Gold Miners’ Q3’25 Fundamentals

Gold miners’ Q3 earnings season just wrapped up, and the majors’ results proved spectacular.  And they really needed to be, to fundamentally justify gold stocks’ monster bull run this year.  Gold miners are earning money hand-over-fist in this lofty gold-price environment, achieving many all-time records.  Their massive profits consistently skyrocketing for over a couple years now still warrant big future gold-stock gains.

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 $23.9b of net assets midweek dwarfed the next-largest similar competitor ETF’s by over 9x!  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 nearly 44% of GDX.

GDX is enjoying a legendary year, skyrocketing 133.9% year-to-date as of midweek!  And that’s part of a way-larger bull run soaring 225.9% over 24.4 months from early October 2023 to mid-October 2025.  With outstanding performance like that, speculators’ and investors’ interest in this sector has naturally soared.  My first essay this year back in early January analyzed why 2025 should prove Gold Stocks’ Revaluation Year.

But financial markets are rarely linear for long, and gold stocks have always been a volatile sector.  So since soaring to extraordinarily-overbought extremes in mid-October, gold stocks were slammed sharply lower.  By early November GDX had plunged 19.1% from that peak under three weeks earlier!  Gold’s historic precedent strongly argues its parallel 9.5% drawdown isn’t over, which would force gold stocks lower.

So major gold miners’ hot-off-the-presses Q3 results are particularly important.  How they are actually faring operationally and financially and their resulting valuations really affect their stock prices’ potential going forward.  Their fundamentals need to be strong enough to both justify 2025’s colossal gains and underpin this powerful bull run continuing after gold’s healthy drawdown.  That should be a good buying opportunity.

For 38 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 81.9% 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 Q3’25.  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 Q3’24.  Those symbols are followed by their current GDX 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 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.

Gold miners’ earnings and stock prices naturally leverage gold.  So with the metal’s quarterly-average price soaring an amazing 39.7% YoY in Q3 to a magnificent record $3,459, these latest results had to be fantastic.  The major gold miners certainly didn’t disappoint, stacking many more records.  As I previewed before Q3’s earnings season even started, these latest results just had to prove awesome.  And they truly did!

The vast majority of the time, GDX’s upper ranks don’t change much.  It takes decades for gold miners to grow to major or super-major size, and not many get there.  So it was really surprising to see big changes among the GDX-top-25 components.  The many-years-old dominance of Newmont and Barrick Mining are coming to an end, after long averaging double-digit weightings.  The kings are dead, long live the king!

After 37 quarters in a row with NEM usually crowning GDX and B in second most of the time, a new super-major champion has seized the throne.  That’s Agnico Eagle Mines, by far the world’s best large gold miner.  We’ve had a long-term investment in it in our monthly subscription newsletter for over several years now, which has soared 560% higher as of midweek!  AEM is way more worthy than NEM or B ever were.

That’s readily apparent in almost any past quarter, then again in Q3’25.  AEM mined 867k ounces of gold, which edged 0.4% higher YoY.  That trounced huge 14.8% and 12.1% production drops at NEM and B!  They have long struggled with and failed to overcome depletion at the vast scales they operate.  Their output perpetually shrinks except for four-quarter spans after they greatly overpay to buy out smaller gold miners.

Agnico’s mining costs are also far-more-profitable, with its Q3 AISCs climbing 6.8% YoY to $1,373 per ounce.  And its full-year-2025 midpoint guidance is much better still at $1,275.  Meanwhile Newmont’s and Barrick’s AISCs are much higher at $1,566 and $1,538, with the former expecting even-worse costs this year at a $1,630 midpoint!  NEM and B have long proven deadweight retarding this sector’s upside potential.

GDX’s managers typically weight their components proportionally to their market capitalizations.  Yet this is apparently evolving, which is good news for this ETF.  Midweek NEM’s market cap was 13.7% higher than AEM’s, yet the latter is weighted more heavily in GDX!  And it is excellent to see NEM’s and B’s long-running double-digit component weightings pared back.  Not even AEM deserves that in such a broad ETF.

In Q2’24 for example, NEM alone commanded 15.0%!  Hopefully those skewed days never return.  GDX now has 45 total components, so double-digit weightings at the top make the lower ranks largely insignificant.  Because of these recent changes, the GDX top 25’s concentration at 81.9% of the weighting is its lowest since Q4’17!  The wider the gold-stock exposure this ETF grants, the more useful it is for traders.

Also unusually, the GDX top 25 includes a whopping four components new to this ETF over the past year!  That’s a record, as even seeing one is a lot.  And the largest gold miner they replaced should’ve never been included in this ETF.  That was China’s Zijin Mining, which indeed produces much gold but that’s a small part of this colossal mining conglomerate’s business.  Its stock trades as symbol 2899 in Hong Kong.

A year earlier in Q3’24, Zijin was GDX’s 9th-largest component which produced a super-major-level 587k ounces of gold.  But all that still only accounted for just over 1/8th of this giant’s revenue!  A “Gold Miners ETF” should only include primary gold miners deriving over half their sales from gold, or at least close to that.  Finally booting Zijin from GDX only recently since the preceding Q2’25 removes a serious distortion.

But its replacement remains problematic for this ETF.  That is Industrias Penoles, which trades in Mexico as PE&OLES.  Apparently global markets don’t like the tilde over that n.  Penoles is among the world’s largest silver miners, which accounted for 31% of its Q3’25 sales.  Its gold output was behind running just 29% even with those dazzling record prices.  While Penoles is better than Zijin, it still doesn’t really belong.

Collectively the GDX top 25 produced 7,938k ounces of gold last quarter, which dropped a big 6.5% YoY.  That sounds pretty bad, as the World Gold Council just reported global Q3 gold mine supply climbed 1.8% YoY to 31,143k.  Even with Newmont and Barrick pooping in the punch bowl like usual, you’d think the biggest gold miners in the world could do better.  Excluding Zijin and its replacement Penoles, they really did.

Removing the former from Q3’24 and the latter from Q3’25, the other 24 top GDX gold miners’ collective production only slipped 1.6% lower.  And that’s despite NEM’s and B’s combined plunging fully 13.8% YoY.  So outside of those deadweight supermajors, the rest of the GDX top 25 are doing really well on the output front.  Pull Newmont, Barrick, Zijin, and Penoles, and the rest clocked great Q3 output growth of 4.4% YoY!

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

Last quarter the GDX top 25’s average cash costs merely edged up 1.4% YoY to $1,158 per ounce.  And that remained under Q2’25’s $1,186 record.  The main reason was there were no super-high-cash-cost outliers, but several with quite-low cash costs.  That includes one of my long-time-favorite mid-tiers New Gold, which recently edged up into the GDX top 25 for the first time.  Its cash costs ran just $639 in Q3.

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 major gold miners’ true operating profitability.

Over a month ago in my GDX-Q3-results-preview essay, I explained on AISCs why my “best guess is they shake out between $1,425 to $1,450 in this just-finished quarter.  But to be conservative, let’s just use the midpoint at $1,500.”  Unfortunately I was wrong on that, as the GDX-top-25 actual Q3 average AISCs surged 7.9% YoY to a record $1,544 per ounce!  There were no crazy-high outliers skewing that either.

Interestingly removing the opposite is what caused that overrun.  For years, Peru’s Buenaventura has remained a fixture in the GDX top 25.  But over this past quarter, it fell to 34th place.  The thing that made this polymetallic non-primary-gold miner unusual is it chooses to report in gold-centric terms, crediting bigger silver, copper, zinc, and lead output as gold byproducts.  That pushed minority gold AISCs deeply negative.

In the prior six quarters ending in Q2’25, BVN’s reported gold AISCs ran -$121, -$578, -$680, +$708, -$852, and -$668!  A month ago I implicitly assumed BVN would remain in the GDX top 25 and report negative AISCs like usual.  While it fell out, its Q3’25 gold AISCs indeed came in at a ridiculous -$1,645 per ounce!  That was largely because one of its copper-silver mines reported insane gold AISCs of -$12,597.

Through all 38 quarters of this research thread, I never once excluded any outliers which were almost always on the high side from the AISC averages.  Doing that would be subjective and dishonest.  So I also included low outliers for consistency, and there’s never been one like Buenaventura.  Had it stayed in the GDX top 25 like usual instead of newcomer NGD, BVN would’ve dragged down that entire average to just $1,390!

That would’ve retreated an outstanding 2.8% YoY, and been well under my $1,425-to-$1,450 best guess before Q3’s earnings season.  Yet it’s healthy to see Buenaventura fade in importance, as it is far from a primary gold miner.  Its Q3’25 gold production of just 35.0k ounces accounted for just 28% of its quarterly revenue.  Its negative AISCs are an accounting fiction from a base-metals miner masquerading as a gold one.

Even without BVN’s big downward skew, the GDX top 25’s $1,544 average AISCs last quarter proved excellent.  If that miner’s -$680 AISCs in Q3’24 are excluded, the rest of the GDX top 25’s actually shrunk a slight 0.7% YoY!  And that’s despite plenty of these gold miners reporting a big reason their AISCs are climbing is higher gold prices proportionally boost contractual gold royalty payments.  That was a big Q3 theme.

The most succinct mention about surging royalty payments came from British major Endeavour Mining.  It reported the largest AISC surge among the GDX top 25 last quarter, an ugly 21.9% jump to $1,569 per ounce.  Its quarterly just released early Thursday warned “Q3-2025 AISC of $1,569/oz; impacted by +$131/oz of gold price driven royalty costs.”  Yet EDV’s full-year-2025 midpoint AISC guidance remained at just $1,250.

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

Last quarter’s astounding record $3,459 gold less those $1,544 GDX-top-25 average AISCs yields huge sector profits of $1,915 per ounce.  That skyrocketed a stupendous 83.1% YoY, and is the highest ever achieved by major gold miners!  It easily bested the preceding two quarters’ last records of $1,470 and $1,861.  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 GDX-top-25 implied unit earnings soared 87%, 47%, 31%, 75%, 74%, 78%, 90%, 78%, and 83% YoY!  Has there ever been an entire stock-market sector rivaling such massive persistent earnings growth?  I don’t know, but the gold miners ought to be among the hottest sectors in all the markets with that kind of track record!  Investors should be flooding in with a vengeance.

And this epic streak will continue.  Now about halfway through this current Q4’25, gold is still averaging $4,052 despite that 9.5% drawdown so far.  That was after gold’s biggest cyclical bull ever, powering up an incredible 139.1% over 24.5 months into mid-October!  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 more.  Over these last four quarters, GDX-top-25 average AISCs have climbed an average of 9.6% YoY.  Apply that to the comparable Q4’24, and Q4’25 could come in around $1,593.

Even a $3,750 current-quarter gold average less $1,600 AISCs would make for GDX-top-25 implied unit profits of $2,150 per ounce.  That would prove another lofty all-time record, skyrocketing another amazing 78% YoY!  So whether gold and gold stocks face more healthy rebalancing selling or not, the gold miners’ earnings are almost certain to keep soaring.  That would make for an extraordinary ten quarters in a row!

Not surprisingly the GDX top 25’s hard accounting results reported to securities regulators also achieved fantastic new records last quarter.  Total revenues shrunk 7.8% YoY to $29,237m, which sure doesn’t sound like a record.  But excluding Zijin Mining from Q3’24 where 7/8ths of its revenues didn’t come from gold, and the rest of the GDX top 25’s soared 42.2% YoY!  Again that conglomerate never belonged in GDX.

The GDX top 25’s bottom-line accounting profits soared 68.7% YoY to a record $9,015m in Q3’25 despite Zijin’s distortions!  Excluding its massive Q3’24 earnings, the rest of these majors’ profits skyrocketed an amazing 136.9% YoY last quarter!  Despite 2025’s prodigious gold-stock gains, many of these GDX-top-25 stocks still trade at high-teens or low-20s trailing-twelve-month price-to-earnings ratios which is fairly-cheap.

Operating cash flows surged 29.8% YoY to a record $13,559m, or 64.2% ex-Zijin!  That ballooned the GDX top 25’s total cash treasuries by 36.4% YoY to another record $28,693m.  That makes for colossal warchests to finance growing production through expanding existing mines, building new ones, or acquiring another gold miners to assimilate their operations.  And higher output naturally boosts future profitability.

Based on 55 years of gold precedent, odds are gold’s overdue drawdown hasn’t yet run its course.  That will suck in gold stocks, as GDX has always generally leveraged material gold moves by 2x to 3x.  So if gold falls under its early-November selloff low of $3,935, GDX’s own $68.28 will also fail.  But gold-stock prices highly likely to trend lower in coming weeks or maybe months would yield good buying opportunities.

Despite their banner year, the gold miners’ epic record Q3’25 results prove their stock prices still aren’t very overvalued relative to their metal.  So any significant drawdown forcing stock prices lower would be an excellent entry point for this almost-certainly-still-in-progress revaluation bull run.  We are licking our chops to add great new fundamentally-superior gold-stock trades in our newsletters when appropriate.

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The bottom line is the major gold miners dominating GDX just achieved their best quarter in history by far.  Dazzling record gold prices fueled record revenues, record unit profits, record bottom-line earnings, and record operating cashflows.  This is nothing new for gold miners, actually their ninth consecutive quarter of skyrocketing per-ounce earnings.  Yet their stock prices are still nowhere near risky overvaluations.

Even with gold’s own necessary drawdown rebalancing extreme technicals and sentiment forcing gold stocks into one, the miners’ profits are going to continue soaring in this current Q4 and likely beyond.  So any material selloffs offer scarce mid-bull opportunities to deploy capital at more-favorable prices, supporting bigger future gains.  The gold miners’ latest epic fundamentals continue to argue for much-higher stock levels.

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