The Globe and Mail reports in its Tuesday edition that Barrick Gold's "no-premium" $6-billion (U.S.) acquisition of Randgold Resources is expected to trigger more deal making among Canadian gold miners this year. The Globe's Niall McGee writes that during the great commodities boom of the mid-2000s, Barrick and others unveiled splashy multibillion-dollar-premium takeovers only eventually to take massive writedowns. Last year, Barrick broke away from the old model by announcing it will pay merely the market price for Randgold. The deal was warmly greeted by shareholders on both sides as a sensible solution in a difficult market. "M&A has slowly been re-entering investor consciousness, and we suspect this trend will gain momentum in 2019, especially since there have now been a few successful transactions," BMO analyst Andrew Kaip said in a note, including the Barrick-Randgold deal as an example. Far from being a one-off, the zero-premium template is one the entire gold industry should learn from and possibly enact, said Jon Case, precious metals portfolio manager with Sentry Investments. Merging companies of roughly the same size would make the new entity bigger, more diversified and in theory less risky.