I had a few good links but they no longer appear to work. What you can do is go to a stock screener website (Bloomberg, Fool, Google Finance etc) then sort by industry (metals and mining) and see what you find. Kitco also frequently posts analyst opinions in charts so you can see a large block of the sector in pms as opposed to base metal companies. Another thing you can do to learn more about miners and their ratios is to pull up miners within Mexus' potential peer group. You will probably be surprised at what you find but be wary, for it is nearly impossible to make an apples to apples comparison in this industry without knowing a lot about the specific stocks and projects.
I have mentioned this a few times before but juniors tend to spend money, not make it - this makes any earnings, regardless of ratio, comparatively more valuable than a company with negative earnings and dilution to pay for it. So in plain English: If you pull up 200 juniors I would bet at least 180 of them have negative earnings. So if you have a company in the top 10% that has a P/E of 1000 - that is an absurdly high ratio but it is still comparatively resilient when placed beside its non profitable peers. Once a mine is proven and established they tend to get low P/Es similar to utilities, reflecting steady income from known customers and contracts and plants/reserves, and the high likely cost of capex for increasing eps. Of course a miner's value is not derived 100% by earnings.
Fresnillo the behemoth is a 12 billion 30x stock, GORO is a P/E of 55, AR nearly -$2 eps on a $2 stock - yowzers. Bunch of juniors, all negative, Torex - p/e of 618! Marlin -20 cents, Timmins P/E of 8 - undervalued, GoldCorp - 80, Yamana and Primero, hugely negative etc. I just looked through about 50 of these, only Timmins was under-priced by P/E ratio but it is hard to tell without knowing a lot about the specific companies. Maybe low ratio company X is running out of high grade ore in a risky country while high ratio company B has been using its income on acquisitions and expansion and will have a huge mine coming online soon. All you can do to make better mining speculations is to learn more about other projects so that you can make better comparisons, mentally rank them, and potentially find cheap gems.
I would argue that Mexus is highly likely to receive more than a 10x ratio in this current environment, especially since if they prove one low cost mine it makes it more likely the market will believe they can do the same at the SF or potentially elsewhere. I don't think Mexus will ever have a 100-600 ratio beyond start-up but anything is possible. I found so many absurdly high P/E examples I will stop there because I don't want to imply that I think Mexus will be justifiably priced at such a high multiple if they go on to earn significant income. They could be, but if that ever happens it would probably be a good place to take ample profits.
