The GoldNerds spreadsheet has over 25 graphs. You choose the companies to compare in the graphs.

Did you know you can buy gold more cheaply when it is underground? Gold in an exploration lease is often less than ten dollars per ounce, or less than a hundred dollars an ounce underneath a working mine. You can buy a lot of ounces this way, for a lot of leverage to a rising price of gold, but you incur company risk. Bargains abound, but you may need a GoldNerds spreadsheet to find them.

The first example graph shows one of the measures of the in-ground cost of gold. The in-ground cost of a company's gold is the value of the company (its market capitalization or enterprise value) divided by the number of ounces of gold it has rights over (typically expressed as its gold resources or reserves). The in-ground cost of gold escalates as a deposit is found, gets a resource statement, then a mining study, and finally goes into production. However, at all these stages the cost of the in-ground gold is far lower than the cost of bullion.

By buying shares of gold companies, you get to effectively own a lot more ounces of gold than by buying bullion. This gives you greater leverage to rises and falls in the gold price. This is part of the reason that the share prices of gold companies, even those that are not producing gold, are so sensitive to the price of gold. When the gold price moves up or down, gold shares usually rise or fall by a much greater percentage.

Even among producers there are big differences in the in-ground cost, because mining costs vary between resources and because companies go in and out of favor for non-fundamental reasons. Here is a graph of in-ground costs for some ASX gold producers in February 2016: