Australia’s Unemployment Rate Continues Steady Rise

SYDNEY—Australia’s unemployment rate continued to rise in October, potentially ruling out a further hike in interest rates in December.

The jobless rate climbed to 3.7% in October from 3.6% in September, despite employment jumping by 55,000 over the month, the Australian Bureau of Statistics said Thursday.

The rise in the unemployment rate was expected by economists, but the jump in employment was more than twice the consensus estimate for a 20,000 increase.

The labor force participation rate rose to 67.0% in October from 66.8% in September, the ABS said.

The solid gain in employment in October follows news on Wednesday that wages grew at their fastest pace in more than a quarter of a century in the third quarter as a big rise in the minimum wage helped drive broad strength in new wage agreements.

Still, neither the employment gains nor the rising momentum in wages are likely to be enough to spark a further rise in interest rates at the RBA’s next policy meeting in early December.

The central bank is likely to look at the level of the official cash rate again in February when it reviews its economic forecasts and has seen another quarter of inflation data.

The RBA raised interest rates last week for the first time since June and left open the prospect of further increases if inflation pressures remain resilient. The central bank also revised up its forecasts for inflation in 2024 and 2025.

“It’s a very solid jobs report, highlighting continued tightness in the labor market and illustrating the dilemma the RBA faces as it looks to end its rate hike cycle in line with its global central bank peers,” said Tony Sycamore, market analyst at IG.

“While we don’t think today’s jobs [data] will prompt the RBA to raise rates next month, the RBA will need to see labor market and inflation data ease in the coming months to avoid having to raise rates early in 2024,” he added.

The large increase in employment in October followed a small increase in September of around 8,000 people, the ABS said.

The annual growth rate in hours worked fell to 1.7% in October, down from growth of around 5.0% in the middle of the year, showing that the job market is slowly losing momentum.

The underemployment rate remained at 6.3% in October, the ABS said. While this was 0.4 percentage points higher than October last year, the result was still around 2.4 percentage points lower than before the Covid-19 pandemic.

Gold is one of the market’s go-to hedges in rocky times. Don’t forget that gold miners’ stocks are too.

The stock market’s gains in 2026 belie the rocky macroeconomic picture: elevated inflation, heightened geopolitical tensions, and jitters about the artificial-intelligence trade. That backdrop, in theory, should be the time for gold to shine. Instead, the price of the yellow metal has tumbled more than 5% so far, after last year’s blistering 65% rally. In part, the U.S. dollar’s recovery has stymied gold, which benefited from the greenback’s weakness in 2025.

Even with the precious metal’s recent weakness, gold mining stocks could be the best way to profit from this year’s uncertainty.

Gold miners “are a valuable hedge against macro risks that would likely be damaging for equities,” BCA Research’s Noah Weisberger and Rishabh Shah wrote this week.

Concerns about the Federal Reserve’s next moves to tackle inflation, the increasingly crowded AI trade, and steep valuations for tech stocks are just some of the drivers that could help gold’s price get on even footing— and lead to even bigger gains for miner stocks.

These stocks’ prices tend to outpace gold’s moves, because the companies have fixed operational costs. So when gold’s price rallies, their profit margins soar, and vice versa. For instance, the VanEck Gold Miners GDX +7.39% exchange-traded fund has fallen 11% this year as the metal has slumped.

Now, gold’s price just needs to stabilize to help miners’ stocks take off, and that seems to be happening. The precious metal has recently found support above the $4,000 level, and has stuck in a narrow range since the end of June. But its price rose ever so slightly in July, ending a four-month losing streak for the metal. Technical analysis also suggests that gold is due for a comeback.

Barron’s recently wrote that the pullbacks for both gold miners and the metal itself are overdone. Senior technical analyst Doug Busch noted that the VanEck ETF is on the “verge of a breakout” and has the potential to hit $11o in early 2027, up more than 40% from its current price.

Gold miners also have more than their role as a market hedge going for them. Their fundamentals are solid, too, says Chris Mancini, portfolio co-manager of the Gabelli Gold Fund.

“Precious metals miners are generating substantial amounts of free cash flow given profit margins of over $2,000 per ounce, and are returning this cash to shareholders through buybacks and dividends,” he said in an email.

“Buying the miners is a cheap way to get exposure to the price of gold,” he added. His fund owns Newmont NEM +6.71%, a Barron’s stock pick last year, and Agnico Eagle Mines as top holdings, as well as miners Northern Star Resources, Endeavour Mining, and Kinross Gold K+8.59%.

Miners are better businesses than they used to be, the BCA team added.

“Capex is more disciplined, margins are high and rising…and they are largely independent of the AI story,” Weisberger, BCA’s head of equities, and Shah, a senior analyst, wrote.

That last part is key. AI is disrupting the software industry and many other services and information-oriented businesses, and investors have piled into AI stocks. But ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and other large-language models aren’t going to replace the need to mine for metals.

“Equity portfolios can benefit from exposure to quality that is uncorrelated to AI risk, and gold miners fit the bill,” the BCA team said.

They recommend that investors buy the VanEck Gold Miners ETF, which owns top miners such as Agnico, Barrick Mining ABX +7.24%, and Newmont.

An important bonus for big gold miners’ stocks is that their valuations are attractive after the gold’s pullback, too. The VanEck ETF is now trading at just a little more than nine times next year’s earnings estimates. That’s a big discount to its five-year average price-to-earnings ratio of 14, according to FactSet.

What’s more, the ETF is currently valued at a more than 50% discount to the S&P 500 SPX -0.17%, which is trading for about 19 times earnings estimates for 2027. Mining stocks have typically traded at just a 25% discount to the broader market over the past five years. So there is significant upside for the group if valuations move back toward normal levels.

One factor that complicates mining stocks as a market hedge, of course, is if stocks bounce back, which has been the case so far in August.

But both the market and economic outlooks remain cloudy, and investors remain nervous about the Fed’s next moves and AI stocks. Gold miners should do just fine, even if the anxious mood on Wall Street persists.