This year’s PDAC is seeing plenty of visitors, but a dearth of capital which will lead to serious shortages ahead, and ultimately far higher metal and stock prices.
TORONTO (MINEWEB) – I’ve been attending PDAC meetings since the late 1970s and have seen it through a number of major downturns and subsequent recoveries, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a downbeat convention as it is proving to be this year.
What sets it apart is an underlying feeling that this time the downturn may have longer to run.
Even in 2009, following what may have been an even bigger market crash in Q4 2008, there were already signs that the industry might be pulling out of its fall; this time around that optimism is not at all apparent – and this is within a community which is by its very nature a generally optimistic one. If you’re a prospector or a geologist or a miner you have to be an optimist by definition.
It is interesting viewing the local press in this respect. There were indeed comments leading up to the opening of the event that the situation among the TSX-V juniors in particular was so dire that there were almost certainly going to be a big number of no-shows with the companies not going to be able to afford to send personnel, and put them up at the kind of inflated Toronto hotel prices currently prevailing because of the general influx of visitors for one of the bigger events in the Toronto convention calendar.