✦ The Future BetsNarrow moat

A gold miner cannot invent a better product or charge more for the one it has. Everything it can control is upstream of the price: what it owns, what it costs to dig, and how long the ore lasts. Barrick's future bets are therefore about ore bodies and corporate structure — the only two levers a price-taker actually holds.

The best of them is a discovery. Fourmile, next to the existing Nevada operations, has been called one of this century's most significant gold finds, with a conceptual mine outlined at roughly 600,000 to 750,000 ounces a year at all-in costs near $850-900 an ounce¹ — half the industry's. In August 2026 Barrick settled its long-running disputes with Newmont in a $4 billion arrangement that folds Fourmile, Mike and Fiberline into the Nevada joint venture, with Newmont paying Barrick a $1.95 billion top-up in cash². The structural bet follows from it: an initial public offering of a minority stake in the company holding Barrick's North American gold assets — Nevada Gold Mines, Pueblo Viejo and Fourmile — targeted for completion by the end of 2026³.

The other two bets are copper, and they explain why 'Gold' came out of the company's name in 2025. The Lumwana Super Pit in Zambia, about $2 billion, roughly doubles throughput and copper output with first production expected by the end of the first quarter of 2028. Reko Diq in Pakistan is larger and shakier: a Phase 1 designed for 240,000 tonnes of copper and 297,000 ounces of gold a year, which Barrick slowed in February 2026 on escalating security risks, extending its review to mid-2027 and flagging potential significant increases to the capital budget and timeline⁴.

Read honestly, none of this creates a moat — a bigger, cheaper price-taker is still a price-taker. What these bets can do is move Barrick down the cost curve and stretch its mine lives, which is the difference between surviving the next gold trough and being restructured by it. Grade them on one number apiece: Fourmile's all-in sustaining cost when it publishes a prefeasibility study in 2028, Lumwana's first copper against the Q1 2028 date, Reko Diq's capital budget when the review ends in mid-2027, and whether the IPO prices at all by December.