Gold Stocks’ Autumn Rally ‘25

The gold miners’ stocks have enjoyed a stronger summer, gradually grinding higher.  Several major new secular highs have been achieved, and investor interest is slowly mounting.  This is quite a bullish setup heading into gold’s seasonal autumn rally, which is usually fueled by outsized Indian demand.  Naturally gold stocks tend to leverage their metal’s nice upside in coming months, portending breakouts to bigger gains.

Seasonality is the tendency for prices to exhibit recurring patterns at certain times during the calendar year.  While seasonality doesn’t drive price action, it quantifies annually-repeating behaviors driven by sentiment, technicals, and fundamentals.  We humans are creatures of habit and herd, which naturally colors our trading decisions.  The calendar year’s passage affects the timing and intensity of buying and selling.

Gold stocks display strong seasonality because their price action amplifies that of their dominant primary driver, gold.  Gold’s seasonality generally isn’t driven by supply fluctuations like grown commodities see, as its mined supply remains relatively-steady year-round.  Instead gold’s major seasonality is demand-driven, with global investment demand varying considerably depending on the time in the calendar year.

This gold seasonality is fueled by well-known income-cycle and cultural drivers of outsized gold demand from around the world.  Starting in late summers, Asian farmers begin to reap their harvests.  As they figure out how much surplus income was generated from all their hard work during the growing season, they wisely plow some of their savings into gold.  Asian harvest is followed by India’s famous wedding season.

Indians believe getting married during their autumn festivals is auspicious, increasing the likelihood of long, successful, happy, and even lucky marriages.  And Indian parents outfit their brides with beautiful and intricate 22-karat gold jewelry, which they buy in vast quantities.  That’s not only for adornment on their wedding days, but these dowries secure brides’ financial independence within their husbands’ families.

So during its bull-market years, gold has tended to enjoy sizable-to-strong autumn rallies driven by these sequential episodes of outsized demand.  Naturally the gold stocks follow gold higher, amplifying its gains due to their profits leverage to the gold price.  Today gold stocks are once again back at their most-bullish seasonal juncture, the transition between the typically-drifting summer doldrums and big autumn rallies.

Since it is gold’s own demand-driven seasonality that fuels gold stocks’ seasonality, that’s logically the best place to start to understand what’s likely coming.  This old research thread focuses on modern bull-market seasonality, as bull and bear price action are quite different.  Gold enjoyed a mighty 640.1% bull run from April 2001 to August 2011, fueling gold stocks skyrocketing 1,664.4% per their leading HUI index then!

Following that secular juggernaut, gold consolidated high then started correcting into 2012.  But the yellow metal didn’t enter formal bear territory down 20%+ until April 2013.  That beast mauled gold on and off over several years, so 2013 to 2015 are excluded from these seasonal averages.  Gold finally regained bull status powering 20%+ higher in March 2016, then its modest gains grew to 96.2% by August 2020.

Another high consolidation emerged after that, where gold avoided relapsing into a new bear despite a serious correction.  Later the yellow metal started powering higher again, coming within 0.5% of a new nominal record in early March 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine.  So 2016 to 2021 definitely proved bull years too, with 2022 really looking like one early on.  Then Fed officials panicked, unleashing market chaos.

Inflation was raging out of control thanks to their extreme money printing.  In just 25.5 months following the March 2020 COVID-lockdown stock panic, the Fed ballooned its balance sheet an absurd 115.6%!  That effectively more than doubled the US monetary base in just a couple years, injecting $4,807b of new dollars to start chasing and bidding up the prices on goods and services.  That fueled an inflation super-spike.

With big inflation running rampant, Fed officials frantically executed the most-extreme tightening cycle in this central bank’s history.  They hiked their federal-funds rate an astounding 450 basis points in just 10.6 months, while also selling monetized bonds through quantitative tightening!  That ignited a huge parabolic spike in the US dollar, unleashing massive gold-futures selling slamming gold 20.9% lower into early September.

That was technically a new bear market, albeit barely and driven by an extraordinary anomaly that was unsustainable.  Indeed gold soon rebounded sharply, exiting 2022 with a trivial 0.3% full-year loss!  Gold kept on powering higher, reentering bull territory up 20.2% in early February 2023.  So I’m also classifying 2022 as a bull year for seasonality research.  Gold’s modern bull years include 2001 to 2012 and 2016 to 2024.

Prevailing gold prices varied radically across these secular spans, running just $256 when gold’s mighty 2000s bull was born to June 2025’s latest record high of $3,431.  That vast range of gold levels spread over all those long years has to first be rendered in like-percentage terms in order to make them perfectly comparable with each other.  Then they can be averaged together to distill out gold’s bull-market seasonality.

That’s accomplished by individually indexing each calendar year’s gold price action to its final close of the preceding year, which is recast at 100.  Then all gold price action of the following year is calculated off that common indexed baseline, normalizing all years.  So gold trading at 110 simply means it has rallied 10% off the prior year’s close.  Gold’s previous seasonality before 2024 was averaged in is shown in light-blue.

This modern-gold-bull-year average now encompasses fully 21 years, solidifying it with big inertia against change.  Yet 2024’s outsized upside gold action proved so remarkable that it still pulled gold seasonals considerably higher.  Last year gold soared 27.2%, doubling its prior-20-bull-year average gains of 13.7%!  That boosted seasonals from the light-blue line to the dark-blue one, elevating average annual gains to 14.4%.

Amazingly 2025 is even better so far, with gold soaring 29.1% year-to-date as of mid-week!  One key driver is American stock investors starting to return, as seen in holdings of major US gold ETFs.  The combined bullion held by GLD, IAU, and GLDM has surged 13.1% or 179.8 metric tons YTD on differential ETF-share buying.  This is a huge acceleration from 2024, when they anomalously only edged up a trivial 0.1% or 1.2t!

Despite recent buying, American stock investors’ implied gold portfolio allocations remain next to zero.  While GLD+IAU+GLDM holdings were worth $169.4b midweek, that’s still less than 0.3% of the combined market capitalization of the S&P 500 stocks!  These guys warming to gold again while having vast room to buy combined with typical outsized Indian demand should make for a bigger-than-usual autumn rally this year.

On average through these modern gold-bull years, the yellow metal has rallied 5.2% between mid-June to late September.  As you can see in this chart, those autumn-rally gains pick up in late July when Indian farmers’ harvests increasingly come in.  This summer gold has had considerably more upside momentum than usual.  That’s despite hitting crazy-overbought extremes in mid-April all but guaranteeing a serious correction.

Yet gold defied high major-selloff odds and consolidated high instead, a great show of strength.  This year gold surged to a record high of $3,431 around mid-June’s usual seasonal nadir, on Israel attacking Iran.  But there were two candidates for gold’s summer-doldrums low on either side, a $3,179 close earlier in mid-May and a $3,272 one later exiting June.  A 5.2% rally from these would take gold between $3,344 to $3,442.

Gold has already achieved that this summer, surging back to $3,430 on close this week just shy of a new record!  So the yellow metal’s usual autumn-rally gains could’ve been pulled forward, leaving gold spent heading into August and September.  But I really doubt that given this unusual scenario and bullish setup.  And it’s not just American stock investors who love chasing upside momentum likely to continue buying gold.

American gold-futures speculators have big room to buy too.  Normally later in major gold uplegs, specs exhaust their long buying as these bullish bets challenge the top of their gold-bull trading range.  Yet in the latest weekly Commitments-of-Traders report on their positioning, total spec longs are only running 40% up into their current bull’s range.  In it gold rocketed an epic 88.6% higher without a single 10%+ correction!

Usually after major gold bulls, specs’ total gold-futures longs have soared 95% to 100% up into their gold-bull trading range.  So these traders also have lots of room to chase gold’s upside momentum, and the extreme leverage inherent in gold futures really amplifies it.  Gold’s autumn-rally setup this year is unusually-bullish, even if these record gold prices retard some demand from shrewd price-sensitive Indian buyers.

Gold’s average 5.2% autumn rally over most of this past quarter-century is its second-biggest seasonal one, sandwiched nicely between spring’s 3.8% and winter’s 7.6%.  But it can grow much larger in the right conditions.  Just a year ago in 2024, gold blasted 16.8% higher from early June to late September!  Even a 10% autumn rally this year would catapult gold to $3,497 to $3,599 depending on which starting low is used.

That’s really bullish for gold stocks, as their leading GDX ETF tends to amplify material gold moves by 2x to 3x.  But only birthed in May 2006, GDX is too young for this long-term seasonal analysis.  So instead the classic HUI gold-stock index is used, which is functionally interchangeable with GDX containing the same major gold miners.  Gold stocks’ already-outsized autumn-rally gains are set to grow larger as gold runs.

Following the metal which drives their profits, the major gold stocks’ parallel autumn rally also runs from mid-June to late September.  During these modern gold-bull years, it has averaged 8.2% gains for 1.6x upside leverage to gold.  That has actually proven gold stocks’ weakest seasonal rally, behind spring’s 12.0% and winter’s 10.4%.  But this summer of 2025 is already looking considerably different than typical ones.

Like gold, GDX surged in mid-June near its usual gold-summer-doldrums low to an impressive 12.7-year secular high of $54.46.  GDX’s alternative autumn-rally start dates match gold’s, happening earlier in mid-May or later in late June.  If the former deeper low is used, GDX has already surged 18.2% higher as of midweek!  That drops to a 6.1% rally from the latter low, but that’s still outsized this early in the autumn rally.

Since gold stocks are so darned volatile, their autumn-rally price action isn’t as linear as gold’s.  They’ve tended to rally out of June, surge into mid-July, retreat into late July, and then finally power up smartly into late September.  The majority of gold-stock upside this time of year tends to accrue in just August and September.  And again the major gold stocks dominating the HUI and GDX tend to amplify gold by 2x to 3x.

So in that 10%-gold-autumn-rally scenario, GDX ought to power 20% to 30% higher.  Reckoned from its late-June low which is more representative of a summer-doldrums bottoming, that implies GDX blasting up somewhere between roughly $61 to $66 in coming months!  As this dominant gold-stock ETF just edged up to a 12.8-year secular high midweek, anything above current levels should fuel excitement.

The great majority of investors aren’t contrarians seeking to buy low while out-of-favor, instead they love chasing proven winners.  So the faster and higher gold stocks rally, the more investors flood in to ride those mounting gains.  The more they buy, the faster and higher gold stocks rally generating more interest and bullish financial-media coverage.  And 2025’s autumn rally has a fantastic imminent buying catalyst.

The gold miners are on the verge of reporting their Q2’25 results, which will prove their best ever by far with these record prevailing gold prices!  I wrote a whole essay in late June explaining how gold miners are stacking records.  In a nutshell, they are going to soon report dazzling record revenues, operating cash flows, implied unit profits, and bottom-line earnings.  Those Q2 results release between now to mid-August.

This latest-reported quarter will prove the eighth in a row where major gold miners’ per-ounce earnings soared between 31% to 90% year-over-year!  Q2’25 is now tracking for enormous 75%-ish YoY growth!  These epic results along with gold miners’ still-low valuations ought to attract the attention of institutional value investors.  Many gold stocks are trading at teens-or-lower trailing-twelve-month price-to-earnings ratios.

Adding to the fundamental impetus for big buying ahead, gold stocks are even more undervalued relative to the metal driving their profits.  When gold-stock prices are viewed through the lens of gold, their gains compared to it actually stalled out a year ago!  That means this sector still has massive catch-up rallying left to do to reflect current gold price levels.  This will become more apparent as gold-stock interest returns.

Any material gold-stock capital inflows will fuel more secular upside breakouts in this sector, enticing in more buying.  So gold stocks are really sitting pretty heading into the heart of 2025’s autumn rally, likely to achieve outsized gains especially if gold continues powering higher on balance.  This is gold stocks’ best autumn-rally setup in fundamental terms I’ve ever seen, after a quarter-century-plus researching these seasonals!

Like their metal, gold stocks’ monthly gains in this autumn-rally timeframe improve as momentum builds.  This last chart uses a similar methodology to slice modern-gold-bull-year gold-stock seasonals into more-granular calendar months.  The HUI and GDX major gold stocks’ average gains grow, with August and September clocking in much better than June and July.  Again more traders start chasing as gains mount.

This autumn-rally span doesn’t include gold stocks’ strongest months seasonally, which have been May, November, April, and December.  But the distribution of gains from June to September is interesting.  On average during these modern gold-bull years major gold stocks edged up 0.2% in June, climbed 1.2% in July, rallied 2.4% in August, and surged another 3.1% into late September at that average autumn-rally topping!

Because of that self-reinforcing momentum-chasing dynamic, gold-stock gains accelerate later in any meaningful rally, upleg, or bull.  Again the more gold stocks rally, the more traders want to buy them.  So historically nearly 2/3rds of this sector’s autumn-rally gains come in August and September up to that seasonal topping!  Based on decades of precedent, odds are the best of today’s autumn rally is still yet to come.

We’ve been preparing for this by refilling our newsletter trading books with great fundamentally-superior mid-tier and junior gold stocks over this past month or so.  They well-outperform the majors during gold bulls, better able to consistently grow their production from lower bases often at lower mining costs.  After a quarter-century-plus intensely studying and actively trading smaller gold stocks, we’ve achieved much success.

In the first half of 2025, we realized 34 mostly-gold-stock trades in our newsletters averaging nice +40.7% annualized gains.  Much-bigger ones are coming as gold stocks resume powering higher.  Last year we realized 84 stock trades averaging annualized realized gains of +43.1%.  That utterly trounced GDX, which terribly lagged gold only rallying 9.4% in 2024!  Gold stocks’ mid-summer drift is a good time to add positions.

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The bottom line is gold and its miners’ stocks are nicely set up to achieve big autumn-rally gains this year.  This seasonal strength has tended to run from mid-June to late September, historically driven by outsized Indian gold demand.  But this year that is likely to be augmented or overshadowed by mounting gold-ETF buying from American stock investors.  American gold-futures speculators also still have much room to chase.

Gold stocks will rally with gold, amplifying its gains in coming months.  Yet they are also about to report their best quarterly results ever by far, which should pique interest among institutional investors.  Fund capital inflows on fantastic fundamentals could easily force this small sector to outperform gold way more than usual.  Once gold stocks really start running, they tend to attract in more traders accelerating gains.

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