The Supply Side the Rally Is Ignoring

Gold is up roughly 60% over the past 18 months. Equity multiples have followed. Reserve replacement, the underlying engine, has not.

In FY24, only 8 of the world's top 20 gold producers replaced what they mined organically. The other twelve leaned on M&A and price-deck resets to clear 1.0× at the headline.

The price-deck point is the one most people skip.

When a company lifts its long-term gold assumption, more of the resource becomes economic, and reserves go up at the stroke of a pen. That is a legitimate adjustment when prices reset higher. It also reverses the moment prices roll over, which makes it a fragile floor under reported reserves.

M&A sits in a similar bucket. Acquired ounces are real ounces, but they were someone else's discovery. The acquirer's organic engine is unchanged.

Strip both out, and the picture reorders quickly.

Zijin Mining Group and Equinox Gold stay in the top tier organically. Barrick, Alamos Gold and AngloGold Ashanti drop sharply. Newmont, Kinross and IAMGOLD print well below 1.0× organically.

If this pattern holds across cycles, the gold sector's medium-term production profile depends more on deal flow and price assumptions than on what the drill bit finds. That is a different investment thesis to the one most sell-side reports are running.

For royalty and streaming companies, the question is which counterparties have a self-funding ore body and which are leaning on the cycle to look that way. For PE and IB coverage, the same question shows up in every diligence pack.

The data sits in the filings. The work sits in the normalisation. Pulse Intelligence does that second part by default, in real time. Less searching. More strategising.™