Consensus community valuation
Funding floodgates open for gold miners as record prices inspire cash avalanche
Josh Chiat
Cash is flying through the door for ASX gold stocks, powering M&A, mine builds and drilling. Pic: Getty Images
[Bear77 note: Looks more like a sinkhole than a cash avalanche or cash flying through a door, but hey, they got a picture of cash in there, so point made? ? Maybe ? Some of these companies may turn out to be cash sinkholes, but I don't think MM8 is going to be - but then I would say that - I hold MM8]
16 hours ago.Updated 10 hours ago [as of 10:55pm Adelaide time on Thursday 19th Feb, 2026]
- Gold is at record highs, sending cash flying into the industry
- Magnetic Resources announces takeover from Genesis Minerals, as M&A trend continues
- Explorers remain confident they can raise cash and make new discoveries in a hot market
Gold's rise to US$5000/oz in the midst of global geopolitical turmoil has been staggering, transforming the industry into the place to be for miners, explorers and investors.
The question for many now is what to do with the enormous sums of money flowing into the sector, both from mining and well-heeled investors seeking a slice of the action.
Two deals on the eve of the RIU Explorers Conference in Fremantle, one of Australia's largest mining events with 2700 delegates descending on the port city, illustrated how strong the corporate interest is in the sector.
Magnetic Resources (ASX:MAU) was the talk of the town as proceedings began after revealing a $639 million takeover by next door neighbour Genesis Minerals (ASX:GMD), which will plug MAU's 2.2Moz Lady Julie gold project near Laverton in WA into the network around GMD's Mt Morgans mill.
The $2 per share bid, comprising 70% cash and 30% scrip, realises a 100x gain for anyone patient enough to have waited through successive downturns to arrive at the current gold boom.
It comes as executives see a big uptick in activity across the cashed up industry.
"I think generally people have raised a lot of money, and there's a hell of a lot of work going on everywhere," Magnetic managing director George Sakalidis said.
"I think it's allowed people to raise lots of money so they can do drilling or go into production or get approvals.
"So (the gold price has) really pushed the potential to find more discoveries."
Speaking of cashed up, the other major news was a $175 million placement for Horizon Minerals (ASX:HRZ), which will enable the one-time penny stock that floated on some small gold mines near Coolgardie in 2010 to become a 100,000ozpa mining operation around Kalgoorlie by refurbishing the Black Swan processing plant.
"They're raising $170-180 million off a market cap which is just over $200m. I think that's remarkable," long-term industry observer and CEO of listed investment company Lion Selection Group (ASX:LSX) Hedley Widdup said.
"And it shows that there's an awful lot of money forcing its way into the space."
Opportunities abound
While market caps have lifted with the rising gold price, Widdup still sees value in Australian names.
But now they are better positioned to pursue growth via drilling, M&A and expansion spending.
"If you can raise five million bucks at a time, you can go off and drill a few holes. If you can raise $50 million, you can complete a feasibility and maintain an aggressive exploration program and be filling the market with news and de-risking yourself rapidly," Widdup said.
"This whole business of being able to raise money doesn't just push them forward, it puts them in a stronger position and it means they don't have to come back to the market nearly as frequently either, which is something which investors hate."
Among the juniors Widdup has been tracking who are on their way to becoming 75,000ozpa gold miners include Medallion Metals (ASX:MM8), which reached FID on its Ravensthorpe gold project this week, and Brightstar Resources (ASX:BTR), which recently raised $180m to put to a standalone processing plant in Laverton.
The cashflow from Laverton will eventually be used to fund the larger Sandstone project, which Brightstar thinks can make the firm a 200,000ozpa producer by the end of the decade.
Still bullish
Widdup is one of a number of commentators who remain bullish on gold. Its 67% gain in 2025 was the safe haven asset's best performing year since 1979, driven by the eccentric foreign and domestic policy of Donald Trump.
With confidence in the US dollar waning and the scale of government debt an ongoing concern, central banks and investors have piled into the precious metal.
Related commodities like silver and platinum have joined gold as a hedge against economic uncertainty.
In that context, Widdup said the main buyers of gold, which include stablecoin issuer Tether, were "incredibly price insensitive".
"They're all motivated to buy it and the outlook for them is to keep collecting it. Central banks, Tether and I think the legion of investors which are coming today have been driven by historic performance," he said.
"That tends to be a little bit fulfilling but in a world with all this conflict it's well supported by the multi-factors that tend to underpin gold performance.
"It's impossible to say how long that would go but I would say the worst thing that could happen to the gold market is a doubling of production and I don't see that happening."
The question for miners now is where to deploy cash, with some miners sitting on hundreds of millions if not billions on their balance sheet.
Ramelius Resources (ASX:RMS) managing director Mark Zeptner said the company, which owns the Mt Magnet mine in WA, was finding the balance between returning cash to shareholders, investing in growth to double production to 500,000ozpa this decade and putting $80-100m into exploration.
"For us at Ramelius, we're very mindful that we're going ... a very capital intensive phase, really expanding Mount Magnet, reconstructing that plant, building a new plant at Rebecca-Roe, that's more capital that we're deploying in the next two years than we've probably spent in the last 10," he said.
"It's good to have the cash to be able to do all of those things at the same time."
Explorers chase the next generation
Cash is also trickling down to previously unloved early stage explorers who are searching for the next big gold mine and finding enthusiastic backers.
"I still think (gold is) on its onwards and upwards trajectory," Luke Cox, managing director at Caprice Resources (ASX:CRS) and a former commodities trader said.
"Where will it get to? I think we've still got probably US$5500 to US$6000 this year, just with what's going on around the world.
"There's going to be dips within that over the next six to 12 months.
"People who I never thought would go out there and buy physical gold are buying little nuggets and little gold bars as well, so they see a future."
Gold fever has enabled Caprice to secure large capital raisings for its Island gold project near Cue, where the Vadrians discovery is emerging as a potentially high-grade deposit in the 30Moz Murchison region of WA.
$60m capped Caprice is up around 75% since the start of last year, and raised $7m to fund drilling at Island last June.
"We're still drilling. We're getting to a decent size now where we're becoming quite serious on the market," Cox said.
"But we've got a drill rig there, RC drilling. We're still trying to find the strike extent, it's still way open at depth.
"So who knows how big this thing's gonna be. A lot of people do the numbers on the back of a cigarette packet – they can see this is starting to stack up quite nicely."
"At Stockhead, we tell it like it is. While Magnetic Resources, Medallion Metals, Brightstar Resources and Caprice Resources are Stockhead advertisers, they did not sponsor this article."
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Disclosure: Of the goldies mentioned in the article above by Stockhead, I (Bear77) do hold Medallion Metals (MM8), Brightstar Resources (BTR), Ramelius Resources (RMS), Horizon Minerals (HRZ) and Genesis Minerals (GMD) in either my SPF (speccy portfolio) or SMSF. And some of those here on SM as well.