Gold miners are equities first and gold claims second: operating leverage to the gold price on the way up, equity beta and balance-sheet risk on the way down. The GDX/gold ratio is the gauge of which half is winning. TheDailyGold’s 08/2026 chart: miners lagged gold badly in 2007–early 2008 (gold $600→$1,000, ratio falling) and again in 2011, then the ratio collapsed in the 2008 crash — the “2008 boogeyman,” the fear that a stock-market crash takes miners down regardless of gold. Since 2013 the ratio has lived in a 0.010–0.022 range; days after gold’s 29% correction low it printed 0.022, which he calls a breakout from a 13-year base.
Reading it: the chart shows the ratio at the top of its range, not through it — call it a test, not a breakout, until it holds. What is genuinely different from 2007 and 2011 is the direction: then miners were weakening into a gold rally (the divergence that preceded the ratio’s collapse), now they are strengthening out of a gold correction. Relative strength of the leveraged claim after a drawdown in the underlying is a real signal — the same logic as Most-shorted baskets outperform — but it says miners are being bought, not that 2008 can’t recur. The author sells a newsletter and “carnival barkers” is doing rhetorical work; the Ratio charts discipline applies.