The major gold miners are finishing reporting their best quarter in history! Gold’s monster bull run soaring to astounding record highs supercharged miners’ results. The metal’s massive gains far outpaced rising mining costs, fueling record-shattering revenues, earnings, unit profits, and operating cashflows. These stupendous fundamentals have left plenty of great gold miners still relatively-undervalued despite huge rallies.
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 $33.6b of net assets midweek dwarfed the next-largest similar competitor ETF’s by nearly 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 46% of GDX.
Last quarter proved remarkable for both gold and GDX. Both soared into mid-October, achieving many record highs in extraordinarily-extreme overboughtness. By then gold had skyrocketed 65.8% YTD to 33.0% above its baseline 200-day moving average, a 19.5-year extreme! GDX amplified gold by 2.3x to colossal 149.0% YTD gains, catapulting it 62.9% over its 200dma to its third-most-overbought close ever!
A half-century-plus of gold’s own precedent argued a big-and-fast drawdown was necessary from there to rebalance away such extreme technicals and sentiment. Gold quickly fell 9.5% into mid-November, but just shy of correction territory big China-Monday buying kicked in. GDX plunged 19.1% in that span, making for 2.0x downside leverage in major gold stocks’ normal 2x-to-3x range. Then they rallied back hard.
Gold surged 15.1% into late December, back into new-record-high territory near year-end. GDX blasted up 33.7% or 2.2x in sympathy. So both the metal and its major miners’ stocks averaged lofty all-time quarterly-average highs in Q4 near $4,150 and $78.98. They exited 2025 with epic 64.3% and 152.9% or 2.4x gains! Could gold miners’ fundamentals possibly justify that moonshot, or was it mostly herd greed?
For 39 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 82.8% 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 Q4’25. 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 Q4’24. Those symbols are followed by their current GDX weightings.
Next comes these gold miners’ Q4’25 production in ounces, along with their year-over-year changes from the comparable Q4’24. 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.
After decades of deep gold-stock analysis and very-successful gold-stock trading, I knew Q4 was going to prove record-shattering. Back in early January way before any Q4 results came out, I wrote an essay explaining why Q4’25 would prove gold miners’ greatest quarter. And the actual results bore that out in spades. My record unit-profits forecast then proved pretty close to reality, but other numbers blew me away.
Out of the four quarters in any year, Q4 results are the most-challenging to analyze. Most gold miners run on calendar years, so Q4 results are annual reports. Some companies don’t break out Q4 from full-year results very well, so its numbers have to be calculated across quarters. Even worse, filing deadlines are much longer for annuals. US 10-Ks must be finished within 60 days after year-ends, compared to 40 for 10-Qs.
And Canada which is the epicenter of the gold-stock universe is way worse. Its regulators must hate shareholders, as annuals’ filing deadlines are an insane 90 days after year-ends! Q4 data coming out at the end of Q1 is so darned stale its usefulness has mostly rotted away. So not all the GDX-top-25 companies had reported yet as of midweek. But I’m not waiting until early April for a few feet-dragging stragglers.
Because of some gold miners’ late filings and disdain for shareholders by not providing timely results, Q4 comparisons are complicated. For example, the GDX top 25’s collective gold production plunged 15.7% YoY to just 7,782k ounces in Q4’25. That is only about 1/8th up into their range of this past decade or so. Yet South Africa’s super-major Harmony Gold isn’t reporting its Q4 results until March 11th, and they are material.
Last quarter HMY guided its fiscal-2026 output to a 1,450k-ounce midpoint. Harmony’s fiscal years run two quarters offset from calendar ones, further muddling analysis. But divide that by four, and HMY is mining about 363k ounces per quarter. In the comparable Q4’24, Harmony produced 399k. So if you add 375k into Q4’25 for HMY, GDX-top-25 output fell a milder 11.6% YoY. A big composition change explains more.
For years the Chinese behemoth global mining conglomerate Zijin Mining was wrongly included in GDX. While it produced a huge 587k ounces of gold in Q4’24, that was only a small fraction of its diversified mining operations and revenues. Pull that and Harmony out of Q4’24, and the GDX top 25’s production slid a better 5.6% YoY. Some is due to another late reporter , which “produced” 120k in Q4’24.
So the GDX majors’ production shrinkage is closer to overall global gold-mining output. The World Gold Council publishes the best-available global gold fundamental data about one month after each quarter-end. In Q4’25, its data showed worldwide gold mine production grew a slight 1.1% YoY to 30,792k ounces. The GDX top 25 including that Q4’25 Harmony estimate only accounted for 26% of that, which is interesting.
The world’s biggest gold miners don’t dominate this industry. Much gold is produced as byproducts for other primary metals, much comes from way-more-numerous smaller mid-tier and junior gold miners, and much comes from widespread small-scale artisanal gold mining. So the GDX top 25 don’t monopolize gold production despite ruling the gold-stock realm. But holy cow their market capitalizations have soared!
My spreadsheet tracking gold miners’ quarterlies is far-more-detailed than this summary table. I’ve long included market caps among much other data. This week the collective market cap of the GDX top 25 is running $969.9b, just under a trillion dollars! For comparison just after Q3’23 right before gold’s latest monster bull was born, that ran just $272.2b. And excluding Zijin Mining, it was much lower still near $230.0b.
From early October 2023 to late January 2026 as gold soared an epic record 196.4% higher in a single cyclical bull, GDX skyrocketed 332.9%! That was only 1.7x leverage, on the low side. And major gold stocks’ market caps roughly quadrupling doesn’t mean they can’t power higher still, but additional gains will need way-larger capital inflows to drive. Gold-stock gains’ gravy days are over, we’ll have to work for more.
With major gold miners’ output shrinking some again, Q4’s radically-higher gold prices had to translate into far-greater profits. From a high level, the economics of gold mining are simple. Prevailing gold prices less mining costs yield unit profits. And Q4’s record quarterly-average gold price of $4,150 skyrocketed an astonishing record 56.0% YoY! There was no way mining costs could rise anywhere near pacing that.
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.
The GDX top 25’s average cash costs last quarter were unbelievably good, way better than I hoped for. They did climb to a new record $1,205 per ounce, but that was merely up 4.2% YoY! I would’ve guessed 10%+ for several reasons. High gold prices spur miners to feed lower-grade ores into their mills, which become way-more-economical. Gold being a hot sector also bids up limited inputs’ prices, including labor expenses.
But the main reason gold miners’ unit costs should’ve surged is royalties. Many mine buyouts have some kind of future royalties attached to them, which scale with gold prices. Owners are less willing to part with gold mines unless they retain some future participation in their earnings streams. Royalty payments soaring with gold has been a major theme in GDX-top-25 quarterlies over the past year or so, including in Q4.
Most gold miners include analyses in their results explaining why production and mining costs moved the way they did from comparable quarters. Royalties were a big part of those. One example came from , which broke out cash costs excluding royalties. IAG’s headline Q4’25 cash costs were $1,367 per ounce, but without royalties they would’ve been only $1,031! Royalties are running a quarter of IAG’s costs!
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.
A couple months ago in my Q4’25 GDX-top-25 results preview essay, I conservatively assumed AISCs would average around $1,600 per ounce. But they proved considerably worse, surging 14.2% YoY to a record $1,661! The main reasons were composition changes in GDX’s upper ranks and those royalties. On the former, Peru’s polymetallic was in this elite group in Q4’24 but fell to 27th place this week.
BVN is an unusual non-primary-gold miner still choosing to report in gold-centric terms. So bigger silver, copper, zinc, and lead outputs are credited against gold’s costs as byproducts. Thus Buenaventura’s gold AISCs have often been super-low or even negative! Without BVN dragging down the average for the GDX top 25, it comes in higher. A year ago in Q4’24, BVN’s AISCs were the lowest by far in this group at $708.
Those soaring royalties were the biggest reason major gold miners’ AISCs surged so much. Cash costs are the largest component of AISCs by far, including royalties. Q4’s far-higher average gold prices had to translate into much-fatter royalty payments, which some major gold miners discussed. hadn’t yet released Q4 results at this essay’s Wednesday-close data cutoff, but had done an operational preview.
In that it had reported in late January “AISC of ~$1,650/oz increased by ~$81/oz or 5% over Q3-2025, largely due to +$45/oz higher royalty costs related to higher gold prices.” In its 2026 AISC guidance, EDV listed royalties as the first reason for a $1,700 midpoint this year for a sharp 18.5% jump from the roughly $1,435 last year per that preview. Despite surging royalties, gold miners’ Q4 AISCs are still low relative to gold.
Amazingly last quarter, the GDX top 25’s average AISCs were just 40% of average prevailing gold prices! That is the lowest in the 39 quarters I’ve been advancing this research thread, and almost certainly the best ever. The average before Q4’23 when gold’s latest monster bull was born ran 66% through the prior 30 quarters. With mining costs rising way more slowly than gold, its miners’ earnings skyrocketed in Q4’25.
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 $4,150 gold less those $1,661 GDX-top-25 average AISCs yielded huge sector profits of $2,490 per ounce! Shattering Q3’25’s previous record of $1,915, that skyrocketed an incredible 106.3% YoY! Major gold miners’ unit profits more than doubled, amplifying average gold’s huge gain by 1.9x! And that was despite considerably-higher mining costs largely due to those scaling royalties.
Yet it’s not just Q4’25 that was mind-boggling, but major gold miners’ incredible earnings-growth streak. During these latest ten quarters, the GDX top 25’s implied unit profits have soared 87.2%, 46.7%, 31.5%, 75.3%, 74.0%, 77.5%, 89.7%, 77.6%, 83.1%, and 106.3% YoY! There can’t be any other sector in all the stock markets even remotely competing with such massive and consistent profits growth, it is utterly phenomenal.
And shockingly it ain’t over yet! Gold soared again into late January in a popular speculative mania fueled by frenzied Chinese buying. And despite 55+ years of dollar-gold precedent just screaming for a big-and-fast drawdown out of gold’s crazy-extreme 45.9-year overboughtness high, gold has remained miraculously resilient since late January’s brutal crash. So Q1’26’s average gold price so far is running $4,905!
That may not hold into quarter-end, but Q1 is already 7/10ths over. Gold would have to plunge way under there in the next several weeks to drag its average significantly lower. If $4,905+ holds, it would crush last quarter’s record $4,150 and soar another 71%+ YoY! So almost no matter what happens into month-end, Q1’26’s gold-miner earnings should again prove record-shattering. Gold miners’ fundamentals are epically strong.
That is sure evident in the GDX top 25’s hard accounting results reported to securities regulators. And all the following numbers are conservative, because HMY, EDV, NGD, and FNV hadn’t yet reported Q4’25 by midweek but are included in Q4’24’s results. WPM proved a straggler both times. The numbers the major gold miners put up last quarter are off-the-charts huge! No one has ever seen anything like this in gold stocks.
The GDX top 25’s top-line revenues soared 51.7% YoY to a record-shattering $36,697m! Their bottom-line GAAP profits skyrocketed 147.1% YoY to a lofty record $12,580m, even without those remaining results. Cash flows generated from operations blasted up 80.3% YoY to a record $18,303m, helping catapult cash treasuries up 95.2% YoY to a record $36,664m! Gold miners are earning money hand-over-fist here.
But unfortunately they are burning part of this windfall in stock buybacks, which seems foolish. With gold stocks powering up to many new records in Q4, the major gold miners shouldn’t be repurchasing shares. Rather than buying super-high, they’d be much better off selling shares at record highs to raise capital. They could invest that in new mines and expansions, or save it to buy back shares later at lower prices.
The three top GDX components and world’s largest gold miners are , , and . All rushed to buy back their own shares last quarter, with share repurchases clocking in at $373m, $428m, and $500m. That represented 24%, 33%, and 21% of their massive Q4 earnings, big chunks. Their total stock buybacks in 2025 soared 303% YoY to $683m, 85% to $2,303m, and 201% to $1,500m!
With all three struggling to overcome depletion at the vast scales they operate, presumably management could find better uses for windfall profits than buying back their own shares near or at record highs. On the other hand, them allocating big cash to share repurchases could be another indication that finding and developing sizable new gold deposits is harder than ever. Shrinking mined supply would be very bullish for gold.
Also interesting despite gold stocks soaring last year, plenty of the GDX top 25 are still sporting relatively-low trailing-twelve-month price-to-earnings ratios for this sector. Those include the high-teens to low-twenties, fairly-modest valuations for high-flying gold stocks. So for the most part, gold miners’ earnings growth has kept pace with their huge stock-price gains. That argues they still have more room to power higher.
When and how that happens is totally dependent on gold, like always. The major gold stocks of GDX have always acted like leveraged plays on their metal, amplifying its material moves by 2x to 3x. So gold stocks are going higher if this gold juggernaut continues rallying on balance. But if gold’s overdue serious big-and-fast drawdown comes first, gold stocks will be hammered much lower yielding way-superior entry prices.
The bottom line is the major gold miners dominating GDX just achieved their best quarter in history by far. Q4’25’s astonishing record-shattering gold prices fueled record-shattering revenues, bottom-line earnings, unit profits, operating cash flows, and cash treasuries for the gold miners. And this is nothing new for this high-flying sector, actually proving major gold miners’ tenth consecutive quarter of skyrocketing unit earnings.
With another phenomenal record quarter underway in Q1’26, this unparalleled epic earnings-growth streak isn’t over yet. But gold stocks’ ongoing decent valuations doesn’t mean they are great buys today, that totally depends on gold’s fortunes. If it continues defying the odds to consolidate high and base for its next upleg, gold stocks will thrive. But if gold rolls over hard in a rebalancing selloff, they will get crushed.
