Australia’s gold output is now at a two-decade low, having fallen to 219 tonnes in 2008, and down 27 percent from 2007 output, as mining companies dug up more lower grade gold bearing ores in response to rising bullion prices.

South Africa’s 2008 gold output was the lowest since 1922 due to power shortages, dwindling grades, and the closure of several mines. South Africa’s Chamber of Mines reports a 13.6 percent decline in annual gold output in 2008, helping to push the price of the precious metal higher.

The world’s largest gold refinery increased coin output to the highest level in 23 years as the demand for South African Krugerrands rose. The refinery has doubled weekly production to 20,000 ounces of blank coins for minting as of January 2009. In addition, the U.S. Mint has sold 93,500 ounces of its popular American Eagle gold coin in the first seven weeks of this year, the same amount it shipped during the whole of 2007.

Nice email in my inbox this am from the Silver Prices Newsletter. The comparision between Silver, Gold, USD and the Dow’s performance over the last couple of months in 2009 is revealing.

I really like CTO. I think it is rather nicely positioned with a low market cap and over 10m ozs of JORC gold at 14gms/ton average grade.

I have been a so called “gold bug” for almost 30 years. Over that time I have meet only a handful of people who have specialised in Gold investing. Over the last decade it became almost impossible to find a large stock broking firm with a good gold analyst… and I suspect that there still is a dearth of experienced gold analysts available through the major broking houses. True many have recently become “gold experts” , but these newly minted experts don’t seem to have much depth to their knowledge and seem mostly to be trend followers usually unwilling to do the hard research yards. There are notable exceptions: Lodge Partners recently did some excellent in depth gold company research… and if you can beg, borrow or … it you will become well informed quite quickly…. However as I understand it Lodge really only deal with high net wealth individuals and corporations.

WilsonHTM are pretty good and for those that really want good information the http://www.intierra.com/Homepage.aspx database is outstanding.

If you have someone that you know is good with the golds please post a comment or even just email me on [email protected] and I will eventually compile and publish a list.

Happy hunting

This is pretty interesting multiply the resource by the average grades and then compare the market caps…. Across Australia’s top 20 producers there is one incredible BUY.
(I’ll talk about the caveats in tomorrows post)

All gold and silver will be held by the Custodian at its London vault premises. Platinum and palladium will be held by the Custodian at its London vault premises or by Zurich Sub-Custodians at their Zurich vault premises.

Bullion may be held elsewhere by the Custodian or a Sub-Custodian on a temporary basis prior to Bullion being transported to such vault premises or as part of a creation or redemption process. The Custodian will be responsible for the transportation, handling and any costs associated with moving Bullion to or from its London vault premises and between any vaults of sub-custodians.

As at the date of this Prospectus the Sub-Custodians directly appointed by the Custodian are the Bank of England, The Bank of Nova Scotia (ScotiaMocatta), Deutsche Bank AG, JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., UBS AG, Barclays Bank PLC, Johnson Matthey plc, Brink’s Global Services Inc. and ViaMat International.

All Bullion for the Metal Securities will be held in allocated form pursuant to the terms of the Custodian Agreements except that some Bullion may be held in unallocated form on a short term basis when Bullion is in the process of being allocated or de-allocated in connection with creations and redemptions of Metal Securities or any residual portion that is too small to make up a whole Good Delivery bar.

Bullion held in allocated form is not a credit risk against the Custodian but represents direct ownership of the metal, whereas Bullion held in unallocated form is an unsecured credit risk against the Custodian.