Good afternoon
consumer confidence in the States disappointed - not surprising to me - when you look at their presidential candidates, there is every reason to be confused - to the very least and to put it extremely mildly!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Weak economic numbers from China, especially manufacturing and services indices, have been annopunced today, leading to renewed weakness of the yuan.
Both of the above lead to some reasonable agressive profit-taking in equities around the world today - unfortunately, weakness also extended to the metals complex, which had shown some nice rises until today ( zinc nearly up 20% from recent lows has been the strongest ), and to oil.
The nice exception has been gold - trading at 1226 US$/oz, and pushed higher by the largest increase of holdings in the gold ETF in 6 years! Sentiment for gold has certainly turned the corner!!
BHP´s result and their large dividend cut, which probably was even larger than expected, got the ehadliens today. Most importantly perhaps, BHP is very cautious on iron ore from yesterday´s very strong level of 51,50 US$/t - that´s certainly stronger than almost everyone was expecting. But the dividend cut was taken well by markets, as was another cut in capex from 11 bill$ last year to 7 bill this year, and 5 bill next.
Beadell Resources - raised 50 Mill A$ at the ridicilous price of 19,5ct. I am annoyed as existing shareholder - but to protect my interest and too much dilution, I had to play the game and had to subcribe for a few. Reportedly, the placement has been massively oversubdcribed, and teh stock has already returned to pre-placement levels on very strong turnover. The company wants to use the funds for agressive exploration, general working capital, and "some" debt payment. This placement puts them on very save footing, but excessively dilutes my upside as a shareholder....pity...I could have understood say 20 mill$, but not this large amount.
Cardinal Resources - announced two more, excellent drillholes into their property in Burkina. Both holes intrescted more than 300m of mineralised zone,including some very high grade intersections of 45m with 7,7g gold, and 35m with 3,65g gold/t. Some of the recent holes had been indicating a large tonnage, low strip ratio, very consistant resource of say 1.2g / t - hence tehse high grade intersctions could turn out to be very significant. The company has 3 mill$ cash left, is in the process toe xtend the drilling , but at some stage, will need to raise some further funds. CDV continue to be a good story....next round of drilling could turn out to be important as to defining more high grade parts of the orebody.
Have a nice evening
WS