The Osaka Group: After more than 2 years in the doldrums, gold mining stocks have bucked the equity markets’ jittery start to 2016. Concerns over the outlook for China’s economy as well as worsening tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran have led to sharp selloffs in global stocks.

The Osaka Group has reiterated its standing recommendation to longer-term investors to acquire gold mining stocks of companies like Barrick Gold, Newmont Mining and Yamana Gold justifying such calls with assertions that they will not underperform the underlying metal like they did in gold’s run up to its record high of $1931.00 an ounce in September 2011.

“Investors have every reason to be skeptical of mining stocks; they did perform rather badly compared to the metal itself during the multi-year bull market but that won’t be the case this time around, we believe,” said a commodities analyst from The Osaka Group.

“The last couple of days have seen a 10% surge in the value of Barrick Gold’s shares and 5% in Yamana Gold’s. That’s quite impressive when one considers that the US markets are down sharply in the first few sessions of 2016,” he added.

Gold prices have been in a bear market and fell a further 10% in 2015 but The Osaka Group believes 2016 will hold some cheer for the yellow metal

“It’s our sincere belief that this year will mark a change in the prevailing narrative that US interest rates are some kind of upward trajectory. We expect the Fed to take back the hike they implemented at their December meeting and we expect to hear rumblings about further monetary stimulus as the US economy heads towards a recession. Gold will benefit from that and so will the miners,” concluded The Osaka Group analyst.