No worries @Stuey727, I'd forgotten about that exchange - being 6 months ago as it is... I've just gone through and made the links into actual links rather than the type you have to copy and then paste into your browser - which was the only type we could use back then in forum posts - thankfully Strawman.com now allows proper weblinks in posts as well as some other formatting features that have always been available when you are creating straws.  However, we still can't add pictures or attach files to forum posts...  like we can to straws...  Perhaps one day...

As a person who says they enjoy reading my mining sector war stories Stuey, I'd say you're in a very small group indeed, possibly all by yourself, but that's OK, if I post something and one person enjoys it, it's worth the effort.

I see SVL are trading a couple of cents higher than where they were when we were last talking about them in October (6 months ago) and they VERY briefly spiked up to 36.5 cps (on 1-Feb-2021), which was around 80% higher than the 20 cps level they were at in October.  But they just as quickly dropped back down again, eh!  There is some method to that madness however,  They spiked up after their last "Significant high-grade drill results from Bowdens Silver" on 28-Jan-2021 and their "Quarterly Activities and Cash Flow Report" on 29-Jan-2021.  They came back to earth because as soon as the share price went north of 30 cps, they announced a "PLACEMENT TO RAISE $30 MILLION" at 22 cps (on 15-Feb-2021).  Also, just prior to the share price spike up, they also announced that they had sold their 100% interests in the Webbs and Conrad Silver/Polymetallic Projects (both located in the New England region of New South Wales) to Thomson Resources Limited (ASX:TMZ) for:

1. a non-refundable payment of A$50,000 to be paid to Silver Mines within five Business Days of signing the binding Term Sheet (paid);
2. a payment equivalent to the cash rehabilitation bonds in place at Completion and the replacement of any non-cash rehabilitation bonds (currently, the aggregate of both types of rehabilitation bonds is approximately $269,000);
3. Share Consideration of 75,000,000 fully-paid ordinary shares (with a current market value of approximately A$9.4 million) in Thomson Resources escrowed for 12 months from the date of issue; and
4. Option Consideration of 50,000,000 Options with: an exercise price of $0.124 per option; an expiry date of 3 years from the date of issue; vesting 12 months after the date of issue; and which shall be issued on Completion.

Thomson Resources (TMZ) initially spiked (very briefly) as high as 22.5 cps on that news, but are now back down below 12 cps.  So those options are NOT in the money now.  And they may not be when they vest next year either.  At least SVL have retained SOME upside to those projects via those options, so if they cause TMZ to go gangbusters when they develop the projects into producing mines (if, and when), then SVL can pay 12.4 cents per option to convert them into FPO (fully paid ordinary) TMZ shares.

Interesting that SVL's website has this page:  https://www.silvermines.com.au/about/

...which says:  

"Company Overview

Silver Mines Limited is an Australian public resource company listed on the Australian Securities Exchange.

The Company has recently purchased the Bowdens Silver Project located near Mudgee in New South Wales. The Project holds substantial resources as the largest undeveloped silver project in Australia and one of the largest globally.

The recently consolidated Project area comprises 1,654 sqaure kilometres (408,000 acres) of titles covering approximately 80 kilometres of strike of the highly mineralsied Rylstone Volcanics.

Silver Mines also holds the Conrad and Webbs high grade silver projects in Northern New South Wales.

The Silver Mines strategy has been to consolidate quality silver deposits in New South Wales and to form Australia’s pre-eminent silver company.

The Company’s goal is to provide exceptional returns to shareholders through the acquisition, exploration and development of quality silver projects maximising leverage to an accretive silver price."

--- ends ---

Except they don't own Conrad and Webbs any more, as I've just explained, so they're not keeping their own website up-to-date, and people using it for research purposes could get the idea that they are a multi-asset silver company, whereas they just have Bowdens.  They are a single project company, with all of the risks that involves. 

To be honest, I can't see that much has changed in the past 6 months except that SVL have raised more money, dilluted existing shareholders in the process, and sold off two of the assets they had been touting as being "quality silver deposits in NSW" that were going to propel them to become "Australia's pre-eminent silver company."

Yeah I agree with your assessment I think - though the drill hole may suggest bowdens could be a little more attractive (it's probs feasible at these silver prices, just don't think they'd make enough money on it to warrant their valuation). One thing I think SVL is good at is marketing & raising money... Kudos to the management I guess.  

I think that spike in prices was related more to when redditors tried to do a silver squeeze following the GME hilarity.  (tried to post a picture, but they still need that functionality!)

To give an example, first Majestic is one of the larger silver miners in America - I tried to post a picture, but apparently we can't do that yet! 

Their share price went from $13.89 on 27th Jan to $22.12 on Jan 1st Feb. By the end of the 2nd Feb they were down to $16.76. 

I actually held a small stake in First Majestic at the time so was following along... tried to put a stop loss on at around overnight $20, but they gapped down at the start of the 2nd on me and sold at about $18 hahahaha - oh well. But yeah, essentially reddit sillyness I think pushed the SVL price as it is the only asx company with silver in its name... Silver being in their name was how I originally found it... 

Haha! Well to me the war stories are all about learning what not to do... And if someone has made mistakes for 20 years, that's a good starting point. 

Yeah - Good call - I have indeed been making mistakes for twenty years Stuey - but in recent years, thankfully, more good decisions, and less poor ones.  So I am learning from my mistakes, and I can understand the appeal of learning from other people's mistakes rather than making them all yourself.  However, I can tell you, when you make a bad one, it's a great teacher, and you usually will only make that mistake once.

Hopefully...

Sorry Stuey727, No - I don't remember the username and didn't get the real name - was somebody quoting somebody else's HC (hotcopper) post from memory - I personally try to stay away from HC because I get sucked in to wasting too much time (and sometimes money) when I do go there. And there's SO much negativity everywhere! Regarding gold ore types - there are many different types...

See here: https://www.911metallurgist.com/blog/classification-of-gold-deposits-auriferous

and: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/chemistry/gold-ore

and: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_extraction

Some of the factors that affect the costs include the deposit and processing plant location (particularly in relation to existing infrastructure like roads, rail lines, water supply, power, etc.), how deep the paydirt (ore containing good grades of gold) is - below surface, the ore type and charactersitics, the byproducts (if there are any) and the costs to extract those if required, and the input costs for running the plant, which will depend on the chemistry used to extract the gold. There's a lot to it, and I don't pretend to understand it all. Google is your friend here.

Regarding CDU (CuDeco), most retail shareholders are of the opinion that a number of Chinese shareholders, who were corporations mostly (not individuals) and owned substantial quantities of CDU shares, installed their own people onto the CDU board and into senior management positions after they sidelined the founder, and then got the founder's mates to quit the board and management of the company as well, then they mismanaged the company, did a number of dodgy cap raisings which resulted in them gaining much larger percentage ownership of the company and ordinary retail shareholders getting severely dilluted, the company did a number of dodgy financing deals, and then called in the administrators and liquidated the company when the company couldn't pay its bills. These same corporations/substantial shareholders - who were also lenders to CDU - had secured the main assets of the company against the money that the company owed to them - so they were in the box seat to pick up the company's remaining assets at firesale prices with a view to most likely bringing the company back into production at some point in the future after gaining 100% ownership of all of its assets. A number of shareholders have been trying to get ASIC to investigate a whole series of claims of this nature, but no joy to date. FIRB also don't seem interested at all. The only political party to give us any time so far has been Pauline Hansen's "One Nation" party, and they haven't managed to get any answers from ASIC or FIRB either. They've just been stonewalled. I've basically written off that "investment". I hold out almost no hope of ever seeing any residual value from those shares. A class action lawsuit is being put together against the former directors of the company, so we'll see how that goes, but I don't expect it will go well. And if it does, it will take many years to play out, based on my experience with other class actions that I've been involved in. You can google that too if you want more info ("What happened to CuDeco"). The lesson there is keep a close eye on management, and the share register - watch out for overseas-based substantial shareholders who are also lenders to the company and have ownership rights to the company's assets if they default on their loan obligations. Not a good situation to be in, particularly in a cyclical industry such as mining, when you're at the mercy of prevailing commodity prices. In the case of CuDeco, it was clear that it was in the Chinese substantial shareholders best interests for the company to fail, so they could end up owning the company's assets for a small fraction of what they would have paid had they tried to takeover the company when it was still producing copper. To that end, they got rid of the company's founder, and anybody else who knew how to run the place properly, installed their own managers and board members, and just let nature take it's course I guess. We got screwed. They ended up with a high grade copper deposit and a state-of-the-art processing plant, which was shut down basically because of a mountain of debt. The debt got wiped out by the Administration and liquidation process. What they will end up with is all upside, no downside. Great plan really. Not terribly ethical, but highly effective. At least one Australian company has offered to buy the plant for more than what the Chinese are offering, but the administrators weren't interested apparently. They prefer the lower Chinese offer for some reason. Go figure! You'd think FIRB might take a look (the Foreign Investment Review Board, who are supposed to manage overseas companies and individuals buying Australian assets) but they aren't interested - saying it's a matter for ASIC. ASIC are useless, and just won't investigate it at all. I'm done with talking about CDU now - I'm already on my second glass of Jameson...

Regarding why I think NST is so good - check out the following where you'll find all the answers:

https://strawman.com/reports/NST/all

https://strawman.com/forums/topic/4503

https://strawman.com/forums/topic/4258

Ultra-low interest rates (and negative interest rates) globally pushing people into alternative asset classes (including gold), the way the world's largest economies are intentionally devaluing their own currencies, increasing volatility, the rise of China and the decline of the USA, and what that means for the world, unknown but inevitable shocks to come (just like the COVID-19 pandemic was, the GFC was, 9-11 was, etc.), and... eventually... inflation. But I probably forgot a couple. Must sleep now...

I have at various times attempted to find companies listed on the ASX that provided good pure-play exposure to silver, and there haven't been very many, and they have not done well, as a general rule. Some of them have had a go at developing the Bowdens silver deposit in prior years, and failed. Here are some links to recent media articles or websites concerning Bowdens:

https://www.smh.com.au/environment/conservation/fears-a-central-west-silver-mine-may-have-a-lead-lining-20200724-p55f66.html

https://bowdenssilver.com.au/

https://www.mining-journal.com/resourcestocks-company-profiles/resourcestocks/1369957/silver-mines-times-bowdens-to-perfection and 

https://www.mining-journal.com/resourcestocks-company-profiles/resourcestocks/1374550/sprott-backed-silver-mines-polishing-project-in-time-for-bull-run

Plenty of positive sentiment there (apart from the first link), however the track record for ASX-listed silver miners here in Australia has been - for the most part - pretty dismal - apart from South32 (S32) who own and operate the Cannington mine in Queensland, Australia, which has grown to become the world's largest and lowest cost producer of silver. Cannington currently produces six per cent of the world's silver annually. I hold S32 shares. However I do not hold SVL shares. I agree that SVL's SP (share price) has done well over the past 12 months. However if you zoom out, their 5-year chart shows that they are just repeating their 2016 spike, and they just headed South East for 2 years after that. Their 10-year chart looks really bad. If they were still a silver miner back in early 2011, they briefly tagged $10/share. Well - either way, they did hit that level, however I don't know what they were called and what they were doing back in 2011. I'm sure they've raised a shipload of capital since then however. I am unconvinced about the gold-silver ratio snapping back to historical norms. That ratio has become stretched over recent years, and many believe that it will snap back at some point, like a rubber band. I think there are now fundamentally different drivers for silver and gold, and that the ratio is no longer something that people should rely on in relation to valuing silver vs. gold. Just my opinion of course, and there are plenty of people who will disagree - and that's OK. I'm NOT saying that silver will NOT do well from here. It probably will. What I am saying is that I don't think you can necessarily extrapolate a rising silver price directly from a rising gold price any more - in terms of a direct ratio. I think they can actually move in opposite directions at times, or at least move at different speeds in the same direction. In short, I prefer gold over silver and I think that gold has more upside in percentage terms than silver does. I also think that silver is now mostly priced based on supply/demand dynamics which are based around the various uses of silver. Gold has very few industrial uses. It therefore has very different price drivers. Silver is no longer viewed as a "store of wealth" or as an ultimate currency - the way gold is - i.e. you can't print more gold. I believe they are decoupling.

In terms of SVL specifically, be wary of single project companies, or where the investment thesis depends on the successful development of a single project. Particularly where there is or might be serious opposition to the project from local landowners or nearby residents. I own shares in Regis Resources (RRL), a gold miner who have all of their mines in WA. However they are attempting to develop their McPhillamys Gold Project which is located approximately 35 kilometres south east of the town of Orange and 30 kilometres west of the town of Bathurst in the Central West region of New South Wales. While the project represents an organic growth opportunity for the Company and Regis is pushing forward with plans to bring the project into development, it sits on some prime farmland, and it might not all be smooth sailing for RRL from here - we shall see. See here: https://mcphillamysgold.com/

And: https://www.regisresources.com.au/General/about-regis-resources.html

All I'm saying is be aware of the risks. And where there don't seem to be any risks, you probably haven't looked hard enough. It would be really good to have a successful and profitable pure-play silver producer listed on the ASX with mines (or a mine) here in Australia, however after all of these years, we haven't produced any that have lasted very long. Hopefully that changes, but I wouldn't personally be investing in an early stage company with a view that they will be the one. I prefer to gain my silver exposure via a successful diversified miner - and I have - via S32 - with their Cannington silver mine - see here: https://www.south32.net/our-business/australia/cannington Hope some of those random thoughts are of some help to you Stuey727.

Thanks Bear, that's very heplful! Yeah, I was looking for the same, which is how I ended up here (and on Stake...). I bought some SVL shares a while ago, but have since sold them after looking at the feasibility study in a bit more depth. Thank you for the history - that's super useful! I'm very much a newbie to mining. Yeah, the SVL share price has went up, but I think it's overpriced and just running on the silver spike at the moment. (maybe 30--40% overpriced) They seem to raise a lot of capital. Yeah, I think my thoughts with the silver price is a few things. 1. I think we are in for a pretty serious inflation cycle in the long run due to quantitative easing - I figure silver will do well in this - I'm not too sure about the silver/gold ratio.2. Silver seems to have a lot of industrial uses in areas that are growing very quickly, consequently, I think that this could put some significant upward pressure on the price. Thanks for the information about that - it's quite useful. I live in Newcastle and my hometown is Scone (lots of mining near Scone, community mixed on it), but perhaps I should investigate broader community feeling out towards Mudgee. I think I'd be surprised as there are already mines out near Mudgee and it's not Prime farmland in my view. Your post has been fantastic thanks! I'm quite new to valuations and valuing mining, so trying to understand it all! Do you know anything that would be good to read in this area to help me get my head around it? I might aim to write up my valuation of GOR at some point - I'm quite positive on Gold over the next 10 years and would be interested in your view on that company.

No problem Stuey727. I'm not saying that SVL has a lot of local area/community opposition - I just noticed that some concerns were flagged in that first article that I linked to - this one: https://www.smh.com.au/environment/conservation/fears-a-central-west-silver-mine-may-have-a-lead-lining-20200724-p55f66.html However, if the land isn't particularly valuable except for mining, and it's a mining area, it's probably going to get the green light. It's then just a matter of if they can get the thing into production at a time of high silver prices, pay off their debt and make some money for their shareholders. The history isn't great - of profitable pure-play silver producers that have lasted here in Australia - but you never know, SVL might be the one.

I have just been burned too often on story companies - as in companies with a great story, where it sounds great, and you can't think what could possibly go wrong, but things go wrong anyway. So I'm a little risk averse with early stage project developers now. Even late stage project developers actually. I like to see the bugs ironed out - the de-bottlenecking completed, the plant optimised - and running at nameplate capacity or above - and the company producing cash. I might miss out on them doubling or tripling in that early stage, but I'll likely miss out on a few capital raisings as well and if they are that good, there will still be further upside later as well. By my reckoning, only about 1 or 2 out of every 10 project developers are still around and making profits 10 years after they start building their plant - and that includes gold project developers. You wouldn't think you could lose money with a gold mine eh?!? But they somehow manage to do it. Silver mining is rarer - except for silver production as a byproduct of gold or copper production - and the odds are even worse. I agree that silver has many industrial uses. However, beware of cheaper substitutes. If the same qualities that silver has can be found in a cheaper alternative metal, even in an alloy (man-made metal made by blending other metals), then you can bet that the vast majority will go with the cheaper option. I'm talking specifically about industrial uses there, not as jewellery. I'm not going to start giving advice on accurately valuing mining companies in terms of dollars per share. It's more of an art than a science and it depends on a number of assumptions, and the main one is the price projections (or price range) for the main commodity that the mine will be producing, should they get that far. One thing you can do is look at similar companies that are already producing the same commodity and have similar ore types and a similar process plant design and costs - and compare. Be aware however that you always have to anticipate a number of capital raisings (well, usually, not always) over the period during which a company transitions from being an explorer to a developer to a producer, so the share count is almost always significantly higher by the time they are in production. And unless all of the capital raisings are extended to all shareholders equally and you do participate in all of them, you are going to have your original position dilluted significantly. So you are either going to have tipped more money in, or you are going to own less of the company. Quite often both.

Sometimes, you can still make money - on the good ones. Unfortunately, the good ones are the exception. The other thing is that there are a number of things that are specific to the supply/demand dynamics of individual commodities. For instance, what Indonesia does in terms of limiting or banning nickel exports out of Indonesia has a big effect on the nickel price, because Indonesia is a large player in that market. Just to give one example.

I am also bullish on gold over the next 10 years, and I hold GOR in my super (my CBUS industry super fund). Along with NST, EVN, SAR (who will soon merge with NST), SBM, RRL and RMS. I also hold a number of mining services and engineering services companies who mostly work in the gold mining industry, and those companies include GNG, LYL, NWH, MAH, and MLD previously also. MLD mostly do contract mining for gold miners however I don't currently hold them - just not enough capital. You can't pat ALL the fluffy dogs. I like GOR, and I like that they have that gold mining area (east of Laverton in WA) pretty much all to themselves - and their JV partners Gold Fields - who are based out of Jo-burg in South Africa. The positives are they have a low AISC (low costs), the ore is easy to get at and relatively easy to process, and they are highly profitable. And they have HUGE exploration upside potential in that area. The negatives are they don't produce much, because they currently only have one producing mine (Gruyere) and they only own half of that, so only get half the gold it produces, and the grades aren't spectacular. I have written a few straws on GOR - see here: https://strawman.com/reports/GOR/all The following forum is also worth a browse through if you are into gold: https://strawman.com/forums/topic/4503

Regarding QE - there is likely to be a reckoning at some stage, and I've seen many calling inflation as a probable result at some point, however since the GFC we just haven't seen it, and the latest rounds of QE - due to the pandemic and its economic fallout - have made the huge QE that resulted from the GFC seem like lunch money by comparison. Inflation would be good for gold, but I'm bullish on gold even without inflation.

Thanks again Bear! I'm not convinced SVL is - in fact, unless they make some drilling success, or the silver price spikes higher than it is, I don't think they are a fantastic bet - an overpriced one at the moment. That's very useful to know about project developers thanks. Do they generally stuff up and then get taken over by another group? Useful to know about the substitutes - the uses I was mainly thinking of was in solar/that kind of area. Are there substitutes you know about there? I might need to read up more. Yeah, I think that's my reasoning for GOR also - they seem to be valued fairly in terms of their current mine, but have so much exploration potential - they seem to have a huge amount of territory to explore on. Thanks, I'll take a look at the straws. (I own GOR and NST at the moment) Yep. When the inflation will happen I think is questionable. Christopher Joye, who I deeply respect mentioned he thought it would be 10-15 years out (can't remember exactly what it was sorry). I think we're already seeing it in equities with the low interest rates and excess liquidity, but don't think it's followed into consumer spending for the most part. I just don't see how the debt we owe is going to be repaid without inflation.

My experience with project developers is that a lot of things can go wrong, and often do. Some potential issues can be easilly identified. Others perhaps not so much. An example of the former was when I was involved in a competition on another site that I no longer use - which involved model portfolios - and I had Gascoyne Resources in my model or virtual portfolio - when they were developing Dalgaranga (a gold mine). I read a post that clearly explained why they would probably not make any money. The person who wrote it was clearly very knowledgable about gold processing plants and the industry and explained that the first problem was the management - I think his argument was that they were geologists and not business-people, and they had no prior experience of taking a discovery through to production, the second issue was the ore type and the assumptions that they were making about their projected costs. He gave an example of another mine that had very similar ore and had run into a lot of trouble and their costs had blown out and they were struggling to produce gold at a profit now. There was also the issue that GCY (Gascoyne's ticker code) had contracted GNG (GR Engineering) to build the plant, yet GNG had not done the PFS (pre-feasibility study) or the DFS/BFS (definitive/bankable feasibility studies). GNG usually do the studies and then win the EPC contract to design and construct the plant, but not in this case. It looked like the studies had been done more-or-less in-house by GCY's management with help from some external experts on various aspects. The crux of that issue is that GNG were building a plant designed by others, and their liability was therefore rather limited. If GNG had designed (engineered) the plant, they would build it, commission it, iron out the bugs, and hand it over in good working order, but that is not necessarily going to be the case when they are building to someone else's plans and design. I took that all into consideration and sold my GCY at a profit before the commissioning of Dalgaranga got underway. The rest, as they say, is history. See here: https://thewest.com.au/business/mining/gascoyne-resources-collapses-just-weeks-after-245m-raising-ng-b881218568z

I also followed a company called Heron Resources (HRR), who are still trading, but they're now sub-6c/share, down from around $1.20/share back in August 2016, and they were over $1.50/share around a decade ago - their 10 year graph is all top left to bottom right, the exact opposite of what you want to see. I held HRR shares for a couple of years, but I became concerned when their EPC contractors - Sedgman - part of CIMIC Group (ASX:CIM) got into a major dispute with them over huge extra costs over and above the fixed price they had previously agreed to. HRR was planning to be an up-and-coming zinc producer, and they had signed a fixed price contract for price certainty, something that is valuable when you are trying to raise money to build a processing plant like they were at Woodlawn, between Canberra and Goulburn. Long story short, they had to raise a LOT of extra capital at a HUGE discount, and all of their shareholders at that time got screwed big time. It looked very likely they would go broke, and they still might, but for now they are still kicking. I'm out now obviously.

One I did manage to ride into the ground was CuDeco (CDU, when they were still listed), which was developing a high-grade copper mine called Rocklands near Cloncurry in Queensland. See here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-05/cudeco-goes-into-liquidation-owing-$60-million

They got highjacked by Chinese interests, the original founder got shafted (moved on) and they got driven into the ground and are now being phoenixed by entities associated with those same Chinese interests at a fraction of what they are worth. And ordinary retail shareholders (including me) got zero. 100% loss.

Regarding your question Stuey - "Do they generally stuff up and then get taken over by another group?" Sometimes. It varies. Lots of stuff happens. Generally they just run out of money and that's when the trouble starts. Why they run out of money varies, but it's usually because of something happening that they didn't count on or were not prepared for. I find it useful to study the management of such companies. If the management team have a good track record of bringing mines into production successfully, that's a big plus. Although not always. I did have shares in a company called Carbine Resources, who were going to make a lot of money out of the historic Mount Morgan gold mine in Queensland, mostly from reprocessing old mine tailings (waste) with far newer technology that was supposed to extract the remaining gold for a very low cost. I got interested when a guy called Tony James took over as MD (Managing Director). See here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-04-14/new-management-team-to-oversee-reopening-of-mt-morgan-gold-mine/7325270

Tony had enjoyed quite a bit of success - see here: https://www.businessnews.com.au/Person/Tony-James

A number of companies he had run had been taken over by larger companies at very good premiums and shareholders had done very well. However, that was not to be the case at Carbine. A new report revealed that the reports they had been relying on previously were seriously flawed and their costs were now going to be so high that the project was now not economic - i.e. they wouldn't be able to make any money out of it if they did build it. This happened to coincide with some moves by Patrick Walta and associates. Walta was a director of Carbine at one point and also (along with his associates) controlled the land that Carbine thought they were going to buy as part of their business case (or business plan) - but Walta and his associates changed that deal - the same Patrick Walta who is now the MD of New Century Resources (NCZ) - who are trying to make money out of reprocessing old mine tailings at the old Century zinc mine in Queensland. And struggling big time. Further Reading: https://stockhead.com.au/resources/carbine-bails-mount-morgan-md-chairman-quit/ and  https://www.australianmining.com.au/news/new-century-to-hail-us-financial-backer-via-capital-raising/

I could go on with these war stories for days most probably, but most people would find it boring and not too useful. Point is, the things that go wrong and sometimes blow your investment thesis up are often not obvious, and appear to come out of nowhere occasionally.

Regarding: "Useful to know about the substitutes - the uses I was mainly thinking of was in solar/that kind of area. Are there substitutes you know about there? I might need to read up more."  No, I didn't have anything specific in mind. I was just making the general point that if the price of silver goes up, and people can use cheaper alternatives (substitutes) for industrial uses, they will. That's all. Something to be aware of. The thing about silver is that it has two distinct drivers - one being industrial uses and the other being a precious metal like gold - a store of wealth some people call it. I think gold is a better option for that. I think silver will increasingly be priced in the future based far more on its industrial uses, and the risk is that if it rises too much in price, people will try hard to find something else with similar qualities that can do the same job at a lower cost. Generally speaking. Nothing specific in mind in terms of a substitute for silver.

Good to hear that you hold NST Stuey - it's the best gold producer we have here in Australia by a country mile. We could be in for some gold price volatility now I think, and that volatility will be magnified in the share price movements of Australia's ASX-listed gold producers, as we saw today - with most of them falling by between 8% and 13% (RMS -13.25%). Newcrest (NCM) outperformed the sector by only falling -4.84% today. I'm not too worried by single day movements. I believe gold is still in a bull run, and we will get sharp mini-corrections within that bull run, however I think the overall trend will remain up for gold for the next few years. The good news is that for those who still haven't managed to add a quality gold producer to their portfolio, there might be some opportunities to pick up some for less in the next little while. NST closed $1.93 cheaper (-11.46%) today (Tues, 10-Nov-2020 - at $14.91) than where they finished up yesterday (at $16.84). That's a significant pull-back - in one day - and they might get even cheaper. I won't be selling however, I might be buying more, but I won't be selling my gold stocks at this point. Not this year. And probably not next year either. But never say never...