david bond comments on this year's silver summit, which was a lot better than last year's:

You've got to ask yourself, honestly, if the small caps are the place to be, considering the set-your-hair-afire performance of (by silver-sector standards, anyway) of the big dogs. A year ago, Teck was $2.60 and today it's $26.26 – a 10-bagger!; Hecla was 99 cents 52 weeks ago and is $4.06 today, still a minor slice of its book value; Silver Standard has bounced back up from $5.35 a Silver Summit ago to $25.60 at this year's Summit.

Our favourite profitably-producing juniors haven't recovered nearly as nicely: Silvercorp, which mines lead and silver underground in China from its world class Henan-Found property, climbed up from $1.19 a year ago to its current $4.88; Metanor, Quebec's premiere gold-making up-and-comer, crawled out of its 26-cent hole but is still a mere 81 cents; U.S. Silver bottomed at 3 cents but is still just a dime higher; First Majestic saw the depths of 87 cents and is now a healthy $2.45, but . . .? If the producing juniors could do as well as Teck, we could all burn our mortgages and buy yachts somewhere warm.

To reiterate: The underlying fundamentals of all these companies haven't changed one whit. Veins and grades do not disappear overnight. Costs, given the respite in energy prices, have probably dropped. Precious metal prices, rather than cratering, have plateaued rather nicely as if they are not even anticipating the impact of Obamanomics and its hugely inflationary consequences. Means we're in the cat-bird's seat. We're the stealth market.

Funds run by Lehman and others, and investment bankers, bought heavily in to the mining stocks at all levels a few years ago, and made fortunes, but our miners were the first to be kicked to the curb as these outfits scrambled to recover some of the liquidity they'd lost in the derivatives Ponzi scheme. That's why we crashed. It wasn't because of our fundamentals. It's our understanding that the funds are out of the game, either for lack of cash or under orders from Bernanke-Paulsen-Geithner not to goose the price of gold and silver. God forbid some U.S.- or Canada-based fund should provide capital for a mineral-producing enterprise! Better we should prop up a bunch of filthy banksters, n'est-ce pas? Which means that the only folks left in the junior mining sector (and perhaps big chunks of the senior mining sector as well) are us little people, who aren't in here to get Bernie-style rich but merely to grow our wealth in an intelligent way so we can hold the cops at bay when they come for our guns and our groceries.

The Silver Summit, and silver-mining stocks, may be the only game in town that is too small to fail and too big to be busted. Silver is the people's money; the Silver Summit is the people's conference. Our clients mine money, as Phil Lindstrom used to say. Which means we've nowhere but upwards to go.

http://news.silverseek.com/SilverSeek/1254752632.php