Thar's Gold in Them Thar Hills

I spent a couple of years living in the Sierras just south of Yosemite. One blazing summer afternoon I spent a few hours along a creek bed adjacent to my friends property panning with a buddy. He had the gold bug. I vividly recall an evening a coworker of his came down from a hike with a solid chunk of quartz that appeared to have gold flakes hugging the exterior. I can still visualize the look of utter despondence in his eyes as he peered into the soul of that quartz as if it were an Oracle while murmuring to himself in abjection that he had never found anything like this in all his years of searching. It turned out after all that it wasn't gold, but that day I came to intimately learn the power that just the thought of gold can have on a man.

The best thing about being under a blazing sun panning that day along the creek was dipping into the cold water to grab a cold beer. While I did find a couple of minute flakes the amount of work put into it and the soreness of my lower back after being hunched over for long periods put things into perspective -this was not fun, and not really worth it -except for the beer. What made things worse is that while digging through the embankment we unsettled a colony of ants that had a fierce bite and would crawl up my shorts when I bent over to peer through the snipe scope and nibble on my legs.  This is not the way it's glamorized.

I by no means have the gold fever, but when I see an opportunity arising I'm interested, and it looks like right now the market is indicating there may be one in gold. One of the sage pieces of wisdom I've heard relating to gold is that you buy when the charts are ugly, not when they look good. Over the last couple of days miners have been showing up in my screens and if one thing is clear from their chart it's that they don't look good at all, with many are at or near their 52-Week lows.

One of the first that popped up this week was IAG. On the daily price is near it's 52-Week low, but what stands out is volume on the monthly chart. We're currently in the middle of March and volume has picked up to levels not seen since May of 2010.

IAG

In addition a number of high volume surges have shown up today in other gold related and mining related stocks as well.  Looking at these charts I see no reason why the average retail investor should be interested in this other than it looks cheap. This amount of volume pouring in suggest to me that there may be bigger players accumulating.  It is said that price follows volume so I'll be keeping an eye on these stocks to see if this bears true in this situation.

EGO

GFI

LSG

NSU

SBGL

SVM