GDX · VanEck Gold Miners ETF (NYSE Arca Gold Miners / GDM index) $95.38 -0.55 (-0.57%) 2026-SEP-18 12:48 EST

GDX holds the shares of gold-mining companies. Their profits move more than the gold price does, because their costs are largely fixed — so a higher gold price flows disproportionately to the bottom line. Gromen folds them into the same 40% "gold and gold miners" bucket as bullion. He gave no miner-specific argument in this discussion; the case is the gold case above, with the extra swing (and extra risk) of owning companies rather than metal.

The other half of the pair. Gold miners, on the same valuation measures where copper miners look expensive, are "extremely cheap." That is the whole relative case — he is not forecasting a gold price, he is buying the cheaper of two mining sectors and shorting the dearer one. Most of his fund's net long exposure, he says, comes from gold and oil.

How he owns gold is as important as that he owns it. Rather than the large producers, he buys small companies with a queue of identifiable events ahead of them: a permit due, a preliminary economic assessment due, a final investment decision due. Each of those events, if it goes well, re-rates a small company much more than a good quarter re-rates a large one — and crucially, he can list them in advance, so he knows what he is waiting for.

He also treats gold exposure as something to hedge rather than sell. After a big rally he shorts more gold names; after a pullback he covers. The purpose is to avoid ending up with too much of a good thing after it has already run — "not to have too much gold especially after a big move up" — rather than to bet against the metal. The gold names he shorts are described by type, never named: "larger companies, no growth, maybe some of them not well managed."

An ETF is a single fund that holds a basket of companies — here, the big gold miners. Miners are "leveraged" to gold: their costs are mostly fixed, so each extra dollar of gold price falls largely to profit, and their shares move more than the metal. He expects miner funds to double again next year and once more after that, roughly quadrupling from here in about two years — but only if gold and silver keep rising.

GDX is a basket fund holding the world's biggest gold-mining companies — buy one share and you own dozens of miners in proportion to their size, with Newmont and Agnico Eagle currently the two largest and Barrick third. Feneck treats it as the anchor of his portfolio rather than a stock pick, because it removes the risk that you happen to pick the one big miner that executes badly: "if you just own Newmont versus Barrick, you're going to have two different experiences."

His actual call is on timing. GDX fell about 40% between March 1 and August 1 as the war and a hawkish new Fed chair drove money out of the sector; he called the bottom at $70 and it trades at 97–98 as they record. That is a specific, checkable claim, and it is the reason he was buying every single week through July and August while his cash fell from 12–14% to 8–10%.

The structural argument underneath: only about 0.1% of the world's investable money sits in this sector. If a rotation out of expensive technology stocks pushes that to 1%, the flow into a small sector is enormous — and the ETF captures it without needing any single company to succeed.

GDX is a basket of the large gold-mining companies; it tracks the GDM index Stöferle quotes. His case is that this is now where the bigger upside is, because the metal has already run and the miners haven't caught up.

The numbers he cites: the index trades at 13 times earnings while the S&P 500 trades at 28; the gross margin is 54% and the EBITDA margin 56%; and the sector as a whole holds more cash than debt ("net cash") — the healthiest he has seen in his career.

The hidden kicker: mining companies still plan their businesses assuming gold sells for $2,000–2,400 an ounce. Every dollar above that drops almost straight to profit — which is why he calls it "a hidden option on the balance sheets." The catch he is upfront about: miners carry risks gold doesn't (geology, permits, energy costs, bad management), and over the long run since 1971 simply holding the metal beat holding the miners. So this is a trade to time, not a forever holding.

GDX holds the large gold-mining companies. Rule's case for owning miners rather than the metal is operating leverage — a jargon term with a simple meaning. A miner's costs are largely fixed: the same diesel, wages and equipment whether gold is $4,000 or $4,700. So when the gold price rises 15%, the extra revenue drops almost entirely into profit, and profits can rise far faster than the metal did. "The leverage return on miners that you get as a consequence of rising gold prices increasing their earnings faster than the increase in the gold price attracts me."

The price of that leverage is company risk — a mine can flood, a grade can come in lower than the drill results implied, a government can change the rules. Rule accepts that trade because he does the work: "I'm willing to do the work. I'm willing to understand it. I'm willing to take company risk." He is explicit that this is not everyone's trade. In his framework GDX is the investor's bucket: people willing to carry single-company risk and more volatility than the metal.

He also gives the sell-side of the argument in the same breath. GDX went from about $70 to $105 in three weeks; someone with 18–20% of their portfolio already in gold stocks "might be a time to sell some." But he sets against that a striking fact — precious metals and their equities are still less than half of one percent of North American savings and investment assets. Most people aren't overweight; they own essentially none.

GDX holds the large gold-mining companies. Gromen owns miners and expects them to do well — but deliberately keeps them the smaller slice, about 20–25% against 75–80% in bullion.

The reason has nothing to do with mining economics. It is that if gold is being pulled back into the monetary system, governments have a history of taking the gold — and a mine is a fixed asset sitting inside a country's borders, while a bar in a private vault is not. "It's a lot easier to grab gold in the ground than to go door to door asking people to take you to their private vault." He isn't predicting miners get nationalised below their share price; he simply doesn't want to be right about gold and still lose, which he calls being "wrong for the right reason." Over a full cycle he thinks bullion wins on a risk-adjusted basis.

GDX is a single fund that owns the big listed gold-mining companies, so buying it is the simplest way to bet on gold miners as a group rather than picking one and taking the risk that its particular mine floods or its particular mill breaks.

Hay's instruction here is deliberately conditional. A chart from Adam Taggart, he says, "suggests that any pull-back on GDX, the leading gold miner ETF, should render it an accumulation candidate." In plain terms: wait for the price to dip and then buy, rather than chasing it after the run it has just had.

The argument for why the miners are worth accumulating at all belongs to the guest, Kevin Muir, and it is a valuation one. Gold-mining shares trade at about 11 times their earnings, which he says is as cheap as they have ever been outside the 2008 financial crisis and the miserable 2011-13 stretch. The obvious objection to a cheap-looking commodity stock is that the multiple only looks cheap because profits are about to collapse — you are dividing by an earnings number that is about to shrink. Muir's answer is that this has already happened: gold fell, and the miners' earnings fell with it, so the damage is in the numbers now rather than ahead of them. Meanwhile the analysts who build the forecasts were slow to put a higher gold price into their models, so if gold merely stops falling, those forecasts get revised upward, profits stop declining, and a stock trading at 11 times a bottoming profit number is genuinely cheap rather than a trap.

Muir is acting on it — "I am buying gold, platinum, and a bunch of different gold mining stocks" — and adds one discipline worth remembering: if it doesn't work, he sells rather than buying more, because "losers average losers."

GDX holds the large gold-mining companies — a way to own the profits of digging gold up rather than the metal itself. Miners are more volatile than bullion because their profit is the gap between the gold price and their fixed costs, so a modest move in gold swings earnings a lot.

Hay's chart is a contrarian one: last year was the largest year of money leaving these funds on record — even though the miners had a spectacular year and were reporting real profits. Normally you'd expect floods of money chasing that, which is a classic warning sign (as it was in 2016). Getting the opposite tells him there is "a lot of investor apathy," which is what cheap, unloved sectors look like before they work.

He adds a fundamental improvement: mining "has been very poorly run for a long time," but it is starting to copy the energy industry's newfound capital discipline — spending less and returning more instead of splurging every time prices rise. Cheap, profitable, hated and better managed is his preferred combination.

GDX is a basket fund that owns the big gold-mining companies, so it is the standard shorthand for "how are gold miners doing." Miners are a leveraged bet on the metal: because most of their costs are fixed, a move in the gold price shows up roughly doubled in their share prices — which is exactly what happened in the Q2 drawdown Polomny relays here, with gold down 11.52% in March while GDX fell 20.78%. The leverage, as the note puts it, "cuts both ways."

The item is really about a tool, not a trade. Incrementum — the Austrian shop behind the annual In Gold We Trust report — publishes a signal that flips gold-miner exposure between three settings (Offensive, Neutral, Defensive), and it went Defensive before the drop, so the desk sat in cash and is now rebuilding "cautiously and selectively" into what it calls a dislocation rather than a deterioration: the miners still have their best balance sheets in years and record margins, but trade well below what that would justify.

Polomny's stance is deliberately non-committal. He calls the signal "interesting and useful," notes it "catches most of the moves in the GDX," and then does something worth copying — he had the claimed track record independently torn apart and published the result, which says the numbers are internally consistent and economically plausible but not yet verified alpha, and lists exactly what evidence would settle it. So: a tool he is watching and a sector he still regards as structurally cheap, not a buy recommendation on the ETF.

GDX is a basket of gold-mining stocks. Bill Baruch bought more after gold's worst quarter since 2013, for two reasons: gold tends to do well seasonally in July, and — his bigger bet — he thinks the Fed under Kevin Warsh only sounds hawkish (markets price a 30% chance of a July rate hike, 50% by year-end). Baruch expects that tough talk to be "walked back" to boost the economy and stock market ahead of the midterm elections, which would be bullish for gold.

Jenny Harrington flatly disagrees on gold itself — she says there's no way to value it and "it's not an investment," just a bet on other people's behavior. So this is a split-desk call: bullish from the buyer, dismissive from the fundamental investor.

GDX is a basket of gold-mining company stocks — instead of owning gold, you own the businesses that dig it up, which tend to swing much harder than the metal itself (their profits are leveraged to the gold price). Gromen watches a simple gauge: the "gold-to-oil ratio," roughly how many barrels of oil an ounce of gold buys. Because energy is a miner's biggest cost, a high ratio (expensive gold, cheap oil) is a rough shorthand for fat mining profits.

That ratio has climbed roughly tenfold over the last 18 years, yet — he argues — the stock market still prices gold miners as if it will fall back to where it started. He thinks the opposite: the same forces (fiscal dominance, a fading US ability to enforce the dollar) push the ratio higher. If he's right, miners are cheap relative to the profits they're about to earn — a mispricing to the upside.

GDX is a basket of gold-mining stocks. His trade-alert service exited it in the first quarter near the highs and is now buying back — but deliberately slowly, in thirds and quarters, because the Hormuz crisis isn't over and the miners could still fall further. The discipline: "only monkeys pick bottoms," so his capitulation model tells him when the weak hands have been flushed and he scales in on each leg down rather than calling the low.

GDX is a fund of gold-mining companies. He's been buying it because sentiment toward gold miners has swung from euphoric highs in January (when gold was near $5,600) all the way to "historic lows."

He calls it a "screaming buy." The setup: when the U.S. sent forces toward the Persian Gulf, fears flipped from rate cuts to rate hikes, which scared off the casual "tourist" buyers and crushed the miners — even though the underlying gold business is still very profitable. Buying when the weak hands have been flushed out and the fundamentals are intact is his classic contrarian move.

GDX is a fund of gold-mining companies. He sold it in January when the market got frothy (traders were buying eight times as many bullish silver bets as bearish ones — a sign of crowd euphoria).

Now, after a sharp pullback toward the "100-day moving average" (a common gauge of the medium-term trend), he's buying back. His rule: in a young bull market, dips toward that line are good entry points. He still sees gold as under-owned — only ~1.25% of household wealth versus ~3% in the 1980s.

GDX holds the gold-mining companies. A year ago nobody wanted them — the line was "central banks buy gold, not gold miners." Muir was a bull, arguing that with gold rising this fast the miners couldn't help but start gushing profits, which would force the number-crunching funds to buy in. That happened, and the miners went "ballistic" — far more violently than even he imagined.

His takeaway now isn't "buy more" or "sell" — it's a lesson about these rotations: they're a series of mini rolling bubbles, each more violent than the last. If you catch yourself saying a move has gone "too far, too fast," fine, take profits — but never use that feeling as a reason to bet against it, because these moves always run farther than you can imagine.

GDX is a basket of gold-mining stocks. It's a core holding he's owned for 3–4 years. His key point: the entire gold-and-silver miner group was tiny — about $290 billion a year ago — so when a relatively small amount of money flowed in, the sector rocketed ~140%. Small, cheap sectors move violently when capital finally arrives.