Everybody who's owned gold and silver mining shares through a couple of cycles has their favorite story of the stock that took off and ran away. There was Glamis Gold, which rose from $1 to $40 in the space of a few years before selling out to Goldcorp. And Silver Wheaton, which soared from $3.45 in 2008 to over $40 in 2011. And many, many more.

That's how mining shares -- which are, as the industry likes to say, leveraged plays on gold and silver -- behave when the underlying metals start to rise. And you only need to find and ride a few such moonshots to justify a lifetime of obsessing over your investments.

Now, after a brutal and interminable bear market, a few of the better miners and streaming companies are starting to show signs of that famous upside potential. Three examples:

There's no way to know whether this is a head fake in an ongoing bear market or the start of another epic rise -- which, this time, we don't want to miss! But when that epic rise does come, its initial stage will look like these charts. So the current action at least bears watching.