The Globe and Mail reports in its Tuesday edition that by adding some managerial heft and by spreading its debt over a bigger asset base, Barrick's board is betting that shareholders will show the company some extra love after it merges with Randgold. The Globe's Tim Kiladze writes, however, that many investors have already turned their backs on the sector. Investors were badly burned when the commodity supercycle started to crash in 2011. From its peak to its trough, the NYSE Arca Gold Miners Index dropped 81 per cent. "Along the way, the spirits and sensibilities of an entire generation of gold equity investors were sorely tested, while generalist investors simply abandoned gold miners as a relevant asset class," Trey Reik, a portfolio manager at commodity player Sprott Asset Management, explained in a note to investors last year. Complicating things, through the worst of the downturn, the top executives of some gold companies continued to earn lavish amounts of executive compensation. This included Barrick executive chairman John Thornton, who lost two shareholder "say-on-pay" votes in three years. Fed up, many investors decided to ditch miners' shares and buy exchange-traded funds -- if they bought at all.