Is Nova Minerals Corp (NVA) a good stock to buy?
Two or more of our tested checks point the wrong way. When the survival check is one of them, no price makes that acceptable.
What each rating means, in numbers
Business quality — Weak. Passes 2 of the 7 health checks we can measure — things like making a profit, turning it into cash, and not piling on debt. Across 131,000 company-quarters the weakest scorers went on to fail at 5.4% against 1.4% for the strongest, in every era and all twelve sectors.
How wild is the price? — Very wild. The share price swings about 90% in a typical year, which puts it in the most volatile fifth. Out of every 100 companies that swung like this, about 8.6 went bankrupt within the year. Across the three periods we tested that ran from 3.7% to 11.5%.
What "tested" means here, and why there is no score out of 100
Tested means the read was measured against what actually happened afterwards, on a history that keeps the companies that were later delisted, using only figures that had been filed on the day they are used. Survival was ranked on companies that really did fail. What an owner keeps was tested across the universe from 2011 to 2025.
The full record of everything we have tested is on the research pages.
Which benchmark. Over the period we tested, the median listed company returned +5.8% a year while the S&P 500 returned about +13.9% — the index is weighted by size and was carried by a handful of enormous winners. So "beats the index" and "beats the other companies you could have bought" are different questions. Where a read says it picks better companies, it means the second one. None of these gets you an index fund's return, and we would rather say that than imply otherwise.
The quality read is the strongest thing we have tested: 131,000 company-quarters across 5,300 companies, where the weakest scorers went on to fail at 5.4% against 1.4% for the strongest, holding in every era and all twelve sectors. It still says less likely to break, not likely to beat the market — every band in that study lost to the index at the median, because the median listed company does.
Each read is shown on its own rather than merged into a single score, so you can see which part is strong and which is weak instead of taking an average on trust.
▾ What goes into the smart-money reading
Contributions (weight × component score) sum to the total. This near-term score now includes fundamental health (leverage, FCF trend). See the Financial Health section for the full balance-sheet read.
Chance the S&P 500 falls 10% or more in the next three months.
Counted from every day since 2006. Says nothing about NVA — see the board for how it is measured.
📍 Where to start on this page, and what to look at first
How to read NVA (cyclical commodity producer)
A miner or energy producer earns whatever the commodity price is, so a single DCF swings with the cycle. Judge it against peers and where you think the commodity cycle is heading.
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EV/Sales peer comparison ↓
How the price compares to similar producers is more meaningful than a through-cycle DCF.
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2
Interactive calculator (test cycle assumptions) ↓
Flex the growth/discount inputs to see how sensitive the value is to where we are in the cycle.
Standard DCF doesn't fit NVA well — but that's expected for this kind of business. The EV/Sales Peer Comparison below uses the metrics actually used by analysts who value gold & silver mining. Reverse DCF + Football Field also work as cross-checks.
Miners, metals and energy producers earn whatever the commodity price is at the time. A discounted-cash-flow model leans on recent cash flow, so it swings with the cycle: the result is dominated by where we are in the commodity cycle rather than by durable business economics.
For this business type, lean on the EV/Sales peer comparison and Reverse-DCF below (how today's price compares to similar producers and what growth it implies), and weigh the commodity-price outlook. Treat the DCF number as a rough mid-cycle reference, not a buy/sell trigger.
How does NVA stack up against its closest peers?
We take the 8 same- or closely-related-industry companies closest in size to NVA and check what investors are paying for each dollar of their revenue (or profits). If NVA is much more expensive on the same yardstick, that's a red flag — unless you have a specific reason it deserves a premium. For a leveraged business, FCF yield (in the table) is usually more reliable than EV/Sales, because revenue multiples ignore differences in margins and debt.
▾ What's "EV / Sales" in plain English?
EV (Enterprise Value) = market cap + total debt − cash. It's "what you'd pay to buy the entire company outright" — you pay the market cap to shareholders and take over their debt, but you keep their cash. EV is fairer than market cap alone because it includes the debt the new owner inherits.
EV / Sales = EV ÷ annual revenue. So "2.5×" means investors pay $2.50 of enterprise value per $1 of yearly sales. Higher = market is paying more per dollar of sales (usually because they expect future growth or fat margins).
p25 / median / p75 are the 25th, 50th (middle), and 75th percentile of the peers' multiples. Half the peers fall between p25 and p75. The median (p50) is the typical peer — that's the benchmark we compare to.
Bold middle number = median peer. Half the peers trade above it, half below. Computed over 8 same-industry peers; implausible multiples excluded.
⚠️ Important caveat: peer multiples only work if the peers are genuinely comparable. Always check the peer list below — if the auto-picker grabbed micro-caps or unrelated businesses, the comparison is noise. A medical-device giant priced against tiny biotech startups won't produce a useful signal.
▾ View peer list (8)
| Ticker | Company | Industry | Mcap | EV/Sales | EV/GP | EV/EBIT | FCF Yield |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PLG | PLATINUM GROUP METALS LTD | Gold & Silver Mining | $153M | — | — | — | 0.7% |
| GLDG | GoldMining Inc. | Gold & Silver Mining | $216M | — | — | — | — |
| GORO | GOLD RESOURCE CORP | Gold & Silver Mining | $225M | 2.3x | 8.4x | — | 3.0% |
| FURY | FURY GOLD MINES LTD | Gold & Silver Mining | $110M | — | — | — | — |
| TII | Titan Mining Corp | Gold & Silver Mining | $292M | 4.1x | — | — | 0.0% |
| USGO | U.S. GoldMining Inc. | Gold & Silver Mining | $102M | — | — | — | 0.1% |
| SBMT | SILVER BOW MINING CORP. | Gold & Silver Mining | $295M | — | — | — | — |
| VOXR | VOX ROYALTY CORP. | Gold & Silver Mining | $312M | 25.9x | 31.0x | — | 1.2% |
Quality & solvency checks
Cheap stocks can be cheap for a reason. These screens warn when a low valuation comes paired with structural fragility.
What these health ratings mean, in numbers
Business quality — Weak. Passes 2 of the 7 health checks we can measure — making a profit, turning it into cash, not piling on debt, not issuing shares. Across 131,000 company-quarters the weakest scorers went on to fail at 5.4% within a year against 1.4% for the strongest, and that held in every era and all twelve sectors. It says "less likely to break", not "likely to beat the market".
Why it matters: Cheap-looking stocks (low P/E or P/B) often have low Z-scores because the market knows the company is dying. Z-score warns you before you fall into a value trap.
Reference: > 3.0 = safe zone · 1.81–3.0 = grey zone · < 1.81 = distress zone
Full explanation →
The Z-score needs working capital, retained earnings, EBIT, sales and total assets from the latest balance sheet, and at least one of those isn't reported in machine-readable form here — common for foreign private issuers. We leave it blank rather than compute a distress verdict from an estimated input. It doesn't affect the reported figures in the financial tables below.
▾ The checks — what passed, what didn't (and what we couldn't measure)
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✗ Positive net incomeNet income -$25.6M in FY2026.Why this matters: Does the company actually earn a profit? Sustained losses eventually force it to raise money — diluting you — or take on debt.
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✗ Positive operating cash flowOperating cash flow -$8.8M (was -$7.7M the prior year).Why this matters: Profit can be an accounting figure; cash from running the business is harder to fake. Negative operating cash flow means the core business consumes cash and must be funded externally.
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✓ Cash flow backs up reported profitOperating cash flow -$8.8M vs net income -$25.6M.
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✓ Return on assets improvingReturn on assets -55.4% vs -108.6% a year ago.
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✗ Debt load (vs assets)Total debt is 2.8% of assets vs 0.0% a year ago ($1.3M of $46.2M assets).Why this matters: Rising debt relative to assets means more risk and more cash going to interest instead of shareholders. Falling debt is a sign of strengthening.
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✗ Short-term liquidity (current ratio)Current ratio 3.13x vs 3.52x a year ago.Why this matters: The current ratio compares assets it can turn to cash within a year against bills due within a year. Below 1.0 means it may struggle to cover near-term obligations.
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✗ Share count (dilution)Share count rose 49.0% (24.0M → 35.7M year-over-year).Why this matters: Issuing lots of new shares splits the pie into more pieces, shrinking your slice. Stable or falling share count protects existing owners.
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· Pricing power (gross margin) (n/a — data not reported; not scored)
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· Sales per asset (asset turnover) (n/a — data not reported; not scored)
Missing data is never counted as a pass or a fail — it's shown as n/a and excluded from the denominator. Each check compares the company against its own prior year.
Plain English: the company holds about $27M in cash and is burning roughly $9M/year in operations. At that pace, the cash lasts 3.0 yrs before it must raise capital (diluting shareholders), take on debt, or cut spending.
Assumes constant burn and ignores financing/asset sales. For pre-profit biotech and growth companies, this matters more than a DCF — a great drug pipeline is worthless if they run out of money before approval.
The market may be paying up for the potential future value of its gold and silver mining projects, which are not yet generating positive operating cash flow. The biggest risk to our model's base assumptions is that operating cash flow continues to be NEGATIVE, rather than stabilizing or growing at the modeled rate.
As of 12 days ago
Anatomy of a share
What you're buying per share. Bars are at the same scale so you can see the relative size of revenue, costs, cash flow, and debt — not just read them in a table.
What's free cash flow / what do these mean?
Revenue per share — how much the business earns from customers, divided by the number of shares outstanding. Top of the income statement.
Earnings per share — profit left after operating costs, interest, and taxes, per share. Two versions appear on this page and are not interchangeable: GAAP diluted EPS uses the company's weighted-average diluted share count during the reporting period (this is the "earnings" in "price-to-earnings"); net income per current share divides annual net income by today's share count. They differ whenever the share count has changed.
Owner-earnings free cash flow per share — the cash the business produces for shareholders. Savng's owner-earnings FCF subtracts capital expenditures and stock-based compensation from operating cash flow (SBC is a real dilution cost even though it's non-cash). This is deliberately more conservative than "standard" FCF, which subtracts only capital expenditures — so our figure is lower than the headline FCF you'll see elsewhere. FCF funds dividends, buybacks, debt repayment, and acquisitions; a company can report positive earnings yet negative FCF.
Debt per share — total interest-bearing borrowings divided by shares. High debt-per-share next to thin FCF-per-share is a fragility signal.
What you actually need to decide
Every stock price is a disagreement. Here's the single thing that must go right for the bulls, the single thing that breaks the thesis, and the concrete signposts to watch so you can update your view as real results arrive.
- Updates on resource estimates and feasibility studies
- Progress towards mine development and permitting
- Any shift towards positive operating cash flow
The trend, in plain numbers (FY2025 → FY2026, latest reported)
Straight from the financial statements — no model, no opinion. For a small or unprofitable company, the direction of these numbers usually tells you more than any single valuation.
- Free cash flow is negative at -$19.5M — the cash burn widened vs last year.
- Still unprofitable at -$25.6M — loss widening.
Nothing was clearly improving year-over-year.
Management & Leadership
Christopher Gerteisen serves as the Chief Executive Officer, with Ashlie Thorburn as the Chief Financial Officer. Other key officers include Craig Bentley as Director of Finance & Compl. and Ian Craig Pamensky as Secretary. The company is focused on mineral exploration and development.
Chief Executive Officer
Chief Financial Officer
What They Make
Nova Minerals Corp is engaged in the exploration and development of gold and silver mining projects. The company aims to extract and sell precious metals, with revenue ultimately coming from buyers of these commodities.
End Markets
Revenue Drivers
Why Is It Priced Like This?
Why Customers Pay
What we use instead: earnings (P/E, EV/EBIT), book value (P/B) — computed from the figures this company does report, shown in the sections below. Those numbers are unaffected by the missing cash-flow data.
Despite operating cash flow being NEGATIVE latest and net income being NEGATIVE latest, the market may be assigning value to the potential for future discoveries and successful mine development, which is not in the model.
Business Model & Valuation
How They Make Money
The company funds itself through equity raises and has $26.8 million in cash and short-term investments, with total debt at $1.3 million. It does not currently pay dividends or engage in significant buybacks.
Normalized FCF
Cyclical/commodity sector (Gold & Silver Mining) with negative current FCF: normalized FCF uses multi-year median to smooth through the cycle.
Show advanced inputs
| Sector Default | 5.0% |
| Sector Default Source | Basic Materials sector default |
| Best Estimate | 5.0% |
| Method | sector_default |
| Growth Basis | total |
What this model does NOT do: this is a consolidated owner-earnings cash-flow model. Standalone segment assumptions: none. It does not project production volumes, realized commodity prices and unit cash costs independently; their combined effect is embedded in the historical revenue and cash-flow trend the model extrapolates. The calculator above can only approximate a segment's impact through the single consolidated growth rate — it cannot model any one line separately. For a true segment-level view, build a separate model from the company's segment disclosures.
Maturity & Competitive Position
Moat Signals
Net income has been NEGATIVE latest, and operating cash flow has been NEGATIVE latest.
Geography & Markets
Geographic Risks
Market Signals
These are timing signals, not value signals — they describe the stock's recent price behavior, not what the business is worth. Use them for the "the thesis looks good, but is now the moment?" question. Each tile below explains what it's saying.
Why it matters: Short-term contrarian indicator. Extreme readings often precede mean reversion, though not always.
Reference: 30–70 normal · >70 overbought · <30 oversold
Full explanation → (14)45.9NeutralMomentum is balanced — neither overbought nor oversold.
Why it matters: When the fast line crosses above the slow line, short-term momentum is turning up; below, turning down. A timing cue, not a value signal.
Reference: Line above signal = bullish momentum · below = bearish
Full explanation →BearishLine below signalThe fast trend is below the slow trend — short-term momentum is currently downward.
Technicals describe price, not the business. A great company can have a "bearish" tape (a buying chance) and a weak one a "bullish" tape (a trap). Pair these with the valuation and health sections above.
QUALITY
Data Quality & Risk Flags (10 notes — click to expand/collapse)
Guardrail Notes (10)
- Cyclical sector: using normalized cash flow (median OCF minus estimated maintenance capex).
- Median OCF is negative — OCF-based normalization not applicable.
- Limited cash flow history (2yr) — normalized FCF is less reliable.
- Normalized OCF-capex was negative. Falling back to median raw FCF.
- No positive normalized FCF. Using EPS as proxy.
- Model implies no positive equity value under these assumptions. Valuation is speculative/low-confidence.
- Illiquidity discount 15% applied (small/micro-cap — harder to exit, demand a margin).
- Foreign private issuer (files 20-F): the share count is the ordinary-share count from the filing and the ADS-to-ordinary ratio for this listing is not on file. Market cap and per-share figures assume 1 ADS = 1 ordinary share and may be off by the true ratio.
- Cyclical commodity producer: price is far above our modelled value. FCF-DCF structurally understates capital-intensive miners/energy — use the EV/Sales peer lens and the commodity-price outlook, not this single number.
- Extreme valuation gap (P/IV withheld — see the note above): result may be dominated by model assumptions, share count issues, or sector-specific dynamics. Treat as low confidence.
FINANCIALS
Financial Statements (5-year tables — click to expand)
From Nova Minerals Corp's SEC filings (EDGAR).
Income (5yr)
| Year | Revenue | Net Income | EPS |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | — | -25.6M | $-0.72 |
| 2025 | — | -11.8M | $-0.49 |
| 2024 | — | — | $0.00 |
| 2023 | — | — | $0.00 |
| 2022 | — | — | $0.00 |
Cash Flow (5yr)
| Year | Operating CF | CapEx | − SBC | Free Cash Flow |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | -8.8M | 2.7M | 8.0M | -19.5M |
| 2025 | -7.7M | 141,169 | 606,537 | -8.5M |
How we define FCF: operating cash flow − capital expenditure − stock-based compensation (owner-earnings basis — SBC is a real cost to shareholders even though it's non-cash). Latest year: -8.8M − 2.7M − 8.0M (stock-based comp) = -19.5M. This is the same owner-earnings FCF definition the valuation model uses, though the DCF's starting value is a mid-cycle estimate (median operating cash flow less estimated maintenance capex and stock compensation — by design NOT the table's FCF, which deducts every year's full capex), not this single year.
Balance Sheet
| Total Assets | 46.2M |
| Total Liabilities | 22.6M |
| Equity | 22.9M |
| Total Debt | 1.3M |
Similar companies worth a look
Same sector and industry, similar fundamentals shape. Verify everything yourself — this list is computed mechanically and does not reflect our judgment about whether any of these are a good investment.
The questions people ask about NVA
Is Nova Minerals Corp (NVA) a good stock to buy?
We do not publish a single fair value for Nova Minerals Corp, because one number would not be reliable for this business (the page explains why). Judge it on what today's price assumes, its financial-health checks and what insiders are doing, all shown here from SEC filings. This is educational research from SEC filings, not investment advice.
Is Nova Minerals Corp (NVA) overvalued?
A single fair-value number is not reliable for Nova Minerals Corp, so we do not call it overvalued or undervalued. The page shows what growth today's price assumes and how the company's finances look instead. This is educational research from SEC filings, not investment advice.
What growth is priced into NVA?
Working backwards from today's price, the market expects NVA's cash flow per share to grow by roughly 100.0% a year over the next five years. Compare that with the company's actual record on this page.
Where do these numbers come from?
From Nova Minerals Corp's own SEC filings (10-K and 10-Q), Form 4 insider filings and daily market prices. Every figure on the page links to how it was calculated, and the model's weak spots are listed next to its results.