Gold miners ETF hits its weakest RSI reading since June

The VanEck Gold Miners ETF closed Friday at $80.20, and the word going round for it is oversold. We ran the numbers on the closing series ourselves before repeating that, and the answer depends entirely on which setting you use.

Oversold on one setting out of four

On a seven-day relative strength index, GDX sits at 26.3, which is below the conventional 30 line and genuinely oversold. On the standard fourteen-day setting it is 34.5. On twenty-one days it is 39.1. On the weekly chart it is 43.0, which is not near anything. The last time the fourteen-day reading actually went below 30 was 20 March. Friday was the first close under 35 since 10 June, which is the real finding here and a different claim from oversold.

The dating is off in the other direction too. Since 1 July the fund is up 6.8%, and measured against gold itself it is up 8.0% over the same stretch. Whatever happened in July, GDX has spent the months since recovering from it.

What did happen is recent and sharp. GDX closed at $89.28 on 9 October and at $80.20 on 23 October: down 10.2% in ten sessions. That is the whole of the weakness the indicators are picking up, and it is two weeks old rather than four months old.

The signal that marked the top

Worth noting what the 9th was. Tickeron recorded that day as the moment GDX's stochastic oscillator climbed out of oversold territory, a signal usually read as bullish. It marked the local high to the day, and the fund has not seen that price since.

“GDX sees its Stochastic Oscillator climb out of oversold territory, which could be a bullish sign for the stock.”

— Tickeron technical note on GDX, 9 October 2026, https://tickeron.com/ticker/GDX/

The wider frame is more useful than any oscillator. GDX is 30.8% below its 27 February peak of $115.84; the gold ETF GLD is 26.1% below its own peak from 29 January. Bitcoin, at $79,986 on Monday morning, is 30.1% below its peak of a year ago almost to the day, with a fourteen-day RSI of 41.4. We wrote last week that bitcoin had fallen further than gold over a year; the miners have now fallen by the same amount as bitcoin, which is a strange place for a hedge to end up. None of those three is oversold on the default setting. All three are a long way from where they started the year.

This piece is informational, not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any asset. Every indicator reading above is our own calculation on closing prices to 23 October 2026, and an RSI describes what a price has already done rather than what it will do next.