A percent off the high is a measurement. It is not a reason to buy, and it is not the same number on every screen.
This is not a recommendation to buy or sell gold, gold mining stocks, or any fund. It is not investment, tax, or legal advice. It is not a gold price forecast. Prices move all day. Screens do not match. Read the source of any percent before you treat it as a fact about your own money. Do your own work.
The one idea is simple. A gold price drop of about 26 percent from a high is a measure of how far the price fell. It is not a signal. “Buy the gold dip” answers the question “is it cheaper than the peak?” Waiting answers a better one. Cheaper than what, on which series, and for what job?
The 26 percent is real. It is not the only percent.
On Friday morning, October 23, 2026, a USA Today screen put the spot gold price at $4,026.87 an ounce as of 8:05 a.m. Eastern. It said that price was 26.49 percent under a 52-week high of $5,477.79. That is the 26 percent in the headline. It is one publisher’s morning feed. It is not a settlement, and it is not the low of the day.
Do the arithmetic so the percent is not a slogan. Take $5,477.79 minus $4,026.87. The gap is $1,450.92. Divide by the high. You get about 26.5 percent. The headline rounds that to 26. Rounding is fine. Mixing it with a different high is not.
The futures settlement tells a smaller story. Dow Jones, carried by Morningstar, said front-month Comex gold for October delivery ended the week at $3,991.10. That series was 24.96 percent under its 2026 settlement high of $5,318.40, set on January 29. Same week. Same metal. About a point and a half less than 26.
A third series sits in between. GoldPrice.com said Thursday’s close of $4,024.51 was 25.5 percent under an all-time closing high of $5,405, also dated January 29. Its 52-week range on that page ran from $3,948.50 to $5,405. Friday afternoon the same site showed a live price near $3,998.
Three highs. Three “now” prices. Three percents. About 26.5. About 25. About 25.5. Later in the day the live price was lower than the morning $4,026.87, so the percent off that USA Today high would have been a bit larger if you had refreshed the screen. None of this is a trick. These are three different ways of quoting the same metal, so the percent changes. Spot, a futures settlement, and a daily close are not the same price.
If someone tells you gold is down 26 percent, ask which high and which price. If they cannot say, they are selling a mood. A mood is a poor gold investment strategy.
Down 26 percent from the high is not down 26 percent this year
This is the mistake that turns a chart into a story.
The Comex front month was down $334.50 on the year, or 7.73 percent, at Friday’s $3,991.10 settlement. GoldPrice.com had Thursday’s close down 7.86 percent for 2026. USA Today’s morning spot was only 1.51 percent under its price of a year earlier, when it had gold at $4,088.80. The Dow Jones note said the futures series was down 3.09 percent from 52 weeks ago.
Read those next to the 26 percent. The January high is not the price on January 1. A 26 percent drop from the high is not a 26 percent loss for the year. A person who bought the high is nursing a large drawdown. A person who bought near the start of 2026, or a year ago, is looking at a much smaller move. “Should I buy the dip?” depends on whose dip it is.
A peak-to-trough percent also hides the path. Gold did not fall in a straight line from January to October. It had already traded under $4,000 in July. The July 16 Comex settlement was $3,985.60. Friday’s $3,991.10 was the lowest settlement since that day, and only a few dollars above it. Part of this “dip” is a return to a price the market already traded three months ago.
That matters for anyone hunting a bargain. This price already traded in July. It is not a new bargain. It can still be a useful price. It is not a discovery.
What the tape did, without mixing the feeds
Keep each price series on its own.
USA Today, Friday morning: spot $4,026.87, down $95.04, or 2.31 percent, from a previous close it listed at $4,121.91. A week earlier on that feed, $4,155.06. A month earlier, $4,365.11, so about 7.75 percent lower in a month. The 52-week low on that page was $3,936.55. The morning price was still 2.29 percent above that low.
Dow Jones futures: Friday’s settlement $3,991.10, down $51.70, or 1.28 percent, on the day. Down $168.40, or 4.05 percent, on the week. That was the largest one-week drop since the week ending June 5. Down $199.90, or 4.77 percent, over two weeks. Down seven of the past nine weeks. The third-lowest settlement of 2026. Off 24.96 percent from the January 29 settlement high. Month to date, down 3.96 percent.
Live spot was messier, which is normal on a day that breaks a round number. A Reuters note carried by Roic News put an intraday low at $3,986.50, then a recovery to $4,026.15 by 09:36 GMT. Bloomberg described a drop to less than $3,990, the lowest in more than three months, after a fall of almost 3 percent on Thursday. GoldPrice.com at 4:05 p.m. Eastern showed $3,998.23. GuruFocus showed a futures price of $4,010.60 for the day. Same Friday. Different clocks.
The break under $4,000 was real. It was not a single close you can photocopy onto every chart.
Silver was weaker than gold into Thursday’s close. GoldPrice.com had silver at $54.59, down 5.84 percent, and a gold-to-silver ratio of 73.7. Its silver range on that table ran from $46.44 to $118.45, with silver down 24.17 percent in 2026. Gold’s drop from the high is large. Silver’s year is a different chart. Do not let one metal’s percent speak for the other.
Oil did not fall with gold. A CNBC settlement report put Thursday’s Brent close at $113.17, with U.S. oil near $99.47. On Friday, Brent traded through $117. The Financial Times high was $117.45, under a headline that oil hit $117. Later Friday screens had Brent near $116.72 to $117.02, and U.S. oil near $103. Stocks had a hard Thursday. The Nasdaq Composite fell 2.60 percent, to 26,008.86. The S&P 500 fell 1.21 percent. Gold was sold with risk assets, not against them.
Why gold prices are falling
People ask why gold prices are falling and what happens next. The first half has evidence. The second half does not, not yet.
The cleanest description of this week came from Justin Lin at Global X ETFs. He called the move a selloff driven by a need for cash. In a sharp drop, he said, gold is a source of cash for margin calls and other bills. A margin call is a bill that comes due when a trade moves against the holder. That is an old pattern. When an investor needs cash in a hurry, that investor sells what can be sold today. A bar, a future, and a gold-backed fund can be sold in an afternoon. A mine cannot. A house cannot. Gold is easy to sell, so in a panic people sell it to raise cash. That same ease is why it can fall when you hoped it would be a shelter.
The rate story sat on top of that. The Federal Reserve meets October 27 and 28. CME futures cited on Friday put the chance of an October hike at about 9 percent, which is about a 91 percent chance of a hold. December was the live argument. Gold pays no interest. When the market thinks cash and bonds will pay more, some holders sell metal to hold the thing that pays. Hotter inflation talk, helped by firm oil, keeps a hike in the conversation. That is not a full theory of gold. It is enough to explain a week in which bonds were bought and gold was not.
A round number is not a floor. Friday’s spot trade went under $4,000, and the futures week closed at $3,991.10. A label that does not hold is not a scandal. It is a reminder that a round number is a label.
Published targets are opinions. Société Générale levels cited on FXStreet sat at $3,960, $3,940, and $3,830. Lin said gold was close to testing about $3,900. None of those figures is a fact about next week. The facts are the break, the bounce, the weekly futures close under $4,000, and the distance from January.
There is a slower reason under the week’s noise. Gold had a huge run into the January high. A market that rises that far can fall a long way and still be far above where it traded for most of the last decade. A 26 percent gold price decline from a spike is a violent gold price correction. It is not, by itself, proof that the long run turned. It is proof that the people who paid the high are poorer in dollars than they were on January 29, if they still hold.
What happens next is a set of paths, not a date
“What happens next” is the sentence every dip invites. It cannot be answered with a price. It can be answered with the things that would have to change.
One path is that the forced selling fades and the same buyers who wanted gold in the autumn come back. That path needs less stress in the stock market, or a Federal Reserve message that sounds finished with higher rates. It does not need a slogan. It needs buyers.
A second path is that the October hold, if it comes, sounds tough, oil stays high, and the return on bonds after inflation stays high enough that some holders keep selling gold. In that path the July settlement low of $3,985.60 is not a side note. It is a price the market already traded once. A nearby old price is not the same as a safe price. The price can go through an old low because the reason for the old low got worse.
A third path is a long grind. Not a crash. Not a V. Weeks in which gold trades a few percent either side of $4,000 while the argument about December rates stays open. Most of the pain in a grind is boredom and the cost of being early. Headlines still shout. The account does not.
You do not get to pick the path by wanting it. You get to decide which path would make your reason wrong. If your reason was “gold only goes up,” Friday already hurt it. If your reason was “I want an asset that is not a promise from a government or a company,” Friday did not touch that reason. The price changed. The job description did not.
That is as far as a gold market outlook can go without turning into a forecast dressed up as a fact. Anyone selling a date and a target is selling a gold price forecast. Treat it as a view. Do not treat it as a calendar.
Is now a good time to buy gold?
People ask if now is a good time to buy gold. The honest answer is that the question is missing three words. Good for whom, for how long, and compared with what?
“Now” is a screen. On Friday morning it was $4,026.87. On Friday afternoon it was near $4,000, or a little under, depending on the feed. By the time you read this, “now” has moved. A decision tied to one price just under a round number is a headline, not a method.
“Good” is a fit. Gold can be a poor short-term trade and a holding you still want for a decade. It can be a fine trade for a person who can sell, and a bad purchase for a person who will need the dollars in six months. The metal does not know the difference. You do.
“Time” is the part the dip ignores. A 26 percent drop feels like a sale because shops train us to think that way. Gold is not a coat on a rack. There is no manager who marked it down so you would take it home. There is a crowd that paid more in January and a crowd that is paying less in October. The second crowd is not automatically smarter.
Compared with January’s high, gold is cheaper on every series cited here. Compared with July 16, the futures settlement is almost unchanged. Compared with a year ago, the change is small and the sign depends on the feed. Compared with cash, gold still pays nothing. Compared with a mine, a bar has no pit wall and no dividend. “Cheaper” without “than what” is not an analysis.
So the useful reply to “is now a good time” is a set of tests, not a yes or a no. If you cannot pass them, waiting is the position. Waiting is allowed. It is not cowardice. It is what you do when the only argument on offer is a percent.
Should investors buy gold after a 26 percent decline?
Should investors buy gold after a 26 percent decline? Only if the decline changed the facts that matter to them, and only if they can say which 26 percent they mean.
Start with the entry you already have, if you have one. A holder who bought near $5,300 to $5,500 is down roughly a quarter. Buying more is averaging down. Averaging down lowers the average price. It also raises the amount of money that is wrong if the next move is another quarter off the high. Those are different sentences. People say the first one out loud and skip the second.
A holder who bought near $4,100 a year ago is not looking at a 26 percent loss. On the USA Today morning comparison, that person is down about 1.5 percent. “Buy the dip” is a strange instruction for a loss that small. The dip is mostly someone else’s.
A new buyer has no average to repair. The only question is whether $4,000 gold, more or less, does a job that cash does not do. If the job is “make 26 percent back because it fell 26 percent,” that is a story about symmetry. Markets are not required to be symmetrical. A market can fall 26 percent and then fall more. It can also rise without asking your permission. The percent you are owed is zero.
There is a version of buying after a large drop that is not a slogan. You decided years ago what share of your money can sit in gold. The price fell. The share is now smaller than your plan. You add back to the plan, on a date you wrote down before the week got loud. That is rebalancing. It can be wise or unwise depending on the plan. It is not the same act as chasing a headline that says the dip is here.
If you do not have a share written down, this week is a bad week to invent one. Do not invent a plan on a week when the price is swinging. The gold price volatility of a 4 percent week, after a 25 percent slide from the high, makes every choice feel late or early. Feeling late is not research.
Buy the dip needs a rule
“Buy the gold dip” sounds like a strategy. It is only a phrase until you write down the rule that would make you buy. A phrase without a rule is a mood.
A rule has a trigger that is not “I feel scared of missing the bounce.” It might be a percent from a high you defined in advance. It might be a calendar. It might be a gap between the gold price and a cost you care about, if you are looking at miners. It might be “I add on the first trading day of the quarter, whatever the price.” Any of those can be lived with. None of them is magic. The point of the rule is that you wrote it before Friday.
The dip buyer who has no rule faces a stack of new dips. Gold was down about 4 percent on the week in futures. It was down about 8 percent in a month on the USA Today feed. It was down about 25 to 26 percent from the January area. Which dip are you buying? If you buy the weekly dip, you may be early for a monthly one. If you wait for 30 percent off the high, you may never get it, or you may get it at a moment when your reason for owning gold has changed. The rule picks the dip. The headline does not.
Waiting has a matching failure. Waiting forever because the price might go lower is also a mood. Cash has a cost when inflation is not zero. Gold has a cost when it pays nothing and falls. Cash and gold each have a cost. The person who waits should be able to say what would end the wait. A date. A percent. A Federal Reserve fact. A personal fact, like a bill that comes due. “I’ll know it when I see it” is how people buy the next spike and call it courage.
Write the end of the wait in a sentence you could show a skeptical friend. If the sentence is only “when it feels safe,” it is not finished.
Three words that are not the same
Gold price volatility, gold price correction, and gold price decline get used as if they were one event. They are three measurements.
Volatility is how much the price jumps around. A 4 percent week is volatile. A day that trades under $4,000 and back through it is volatile. Volatility is not a direction. A volatile market can finish the year higher or lower. Owning gold means owning that noise. If a few hundred dollars an ounce would force a sale, the position is too large, whether or not the long-term story is right.
A correction is a fall that people still describe as a pause inside a larger rise. The word is a judgment. Twenty-six percent off a high is a large pause. Some will call it a bear market because it is past 20 percent. The label does not pay you. What matters is whether the buyers who created the January high are gone or merely waiting. No Friday screen can tell you that. Reports of who holds the futures, and the next months of trading, can. Even then, the reading is late.
A decline is the plain word. The price is lower than the high. Use it when you do not want to smuggle in a forecast. “Gold is in a decline from the January high” is a fact on every series here. “Gold is in a healthy correction” is a hope. “Gold is in a crash” is a mood. Prefer the fact.
The gold investment outlook is where these three words get mixed up. An outlook that starts with “after a 26 percent drop, the easy money has been made on the downside” has assumed the answer. Easy is not a unit. The downside does not send a notice when it is finished.
Long-term gold is a job, not a trophy
Long-term gold investment is the phrase people use when they do not want to defend a trade. Sometimes they are right to use it. A decade is not the same thing as a week. Gold’s long record is as a thing a government cannot print more of, not as a thing that rises every quarter.
The job has to be named. One job is to hold buying power across a long stretch in which cash buys less. That job does not require this month’s price to be the low. It requires that you can leave the position alone while the screen looks bad. If you cannot, you do not have a long-term holding. You have a trade you do not want to call a trade.
Another job is insurance against a shock you cannot time. Insurance that you sell during the shock, because the price fell, is not insurance. This week’s rush to raise cash is the test. Gold fell when stocks fell. It did not pay you for being scared on Thursday. A holding that falls with the thing it was meant to offset has not failed forever. It has failed this week. Know which failure you can live with.
A third job is a bet on the next move up. That job is allowed. It is not long-term investing. It needs a sell rule as well as a buy rule. “I’ll hold until it feels right” is how a bet becomes a pile you cannot explain. If the job is a bet, say so, and size it like a bet. Small enough that a further 20 percent drop is annoying, not life-changing.
Long-term does not mean “ignore the price.” It means the price is not the reason you own it. The reason survives $3,991 and it survives $4,500. If the reason dies at $3,900, it was a price target dressed up as a reason to hold.
Four holdings, four costs
Cash, a gold bar, a gold fund, and a gold mining stock are four different holdings. Each one has its own cost.
Cash pays interest and loses to inflation if the interest is not enough. It does not swing 4 percent in a week. It is easy to spend. For a bill due in the spring, that ease is the point.
Gold pays no interest. It can fall 26 percent from a high and still be the asset you want if your worry is the value of the dollar, not the next quarter. It can also sit there doing nothing while cash pays you. The cost of that choice is real. Do not wave it away with a speech about history. History includes long stretches when gold bored its owners.
A gold-backed fund is not a bar. It can be easy to sell, which is why it gets sold when people need cash in a hurry. It has a fee. It has a structure you should read. Some funds hold metal. Some hold futures. Some hold miners and call it gold exposure because the marketing department was in a hurry. The word “gold” on a fund page is not a holding. The holdings list is the holding.
A gold mining stock is the fourth holding. It is a business. The gold price is the sales line, not the whole firm. Costs, debt, politics, and the number of shares sit between you and the ounce. In a drop, miners often fall more than the metal, because the market is pricing the gap, not the ounce. That extra swing is not a gift. It can help you or hurt you.
You can own more than one of these. You should not pretend they are the same holding because they all contain the word gold.
What the drop does to a mining stock
People who ask whether to buy the gold dip often mean the shares. The shares are a different question.
Say a mine’s all-in sustaining cost is $1,500 an ounce. At a $4,500 gold price, the gap is $3,000. At $4,000, the gap is $2,500. The gold price fell about 11 percent from $4,500. The gap fell about 17 percent. If the stock was priced off the gap, it can fall more than the metal. That is why gold stock performance is usually louder than the gold price. It is also why “gold is down 26 percent, so the miners are cheap” skips the only math that matters.
All-in sustaining cost is not a standard accounting line. Each firm defines it. It tries to include the cost of keeping the mine going. It often leaves out the cost of growing the mine, interest, and a surprise. Royalties can fall when the gold price falls, so the reported cost per ounce can improve while the business earns less. A lower all-in sustaining cost is not automatically good news when the gold price is falling. Read the table that shows what went into the cost.
Canadian gold stocks make the point without turning this into a shopping list. These are illustrations from company releases, not a ranking and not a recommendation.
Agnico Eagle, in the second quarter of 2026, reported an all-in sustaining cost of $1,459 an ounce and net cash of $3.267 billion at June 30. At a $4,000 gold price the gap over that cost is still wide, on the order of $2,500 an ounce. The firm also raised 2026 capital spending to $2.6 billion to $2.8 billion after approving work at Hope Bay, and it has unstable rock at the Barnat pit. A wide gap plus a bigger build is not the same as a wide gap and nothing to do.
Barrick’s second-quarter all-in sustaining cost was $1,866 an ounce. Its 2026 cost guide of $1,760 to $1,950 assumes a $4,500 gold price. Friday’s market is not that assumption. The company’s share of free cash flow in the quarter was $141 million, against operating cash flow of $1.70 billion. The firm can look rich on the cash it brought in and ordinary once the spending is subtracted. A lower gold price squeezes the second line first. The company’s share of gold sold in the quarter was 801,000 ounces, not a million.
Kinross did not leave its July guide standing. On September 23 the company cut 2026 and 2027 production, counting only its own share, to about 1.84 to 1.86 million gold-equivalent ounces. Gold-equivalent ounces count other metals as if they were gold. The same release put 2026 all-in sustaining cost at about $1,850 to $1,900. It also raised the share of free cash flow it aims to return in 2026 from 40 percent to 50 percent. A higher share of a smaller pool is not automatically more cash. At $4,000 gold, the gap over $1,900 is still wide. It is thinner than it was over the old $1,730 marker.
The pattern is the lesson. A 26 percent drop in gold does not mean these firms lose money on the last cost they reported. It does mean the spare cash per ounce is smaller than it was at the January high, and the stocks can still fall if the market had priced the high. Canadian gold stocks are a claim on that spare cash. The shares are not a claim that pays you the gold price. They are a claim on what is left after costs.
A small explorer that is not yet mining is a different holding again. It needs new money from investors. A lower gold price makes that money harder to raise, even when a producer is still showing a gap. This piece is not a tour of that market. If your dip-buying plan is a story stock that is not yet producing gold, you are not buying the gold dip. You are funding a hope.
A gold investment strategy that survives a loud week
Strategy is a dull word. Good. Dull is what you want when the percent is loud.
First, pick the series you will use and stick to it. If you follow Comex settlements, the drawdown from the high is 24.96 percent at $3,991.10, and the year is down 7.73 percent. If you follow the USA Today morning spot feed, you were 26.49 percent under a $5,477.79 high at $4,026.87. Do not switch series because the other one makes a better headline. Switching is how people buy a feeling.
Second, write the job in one sentence. Savings across years. Insurance. Speculation. If the sentence needs a price target to make sense, it is speculation. Size it that way.
Third, write the size in dollars you can ignore for the horizon you named. Not in ounces. Dollars. An ounce count hides the pain. A dollar count does not.
Fourth, write what would make you add, and what would make you stop. A date beats a hunch. A percent you chose in September beats a percent you discovered on Friday. “I will not add just because it fell through $4,000” is a complete rule. It may not be your rule. It is better than no rule.
Fifth, separate metal from miners. If you want the metal, do not comfort yourself with a miner’s dividend. If you want the business, do not comfort yourself with a bar’s simplicity. Read the cost, the cash, the debt date, and the problem the company has already admitted. Then decide if the gap at today’s gold price is the gap you assumed when you first looked. If you assumed $5,000 gold would last, update the assumption. Do not call the update a dip purchase. Call it a new set of assumptions.
Sixth, ignore anyone who answers “buy or wait” in one word. They do not know your bill, your taxes, or your sleep. This article does not know those things either. That is why it will not pick for you.
The week ahead is a test, not an oracle
The Federal Reserve meets October 27 and 28. An October hold is the widely discussed base case in market notes. It is not a fact until the statement exists. A hold that sounds finished with hikes can help gold. A hold that sounds ready to hike again can hurt it. Neither sentence tells you whether you should own the metal. It tells you what other traders may do on the afternoon of the statement. The market’s reaction tells you what other traders did. It does not tell you what you should own.
Company reports sit in the same window. Agnico Eagle and Kinross are due on October 28. Those reports will not settle the gold price. They will show whether costs and cash still match the stories told in the summer, at the prices the companies actually received, which were higher than Friday’s screen. A miner can report a fine quarter and still see the shares fall if the market is pricing the next ounce, not the last one. Read why any result missed. Do not buy or sell because of one word in the headline.
Oil is the other input. A week of cheaper gold, with Brent still above $110, can squeeze mines that burn a lot of diesel. The fuel cost shows up later, in the cost figures, not on Friday afternoon. If your gold investment strategy includes miners, the oil price is part of the cost, not a separate hobby.
What this drop does not mean
It does not mean gold is cheap in some absolute sense. Cheap versus January is true on the series above. Cheap versus the cost of mining is a different test, and several large producers still show a wide sustaining-cost gap at $4,000. Cheap versus a model that needs $5,500 gold is a third test. A model is not an instruction to buy.
It does not mean the long run is over, and it does not mean the long run is safe. A 26 percent decline can be a stop on the way back up. It can be the first step of a larger fall. Both have happened in other decades. Using one decade and hiding the other is an argument, not a record. If you want the long record, take the boring parts too.
It does not mean you missed the only chance. July already had a futures settlement under $4,000. Friday traded near that price again. If your plan needs one perfect price, the plan is fragile. Prices come back to old areas. They also leave and do not come back on your schedule.
It does not mean every gold product fell 26 percent. A fund that holds metal should be close to the metal, minus fees, over time. A fund that holds miners can be nowhere near that percent. A stock you bought in March is living a different percent from a stock you bought on January 29. Look at the price you paid, not the high on a chart you did not buy.
It does not mean waiting is free, and it does not mean buying is brave. Brave is not a financial category. A written plan is. The person who buys because a headline said “dip,” and the person who waits because a headline said “falling,” are doing the same thing. They are letting the words “dip” and “falling” make the decision.
A plain way to use the headline
Take the 26 percent apart before you obey it.
On one Friday morning screen, spot gold at $4,026.87 was 26.49 percent under a 52-week high of $5,477.79. On the Comex settlement series, $3,991.10 was 24.96 percent under $5,318.40. On a closing series, Thursday’s $4,024.51 was 25.5 percent under $5,405. The year-to-date futures loss was 7.73 percent, not 26. The one-year change was small. The week was down about 4 percent in futures. The month was down closer to 8 percent on the morning spot feed. Those are six facts. A single “26 percent dip” flattens them into a sale sign.
If you already own gold, ask whether your reason survived. If the reason was the January price, the reason is hurt and buying more will not heal it by magic. If the reason was a job that does not depend on the next hundred dollars, check your size and leave the reason alone. If you own miners, check the gap at a gold price near $4,000, not at the price in last spring’s presentation.
If you own none, nothing here says you should start. A gold price correction can make a patient person curious. Curiosity is not a position. The work is the series, the job, the size, and the rule that would make you act on a later day. Buy or wait is a false choice if both are impulses. Pick a rule. Then the buy-or-wait choice is easy, and the headline can go back to being a headline.
Gold under $4,000 is a place on a chart. Twenty-six percent is how far one screen sat under a high that not every chart even shares. Neither one is an instruction. The instruction, if you want one, has to come from the job you wrote down. If you have not written it down, the careful choice is to wait until you have.
Figures used here come from reports dated October 23, 2026, and from company releases earlier in the year. The 26.49 percent figure is from a USA Today spot screen at 8:05 a.m. Eastern, using a 52-week high of $5,477.79 and a price of $4,026.87. The 24.96 percent figure is from Dow Jones settlement data carried by Morningstar: a $3,991.10 Comex settle versus a $5,318.40 high on January 29. The 25.5 percent figure is from GoldPrice.com, using a $5,405 closing high and a Thursday close of $4,024.51. The $3,986.50 low is from a Reuters note carried by Roic News. Thursday Brent at $113.17 is a CNBC settlement figure. Friday Brent through $117 is from the Financial Times. The October hike odds, about 9 percent, are CME futures as cited that day. Miner costs and guidance are from Agnico Eagle’s second-quarter results, Barrick’s second-quarter results and 2026 cost guide, and Kinross’s September 23 update. AISC is a non-standard measure. Gaps at $4,000 are illustrations, not forecasts of earnings or prices. Share prices move. This is not advice.