So far in August the combined market capitalisation of the MINING.COM TOP 50 rose from $2,169 billion to $2,375 billion. That is $206 billion in seven sessions, three Barricks conjured out of metal prices, and it puts the sector comfortably ahead of big tech on the year.
Of that $206 billion, $108 billion came from the gold and silver names alone after bullion topped $4,500 an ounce in New York yesterday and silver made a vainglorious attempt to recapture the heights of January.
On February 27, right before the Iran war, the fifty were worth $2,748 billion, up 28% on the year and far above previous records for the series going all the way back to the last decade (the ranking dropped to just $700 billion at the height of covid but we’re never falling for that again are we?).
Then in March, $420 billion evaporated inside a single month as gold fell away and the last drops of the silver squeeze was squoze. The best seven sessions the sector has had in years still leave it 14% below where it stood in February so technically this is a recovery, but we’ll take.
Based metals
Gold has supplied every lurch on the chart, the February spike, the March collapse, the August melt-up, but it’s the base metals that has made August so precious for punters.
The copper and diversified names in the ranking have added $246 billion in market cap this year, a gain of 24%. The gold, silver and royalty names have added $18 billion, a gain of 2.6%.
It is worse than that for the gold camp, because eight of the eighteen precious metals names in the ranking are actually down on the year. Lundin Gold is off 21.1%, Shandong Gold 19.9%, Northern Star 14.1%, Fresnillo 9.5%, Gold Fields 8.8%, Barrick 6.7%. Meanwhile Glencore is up 40.9%, South32 39.3%, Southern Copper 37.9%, Teck 37.5%, Freeport 34.4% and KGHM 30.8% on a copper price that has been touching fresh Comex records.
Magnificent miners
From the close on 31 July to yesterday Newmont added $22.5 billion, Agnico Eagle put on $17.9 billion. Barrick went the other way as is its wont. The gold’s bounce could not paper over a second quarter miss or Nevada, where the dispute with Newmont was settled for $1.95 billion and the way cleared for a North American listing. Money that might have gone to Barrick appears to have walked across the street to its partner instead.
Freeport crept back to $98 billion, close enough to the $100 billion club to hear the music, helped by a copper price that is firm partly because Freeport is not producing the way it could. Its Indonesian unit is doing furnace repairs, the freshest interruption in a run that began with the Grasberg mud rush back in September 2025.
Both do the same peculiar thing to the shares, which is to lift them by keeping metal off a market the company would rather be selling into. Ivanhoe’s DRC troubles, Cobre Panama’s years-long absence, Codelco’s production problems, all have the same effect and could even bring about the unthinkable: Codelco joins the Top 50.
Rerating resources
These pages have likely tossed around the word rerated too many times when it begins to look as if investors are valuing the industrial economy the way they should. Another reality check is probably in order.
The Magnificent 7 are worth $23.4 trillion. All fifty miners come to under $2.4 trillion (and if you count the next 50 it doesn’t add much either). The seven are worth 9.8 of the entire ranking. Nvidia on its own is worth 2.3 of it, or about 24 BHPs. Amazon outweighs all fifty. Even the magnificents’ minnow Tesla matches the eleven biggest miners put together.
The seven are not having a uniform year either. Nvidia is up 20% YTD and carrying the group along with Amazon. Meta is down 12% and Tesla down 27%. The seven are not a fixed constellation and the rocket boosters are probably going to swap it out for SpaceX (still nearly $2 trillion after socking it to the IPO buyers) soon to rub our noses in it.
The acronym before this one was FAANG, and it had Netflix in it. Netflix. There was a moment when the market held a company that only ever had one good show and that show was the first three seasons of Black Mirror in the same regard as half the mining industry.
Mining has form here too. In January 2023, MINING.COM ran a chart headlined DeFAANGed, when the miners briefly outran big tech and everyone got rather carried away. Mining stocks ended that year 1% higher. The FAANG fivesome added 74% and was worth a collective $12 trillion going into 2024.
