The gold miners’ stocks have soared this year as investors flock back into this long-abandoned sector. Many traders wonder if these eye-popping gains are merely the product of fleeting sentiment that could reverse anytime, or are supported by strong underlying fundamentals. With the gold miners reporting their latest quarterly operating results, this extensive new data offers great insights into gold mining’s fundamentals.

By law, publicly-traded companies must file quarterly earnings reports four times a year. These yield a treasure trove of valuable information for traders, and are easily the single-most-important contribution to financial-market transparency. The Securities and Exchange Commission requires companies traded on the US stock markets to file quarterly earnings reports no later than 45 days after their quarters end.

For reasons that mystify me, the gold miners love to push this limit. Despite having modern computer accounting systems that can produce final numbers within days of quarters ending, most of the gold miners report 4 to 6 weeks after quarter-end. Rather ironically, many issue press releases within a week or two after quarter-end that contain some of the key information to later be included in their quarterly reports.

So 6 weeks after every quarter-end, I like to dig into the operating results of the world’s best gold miners to get a better feel for how this industry is faring fundamentally. But unfortunately, there’s an exception to the SEC rules for the fourth quarter. They extend the reporting deadline out to 90 days after the end of that particular quarter. So naturally many of the already-slow-to-report gold miners take advantage of this slack.

As an investor, the idea of Q4 results coming out near the end of Q1 irritates me to no end. With plenty of gold miners reporting way out in mid to even late March, their Q4 data is practically ancient history by then!  But as a CPA and former Big Six auditor, I understand the Q4 delay. Producing annual reports, or 10-Ks in SEC terms, is far more time-consuming than the much-smaller quarterly reports known as 10-Qs.

The 10-Qs filed during the first three quarters use unaudited numbers, so there’s no need for CPA firms to investigate and sign off on them. 10-Ks require fully-audited results, and the months after Q4 are the busy season for auditing where CPAs are swamped. And the vast array of data and analysis included in 10-Ks takes way longer to collect, organize, proof, and publish than the rest of the year’s quarterly reports.

So doing my quarterly analysis of gold miners’ operating results is more challenging after Q4 because less data is available. But I’d much rather use what’s out there now than wait until the very end of Q1 to take a look at Q4’s results. Many gold miners issue press releases summarizing key Q4 results even before they file their 10-Ks, so they’re a great source of early data.  And Q4 was exceedingly important for gold miners.

With gold soaring as high as 17.5% year-to-date last week, and the flagship HUI gold-stock index literally skyrocketing 62.4% higher in less than a month, the psychology in this sector has shifted radically from Q4. Remember that was a horrendous hyper-bearish sentiment wasteland, where everyone was utterly convinced gold and its miners were doomed. That all swirled around the Fed’s imminent rate hikes.

Despite history showing that Fed-rate-hike cycles are bullish for gold as I proved before the December hike, American futures speculators were convinced otherwise. So they pounded gold relentlessly from late October after the Fed indicated a December rate hike ending 7 years of ZIRP was indeed likely. By the day after that hike, extreme record futures selling had crushed gold to a dismal 6.1-year secular low of $1051.

Gold’s average price in Q4 was just $1105, the worst since Q4 2009. This was widely believed to be an existential threat to gold mining.  As recently as last summer, $1200 gold was erroneously seen as the breakeven level for the gold industry. So the HUI was hammered to a brutal 13.3-year secular low in November, even though gold miners’ Q3 operating results argued such levels were fundamentally-absurd.

Thus Q4 2015 was arguably one of the toughest quarters gold miners have ever faced. While it’s certainly true past quarters many years ago had lower gold prices, mining costs were commensurately lower then too. Q4 was a real test of how the gold miners could function in a super-low-gold-price environment. So I’ve been impatiently waiting for enough Q4 operating results to analyze this industry for over 6 weeks now.