Hedge funds slash bullish wagers on gold over Trump election win
Hedge funds and other large speculators boosted net-long positions by 11% to 197,362 as of Nov. 12, the lowest in 14 weeks.
Northern Dynasty Minerals (TSX:NDM) has entered into a bought deal financing with Cantor Fitzgerald Canada to raise $10 million that will allow the miner to further advance its Pebble copper-gold-silver project in Alaska.
The deal prices the company’s shares at 64 Canadian cents, a 13.5% discount to the stock’s price before the financing was announced.
The Canadian miner has also granted the underwriters an over-allotment option to acquire up to an additional 2.34 million-plus shares, which could raise another $1.5 million.
The company is still looking for a partner for Pebble mine as fellow Canadian company First Quantum Minerals pulled out last year.
Development of the proposed mine was mostly stalled during the Obama administration, but is moving forward under President Donald Trump, who is in favour of increasing domestic mining.
The Vancouver-based company reached a key settlement in 2017 with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which ended a dispute over the agency’s decision to block construction of Pebble mine.
It came three months after Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) granted Northern Dynasty’s subsidiary — Pebble Limited Partnership — a long-awaited land-use permit.
And last month, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released a draft environmental impact statement for the project, which shows no major data gaps or substantive impacts associated with a mine at the Pebble site.
The current resource estimates indicate the asset holds 6.5 billion tonnes in the measured and indicated categories containing 57 billion pounds copper, 71 million ounces gold, 3.4 billion pounds of molybdenum and 345 million ounces of silver. In the inferred category, Pebble has 4.5 billion tonnes — 25 billion pounds copper, 36 million ounces of gold, 2.2 billion pounds of molybdenum and 170 million ounces of silver. Palladium and rhenium are also present at the site.
The company is still looking for a partner as fellow Canadian miner First Quantum Minerals (TSX:FM) pulled out last year.
There are currently four operating mines and four late stage development projects in Alaska. (May courtesy of Northern Dynasty Minerals.)
