Two heartening signs of a buyer's market in natural resources include Lundin Mining's (TO:LUN) purchase of Candelaria for nearly $2 billion and Glencore's (LONDON:GLEN) posturing for super major Rio Tinto (NYSE:RIO).
Lundin and Glencore are entrepreneurial miners with large insider ownership.
In the case of Lundin, you have the Lundin Family Trust ponying up $100 million for the Candelaria related financing, which will more than double the mid-tier’s 2013 Copper output.
The Lundin’s have a track record of knowing what projects to buy and when to sell them. Take Red Back Mining, for example, which they sold to Kinross Gold (NYSE:KGC) for $7.1 billion in 2010 at the height of the resources bull market (note that Kinross’s market cap is just $4.1 billion today. How things have changed)
He's Buying
At Glencore, CEO Ivan Glasenberg, with roughly $6 billion worth of Glencore stock personally, wants to use his paper to gobble up the world’s second-largest miner during the worst commodities environment in decades.
Both family investment manager Lukas Lundin and Glasenberg appear to be working overtime to grow their enterprises as they have the time horizon (5+ years) to stomach another bad couple of years.
I can't predict a bottom, but I do want to be on the same side of the trade as Lundin and Glasenberg.
We're prioritizing our favourite natural resource stocks in our Resource Opportunities newsletter, which has the benefit of Lawrence Roulston’s geological mind and over three decades of experience evaluating mineral projects; coupled with my own ear-to-the street.