Basic material stocks became popular with the increase in raw material prices due to the strong growth of China from the recent year. Not only directly commodity mining stocks exploded, also supplier of mining equipment started to boom. The basic material sector is a small investment field with around 600 listed companies. I made a list of the best stocks picks for next year. My criteria are:

The Ben Bernanke's comments were just released before he testifies in front of a Joint Economic Committee. It should be noted that gold, silver, and gold mining stocks are declining lower. This tells us all that the Federal Reserve is not looking to implement another quantitative easing program at this time.  ...

GDX: Short term traders should watch for intra-day resistance around the $43.00, and $43.50 levels. Take note, the GDX is still trading below the important daily chart 50, and 200 moving averages, this technical position puts the important ETF in a weak technical position. All of the leading gold mining stocks are holding up very well on an intra-day basis. Most of the daily charts of the gold mining stocks are still very vulnerable to declines after this short term bounce concludes.    

This afternoon, almost every major stock market index is trading lower on the session. Traders and investors are experiencing a very rare broad based decline. The one sector that is showing strength today is gold and the gold mining stocks. The SPDR Gold Trust (NYSEARCA:GLD) is actually trading higher by $1.88 to $161.25 a share.