LOOKS LIKE THAT HARD METALS ARE GOING TO HAVE A LEG UP ON THE MARKET.

interesting read on the "HARD ASSETS SHOW "

12/1/2008 1:41:15 PM | Thom Calandra

At hard assets shows, investors bank on ‘Melt-UP’ for prices

Hard assets such as gold and uranium are drawing a grizzled group of investors, and they are upgrading their knowledge of commodities each cycle.

At the San Francisco Hard Assets Show going on right now, almost 2,000 common folk came to town to hear about the woes of a mining industry strapped for cash to find and produce rare metals and other commodities.

“Oh yeh,” bottom-fishing editor John Kaiser quipped as we admired the Mega-Uranium tote bags piled onto the giveaway tables, “we’re in a bull market. Maybe that’s why none of us doubled our money shorting all of these companies.”

Of some 1,600 mining companies Kaiser and his investor service track, about half have shares selling for less than 10 cents. Most of the companies are headquartered in Canada.

Still, the rising price of gold, and the shrinking availability of gold and silver coins worldwide, continue to draw garage-loft investors to commodities conferences. Their interest comes even as securities of mining companies are shedding two-thirds of their value, and more.

“We’re holding our own,” Richard Ziock of Carlsbad, California, told me as he and his wife, Angela, waited for a badge to enter the downtown conference. I had seen Ziock nearly a year ago, at the Phoenix Metals Show in Arizona, and here he was, a retiree, still making the rounds.

Timothy Wood, the South African writer and editor who runs some of these hard asset shows around North America for International Investment Conferences, told me attendance at the San Francisco session is about half what it was last year at this time. That’s the wimpy economy working its mojo.

Still, Wood says the audience is becoming more sophisticated than in the past. So Tim is designing panels and speaker topics that address thorny issues facing our un-manicured geologists, surveyors and miners working the planet for gold, diamonds, rhodium, uranium, silver and so on.

Like how companies short on cash can find money in the marketplace. Start by praying. “Your typical company is not going to be raising money right now,” Brent Cook, a geologist, told us all. Those lucky enough, or conservative enough, to have some cash stored for a rainy day – Argentina miner Exeter Resource (TSX: V.XRC, Stock Forum) and its $29 million horde were mentioned several times at the show – will live, but just barely, to see another heyday for junior exploration companies, Cook said.

For our attendees Dick and Angela Ziock, times when it looks garsh-darn awful for corporations are a time of great opportunity for garage-loft investors. Thus, they applauded when Al Korelin, a longtime radio talk host, forecast from his podium, “I think you are going to see price appreciation skyrocket.”

Right at that moment, sitting where I was on Al’s panel and facing the audience, I could see several hundred people, maybe more, nod their heads, as if to mouth that old cliché, “From your mouth, Al, to God’s ears. We pray for the Melt-UP.”