Gold Mid-Tiers’ Q3’25 Fundamentals

Mid-tier and junior gold miners’ just-reported epic record third-quarter results are the best this industry has ever achieved!  These smaller gold miners in this sector’s sweet spot for upside potential shattered all records, trouncing the larger majors’ performances.  Mid-tiers’ long-soaring and colossal earnings which are still blasting higher support much-higher stock prices.  These miners’ fundamentals are utterly phenomenal.

The leading mid-tier-gold-stock benchmark is the GDXJ VanEck Junior Gold Miners ETF.  With $8.3b in net assets mid-week, it remains the second-largest gold-stock ETF after its big-brother GDX.  That is dominated by far-larger major gold miners, though there is much overlap between these ETFs’ holdings.  Still misleadingly named, GDXJ is overwhelmingly a mid-tier gold-stock ETF with juniors having lesser weightings.

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+.  Today only four of GDXJ’s 25 biggest holdings are true juniors!

Their Q3 outputs are highlighted in blue in this essay’s table.  Juniors not only mine less than 75k ounces per quarter, but gold output generates over half their quarterly revenues.  That excludes streaming and royalty companies that purchase future gold output for big upfront payments helping finance mine-builds, and primary silver miners producing byproduct gold.  But mid-tiers often make better investments than juniors.

These gold miners dominating GDXJ offer a unique mix of sizable diversified production, excellent output-growth potential, and smaller market capitalizations ideal for outsized gains.  Mid-tiers are less risky than juniors, while amplifying gold uplegs more than majors.  So we’ve long specialized in the fundamentally-superior mid-tiers and juniors at Zeal, actively trading these smaller gold miners for a quarter-century-plus now.

While investors largely ignored mid-tiers for long years, they are coming around.  As of midweek, GDXJ has soared 128.8% year-to-date!  Back in mid-October when gold peaked, GDXJ had skyrocketed an incredible 163.9% over just 9.5 months!  At that point GDXJ’s total bull run with gold born in early October 2023 had moonshotted 262.3% higher!  Remarkably mid-tiers almost quadrupled in just over two years.

Yet Q3’s frankly-astounding fundamentals join technicals in arguing their gains are far from over.  From early October 2023 to mid-October 2025, gold powered a monster 139.1% higher in its biggest cyclical bull ever!  But GDXJ merely amplified that by 1.9x, seriously underperforming with weak leverage.  Historically the smaller gold miners have tended to multiply gold uplegs and bulls by 3x to 4x+, far beyond current levels.

Case in point, gold’s previous 40%+ monster upleg crested in early August 2020 at exactly 40.0% gains.  GDXJ skyrocketed 188.9% in that span for fantastic 4.7x upside leverage!  Given smaller gold miners’ epic record fundamentals evident in their latest results, they certainly ought to see similar outperformance this time around.  Amazingly that argues the lion’s share of their stock-price gains are likely still yet to come.

For 38 quarters in a row now, I’ve painstakingly analyzed the latest operational and financial results from GDXJ’s 25-largest component stocks.  Mostly mid-tiers, they now account for 69.5% of this ETF’s total weighting.  While digging through quarterlies is a ton of work, understanding smaller gold miners’ latest fundamentals really cuts through the obscuring sentiment fogs shrouding this sector.  This research is essential.

This table summarizes the GDXJ top 25’s operational and financial highlights during Q3’25.  These gold miners’ stock symbols aren’t all US listings, and are preceded by their rankings changes within GDXJ over this past year.  The shuffling in their ETF weightings reflects shifting market caps, which reveal both outperformers and underperformers since Q3’24.  Those symbols are followed by their recent GDXJ weightings.

Next comes these gold miners’ Q3’25 production in ounces, along with their year-over-year changes from the comparable Q3’24.  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 last 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.

Given gold’s quarterly-average price soaring an amazing 39.7% YoY to a magnificent record $3,459 in Q3, smaller gold miners’ results had to prove spectacular.  They indeed slammed the ball out of the park, stacking many more all-time records!  No one has ever seen gold miners put up a quarter like this, and the currently-underway Q4 is actually tracking much better.  Mid-tiers and juniors deserve far more capital.

Last week I analyzed the GDX-top-25 majors’ Q3 results, which were also record-level extraordinary.  It’s interesting to compare mid-tiers’ and majors’ fundamentals, as smaller gold miners nearly always well-outperform their larger more-popular peers.  This latest reported quarter was no exception to that long precedent, starting with production.  In Q3 the GDXJ top 25’s gold output slipped 2.0% YoY to 3,013k ounces.

That proved much better than the GDX top 25’s sliding 6.5% YoY last quarter.  But both were skewed by composition changes.  In the comparable Q3’24, Mexican silver behemoth Fresnillo was included in GDXJ’s upper ranks.  But in the year since, it was transferred from this ETF to GDX.  Its replacement was the gold-streaming company Royal Gold, which is way smaller.  Exclude both, and GDXJ-top-25 production grew.

The other-24-largest mid-tiers’ and juniors’ collective output climbed 1.7% YoY without that swap.  And it would be better still if not for a major acquisition.  In late November 2024, supermajor AngloGold Ashanti bought out Egyptian gold miner Centamin.  That long-time GDXJ-top-25 stalwart had mined 132k ounces of gold in Q3’24.  So without a couple composition changes, mid-tiers’ and juniors’ production growth was good.

While GDXJ’s roster is gradually improving, there is still much overlap with its big-brother GDX.  Fully 24 of these GDXJ-top-25 gold miners are also included in GDX, where they are now weighted at 40.9% of its holdings.  GDXJ expands that by about 2/3rds to 68.0% for these same 24 stocks.  GDXJ’s top 14 stocks are also all now included in the GDX top 25!  I’ve long argued these two ETFs should be more differentiated.

Under the same management, ideally their holdings should be mutually-exclusive.  VanEck ought to pick some threshold to divvy up the gold miners.  It could be production, revenues, market capitalizations, or some combination.  All larger gold miners above that level would only be included in GDX, while all smaller ones under it would only be in GDXJ.  Way less holdings overlap would make both ETFs way more useful.

Majors and mid-tiers have always been fundamentally different.  Larger gold miners usually struggle to overcome depletion at the big scales they operate.  And despite their supposed economies of scale, their mining costs are often higher driving lower unit profits.  Majors also have high market caps saddling their stock prices with more inertia.  Mid-tiers’ smaller bases make consistently growing production on balance easier.

Mid-tiers have littler stables of gold mines than majors, typically running from one to four.  So any sizable expansions or new mine-builds really move the needle in overall production.  That helps them not only overcome depletion, but generally grow.  And investors love output growth since it provides the cashflows necessary to continue expanding existing mines and building new ones, ultimately driving stock prices higher.

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 primary 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 smaller gold miners.  They illuminate the minimum gold prices necessary to keep the mines running.

Last quarter the GDXJ top 25’s average cash costs climbed 6.7% YoY to $1,194 per ounce.  That was their highest ever, but still vastly under these lofty prevailing gold prices.  One super-high-cash-cost outlier helped drag up that average, Peru’s polymetallic non-primary-gold miner Buenaventura.  Excluding its extreme $1,826 which soared 36.9% YoY, the rest of these GDXJ-top-25 miners averaged a better $1,159.

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 smaller gold miners’ true operating profitability.

Remarkably in Q3’25 the GDXJ top 25’s average AISCs merely climbed 2.9% YoY to just $1,369 per ounce!  That remained well under Q4’22’s record high of $1,442, which was back when gold averaged just half last quarter’s levels at $1,731.  These smaller gold miners crushed the majors, with the GDX-top-25’s average AISCs surging a bigger 7.9% YoY to a way-higher $1,544!  Mid-tiers’ mining costs are phenomenal.

But unfortunately they remain skewed low by that same Buenaventura, which reported crazy negative gold AISCs of -$1,645 per ounce last quarter!  How is such sorcery possible?  BVN now mainly mines silver, copper, zinc, and lead, but chooses to credit them as byproducts to smaller gold production.  In Q3’25, its gold output only accounted for 28% of sales.  It is really a base-metals miner masquerading as a gold one!

Ridiculously one of its copper-silver mines reported Q3 gold AISCs of -$12,597.  Due to this fiction, in the previous six quarters ending Q2’25 BVN’s reported gold AISCs ran -$121, -$578, -$680, +$708, -$852, and -$668!  But they still have to be included in the average for consistency’s sake.  I’ve never once excluded any outlier from this 38-quarter-old research thread, and the vast majority of those were upside extremes.

Ex-BVN, the rest of the GDXJ top 25’s average AISCs weighed in at $1,547 last quarter.  Also ex-BVN from the comparable Q3’24, those climbed 5.6% YoY.  Buenaventura’s stock has fallen out of favor since it’s not a primary gold miner, and in Q3’25 it dropped out of GDX’s upper ranks after a long stint included.  That’s a key reason the GDX top 25’s average AISCs rose that 7.9% YoY to $1,544, right in line with GDXJ’s.

But the GDX majors had no super-high-cost outliers, while GDXJ included two.  I define that as AISCs over $2,000.  OceanaGold and SSR Mining both reported extreme AISCs of $2,333 and $2,359 in Q3, but didn’t make the GDX-top-25 cut.  Both companies explained in their latest results why those were outliers, and guided to lower full-year-2025 midpoint AISCs of $1,975 and $2,120 which implies much-lower Q4 ones.

If you remove these outliers taking out OGC, BVN, and SSRM, the rest of the GDXJ top 25 averaged great AISCs of $1,440!  That’s much more comparable to the GDX top 25’s $1,544 since it had no extreme outliers last quarter.  Again mid-tiers and juniors have generally long mined gold at lower costs than majors.  They usually choose higher-grade gold deposits to develop and have much less corporate overhead.

After my quarter-century-plus of intensely studying this sector, I’ve found the best metric for measuring gold mid-tiers’ collective fundamental performance is their implied unit earnings.  That simply subtracts the GDXJ-top-25 average AISCs from the quarterly-average gold price.  This is way cleaner than bottom-line accounting profits, since a varying GDXJ-top-25 subset’s are usually distorted by big noncash charges or gains.

Last quarter’s astonishing record $3,459 gold less those $1,369 GDXJ-top-25 average AISCs yields huge sector profits of $2,090 per ounce!  That skyrocketed a stupendous 82.4% YoY, and is the highest ever achieved by either GDXJ or GDX!  It easily bested the preceding two quarters’ last records of $1,488 and $1,918.  And those epic record Q3’25 profits were just the latest in a long trend of phenomenal earnings growth.

Over the last nine quarters ending Q3’25, these GDXJ-top-25 implied unit earnings soared 106%, 133%, 63%, 63%, 71%, 95%, 91%, 79%, and 82% YoY!  Has there ever been an entire stock-market sector rivaling such massive persistent earnings growth?  With that kind of track record, mid-tier gold miners ought to be among the hottest sectors in all the markets!  Investors should be flooding in with a vengeance.

And this epic streak will continue.  Now nearly 4/7ths through this current Q4’25, gold is still averaging $4,057 despite its 9.5%-at-worst drawdown so far after soaring to extraordinarily-overbought extremes in mid-October capping that largest cyclical bull ever.  After gold’s next-ten-largest cyclical bulls since 1971, it averaged big-and-fast 20.8% drawdowns over just 2.1 months.  That precedent implies $3,445 gold.

But even if gold drops that low soon, its Q4 average will almost certainly remain way above last quarter’s record $3,459.  We’re probably looking at around $3,750 at worst, and closer to $4,000 if gold consolidates high instead of selling off seriously.  Over the last four quarters, GDXJ-top-25 average AISCs have climbed an average of 5.2% YoY.  Apply that to the comparable Q4’24, and Q4’25 could come in near $1,417.

Even a $3,750 current-quarter gold average less conservative $1,450 AISCs would make for GDXJ-top-25 implied unit profits of $2,300 per ounce.  That would prove another lofty all-time record, skyrocketing another amazing 75% YoY!  So whether gold and gold stocks face more healthy rebalancing selling or not, mid-tiers’ earnings are almost certain to keep soaring making for an extraordinary ten quarters in a row!

These elite mid-tiers’ and juniors’ hard accounting results reported to securities regulators confirmed their epic record quarter.  The GDXJ-top-25’s total revenues soared 47.8% YoY to a great record $13,406m!  Despite those discussed-above composition changes being unfavorable for collective sales, that trounced Q4’24’s previous record of $11,193m.  With such high gold prices, big revenues are deluging in for gold miners.

Mind-blowingly the GDXJ top 25’s bottom-line accounting profits nearly quadrupled, skyrocketing 294.5% YoY to a huge new record $2,900m!  Q3’25’s earnings had minimal material unusual noncash items flushed through income statements, they were pretty clean.  But the comparable Q3’24 had massive ones both ways, mainly mine-impairment writeoffs and rare reversals of those.  I like to back out big unusual items.

Even resulting adjusted Q3’25 earnings skyrocketed nearly the same 287.7% YoY to $2,786m!  So there’s no doubt smaller gold miners are earning money hand over fist in this fantastically-lucrative record-gold-price environment.  Such fat-and-rich profits naturally catapulted the GDXJ top 25’s cashflows generated from operations up 62.9% YoY to a record $4,955m.  Total cash treasuries soared 59.1% YoY hitting a record $12,491m.

While bottom-line earnings are crucial for stock valuations, OCFs and cash on hand directly fund future production growth.  Gold miners flush with cash as more pours in are way more likely to invest windfalls in expanding their existing mines, building new ones, and acquiring operating mines from other companies.  That should make for faster production growth among smaller gold miners in coming years, which is very bullish.

Yet despite these astounding fundamentals from gold miners’ best quarter ever, I’d be wary here.  Gold stocks are ultimately leveraged plays on gold, which overwhelmingly drives their profits.  They amplify material gold moves both up and down.  And after soaring in its biggest bull ever to crazy-overbought levels just over a month ago, gold is already in a selloff and remains due for more healthy rebalancing selling.

Without fail through history, gold-stock prices leverage big gold drawdowns with much-bigger losses.  GDX majors have long tended to amplify gold by 2x to 3x, and smaller GDXJ mid-tiers usually do even better when gold is rallying but even worse when it is falling.  So until gold looks to have either sold off deep enough for long enough or alternatively drifted sideways for long enough to look like it is bottoming, stay wary.

Why deploy capital now if gold stocks could fall another 10%, 20%, or even 30% in the near future?  Their epic record fundamentals will remain the same, but they will likely see way-better entry prices after gold’s overdue selloff runs its course.  Now is the time to do your homework, researching to find the best mid-tiers and juniors with superior fundamentals to buy when gold’s technicals and sentiment look more favorable.

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The bottom line is smaller mid-tier and junior gold miners just reported the best quarter in the history of gold mining!  They largely held the line on costs while gold soared, catapulting unit profits and bottom-line earnings to dazzling new records.  The former have now skyrocketed with mostly-high-double-digit annual gains for an astonishing nine quarters in a row!  And that streak will persist in this currently-half-over Q4.

These epic record fundamentals combined with gold stocks underperforming gold’s latest monster bull argue for bigger gains to come.  Gold-stock prices still need to mean revert way higher relative to underlying corporate profits.  But with gold suffering a healthy drawdown after an extreme topping, much-better gold-stock entry prices are very likely as it runs its course.  Get your shopping list dialed in before that.

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