Grading the Miners: How We Score Gold & Silver Producers — and Who Topped Q1

Ask a sell-side analyst whether a gold miner is a buy and you'll get a rating that's been "outperform" since the stock was a third of the price. The incentives are upside-down, the language is mush, and the number that actually matters — what the company disclosed last quarter — gets buried under a price target nobody will be held to.

So we built our own scorecard. No vibes, no banking relationships. Just the filings.

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1. Two Numbers, Not a Slogan

Every miner we cover gets two scores, each on a 0–100 scale:

• Miner Quality — the durable stuff. Financial strength, cost position (AISC and cash costs per ounce), reserves and mine life, and how management actually allocates capital. This is "is this a good business," not "is the chart green."
• Quarterly Momentum — how the latest quarter trended versus its own history and guidance. A great business having a soft quarter scores high on Quality, lower on Momentum. A turnaround can light up Momentum before Quality catches up.

You want both, because they answer different questions. Quality tells you what you own. Momentum tells you what's happening to it right now.

2. How the Score Is Built

The pipeline is deliberately boring, because boring is what you want when money's involved:

1. Pull the disclosures. Production, AISC, revenue, cash flow, balance sheet, dividends and buybacks, reserves — straight from the company's official quarterly results and reserve statements.
2. Score in code. A deterministic rubric turns those metrics into component scores. Same inputs, same output, every time — no mood, no narrative.
3. Human review before it publishes. A person checks the extraction and the result against the source documents before the score ever goes live. Every published score carries a confidence rating and links back to the filings it's built on.

That's it. Sourced from official disclosures, scored by rubric, human-reviewed. If we can't stand behind a number, it doesn't ship.

3. The Q1 2026 Leaderboard

Twenty-three producers and royalty names, scored off their latest quarter. The standouts:

Newmont leads the complex at 86 Quality / 87 Momentum — scale, cash flow, and a quarter that delivered.

On Quality, the top of the table is exactly who you'd want anchoring a portfolio: Newmont (86), Hecla (85), Franco-Nevada (84), Wheaton Precious Metals (82), Lundin Gold (81), and a tie at 80 between Barrick and First Majestic Silver, with Royal Gold (79) right behind. The royalty model — Franco, Wheaton, Royal Gold — does what it says on the tin: high marks for balance-sheet quality without the operational knife-fight.

On Momentum, the silver names ran hot. Pan American Silver tops the entire field at 92, with Hecla at 90 and Newmont at 87 close behind, then First Majestic (85) and Royal Gold (84). When silver moves, the leverage shows up in the quarter.

And the other end of the tape, because a scorecard that never says anything critical is a brochure: Gold Fields (56) sits lowest on Quality this quarter, with Equinox Gold and Harmony (62 each) not far above. Lower isn't a death sentence — it's a flag to go read why.

4. Where to Find Them

The scores live in two places:

• The ETFs & miners table now has a sortable Score column — rank the whole complex by Quality in one click, glance at Momentum next to it.
• Each miner's page (for example, Agnico Eagle) carries the full breakdown: the quarter anatomized into ounce economics, the cash machine, the fortress balance sheet, production versus guidance — and the score dials, with the source filings linked underneath.

The goal isn't to tell you what to buy. It's to put the same disclosure-grade tape in front of you that the desks use — and let you do the thing the ratings industry would rather you didn't: check the work.

Not investment advice. Scores reflect each company's official quarterly disclosures as of 2026-Q1 and are updated as new quarters are reported.