⚠ Every Ounce Sold Has to Be Found AgainHigh threat

A gold mine is a business that consumes its own inventory and cannot reorder. Barrick produced about 3.26 million ounces in 2025¹, and every one of those ounces is gone — sold, dispersed into jewellery and vaults and bars, and permanently subtracted from what the company owns.

That is the treadmill, and it makes mining unlike almost every other business in this collection. A software company that sells a licence still has the software. A retailer restocks. A miner has to spend money finding a replacement for the thing it just sold, and if it fails to, the company gets smaller, quietly, at a rate of a few million ounces a year.

The replacement can be bought or found. Buying is expensive at the top of a cycle, which is where the gold price currently sits — and the acquisition record of the gold industry at cycle peaks is the worst in mining. Finding is cheaper and much less reliable: a major new deposit is a rare event and Fourmile is the only one in Barrick's portfolio of the scale that changes the arithmetic rather than maintaining it.

The counterweight is a reserve base of roughly 77 million ounces and a reserve life measured in decades, which buys time to be patient.

The number to watch is the reserve replacement ratio, adjusted for changes in the gold price assumption. Below one, sustained, is liquidation.