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Greetings again from the Sheslay Valley as we continue to learn more about this unique mineral-rich and under-explored area of northwest British Columbia…after a few days up here and a fly-over of the trend in a helicopter, we have enormous amounts of material that we’ve compiled, including pictures and video footage, that we’ll be sharing with our readers next week…

Gold has traded between $1,313 and $1,325 so far today…as of 9:10 am Pacific, the yellow metal is unchanged at $1,318…Silver is off 2 pennies at $20.01…Copper is flat at $3.02…Crude Oil has added 78 cents to $104.18 while the U.S. Dollar Index is relatively unchanged at 79.43 and headed for a sharp weekly decline…the Index appears destined for a serious test of the critical 79 support level in the very near future…

Gold hit a two-week high yesterday, a day after minutes of the Fed’s March meeting were released and showed that several policy makers said projections for an interest rate rise might be overstated…Fed Chair Janet Yellen indicated last week that the U.S. economy will need stimulus for “some time” after stating last month that rates might start to rise about six months after asset purchases end…

Bullion has been showing some strength this week but volume for the benchmark Gold contract in China, the largest user, is nearly 40% less than three weeks ago, according to data from the Shanghai Gold Exchange…“The Gold price is continuing to find support from the unexpectedly dovish Fed minutes from mid-week because the U.S. dollar has been tending towards weakness ever since,” analysts at Commerzbank AG wrote in a report today. “Because physical demand is also generating little impetus at present, the latest price rise is likely to have been driven predominantly by speculation.”

Gold and Silver imports into India, the world’s second-biggest buyer of the metal, dropped 40% to $33.46 billion in 2013/14, a trade ministry source said today, following a series of restrictions imposed by the federal government to curtail the current account deficit…however, the fall in Gold and Silver imports narrowed in March, down 17.27% from a year earlier to $2.76 billion, a source told Reuters…last month, the Indian central bank allowed five more private banks to import the yellow metal, in what many saw as a first significant step in easing of tough rules on imports…

OPEC Production Declines In March

Production by OPEC, which supplies more than one-third of the Oil consumed globally, fell by over half a million barrels a day last month to 29.6 million barrels daily, the group said in its monthly Oil market report…a steep drop in Iraq’s Oil output of nearly 300,000 barrels a day led the decline, though there also was a substantial downturn in production from Angola, Libya and Saudi Arabia last month…

Today’s Equity Markets

Asia

Japan’s Nikkei posted its biggest weekly fall since the March 2011 nuclear disaster, a 7% setback after a 340-point drop overnight…the Nikkei closed at 13960, its first close below 14000 since October…meanwhile, China’s Shanghai Composite lost only 4 points overnight to finish at 2131 after closing at its highest level in nearly two months yesterday…revealing comments from the Vice Governor of the People’s Bank of China who was speaking in the U.S. yesterday…he said officials should be careful in implementing stimulus measures since they are less efficient than natural market forces in boosting growth…the Chinese are learning…his comments come one day after Premier Li Keqiang said Beijing won’t take any short-term easing measures to combat economic volatility…

Interestingly, the Chinese government was unable to sell all the bonds offered at an auction today, its first such failure in nearly a year amid concerns about slowing growth in the world’s second-largest economy…the bond failure followed inflation data that showed prices fell in China last month, reinforcing the picture of a sluggish economy weighed down in part by government efforts to squeeze leverage out of the financial system…consumer prices fell 0.5% in March from the previous month, while producer prices remained mired in deflationary territory for a 25th consecutive month, according to figures published by the National Bureau of Statistics today…

Europe

European markets were down significantly (over 1%) today…

North America

The Dow is off another 62 points as of 9:10 am Pacific…U.S. producer prices recorded their largest increase in nine months in March as the cost of food and services rose, pointing to some pockets of inflation at the factory gate…the Labor Department said this morning that it’s seasonally adjusted PPI for final demand increased 0.5% last month after slipping 0.1% in February…that was the largest increase since June last year – a good sign, actually, as a little inflation at this point is needed…meanwhile, new data shows that the U.S. budget deficit shrank to $37 billion in March from $107 billion in the same month last year…that’s the lowest read for the month of March in 14 years…

Nasdaq Updated Chart

The Nasdaq has been beaten up significantly since its March 6 intra-day high of 4372, thanks to a sell-off in tech and biotech stocks…the Nasdaq dropped as low as 4007 in early trading today, an 8.3% drop in just over a month but a healthy and quite normal pullback nonetheless…the iShares Nasdaq Biotechnology ETF has been the tip of the arrow when it comes to trading momentum…it peaked at 272.23 on Feb. 25 and has since lost nearly 20% as it hovers precariously above its 200-day moving average…

Below is 3-year weekly Nasdaq chart from John that provides some critical perspective…there are two important channels of support to be aware of with regard to the Nasdaq…the Index has landed on the first channel as you can see below, just above the SMA(40) on this weekly chart…the second channel is the long-term uptrend line that goes back to late 2011…the Nasdaq would have to fall another 10% to touch this support which is currently just above 3600…it also coincides with the Fib. 50% retracement level (3588)…the recent drop-off in buy pressure, combined with a bearish -DI crossover and an RSI(14) that may need to unwind a little more, suggest that a test of the 3600 area is very possible but this would likely present a tremendous buying opportunity – especially if such a move were to happen quickly in “panic” fashion…

The TSX is down 39 points as of 9:10 am Pacific…Goldcorp Inc. (G, TSX) has raised its hostile bid for Osisko Mining Corp. (OSK, TSX-V) to $3.6-billion ($7.65 per share) in an attempt to squash a friendly, albeit convoluted, deal from Yamana Gold Inc. (YRI, TSX)…investors pushed OSK shares slightly above Goldcorp’s revised bid yesterday…

The Venture is holding steady, up 2 points at 996 as of 9:10 am Pacific…

“Buckle Up”:  A Wild Ride At The Hat In Recent Months Could Soon Accelerate

After 11 drill holes, entering this current round of drilling, getting a handle on the geometry of a potential sizable deposit at the Hat is a priority for the Doubleview Capital Corp. (DBV, TSX-V) technical team…a critical member of that team with extensive international experience and an impressive track record at figuring out porphyry deposits is 63 year-old John Buckle who’s both a geologist and a geophysicist…he began his career with Teck in 1972…Buckle’s interpretations of historical data from Utah Mines were hugely important in allowing DBV to hit the margins of the mineralized system on just the 6th hole last year.  “We were in the right neighborhood when we started at Anomaly A,” Buckle told us, “but hole 6 at Anomaly B gave us the sniff we were looking for, and that’s very early into a drill program.  After holes 8 and 11, we’re getting much closer to finding the right house.  I told Farshad, if this isn’t a mineralized porphyry I’d eat my hat.”

We’ll have much more with Buckle next week – he’s an interesting individual who brings not only his unique expertise to the table, but humor and character as well…he’s one reason we’re so confident that DBV is on the right track at the Hat.  “I do know that if we keep on hitting it where we think it is, then we’ll soon get this thing unraveled,” he stated. “It’ll depend on what we see.  Hole 11 ended in mineralization, so we don’t know where the limit of this is yet.  We haven’t hit the edges yet.  It could take a few deep holes before we begin to see where the edges of this thing are.”

Ashburton Ventures Inc. (ABR, TSX-V) Update

A situation we’ll be exploring in some detail next week is Ashburton’s (ABR, TSX-V) Hackett Property which we have just visited…it’s only 1000 metres from Doubleview’s discovery holes, and just 300 metres shy of the historical Hoey showing…unquestionably, the trend of mineralization leads right to the Hackett (never previously drilled or systematically explored) which makes ABR at 5.5 cents (with only 36 million shares outstanding) a very compelling speculative opportunity in our view…if DBV is able to prove up a major deposit, ABR could literally explode…

“We couldn’t be in a better place at a better time,” ABR President Kyler Hardy told BMR.  “Looking at the data, it’s publicly available, we’re very much on that trend with the DBV discovery…it’s very interesting.  We’re in a good position to experience similar success to DBV.  In my opinion,” Hardy continued, “we’re into a very, very large regional play rather than simply an isolated deposit (Sheslay Star target) that was looked at previously.  Garibaldi as well, they’re got a very interesting project with the Grizzly.  It does look like a parallel-type structure.  What we’ve been seeing so far, everything seems to line up.”

Below is a 2.5-year weekly ABR chart showing the horizontal channel that has been in place since late 2012…consistent accumulation has occurred since early this year, following the announcement of DBV’s discovery, and the overall bullish trend remains intact as confirmed by the ADX indicator…

Prosper Gold Corp. (PGX, TSX-V) Update

We captured some excellent aerial shots of Prosper’s Sheslay Property yesterday, and we’ll be sharing some of those with our readers next week…keep in mind that Prosper could be drilling the Sheslay in as little as three weeks, and any success in step-out drilling between the Star targets, and/or in drilling at Pyrrhotite Creek, could really ignite this entire district…only 9 holes have ever been drilled at Pyrrhotite Creek and that was over 40 years ago…one of the last holes returned 480 feet of 0.39% Cu from surface (never assayed for Gold)…it is a distinct, multiple-target area, approximately 4.5 km southwest of the Star, with all the geological and geophysical signatures of a potential major new discovery…Prosper has a world class technical team led by Dr. Dirk Tempelman-Kluit who discovered the multi-million ounce Blackwater deposit that was acquired by New Gold Inc. (NGD, TSX) from Richfield Ventures in early 2011…guided by Pete Bernier and Tempelman-Kluit, Richfield soared from pennies to more than $10 a share on the buy-out…that’s the kind of success they could repeat with Prosper and the Sheslay Property which they optioned from Firesteel Resources Inc. (FTR, TSX-V) last year after looking at more than 150 other properties throughout the world…

Below is a 2.5-year weekly PGX chart from John…the strong support band between 45 and 50 cents has held, laying a solid foundation for a powerful upside move on strong drill results…

Note: John and Jon both hold share positions in DBV and GGI.  Jon also holds share positions in PGX and ABR.