Very true what you say. The gold miners used to be a leveraged play on gold because their earnings went up a lot quicker for every unit increase in the gold price. But that has all changed ever since the cost of mining gold shot up to over USD 1200 an ounce. Most gold miners now are hanging by a thread and if the gold price should fall below USD 1200 an ounce on a sustained basis, we are looking at sector wide bankruptcies. In which case all the miner ETFs like GDX, GDXJ and SIL would implode and they would be liquidated wholesale.