FWIW, I am a subscriber to Barron's weekly financial magazine here in the U.S. In the newest issue of Barron's - dated today- Aug 10,2009, one of their feature stories covers the USAA Precious Metals, and Minerals Fund ticker: USAGX. They describe this fund as being the very best fund in it's sector for a ten year period as rated by Lipper Analytical Services, an award the fund has received for each of the past five years in a row. Morningstar, another rating agency, gives the fund four out of five stars for overall performance when measured against all mutual funds.

The article goes on to describe the fund in detail, and how it's managers use deep research to enhance the fund's overall performance. The fund managers visit mines, and properties, talk with company management, and the miners working on site to get a better sense, or feel of what's going on at a particular company before deciding to invest.

A little further into this article the funds' investment holdings are described in detail:

" Among the 42 companies in the fund's portfolio are six(6) real STANDOUTS in year to date performance. Canadian miner SAN GOLD ( SGR CANADA), which is looking for the precious metal in the Rice Lake region of Manitoba, (tops the list) having returned 136.7%. Osisko Mining (OSK Canada) is developing a gold deposit in northeastern Quebec is up 89.8% ( coming in second).........."

Other members of the six are Minefinders, Iamgold,Impala PLatinum, and Randgold resouces coming in last @ 36.3% A little further on toward the end of the article both Gammon, and Great Basin Gold are mentioned as future prospects.

Earlier this week it was reported that the USAA fund was one of the largest fund holders of San Gold with 5,700,000 shares as reported at the mffais website:http://www.mffais.com/sgrcf.ob#holdings