Smallcappower: SmallCapPower was a Gold Plus sponsor at the recent PDAC convention held in Toronto. We thought this would be a great time to ask our roster of experts, “What commodity has the best upside potential?”
Jay Taylor: You know I think we’re looking at geopolitical aspects that make palladium one of my top picks in the medal sector. And I’m saying that as a gold bug and one that really loves gold as a monetary asset. But frankly, the supply of palladium coming out of South Africa is a major problem; the continuation of difficulties in mining palladium and platinum, but palladium is the medal I’m most bullish on. It’s very difficult. So the supply side is very problematic. And it’s my understanding that Russia, which had been a net exporter of palladium, is actually talking about importing palladium, going into the markets and buying palladium. So my question is, “Where is the palladium going to come from?” That’s a good question. I mean we have North American palladium. There’s one company that’s on my list. I like them a lot. There aren’t many choices in that field. So that’s probably my favorite metal.
Brent Cook: Barring World War III, which would probably do something for gold, I don’t know. I think gold’s going to do all right. I think later this year the copper price should be coming up. There is a shortage coming up. And zinc maybe two years out from now. There’s really three that I like a lot.
Vikas Ranjan: I like zinc. I also like nickel and the gold may surprise you as well.
John Kaiser: The commodity that people talk the most about is zinc, and every year they say zinc is getting ready to break out. Now zinc needs to go through $1.20 to really make people convinced it’s finally happening. Some of the experts are predicting that this year will be sluggish for zinc. But by 2016, the mountain in the warehouse, which is already at half point, will be even lower and will reach that tipping point. So markets tend to anticipate the actual developments so now is a good time to look at zinc stories. Either advanced companies where they’ve already done an economic study, or ones which have a mineralized system where they are going to do more work to flesh it out and make it bigger, upgrade the resource, estimate and perhaps do an economic study. This is the medal where right now one should focus one’s attention.
Eric Coffin: If we’re going to just talk about where things are at the end of the year, I suspect the best percentage move is probably going to be uranium. For the simple reason that hardly anybody is making money-money on uranium right now. It needs to move up for anybody to get anywhere. I like zinc, but I don’t think 2015 is going to be zinc’s year, I think it’s probably going to be 2016. But you may actually see it start to more before that. There’s a large zinc mine that basically gets to the end of its mine life in Q3. When Century Mine goes offline the deficit, the inventory that’s been falling off for three years now, that drop off should really accelerate after that, so I think 2016 could be a good year for zinc. But I’m not sure where it’s going to get to by the end of the year so I put that probably second after uranium. And actually I think copper’s probably going to come back a little bit too. There have been several mine accidents, generator explosions, all the usual stuff you get at mine sites that have collectively probably knocked 300 or 400 tons off of this year’s copper production. I’d assumed all along there’d be a fair size surplus this year, I wasn’t expecting copper to do that well this year, but I think that surplus may actually not show up. So we may actually have seen the worst of it a month ago.
