Precious Metals Royalty Companies Compared (2026)

Comparison as of 12 August 2026 (market data at the 11 Aug close). A point-in-time snapshot, not an evergreen guide. Fundamentals come from each company’s fiscal-2025 annual filing — a 10-K for Royal Gold, an Annual Report or Annual Information Form for the other four — and its most recent disclosed results; market data (prices, market caps, multiples, analyst targets) is a single 11 Aug 2026 close for all five, so there is no per-company price-date spread in this refresh. Price deck: one shared deck for every column — the fixed gold grid of blog-valuation.md Table 3b, bear US$3,000 / base US$4,000 / bull US$5,000 per oz, with spot ~US$4,370/oz carried as a cross-check; the base rung sits deliberately below spot, so every value read here is struck on a conservative base. Silver ~US$60/oz. FX: not applicable — all five report in US dollars, a rare simplification in this series. Ratings (royalty/streaming archetype-weighted composite, to one decimal): Franco-Nevada 4.6/5 · Wheaton 4.5/5 · Triple Flag 4.4/5 · Royal Gold 4.2/5 · OR Royalties 4.0/5 — all five recompute exactly to their published figures. Value reads (on the conservative US$4,000 base rung): Wheaton and Franco-Nevada Modestly overvalued; Royal Gold, OR Royalties and Triple Flag Fairly valued — not one reads as undervalued on the base deck, though all three fair-valued names tip cheaper at the ~US$4,370 spot. The primary yardstick is portfolio P/NAV, and for the first time in this series it is fully comparable — all five now publish a portfolio NAV on the same base rung. The two findings no single-name post could make: quality is priced monotonically — rank the five by scorecard and you rank them by P/NAV in the identical order, so no name is dominated and there is neither a bargain nor a value trap in the group (Section 5); and not one of the five reaches even its own floor NAV at any rung of the shared gold ladder — the royalty premium is structural, not five separate mispricings (Section 3.2). Every basis difference is consolidated in the comparability ledger, Table 9. Update cadence: refreshed when the underlying analyses are refreshed. For information only, prepared with AI assistance — see the disclaimer at the end.

Five precious-metals royalty and streaming companies, five different answers to the question of how to own an ounce you never dig up. One paid US$4.3 billion in a single February morning to double a silver stream on a Peruvian copper mine, and funded it without issuing a share. One has raised its dividend for nineteen consecutive years and finished its largest-ever investment year still carrying zero debt. One tripled its asset base by buying a competitor mostly with paper, and holds the group’s longest dividend-growth record at twenty-five straight years. One earns the highest cash margin of the five — 96.7 cents on the dollar — while two-fifths of its book rides on a single Québec gold mine. And one leads every per-dollar row in the table and trades on the cheapest cash-flow multiple in the group, yet carries a controlling shareholder who owns nearly two-thirds of it. This post puts all five on one construction — one date, one currency, one shared gold deck — and produces two findings no single-name post could: quality is priced in a perfectly straight line here — the highest-rated name is the dearest on portfolio NAV and the lowest-rated is the cheapest, in exact rank order, so the group sits on a clean quality-price frontier with no name beaten on both axes at once (Section 5); and not one of the five clears even its own conservative floor NAV at any rung of the shared ladder, which says more about how a royalty NAV is built than about how any of them is priced (Section 3.2). To screen these five and every other royalty and streaming name on the same fields, go to Metal Pilot.

1. The peer group

The peers and the inclusion rule. The five largest listed precious-metals royalty and streaming companies with a published Metal Pilot single-name analysis as of August 2026: the three seniors (Wheaton, Franco-Nevada, Royal Gold) and the two mid-tier names (OR Royalties, Triple Flag). No qualifying name was cut for size. Sandstorm Gold Royalties is absent because it no longer exists as a separate company — Royal Gold acquired it, together with Horizon Copper, in October 2025, and its assets are inside the Royal Gold column here. Metalla Royalty & Streaming is excluded on materiality, at US$11.7 million of FY2025 revenue against OR Royalties’ US$277.4 million, roughly a fortieth of the smallest name in the group. Ordered by market capitalisation in US dollars, largest first — a ranking that now separates OR Royalties and Triple Flag by barely one per cent, the two effectively tied at ~US$6.2–6.3 billion. Before trusting a single number in Table 1, read the comparability ledger in Section 6.1 (Table 9) — every place a company’s basis differs from this post’s construction is recorded there once, with the direction of the bias, rather than scattered through footnotes. For the buy-list that ranks these same five on one objective production metric, see Best Gold Royalty Stocks by GEOs ; this post is the quality-and-value companion to that ranking, not a competitor to it.

Table 1. The five compared, headline figures

The cash-margin construction, applied identically to all five: cash margin = 1 − (cost of sales excluding depletion) ÷ FY2025 revenue, on a group basis. Interest, corporate general and administrative expense and depletion are all excluded, because a royalty company’s only true cost of sales is the contractual per-ounce payment it makes to the operator. Two of the five figures are not struck on exactly that denominator and are flagged in the ledger (Table 9).

Source: each company’s FY2025 annual filing as analysed in the five underlying posts linked in Section 6.1; market data per those posts, all at the 11 Aug 2026 close. All five report in US dollars — there is no FX conversion anywhere in this table. GEOs are gold-equivalent ounces, and they are not built the same way across the five (Table 9): Franco-Nevada’s and Triple Flag’s are company-reported ounces sold, Royal Gold’s and OR Royalties’ are derived as revenue divided by the average gold price, and Wheaton’s are ounces produced, converted on the company’s own 2025 price assumptions rather than a market average — which is why its revenue per GEO is the only one that does not land near the ~US$3,432/oz FY2025 average gold price. Per-dollar rows divide by the market capitalisation struck at each company’s 11 Aug price and move with it (rule S14). Portfolio NAV/share and P/NAV are each company’s own top-down portfolio NAV at the shared US$4,000 base rung and 5% discount (Section 3); every one is a conservative floor that credits no growth beyond booked reserves, and P/NAV is price ÷ that floor. Enterprise value per GEO uses each company’s own enterprise value, two of which rest on an estimated net-debt figure. Concentration is measured on revenue for the first three and on GEOs for the last two; for a royalty book the two are near-identical. Ratings are recomputed here on the royalty/streaming archetype weighting (Section 4); value reads are as published in each underlying analysis. Portfolio counts follow each filer’s own definition of an “interest” — see Table 9.

Three structural facts recur in every section below. First, the group runs 10 to 1 on market capitalisation and 8.5 to 1 on gold-equivalent ounces — but 9 to 1 the other way on interest count: Wheaton is ten times Triple Flag’s size and Franco-Nevada holds nine times Wheaton’s number of assets. Second, the market-cap order is not the per-dollar order, and it is very nearly its inverse: the two largest names buy the fewest ounces and the fewest producing interests per dollar of market value, and the two smallest buy the most. Third, the cash-margin column spans eleven points and tells you almost nothing about quality — it is a near-perfect proxy for how much of each book is streams rather than royalties, which Section 2.4 quantifies.

2. Operating and financial position

2.1 Company by company

Wheaton Precious Metals is the largest name in the group on market capitalisation and gold-equivalent ounces alike, at US$62.2 billion and 689,864 GEOs, and the smallest but one on asset count at 48 assets under 42 agreements. Its single-name analysis carries the group’s most aggressive published growth target — 1.2 million GEOs by 2030, a midpoint-implied +74% on 2025, more than five times Franco-Nevada’s guided pace — and the group’s most concentrated book, with Salobo alone at roughly 45% of revenue and the top three interests at about 68%. It earns the lowest cash margin of the five at ~86%, and buys the second-fewest ounces and the fewest producing interests per dollar of market value in the group. The structural fact that separates it: Wheaton is the only company here that is essentially a pure streamer, and the only one carrying net debt of any size — ~US$2.40 billion, all of it created in a single February 2026 transaction and now confirmed in the H1 2026 financial statements it was still an estimate against at the July window.

Franco-Nevada is the second-largest at US$46.2 billion, and its single-name analysis carries the largest portfolio here by a wide margin: 430 interests, 119 of them producing, against Wheaton’s 48 and 23. That breadth buys it the lowest concentration in the group — an estimated ~17% in its largest interest and ~42% in its top three — and the only material non-precious exposure, with energy royalties at 11.2% of revenue and iron ore at 3.1%. It is also the slowest-growing: a 2030 outlook midpoint of ~585,000 GEOs is only +13% on 2025’s 519,106, the lowest published growth rate of the four names that publish one. It buys the fewest ounces per dollar of market value of any company here, at 11,236, and trades on the richest cash-flow multiple at 30.9×. The structural fact that separates it: Franco-Nevada is the only one of the five with zero debt, maintained through a record ~US$2.2 billion investment year and now standing at ~US$0.8 billion of net cash.

Royal Gold sits third at US$19.7 billion and ~300,000 GEOs, on 393 interests of which 84 produce. It buys the second-most ounces per dollar in the group at 15,228 and holds the joint-lowest top-three concentration at ~42%, and its ~87% cash margin is the second-lowest — a direct consequence of a book that is 67% streams by revenue. Its analysis carries the group’s longest dividend-growth record at twenty-five consecutive annual increases and the only 5 on reserves and life on the whole board, earned on cornerstone mine lives running to 2045 and 2049. The structural fact that separates it: Royal Gold is the only company here with no published multi-year GEO target. Where the other four commit to a dated 2030 number a reader can hold them to, Royal Gold’s growth case rests on annualising the Sandstorm and Kansanshi volumes that entered only a single quarter of its FY2025 revenue base — which makes its forward volume the least verifiable in the group, in either direction.

OR Royalties is now marginally the larger of the two mid-tiers at US$6.3 billion, on 80,775 GEOs across 197 interests of which just 22 produce — the fewest producing interests in the group, from the widest jurisdictional spread at 20-plus countries. It earns the highest cash margin of the five at 96.7%, the direct arithmetic of a book that is 64% royalties by revenue, and its analysis guides to 120,000–135,000 GEOs by 2030, a midpoint-implied +58% and the second-fastest here. Against that, it carries the group’s second-most concentrated book: Canadian Malartic alone is ~39.5% of GEOs and the top three are ~65%. The structural fact that separates it: OR Royalties is the only name in the group with more of its cash flow in one asset than any peer has in three — a genuinely tier-1 asset, but one that caps how far its 197-interest count can be read as diversification.

Triple Flag Precious Metals is fourth by market cap at US$6.2 billion — a whisker behind OR Royalties — on 113,237 GEOs and 242 interests, 36 of them producing, per its single-name analysis . It leads every per-dollar row in Table 1 — 18,264 GEOs, 5.81 producing interests and 39.03 total interests per US$1 billion of market capitalisation, and the lowest enterprise value per ounce at US$56,519 — and trades on the cheapest cash-flow multiple in the group at 19.8×, against a 93% cash margin that is second only to OR Royalties’. Its guided 2030 outlook of 150,000–160,000 GEOs implies +37%. The structural fact that separates it: Triple Flag is the only company in the group with a controlling shareholder, whose ~64.8% stake and board-nomination rights make it a listed company with a private-equity governance structure rather than a widely held float.

2.2 Production

Figure 1. Gold-equivalent ounces, absolute and per dollar of market value

Figure data: Table 1, this analysis. The two series carry different units, so each is scaled to its own maximum — bar lengths compare within a series, not across the two, and every bar prints its true value. Rows are in the post’s market-cap order, which is also the absolute-ounce order. The per-dollar series is computed at the 11 Aug share price and moves with the price. Royal Gold’s ounce count is derived as revenue ÷ average gold price rather than company-reported, and Wheaton’s is ounces produced on the company’s own price assumptions (Table 9).

The two series very nearly invert the group, and that is the section’s first finding. Wheaton produces 689,864 ounces — 8.5 times OR Royalties’ 80,775 — yet on a per-dollar basis it sits dead last of five at 11,091 ounces per US$1 billion of market value. Triple Flag leads the per-dollar read at 18,264, 63% ahead of Wheaton’s 11,091, and Royal Gold is second at 15,228 despite being third on absolute scale. The two seniors are the two worst per-dollar names in the group; the two smallest are first and third. Whether that discount is deserved is Section 3’s question — but the direction is unambiguous, and it is the same direction the interest counts point in below.

2.3 Portfolio depth

Figure 2. Producing interests, absolute and per dollar of market value

Figure data: Table 1, this analysis. Each series is scaled to its own maximum; bar lengths compare within a series only, and every bar prints its true value. Rows are in the post’s market-cap order. Portfolio depth stands in for attributable reserves here, and the substitution is deliberate — three of the five publish no consolidated attributable reserve figure at all (Table 9), so a reserves-per-dollar row would exist for two companies and be blank for three. Each filer counts an “interest” on its own definition, which structurally favours royalty-weighted books.

Franco-Nevada leads the absolute count and Triple Flag the per-dollar one, and the gap between them is the widest in the post. Franco-Nevada’s 119 producing interests are 5.2 times Wheaton’s 23, but per US$1 billion of market value it buys 2.58 against Triple Flag’s 5.81 — and Wheaton’s 0.37 is sixteen times fewer producing interests per dollar than Triple Flag’s, the single widest per-dollar spread anywhere in this comparison. The ranking flip is total: on the absolute series the order runs Franco-Nevada, Royal Gold, Triple Flag, Wheaton, OR Royalties; on the per-dollar series it runs Triple Flag, Royal Gold, OR Royalties, Franco-Nevada, Wheaton. Only Royal Gold holds its place. The honest caveat is that a count is not a size — one Salobo stream is worth more than fifty exploration royalties — which is exactly why this row sits beside the ounce row rather than instead of it.

2.4 Cash margin and portfolio quality

A note on why this section is not a cost comparison. For an operating miner, unit cost is the dimension that separates the good from the marginal. For a royalty company it is structurally ~80–90% by design and discriminates almost nothing — the scorecard’s own royalty convention, applied in all five underlying analyses, says as much and scores the dimension on margin durability instead. The construction restated: cash margin = 1 − (cost of sales excluding depletion) ÷ FY2025 revenue, group basis, no interest, no corporate overhead, no depletion. Applied identically, it produces an eleven-point spread across the five — and that spread is almost entirely a description of business model, not of quality.

Figure 3. FY2025 cash margin

Figure data: Table 1, this analysis. Bars are scaled from zero against the highest value in the set, which is why they are almost the same length — the near-identical bars are the finding, not a rendering problem. Franco-Nevada’s ~89% is derived per gold-equivalent ounce from its own disclosure as reported in the Royal Gold analysis, because Franco-Nevada’s own analysis publishes a 74.3% figure that is a GAAP operating margin — after general and administrative expense and depletion — and is a different object that is not used here. Wheaton’s ~86% is a per-ounce figure rather than a revenue-denominator one; on a strict revenue basis it is closer to ~84.5%. Both deviations are in Table 9.

The margin ranking is an almost perfect inverse of the stream share of each book. OR Royalties tops the table at 96.7% on a book that is 64% royalties by revenue — and a royalty carries essentially no cost of sales at all, since the operator simply pays a percentage of what it sells. Wheaton sits last at ~86% because it is effectively a pure streamer: every ounce it receives costs it a contractual per-ounce payment, from US$433 at Salobo to 20% of spot at Antamina. Royal Gold’s ~87% sits beside it on a book that is 67% streams by revenue. Triple Flag at 93% and Franco-Nevada at ~89% fall exactly where their mixes put them. Read as a quality signal, this column would rank the smallest company in the group first and the largest last; read correctly, it says only that a royalty is a cheaper instrument to own than a stream, which every one of the five already knew when it chose its mix.

What the margin column does not capture is what the ounce actually costs to buy. The enterprise-value-per-ounce row in Table 1 is the better read of price paid for flow: Triple Flag at US$56,519 and Royal Gold at US$68,000 against Wheaton’s US$93,642 and Franco-Nevada’s US$87,651 — a 66% spread between the cheapest and dearest ounce in the group, from a margin column that spans eleven points and ranks the two nearly opposite. Where the margin does matter is durability, and durability is a counterparty question, not an arithmetic one. Wheaton’s fixed per-ounce payments widen automatically as gold rises and cannot be renegotiated; OR Royalties’ percentage royalties scale with the operator’s realized price but expose it to the operator’s decisions about what to mine. Neither is better; they fail differently, and only the second is visible in this column.

2.5 The three metrics side by side

Figure 4. Where each company sits on all three metrics

Figure data: Table 1, this analysis. Shading is ranked within each column separately, never across the grid — the three metrics carry different units, so a level 9 means “the highest value in this column,” not a fixed number. Rows are in the post’s market-cap order. Every cell is disclosed by all five companies; there is no n/d in this grid.

Triple Flag leads two of the three columns and OR Royalties the third — and the two largest companies in the group lead none. That is the sharpest form of the pattern running through this whole section. Wheaton is last on all three columns; Franco-Nevada is second-last on two and mid-table on the third. Royal Gold is the most consistent name in the grid, second on both per-dollar columns without leading either, and last but one on margin. Leading a per-dollar column is a statement about that column and nothing more — the verdict is Section 5’s job — but a reader who assumed the seniors would win on scale-adjusted measures should note that they lose on every one of them.

The peers sort into three shapes, not five, and the thing that separates them is instrument mix. One pure streamer (Wheaton): fixed per-ounce payments, the lowest margin, the most concentrated book at ~68% in three assets, and the only genuine single-transaction risk appetite in the group. Two royalty-weighted diversifiers (Franco-Nevada, OR Royalties): percentage-of-revenue interests, the two highest margins after Triple Flag, and the two extremes of concentration — Franco-Nevada the least concentrated name here at ~42% in three, OR Royalties the second-most at ~65%, from books built the same way at a 7-to-1 size difference. Two mixed-model acquirers (Royal Gold, Triple Flag): both roughly half to two-thirds stream by revenue, both re-scaled inside the last twelve months by a single large deal — Sandstorm and Kansanshi in one case, Ravenswood and Orogen in the other — and both carrying an unproven integration inside their value read.

Carry three facts into Section 3. The group runs 10 to 1 on market capitalisation and 8.5 to 1 on ounces, but inverts to 9 to 1 the other way on interest count. Published growth to 2030 runs from +13% to +74%, and the fastest-growing name is the largest one, which is not what a maturing-franchise story would predict. And three of the five publish no consolidated attributable reserve figure at all — Royal Gold and OR Royalties say so explicitly as non-operators, Triple Flag publishes only underlying 100%-basis reserves it does not own — so the duration read every producer comparison in this series relies on is simply not available here, and Section 4’s reserves dimension is scored on cornerstone mine lives instead.

2.6 Balance sheets and capital returns

Two of the five carry net cash, two carry modest net debt, and one carries the group’s only dated refinancing event.

Table 2. Balance sheet, credit and capital returns

Source: each company’s FY2025 annual filing and most recent disclosed results, as analysed in the five underlying posts linked in Section 6.1. Net debt and enterprise value are already in Table 1 and are not repeated as separate rows here. Leverage is on each company’s own reported basis and the bases differ, so the “net debt ÷ FY2025 operating cash flow” row is this comparison’s own single-construction alternative, computed identically for all five from Table 1. All five are effectively free-cash-flow machines: a royalty company carries no sustaining capex, so free cash flow tracks operating cash flow almost exactly and every one of the five funds its dividend several times over — the real “capital intensity” is discretionary M&A, captured in the equity-issuance row, not a capex line. One net-debt figure remains an estimate: Triple Flag’s ~US$0.2 bn is its own analysis’s estimate of a post-Ravenswood position; Wheaton’s ~US$2.40 bn, an estimate at the July window, is now confirmed in the H1 2026 results. No public credit rating was identified for any of the five; only Triple Flag’s analysis states the absence explicitly.

Figure 5. Net debt against a year of cash flow

Figure data: Table 2, this analysis. Computed identically for all five as net debt divided by FY2025 operating cash flow from Table 1, rather than on each company’s own reported leverage basis. Triple Flag’s bar rests on an estimated net-debt figure (Table 2); Wheaton’s is now confirmed in H1 2026.

The whole group would repay its net debt out of eighteen months of cash flow, and two of them are owed money. That is unusual enough to state plainly: not one of these five carries leverage that a producer comparison would consider material, and the widest position in the group — Wheaton’s 1.26× — is the direct result of a single deal that added roughly 70,000 ounces a year of production and was funded without issuing a share. Stress-tested at the low end of Section 3’s ladder — gold at the US$3,000 rung — the read barely changes: cash flow falls, but with no cost base to erode and no covenant near breach, the worst case is a slower dividend increase, not a solvency question. The dividend-record row discriminates far more than the leverage row does. Royal Gold’s 25 consecutive annual increases and Franco-Nevada’s 19 are records built across two full commodity cycles; Wheaton’s three-year streak and Triple Flag’s four increases since 2021 are records that have not yet been tested by a falling gold price. OR Royalties sits between them with 45 consecutive quarterly payments and the group’s only meaningful buyback year relative to its size.

The equity-issuance row is where the capital-allocation dimension is actually earned. Three of the five funded a transformational deal in the last eighteen months. Wheaton paid US$4.3 billion for BHP’s Antamina silver interest and Franco-Nevada deployed ~US$2.2 billion across Western Limb, Côté Gold and Porcupine — neither issued a share. Royal Gold paid for Sandstorm and Horizon with 18.6 million shares, roughly 22% of its post-deal count, and Triple Flag issued 5.63 million for Orogen but funded the US$440 million Ravenswood stream entirely from cash and its facility. Each route is defensible and each has a cost: the two that paid cash now carry the group’s largest and third-largest net-debt positions, and the one that paid paper diluted its holders to buy scale it could not otherwise reach.

One row belongs here that a net-debt figure never captures. None of the five carries preferred stock or a subsidiary minority interest — a genuine structural similarity worth stating. The one claim that does rank ahead of the common is Wheaton’s US$1.5 billion two-year term loan, maturing in 2028, drawn to part-fund Antamina; at 27% of the group’s total net debt it is not a solvency question, but it is a dated refinancing event that no peer carries.

2.7 Hedging and price-risk exposure

All five are structurally unhedged on commodity price, by design and without exception. That row is unanimous and therefore discriminates nothing — the streaming and royalty model exists to give shareholders undiluted leverage to the metal, and every one of these companies says so in its own filings. What differs is which metal, and what non-commodity exposure sits alongside it.

Table 3. Price-risk position

Source: each company’s FY2025 annual filing derivative and market-risk disclosures, as analysed in the five underlying posts linked in Section 6.1. Metal mixes are not all on the same denominator — Wheaton’s, Franco-Nevada’s and Royal Gold’s are revenue shares, OR Royalties’ and Triple Flag’s are gold-equivalent-ounce shares (Table 9). Franco-Nevada does not publish a gold-versus-silver split within its precious-metals segment, so its silver weighting is not stated. Coverage percentages are not compared, because none of the five hedges volume.

Silver weighting is the real price-risk differentiator, and it splits the group two-to-two with one unknown. Triple Flag at 36% of ounces, Wheaton at 36% of revenue and OR Royalties at 30.5% of ounces carry two to three times Royal Gold’s 12%. Silver has historically been the more volatile of the two metals in both directions, so those three names offer more torque and more drawdown for the same move in the precious-metals complex — a difference that matters more here than in any producer comparison, because none of these companies has a cost base to absorb it.

Two exposures are unique to a single company each. Franco-Nevada is the only name with a segment on a different price cycle entirely — 11.2% of revenue from oil and gas royalties across the Marcellus, the Weyburn Unit, SCOOP/STACK, Haynesville and the Permian, which will not move with gold and may move against it. And Royal Gold is the only one with a floating-rate exposure large enough to name, having averaged US$409 million outstanding at 6.1% through FY2025; Franco-Nevada’s zero-debt position removes the same risk outright, and the other three carry facilities drawn modestly or not at all.

Concentration is the price risk none of the five hedges and all of them disclose. OR Royalties’ ~39.5% in Canadian Malartic and Wheaton’s ~45% in Salobo are the two largest single-asset exposures in the group, and both sit with an investment-grade counterparty on a long-life asset — Agnico Eagle and Vale respectively. Franco-Nevada’s estimated ~17% top interest is less than half either figure. The named risk most likely to break each thesis, drawn from each company’s own register: for Wheaton, an operational disruption at Salobo; for Franco-Nevada, the dated contractual step-downs at Candelaria in 2027 and Antapaccay in 2028; for Royal Gold, the Sandstorm integration failing to earn its keep; for OR Royalties, Canadian Malartic; for Triple Flag, the Cerro Lindo stream stepping from 65% to 25%, which began in the second quarter of 2026. Four of those five are dated, disclosed and already in motion.

3. Asset value

3.1 What the market pays

The primary yardstick here is portfolio price to net asset value, and for the first time in this comparison it is fully comparable across all five. Every one of the five underlying analyses now builds a top-down portfolio NAV on the same shared US$4,000 base rung of the fixed gold grid, at a 5% discount rate, and every one publishes the resulting NAV per share — so a single P/NAV column is computable on one construction, which the earlier iteration of this post could not do when only four names built a NAV and each on its own deck. Each NAV is a deliberately conservative floor: it credits the booked producing book and nothing of the guided growth, the development pipeline or the exploration tail, which is exactly why every one of the five trades at a premium to it (the sector band is ~1.3×–2.5×). The trailing cash-flow multiple is carried as the supporting relative read, in that order of confidence.

Table 4. Value against the yardstick

Source: Section 7 of each of the five underlying posts (Section 6.1), all at the 11 Aug 2026 close — Wheaton US$136.97, Franco-Nevada US$238.65, Royal Gold US$233.00, OR Royalties US$33.53, Triple Flag US$29.90. The five NAVs are now on one common price rung (US$4,000) and one discount rate (5%), but not one common build — Royal Gold’s is a three-tranche discounted cash flow on disclosed cornerstone lives, the other four are top-down sum-of-the-parts or portfolio-cash-flow capitalisations (Table 9) — so P/NAV is comparable to a first order but the underlying constructions differ in rigour. Every NAV is a conservative floor that credits no growth beyond the producing book. The blended fair value is each post’s own three-method weighting (NAV × target P/NAV, P/CF at a justified multiple, dividend yield-support), which is what each “value read” is measured against; struck at the ~US$4,370 spot rather than the US$4,000 base, all three fair-valued names tip modestly cheaper. Every P/NAV and value read is a ratio of a dated price to a modelled value and moves with both.

Figure 6. Price to portfolio NAV, cheapest first

Figure data: Table 4, this analysis, at the 11 Aug close. Bars scale to the dearest name (Franco-Nevada, 2.78×); the dashed marker is 1.0× parity, at 1.0 ÷ 2.78 of the scale, the same denominator every bar length uses. No bar reaches the parity line — every one of the five trades above its own floor NAV, which is the normal shape for a royalty book and the subject of Section 3.2. P/NAV is price ÷ the US$4,000-rung NAV/share; all five NAVs are conservative floors on different builds (Table 9).

The five span 1.80× to 2.78× portfolio NAV — and the ordering is a near-perfect size ranking in reverse. The two seniors are the two dearest on the yardstick, the two mid-tiers and Royal Gold the three cheapest. OR Royalties is the cheapest name in the group at 1.80× its floor NAV, 35% below Franco-Nevada’s 2.78×, and it earns that on a book that also carries the highest cash margin and the second-fastest growth — while Triple Flag, cheapest of all on cash flow at 19.8×, sits third on P/NAV at 2.02×. That the two “cheap” lenses point at two different names — OR on NAV, Triple Flag on cash flow — is itself a finding, and it is why Section 5 reads the two together rather than picking one.

The trailing cash-flow multiple flatters nobody equally, and it flatters the smaller names. All five multiples are trailing FY2025 cash flow, struck against a market cap that has re-rated with gold — Wheaton’s, Franco-Nevada’s and Royal Gold’s each closed a transformational deal after the FY2025 period end (Antamina on 1 April, the Sandstorm and Kansanshi annualisation across 2026, Ravenswood on 24 June), so their forward multiples compress by an amount this trailing column cannot quantify. So the P/CF ranking is right about today and structurally conservative about three of the five names, in the same direction — which is the opposite of the P/NAV column, where every name is measured against the same forward-blind floor. The two yardsticks agree on the seniors being dear and disagree on which mid-tier is cheapest, and the reconciliation is the denominator: a floor NAV credits no growth to anyone, while a trailing multiple silently rewards the three names whose FY2025 cash flow understates their forward run-rate.

3.2 Price sensitivity

All five underlying analyses now publish a NAV-per-share grid across the same fixed gold ladder — the five US$500 rungs from US$3,000 to US$5,000 of blog-valuation.md Table 3b — at a 5% discount rate, so this section builds the one figure a single-name post cannot: the whole peer group’s P/NAV against one shared deck, column-for-column with each company’s own grid. For the first time all five are in the grid — OR Royalties, which published no NAV in the prior iteration, now builds one, so no name is excluded. Because every company is on the identical price columns, a reader can carry a number straight across from any single-name analysis.

Table 5. Price to portfolio NAV across the shared gold ladder, all five companies

Source: each company’s own NAV/share sensitivity grid at the 5% base-case discount-rate row, from the five underlying posts linked in Section 6.1; P/NAV = the 11 Aug price ÷ the NAV/share at each rung. The gold columns are identical for all five — the fixed Table 3b grid, US$3,000–US$5,000 in US$500 rungs, so the base rung is US$4,000 (~9% below the ~US$4,370 spot) and the outer columns are a symmetric ±25% test. Rows ordered by base-case P/NAV, ascending — not the post’s market-cap order. Every NAV is a conservative floor on the build named in Table 4 (Table 9).

Figure 7. Price to portfolio NAV against the shared gold ladder

Figure data: Table 5, this analysis, at the 11 Aug close. Shading ranks cheapness within this figure’s own 1.45×–3.98× range — a higher level means a lower (cheaper) P/NAV, so the “cheap” corner lights up; the base-case US$4,000 column is outlined, one cell per row. Rows are ordered by base-case P/NAV, ascending. Every gold column is the same absolute price for all five (the fixed Table 3b grid).

Not one of the twenty-five cells in this grid falls to 1.0×, and that is the finding. No company in this group trades at or below its own conservative floor NAV at any rung of the shared ladder — not at gold twenty-five per cent below the base deck, where P/NAV is highest, and not at twenty-five per cent above it, where the cheapest name, OR Royalties, still sits at 1.45×. The crossover read is therefore uniform and it is “never”: none of the five reaches parity with its own floor at any gold price on the ladder, which in a producer comparison would be an alarming result and here is close to a definition of the sector. The reason is structural, not a verdict on price: every one of these NAVs is a floor built on booked reserves and today’s cash flow, and every one of these companies is guiding to growth that sits entirely outside it — so the persistent 1.3×–2.8× premium is not five independent mispricings, it is what the market pays for the pipeline a reserves-only NAV is definitionally unable to see.

The ranking is almost perfectly stable, with a single rank flip at the top. The three cheaper names hold their order — OR Royalties, then Royal Gold, then Triple Flag — from the harshest downside to the highest upside, converging toward the ~1.45×–1.50× region at the US$5,000 rung as their gold leverage compounds. The only flip is between the two seniors: Franco-Nevada is fractionally cheaper than Wheaton at the US$3,000 rung (3.75× vs 3.98×), and Wheaton is fractionally cheaper from US$4,000 up (2.75× vs 2.78×), because Wheaton’s steeper stream leverage lifts its NAV faster as gold rises. The spread also narrows sharply as gold climbs — the gap between the dearest and cheapest row runs 2.18 turns at the US$3,000 rung and 0.76 at the US$5,000 rung — the operating-leverage story in one line: a name already at 2.8× its floor gains proportionally less from the same price move than one at 1.8×.

4. Rating Scoreboard

All five are scored on the Metal Pilot Company Scorecard: the same nine dimensions, the same 1–5 anchors, the same band definitions. The compared companies are the peer set for this post, and in this case that is very nearly what the underlying analyses already used. Four of the five benchmarked their subject against essentially this exact group; the two deviations are Royal Gold’s, which omitted Triple Flag, and OR Royalties’, which added Metalla Royalty & Streaming, a micro-cap at a fortieth of the group’s smallest revenue. Both were re-checked and neither changes a star. Adding Triple Flag to Royal Gold’s set does not lower its asset-quality score, since Triple Flag is smaller than Royal Gold on every scale metric in Table 1; and removing Metalla from OR Royalties’ set would if anything have raised its comparison bar, not lowered it, and its own rationale already benchmarks directly against Triple Flag and the seniors. No relative star is re-scored in this post.

Table 6. The nine-dimension scorecard, five companies

All five are the royalty/streaming archetype, so all five carry the same weighting from blog-company.md Table 2: asset/portfolio quality, growth and optionality, capital allocation and management are the dominant dimensions at 15% each; the remaining five carry base weight at 8% each. No dimension is not-applicable for this archetype. Rows are ordered by weight descending, not by the scorecard’s own dimension order. The dimension numbers are not printed: reordering by weight puts them out of sequence, and a column reading 1, 4, 6, 7, 2, 3, 5, 8, 9 reads as an error rather than as a deliberate ordering.

Source: the Metal Pilot Company Scorecard, as applied in the five underlying analyses linked in Section 6.1, where every star is substantiated with a sourced figure. This table is the scorecard’s only artifact — it already prints a numeral per company per dimension in a grid, so a shaded heat-map of the same values would add one colour channel and repeat all forty-five numbers. Composites are Σ(weight × score), reproducible on sight from the rows above: Franco-Nevada 0.15×(5+4+5+5) + 0.08×(4+4+5+4+5) = 2.85 + 1.76 = 4.61 → 4.6/5; OR Royalties 0.15×(3+5+4+4) + 0.08×(4+4+5+4+3) = 2.40 + 1.60 = 4.00 → 4.0/5. The band mapping is ≥4.25 High quality, 3.5–4.24 Solid, 2.5–3.49 Average, below 2.5 speculative. All five composites recompute exactly to the figures their own posts publish — 4.53, 4.61, 4.23, 4.00 and 4.38 — so no rating is re-rated here and no reconciliation delta exists.

Two of the nine rows are unanimous, and both should be flagged rather than read. Cost position and margins scores exactly 4 for all five companies, across a published cash-margin spread from ~86% to 96.7% — precisely the outcome blog-company.md Table 2 predicts for this archetype, where a near-maximal margin is a design feature rather than an achievement. Jurisdiction and geopolitics is also unanimous at 4, across five genuinely different footprints: Triple Flag’s nine countries, Wheaton’s eighteen, OR Royalties’ twenty-plus, Franco-Nevada’s mix of Chile and a shuttered Panamanian mine, Royal Gold’s Canada-and-Nevada core with a Zambian and Turkish tail. Five different geographies, one score. Together those two rows carry 16% of the weighting and do no discriminating work at all — a reader who wants a sharper ranking should read the other seven rows and treat 0.64 of every composite here as a constant.

Asset quality is a pure size ranking and growth is very nearly its inverse — and they carry equal weight. The asset-quality row reads 5, 5, 4, 3, 4 down the market-cap order — a near-perfect scale ranking, broken only by OR Royalties’ 3 sitting one rung below the similarly-sized Triple Flag’s 4 (the concentration penalty, below). The growth row then reads 5, 4, 5, 5, 5 — the only company scoring below 5 is Franco-Nevada, the second-largest, on a guided +13% to 2030 against the group’s +37% to +74% elsewhere. The two heaviest dimensions in the rubric therefore pull in opposite directions across the size ranking, which is most of why the composites land inside a 0.6-point band despite a 10-to-1 spread in company size.

Environmental, social and governance scoring is the widest row in the table and the only one where two mid-tiers split. Wheaton, Franco-Nevada and Triple Flag all score 5; Royal Gold and OR Royalties both score 3, a two-point gap and the largest anywhere on the board. Triple Flag earns its 5 on the strongest independent validation in this whole series — ranked first of 104 companies in the precious-metals industry by Sustainalytics, with a third consecutive MSCI AA — while Royal Gold’s 3 reflects a framework-level disclosure its own analysis calls lighter than the largest peers’, and OR Royalties’ the same at smaller scale. For a group of non-operators whose real environmental exposure sits with their counterparties, this row is measuring disclosure quality rather than footprint, and it should be read that way.

The single outlier score on the board is OR Royalties’ 3 on asset quality — the only sub-4 anywhere on a 15%-weight dimension, and worth 0.15 of composite against a 4. It is earned honestly: OR Royalties has a genuine tier-1 cornerstone in Canadian Malartic, but its 80,775 ounces now sit below Triple Flag’s 113,237, a reversal from prior years, and Table 1’s ~65% top-three concentration is the second-highest in the group. That one cell is most of the gap between OR Royalties and Triple Flag, the name it is now effectively tied with on market cap.

The ranking survives a different weighting completely — every rank holds. Recomputed as a plain unweighted mean of all nine dimensions, the order is Franco-Nevada 4.56, Wheaton 4.44, Triple Flag 4.33, Royal Gold 4.22, OR Royalties 4.00 — position for position identical to the archetype-weighted order of 4.61, 4.53, 4.38, 4.23 and 4.00. The closest margin is Triple Flag against Royal Gold for third, which narrows from 0.15 points under the archetype weighting to 0.11 under equal weights without crossing; what compresses it is the base-weight block, since lifting those five dimensions from 8% to 11.1% rewards Triple Flag’s 5 on ESG and penalises Royal Gold’s 3. The order is a read on the companies, not an artifact of which dimensions this archetype decided to weight heavily.

5. Summary

The scorecard answers “how good is this company?” The valuation work in each analysis answers “how is it priced today?” Reading both together is what turns five ratings into something a reader can use — and this group produces a strikingly clean answer: quality is priced in a straight line.

Table 7. Quality × Value, and what each verdict means

Source: the five underlying analyses linked in Section 6.1. Every P/NAV is struck at the 11 Aug close — Wheaton US$136.97, Franco-Nevada US$238.65, Royal Gold US$233.00, OR Royalties US$33.53, Triple Flag US$29.90 — against the shared US$4,000-rung NAV, and all five move with the price. Quality is the archetype-weighted composite from Table 6, to one decimal; all five match the figures their own posts publish. The value reads are each underlying post’s own five-point conclusion on its blended fair value, not a mechanical read off P/NAV — Royal Gold’s “full end” qualifier, for instance, reflects a base-case blend just −8.4% below the price that flips to “modestly overvalued” on a one-notch change in either target multiple. The NAVs vary in estimate content and build (Table 9); rows ordered by quality, descending.

Figure 8. Quality × Value matrix

Figure data: Table 7, this analysis, at the 11 Aug close. The shaded band is the cheaper-than-median half of the value axis (P/NAV below the group median of 2.02×); the horizontal marker is the 4.25 High-quality threshold, which Franco-Nevada, Wheaton and Triple Flag clear and the other two do not. The y-axis runs 4.0 to 4.6 rather than the series’ usual full 1–5 range — all five composites fall inside a 0.6-point band, and a 1–5 axis would compress them into the top eighth of the plot and destroy exactly the resolution this post type exists to provide (Section 6.1). Every point prints its own value, so nothing is read off the axis. Every dot is on the same footing; the dominance screen below is an arithmetic read of these same two coordinates, not a second class of company.

The five points fall on a rising diagonal, and that near-straight line is the finding. Rank the group by quality — Franco-Nevada, Wheaton, Triple Flag, Royal Gold, OR Royalties — and you have ranked it by P/NAV in the identical order: 2.78×, 2.75×, 2.02×, 1.93×, 1.80×, monotonically down. There is no cheap high-quality name in the top-left “bargain” corner and no expensive low-quality name in the bottom-right “trap” corner; both of those quadrants are empty, and that is the market pricing this sector with unusual internal consistency. The two seniors sit top-right, high quality and dear enough to read as modestly overvalued on the conservative base deck; the two mid-tiers and Royal Gold sit lower-left, a step cheaper on NAV and reading fairly valued — with all three tipping modestly undervalued once the ~US$4,370 spot is credited over the US$4,000 base.

No name is dominated, and that is the second finding — the sharpest kind of “no clear winner.” A company is dominated when another in the group beats it on both quality and price at once, which would make it strictly the worse choice. Here nothing is dominated: because P/NAV rises in lockstep with quality, every name is either the highest-quality option at its price or the cheapest option at its quality level. Franco-Nevada is the best quality but the dearest; OR Royalties is the cheapest but the lowest-rated; and each of the three names between them is, by construction, the best available trade-off at its own point on the line. The peers sit on a clean quality-price frontier, and the choice among them is therefore purely a preference question — how much quality you are willing to pay for per turn of NAV — not an arithmetic one this post can settle. That result also survives the alternative weighting: under an equal-weighted composite the quality order is unchanged (Section 4), so the frontier holds there too.

What the frontier does not do is bless the top of it. Franco-Nevada and Wheaton are the two names priced for what they already are, and both read modestly overvalued on the conservative base — neither needs a re-rating thesis, and both carry a visible objection in Table 1 beside them. Franco-Nevada asks to be owned for nineteen consecutive dividend increases, zero debt through its largest investment year, and the lowest concentration in the group — against the slowest published growth here at +13%, the fewest ounces per dollar at 11,236, and the richest P/NAV in the set at 2.78×. Wheaton asks to be owned for the group’s fastest growth at +74% and a US$4.3 billion acquisition funded without a share of dilution — against the most concentrated book, the lowest cash margin, sixteen times fewer producing interests per dollar than Triple Flag, and a stream structure with no cost-side cushion if gold reverts. Both are high-quality compounders at a full price, which is a different proposition from a cheap one, and the matrix is built to say exactly that.

The three fair-valued names are the re-rating candidates, and they are cheap for three unrelated reasons. Triple Flag is the cheapest name in the group on cash flow at 19.8× and third-cheapest on NAV, and its own analysis names three structural reasons the discount may persist rather than close: a controlling shareholder at ~64.8% that keeps the float small and the governance private-equity-shaped, no public credit rating alone among five unrated names, and a legacy stream mid-step-down at Cerro Lindo from a 65% to a 25% silver rate. Royal Gold’s discount is an integration question with a date on it — a fifth of its book was bought with paper one quarter before the FY2025 close, so its trailing multiple captures a single stub quarter of it and compresses on arithmetic alone if the volumes simply annualise. OR Royalties’ is a concentration question — ~39.5% of its ounces ride on one Québec mine, and its own analysis notes an unusually wide analyst range as evidence the Street cannot agree how much of the +58% 2030 outlook is already priced. None of the three is an asset-quality problem; each is a different bet on a different catalyst landing.

Table 8. Analyst consensus against this analysis

Source: market-data providers as compiled in the five underlying posts (Section 6.1), all as of the 11 Aug close; implied upside is against the price in the same row. This refresh runs the cross-check on all five companies — the earlier iteration could only fill two — so the disagreement is now visible group-wide. Rows ordered by implied upside, descending.

Every one of the five consensus targets sits above the current price, and every one sits above this analysis’s read — the disagreement is structural and it is about the deck, not company quality. The Street’s targets imply +16% to +44%; this analysis reads two names modestly overvalued and three fairly valued on the base. The entire gap is the gold assumption: every one of these analyses strikes its base on the conservative US$4,000 grid rung, ~9% below the ~US$4,370 spot and further below the US$4,500–4,750 decks the sell-side is working from, and a royalty’s NAV and cash flow both carry that difference at close to one-for-one operating leverage. A reader who believes spot gold holds and rises should read toward the bull column in every one of the five posts — and toward the Street — where the same names migrate from fair-to-full back toward cheap. The consensus and this analysis do not disagree about which companies are good; they disagree about what gold does next, and they say so in the open.

None of this is a ranking to buy the top of. The frontier is arithmetic on two measured axes, not a view on which company suits any particular reader, and a clean frontier with nothing dominated is precisely the result that cannot be turned into a single pick — it says the choice is a preference between quality and price, and it leaves that choice to the reader. Every value read here is dated to a single 11 August price against a gold price that has moved twice in the last twelve months by more than the entire spread of this table, and the whole group re-rates together when gold moves. To run the same nine dimensions, portfolio metrics, cash margins and valuation multiples across the whole royalty and streaming universe rather than these five, explore Metal Pilot.

6. Sources, methodology & disclaimer

6.1 Sources, methodology & data vintage

This post is a synthesis of five single-company analyses published on this blog, each built from that company’s fiscal-2025 annual filing and most recent disclosed results. It contains no primary research of its own; its contribution is putting all five on one construction. The underlying analyses, with every figure sourced and every scorecard star substantiated, are:

• Wheaton Precious Metals (WPM) — Stock Analysis 2026 [4.5] — recomputed here at 4.5/5
• Franco-Nevada (FNV) — Stock Analysis 2026 [4.6] — recomputed here at 4.6/5
• Royal Gold (RGLD) — Stock Analysis 2026 [4.2] — recomputed here at 4.2/5
• OR Royalties (OR) — Stock Analysis 2026 [4.0] — recomputed here at 4.0/5
• Triple Flag Precious Metals (TFPM) — Stock Analysis 2026 [4.4] — recomputed here at 4.4/5

For the ranked buy-list that orders these same five on one objective production metric, see Best Gold Royalty Stocks by GEOs — this comparison is its quality-and-value companion, not a competitor for the same keyword. For the market backdrop these companies operate in — the group runs 64%–89% gold with a 12%–36% silver weighting — see the Gold — A Complete Market Guide . The sibling comparisons in this series are North American Gas Producers Compared and North American Oil Producers Compared . Market data, share prices, market capitalisations, cash-flow figures and analyst consensus are as compiled in the five underlying posts, all at the 11 Aug 2026 close. Spot gold of ~US$4,370/oz and silver of ~US$60/oz are as of early August 2026, per those posts.

Every composite reconciles, and there is no printed-arithmetic defect to flag this time. All five ratings were recomputed from their own published dimension scores on the royalty/streaming archetype weighting and every one matched: 4.53, 4.61, 4.23, 4.00 and 4.38. No re-rate is opened on any source post. A prior iteration of this comparison flagged an arithmetic-string typo in the Triple Flag post; that post now prints the weighted-average string correctly (0.15×5 + 0.15×5 + 0.15×4 + 0.15×4 + … = 4.38), so the caveat is retired.

This is a dated artifact. Like the analyses it draws on, it carries market capitalisations, enterprise values and valuation multiples that go stale quickly — the deliberate deviation from this blog’s normal practice of keeping company posts free of point-in-time valuations. Every such figure is dated, and the whole post is refreshed when the underlying analyses are.

Table 9. Comparability ledger — every place a basis differs from this post’s construction

Source: this analysis, built while pulling the figures in Table 1 from the five underlying posts linked above. This ledger is the only place these basis differences are consolidated; Section 1 points to it before the reader meets a single figure, and every table and figure it qualifies cites it by name.

Methodology and its limits — nine choices, each with a cost. First, portfolio P/NAV as the primary value yardstick, now that all five publish a NAV on one shared rung — it buys the archetype’s intrinsic anchor computed identically for every name; it costs some comparability, because the five NAVs are conservative floors on four different builds (Table 9) and Royal Gold’s DCF is more rigorous than OR Royalties’ single capitalisation. Second, the trailing cash-flow multiple as the supporting read — it buys the metric the sector actually trades on, but it is trailing, so it structurally understates the three names that closed a transformational deal after their FY2025 period end. Third, portfolio depth as the stock metric in place of attributable reserves — it buys a row every company discloses; it costs the duration read, because a count is not a size and it favours royalty-weighted books. Fourth, gold-equivalent ounces as the canonical flow unit — the sector’s own convention, at the cost of precision, since for four of the five a GEO is revenue ÷ a gold price. Fifth, one cash-margin formula applied to all five, with two figures on a per-ounce denominator and flagged. Sixth, no FX anywhere — all five report in US dollars, the one comparison in this series with no currency assumption to defend. Seventh, one shared price deck and one price date — the fixed Table 3b gold grid at a single 11 Aug close, which is what makes P/NAV comparable at all and what the prior iteration lacked. Eighth, the royalty/streaming archetype weighting applied uniformly, since all five are the same archetype, every composite recomputed and reconciled. Ninth, the quality × value plot’s y-axis runs 4.0 to 4.6 rather than the series’ usual 1–5 — a full-range axis would compress five composites inside a 0.6-point band into the top eighth of the plot, destroying the discrimination this post type exists to provide; every point prints its own value, so nothing is read off the axis, and the deviation is recorded here rather than left implicit. No figure was skipped for want of a component: every graphic here is an HTML/CSS component from the library, and no cross-company question in this post routed to a chart type the component set cannot express (rule S19).

Data as of the 11 August 2026 close; refreshed when the underlying analyses are refreshed. One timing note remains. All five underlying analyses are struck at the same 11 Aug close, so the seven-day price spread the prior iteration carried is gone, and Wheaton’s post-Antamina balance sheet (~US$2.4bn net debt) and Franco-Nevada’s Q2 results — both estimates or pending at the July window — are now confirmed. The one figure still an estimate is Triple Flag’s ~US$0.2bn post-Ravenswood net debt, its own analysis’s estimate pending a fuller disclosure. Provenance: Wheaton Precious Metals Corp. — Annual Report — 2025; Franco-Nevada Corporation — Annual Information Form — 2025; Royal Gold, Inc. — 10-K Filing — 2025; OR Royalties Inc. — Annual Information Form / Annual Report — 2025; Triple Flag Precious Metals Corp. — Annual Information Form — 2025.

6.2 Disclaimer & disclosure

This comparison is for informational purposes only and is not investment advice; do your own research or consult a licensed advisor. It is a point-in-time snapshot as of the 11 August 2026 close — share prices, multiples, analyst targets and the valuation reads all move, and portfolio, production and net-asset-value figures are estimates as of the stated dates. Net asset values here are prepared under stated modelling conventions on booked reserves and do not represent market value; one of the five net-debt figures is an author estimate. The ratings and two-axis verdicts are analytical reads of quality and price, not personal buy or sell instructions. A ranking is not a recommendation to buy the top of it, a clean frontier is not a shopping list, and a “fairly valued” read is not a buy signal — the frontier here has no dominated name to avoid and no single name it can crown. This report was prepared with AI assistance; figures were sourced from company filings and market data and reviewed, but readers should verify before acting. The author holds no position in any of the five companies as of the date of writing.