Happy Sunday, GoldBuzzers!

Gold’s having a rough few months, but the mining stocks have had it worse. That’s not a contradiction, and in today’s Deep Dive, I want to walk through why the gap between the two is one of the most useful signals in the market right now.

Let’s get into it. ⬇️

Gold slipped to $4,100 an ounce on Friday and closed the week down about 1.5 percent, while silver took the harder hit, falling below $60 for a weekly loss of roughly 4.5 percent. Once again, the pressure on both came from the same place: oil.

Crude jumped five percent this week after renewed strikes between US and Iranian forces, and pricier energy means stickier inflation, which means the Fed stays hawkish for longer. Markets now put the odds of a September rate hike somewhere between 50 and 60 percent, and minutes from the June meeting showed several policymakers pushing for one before rates were left on hold.

The next tests arrive fast. June CPI lands Tuesday, and Fed Chair Kevin Warsh testifies before Congress next week. There were bright spots underneath the red ink, though. China's central bank added to its gold reserves in June at the fastest monthly pace in more than two and a half years, and Washington and Tehran are reportedly keeping peace talks alive despite the flare-up.

Gold closed at $5,420 an ounce on January 28. By the end of June it was trading in the low $4,100s, down about 25 percent from that peak and posting its worst quarter in 13 years.

You might expect the mining stocks to be sitting in the same spot. They’re not. They’re further down the hole.

The VanEck Gold Miners ETF (GDX), the basket most people use as a proxy for the sector, fell 21 percent in the second quarter alone. It went from around $96 in early April to roughly $75 by June 30, and it has been grinding near $74 since. Silver miners took a similar beating even though silver itself is holding near $60.

That split between the metal and the companies that pull it out of the ground is what I’m watching very closely at the moment. It shows up in most precious metals cycles, and it usually resolves in a way that rewards patience over panic.

Why spot is holding up

Gold's pullback is profit-taking after a run that got ahead of itself, not a break in the underlying case. The floor under the price continues to see real money moving in.

Central banks bought 244 tonnes in the first quarter of 2026, up three percent from a year earlier, and they kept buying as the price fell. Bar and coin demand climbed 42 percent year over year to 474 tonnes, the second-highest quarterly total on record. When the price dropped, physical buyers did not run for the exits. They showed up with bids.

Silver walked the same path. It set a record near $121 in late January, corrected hard, and now trades around $60, still up more than 60 percent from a year ago. The metal held. The open question is whether the equities follow.

Why the miners fell further

Miners are a leveraged bet on the metal price, and leverage works in both directions.

The math behind it is simple. A typical gold producer carries an all-in sustaining cost somewhere near $1,500 an ounce. When gold sells for $5,000, the margin per ounce is enormous and profits balloon. When gold slips toward $4,000, that same fixed cost eats a bigger slice of a smaller number, and earnings compress fast. That’s why GDX returned about 50 percent over the past year while the metal, tracked by GLD, returned roughly 22 percent. The miners gave you more on the way up. They’re handing back more on the way down.

There is a concentration problem on top of that. GDX leans heavily on a few names: Newmont at about 10 percent of the fund, Agnico Eagle near 10 percent, Barrick close to eight percent. A cost overrun at one large producer or a permitting fight in the wrong country lands on the whole index whether or not gold moved that week.

The charts match the fundamentals. GDX sits below its 50-day moving average and has been flashing sell signals on the daily. The junior gold miners (GDXJ) are down on the year while gold itself is roughly flat. Silver miners tell the same story. The Global X Silver Miners ETF (SIL) dropped below its 50-day average at the start of June and has not reclaimed it, even after returning better than 65 percent over the trailing 12 months.

Where that leaves the two sides of the trade

If you hold physical gold, a gold ETF, or a royalty and streaming name, this stretch has been calmer. Those vehicles track spot closely and collect the central-bank and safe-haven flows without carrying a mine's payroll or its country risk.

Miners ask for more patience. The sector's higher beta means it can keep lagging even after spot gold steadies, and company-level factors weigh heavily when margins tighten. The setups right now favor waiting for evidence of a turn rather than guessing at the bottom: relative strength that stops sliding, and volume that confirms buyers are actually back.

One signal worth noting from inside the industry. Genesis Minerals recently put a $3.9 billion rival bid on the table for Vault Minerals.

When producers are willing to pay up for someone else's ounces during a correction, it’s a good sign that the people closest to the assets think the cash flows are durable and the equities are cheap.

None of this breaks the longer-term case. Gold's biggest buyers are still buying, silver held a level plenty of people expected it to lose, and stretches where miners lag the metal have historically come right before the miners catch up in a hurry. The warning in the mining charts and the strength in the bullion price are not a contradiction. They’re two clocks running at different speeds, and they always sync back up.

That’s all for this Sunday, folks. See you on Tuesday.

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Rick Adams
Founder, GoldBuzz
rick@goldbuzz.com