Gold Stock Calculator
Produce a risk-adjusted Net Asset Value per share from first principles. Enter only what you know — tonnage and at least one gold price are required; every other field has a sensible default so the tool works even with limited information. Category and study-stage confidence weights are applied automatically.
How It Works
- Enter resource and reserve tonnage by category from the company's most recent technical report. At least one non-zero tonnage is required.
- Add whatever you know about grade, recovery, operating costs, and financial assumptions. Every field here is optional — leave anything blank and a reasonable default will be applied, with the values used listed in the output. Fewer inputs mean lower accuracy.
- Pick the study stage — Preliminary Economic Assessment, Pre-Feasibility Study, or Feasibility Study. Each carries a different engineering-precision multiplier that gets applied to the final NAV.
- Enter one or more gold-price benchmarks. Column 1 is pre-filled from the live commodity ticker. Add trailing averages or your own long-term deck in the remaining columns for sensitivity.
- Review the matrix — three NAV scenarios across every price benchmark. The stage-adjusted row (highlighted in gold) is the realistic, risk-adjusted number to anchor on for position sizing.
Confidence Weights Applied
- Inferred resources: 20% confidence weight
- Indicated resources: 50%
- Measured resources: 75%
- Probable reserves: 85%
- Proven reserves: 100%
Study-Stage Haircuts
- Preliminary Economic Assessment: 30% haircut (±50% economic precision)
- Pre-Feasibility Study: 15% haircut (±25% precision)
- Feasibility Study: no additional haircut (study used as reported)
Known Limitations (V1)
This calculator is a directional tool, not a replacement for a full engineering model. What it does not include:
- Corporate tax (add ~25-30% to opex for a rough proxy)
- Sustaining capex during operations — material in declining-grade operations
- Inflation adjustment — all numbers in nominal USD
- Royalty streams and NSR payments
- Debt servicing — the calculator assumes 100% equity financing
- Commodity-price hedges — a hedged producer earns less upside than the spot price suggests
- Gold only — multi-commodity support is in the Copper, Silver, and Polymetallic tools
Do your own due diligence.
Read the company's 43-101 technical report, their most recent annual information form, and their insider-transaction filings before acting on any NAV estimate — including this one. Informational only; not investment advice. Full disclaimer →
Understanding Gold Stock Valuations
What NAV Actually Tells You
Net Asset Value per share is a benchmark for what a gold deposit is worth in the ground today, discounted back to present value. It is the closest thing the industry has to a fair-value anchor. Unlike a P/E ratio (which assumes the company is profitable) or a market-cap-to-ounces metric (which ignores extraction economics), NAV captures the full cash-flow profile a deposit is expected to generate over its life. When a stock trades at 0.5x NAV, the market is paying half of what the engineering study says the deposit is worth. That discount can be a bargain or a warning sign — the calculator gives you the denominator; reading the 43-101 tells you whether to trust it.
How This Calculator Builds the Number
The math is a simplified three-step DCF. First, total recoverable gold ounces are computed from tonnage × grade × recovery, with tonnage weighted by resource category confidence. Second, the revenue these ounces generate over the mine life is discounted back to present value at your chosen discount rate, net of operating costs and initial capex. Third, a study-stage haircut is applied to reflect that early-stage PEA figures are less reliable than feasibility-study figures. The result is a per-share risk-adjusted NAV at each gold price you specify.
Three levers drive most of the sensitivity: grade (direct multiplier on revenue), discount rate (compounds over mine life), and gold price. Small changes to any of the three produce large changes in the output number. That is real — it reflects how volatile gold-equity valuations genuinely are — not a calculator flaw.
Reading the Output Matrix
Three rows, up to four columns. The gross NAV row assumes every tonne is measured-category quality with no study-stage risk — the theoretical maximum a company could deliver if everything were derisked. The category-weighted NAV row discounts for resource classification only. The stage-adjusted NAV (highlighted in gold) applies both category and study-stage haircuts — the most realistic read and the number to anchor on for position sizing. Across columns, you see how each scenario responds to different gold prices: the wider the spread between your lowest and highest price inputs, the higher the gold-price volatility embedded in your thesis.
When to Use This Tool (and When Not To)
Use it when you want a quick, disciplined estimate of what a gold deposit is worth at different price decks, without building a full-scale financial model. Useful for first-pass screening, quick comparisons between two deposits, and sanity-checking a published P/NAV claim. Do not use it as the sole input for a position-sizing decision on a company you plan to hold for years — a full model should include tax, sustaining capex, inflation, royalty leakage, and hedge positions, all of which this V1 tool deliberately omits to stay fast and approachable. Our Verdict Framework scorecards are where the broader due diligence lives; this calculator sits alongside them as a sensitivity workbench.
Input Quality is Everything
Garbage in, garbage out applies with unusual force to NAV models. A grade of 1.2 g/t vs 1.8 g/t is a 50% difference in contained ounces at the same tonnage — and therefore roughly a 50% difference in NAV before any other assumption. A discount rate of 5% vs 10% produces materially different present values over a 15-year mine life. Resource category matters because inferred ounces rarely convert to production 1:1 — a company can lose 50-80% of its inferred ounces through infill drilling. When you leave inputs at defaults, the calculator warns you in the output so you can judge how much weight to put on the number. Filling in the real figures from the 43-101 tightens the result significantly.