Since 1960 #juniors spent about $61 billion on #mining #exploration in Canada

Since 1960 juniors spent about $61 billion on exploration in Canada - 36 percent of the total exploration spend - and made about 45 percent of total discoveries

Junior vs. Senior - Discovery performance in charts

Mineweb.com EXPLORATION

We take a look junior performance in Canada, versus seniors, through research provided by Richard Schodde over at Minex Consulting.

Author: Kip Keen
Posted: Tuesday , 26 Nov 2013 HALIFAX, NS (MINEWEB) - 
In a recent presentation Richard Schodde over at Minex Consulting draws a striking picture of the performance of juniors and seniors in mineral exploration in Canada and abroad. We thought it worthwhile sharing a few of his graphs (with his permission) that draw a clear picture of the importance of juniors in the Canadian exploration scene.

 The summary statistic is this. Since 1960 juniors spent about $61 billion on exploration in Canada - 36 percent of the total exploration spend - and made about 45 percent of total discoveries, Schodde says.
Here we see the raw spending, seniors versus juniors:

In recent decades it's apparent that junior spending has skyrocketed, a fact that can in part be attributed to the increasing power of the personal computer. Bare bones companies, starting in the 1980s could compete with majors in the exploration game.
Discoveries followed the money:

We see that juniors made many of Canada's discoveries in recent decades, indeed, most of them in the past 10 years. Often exploration is a fruitless task, however. You spend money and find nothing and this is evident Schodde's overall ratio of total exploration spend to the value of discoveries. For juniors this was 0.89.
Typically, it's the rare, major discoveries that make for massive returns (though not only). This is evident in the next graph where Tier 1 discoveries - big ones - drive Schodde's estimates of discovery value far above what was spent. Juniors in the past decade have ruled this roost (yellow bars=value created, red line=spending) making most of the big discoveries.

Where do we go from here? Metal prices dominate the exploration cycle in Schodde's analysis (though there are other contributing factors) and he extrapolates future exploration spending in a variety of gold price scenarios. His general sentiment: the sky isn't falling. Taking $1,200 an ounce gold, he forecasts exploration spend to average about $1.3 billion a year in Canada in the coming years. That's well off 2012, a banner year. But historically speaking, it's still quite a healthy level.

Credit: Minex Consulting

Read the article online here:  Junior vs. Senior - Discovery performance in charts - EXPLORATION - Mineweb.com Mineweb

Rich families hoarding cash: Citi

Wealthy families have about 39 percent of their assets in cash

Rich families hoarding cash: Citi

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A new survey of family offices by Citi finds that the wealthy are cash heavy—meaning they may fall short of the investment returns they're expecting.
Wealthy families have about 39 percent of their assets in cash, according to a recent poll of more than 50 large family office representatives from 20 countries conducted by Citi Private Bank.
Stocks represented about 25 percent of portfolios on average. Bonds were about 17 percent of the asset mix and various classes of less liquid and alternative investments amounted to 19 percent.
"Using these weightings, our own return expectation for the portfolio … comes to just 4.4 percent. This matches what we at Citi Private Bank observe generally among high end investors: very high cash holdings, with a current asset allocation unlikely to achieve return targets," Steven Wieting, the bank's global chief investment strategist, wrote in a recent client note.

Read the whole article here:  Rich families hoarding cash: Citi


The Pangea Advisors Blog

#Coconut Crisis Looms as Postwar #Palm Trees Age: Southeast #Asia @Bloomberg

• world consumption of coconut products is growing more than 10 percent a year, production is increasing by only 2 percent

• The trees, many of which were planted about 50 to 60 years ago, no longer yield enough to meet rising demand

• The harvest in the Asia-Pacific is now about 40 nuts per tree a year, compared with a potential yield of 75 to 150, it estimates, saying replanting is advisable after 60 years.

• The global coconut area was about 12.3 million hectares (30.3 million acres), yielding 64.3 billion nuts

• Asia-Pacific accounts for about 85 percent of the global supply of the commodity that goes into food, fuel, soaps and cosmetics

See the whole article on Bloomberg:  Coconut Crisis Looms as Postwar Palm Trees Age: Southeast Asia - Bloomberg


The Pangea Advisors Blog

#Bubbles, Bubbles Everywhere | Mauldin Economics

The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.

– Albert Einstein

Genius is a rising stock market.
– John Kenneth Galbraith

Any plan conceived in moderation must fail when circumstances are set in extremes.
– Prince Metternich

Bubbles, Bubbles Everywhere

You can almost feel it in the fall air (unless you are in the Southern Hemisphere). The froth and foam on markets of all shapes and sizes all over the world. It is an exhilarating feeling, and the pundits who populate the media outlets are bubbling over with it. There is nothing like a rising market to help lift our mood. Unless of course, as Prof. Kindleberger famously cautioned (see below), we are not participating in that rising market. Then we feel like losers. But what if the rising market is … a bubble? Are we smart enough to ride and then step aside before it bursts? Research says we all think that we are, yet we rarely demonstrate the actual ability.

This week we'll think about bubbles. Specifically, we'll have a look at part of the chapter on bubbles from my latest book, Code Red, which we launched last week. At the end of the letter, for your amusement, is a link to a short video of what you might hear if Jack Nicholson were playing the part of Ben Bernanke (or Janet Yellen?) on the witness stand, defending the extreme measures of central banks. A bit of a spoof, in good fun, but there is just enough there to make you wonder what if … and then smile. Economics can be so much fun if we let it.

I decided to use this part of the book when numerous references to bubbles popped into my inbox this week. When these bubbles finally burst, let no one exclaim that they were black swans, unforeseen events. Maybe because we have borne witness to so many crashes and bear markets in the past few decades, we have gotten better at discerning familiar patterns in the froth, reminiscent of past painful episodes.

Let me offer you three such bubble alerts that came my way today. The first is from my friend Doug Kass, who wrote:

I will address the issue of a stock market bubble next week, but here is a tease and fascinating piece of data: Since 1990, the P/E multiple of the S&P 500 has appreciated by about 2% a year; in 2013, the S&P's P/E has increased by 18%!

Then, from Jolly Olde London, comes one Toby Nangle, of Threadneedle Investments (you gotta love that name), who found the following chart, created a few years ago at the Bank of England. At least when Mervyn King was there they knew what they were doing. In looking at the chart, pay attention to the red line, which depicts real asset prices. As in they know they are creating a bubble in asset prices and are very aware of how it ends and proceed full speed ahead anyway. Damn those pesky torpedoes.

Toby remarks:

This is the only chart that I’ve found that outlines how an instigator of QE believes QE’s end will impact asset prices. The Bank of England published it in Q3 2011, and it tells the story of their expectation that while QE was in operation there would be a massive rise in real asset prices, but that this would dissipate and unwind over time, starting at the point at which the asset purchases were complete.

Oh, dear gods. Really? I can see my friends Nouriel Roubini or Marc Faber doing that chart, but the Bank of England? Really?!?

Then, continuing with our puckish thoughts, we look at stock market total margin debt (courtesy of those always puckish blokes at the Motley Fool). They wonder if, possibly, maybe, conceivably, perchance this is a warning sign?

And we won’t even go into the long list of stocks that are selling for large multiples, not of earnings but of SALES. As in dotcom-era valuations.

We make the case in Code Red that central banks are inflating bubbles everywhere, and that even though bubbles are unpredictable almost by definition, there are ways to benefit from them. So, without further ado, let’s look at what co-author Jonathan Tepper and I have to say about bubbles in Chapter 9.

Easy Money Will Lead to Bubbles and How to Profit from Them

Every year, the Darwin Awards are given out to honor fools who kill themselves accidentally and remove themselves from the human gene pool. The 2009 Award went to two bank robbers. The robbers figured they would use dynamite to get into a bank. They packed large quantities of dynamite by the ATM machine at a bank in Dinant, Belgium.…

Read the rest of the piece here:  Bubbles, Bubbles Everywhere | Thoughts from the Frontline Investment Newsletter | Mauldin Economics