via Barron's - A Bad Day For Long Bonds

The MACD crossover for the monthly 30-year U.S. Treasury Bond chart is still intact with the sell-off in treasuries on quarterly options expiry. Since GBN.V is strongly inversely correlated with this chart, and has been for years, this is a very important turning point:

http://blogs.barrons.com/incomeinvesting/2012/12/31/bad-day-for-long-bonds-tlt-down-1-82/

via GoldSeek - An Interview With Peter Grandich

http://news.goldseek.com/GoldSeek/1355169720.php

via WSJ - Forget The Metal And Focus On The Stocks

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323316804578161230254371890.html

What Happened This Year

At the end of Q3, fiscal 2012, production was drastically curtailed, though shareholders were not kept informed of the change, until August, 2012 with the Q4 report for 2012.

The method used was under-utilization of the mill, and processing any and all available low grade material.

This material was made available by hauling all of the available below-cutoff-grade ore from the EP Zone, and whatever mucking they took from Roy Lloyd, and open pit bulk samples.

The high grade material from EP was stockpiled. Considering that 3000tpd can be trucked to the mill from the Komis deposit, the 500k tonnes of high grade ore from the EP Zone would have taken 200 days to complete the stockpile, plus some time for trucking of low grade mill feed.

This is enough ore to run the mill at full utilization for two years and three months.

EP Zone ore is very easy to mine, and very easy to process. The ore is not refractory in any way and is in a flat-lying near surface glacial till. Most of the gold is recovered in the gravity circuit and does not require much chemical treatment, if at all.

The big change came about when Waterton got involved. You can see the plan would have taken shape a year ago, prior to the curtailment of production in favour of stockpiling. The company outlook planned on $900/oz. gold, going into 2012, and thereafter. They didn't forsee a robust gold price almost double that.

The stockpiled ore will cover production and payments for up to two years, and one quarter, while a new financing is arranged, to essentially reach the goal of building a new mill.

-F6