Hecla Mining Company has just announced that it is sell its Venezuelan activities to Rusoro Mining Limited for $25 million, of which £20 million is in cash and remainder in shares of Rusoro common stock.

Company President and CEO, Phillips S. Baker, Jr., said that:

“The sale of our Venezuelan properties is part of our strategy to reduce the financing put in place to acquire Greens Creek. Prior to this transaction, Hecla repatriated approximately $39 million in cash that generated a $14 million foreign exchange loss. This transaction generates immediate cash from both the sale of the assets and the repatriation of $25 million of cash from our Venezuelan subsidiaries (read more…)

Charts courtesy www.stockcharts.com

Continuing with the deployment of our opportunity cash we acquired more of Pan American Silver Corporation at $31.06 today. As we can see from the chart this stock has been sold off from a high of $42.00 to around $30.00 recently and hopefully the downside is limited (read more…)

The market reacted positively to Endeavours latest news release with turnover up from an average volume of 118,000 to 259,000, adding $0.27 to close at $3.15. The excitement is predicated on the news that Endeavour has encountered several new zones of high grade silver mineralization, including 6,680 gpt silver and 11.2 gpt gold over 1.15 m in drill hole EPS3-1.

From the companies web site we can glean the following (read more…)

Today we purchased the JAN09 Call options at a strike price of $10.00 for $1.00 per contract for the Hecla Mining Company. As we can see from the chart the stock appears to be oversold having been sold down from the $13.00 level to close at $8.28 today (read more…)

As you are aware our strategy on the way up was to take some profits off the table as various precious metals stocks became overbought. By adopting this strategy we have managed to lock in some profits and also to generate some ‘opportunity cash’, which we can now deploy at cheaper entry prices (read more…)

Having missed out recently in our attempt to purchase call options on Kinross Gold Corporation we managed to bag a few today. We bought the JAN09 series at a strike price of $20.00 for an average of $2.68.

This trade will be funded from the ‘opportunity cash’ that forms part of our trading account. Kinross we believe is undervalued at the moment and as we can see from the chart the stock price is now below the 200dma and the technical indicators suggest that this stock is now oversold.(Read more)

Silver: A readers view

From time to time we like to publish the work of others in order to bring you a different perspective on the silver market. Today one of our readers has submitted an article for your perusal, enjoy (read more…)

We normally deal with the buying and selling of gold and silver mining producers, as that’s where we have placed the lion’s share of our funds. However we do receive requests about what we own in terms of the physical bullion and where we store it (read more…)

Some of our readers are stockholders of Apex Silver Mines Limited and have written expressing their concern about this stocks performance. Firstly, we must point out that we are not financial advisors; we represent a small group of investors in the United Kingdom and also invest our own funds in the precious metals markets. However we will throw our humble opinion into the ring in an attempt to answer our reader’s requests (read more…)

Bradford Cooke, Chairman and CEO of Endeavour Silver Corporation is suing Canaccord for not following their instructions to buy bonds and instead purchased $5 million dollars worth of Asset Backed Commercial paper (ABCP) (read more…)