New gold miner ETF avoids primary investment in Barrick

Looks like you can now buy a gold-mining stock exchange-traded fund without putting the biggest part of your money in Barrick Gold, the biggest gold hedger and enabler of gold price suppression, the company that 11 years ago, by virtue of its enormous hedging, claimed to be the agent of central banks in the gold market:

http://www.gata.org/node/1858

The new ETF is the Sprott Gold Miners ETF, which began trading last week. According to its announcement, the ETF is based on the Sprott Zacks Gold Miners Index and "uses a transparent, rules-based methodology designed to identify 25 gold stocks that historically have the highest beta to the spot price of gold, with each stock's weighting in the index adjusted based on its quarterly revenue growth and long-term debt to equity":

http://www.sprottetfs.com/documents/pdfs/sgdm...pr-20140715.pdf

The ETF received favorable notice from the Wall Street Cheat Sheet, which noted that "each quarter the fund is re-weighted. This means that the fund is going to take profits on its outperformers and reallocate this capital to the underperformers. The Market Vectors Gold Miner ETF does no such thing. In fact, when the fund sees capital inflows, it pumps more money into the top performers because these are the companies that become the highest-weighted stocks in the fund."

The Wall Street Cheat Sheet commentary is here:

http://wallstcheatsheet.com/business/2-rea...sprotts-new-...

Of course GATA is no investment adviser, but nobody who wants a free and transparent market in the monetary metals can be enthusiastic about any investment that abets gold price suppression.