Best Gold Stocks To Watch For October 2025

What to Know About Investing in Gold

As of late September 2025, the price of gold is just under $3,800 per ounce. Gold has staged a significant rally in the last several months, repeatedly setting new price records. Catalysts for this momentum include the weakening of the U.S. dollar, ongoing uncertainty about the tariff landscape in the U.S., surging domestic and international geopolitical tensions, and investors’ potential concern about the independence of the U.S. Federal Reserve. Investors have flocked to gold in this environment, seeking a stable place to hold their assets.

Many momentum investors avoid purchasing an asset when it is at or near record high levels. However, there are ample reasons to still invest in gold despite its recent price movement:

1. Investors may not have any reason to suspect that gold will fall from its current price point any time soon.
2. The metal can still provide a helpful hedge against inflation, despite its high price.
3. Finally, if global markets continue to shift from the U.S. dollar, gold may provide some security for American investors in particular.

Of course, gold doesn’t offer some of the benefits of stocks—holding physical gold requires effort and the costs of storage and security, and gold doesn’t provide dividend payments, for example. For many investors, indirect access to gold via companies involved in mining and producing the metal represents a suitable alternative.

How We Chose the Best Gold Stocks

Our screen includes gold-mining companies with shares that trade on the Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange. To be included in the screen, companies must have a stock price of $5 or above, a market capitalization of at least $300 million, and at least 100,000 in average daily trading volume. All of these factors help to ensure that the list includes only established firms. Lastly, we ranked all gold mining companies fitting these criteria based on highest 30-day return, excluding any with a negative return over that time period.

We found that, for September 2025, nine gold mining companies had positive 30-day returns, with the highest being an impressive 58.4%. Notably, there is a company on the list without a P/E ratio. This can be the case when a company experiences net losses in the current and/or prior-year quarter, or when it shifts from losses to earnings in that period, making it impossible to calculate a P/E ratio.

Investing in gold mining companies is a popular strategy for gaining indirect access to the metal. Before doing so, though, investors should consider some of the key benefits and risks of gold as an investment. Advantages of these companies may include their potential as a leveraged play on gold—the price of gold rising can push the price of their shares upward as well, and they may even experience higher returns thanks to their role in producing gold for investors. A higher gold price can also generate capital gains for gold mining companies when their profits also increase. Further, gold mining firms have the benefits of stocks—liquidity, the potential for dividend payments, and so on—that gold as a metal lacks, without the need to account for storage and transportation of a physical gold investment.

On the other hand, gold mining companies have disadvantages as well. A primary disadvantage is that most of these names do not focus exclusively on gold, and indeed some are primarily targeting other metals. This exposes the companies to unrelated risks tied to the performance of other commodities. Mining firms as a group tend to also face risks including regulatory fluctuations due to their broad geographic reach. They are also subject to market-wide risks and volatility that may not impact physical gold investments to the same degree. Finally, a rise in gold prices is no guarantee that the share price of a mining firm will also increase.

The stocks listed above are at the top of our list for this month. However, past performance is not a guarantee of any future returns.

The Bottom Line

Gold mining stocks can be a compelling alternative to physical gold investments, providing a degree of indirect access to the gold market. Their prices often correlate with the price of physical gold, but not always. Nonetheless, many investors find these stocks to be a suitable option because of their advantages over physical gold, including the ability to avoid logistical considerations, liquidity concerns, and more.

The comments, opinions, and analyses expressed on Investopedia are for informational purposes only. Read our warranty and liability disclaimer for more info. As of the date this article was written, the author does not own any of the securities listed above.