It was a mixed start to the trading week with the big board issues taking on gains, while the junior explorers faced some profit taking during Monday’s session on the Canadian markets. For the tale of the tape, the TSX Exchange added a modest 0.96%, while the TSX Gold Index surged 6.1% and the TSX Venture Exchange, Canada’s largest junior exploration bourse, lost 0.85% with the declining issuers out pacing the advancers by a 462 to 277 margin on volume of 138 million shares traded.

The current “battle” in the gold market is around the $900 level, a fairly steep retrenchment from the recent highs of $1,011.

The world has certainly given us a lot, and we keep asking for more. We have a need for many natural and precious resources that nature has to offer, but we must know where to look. The better we can find and extract these resources, the better we can use nature’s gifts to their full potential.

We have good news for Australia. Earnings are going up for some companies! Rising resource prices for tangibles like coal, iron ore, and gold should continue to generate earnings growth for Aussie exporters. It’s true that energy costs are rising for Aussie producers and the strong local dollar puts a dent in earnings.

The huge run-up in commodity prices between January and mid-March has been a welcome boost for listed producers in the falling Aussie equities market. Oil, sugar, coal, gold, wheat… all these things have gained voraciously. Australian companies drilling, harvesting and mining them have weathered the storm of equity-selling better than other stocks.