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The gold miners’ stocks just surged within spitting distance of new record highs. Achieving them will be a momentous technical and sentimental milestone, as their last record close was a shocking 14 years ago. Gold stocks forging into new record territory will fuel much bullish financial-media coverage and trader interest. Their increasing capital inflows will accelerate this sector’s overdue revaluation way higher.

For many years now, the GDX VanEck Gold Miners ETF has been the dominant gold-stock benchmark. It gradually usurped the previous NYSE Arca Gold BUGS Index, better known by its utterly-unintuitive HUI symbol. GDX is now on the verge of surpassing its all-time-record-high close of $66.63 seen way back in early September 2011! That was a staggering 14.0 years ago, effectively an eternity in the markets.

On Wednesday, the data cutoff for this essay penned early Thursday, GDX climbed 0.6% to $65.19. That was merely 2.2% under that previous record close, a day or two of modest rallying for gold stocks!So a new gold-stock record draws nigh, likely any day now. And this sector’s strong upside momentum argues new records will soon stack up fast. Gold stocks’ upside lately has been fantastic, way outperforming gold.

Year-to-date as of midweek, GDX has skyrocketed 92.2% higher!That has amplified gold’s huge parallel 35.8% gains by 2.6x, right in the middle of major gold stocks’ usual 2x-to-3x leverage to their metal. The gold miners have massive profits leverage to gold, which their stock prices reflect. Interestingly most of this sector’s recent outperformance ignited with Q2’s earnings season, as miners reported epic record results.

Back in mid-July before these latest quarterlies, GDX was “merely” up 50.8% YTD only leveraging gold 1.8x. Then the parade of spectacular results began and ran for several weeks. In a mid-August essay, I analyzed the GDX-top-25 components’ latest operational and financial results in depth. Thanks to last quarter’s average gold price soaring 40.6% year-over-year to a lofty record $3,285, they proved phenomenal.

The best proxy for how gold miners as a sector are faring fundamentally is their implied unit profits. This key metric simply subtracts the GDX top 25’s average all-in sustaining costs per ounce in any quarter from its average gold price. In Q2, these skyrocketed an amazing 77.6% YoY to record-shattering levels of $1,861!And that huge stock-market-leading earnings growth was just the latest in miners’ long streak of it.

Over the last eight quarters ending in Q2’25, the GDX top 25’s implied unit profits rocketed up 87%, 47%, 31%, 75%, 74%, 78%, 90%, and 78% YoY!This is astounding, making gold stocks the best sector in all the stock markets by far. But speculators and investors mostly haven’t been aware, likely because the AI stock bubble stole all the market limelight. Yet these latest results were so epic traders started taking notice.

A month ago when GDX was still considerably lower, I wrote an essay analyzing why it was on record-high watch. It included a long-term secular chart stretching way back to 2007, encompassing nearly all of this leading gold-stock benchmark’s history. Then about 2/3rds of the way through Q2’s earnings season, GDX had another 16.1% to rally before besting September 2011’s record. That has now narrowed to just 2.2%.

During miners’ latest results reported from late July to mid-August, GDX surged 14.0% with no support from gold!The yellow metal actually slipped 0.4% in that span, so gold stocks’ outperformance was colossal. It is really unusual for them to blast higher without their metal, so that revealed more investors are growing aware of miners’ epic fundamentals. A wider following is very bullish for this sector’s fortunes.

Then in recent weeks since Q2 reporting wound down, GDX surged another 11.9% to this week’s near-record close. That was fueled by an underlying strong 6.8% gold rally as it finally broke out of recent months’ high-consolidation trading range. If you need to get up to speed on that and what caused it, my gold-breakout-nears essay last week analyzed it. That pair of rallyings has left new gold-stock records nigh.

This chart switches back to our usual several-years-ish format, which includes GDX’s entire increasingly-powerful bull run. Just before this latest earnings season got underway, GDX was still way down near $51. So gold stocks’ blistering 27.5% surge in the six-or-so weeks since is remarkable, amplifying gold’s own 6.4% upside by a massive 4.3x!The red line shows where gold stocks will finally reenter record territory.

Being in the financial-newsletter business for over a quarter-century now, I’ve long been blessed to be able to watch market action all day every day. I wake up at 4:50am on trading days to work out, while watching Bloomberg or CNBC to get caught up on overnight activity. Then all day long in my office one of these channels is streamed to a big television above my monitors. Mainstream financial media is very revealing.

The topics covered are always reflections of prevailing sentiment, showing whatever zeitgeist happens to be dominating the mindshare of traders. And they love piling on to upside momentum to chase winners. So the financial media selling advertising to reach traders aggressively and bullishly covers whatever sector happens to be hot. Gold stocks soon breaking out to new all-time-record highs will achieve that popularity.

Bullish gold-stock coverage has already grown considerably in recent weeks as GDX surged. I’m seeing the miners mentioned several times a day now, and that’s just from glancing up periodically from my work. Every time mainstream financial media runs a gold-stock segment, more traders become aware this sector is flying. That leaves them more interested in looking into gold miners and deploying capital.

Sectors achieve peak popularity and coverage when they blast well into new-record-high territory. Think of the extensive wildly-bullish reporting on bitcoin or NVIDIA’s stock in recent years. The farther GDX can surge or forge over $66.63, the more excitement for gold stocks that will generate. That dynamic forms powerful virtuous circles of buying, which really accelerate gains as growing numbers of traders chase.

The longer and higher gold stocks rally, the more financial-media coverage grows in both frequency and bullishness. The more traders become aware of gold stocks’ big gains, the more they want to chase them and deploy capital. The more shares they buy, the faster this sector climbs. That acceleration becomes self-feeding, attracting in expanding numbers of traders. Gold stocks are finally back to the verge of this!

That being said, they have just run far and fast. GDX soared into extreme-overbought territory in this last week or so. This Wednesday, GDX stretched 41.5% above its 200-day moving average!That is way over the last five years’ precedent of the extreme-overboughtness threshold starting at 30%. So it would certainly be healthy for gold stocks to pull back to rebalance overextended technicals and greedy sentiment.

This chart has yellow Bollinger bands straddling GDX’s 50dma at 2.5 standard deviations away. For a few weeks now, this ETF has crowded the upper one. Past similar episodes in these last couple years have usually been followed by GDX selloffs, often back down to that 50-day moving average shown above in white. Midweek that was running $55.40. We may see some gold-stock weakness before new record highs.

But the bullish case for gold stocks from here still far outweighs the bearish one. Circling back to Q2’s epic record earnings growth, that will continue for the ninth-straight quarter in this current Q3. Already 7/10ths of the way through, quarter-to-date gold is averaging another record $3,362. If that holds into quarter-end, which is likely since gold is trading way above it, quarterly-average prices will soar another 36% YoY!

The GDX-top-25 gold miners averaged full-year-2025 AISC guidances of $1,537 in those latest results. And that’s conservative, as plenty major gold miners forecast lower mining costs on improving output in Q3. Still subtracting that from average gold prices yields huge Q3 implied sector unit profits of $1,825 per ounce, which would skyrocket another 74% YoY!Q3 results will be released between late October to mid-November.

While gold stocks are finally returning to favor, they’ve generally languished out of it for long years. So gold-stock prices are nowhere near reflecting miners’ epic windfall earnings at these record prevailing gold prices. Astoundingly plenty of gold stocks are still trading at cheap single-digit or teens trailing-twelve-month price-to-earnings ratios!They look really attractive in stock screens run by institutional value investors.

Interestingly plenty of signs suggest professional investors have been dominating the gold-stock buying this year. These fund guys are always watching the markets looking for opportunities, and their discipline mostly overcomes emotions. Meanwhile individual investors who can really fuel gold-stock moonshots are only starting to pay attention. They always crowd in late, not starting to chase until big gains entice them.

While gold miners’ bullish fundamentals are the primary reason their stocks need to revalue much higher, there are also technical reasons. As I mentioned above, long years of precedent show major gold stocks of GDX tend to amplify material gold moves by 2x to 3x. Gold’s current mighty cyclical bull born way back in early October 2023 has soared 95.8% in 23.0 months as of Wednesday!But wait, there’s more.

This entire bull run is actually a single monster upleg, not seeing any 10%+ corrections!Big foreign gold demand has taken the lead propelling gold higher in these last couple years. That has left gold’s usual primary drivers of American speculators’ gold-futures trading and American stock investors’ gold-ETF-share buying with lots of capital firepower left to drive gold higher. My essay last week analyzed both.

Even though gold’s bull run almost certainly isn’t over yet, gold’s 96% gains so far support huge GDX upside of 192% to 287%. Yet at best across that entire gold-bull span, GDX is still “only” up 151.6% as of midweek. That’s still poor 1.6x upside leverage to gold, too low to compensate investors for the big additional operational, geological, and geopolitical risks gold stocks heap on top of gold price trends. This needs to rise.

Gold’s last 40%+ monster upleg cresting in early August 2020 was comparatively small clocking in at +40.0%. Yet GDX amplified that by a fantastic 3.4x to 134.1% gains!Generally the bigger a gold bull run, the more gold-stock excitement that generates translating into bigger GDX outperformance. So seeing this dominant gold-stock ETF’s gold amplification double from here near 3.2x wouldn’t be a surprise at all.

Gold-stock upside leverage grows rapidly then peaks late in gold bull runs when greed runs high, stoked by bullish financial-media coverage. 3.2x gold’s current 95.8% gains would catapult GDX’s bull run way up to +306%!That translates into GDX share prices over $105, or another 62% higher from midweek levels!And higher gold prices elevate that target accordingly, gold-stock upside remains massive from here.

If you want to get deployed in gold stocks, the earlier the better. At some point when retail investors crowd in, their prices will shoot near-parabolic. That will quickly suck in all-available near-term buyers, forcing a major topping as their capital firepower exhausts. Our popular newsletters are full of great gold-stock trades. We’ve always specialized in fundamentally-superior mid-tier and junior gold stocks which outperform.

This past spring most of our newsletter gold-stock trades were stopped out with good-to-huge realized gains. We waited for gold to cool off, then started redeploying in late June. As of Wednesday, these young gold-stock trades already had unrealized gains running as high as +87%!The getting has really been good in this sector, but that won’t last forever. Buy in before the thundering herd, or miss this mighty bull run.

The bottom line is new gold-stock records draw nigh. For the first time in a shocking 14 years, the leading gold-stock ETF is on the verge of new-record territory. That momentous technical milestone will really ramp bullish gold-stock coverage by the financial media. That in turn will grow awareness of this sector’s mounting gains and outstanding fundamentals, enticing in increasing numbers of traders to chase gold stocks.

Their buying will amplify sector upside, bolstering virtuous circles of capital inflows. The gold miners’ long eight-quarter streak of colossal earnings growth and festering undervaluations support much-higher stock prices. And relative to gold’s mighty cyclical bull, gold stocks’ overall upside leverage still remains very low compared to precedent. So technicals also support more big gold-stock rallying as miners revalue higher.

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