Gold Mining Winners & Losers: Hecla Mining
NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Gold mining stocks lost ground Thursday, tracking the price of the precious metal into the red.
Some of the inflation-fear heat that has spurred gold prices above $1,000 an ounce appeared to lessen in light of Wednesday's consumer-price data, which showed that inflation hasn't yet flared.
In trading on the
New York Mercantile Exchange
Thursday, the gold futures contract fell $5.50, or 0.54%, to $1,014.70 a troy ounce.
Thursday's trading action follows three days of presentations by gold-company executives at the annual Denver Gold Forum. Perhaps not surprisingly, given gold's recent spike above the psychologically rich $1,000 level, the tone of the conference was upbeat, participants say.
Even though inflation fears appear to have subsided at least a little, the bullish argument for gold and gold stocks rests on several factors, including what many expect to be some net buying by central banks in the near future. That should offset weaker physical demand for the metal among jewelers worldwide.
Some analysts believe gold stocks are reasonably well priced for investors to use as a way to diversify their portfolios.
But from a fundamental perspective, gold prices need to go higher still before miners (and their shareholders) see absolute share-price appreciation, says Mark Liinamaa, metals analyst at
Morgan Stanley
(MS) - Get Report
. For that to happen, he added, inflation worries need to take hold more strongly.
"Ultimately, I think gold prices may prove to be range-bound until inflation concerns become more immediate," he said.
Among Thursday's biggest movers to the downside were the metals-concentrate producer
Hecla Mining
(HL) - Get Report
, whose shares lost more than 9% to $4.52 and
New Gold
(NGD) - Get Report
, which fell 5% to $3.86.
The majors fared better.
Barrick
(ABX)
lost 1.2% to $38.06;
Goldcorp
(GG)
shed nearly 2% to $42.12;
Newmont Mining
(NEM) - Get Report
fell 2.7% to $45.83; and
Yamana Gold
(AUY) - Get Report
gave up 2.6% to $11.09.
-- Written by Scott Eden in New York
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Scott Eden has covered business -- both large and small -- for more than a decade. Prior to joining TheStreet.com, he worked as a features reporter for Dealmaker and Trader Monthly magazines. Before that, he wrote for the Chicago Reader, that city's weekly paper. Early in his career, he was a staff reporter at the Dow Jones News Service. His reporting has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Men's Journal, the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, and the Believer magazine, among other publications. He's also the author of Touchdown Jesus (Simon & Schuster, 2005), a nonfiction book about Notre Dame football fans and the business and politics of big-time college sports. He has degrees from Notre Dame and Washington University in St. Louis.
