Gold Stocks Revaluing Higher

By Adam Hamilton, CPA

Gold miners’ stocks are revaluing higher, normalizing into a new higher-price regime.  Technically this is evident in their current high consolidation after soaring last year.  The miners’ fantastic fundamentals at these lofty prevailing gold prices also more than justify much-higher stock prices.  This sector’s growing market capitalization as it revalues is bullish, expanding funds’ interest in gold stocks and willingness to invest.

As January 2025 dawned almost 16 months ago, I wrote an essay predicting last year would prove gold stocks’ revaluation year.  At the time that thesis was hardcore contrarian, as gold stocks’ performance in 2024 was shockingly-poor.  The leading GDX gold-stock ETF merely eked out 9.4% gains that year, only 0.3x gold’s great 27.2%!  Gold stocks were hopelessly underperforming their metal as investors shunned them.

With gold stocks languishing deeply out of favor back then, I concluded “…2025 has great potential for gold stocks to enjoy a major-paradigm-shift revaluation higher.  Gold just experienced one last year, which gold stocks greatly lagged.  Despite the gold miners earning massive record profits, investors weren’t interested.  Gold hadn’t yet rallied high enough for long enough to convince them of its staying power…”

“But with gold consolidating high instead of plunging after soaring in 2024, these much-higher prices are becoming the new normal.  That makes gold miners’ fat-and-rich profits durable, leaving their stocks deeply undervalued.  Fund managers will increasingly notice that, and start upping their tiny allocations.  The resulting gold-stock gains will turn psychology bullish again, fueling increasing buying normalizing prices.”

Indeed contrary to popular expectations, gold stocks soared enjoying an epic 2025 as GDX skyrocketed 152.9%!  That amplified gold’s astounding 64.3% gains by 2.4x, right in the middle of major gold stocks’ usual leverage range of 2x to 3x.  Legions of speculators and investors who wouldn’t even consider gold stocks in 2024 became converts in 2025, their chasing capital inflows catapulting this sector way higher.

But such massive gains were risky, as prices can blast higher too far too fast to be sustainable.  In just 13.9 months into GDX’s latest record at the end of February 2026, GDX had launched a stratospheric 243.0% higher!  On the way in late January, this dominant gold-stock benchmark rocketed to its most-overbought levels ever stretching 67.4% above its baseline 200-day moving average!  That was way too hot.

Such extremes of speculative excess left gold stocks vulnerable to brutal big-and-fast selloffs, which could’ve seriously retarded or even scuttled gold stocks’ revaluation higher.  Indeed in late January, GDX crashed 12.7% in a single trading day which proved its 7th-worst one ever!  February saw additional ugly 6.3% and 7.3% down days, followed by a worse 8.8% one in early March before more 6.1%, 6.3%, and 5.9% ones!

Just last week GDX plunged another 6.2% in a day after Trump’s Fed-chair nominee was more hawkish than traders expected in a Senate hearing.  He told lawmakers “There’s probably no more pressing question than the cost of living.”  That inflation focus slashed Fed-rate-cut odds this year, hammering gold down 2.4% which spilled into its miners’ stocks.  Gold stocks have indeed been pounded hard in recent months.

Yet despite all that violent buffeting, gold stocks’ revaluation higher remains intact.  That’s sure evident in recent years’ GDX technicals.  Despite collapsing 30.8% at worst in just 0.7 months into late March, the major gold stocks are effectively consolidating high.  Deeply out of favor in 2024, GDX averaged merely $34.80 on close.  That soared 65.6% to $57.65 in 2025, fantastic progress in gold stocks’ revaluation higher.

Last year’s gold-stock-price normalization achieved many noteworthy milestones, but one of the most-telling happened in early September.  That’s when GDX finally rallied to its first new record close in fully 14.0 years, since early September 2011!  Ever since then major gold stocks have continued forging deeper into new record territory.  This revaluation process continues this year despite GDX’s big-and-fast selloff.

As of midweek, so far in 2026 GDX has averaged an awesome $97.79 on close!  That’s another 69.6% higher than 2025’s average, proving technically that gold stocks revaluing higher remains alive and well despite recent extreme volatility.  And with 2026 already 1/3rd over, it would take some kind of biblical calamity for gold stocks not to significantly best 2025’s $57.65 GDX average.  Such a disaster isn’t very likely.

This is a gradual secular trend driven by fundamentals.  Higher gold prices fuel higher gold-mining profits justifying higher gold-stock prices.  But this underlying valuation shift is muddied by all kinds of short-term market noise.  Gold stocks are forever volatile, surging in bulls then plunging in bears.  Think of all that like a sine wave oscillating around a rising line.  Gold stocks are revaluing higher despite their bulls and bears.

This phenomenon was evident through gold’s last cyclical bull, a record monster powering 196.4% higher from early October 2023 to late January 2026 without a single 10%+ correction!  Through that span into today, GDX surged 70.2% in 12.6 months, plunged 23.4% in 2.3 months, skyrocketed 243.0% in 13.9 months, and crashed 30.8% in 0.7 months!  Despite these violent cycles, gold stocks have rallied big on balance.

200-day moving averages offer great perspectives illuminating underlying secular trends out of mercurial data.  They distill out short-term market choppiness revealing longer-term directionality.  Note in this chart that the upslope of GDX’s 200dma in black started rising in 2025 before inflecting to a much-steeper newer upslope in Q4.  That’s further strong technical evidence that gold stocks are indeed revaluing higher.

But bullish price action isn’t sustainable indefinitely if not supported by strong underlying fundamentals.  If gold miners’ earnings had shrunk over these past couple years, gold-stock prices would be doomed to mean revert way lower to reflect those weakening fundamentals.  Thankfully that’s not the case, the exact opposite has proven true.  Right after every quarterly earnings season, I dig into GDX’s top 25 stocks’ results.

Every gold miner reports a great deal of operational and financial data every quarter to analyze.  But I’ve found a fantastic construct to summarize it all is implied unit earnings.  That simply averages the GDX top 25’s all-in-sustaining costs per ounce each quarter then subtracts that from its average gold price.  This reveals trends in gold miners’ collective earnings, and how much they are leveraging revaluing gold prices.

Back in Q4’23 when gold’s late epic bull was born, GDX averaged just $29.26 on close.  That same quarter gold’s average price was running $1,976.  That less the GDX-top-25 gold miners’ average AISCs of $1,296 yielded implied unit profits of $680 per ounce then.  If that crucial metric had drifted sideways or lower since, there would be no chance gold stocks are revaluing higher.  Sustainable stock prices depend on earnings.

But over the last nine fully-reported quarters ending Q4’25, GDX-top-25 implied unit profits have steadily grown and surged.  From Q4’23 to Q4’25, they weighed in at $680, $775, $1,048, $1,046, $1,207, $1,470, $1,861, $1,915, and $2,490 per ounce!  Q4’25’s latest record is 3.7x higher than Q4’23’s levels, fundamentally supporting proportionally-higher gold-stock prices.  Yet those have fallen behind soaring earnings.

Q4’25’s GDX average close of $78.98 was only 2.7x better than Q4’23’s, so implied-unit-profits growth well outpaced stock-price appreciation.  That means gold-stock valuations have actually become cheaper in recent years despite soaring stock-price levels!  Huge earnings growth outperforming share-price gains argues strongly for gold stocks’ revaluation higher being not only fundamentally-righteous but sustainable.

And GDX-top-25 implied unit earnings’ representation of this key relationship is way understated.  Back in Q4’23, these elite gold miners’ bottom-line GAAP profits reported to securities regulators totaled a horrendous -$3,547m.  That huge collective loss resulted from massive impairment charges at some of majors’ gold mines due to low prevailing gold prices.  For comparability unusual one-off items must be adjusted out.

Without all those colossal noncash distortions to net income, the GDX top 25 earned about +$2,161m in Q4’23.  Since then their aggregate earnings have gradually soared to their latest record $12,580m in Q4’25.  That is 5.8x higher than nine quarters earlier, supporting much-higher gold-stock price levels!  If gold-stock prices had actually matched miners’ profits’ growth, GDX would’ve averaged over $170 in Q4’25!

While gold-stock popularity has indeed grown dramatically because of 2025’s revaluation higher just like I predicted leading into last year, the miners are still undervalued relative to earnings.  Investors have a long way to go to fully appreciate and price in this sector’s best-in-stock-markets profits growth.  The GDX top 25’s trend in implied unit earnings illustrates this nicely without requiring any accounting adjustments.

Over the last ten reported quarters ending in Q4’25, the GDX top 25’s implied unit earnings have grown 87%, 47%, 31%, 75%, 74%, 78%, 90%, 78%, 83%, and 106% year-over-year!  I can’t imagine any other sector in the entire stock markets besting that stellar track record.  And gold miners’ hyper-profits-growth trend hasn’t fully run its course.  The gold miners’ Q1’26 results just starting being reported will prove epic.

Despite gold’s own popular speculative mania climaxing, subsequent crash, and later serious drawdown into late March, gold still averaged a stupendous record $4,873 last quarter!  That skyrocketed a record 70.0% YoY above Q1’25 levels!  A month ago in an essay on gold-stock green shoots, I laid out a conservative case for GDX-top-25 AISCs averaging $1,900 last quarter.  They’ll likely shake out well lower.

But even that estimates GDX-top-25 Q1’26 implied unit profits running an astonishing record $2,973 per ounce, more than doubling again with another stupendous 102%-YoY gain!  That would lift the GDX top 25’s spectacular average 74.9%-YoY earnings growth over the previous ten quarters to 77.4% over eleven!  Holy freaking cow that is awesome!  Gold miners’ epic fundamentals sure support way-higher stock prices.

The only thing that could torpedo this gold-stock revaluation higher is if gold plunges way lower in coming quarters.  That’s always possible, but doesn’t seem likely given gold’s own bullish fundamentals.  I discussed those a month ago in an essay on gold’s war disconnect.  Between American stock investors still having super-low gold portfolio allocations and the looming war inflation and stock-market bear, gold ought to thrive.

That doesn’t mean it won’t head lower, maybe its recent drawdown isn’t over after January’s extreme parabolic spike.  But like gold stocks, on balance gold should continue grinding higher in coming quarters.  And if gold indeed stabilizes or strengthens ahead as evidenced by its 200dma distilling out all the volatile price noise, gold miners’ earnings will remain super-high or climb further supporting their stocks’ revaluation higher.

This ongoing secular trend argues gold stocks are still good buys despite trading at much-higher prices than in past years.  But care should still be taken when adding positions.  Using that 200dma-upslope revaluation trend which gold-stock cycles oscillate around like a sine wave visualization, it’s prudent to wait for lower points in the latter to allocate significant capital.  You should still buy relatively low in this trend.

Timing those shorter-term surges and drawdowns requires a different mindset along with technical and sentimental tools beyond the scope of this essay.  But I analyze how gold stocks are faring and where they are likely heading in our subscription newsletters.  Last year both combined realized 60 stock trades, which averaged fantastic +119.9% annualized gains!  Recently in mid-March we started redeploying again.

Higher gold-stock prices also mean higher gold-miner market capitalizations, which is bullish for demand from institutional fund investors.  Responsible for allocating massive amounts of capital, they must ensure anything they buy is sufficiently liquid for them to enter and exit quickly without materially affecting those stocks’ prices.  Higher-market-capitalization stocks are better able to absorb significant fund capital flows.

Back just after Q4’23’s earnings season, the GDX top 25’s average market cap ran just $11.5b with a range of $1.6b to $39.1b.  Many funds are wary of touching anything under $10b, as such stocks often have low trading volume.  Yet just after Q4’25’s results, the GDX top 25’s average market caps had soared 3.4x to $38.8b with a range of $9.4b to $125.9b!  This will really elevate gold stocks on more funds’ radars.

The bottom line is gold stocks are revaluing higher.  Despite extreme volatility in this past half-year or so, average gold-stock price levels have remained much higher than ever before.  These strong technicals are justified by spectacular fundamentals.  Gold miners’ earnings have consistently soared for eleven quarters in a row now, driven by much-higher prevailing gold prices.  Huge earnings support way-higher stocks.

Despite gold stocks’ massive gains since early 2025, their stock prices have actually way underperformed both their implied unit earnings and actual bottom-line GAAP profits.  That has left plenty of gold miners with lower valuations today than back when gold’s late monster record bull was born.  As long as gold continues grinding higher on balance on its own bullish fundamentals, gold stocks will keep revaluing higher.

Adam Hamilton, CPA

May 1, 2026
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