The major gold miners’ stocks remain mired in universal bearishness, largely left for dead. They are just wrapping up their third-quarter earnings season, which proved challenging. Lower gold prices cut deeply into cash flows and profits, and production-growth struggles persisted. But these elite companies did hold the line on costs, portending soaring earnings as gold recovers. Their absurdly-cheap stock prices aren’t justified.
Four times a year publicly-traded companies release treasure troves of valuable information in the form of quarterly reports. Companies trading in the States are required to file 10-Qs with the US Securities and Exchange Commission by 40 calendar days after quarter-ends. Canadian companies have similar requirements at 45 days. In other countries with half-year reporting, many companies still partially report quarterly.
These quarterlies offer the best fundamental data available for individual major gold miners, showing how their operations are really faring. That helps dispel the thick obscuring fogs of sentiment that billow up the rest of the time. While I always eagerly anticipate perusing these key reports, I worried what this Q3’18 earnings season would reveal. Lower gold prices, flagging production, and weak sentiment are a witches’ brew.
The definitive list of major gold-mining stocks to analyze comes from the world’s most-popular gold-stock investment vehicle, the GDX VanEck Vectors Gold Miners ETF. Its composition and performance are similar to the benchmark HUI gold-stock index. GDX utterly dominates this sector, with no meaningful competition. This week GDX’s net assets are 50.5x larger than the next-biggest 1x-long major-gold-miners ETF!
GDX is effectively the gold-mining industry’s blue-chip index, including the biggest and best publicly-traded gold miners from around the globe. GDX inclusion is not only prestigious, but grants gold miners better access to the vast pools of stock-market capital. As ETF investing continues to rise, capital inflows into leading sector ETFs require their managers to buy more shares in underlying component companies.
My earnings-season trepidation soared on October 25th. The gold stocks were doing fairly well then, with GDX rallying 14.4% out of mid-September’s deep forced-capitulation lows. Sentiment was slowly improving. But that day GDX plunged 4.4% out of the blue, and the flat gold price at upleg highs certainly wasn’t the driver. The most-loved major gold miner had plummeted after reporting shockingly-bad Q3 results.
Goldcorp has always been one of GDX’s top components. It reported mining just 503k ounces of gold last quarter, which plunged 11.9% sequentially quarter-on-quarter and 20.5% year-over-year! That forced its all-in sustaining costs a proportional 20.8% higher YoY to $999 per ounce. Investors panicked and fled, hammering GG stock 18.7% lower. That was the worst down day in the 24.6-year history of this company.
That left it at an extreme 16.2-year low! GG hadn’t been lower since August 2002 when gold was still in the low $300s, it was apocalyptic. That really torpedoed still-fragile sentiment in this sector, even though GG’s woes looked short-lived. It was bringing a new expansion online at one of its big mines, which was what caused the shortfall. Now in Q4’18 Goldcorp expects production to rebound to 620k ounces at $750 AISCs.
After GG’s Q3 disaster, I worried frayed investors would dump other gold stocks on any hints of less-than-optimal quarterly results. But GDX has ground sideways on balance since that GG shock, weathering this risky earnings season with sentiment so fragile. Ever since I’ve been anxious to analyze the collective Q3 results of the major gold miners as a whole, to see if GG’s travails were unique to it or more systemic.
GDX’s component list this week ran 48 “Gold Miners” long. While the great majority of GDX stocks do fit that bill, it also contains gold-royalty companies and major silver miners. All the world’s big primary gold miners publicly traded in major markets are included. Every quarter I look into the latest operating and financial results of the top 34 GDX companies, which is just an arbitrary number fitting neatly into these tables.
That’s a commanding sample, as GDX’s 34 largest components now account for a whopping 93.5% of its total weighting! These elite miners that reported Q3’18 results produced 296.4 metric tons of gold, which accounts for fully 33.9% of last quarter’s total global gold production. That ran 875.3t per the recently-released Q3’18 Gold Demand Trends report from the World Gold Council. I’ll discuss production more below.
Most of these top 34 GDX gold miners trade in the US and Canada where comprehensive quarterly reporting is required by regulators. But some trade in Australia and the UK, where companies just need to report in half-year increments. Fortunately those gold miners do still tend to issue production reports without financial statements each quarter. There are still wide variations in reporting styles and data offered.
Every quarter I wade through a ton of data from these major gold miners’ latest results and dump it into a big spreadsheet for analysis. The highlights make it into these tables. Blank fields mean a company had not reported that data for Q3’18 as of this Wednesday. Looking at the major gold miners’ latest results in aggregateoffers valuable insights on this industry’s current fundamental health unrivaled anywhere else.
The first couple columns of these tables show each GDX component’s symbol and weighting within this ETF as of this week. While most of these stocks trade on US exchanges, some symbols are listings from companies’ primary foreign stock exchanges. That’s followed by each gold miner’s Q3’18 production in ounces, which is mostly in pure-gold terms. That excludes byproduct metals often present in gold ore.
Those are usually silver and base metals like copper, which are valuable. They are sold to offset some of the considerable costs of gold mining, lowering per-ounce costs and thus raising overall profitability. In cases where companies didn’t separate out gold and lumped all production into gold-equivalent ounces, those GEOs are included instead. Then production’s absolute year-over-year change from Q3’17 is shown.
