What Does The Market Want From Newmont Stock? Trefis Team Thu, November 12, 2026 at 2:39 PM EST 3 min read NEM -4.01% GC=F -2.83% ^GSPC -0.31% SI=F -3.76% HG=F -1.55% Trade Newmont on Coinbase Trading disclosure Trading disclosure The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational.
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Newmont (NEM) digs up silver and copper alongside its gold, and those metals may matter more to the stock than most investors think. You probably see Newmont as a bet on the gold price, yet the stock trades at 13.4 times earnings, against 21.9 for the S&P 500. The price appears to doubt that today's profit lasts. But Newmont's profit also comes from what each ounce costs to produce, not only from what gold sells for. So how much lower are Newmont's gold costs running than it planned?
Newmont Expects Its Gold Costs About 10% Below Plan
Newmont now expects its all-in sustaining cost, its measure of what it costs to keep an ounce of gold coming out of the ground, to be about $1,520 per ounce in 2026. On the fiscal Q3 2026 call, management said this is about 10% better than the guidance it gave at the start of the year. The company named stronger prices for copper, silver and other co-products among the reasons, along with cost discipline.
Silver is not a sideline. Newmont produced 11 million ounces of silver in the third quarter. Its all-in sustaining cost that quarter was $1,450 per ounce, with by-products counted as a credit. Management said unit costs improved from the second quarter on higher gold and co-product volumes. So for 2026, silver and copper are helping to lower what Newmont's gold costs.
Most of it is going back to shareholders. Newmont returned about $1.9 billion through its dividend and buybacks between its second-quarter and third-quarter calls. Management said the company has bought back more than 115 million shares, about 10% of shares outstanding, since February 2024, and the diluted share count fell to 1,051 million in the quarter ended September 30, 2026, from 1,100 million a year earlier.
The cash behind those returns is growing. Free cash flow was $1.91 billion in fiscal Q3 2026, up from $1.57 billion a year earlier. Management said the quarter's operating performance translated into that cash.
Yet the cash does not fully settle whether today's profit can last. Newmont's third-quarter profit beat estimates on higher gold prices, so not all of that cash comes from lower costs.
What Could Push Newmont's Costs Back Up?
Less silver. Management expects fourth-quarter all-in sustaining costs of about $1,900 per ounce, the highest of the year. This is partly because silver output at Penasquito falls to about half its third-quarter level. For 2027, the company expects unit costs to trend higher, with silver at Penasquito roughly 30% below 2026 levels because of planned mine sequencing.
So management expects Newmont's unit costs to rise again in 2027. If the silver shrinks, so does the part of Newmont's profit that did not come from the gold price.
Today, the cash is still going back to shareholders. Lower gold costs are less certain than the cash returns, with silver at Penasquito set to fall. Newmont's all-in sustaining cost per ounce, due in the report expected in February 2027, is the number to watch.
Beyond NEM: A Systematic Way To Invest
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