Barrick Gold Corp. (NYSE: ABX) and Agnico-Eagle Mines Ltd. (NYSE: AEM) both release earnings Wednesday. Besides cranking out gold, that's about all these two companies have in common. Taken together, they're a study in contrasts; the yin and yang of gold miners.

That's made manifest in the companies' ability to surprise analysts. We postulated the surprise potential for these two companies in our recent earnings preview ("Will Gold Stock Earnings Surprise Anyone?"). Based upon Barrick's recent tendency to outperform expectations and Agnico-Eagle's propensity to lag analysts' estimates, we adjusted the then-current consensus earnings figures upward for Barrick and downward for Agnico-Eagle.

Last week, the Street thought Barrick would deliver 36 cents a share in first-quarter earnings. Our model says 37 cents is more likely. Analysts pegged Agnico-Eagle's EPS at 10 cents; we're looking for 9 cents.

So, why does one company gladden our hearts and the other disappoint? It's all in the numbers, really.

Barrick Gold Corp.

Barrick's moniker as a gold corporation is well-earned. By far, its revenue exposure is heavily skewed toward the yellow metal. Fully 84% of fiscal 2008 revenues came from gold sales; the remaining 16% is attributed to copper.

Sales, at $7.91 billion, rose 25% year over year. The rise was accompanied by a nearly equal uptick in costs. Well, nearly equal percentagewise. In actual dollars, the company increased top-line income by $849 million.

Big offsets lurked further below the line, though. Like a whopping $707 million jump in impairment charges. After filtering out these charges, the company's income from continuing operations fell 2% to $1.45 billion.

Fiscal 2008 saw Barrick's average cash cost for gold leap nearly $100 an ounce to $443.

Gold production is heaviest in North America, amounting to 40% of the company's output. Cheap South American production, which makes up 28% of Barrick's total, provides some offset. South American costs, at $251 per ounce, are less than half the costs of producing gold from the company's Australian and African ventures.

Factoring in amortization and ancillary expense, Barrick turned out gold at a total cost of $558 an ounce last year. With an average price of $870 realized from gold sales, the world market provided a boon, expanding the company's margin by $143 an ounce from 2007's level.

On the copper side, Barrick's smart fourth-quarter contracting helped the company maintain an average realized price of $3.09 a pound in 2008. Good thing, too, since total production costs jumped 38 cents to $1.52 a pound.

In fiscal 2008, Barrick's balance sheet took on more debt, but still improved overall. Total liabilities increased 32% to $2.09 billion, while the company's asset base grew by a more-than-offsetting $2.21 billion. Retained earnings jumped $429 million to $2.26 billion.

Agnico-Eagle Mines

Since our earnings preview last week, the consensus earnings expectations for Agnico-Eagle's first quarter dropped a penny to match our 9-cents-a-share projection.

The company's year-over-year revenue fell 16.8% to $380.7 million in 2008, as production costs notched up 12.5% to $186.9 million. It's hard to get much more out of the company's financial statements.

The problem with Agnico-Eagle is transparency. There just isn't much. We're challenged to learn of the company's costs to produce its plethora of metals - gold, silver, copper and zinc - much less the price obtained at their eventual sale. Using the same average spot price acknowledged by Barrick, we can infer that Agnico-Eagle cranked out 41.5% more gold value in 2008 than the year before, but saw its potential copper sales drop 9.7%.

More detective work is required to parse these runes. Agnico-Eagle's opacity may be one of the reasons for analysts' wavering earnings projections. In a nutshell, Barrick's financial statements are to Agnico-Eagle's as glass is to granite.

What we can say is that proportionally, Barrick has three times the exposure to copper than Agnico-Eagle. The fact that Barrick's numbers were better than Agnico-Eagle's is a testament to hedging. Barrick's correlation to copper, proxied by the iPath Dow Jones-AIG Copper ETN (NYSE Arca: JJC), is in fact lower than Agnico-Eagle's. Barrick's correlation to gold, too, is stronger, reflecting the company's bi-metal concentration.

Barrick Gold Corp. (ABX) Vs. Agnico-Eagle Mines (AEM)

Wednesday's earnings results will offer the first, but not the last, test of our earnings momentum scorecard. Another eight constituents of the NYSE Arca Gold Miners Index await earnings over the next couple of weeks. Just like baseball, we have to keep in mind it's a long time ‘til the end of the season.