This week there were a couple things that cropped up on the site as articles for the Irregulars — I made one purchase, adding Ligand Pharmaceuticals to my personal portfolio, I answered a more detailed question about a Thai investment I had covered in the past, and I took a quick look at a legal dispute brewing over at Americas Bullion Royalty, a snake-bitten company (even before gold prices collapsed) that’s been a speculation for me and a watchlist stock on the site for a while.

We also published Myron Martin’s next installment for the Irregulars earlier this afternoon, so we’ll keep this brief today and give you some time to read his look at a handful of little companies — he tends to be focused on small caps and junior mining stocks and follows them more closeely than I care to, so we’ve asked him to share a monthly column with you and cover some of his favorites, which will hopefully be interesting given the collapse of the junior mining and energy sectors in Canada, his preferred hunting ground.

But the questions I’ve been getting personally have mostly been about gold — no surprise, given the incredibly rapid fall in the gold price this Spring. And more specifically, I’ve been getting questions about my largest gold-related holding, Sandstorm Gold (SAND). So even before the stock jumped like a jack-in-the-box today, I was planning to take another look and see how things are looking for them.

Sandstorm Gold is no longer my largest single holding (it was at the top of my portfolio, if you include warrants, for quite a long time), but that’s because the share price has been clobbered — not because I’ve been selling. I did sell my 2014 warrants and roll much of that money way out to the 2017 warrants a while back (I tried to get the 2015s at the time, but the price didn’t work), but all the warrants have also seen their prices decimated this year so that hasn’t helped much.

I very much like the strategy and management of Sandstorm, and this is the kind of environment that can allow them to make good new royalty or streaming deals, since mining companies are essentially cut off from the private markets now that gold has fallen from $1,900 to $1,200 with the rapid rejection of gold as a ...