Sixth World's Roundtable on NEM

I appreciate being asked to contribute to this august group.NEM is a stock I've followed for a while, mostly because of my interest in the mining sector. A key fact about NEM is that it is the largest cap non-ADR gold miner, at about $17 billion. Only the Anglo-American ADRs (AAUK) is larger at a whopping $35 billion. Barrick (ABX) is third at about $12 billion. According to Yahoo finance, the whole industry's market cap is only $118 billion. A couple years ago somebody (I forget who) told me that if the mutual fund heavyweights ever decide to give some sort of significant weighting to gold miners, then 1) the whole industry would rise significantly, since it is relatively small, and 2) companies like NEM, AAUK, and to a lesser extent ABX would do the best, because they are the only ones with anything near a big enough market cap for the big boys to play in without emptying the pool when they take a dive, as it were. As it is, institutions already own 71% of NEM's float, and insiders another 10%. I was interested to see the chart Tom posted that showed the tremendous money flow into NEM since the start of the gold bull.So. . .I think over the longer term, if gold continues its bull run, NEM will do okay--if the big boys are buying miners, they have to buy this one. Over the short run, however, I think Tom made a great case that its overextended and you probably will get a chance to buy this one lower.