Surveying 14 Silver Stocks

By Chris Mack:As long-term shareholders of Pan American Silver (PAAS), who've held it for more than a decade, we were surprised to hear that its management has decided to purchase Minefinders (MFN) - whose PE ratio is roughly twice that of PAAS. We've taken a closer look at the proposed financials, and the deal does not add up.

By Simit Patel:I recently acquired some shares of Pan America Silver Corp. (PAAS) indirectly; these were shares given to previous shareholders of Minefinders (MFN), a company which Pan American just acquired.

By Chris Mack:Geoff Burns, the CEO of Pan American Silver (PAAS), was kind enough to give us an exclusive interview explaining management's reasoning behind their bid for Mine Finders (MFN) in response to our recent article PAAS Acquisition of MFN is Highly Dilutive.

By The Financial Lexicon: With the prices of gold (GLD) and silver (SLV) off to the races to start 2012, let's check in on the miners' stocks to see if they are keeping pace.

The next generation of top-tier silver miners are in the pipeline and will join the likes of Hecla (HL), Pan-American (PAAS) , etc. in terms of production output and of course profitability. This is the time to jump into these stocks as the companies listed below have "de-risked," making these picks safer than their peers.

By Matt Schilling:With the iShares Silver Trust (SLV) down nearly 4.65% over the last few trading sessions, due in large part to the interest rate cuts enacted by the ECB, I wanted to take a closer look at several silver companies and see if I could find a few positive catalysts. After developing a screen, I found three silver companies that actually carry very minimal total debt-to-total cash ratios.

Michael K. Dawson submits: Investors are attracted to mining stocks due to their leverage to underlying metal. When the leverage doesn’t materialize there is always a lot of questioning. The current divergence between physical Gold & Silver and the Gold & Silver Miners is as large as I can recall since I began following the sector in 2002.