Junior mining stocks have been very strong recently, also relative to senior miners. What does it mean?The protagonist in this story is a multi-faced indicator. When we see it, we know that something's up, but we don't know what.
The value of the senior producers can be best by estimating free cash flows to the company, discounting them to the net present value, and so on. Or through the price-to-earnings values. The basis is the same – they are proxies for the prices of metals that they either sell or expect to sell in the future. And yet, due to the above-mentioned differences, they will behave differently.
There is also another factor at play here. Namely, the link between junior miners and stocks is stronger than the one between seniors and stocks. This is quite normal, given that seniors have revenues to back up their valuations, while juniors depend more on the market mood. Can you now see the importance thereof? We only saw this indication a couple of times in recent years, and in most of those cases, it corresponded to key tops in gold and oftentimes also in stocks.