History of Zinc (from International Zinc Association, (http://www.iza.com/uses.html) Centuries before zinc was discovered in the metallic form, its ores were used for making brass and zinc compounds, its ores were used for healing wounds and sore eyes. It is believed that the Romans first made brass in the time of Augustus (20 B.C. - 14 A.D.). In the 13th century Marco Polo described the manufacture of zinc oxide in Persia. At Zawar, India, both zinc metal and zinc oxide were produced from the 12th to the 16th century. From India, zinc manufacturing moved to China in the 17th century where it developed as an industry to supply the needs of the brass industry. In 1743, the first European zinc smelter was established in Bristol in the United Kingdom. A major technological improvement was achieved in Germany which led to the erection of ...

Where has the resources boom gone? I don’t mean the one driven by iron ore or coal, nor oil, but by surging demand from China, India and the rest of the emerging world? Warning bells are sounding in metals markets and there is every indication that even in China, there are some rough times ahead. The shares prices of some Australian producers are reflecting the emerging weakness. last week we reported on Fox Resources, a small Australian miner deferring work on copper and nickel prospects and mine. Power shortages and a looming oversupply of some metals and weakening prices make for interesting decision making for some companies, especially if they are in China. And when a weakening market price happens to emerge as this power crunch happens, China seems to act as one to try and modify the market weakness and correct the imbalance in power demand. Take ...

In a lot of ways silver has been in recent decades the forgotten metal, struggling with an identity crisis as a poor man’s precious metal and/or a rather expensive industrial metal. In its glory days, Broken Hill in western New South Wales was known as Silver City, and to this day the highway leading into the town is so named. Broken Hill gave its name to a rather famous Proprietary, but these day’s when one thinks of BHP Billiton one doesn’t immediately think of silver, or for that matter the zinc and lead upon which the company built its foundations. Today junior mining companies are left to squabble over what commercial deposits may still remain at Broken Hill. Indeed for many years silver became merely a helpful by-product of mining for base metals occurring, as it often does, in base metal deposits. Base metal miners could sell the silver just ...

Oftentimes I talk to investors, even sophisticated ones, and I realize that they treat metals as a group. Particularly in the subset of base metals, most point out the price action of copper and conclude that all base metals are in a raging bull with no signs of slowing down.

Close examination of correlation between various metal prices reveals a very different story, as we shall illustrate. (most charts here are from my friends at Kitco.com)

Phases of a market

“There is nothing new in Wall Street. There can’t be because speculation is as old as the hills. Whatever happens in the stock market today has happened before and will happen again.” - Jesse Livermore, Reminiscences of a stock operator

Each market invariably goes through different phases of a bull. Starting with bottom, accumulation, rise, mania, rolling over, crash, sucker’s rallies, and then it starts all over again. People can

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