Balance Sheet StrengthNarrow moat

One lasting benefit of the post-2019 discipline is a genuinely strong balance sheet. The old Barrick nearly foundered on debt taken on in the last boom; the new one spent years paying it down and now carries little net debt, which in a cyclical, capital-hungry industry is a serious advantage. A miner with a clean balance sheet can keep investing through a downturn, hold its assets rather than dumping them, and pounce when weaker rivals are forced to sell.

Financial strength also lets Barrick return cash to owners rather than merely reinvesting all of it in the treadmill. Buoyed by the gold-price windfall, the company has paid steady dividends and launched large share buybacks — including a multi-billion-dollar programme in 2026¹ — which, when done at a sensible price, are the honest way to hand a cyclical business's peak cash flows back to shareholders instead of burning them on overpriced acquisitions.

Balance-sheet strength is exactly the kind of prudent management a moat investor likes to see — but notice that it is a virtue of stewardship, not a structural moat. It makes Barrick a safer and better-run holder of hard assets; it does not change the price-taking, depleting nature of those assets. The best a strong balance sheet can do is let a good miner behave well through a cycle it cannot control — which is worthwhile, and still not the same as owning a business that does not need the cycle to be kind.