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Mining Monthly: January Edition

What you need to know:
• Gold held flat in January following a big monthly gain of 13% and reaching all-time highs in December, while mining equities lagged.
• Besides gold, other precious metals, commodities, and battery metals had a mixed month, while uranium’s strong performance accelerated, up 16% in January and hitting its highest price in more than 16 years.
• We attended a busy Vancouver Resource Investment Conference in January. Find our top picks from the conference here.

Following a strong close to 2023, gold and PMs took a breath in January with gold flat, closing the month at $2,058/oz. However, the GDX, GDXJ, and SIL underperformed posting monthly losses of 7.1%, 8.3%, and 8.3%, respectively. This compares to broader markets posting solid gains with the TSX up 0.3% and S&P 500 up 1.8%. Other commodities had a slight down month, with copper, steel, and iron ore at 0%, -2%, and -7%, respectively. The battery metals space was flat with lithium’s sharp decline appearing to slow (down 1% vs. 80% YoY).

Uranium posted yet another month of strong positive gains, ending the month up 16% (after +12% in December) to $106/lb bringing gains to 117% YoY. This is also the highest price in over 16 years. Many of the reasons for the continued strong gains are structural and can be found in our note here, but some more bullish news came this month. The most notable being that Kazakhstan’s Kazatomprom (KAP:IL), one of the world’s largest uranium producers, said that it may cut its 2024 production guidance due to poor availability of supplies required to produce uranium.

Transactions and investment activity continued in January (see M&A section below) and, more importantly, we believe sentiment towards the industry is slowly beginning to turn. This was seen first-hand last week at the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference, where a plethora of retail investors circled the floor. More internationally, Saudi Arabia signed an MOU with several countries to boost mining collaboration and is investing to diversify beyond oil (see Major News section).

End-of-month extreme volatility in certain gold and silver equities
On Jan 29th, Amplify ETFs announced the closing of its acquisition of ETF Managers Group (ETFMG) ETF assets, adding over $3.7B of AUM across 14 ETFs, mostly all thematic ETFs. Of the 14, Amplify acquired a Precious Metals ETF and is now sponsoring the “Prime Junior Silver Miners ETF” (SILJ:NYSE). The ETF has been rebranded as “Amplify Junior Silver Miners ETF”. During this change, Amplify changed the ETF benchmark to the Nasdaq Metals Focus Silver Miners Index and rebalanced the portfolio from the prior methodology – which previously mimicked Solactive’s Prime Junior Silver Miners & Explorers Index. Accordingly, there was extreme volatility (+/- 50%) for many gold and silver equities.