The world’s leading gold-stock ETF is nearing a major upside breakout from key technical levels.  GDX is getting closer to challenging and powering above $25.  That would accelerate the sentiment shift in this deeply-undervalued sector back to bullish, enticing investors to return.  Good operating results from the major gold miners in their upcoming Q4’17 earnings season could prove the catalyst to fuel this GDX $25 breakout.

The classic way to measure gold-stock-sector price action is with the HUI NYSE Arca Gold BUGS Index.  But the HUI benchmark is being increasingly usurped by the GDX VanEck Vectors Gold Miners ETF as the gold-stock metric of choice.  GDX is used far more often than the HUI in gold-stock analyses these days, both online and on financial television.  I haven’t seen the HUI mentioned on CNBC for years now.

GDX does have major advantages over the HUI.  Most importantly it is readily tradable as an ETF and with options.  GDX’s component stocks and their weightings are also regularly updated by elite gold-stock analysts, keeping it current.  The HUI is rarely if ever updated to reflect company-specific changes in the ranks of the world’s top gold miners.  GDX is dynamic where the HUI is effectively static and outdated.

GDX also has limitations as a gold-stock metric though.  It was only born in May 2006, so that’s the limit of its price history available for analysis.  And because its managers are paid 0.51% of its assets each year to maintain this ETF, GDX is not as pure of measure of gold-stock performance as a normal index.  Over a decade that adds up to a substantial 5% difference.  Nevertheless GDX’s popularity continues to grow.

This week GDX had $7.7b in assets under management, dwarfing its direct competitors.  That was 21x larger than the next-biggest 1x-long major-gold-stock ETF!  GDX’s sister GDXJ Junior Gold Miners ETF weighed in at $4.7b, but that generally includes smaller gold miners.  GDX is the undisputed king of the gold-stock ETFs.  As a contrarian speculator, I watch GDX’s price action in real-time all day every day.

For an entire year now, GDX has meandered in a relatively-tight trading range between $21 to $25.  As gold stocks periodically fell even deeper out of favor, this ETF slumped down near $21 lower support.  Then as they inevitably rallied back out of those lows, GDX climbed back up near $25 resistance.  That made for a roughly-20% gold-stock price range, certainly narrow by this sector’s standards and tough to trade.

This GDX chart over the past couple years or so highlights 2017’s gold-stock consolidation.  With this unloved sector neither rallying nor falling enough to get interesting, investors mostly abandoned it over the past year.  So gold stocks largely drifted sideways on balance, which certainly proved vexing for the few remaining contrarian speculators and investors.  A GDX $25 breakout would greatly improve psychology.

Last year’s gold-stock performance per GDX was very poor.  This ETF’s price climbed 11.1% in 2017, which is better than a kick in the teeth.  But gold’s impressive 13.2% gain last year well outpaced the gold stocks’ performance.  Normally the major gold miners’ stocks amplify gold advances by 2x to 3x, so GDX should’ve powered 26% to 40% higher in 2017.  Gold stocks are only worthwhile if they outperform gold.

That’s because gold miners face many additional operational, geological, and geopolitical risks compared to just owning gold outright.  So if the gold stocks don’t outperform gold, they simply aren’t worth owning.  Seeing them lag the metal which drives their profits for essentially an entire year is extremely anomalous.  It’s a reflection of the entire global markets proving extremely anomalous in 2017, an exceedingly-weird year.

Gold stocks normally perform much more like 2016 than 2017.  A couple years ago GDX rocketed 52.5% higher in one of the best major-sector-ETF performances in all the stock markets.  That greatly amplified 2016’s underlying 8.5% gold advance by 6.2x.  All those gains rapidly accrued in that year’s first half, as GDX skyrocketed 151.2% higher in 6.4 months on a parallel 29.9% gold upleg!  Gold stocks can really move.

But last year as extreme record-high stock markets and the even-more-extreme bitcoin popular speculative mania stole the spotlight from gold, gold stocks were largely left for dead.  Speculators and investors alike wanted nothing to do with classic alternative investments when everything else proved much more exciting.  Thus GDX hasn’t been able to decisively break out above its $25 upper resistance, despite trying.

GDX did power 34.6% higher in 1.8 months early last year, peaking on a closing basis at $25.57 in early February 2017.  But that rally fizzled with gold’s when stock markets started surging to new records on hopes for big tax cuts soon from the newly-Republican-controlled US government.  By early March GDX had retreated back down to $21.14, right at its $21 support line.  At least that held strong throughout 2017.

The gold stocks soon rebounded into another rally, but that topped at $24.57 in GDX terms in mid-April.  Again gold had stalled out amidst epic general-stock euphoria.  Gold is the key to gold-stock fortunes, as traders only think about the gold miners when gold itself catches their attention.  GDX was repelled right at its 200-day moving average, which can prove both major support or resistance depending on market direction.

By early May GDX was right back down to $21.10 again, increasingly establishing the clear consolidation trend seen in this chart.  The gold stocks couldn’t rally significantly heading into their summer-doldrums lull, and GDX was soon right back down to $21.21 in early July.  That very day I published an essay on gold stocks’ summer bottom, predicting a new upleg once those usual weak summer seasonals passed.

And that indeed happened, with GDX rebounding and then accelerating to power 20.2% higher to $25.49 by early September.  That was right at its early-February peak, a critical level technically to see a major upside breakout.  But once again gold didn’t cooperate, selling off sharply as general stock markets yet again blasted to another series of record highs on renewed hopes for big tax cuts soon.  Taxphoria was huge!

Thus the gold stocks slumped again, falling back down near GDX’s strong $21 support as this ETF hit $21.42 on close in mid-December.  That was the day before the Federal Reserve’s fifth rate hike of this cycle, so gold-futures speculators were scared.  They irrationally fear Fed rate hikes are bearish for gold, even though history has long proven just the opposite.  Gold and gold stocks surged after that hike as I predicted.

From the day before that latest FOMC meeting to this week, GDX rallied 13.8% to $24.37.  Wednesday morning when I decided to pen this essay, GDX was nearing $24.50.  So the long-awaited decisive $25 breakout is in easy reach.  Gold stocks are a volatile sector, with 3%+ daily swings in prices relatively common.  So all it will take to propel GDX above its $25 resistance is a few solid-to-strong sector up days.

The upcoming Q4’17 earnings season for the major gold miners in the next few weeks could prove the catalyst to spark serious gold-stock buying. Because gold stocks are so deeply out of favor, the small fraction of traders that even think about them assume they are struggling operationally. Throughout all the markets, traders wrongly attribute prices stretched to anomalous levels by extreme herd sentiment to fundamentals.

A month ago bitcoin skyrocketed near $20k as many traders believed such extremes were fundamentally righteous due to the underlying blockchain technology.  Yet it was a popular speculative mania, extreme greed sucking people in.  In early December I warned “Once this mania bitcoin bubble bursts, and it will, the odds are very high that bitcoin will lose 50% to 75% of its value within a few months on the outside!”

This week just over a month later bitcoin has indeed been cut in half, falling to $9k intraday.  Extreme prices are the result of irrational and ephemeral herd sentiment, not fundamentals.  Gold stocks are now stuck on the other end of the psychology spectrum, plagued with extreme fear.  Since their prices have been so weak, traders think poor fundamentals must be the reason.  But that’s simply not true at all.

As a contrarian speculator and market-newsletter writer for the past couple decades, few people are more deeply immersed in the gold-stock realm than me.  Every quarter just after earnings season I dive into the actual operating and financial results of the major GDX gold miners.  I’m eagerly looking forward to doing that again with their new Q4’17 results, which will be reported between late January and mid-February.

So now the latest quarterly results available from the major gold miners are Q3’17’s.  I explored them for the top 34 GDX gold miners, representing almost 92% of its total holdings, back in mid-November.  In Q3’17 these elite gold miners reported average all-in sustaining costs of $868 per ounce.  That’s what it costs them not only to produce gold, but to explore for more and build new mines to maintain production levels.

Q3’17’s average gold price was $1279, which means the major gold miners were collectively earning profits around $411 per ounce.  That made for hefty 32% profit margins, revealing an industry actually thriving fundamentally instead of struggling as herd-sentiment-blinded traders wrongly assume.  Gold miners make such excellent investments because their mining costs generally don’t follow gold prices.

Gold-mining costs are essentially fixed during mine-planning stages, when engineers and geologists work to decide which ore to mine, how to dig to it, and how to process it.  Once mines’ necessary infrastructure is built, their actual mining costs don’t change much.  Quarter after quarter generally the same levels of equipment, employees, and supplies are needed to mine gold.  So all-in sustaining costs hold pretty steady.

In the four quarters leading into Q3’17, the top-34 GDX gold miners’ all-in sustaining costs averaged $855, $875, $878, and $867.  That works out to an annual average of $869, virtually identical to Q3’17’s $868 per ounce.  Those flat AISCs happened despite the gold price varying greatly in that five-quarter span, with this metal slumping as low as $1128 and surging as high as $1365.  Gold-mining costs are static.

So as long as prevailing gold prices remain well above all-in sustaining costs, mining gold remains very profitable and spins out big positive operating cashflows.  And relatively-flat mining costs generate big gold-miner profits leverage to gold.  These core fundamental truths about gold-mining stocks are what could help their upcoming Q4’17 results ignite the buying necessary to propel GDX above $25 for a major breakout.

These new Q4 results aren’t going to be spectacular, as gold’s $1276 average price last quarter was just under Q3’s $1279 average.  But assuming flat all-in sustaining costs as usual, $868 in Q4 would still yield fat profit margins of $408 per ounce.  That too is virtually unchanged from Q3’s $411.  So the major gold miners as a sector shouldn’t see collective downside surprises in earnings in Q4, avoiding damaging sentiment.

It’s not the Q4’17 results that should spark major gold-stock buying, but their implications for the current Q1’18 quarter.  While Q1 is young, gold is averaging nearly $1323 so far as of the middle of this week.  That is already 3.6% above Q4’s average, which is a big move higher.  If these gold levels hold and the major gold miners’ all-in sustaining costs hold, they are looking at Q1’18 profits way up at $455 per ounce!

That’s a whopping 11.5% higher quarter-on-quarter!  Not many if any sectors in all the stock markets can even hope for such massive earnings gains.  And if gold continues powering higher in the coming months in a major new upleg, Q1’s average gold price will be pulled higher accordingly. That means even larger major-gold-miner profits growth.  These super-bullish prospects ought to rekindle material gold-stock demand.

Investors usually buy stocks not because of current earnings, but because of what they expect profits to do over the coming year or so.  Rising gold prices coupled with flat costs give gold-mining profits growth in 2018 some of the greatest upside potential in the entire stock markets.  Institutional investors should take notice of this as Q4’17 results are released, leading to funds upping their tiny allocations to gold stocks.

On top of that January tends to be a big news month for the gold miners, as many publish their cost and production outlooks for the new year.  These reports tend to be bullish on balance, with the major gold miners forecasting higher production and lower costs tending to garner the most attention.  So there’s good odds of positive newsflow over the coming weeks as well, drawing investors’ focus back to gold stocks.

All this shows why the gold miners’ stocks have usually enjoyed strong seasonal rallies in January and most of February.  So GDX now has its best chance in a year of decisively breaking out above $25 in the coming weeks.  That would work wonders for bearish gold-stock psychology.  The more gold stocks rally, the better herd sentiment, and the more traders want to buy them.  And GDX’s potential upside is huge.

This last chart encompasses nearly all of GDX’s entire history going back to early 2007, a half-year after it was birthed.  Gold stocks remain wildly undervalued today, so GDX $25 and even its $31.32 seen at gold stocks’ latest major interim high in early August 2016 are super-low in longer-term context.  GDX is actually still down near stock-panic levels, highlighting vast upside as gold stocks inevitably mean revert higher.

The shaded area in the lower right encompasses the last couple years.  Despite GDX seeing one heck of a bull-spawning upleg in early 2016, the gold stocks remain very low.  GDX itself actually hit an all-time low in January 2016.  The gold stocks were trading at fundamentally-absurd prices as I pointed out that very week.  That extreme anomaly was the product of fleeting herd sentiment, it had nothing to do with fundamentals.

So far in young 2018, GDX is averaging $23.66 on close.  That’s actually worse than Q4’08’s $25.13, which was during the most-extreme market-fear event of our lifetimes.  For the first time since 1907, the general stock markets suffered a full-blown panic in late 2008.  Everything else including gold and its miners’ stocks were sucked into that epic maelstrom of fear.  Traders were terrified, fleeing in horror from everything.

So GDX plummeted as low as $16.37 in late-October 2008, climaxing a devastating 71.0% drop in just 7.5 months.  In that panic quarter of Q4’08, gold averaged just $797.  While industry costs were lower then, the major gold miners were still earning much less in both profit-margin and absolute terms than they are today.  Yet the average GDX share price was much higher in Q4’08 than it’s been over the past year!

The fact GDX could trade around $25.13 during a stock-panic quarter with $797 gold highlights the sheer madness of today’s gold-stock prices.  Since 2017 dawned, GDX has averaged just $22.99 with $1261 average gold levels.  Seeing gold-stock prices 8.5% lower despite strong profits and average gold prices being a whopping 58.2% higher makes zero sense!  The gold stocks have to mean revert far higher from here.

That’s what happened after the extreme pricing anomalies of that late-2008 stock panic too.  Over the next 2.9 years, GDX more than quadrupled with a 307.0% gain!  Another proportional mean-reversion bull out of early 2016’s all-time GDX low would catapult this ETF back up near $51.  That’s still more than another double from today’s levels.  And with gold mining so profitable, this new bull’s gains should be far larger.

While investors and speculators alike can certainly play gold stocks’ powerful coming upleg with major ETFs like GDX, the best gains by far will be won in individual gold stocks with superior fundamentals.  Their upside will far exceed the ETFs, which are burdened by over-diversification and underperforming gold stocks.  A carefully-handpicked portfolio of elite gold and silver miners will generate much-greater wealth creation.

At Zeal we’ve literally spent tens of thousands of hours researching individual gold stocks and markets, so we can better decide what to trade and when.  As of the end of Q4, this has resulted in 983 stock trades recommended in real-time to our newsletter subscribers since 2001.  Fighting the crowd to buy low and sell high is very profitable, as all these trades averaged stellar annualized realized gains of +20.2%!

The key to this success is staying informed and being contrarian.  That means buying low before others figure it out, before undervalued gold stocks soar much higher.  An easy way to keep abreast is through our acclaimed weekly and monthly newsletters.  They draw on my vast experience, knowledge, wisdom, and ongoing research to explain what’s going on in the markets, why, and how to trade them with specific stocks.  For only $12 per issue, you can learn to think, trade, and thrive like contrarians.  Subscribe today, and get deployed in the great gold and silver stocks in our full trading books!

The bottom line is the leading GDX gold-stock ETF looks to be on the verge of a major breakout.  The upcoming Q4’17 results from the major gold miners along with Q1’s higher prevailing gold prices ought to catch investors’ attention.  The gold miners should prove very profitable in Q4, with prospects for big and fast earnings growth in Q1 and all of 2018 as gold powers higher.  This should help GDX get bid well over $25.

Once gold stocks power decisively above that vexing upper resistance level of the past year, the shift in trader psychology back to bullish will really accelerate.  Gold stocks should enjoy relatively-large capital inflows from institutional investors looking for undervalued sectors in an extremely-overvalued stock market.  The forgotten gold miners’ stocks have a good chance to outperform everything again this year like in 2016.

Adam Hamilton, CPA

January 19, 2018

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