Newmont NEM
Basic Materials · Gold · Synthos Deep Dive · 2026-08-04
The Overview
Newmont digs gold out of the ground in Australia, Ghana, Peru, Argentina, Mexico, Canada and elsewhere, and sells it. When the gold price goes up, Newmont makes a lot more money without doing anything differently. That is exactly what has happened: profits went from a $2.5 billion loss in 2023 to a $7.1 billion profit in 2025.
The shares now look very cheap. They cost $97.73, which is about nine times what analysts expect the company to earn in 2027. The company has more cash than debt — a rarity for a miner — and generated $7.3 billion of spare cash last year, of which it used $2.3 billion to buy back its own shares. Thirty-seven analysts follow it; twenty-eight say Buy and none says Sell, with an average target of $139, over 40% above the price.
So why is the stock 26% below its high, and down 13% over six months?
Here is the number that explains it. The cost of producing an ounce of gold — the industry measure called all-in sustaining cost — rose from $1,593 to $1,938 an ounce in a year. That is a 21.7% increase. Revenue grew 16%. So the cost of digging is rising faster than the money coming in, even while gold prices are high. Some of that is self-inflicted by success: the company says royalties and worker profit-sharing payments both rise automatically when the gold price rises.
Two more honest points. First, nobody actually knows what Newmont will earn. The analysts' own forecasts for 2028 range from $7.57 to $18.11 per share — one is more than double the other. That is what it means to own a commodity producer. Second, the company changed its Chief Financial Officer, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Technical Officer and Chief Accounting Officer all at once on 1 July — six weeks ago. Two of those jobs had been filled on an interim basis before that.
Our estimate of fair value is $115, about 18% above the price, and we think the downside is around $72 and the upside around $160. That is a genuinely attractive shape. But we would like to see one quarter in which costs stop running away before acting on it.
- Downside Risk 6/10. Net cash, 73x interest cover, 0.48 beta — and a commodity price nobody can forecast.
- Growth Quality 5/10. Enormous reported growth that belongs to the gold price, not the company.
- Exponential Potential 2/10. A depleting-asset business. Lowest in this batch, and correctly so.
Putting a number on it: our fair-value estimate is $115 against a current price of $127.98 — consistent with our call to stay away or wait for a better setup.
Our summary metrics
"Rated 6 — a fortress balance sheet attached to a commodity price nobody can forecast, with costs inflating faster than most people realise and an executive team six weeks old. The supports are unusually strong for a miner: NET CASH of $1,938 million at 2025-12-31 ($7,650 million of cash plus $594 million of short-term investments against $5,712 million of total debt including $446 million of leases), against $8,972 million of gross debt and $5,353 million of NET DEBT only twelve months earlier — a $7.3 billion swing; interest coverage of 72.97x; a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.154; free cash flow of $7,299 million in FY2025, 7.1% of market capitalisation; $2,303 million of buybacks; and a beta of 0.482, the lowest in this batch, which makes this one of the few genuine portfolio diversifiers here. Against that, five exposures. First, and it is the most current: ALL-IN SUSTAINING COSTS rose 21.7% year on year to $1,938 per gold ounce in the June quarter, and consolidated costs applicable to sales rose 20.4% to $1,463 per ounce — cost inflation is eating the gold-price windfall as it arrives, and the company attributes it to higher direct costs at Boddington, higher third-party royalties and higher worker-participation costs that themselves rise with the gold price. Second, the earnings are a leveraged derivative of a commodity price: the FY2028 consensus EPS range of $7.567 to $18.112 — a 139% spread on eleven analysts — is the honest measure of how unforecastable that is, and no valuation anchored on a point estimate deserves much confidence. Third, governance: on 2026-06-15 the company announced a NEW Chief Financial Officer (Brian Tabolt, replacing interim holder Peter Wexler, who returns to Chief Legal Officer), a NEW Chief Operating Officer (Mark Rodgers, base salary $800,000), a NEW Chief Technical Officer (David Thornton, replacing interim holder Erin Workman) and a NEW Chief Accounting Officer (Joshua Cage) — ALL effective 1 July 2026, and the filing's own words are 'during this time of transition.' Fourth, jurisdiction: operations span Australia, Ghana, Peru, Argentina, Suriname, Mexico, Papua New Guinea and Canada, and the knowledge base's most credible structural warning is that 'Western gold miners face rising confiscation/windfall-tax risk at an end-of-sovereign-debt-cycle.' Fifth, the data: the vendor's own June-quarter revenue field is 43.5% below the company's reported figure, so this dive is unusually dependent on the filing."
"Rated 5 — spectacular reported growth that is almost entirely a price effect, with volumes flat to lower and costs rising fast. Revenue: $11,949M (FY2022), $11,775M (FY2023), $18,557M (FY2024, +57.6%), $22,097M (FY2025, +19.1%). Net income went from MINUS $2,521M in FY2023 to $7,085M in FY2025 and EPS from MINUS $3.00 to $6.41. That is a genuine transformation and almost none of it is operational: it is the gold price, plus the Newcrest acquisition that lifted the share count from 841 million to 1,148 million between FY2023 and FY2024. The June quarter makes the point precisely. Revenue rose to $6,118 million from $5,275 million, +16.0%, and the 10-Q attributes the increase to 'higher average realized gold prices partially offset by LOWER SALES VOLUMES.' Meanwhile consolidated costs applicable to sales rose 20.4% per gold ounce and all-in sustaining costs 21.7%. So the revenue line grew 16% while the unit cost line grew 21% — and the adjusted EPS beat collapsed from 40.1% in the March quarter to 2.4% in June, on revenue that MISSED consensus by 3.7%. Consensus wants EPS of $9.502 in FY2026 (11 analysts), $10.651 in FY2027 (12) and $11.830 in FY2028 (11) — but the FY2028 range of $7.567 to $18.112 tells you the analysts do not know either, and the FY2029 and FY2030 rows on four analysts each show EPS DECLINING to $10.962 and $9.020. The one genuinely operational item: Ahafo North reached commercial production in the fourth quarter of 2025 and is now a reportable segment. A 5: real cash, real balance-sheet repair, and a growth rate that belongs to the metal rather than to the company."
"Rated 2 — the lowest exponential score in this batch, and appropriately so. Gold mining is a depleting-asset business: every ounce sold must be replaced by exploration or acquisition, reserves are finite and located where geology put them, and the product is an undifferentiated commodity sold at a price set globally. There is no network effect, no operating system, no installed base and no pricing power. The only mechanism by which Newmont's per-share value compounds is capital allocation — buying reserves cheaply, selling non-core assets dearly, and shrinking the share count — and the recent record on that is mixed: the Newcrest acquisition took diluted shares from 841 million in FY2023 to 1,148 million in FY2024, a 36% increase, and the company has since bought back $2,303 million of stock in FY2025 and taken the count back to 1,067 million. Net of both, shareholders own 27% more shares than three years ago against a much larger asset base. The one asymmetry worth naming is not a business property at all: the knowledge base's sector lane argues gold miners are 'priced for much lower gold that isn't coming back' and that central-bank accumulation is structural, and if that is right the operating leverage to a sustained higher gold price is genuinely large at a company with net cash and a 6.9x EV/EBITDA multiple. That is an option on a macro regime, not a compounding business. A 2."
What does “fair value” mean?
Fair value is Synthos’s estimate of what one share is worth today, based on our model of the company’s future cash generation and the risks to it. It is not a price target or a prediction of where the stock trades next quarter — it’s the price where we think risk and reward are balanced. Above it, you’re paying for outcomes better than our base case; below it, the market is offering a margin of safety.
The model’s inputs and weightings are proprietary — they’re the product. What we publish is the output, plus an independent, public-math cross-check further down the page (“Check our number”) so you can judge it for yourself.
What do the 5 tiers mean? (Core · Tactical · Watch · Hold · Avoid)
The Road Ahead
What we expect to matter in each window, and the evidence that would prove us wrong.
Short term 0-6 months
No differentiated view- Driver
- "A cheap stock in a six-month downtrend with deteriorating quarterly momentum. Newmont closed 2026-08-04 at $97.73, up 2.47%, which is 25.9% BELOW its 52-week high of $131.95, 49.4% above its low of $65.42, 0.6% BELOW a 50-day moving average of $98.35 and 6.3% BELOW a 200-day average of $104.28 — the only name in this batch trading below both averages. RSI is 54.5 and MACD is mildly negative at −0.81. The three-month return is −9.8% and the six-month is −13.4%, against SPY's +7.6% and +11.1%, while the twelve-month return remains +56.1% against +24.3%. So the stock had an extraordinary year and has spent half of it giving ground. The reason is visible in the 2026-07-23 print: revenue MISSED consensus by 3.7% and the adjusted EPS beat collapsed to 2.4% from 40.1% three months earlier, while all-in sustaining costs rose 21.7% year on year. Against that, the street is at 28 buy, 9 hold, 0 sell with a $139 target 42.2% above spot and a LOWEST target of $110 that is 12.6% above the market price — the widest bull/price gap in this batch. The stance is headwind because the trend, the cost line and the beat trajectory all point the same way, and none of them is fixed by a cheap multiple."
- What we’re watching
- "The 2026-10-22 third-quarter print against consensus adjusted EPS of $2.08 and revenue of $6,158M. The number that decides this dive is not the headline: it is ALL-IN SUSTAINING COSTS PER GOLD OUNCE, at $1,938 in the June quarter against $1,593 a year earlier — a 21.7% increase — and $1,822 against $1,623 for the six months. A third consecutive quarter of 20%-plus AISC inflation would mean the gold-price windfall is being competed away internally. Also watch consolidated costs applicable to sales, at $1,463 per ounce against $1,215; sales volumes, which the 10-Q says fell year on year; and any first commentary from the new Chief Financial Officer, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Technical Officer, all of whom took office on 1 July 2026 and none of whom has yet presented a full quarter."
- Confidence
- Low
Medium term 6-24 months
Neutral- Driver
- "Over two years this is a bet on two variables in opposite directions: the gold price, which the knowledge base's sector lane thinks goes higher for structural reasons, and unit costs, which the company's own filings show rising 21.7%. The valuation gives real room for the first to win: 9.2 times FY2027 consensus EPS of $10.651, 6.9 times trailing EV/EBITDA, 2.94 times book, a NET CASH balance sheet, and free cash flow of $7,299 million in FY2025 — a 7.1% yield — of which $2,303 million went to buybacks. If gold stays where it is and costs stabilise, the earnings power is large and the multiple is low. The problem is that the consensus itself does not believe its own point estimates: the FY2028 EPS range is $7.567 to $18.112 across eleven analysts, and the FY2029 and FY2030 rows on four analysts each show EPS DECLINING to $10.962 and $9.020. What could resolve it: two quarters of AISC growth below 10% would demonstrate that the cost inflation is a lag rather than a trend, and would make a 9x multiple on a net-cash, free-cash-generative business genuinely mispriced."
- What we’re watching
- "Whether all-in sustaining costs stabilise. Whether sales volumes recover — the 10-Q attributes revenue growth to price 'partially offset by lower sales volumes', and a gold miner whose volumes fall while costs rise 21% is losing ground even in a bull market for the metal. Whether the new executive team makes changes to the capital programme, the portfolio or the disclosure; four of the top five finance and operating roles turned over on 1 July 2026. Whether the buyback continues at the FY2025 pace of $2,303 million, 2.2% of market capitalisation. Whether Ahafo North, which reached commercial production in the fourth quarter of 2025, ramps as expected. And whether the divestiture programme is finished: `acquisitionsNet` for FY2025 reads POSITIVE $2,944 million, which is asset-sale proceeds rather than acquisition spending, and the archive does not say what remains to be sold."
- Confidence
- Low
Long term 2+ years
Neutral- Driver
- "Long-run the case is macro and it is made entirely by voices that never mention this company. The knowledge base's sector lane is unusually consistent across fourteen channels: 'gold is the only reserve asset competing with treasuries, so central bank gold buying keeps rising'; 'Gold and gold miners are the historically correct asset for a K-shaped, money-printing, breaking-social-contract regime'; 'Gold miners have delevered and are now well-run with no debt after a 15-year bear market — coming out the other side'; and, most pointedly, 'Gold miners and US industrials are cheap secular plays; miners are priced for much lower gold that isn't coming back.' Newmont is the largest expression of that view, it carries net cash, and it trades at 6.9 times trailing EV/EBITDA. Against it stand two structural objections from the same store and from its most credible source on the subject: that 'Western gold miners face rising confiscation/windfall-tax risk at an end-of-sovereign-debt-cycle, so they may not be the most levered way to play gold this cycle', and that 'there's always an insolvent sovereign between you and a miner's gold.' Both are arguments for owning bullion rather than the miner, and neither can be refuted from this archive. Layered on top is the permanent problem of the business itself: reserves deplete, replacement costs rise, and the only long-run compounding mechanism is capital allocation — where the record includes a 36% share-count increase for Newcrest followed by buybacks that have taken back roughly a quarter of it."
- What we’re watching
- "Whether reserve replacement keeps pace with production — the archive contains no reserve life or replacement-ratio disclosure and it is the single most important long-run number for any miner. Whether jurisdiction risk crystallises anywhere in a portfolio spanning Australia, Ghana, Peru, Argentina, Suriname, Mexico, Papua New Guinea and Canada; the knowledge base's warning about windfall taxation is the specific mechanism to watch, and the 10-Q already flags 'higher third-party royalties at most sites and higher worker's participation costs, both resulting from higher average realized gold prices' — which is exactly that mechanism operating quietly. Whether the share count keeps falling from 1,067 million. Whether the 32% equity interest in Lundin Gold's Fruta del Norte, accounted for on a quarter lag, becomes material or is monetised. And whether costs applicable to sales, at $1,463 per ounce and rising 20% a year, ever revert."
- Confidence
- Low
Exponential Potential
"Rated 2 — the lowest exponential score in this batch, and appropriately so. Gold mining is a depleting-asset business: every ounce sold must be replaced by exploration or acquisition, reserves are finite and located where geology put them, and the product is an undifferentiated commodity sold at a price set globally. There is no network effect, no operating system, no installed base and no pricing power. The only mechanism by which Newmont's per-share value compounds is capital allocation — buying reserves cheaply, selling non-core assets dearly, and shrinking the share count — and the recent record on that is mixed: the Newcrest acquisition took diluted shares from 841 million in FY2023 to 1,148 million in FY2024, a 36% increase, and the company has since bought back $2,303 million of stock in FY2025 and taken the count back to 1,067 million. Net of both, shareholders own 27% more shares than three years ago against a much larger asset base. The one asymmetry worth naming is not a business property at all: the knowledge base's sector lane argues gold miners are 'priced for much lower gold that isn't coming back' and that central-bank accumulation is structural, and if that is right the operating leverage to a sustained higher gold price is genuinely large at a company with net cash and a 6.9x EV/EBITDA multiple. That is an option on a macro regime, not a compounding business. A 2."
What could take this further than the base case — and where the market may be underpricing it. Full forward-growth and acceleration math in Deeper analysis, §4 below.
Deeper analysis
Technicals, fundamentals, valuation, and the full expert-claim evidence panel — the detail behind the numbers above.
Reference table
| Street consensus | $139 (+42.2%) · median $135 · high $175 · low $110 — 12.6% ABOVE spot · 28 buy / 9 hold / 0 sell, consensus Buy. The widest bull/price gap in this batch |
| Valuation | 10.3x FY2026E · 9.2x FY2027E · 8.3x FY2028E · 12.1x trailing · 6.9x EV/EBITDA · 2.94x book · 12.4% FCF yield · dividend 1.04% |
| THE COST PROBLEM — filing-verified | All-in sustaining costs $1,938/gold oz in Q2 2026 against $1,593 — UP 21.7%. Six months $1,822 vs $1,623, +12.3% · Costs applicable to sales $1,463/oz vs $1,215 — UP 20.4% · six months $1,384 vs $1,221, +13.4% |
| June quarter | Revenue $6,118M vs $5,275M (+16.0%) — but MISSED the $6,353M consensus by 3.7% · adjusted EPS $2.10 vs a $2.05 estimate, a 2.4% beat — down from 40.1% in March · growth attributed to "higher average realized gold prices partially offset by LOWER SALES VOLUMES" |
| Balance sheet | NET CASH $1,938M at 2025-12-31 (cash $7,650M + short-term investments $594M vs total debt $5,712M) against NET DEBT of $5,353M a year earlier — a $7.3B swing · debt/equity 0.154 · interest coverage 73x |
| Cash | FY2025 operating cash flow $10,334M, capex $3,035M, free cash flow $7,299M · buybacks $2,303M (2.2% of market cap) · acquisitionsNet +$2,944M — DIVESTITURE PROCEEDS, not spending |
| GOVERNANCE — 8-K of 2026-06-15 | NEW Chief Financial Officer (Brian Tabolt, replacing INTERIM holder Peter Wexler), NEW Chief Operating Officer (Mark Rodgers, base $800,000), NEW Chief Technical Officer (David Thornton, replacing INTERIM holder Erin Workman) and NEW Chief Accounting Officer (Joshua Cage) — ALL effective 2026-07-01. The filing's own phrase: "during this time of transition" |
| Conviction | Positive at the sector level, thin at the name level. 2 name-level claims, both bullish; one is a January technical breakout call the price has since falsified. A 49-claim, 14-channel gold-miner lane is strongly bullish with two structural warnings from its most credible source |
| Technicals | −25.9% from the 52-week high of $131.95, +49.4% above the low of $65.42; 0.6% BELOW the 50-DMA and 6.3% BELOW the 200-DMA — the only name in this batch below both; RSI 54.5; MACD −0.81; 3-month −9.8%, 6-month −13.4%, 12-month +56.1% vs SPY +24.3% |
What the experts actually said 2 traceable claims on NEM · showing the highest-conviction voices
“Gold-silver side breaking out of long bases: Hecla Mining breaking out, Newmont breaking out of a base going back to the 80s.”
“Long gold miners and riding them — Newmont (~11% of GDX), flat since his high-school days, is finally ripping and pulling GDX higher (printed 58); got in during strength and managing risk.”
Every claim reconciles to a real claim_id in the Synthos knowledge base — this is the evidence the verdict is built on, not vibes. Management (the company itself) is shown but half-weighted; one cautionary voice is included on purpose.
Price & moving averages 12 months · 50 & 200-day averages · 52-week range
Solid line = price · dashed line = 50-day average · dotted line = 200-day average · the two thin horizontal lines mark the 52-week high and low. Price above both averages is an uptrend.
Data summary: last close $127.98, 23% above the 50-day average ($104), 19% above the 200-day average ($108) — an uptrend. 5% below the 52-week high of $135, 75% above the 52-week low of $73.
Bollinger Bands 20-day average ± 2 standard deviations
The shaded band widens when the stock gets more volatile. Riding the upper edge = strong momentum (sometimes stretched); the lower edge = weak / potentially oversold.
Data summary: price $127.98 is currently inside the band (band $96–$142).
RSI (14) momentum gauge · 0–100
Above 70 (overbought zone, shaded) = overbought, below 30 (oversold zone, shaded) = oversold. Currently 64.
MACD 12 / 26 / 9 · trend & momentum
The MACD line crossing above the signal line (bars flip to the up color) = momentum turning up; crossing below (bars flip to the down color) = turning down. Bar height = the size of that gap.
Data summary: MACD is currently above its signal line by 0.76, positive momentum.
Relative performance vs S&P 500 & its sector (XLB (sector)), set to 100 a year ago
Solid = NEM · dashed = S&P 500 · dotted = XLB (sector). A rising line means it is beating that benchmark — the sector line shows whether it is a leader or laggard within its own group.
Forward revenue & earnings actual → estimate · "FY" = fiscal year, "E" = estimate
Darker bars = actual results, brighter = analyst estimates. Taller bars to the right = expected growth.
Key stats an RIA wants
1. What happened, and what it cost
The transformation is real and it is a price event.
| FY2022 | FY2023 | FY2024 | FY2025 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | $11,949M | $11,775M | $18,557M | $22,097M |
| Growth | — | −1.5% | +57.6% | +19.1% |
| Operating income | $1,621M | $650M | $5,748M | $10,353M |
| Net income | −$459M | −$2,521M | $3,348M | $7,085M |
| EPS | −$0.58 | −$3.00 | $2.86 | $6.41 |
| Diluted shares | 795M | 841M | 1,148M | 1,108M |
| Operating cash flow | $3,220M | $2,763M | $6,363M | $10,334M |
| Capital expenditure | ($2,131M) | ($2,666M) | ($3,402M) | ($3,035M) |
| Free cash flow | $1,089M | $97M | $2,961M | $7,299M |
| Buybacks | $0M | $0M | ($1,246M) | ($2,303M) |
| Net debt / (net cash) | — | $6,434M | $5,353M | −$1,938M |
Two structural facts sit inside that table and both matter.
The share count jumped 36% between FY2023 and FY2024 — from 841 million to 1,148 million — which is the Newcrest acquisition. It has since come back to 1,067 million in the June 2026 quarter through buybacks. Net of both, a shareholder from three years ago owns roughly 27% more shares against a much larger asset base, and per-share value has to be judged on that basis rather than on the headline earnings recovery.
The balance sheet swung $7.3 billion in one year — from $5,353 million of net debt at 2024-12-31 to $1,938 million of net cash at 2025-12-31. Part of that is the $7,299 million of free cash flow. Part of it is asset sales: acquisitionsNet for FY2025 reads a POSITIVE $2,944 million, which is divestiture proceeds, not acquisition spending, and is documented in Section 5 as a field a reader will misinterpret.
The June quarter, and the number that governs this dive
From the 10-Q filed 2026-07-23 and the earnings calendar:
| Q2 2026 | Q2 2025 | change | H1 2026 | H1 2025 | change | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | $6,118M | $5,275M | +16.0% | — | — | — |
| vs consensus | $6,353M | — | −3.7% MISS | — | — | — |
| Adjusted EPS | $2.10 | $1.43 | +46.9% | — | — | — |
| vs consensus | $2.05 | — | +2.4% beat | — | — | — |
| Costs applicable to sales, gold | $1,463/oz | $1,215/oz | +20.4% | $1,384/oz | $1,221/oz | +13.4% |
| All-in sustaining costs, gold | $1,938/oz | $1,593/oz | +21.7% | $1,822/oz | $1,623/oz | +12.3% |
| AISC, gold-equivalent other metals | $2,660/oz | $1,203/oz | +121% | $2,107/oz | $1,239/oz | +70% |
| Copper AISC | $7,584/t | $6,068/t | +25.0% | $5,958/t | $6,042/t | −1.4% |
This is the table that governs the verdict and it deserves to be read slowly.
Revenue grew 16.0% and unit costs grew 20-22%. The 10-Q attributes the revenue increase to "higher average realized gold prices partially offset by lower sales volumes" — so the volume line is going backwards while the cost per unit is going forwards.
The company names the drivers and two of them are self-reinforcing: costs rose "primarily due to (i) Ahafo North reaching commercial production in the fourth quarter of 2025 resulting in classification as a reportable segment, (ii) higher direct costs largely at Boddington, and (iii) higher third-party royalties at most sites and higher worker's participation costs, both resulting from higher average realized gold prices."
Point (iii) is the important one and it is under-appreciated: royalties and worker profit-sharing rise automatically with the gold price. That is a structural leakage — the higher the metal goes, the larger the share of the increase that is claimed before it reaches the shareholder — and it is precisely the mechanism the knowledge base's most credible structural warning describes when it says Western gold miners face rising claims on their output at this point in the cycle.
And the beat trajectory has collapsed:
| Quarter | Report date | Adjusted EPS actual | estimate | beat | Revenue actual | estimate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q2 2025 | 2025-07-24 | $1.43 | $0.905 | +58.0% | $5,275M | $4,696M |
| Q3 2025 | 2025-10-23 | $1.71 | $1.44 | +18.8% | $5,380M | $5,191M |
| Q4 2025 | 2026-02-19 | $2.52 | $2.07 | +21.7% | $6,818M | $6,228M |
| Q1 2026 | 2026-04-23 | $2.90 | $2.07 | +40.1% | $7,307M | $6,765M |
| Q2 2026 | 2026-07-23 | $2.10 | $2.05 | +2.4% | $6,118M | $6,353M |
Five consecutive beats — and the fifth is a rounding error, on revenue that missed. That is the market's explanation for a stock 25.9% below its high while gold is near records.
2. Governance — the entire executive team changed six weeks ago
From the 8-K filed 2026-06-15, all appointments effective 1 July 2026:
| Role | Appointee | Replacing |
|---|---|---|
| Chief Financial Officer | Brian Tabolt | Peter Wexler, who held it on an INTERIM basis and returns to Executive Vice President and Chief Legal Officer, receiving an additional $500,000 restricted-stock award for the interim service |
| EVP & Chief Operating Officer | Mark Rodgers, age 62, previously Managing Director of the Africa Asia Pacific business unit; base salary $800,000, target bonus 105% | — |
| Chief Technical Officer | David Thornton | Erin Workman, who held it on an INTERIM basis and moves to Senior Vice President and Group Head, Health, Safety, Security and Environment |
| Chief Accounting Officer and Controller | Joshua Cage, age 52, 20 years with Newmont | — |
The filing's own language is the most informative thing in it: the board "extend thanks to Erin Workman for her dedicated leadership in the interim Chief Technical Officer role and contributions to the Executive Leadership Team during this time of transition", and separately thanks Peter Wexler "for his exceptional leadership in the interim Chief Financial Officer role."
Four of the top finance, operating, technical and accounting roles turned over on the same day, two of them having been vacant enough to require interim holders, at a company led by Chief Executive Natascha Viljoen. We do not read this as a negative signal about the business — a new chief executive rebuilding a team is normal and often correct — but it is a fact with consequences: nobody in the finance or operating leadership has yet presented a full quarter, the June results were the last under the outgoing structure, and the cost trajectory documented in Section 1 is now somebody else's problem to fix. It is recorded, weighted as execution uncertainty, and it is one of the three reasons this dive is a Watch rather than a Buy.
3. Valuation — priced in or room?
At $97.73 (market cap $102.98B, ~1,053.7M implied shares):
| Trailing | FY2026E | FY2027E | FY2028E | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | $25,000M+ (TTM, see Section 5) | $26,871M (13) | $28,989M (13) | $29,764M (17) |
| Adjusted EPS | $8.07 (vendor TTM) | $9.502 (11) | $10.651 (12) | $11.830 (11) |
| EPS range | — | $9.100 – $9.988 | $8.665 – $12.839 | $7.567 – $18.112 |
| Range as % of mean | — | 9.3% | 39.2% | 139.3% |
| P/E | 12.1x | 10.3x | 9.2x | 8.3x |
| EV/EBITDA | 6.9x | — | — | — |
| Price / book | 2.94x | — | — | — |
| Free cash flow yield | 12.4% (vendor); 7.1% on FY2025 actual | — | — | — |
| Dividend yield | 1.04% | — | — | — |
| Net debt / EBITDA | −0.24x (net cash) | — | — | — |
Look at the EPS range row, because it is the most honest number in this dive. The FY2028 consensus mean of $11.830 is bracketed by a low of $7.567 and a high of $18.112 — the high is 2.4 times the low. That is not analyst sloppiness; it is the correct expression of the fact that a gold miner's earnings are a leveraged derivative of a price nobody forecasts. Any fair value anchored on a point estimate here deserves materially less confidence than the same exercise on ADP or Trane, and this dive says so rather than presenting a false precision.
The FY2029 and FY2030 rows compound the point: on four analysts each, consensus EPS DECLINES to $10.962 and $9.020. They are excluded from every conclusion.
est.ebitdaAvg and est.ebitAvg are REJECTED on two grounds — fixed ratios and arithmetic impossibility. ebitdaAvg is exactly 39.65% of revenueAvg and ebitAvg exactly 15.79% in every forward year FY2026 through FY2030. And netIncomeAvg EXCEEDS ebitAvg by roughly 2.5 times in every single forward year — FY2026 $10,575M against $4,242M, FY2027 $10,878M against $4,577M, FY2030 $9,994M against $3,895M. Net income cannot be 2.5 times earnings before interest and tax. All forward valuation uses epsAvg.
Peer context is unusable. The vendor peer set — AEM, B, BHP, CRH, ECL, GFI, KGC, RIO, SCCO and SHW — contains three genuine gold peers (Agnico Eagle $76.3B, Gold Fields $30.5B, Kinross $28.0B) alongside two diversified miners, a copper producer, a building-materials group, a specialty chemicals company and a paint company. No multiples are supplied, so no peer comparison is drawn.
3a. What today's price assumes (the inversion)
At $97.73 — 9.2x FY2027 consensus, 6.9x EV/EBITDA, 2.94x book — the price embeds:
- EPS of $9.502 in FY2026 and $10.651 in FY2027. (Consensus; 11 and 12 analysts.) Those imply net margins of 39.4% and 37.5% on the consensus revenue lines, sustained for two years.
- The gold price does not fall materially. (Our derivation; no price forecast exists in this archive.) This is the most fragile assumption in the price, and it is fragile in a way no analysis can reduce: the archive contains no gold-price data, no hedging disclosure and no sensitivity table. What it does contain is a consensus that disagrees with itself by 139% two years out.
- All-in sustaining costs stop rising at 21.7%. (Filing-sourced.) At $1,938 per ounce and growing 21.7% a year, unit costs double in under four years. Consensus EPS growth of 12.1% in FY2027 is not consistent with that continuing.
- Sales volumes stabilise. (Filing-sourced.) The 10-Q says June-quarter revenue growth was "partially offset by lower sales volumes." Falling volumes against rising unit costs is the worst combination available to a miner.
- The market keeps paying 8-10x forward earnings. (Our number.) At 8x FY2027E the stock is $85; at 12x it is $128. Gold-miner multiples are structurally low for real reasons — reserve depletion, jurisdiction risk, capital-allocation history — and expecting a re-rating is a separate bet from expecting the earnings.
3b. The return bridge (why the multiple moves)
Expected return over the next twelve months decomposes as: EPS growth (+12.1%, from FY2026E $9.502 to FY2027E $10.651) + multiple drift (EXPANSION of roughly 5%, from today's 10.3x on the current year toward about 10.8x) + shareholder yield (buyback ~2.2% plus dividend 1.04% ≈ +3.2%) ≈ +20%.
Our base is the only one in this batch that assumes a modest multiple EXPANSION, and the reason is specific: at 9.2x FY2027 consensus with net cash and a 7.1% free-cash-flow yield, the multiple is at the low end of any defensible band for a producer of this scale, and the knowledge base's sector lane argues explicitly that 'miners are priced for much lower gold that isn't coming back.' We assume a small part of that closes and no more.
If the multiple held flat at 10.3x FY2027E the price would be $110 (+12.6%) — which is the street's LOWEST published target. If it expanded to 12x, $128 (+30.9%).
3c. Variant perception (where we differ, what would surprise)
- We are far BELOW the street and the gap is the largest in this batch. Our base of $115 is 17.3% below the consensus target of $139 and 14.8% below the median of $135, against 28 buy ratings and zero sells. We think the sell side is marking to the gold price and under-weighting a 21.7% increase in unit costs that appeared in a filing twelve days ago.
- Our specific disagreement is the cost line, and it is filing-sourced rather than interpretive. Watchable number: all-in sustaining costs per gold ounce in the 2026-10-22 print, at $1,938 in June against $1,593 a year earlier. A third consecutive quarter above 20% growth would mean the gold-price windfall is being competed away internally, and would justify a multiple below 9x rather than above 10x.
- We think the royalty and worker-participation mechanic is under-discussed and is structural. The 10-Q attributes part of the cost increase to "higher third-party royalties at most sites and higher worker's participation costs, both resulting from higher average realized gold prices." That is an automatic claim on the upside: the higher gold goes, the more of the increase is taken before it reaches earnings. It is the quiet, contractual version of the confiscation risk the knowledge base's most credible sector voice warns about.
- Where we are MORE positive than the multiple implies is the balance sheet. A $7.3 billion swing to net cash in one year, 73x interest coverage, and $2,303 million of buybacks is not what the 2.94x book multiple or the C-suite turnover suggest. This company has genuinely fixed its financial position and gets very little credit for it.
- Positive surprise that would force a re-rate: all-in sustaining cost growth below 10% for two consecutive quarters; sales volumes returning to growth; or a materially larger buyback, which at a 12.4% free-cash-flow yield would be the highest-return use of capital available to management.
- Negative surprise that would break the thesis: AISC above $2,100 per ounce; a further decline in sales volumes; a windfall tax, royalty increase or resource-nationalism event in any major jurisdiction; a large acquisition by the new management team, given the share-count history; or a sustained fall in the gold price, against which this company has no disclosed hedge in the archive.
Synthos fair values
All three anchors are multiples of the FY2027 consensus EPS distribution (mean $10.651, low $8.665, high $12.839, 12 analysts), and the unusually wide distribution is itself the reason the range below is unusually wide.
- Bear ~$72 — 8.3x the FY2027 consensus LOW of $8.665, and 9.5x FY2028's low of $7.567. Cross-check: 10.1% above the 52-week low of $65.42; 31.0% below the lowest street target of $110. The scenario: unit costs keep inflating above 20%, volumes keep falling, the gold price gives back part of its move, and a decelerating miner trades at a trough multiple on trough earnings. −26.3%.
- Base ~$115 — 10.8x the FY2027 consensus MEAN of $10.651, and 9.7x FY2028E. Cross-check: 17.3% below the street's $139; 4.5% above the street's lowest target of $110; 12.9% below the 52-week high; 10.3% above the 200-day average. Sensitivity, stated openly: 9x gives $96 — below spot — and 12x gives $128. The scenario: cost inflation moderates without reversing, gold holds, the buyback continues, and the multiple closes part of the gap toward a normal producer level. +17.7%.
- Bull ~$160 — 12.5x the FY2027 consensus HIGH of $12.839, and 8.8x FY2028's high of $18.112. Cross-check: 21.3% above the 52-week high of $131.95; 8.6% below the highest street target of $175. The scenario: the sector lane is right — central-bank accumulation is structural, miners are 'priced for much lower gold that isn't coming back' — costs stabilise, and the largest producer with net cash re-rates toward the middle of its historical band. +63.7%.
Base is 17.7% above spot; asymmetry roughly 2.42:1 to the upside (26.3% down, 63.7% up), plus a shareholder yield near 3.2%. That is the best raw arithmetic in this batch and it is deliberately NOT converted into a Buy, for three stated reasons: the cost line is deteriorating in the most recent filing, the earnings anchor has a 139% dispersion two years out, and four of the five senior finance and operating officers took their jobs six weeks ago.
4. Knowledge base — two name-level claims, and a strong sector lane with its own warnings
Raw hits: 55 (6 case-sensitive entity, 49 free text). Case-sensitive entity hits: 6. Name-level claims on Newmont: 2, both BULLISH. Discarded: 53.
A note on method, because this ticker is collision-prone in an unusual way. "NEM" is a three-letter ticker and "GOLD" is Barrick's ticker, so a case-sensitive entity sweep was run first on NEM, Newmont, Barrick, GOLD and Agnico — and it behaved correctly, returning Barrick for GOLD rather than noise. A free-text sweep on the bare word "gold" was deliberately NOT run: in a knowledge base full of monetary-policy argument it would return thousands of macro claims and nothing usable. The free-text sweep instead used "gold miner", "gold equit", "gold producer", "mining equities" and "central bank gold".
The two name-level claims:
> 2026-02-11 · bullish · conviction 70 · horizon: thesis · entities: GLD, Newmont · channel: mike_green · skill 0.9
> "Gold's rise is flow-driven — rising GLD shares outstanding plus Chinese buying — after Bitcoin had diluted traditional gold flows and masked the upside."
> 2026-01-04 · bullish · conviction 55 · horizon: thesis · entities: NEM, HL · channel: jordi_visser · speaker_role: independent · skill 2.0
> "Gold-silver side breaking out of long bases: Hecla Mining breaking out, Newmont breaking out of a base going back to the 80s."
GRADING the Visser claim, because it is dated, technical and testable. Made 2026-01-04. Since then Newmont has returned −13.4% over six months and −9.8% over three, and sits 25.9% below its 52-week high — although the twelve-month return remains +56.1%. So the breakout was real for the first part of the period and has decisively reversed in the second. Graded: partly right, currently failing. We report it that way rather than crediting the twelve-month number, because the claim was about a breakout and the breakout has failed.
The four other case-sensitive hits name peers rather than Newmont — Barrick (lyn_alden 2021, on the URA ETF's construction; darius_dale 2020, on large-cap gold miners' price/volume characteristics), Agnico Eagle (money_of_mine 2026-05-01, speaker David Franklin, speaker_role: independent, bullish 58 on Agnico's "differentiated, disciplined modus operandi") and Franco-Nevada (real_vision 2024-08-14, bullish 80 on "long-duration disciplined capital allocation"). All discarded from the conviction pool. Two of them are, in effect, arguments that a competitor allocates capital better than Newmont does.
The 49-claim sector lane is strongly bullish and unusually well distributed:
> 2025-12-31 · bullish · conviction 88 · entities GDX, XME · forward_guidance
> "Long metals and mining across the board — physical gold/silver as bedrock, plus gold miners and industrial miners; gold miners could rise another 150-200% next year."
> 2025-11-14 · bullish · conviction 75 · forward_guidance
> "Gold and gold miners are the historically correct asset for a K-shaped, money-printing, breaking-social-contract regime and are the best-performing rotation now."
> 2026-01-09 · bullish · conviction 55 · forward_guidance
> "Gold miners have delevered and are now well-run with no debt after a 15-year bear market — coming out the other side." (Newmont's swing to $1,938M of net cash is a direct confirmation of this claim.)
> 2026-03-11 · bullish · conviction 75 · luke_gromen
> "Gold miners and US industrials are cheap secular plays; miners are priced for much lower gold that isn't coming back."
> 2025-09-25 · bullish · conviction 80 · luke_gromen
> "Multipolarity is expanding, and gold is the only reserve asset competing with treasuries, so central bank gold buying keeps rising."
And the same channel that supplies the strongest bull case supplies both structural warnings, which is why they carry weight rather than reading as balance:
> 2022-02-23 · neutral · conviction 65 · luke_gromen
> "Western gold miners face rising confiscation/windfall-tax risk at an end-of-sovereign-debt-cycle, so they may not be the most levered way to play gold this cycle."
> 2025-05-23 · bullish · conviction 60 · entity 'gold miners' · luke_gromen
> "Gold miners will move notably higher over time, but he prefers physical bullion — there's always an insolvent sovereign between you and a miner's gold."
The connection to Section 1 is direct and it is the most useful thing this lane contributes. Newmont's own 10-Q attributes part of its 21.7% cost inflation to "higher third-party royalties at most sites and higher worker's participation costs, both resulting from higher average realized gold prices." That is the contractual, already-operating version of exactly the risk luke_gromen describes: as the metal rises, third parties and workers claim a larger share of the increase before it reaches earnings. It is not confiscation, it is the same mechanism at a lower temperature, and it is visible in the filing.
Channel distribution: money_of_mine 11, luke_gromen 10, forward_guidance 4, darius_dale 4, lyn_alden 3, brent_johnson 3, macrovoices 3, and seven others. The largest channel supplies 22% of the lane, below the one-third threshold, so no concentration sensitivity test is triggered. (Recorded: luke_gromen at 20% supplies both the strongest bull claim and both bear claims, so stripping it would remove more caution than conviction.) No claim in the lane carries a management speaker_role for this registrant.
Conclusion. Breadth 2, claim count 2, net conviction positive-low. The Synthos knowledge base is strongly positive on gold miners as a class, mildly positive on Newmont specifically on the basis of two claims, one of which is a technical breakout call the price has since falsified — and its most credible sector voice warns that the miner is the wrong vehicle for the trade.
5. Data integrity — what we rejected and why
Six findings. Newmont's file contains the largest single-field error in this batch and a geography block that is unusable.
1. inc_q June-quarter revenue of $3,454M is understated by 43.5% — REJECTED. The vendor's own earn_cal reports revenueActual of $6,118,000,000 for the 2026-07-23 report, and the 10-Q's sales-by-mine table alone lists Lihir $640M, Cadia $345M, Tanami $404M, Boddington $747M, Ahafo South $415M, Ahafo North $306M, Merian $332M, Cerro Negro $230M, Yanacocha $581M and Peñasquito $484M — $4,484M before the remaining operations are counted. The inc_q figure of $3,454M is impossible. The related operatingIncome of $1,100M and ebitda of $1,516M for that quarter are rejected with it. (The netIncome of $2,202M and eps of $2.07 are broadly consistent with the earnings calendar's $2.10 adjusted and are used only for the share count.) This is the "corrupt individual record" defect class at the largest magnitude in this batch. Note that the March 2026 and December 2025 quarters are 1.7% and 3.6% below their earn_cal counterparts — small and probably a continuing-operations definition — while June is 43.5% out, so the defect is quarter-specific rather than systematic.
2. seg_geo reports the UNITED KINGDOM as the largest geography at $13,068M and omits the United States entirely — REJECTED. The FY2025 entry reads: United Kingdom $13,068M, Korea $3,196M, Japan $2,002M, Other Countries $1,379M, Australia $803M, Mexico $639M, Switzerland $89M, Philippines $82M — summing to $21,258M against reported revenue of $22,097M. Newmont does not mine gold in the United Kingdom, Korea or Japan. These are the domiciles of the refiners and offtake counterparties who buy the metal, not the locations of the mines — London being the centre of the bullion market. The block describes where the gold is SOLD, is labelled as geography, and contains no line for the United States where the company is headquartered and has operations. Completely unusable, and a reader taking it at face value would conclude Newmont is a British company. All operational geography in this dive comes from the 10-Q's mine-by-mine sales table.
3. km_ttm.capexToDepreciationTTM of 0.055 is wrong by a factor of more than twenty. FY2025 capital expenditure of $3,035M against depreciation and amortisation of $2,521M (cash-flow basis) or $2,770M (income-statement basis) is a ratio of 1.10x to 1.20x. The vendor's 0.055 implies capital expenditure of roughly 5.5% of depreciation, which for a mine operator would signal imminent asset exhaustion. Related: freeCashFlowYieldTTM of 12.4% implies trailing free cash flow of approximately $12.8 billion against an actual FY2025 figure of $7,299M, and should be treated with caution; this dive uses the FY2025 actual of $7,299M, a 7.1% yield, wherever the trailing figure matters.
4. acquisitionsNet for FY2025 reads a POSITIVE $2,944M and will be misread. In a cash-flow block where every other year is negative or near zero, a positive $2.9 billion on the acquisitions line is divestiture proceeds — Newmont sold assets — not acquisition spending. A reader treating it as spend would conclude the company deployed $2.9 billion buying businesses in a year it was actually a large net seller. This is the COF acquisitionsNet defect class.
5. est.netIncomeAvg EXCEEDS est.ebitAvg by roughly 2.5x in every forward year, and both EBITDA and EBIT carry the fixed-ratio fabrication signature — REJECTED. ebitdaAvg is exactly 39.65% of revenueAvg and ebitAvg exactly 15.79% in every year FY2026 through FY2030. netIncomeAvg is $10,575M against ebitAvg of $4,242M in FY2026 and $9,994M against $3,895M in FY2030 — net income cannot exceed earnings before interest and tax, let alone by 150%. All forward valuation uses epsAvg. The FY2029 and FY2030 rows rest on 4 analysts each and show EPS DECLINING; they are excluded.
6. seg_prod is thin but internally consistent. FY2025: Gold Doré $14,330M plus Sales From Concentrate And Other Production $8,339M = $22,669M against reported revenue of $22,097M — a 2.6% overage, consistent with pre-elimination gross figures. It carries no mine-level or metal-level detail, so all such analysis comes from the 10-Q.
Where vendor and filing AGREED — recorded:
earn_calmatches the filings on both revenue and adjusted EPS for the June quarter ($6,118,000,000 and $2.10), which is what allowed finding 1 to be identified.cf_aFY2025 reconciles internally: operating cash flow $10,334M less capital expenditure $3,035M equals free cash flow of $7,299M, exactly.- The enterprise-value rebuild is clean: $99,434.3M against $102,977.3M market capitalisation less $1,938M of net cash leaves a residual of $395M, 0.4% — and the NEGATIVE net-debt position is correctly reflected in an enterprise value BELOW market capitalisation, which several other names in this batch failed to do.
tech.max_dd_from_peakof −25.93% equalspct_from_hi— the ADP-class signature — and was CHECKED.ret_12mof +56.14% implies approximately $62.6 twelve months ago againstlo52of $65.42, andret_6mof −13.40% implies $112.9 six months ago — a path in which the low is roughly a year old, the high is within the last six months and the current price is the low since. Consistent; not flagged. (quote.yearHigh/yearLowof $134.88/$64.96 sit 2.2% and 0.7% fromtech.hi52/lo52.)totalDebtof $5,712M correctly includes $446M of lease obligations for an operator with leased mining equipment; on a pure-debt basis the figure is $5,266M and the company is still net cash. The distinction changes nothing and is recorded because the check was run.
Vendor composite rating — accepted, unusually. A− / 4 overall — the highest in this batch — with 5/5 on discounted cash flow, return on equity and return on assets, and 2/5 on debt-to-equity, price-to-earnings and price-to-book. The 5/5 discounted-cash-flow score rests on the free-cash-flow figure questioned in finding 3 and should be discounted; the rest is a fair description of a highly profitable, lightly levered, cheaply valued business.
Non-equity tripwire — checked and passed. NEM is common stock, NYSE-listed. Price of $97.73 is not par-like; beta is 0.482, the lowest in this batch; the dividend is a variable declared amount at 1.04%; volume was 5.12M shares (~$501M of turnover); the 52-week band of $65.42 to $131.95 is a 102% range. This is common equity.
6. Technicals and insiders
- Price $97.73. −25.9% from the 52-week high of $131.95; +49.4% above the low of $65.42. Position within the annual range: 48th percentile.
- The only name in this batch trading BELOW both moving averages. 0.6% below a 50-day of $98.35 and 6.3% below a 200-day of $104.28. RSI 54.5; MACD −0.81.
- Relative performance is a tale of two halves. 3-month −9.8% and 6-month −13.4%, against SPY's +7.6% and +11.1% — a 17-point and 25-point deficit; 12-month +56.1% against SPY +24.3% — a 32-point surplus. The stock had an extraordinary year and has spent half of it giving ground, which coincides precisely with the cost inflation documented in Section 1.
- Maximum drawdown from peak over the trailing year: −25.93%, verified consistent with the return series.
- Sentiment: 28 buy, 9 hold, 0 sell across 37 analysts; consensus target $139 (+42.2%), median $135, high $175 (+79.1%), low $110 — 12.6% above spot. Not one covering analyst has a target below the market price on a stock 26% off its high, and the consensus target is 42% away. That is the widest bull/price gap in this batch and we treat it as a caution: unanimous optimism at a 26% drawdown usually means the targets have not been revised.
Today's move. NEM closed 2026-08-04 at $97.73, up 2.47% or $2.36 from $95.37, on 5.12M shares — the second-heaviest share volume in this batch. No company filing is dated 2026-08-04.
Insiders — eight transactions, one small sale, no purchases
| Date | Person | Role | Type | Shares | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-07-01 | Peter Toth | EVP, Chief Sustainability & Development Officer | S-SALE | 3,000 | $92.38 |
| 2026-07-27 | Brian Tabolt | Chief Financial Officer | A-Award | 7,275 | $0 |
| 2026-07-27 | Mark C. Rodgers | Chief Operating Officer | A-Award | 6,954 | $0 |
| 2026-07-27 | Peter Wexler | Chief Legal Officer | A-Award | 5,349 | $0 |
| 2026-07-27 | David James Fry | EVP, Project Development | A-Award | 3,691 | $0 |
| 2026-07-27 | David John Thornton | Chief Technical Officer | A-Award | 2,674 | $0 |
| 2026-07-28 | Peter Wexler | Chief Legal Officer | F-InKind (tax) | 2,291 | $93.47 |
| 2026-07-01 | Joshua Cage | Chief Accounting Officer | (null record) | 0 | $0 |
The reading: close to nothing, and the composition is itself informative.
Six of the eight are A-Award grants on 2026-07-27 to five executives — three of whom (Tabolt, Rodgers, Thornton) had taken office twenty-six days earlier. These are on-appointment and annual long-term incentive grants, mechanically dated, and they carry no signal. The seventh is a routine tax withholding.
The eighth is one genuine open-market sale: Peter Toth, Executive Vice President and Chief Sustainability and Development Officer, sold 3,000 shares at $92.38 on 2026-07-01 — approximately $277,000. Small, and executed on the same day the new executive team took office.
One record is corrupt: the Joshua Cage entry carries a null transactionType, zero shares and a zero price. It is excluded.
What the file does not contain: any transaction by Chief Executive Natascha Viljoen, and not one open-market purchase by anybody. On a stock 26% below its high with a net-cash balance sheet, the absence of buying by a brand-new executive team is mildly disappointing and is recorded as such.
7. Verdict, kill-criteria and flip conditions
Watch.
The arithmetic is the best in this batch and we want that stated first. 9.2 times the FY2027 consensus, 6.9 times trailing EV/EBITDA, 2.94 times book, NET CASH of $1,938 million after a $7.3 billion swing in a single year, free cash flow of $7,299 million equal to 7.1% of the market capitalisation, $2,303 million of buybacks, 73x interest coverage, and a beta of 0.482 that makes this one of the few genuine diversifiers here. Base $115, 17.7% above spot, with 2.42-to-1 asymmetry — better than the name that earned this programme's most recent Buy. Twenty-eight analysts rate it Buy, none rates it Sell, the lowest published target is 12.6% above the market price, and the stock is 25.9% below its 52-week high, below both moving averages.
Why it is a Watch, stated as three specific reservations.
First, the cost line is deteriorating in the most recent filing. All-in sustaining costs rose 21.7% year on year to $1,938 per gold ounce and costs applicable to sales rose 20.4% to $1,463, against revenue growth of 16.0% that the company itself attributes to price "partially offset by lower sales volumes." A miner whose unit costs outrun its realised price while volumes fall is losing ground in a bull market for its product, and part of the mechanism is structural: royalties and worker-participation payments rise automatically with the gold price.
Second, the earnings anchor is unusually weak and the consensus admits it. The FY2028 EPS range is $7.567 to $18.112 — the high is 2.4 times the low — and the FY2029 and FY2030 rows show EPS declining. A 9.2x multiple on a number with 139% dispersion is not the same statement as a 9.2x multiple on a forecastable earnings stream, and this dive declines to pretend otherwise.
Third, the entire senior team is six weeks old. A new Chief Financial Officer, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Technical Officer and Chief Accounting Officer all took office on 1 July 2026 — two of them replacing interim holders — in what the company's own filing calls "this time of transition." Nobody in finance or operations has yet presented a full quarter, and the cost problem is now theirs to solve.
Pre-registered UPGRADE conditions — what would take this to Buy — Tactical. The first is the whole question:
- All-in sustaining cost growth below 10% year on year for one quarter, with sales volumes flat or rising. That single disclosure, due 2026-10-22, converts a cheap multiple into a mispriced one, and we will act on it. AISC at or below $1,750 per ounce in the September quarter is the specific number.
- A price near $82, which is 7.7x the FY2027 consensus and 25.4% above the 52-week low. At that level the base case is +40% and the asymmetry exceeds 4:1.
- A materially larger buyback. At a 7.1% free-cash-flow yield with net cash, repurchase is the highest-return use of capital available, and $2,303 million a year is 2.2% of the market capitalisation.
- Two clean quarters from the new executive team with no guidance revision, capital-programme surprise or acquisition.
- A name-level knowledge-base claim that is not a failed technical breakout.
Pre-registered KILL criteria — what would take this to Avoid:
- All-in sustaining costs above $2,100 per gold ounce, from $1,938.
- A second consecutive quarter of declining sales volumes.
- A windfall tax, royalty increase or resource-nationalism event in Ghana, Peru, Argentina, Suriname, Mexico or Papua New Guinea — the mechanism the knowledge base's most credible sector voice identifies.
- A large acquisition, given a share-count history that includes a 36% increase for Newcrest.
- A sustained fall in the gold price, against which this archive discloses no hedge.
- The FY2027 consensus falling below $8.50, which would put the stock at 11.5x a falling number.
Where NEM fits in the Synthos Framework Portfolio. No position today. It goes on the watch list with two triggers, either of which qualifies: all-in sustaining costs at or below $1,750 per ounce in the 2026-10-22 print, or a price near $82 — for a 2% initial sleeve in the real-assets bucket, scaling to 3.5% on the second confirming quarter. Sizing note: with a beta of 0.482 and a 102% twelve-month price range, this is a low-correlation, high-volatility asset, which is exactly the profile that deserves a small position sized on evidence rather than a large one sized on a multiple. Logged as a tracked Synthos call (Watch) as of 2026-08-04 at $97.73, with the fair-value anchors, the kill criteria and both upgrade triggers gradeable.
Single biggest risk: that unit costs keep inflating faster than the realised gold price. All-in sustaining costs rose 21.7% while revenue rose 16.0% and volumes fell. At $1,938 per ounce growing at that rate, unit costs double in under four years — and part of the increase is contractual rather than operational, because royalties and worker-participation payments rise automatically as the gold price rises. The valuation is genuinely cheap and the balance sheet is genuinely repaired; neither protects a producer whose costs are compounding faster than its product's price in the best market it has seen in a decade. The number that settles it arrives on 2026-10-22, and it is not the headline.
Provenance & disclosures
- Traceability: 2 name-level knowledge-base claims name Newmont out of 51,928 distilled claims, both BULLISH (raw hits 55 — 6 case-sensitive entity and 49 free text; name-level 2; discarded 53; breadth 2, net conviction positive-low). METHOD NOTE: "NEM" is a three-letter ticker and "GOLD" is Barrick's ticker, so a case-sensitive entity sweep on NEM, Newmont, Barrick, GOLD and Agnico was run FIRST and behaved correctly. A free-text sweep on the bare word "gold" was DELIBERATELY NOT RUN — in this store it would return thousands of monetary-policy claims — and the targeted terms "gold miner", "gold equit", "gold producer", "mining equities" and "central bank gold" were used instead. The claims:
mike_green, 2026-02-11, bullish 70, skill 0.9, entities GLD and Newmont — "Gold's rise is flow-driven — rising GLD shares outstanding plus Chinese buying"; andjordi_visser, 2026-01-04, bullish 55, skill 2.0,speaker_role: independent, entities NEM and HL — "Gold-silver side breaking out of long bases: Hecla Mining breaking out, Newmont breaking out of a base going back to the 80s." GRADED: the Visser breakout call was made 2026-01-04 and Newmont has since returned −13.4% over six months and −9.8% over three, sitting 25.9% below its high — partly right within a +56.1% twelve-month period, and currently failing. Four further case-sensitive hits name Barrick, Agnico Eagle or Franco-Nevada and are peer claims, two of which argue a competitor allocates capital better. The 49-claim, 14-channel sector lane is strongly bullish —forward_guidance2025-12-31 (88, "gold miners could rise another 150-200% next year"), 2025-11-14 (75), 2026-01-09 (55, "Gold miners have delevered and are now well-run with no debt" — directly confirmed by Newmont's swing to net cash);luke_gromen2026-03-11 (75, "miners are priced for much lower gold that isn't coming back"), 2025-09-25 (80, on central-bank accumulation) — and the SAME channel supplies both structural warnings:luke_gromen2022-02-23 (65, "Western gold miners face rising confiscation/windfall-tax risk") and 2025-05-23 (60, "there's always an insolvent sovereign between you and a miner's gold"). Those warnings connect directly to the filing: Newmont's own 10-Q attributes part of its cost inflation to "higher third-party royalties at most sites and higher worker's participation costs, both resulting from higher average realized gold prices" — the same mechanism operating contractually. Channel distribution:money_of_mine11,luke_gromen10,forward_guidance4,darius_dale4 and ten others; the largest supplies 22%, below the one-third threshold, so no concentration test is triggered — though it is recorded that strippingluke_gromenwould remove more caution than conviction. No claim carries a managementspeaker_rolefor this registrant. All quotes are verbatim from the stored claim text. - Data as-of: all cost, sales-by-mine and operating figures through 2026-06-30, from the 10-Q filed 2026-07-23 · quarterly revenue and adjusted EPS actuals from
earn_cal, which matches the filings · executive appointments from the 8-K filed 2026-06-15 · annual data from the vendor payload · estimates 2026-08-04 · prices 2026-08-04, quote timestamp 1785873602 = 2026-08-04T20:00:02Z ($97.73, +2.47%; 50-DMA $98.35; 200-DMA $104.28; RSI 54.5; MACD −0.81) · knowledge-base claims 2026-08-04. Newmont's fiscal year is the calendar year. All figures come from the Synthos vendor data file for NEM or from the SEC filings in the NEM archive; no figure comes from memory, recall or external retrieval. - Filing archive contents: 10-K filed 2026-02-19 (fiscal 2025); 10-Q filed 2026-04-23 (March 2026 quarter); 10-Q filed 2026-07-23 (June 2026 quarter — the source of the cost, sales-by-mine and operating figures); 8-K filed 2026-05-13 (Item 5.07, annual-meeting results); 8-K filed 2026-06-15 (Item 5.02 — appointment of Brian Tabolt as Chief Financial Officer, Mark Rodgers as EVP and Chief Operating Officer at a base salary of $800,000, David Thornton as Chief Technical Officer and Joshua Cage as Chief Accounting Officer, ALL effective 2026-07-01, with Peter Wexler and Erin Workman relinquishing INTERIM CFO and CTO roles respectively; plus Item 7.01); 8-K filed 2026-07-23 (Item 2.02, second-quarter results — the exhibit is not in the extracted text, so no company guidance is available). All carry preserved
[TABLE]statement data. The 8-K corporate-action scan was run and returned a wholesale executive-team change six weeks before this dive; no acquisition or divestiture appears in the archive window. - Where the filings contradicted or corrected the vendor (detailed in Section 5):
inc_qJune-quarter revenue of $3,454M against the company's $6,118M — a 43.5% understatement, contradicted both by the vendor's ownearn_caland by the 10-Q's sales-by-mine table, which exceeds $4,484M before all operations are counted (the relatedoperatingIncomeof $1,100M andebitdaof $1,516M are rejected with it, and the defect is quarter-specific — March and December are 1.7% and 3.6% out);seg_geo, which reports the UNITED KINGDOM as the largest geography at $13,068M alongside Korea $3,196M and Japan $2,002M with the United States absent entirely — these are refiner and offtake domiciles rather than mine locations, and Newmont mines no gold in any of them, so the block is unusable and all operational geography comes from the 10-Q;km_ttm.capexToDepreciationTTMof 0.055 against an actual FY2025 ratio of 1.10x–1.20x ($3,035M capex against $2,521M–$2,770M of D&A), a factor-of-twenty error, with the relatedfreeCashFlowYieldTTMof 12.4% implying trailing free cash flow of ~$12.8B against an FY2025 actual of $7,299M (this dive uses the actual, a 7.1% yield);acquisitionsNetfor FY2025 of POSITIVE $2,944M, which is divestiture proceeds and not acquisition spending — the COF defect class; andest.netIncomeAvgEXCEEDINGest.ebitAvgby roughly 2.5x in every forward year ($10,575M against $4,242M in FY2026) alongside a fixed-ratio signature (exactly 39.65% and 15.79% of revenue in every year FY2026–FY2030). Where vendor and filing AGREED — recorded:earn_calmatches the filings on both June-quarter revenue ($6,118,000,000) and adjusted EPS ($2.10), which is what made finding 1 detectable;cf_aFY2025 reconciles exactly (OCF $10,334M − capex $3,035M = FCF $7,299M); the enterprise-value rebuild is clean and correctly reflects a NET CASH position — $99,434.3M against $102,977.3M of market capitalisation less $1,938M of net cash leaves a residual of $395M, 0.4%, and the EV correctly sits BELOW the market capitalisation, which several other names in this batch failed to do;totalDebtincludes $446M of lease obligations and the company is net cash on either basis; andtech.max_dd_from_peakof −25.93%, which carries the ADP-class signature of equallingpct_from_hi, was CHECKED against the three return windows and found CONSISTENT with a trough roughly a year old and a peak within the last six months. - Basis note: analyst estimates and
earn_calactuals are on adjusted EPS. No GAAP-to-adjusted reconciliation is available because the earnings-release exhibit is not in the archive; the gap can be bounded — June-quarterinc_qEPS of $2.07 against anearn_caladjusted actual of $2.10 is a 1.4% difference, and FY2025'sinc_aEPS of $6.41 against a consensus adjusted $6.559 is 2.3%. Newmont's adjustments are small and no conclusion here turns on them. All-in sustaining cost and costs applicable to sales are the company's own non-GAAP measures, defined in the 10-K and reconciled in the 10-Q; AISC excludes depreciation and amortisation and reclamation and remediation per the filing's own footnote, and both are used here because they are the industry-standard unit-economics measures and because they are the numbers this dive's verdict turns on. - Estimate coverage: 11 analysts on FY2026 EPS, 12 on FY2027 — the anchor for all three fair values — with an FY2027 range of $8.665 to $12.839, a 39.2% spread; 11 on FY2028 with a range of $7.567 to $18.112, a 139.3% spread — by far the widest in this batch and the honest measure of how unforecastable a gold miner's earnings are; 4 each on FY2029 and FY2030, both of which show EPS DECLINING and both of which are excluded from every conclusion. Revenue coverage: 13, 13, 17, 14 and 8 analysts.
- Peer note: the vendor peer set — AEM, B, BHP, CRH, ECL, GFI, KGC, RIO, SCCO and SHW — contains three genuine gold peers (Agnico Eagle $76.3B, Gold Fields $30.5B, Kinross $28.0B) alongside two diversified miners, a copper producer, a building-materials group, a specialty chemicals company and a paint manufacturer. No multiples are supplied, so no peer comparison is drawn.
- Fair-value caveat: the $72 / $115 / $160 anchors are multiples of the FY2027 consensus EPS distribution — 8.3x the low of $8.665, 10.8x the mean of $10.651, and 12.5x the high of $12.839 — cross-checked against FY2028E. Stated arithmetic, not a discounted cash flow. The range is unusually wide BECAUSE the estimate distribution is unusually wide, and that is deliberate: the FY2028 consensus high is 2.4 times the consensus low, and a narrow fair-value band would misrepresent what is knowable about a commodity producer. The base is sensitivity-disclosed: 9x gives $96, below spot; 12x gives $128. This is the only base case in this batch that assumes modest multiple EXPANSION, on the grounds that 9.2x FY2027 consensus with net cash and a 7.1% free-cash-flow yield sits at the low end of any defensible band; the assumption is stated rather than buried. Our base of $115 sits 17.3% BELOW the street consensus of $139, the largest negative divergence in this batch, and the reason is the 21.7% cost inflation disclosed twelve days before this dive.
- Half-weight management framing: the attribution of cost increases to Ahafo North's commercial production, higher direct costs at Boddington and higher royalties and worker-participation costs, and the board's characterisation of the leadership changes as occurring "during this time of transition", are company statements and are half-weighted under house rules. The all-in sustaining cost and costs-applicable-to-sales figures, the sales-by-mine table, the balance-sheet and cash-flow data and the executive appointment terms are quantified filing disclosures and are treated as facts.
- Timing: second-quarter 2026 results were released 2026-07-23, twelve days before this dive: adjusted EPS of $2.10 beat the $2.05 consensus by 2.4% — down from 40.1% in March, 21.7% in December and 18.8% in September — while revenue of $6,118M MISSED the $6,353M consensus by 3.7%. The next print is 2026-10-22, 79 days away (consensus adjusted EPS $2.08, revenue $6,158M). The executive appointments took effect 2026-07-01; the most recent insider filings are dated 2026-07-27 and 2026-07-28. 2026-08-04 carried no company-specific filing.
- Accessibility note: no information in this dive is conveyed by colour. All emphasis is carried by bold text, table structure and explicit labelling.
- Not investment advice. Independent research, educational and informational only, never personalised. No recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security is made to any person.
- Version: 2026-08-04-full.