Gold (chemical symbol: Au) is a precious metal, just like silver, platinum and palladium, and one of the most valuable and highly sought after on the planet. Its main purpose is for investing or preservation of wealth, or a hedge against inflation. As small deposits with likewise small operations can already be profitable, gold juniors are the most abundant among junior miners on the various exchanges, but certainly the Canadian TSX Venture and TSX. There are roughly 500 gold exploring/developing/producing companies listed on these two exchanges with a NI43-101 registered resource estimate.
As gold has no fundamental supply/demand mechanism, but supposedly moves on sentiment drivers like Federal Reserve 10y Treasury interest rates, banks and governments/central banks secretly regulating the gold price through large ETFs like GLD, India smuggling, India and China special occasions, European gold repatriation from the US, conflicts around the world, covert China politics to create a gold backed yuan based on gold reserves even superseding those of the US, QEs, US debt, negative interest rates, inflation, impending collapse of the US dollar or even all currencies for that matter, etcetc, none of those drivers has ever been able to influence gold prices in a steady, consequent way so they could be worthy of being named "fundamental". Pricing of the yellow metal is therefore always surrounded with sentiment and speculation, and therefore is risky in itself. The only true market movers in gold are the futures traders, as their traded volume dwarfs any other trade in gold, ranging from physical to ETFs by 50 times or more.
Although inflation has been coming down on high interest rates lately (Spring 2024), gold recently printed new all-time highs, and doesn't seem to be slowing down anytime soon with the Russia and Israel conflicts heating up. Despite mixing US economy readings there seems to be an intention by the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates in H2, 2024, which would devalue the US Dollar and might be the catalyst for the gold price to break into US$2,500/oz territories.