco was filled with resource companies. Investors roamed the booths and sat in on CEO presentations to determine which companies had the best geography, core samples, business plan—and ultimately—chance of returning big upside to shareholders. The Gold Report took the advice of Frank Holmes, CEO and chief investment officer at U.S. Global Investors who recommended the book “The Wisdom of Crowds” by James Surowiecki, and polled attendees for the best prospects. The results were pretty overwhelming.
According to Surowiecki’s research, a motivated, independent-minded group can come up with the right answer and be smarter than even the smartest single member of the group. To test that, we asked investors to tell us their three favorite companies and then aggregated the results to determine which ones the group thought could outperform the market itself.
The top three—First Majestic Silver Corp. (FR:TSX; AG:NYSE; FMV:FSE), Silver Wheaton Corp. (SLW:TSX; SLW:NYSE) and Hecla Mining Co. (HL:NYSE)—were the clear crowd favorites. All had recently reported news. First Majestic, fresh off the acquisition of SilverCrest Mines Inc., now has six producing mines in Mexico and projected output at 11–11.2 million ounces (11–11.2 Moz) by the end of the year. Silver Wheaton, which reported record production in Q3/15 of 11 Moz silver equivalent, recently announced it had added a 140 Moz silver stream from Glencore’s producing Antamina mine. Hecla Mining, which is getting ready to celebrate its 125th anniversary, recently announced that it would begin open-pit mining by the end of 2015 at the San Sebastian project in Durango, Mexico.
Other companies that came to the conference with news include:
Balmoral Resources Ltd. (BAR:TSX; BAMLF:OTCQX) brought results from a new nickel-copper intercept based on ongoing exploration at the Grasset project in …read more