Gold Miners’ Q4’24 Fundamentals

The major gold miners are finishing reporting their best quarter ever!  Lofty record gold prices combined with production growth and decent cost control to catapult unit profits to their highest levels ever witnessed.  These wildly-bullish dynamics also fueled record revenues, bottom-line earnings, and operating cash flows.  Gold-stock fundamentals have never been better, which will lead to massive mean reversions higher.

The GDX VanEck Gold Miners ETF remains this sector’s dominant benchmark.  Birthed way back in May 2006, GDX has parlayed its first-mover advantage into an insurmountable lead.  Its $13.8b of net assets mid-week dwarfed the next-largest 1x-long major-gold-miners ETF by nearly 12x!  GDX is undisputedly the trading vehicle of choice in this sector, with the world’s biggest gold miners commanding most of its weighting.

Gold-stock tiers are defined by miners’ annual production rates in ounces of gold.  Small juniors have little sub-300k outputs, medium mid-tiers run 300k to 1,000k, large majors yield over 1,000k, and huge super-majors operate at vast scales exceeding 2,000k.  Translated into quarterly terms, these thresholds shake out under 75k, 75k to 250k, 250k+, and 500k+.  Those two largest categories account for almost 54% of GDX.

Gold-stock performance has been mixed lately, reflecting the ongoing lack of interest in this contrarian sector.  Year-to-date as of midweek, GDX has surged 23.6% higher.  That amplified gold’s own rally by 2.1x, on the lower end of major gold stocks’ usual 2x-to-3x leverage to the metal that overwhelmingly drives their profits.  The gold stocks are crushing the benchmark S&P 500 this year, which is down 4.8% YTD.

But zooming back out, the gold stocks have dreadfully lagged gold.  It is enjoying a remarkable monster upleg clocking in with epic 62.2% gains across 16.7 months from early October 2023 to late February 2025!  Yet during that span, GDX merely climbed 55.6%.  Gold miners are not worth owning if their stock prices don’t well-outperform, as they heap big operational, geological, and geopolitical risks on top of gold trends.

Historically GDX has really shined in big gold uplegs.  During the last 40%+ monster cresting in August 2020 at 40.0% exactly, GDX skyrocketed 134.1% for great 3.4x upside leverage!  The major gold stocks ought to already be up 124% to 187% in today’s far-bigger gold upleg, which hasn’t seen a single 10%+ correction.  Gold miners’ phenomenal fundamentals all but guarantee a massive revaluation higher is coming.

For 35 quarters in a row now, I’ve painstakingly analyzed the latest operational and financial results from GDX’s 25-largest component stocks.  Mostly super-majors, majors, and larger mid-tiers, they dominate this ETF at 86.4% of its total weighting!  While digging through quarterlies is a ton of work, understanding the gold miners’ latest fundamentals really cuts through the obscuring sentiment fogs shrouding this sector.

This table summarizes the operational and financial highlights from the GDX top 25 during Q4’24.  These gold miners’ stock symbols aren’t all US listings, and are preceded by their rankings changes within GDX over this past year.  The shuffling in their ETF weightings reflects shifting market caps, which reveal both outperformers and underperformers since Q4’23.  Those symbols are followed by their current GDX weightings.

Next comes these gold miners’ Q4’24 production in ounces, along with their year-over-year changes from the comparable Q4’23.  Output is the lifeblood of this industry, with investors generally prizing production growth above everything else.  After are the costs of wresting that gold from the bowels of the earth in per-ounce terms, both cash costs and all-in sustaining costs.  The latter help illuminate miners’ profitability.

That’s followed by a bunch of hard accounting data reported to securities regulators, quarterly revenues, earnings, operating cash flows, and resulting cash treasuries.  Blank data fields mean companies hadn’t disclosed that particular data as of the middle of this week.  The annual changes aren’t included if they would be misleading, like comparing negative numbers or data shifting from positive to negative or vice-versa.

Unfortunately Q4 results are harder to analyze than other quarters’.  Reporting is way more spread out, with US and Canadian companies respectively having long 60-day and 90-day deadlines after year-ends to file results with securities regulators!  Further complicating things, some gold miners publish full-year numbers without breaking out Q4.  So quarterly results have to be calculated by comparing prior quarters’.

Despite all this, gold miners were set up for their best quarter ever primarily due to dazzling record gold prices.  I wrote a whole essay explaining why back in late January, before any Q4 reporting.  That proved true, and for the most part the major gold miners didn’t disappoint.  They continue to enjoy an enormous earnings-growth streak unparalleled in all the stock markets.  Traders should be flocking to gold stocks.

Right off the bat, the GDX-top-25 gold miners achieved excellent 3.1%-YoY production growth to 9,227k ounces!  This finally ended a long seven-quarter streak of shrinkage, and proved much better than global gold mining as a whole.  After every quarter the World Gold Council publishes gold’s best-available global supply-and-demand data in its fantastic Gold Demand Trends reports, which are always essential reading.

Last quarter the WGC reported global mine production slipped 0.2% YoY in Q4 to 30,660k ounces.  That could change some in future GDTs, as the WGC’s analysts have to estimate miners’ outputs before all their quarterly reports.  But seeing the majors apparently outperform their industry was impressive.  Production growth helps finance mine expansions, mine-builds, and mine acquisitions, laying groundwork for future growth.

The biggest contribution to better GDX-top-25 output came from Newmont, the world’s largest gold miner and narrowly GDX’s largest component.  NEM’s production surged 9.1% YoY to 1,899k ounces, which is over 1/5th of the GDX-top-25 total!  But unfortunately that growth is temporary and fleeting.  Back in early November 2023 in the comparable quarter, Newmont finished buying out Australia’s Newcrest Mining.

Such gold-stock mega-mergers drive four subsequent quarters of big growth on combined operations, which masks inexorable depletion.  Newmont has almost finished that newly-merged streak.  Its 2025 production guidance has a 5,900k-ounce midpoint, which would make for an ominous 14%-YoY decline this year!  And the second-largest gold miner Barrick Gold is also facing similar shrinking output in 2025.

GOLD produced 3,911k ounces in 2024, but is only forecasting a 2025 midpoint of 3,325k!  That would prove a 15%-YoY decline, which investors sure aren’t going to like.  Agnico Eagle Mines remains the best super-major on multiple fronts, and sees production near 3,400k ounces this year which would merely be down 2% YoY from 2024’s 3,485k.  So unfortunately GDX-top-25 output is likely to resume declining soon.

Because of the vast scales they operate at, super-majors have long struggled to find sufficient production to overcome depletion and consistently grow.  That’s one key reason I’ve rarely deployed capital in them, always preferring fundamentally-superior smaller mid-tier and junior gold miners.  I’m digging into their Q4 reports now, and plan to analyze them in depth in next week’s essay on the GDXJ-top-25 stocks’ latest results.

Yet production growth can still be found in smaller majors, like the UK’s Endeavour Mining.  Its output soared 29.6% YoY last quarter, among the GDX top 25’s best!  And its 2025 midpoint guidance is 1,185k ounces, which would work out to 7%+ better output.  Yet EDV has a mere 1.4% weighting in GDX while NEM and GOLD command 19.5%!  Underperforming super-majors seriously drag down GDX’s gains.

Unit gold-mining costs are generally inversely proportional to gold-production levels.  That’s because gold mines’ total operating costs are largely fixed during pre-construction planning stages, when designed throughputs are determined for plants processing gold-bearing ores.  Their nameplate capacities don’t change quarter to quarter, requiring similar levels of infrastructure, equipment, and employees to keep running.

So the only real variable driving quarterly gold production is the ore grades fed into these plants.  Those vary widely even within individual gold deposits.  Richer ores yield more ounces to spread mining’s big fixed expenses across, lowering unit costs and boosting profitability.  But while fixed costs are the lion’s share of gold mining, there are also sizable variable costs.  That’s where recent years’ raging inflation hit hard.

Cash costs are the classic measure of gold-mining costs, including all cash expenses necessary to mine each ounce of gold.  But they are misleading as a true cost measure, excluding the big capital needed to explore for gold deposits and build mines.  So cash costs are best viewed as survivability acid-test levels for the major gold miners.  They illuminate the minimum gold prices necessary to keep the mines running.

In Q4’24 the GDX top 25’s average cash costs soared 17.6% YoY to a record $1,157 per ounce!  That’s certainly disappointing and concerning.  Cash costs do rise gradually over time due to inflation, as well as higher gold prices unlocking lower-grade ores to be mined.  In the entire history of this research thread, the GDX top 25’s cash costs averaged 7.8%-YoY quarterly increases.  So last quarter’s big surge is a real outlier.

But GDX-top-25 composition changes played a sizable role.  While the upper ranks of GDX’s holdings only shuffle slightly, smaller gold miners migrate into and out of the lower ranks based on market-capitalization changes.  Two lower-cost producers in the comparable Q4’23 weren’t in Q4’24.  Perseus Mining slumped to 26th in GDX, with Q4’24 cash costs of just $919.  And AngloGold Ashanti gobbled up Centamin since.

All-in sustaining costs are far superior than cash costs, and were introduced by the World Gold Council in June 2013.  They add on to cash costs everything else that is necessary to maintain and replenish gold-mining operations at current output tempos.  AISCs give a much-better understanding of what it really costs to maintain gold mines as ongoing concerns, and reveal the major gold miners’ true operating profitability.

Naturally cash production costs are the largest component of AISCs by far, so rising cash costs drive up AISCs proportionally.  In Q4’24, the GDX top 25’s average AISCs surged 12.2% YoY to an also-record-high $1,454 per ounce.  That was considerably worse than my $1,350 estimate explained in my earlier Q4-earnings-preview essay.  Several factors contributed, including lower-cost miners falling under 25th in GDX.

But the great majority of these major gold miners reported higher AISCs last quarter.  Thanks to the major central banks flooding the world with vast quantities of new fiat currencies since the pandemic, virtually all goods and services prices are inexorably rising.  Specialized gold-mining suppliers face higher input costs like everyone else, which they are passing along to miners.  But a few individual anomalies sure contributed.

The worst AISCs last quarter were reported by Hecla Mining and IAMGOLD running way up at $2,203 and $1,949.  With a small-group average like this, any outliers really force it higher.  Excluding these two miners, the rest of the GDX top 25 averaged $1,377 which is more-representative.  And both of these gold stocks are forecasting better AISCs in 2025, with guidances near midpoints of $1,850 and $1,713 respectively.

Oddly another factor was the GDX top 25’s lowest-cost miner Buenaventura.  While its $708 AISCs last quarter were fantastic, they were comparatively-high.  This Peruvian miner produces lots of silver, zinc, and lead it uses as byproducts to offset gold-mining costs.  In Q1, Q2, and Q3 last year, that hammered BVN’s AISCs negative to -$121, -$578, and -$680 per ounce!  Those dragged down the GDX-top-25 averages.

Like many foreign gold miners, BVN’s quarterly reporting is anemic compared to US companies’.  So it wasn’t clear why Q4’s output declined forcing AISCs way higher.  But Buenaventura will likely get back on track soon, and restoring production will likely drive AISCs negative again.  So last quarter’s record-high GDX-top-25 AISCs mostly resulted from three individual miners rather than across the entire GDX top 25.

But that doesn’t mean the AISC outlook is all rainbows and unicorns.  Back in late October, GDX was on the verge of a psychologically-huge dozen-year secular breakout.  Then just 0.9% away, GDX fell hard as Newmont pooped in the punch bowl.  As I analyzed in depth in my GDX-top-25 Q3’24-results essay back in mid-November, NEM missed big on AISCs.  This only gold miner in the S&P 500 reported $1,611 in Q3!

That was far higher than reiterated guidance all year to that point, so the next day NEM’s stock crashed 14.7% despite reporting huge jumps in sales, profits, and operating cash flows.  That proved Newmont’s worst daily drop in 27 years!  That really damaged institutional investors’ confidence in this sector, since the world’s biggest gold miner couldn’t control costs.  That $1,611 was far higher than guidance near $1,300.

Fast-forward to Q4 results, and I was shocked to see Newmont’s 2025 AISC guide.  For this entire year, NEM is forecasting a midpoint of $1,630 which is even worse than that Q3 debacle!  That’s worse than Barrick near $1,510, and far behind the better smaller majors AEM and EDV which have forecast AISC midpoints of $1,275 and $1,250 this year.  Newmont has real problems which continue to retard GDX upside.

But such strong gold prices easily overshadowed higher mining costs.  The yellow metal averaged an all-time record $2,661 on close in Q4, soaring a whopping 34.7% YoY!  That was the biggest gold increase in the history of this research thread, and way larger than the GDX top 25’s 12.2% AISC increase.  So the major gold miners’ implied unit profits still skyrocketed last quarter, achieving their best levels ever seen by far.

Q4’s lofty $2,661 average gold prices less $1,454 average GDX-top-25 AISCs yields massive unit profits of $1,207 per ounce for the major gold miners!  That soared 77.5% YoY from Q4’23 levels, and trounced the previous record of $1,099 from Q2’24.  So last quarter truly indeed proved the best ever for the major gold miners.  And that made for the sixth consecutive quarter of extreme earnings growth for this sector.

Starting back in Q3’23, GDX-top-25 implied unit earnings skyrocketed 87.2%, 46.7%, 34.9%, 83.7%, 74.0%, and that 77.5% YoY!  These stunning results are far better than any other stock-market sector, and actually rival AI market-darling NVIDIA in recent quarters.  Speculators and investors alike still need to flood into this tiny sector to chase these epic gold-mining fundamentals, which are actually still improving.

This current Q1’25 is proving another hell of quarter for gold, which is averaging $2,820 quarter-to-date about 5/6ths of the way through.  The average full-year-2025 AISC guidance across the GDX top 25 is running $1,512.  That implies Q1 unit profits around $1,308 per ounce currently, which would be another new record soaring another 64.5% YoY!  Gold miners’ record-breaking fundamental run is still going strong.

The GDX top 25’s underlying hard accounting numbers reported to securities regulators are important as well.  But they are way more complex to analyze, which is why that implied-unit-earnings proxy is such a fantastic metric for gold-miner profitability.  One big piece is other countries’ financial-reporting standards, which are very different from the US’s.  Many countries only require half-year reporting instead of quarterly.

I generally divide those by two for a quarterly approximation.  But every-other quarter isn’t followed by half-year results, making GDX-top-25 accounting data noisy.  Big foreign gold miners like the Chinese Zijin Mining and Zhaojin Mining with the numerical stock symbols above have results included in some quarters but not in others.  While they can be adjusted out, I include everything reported for each quarter.

Another problem is some subset of major gold miners are almost always reporting unusual items flushed through income statements.  These are mostly one-time non-cash writeoffs of carrying values of mines or deposits.  But occasionally those can be revalued higher for big non-cash gains.  I note all the material ones every quarter in my results spreadsheet, but over time they accumulate tainting net-income comparisons.

With this in mind, the GDX top 25 achieved record revenues last quarter excluding those two Chinese gold miners which haven’t reported.  Overall sales still soared 33.1% YoY to $24,190m.  That fueled also-record bottom-line earnings of $5,091m, radically better than the comparable Q4’23’s terrible -$3,547m loss on huge impairment charges I explained in that essay a year ago.  Q4’24 had no bigger non-cash items.

Those fat-and-rich accounting profits pushed GDX-top-25 trailing-twelve-month price-to-earnings ratios down sharply to 36.6x.  Three outliers make that more expensive than it should be, with the rest of the GDX top 25 averaging just 22.8x.  Four of these major gold miners now have dirt-cheap single-digit P/Es, while another seven are in the teens!  Such super-low valuations ought to attract fund value investors.

These elite majors’ operating cash flows generated soared 83.3% YoY to another record $10,150m.  That helped grow their collective cash treasuries a big 24.1% YoY to $18,781m.  While behind Q4’20’s record of $22,835m, the GDX top 25 still have vast hoards of cash to continue expanding existing mines, building new ones, and acquiring them from other companies.  Strong OCFs are necessary to fund production growth.

After intensely-studying, actively-trading, and writing financial newsletters about gold stocks for over a quarter-century now, I’m blown away by their Q4’24 results.  Don’t be fooled by this sector’s depressed prices, the miners’ awe-inspiring fundamentals guarantee a massive revaluation higher in gold-stock levels.  Eventually all stock prices gravitate to some reasonable multiple of underlying corporate earnings.

That extraordinary streak of GDX-top-25 implied unit profits skyrocketing began in Q3’23.  The quarter before that in Q2’23, these gold majors earned $598 per ounce.  Q4’24’s latest $1,207 more than doubled that, soaring 101.8%.  Yet last quarter GDX merely averaged $38.36 on close, just 17.7% better than its Q2’23 levels before this epic earnings ramp began!  Today’s low gold-stock prices are an extreme anomaly.

It can’t and won’t last.  Sooner or later gold will power high enough to attract the attention of American stock investors long distracted by the bursting AI-stock bubble.  Maybe that will happen soon during gold’s and gold stocks’ spring rallies, which should catapult gold over the psychologically-huge $3,000 level.  And once they start running, gold-stock gains are fast-and-furious.  So traders need to get deployed before.

Our newsletter trading books are currently full of great fundamentally-superior smaller mid-tier and junior gold miners still trading at absurdly-low prices.  Their upside potential is huge, far better than the majors dominating GDX.  Partially thanks to Newmont’s mismanagement, GDX only rallied 9.4% in 2024.  Yet all 84 gold-stock trades we closed in our newsletters last year averaged +43.1% annualized realized gains!

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The bottom line is the major gold miners dominating GDX just reported their best quarter ever by far!  Fast-rising record gold prices easily overpowered higher mining costs, fueling this sector’s richest-and-fattest implied unit profits in history.  Those have skyrocketed in mostly-high-double-digit annual gains for six quarters in a row now, an epic streak.  Gold miners’ huge earnings growth trounces all other sectors’.

And that’s still going strong, with this current quarter tracking for another record extending this remarkable run.  Major gold miners also just achieved record sales, profits, and operating cash flows, forcing many of their P/Es to deeply-undervalued levels.  Gold-stock prices need to mean revert massively higher to start reflecting their wildly-bullish fundamentals.  That inevitable normalization means colossal gains are coming.

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