Miners might put in a better showing as the year progresses, Citi says

Shares of miners may perform better as the year progresses driven mainly by improvements in their balance sheets and cash flows, whereas markets appeared to be most worried at present with their spot earnings, Citi said on Wednesday.

A regression analysis carried out by the analysts at the broker found that the share prices of the big four miners, Anglo American, Glencore, BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto had been closely tracking their enterprise value-to-spot earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation multiples (EV/EBITDA).

They found that the exact value of that correlation or the so-called R squared value - was 0.91%.

Nevertheless, they admitted that markets were clearly concerned regarding the potential for any further "deterioration" in commodity prices, which might herald capital calls.