Gold, Silver and US Critical Minerals - Is the Second Wave Starting Now?

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The information contained in this communication is provided for general information purposes only and may relate to speculative investments. It does not constitute financial product advice, and has been prepared without taking into account your personal objectives, financial situation or needs. You should consider obtaining independent financial advice before making any investment decision.

Any forward-looking statements are uncertain and not a guaranteed outcome.

Can you feeeeeeel it?

While it's only been 8 wonderful days - it feels like the market is... back?

Global markets all ripping higher.

The ASX hitting new record highs.

Silver up ~12% in the last 7 days - silver stocks all up.

Gold up 8% in the last 7 days - gold stocks all up.

US Critical metals macro news just keeps rolling in and the theme keeps getting stronger.

US critical minerals stocks all up too.

And here’s what happened last night...

(small, ASX listed gold, silver and US critical minerals stocks haven't had a chance to respond to all this... yet)

Gold was up another 2.5%, Silver up another 3.5%.

Plus a few hours ago:

US president Donald Trump and other high ranking US govt officials gathered major mining company bosses at the White House to make a bunch of announcements on how to:

“Reclaim America’s rightful place as the minerals superpower of the world”

(sources)

Here is what Trump said to more than 200 mining, educators, investors and fellow politicians at a roundtable at the State Department aimed at supporting the industry:

"We're reclaiming America's rightful place as the minerals superpower of the world,"

"Critical minerals are the raw materials of American strength that power everything from advanced weaponry to automobiles, and we want these essential products to be mined, refined and made right here in the USA,"

(watch the full 36 minutes of US President Donal Trump this morning talking about the importance and urgency of rebuilding USA mining here)

Gold, silver and US critical minerals stocks ran hard in the first half of 2025, but have cooled over the last 7 months.

The first “hype fueled” run is always fun, but it's the SECOND and bigger run when real world events (government policy, capital and demand) start catching up to the hype...

(like we saw in the 2017/8 battery metals speculative hype run before the earth shattering 2020/22 second run when it became more real, and the soft period in between)

That second run is what we are holding on for.

And we think it's starting now...

(well, 8 days ago from July 31st)

8 days in and I feel like my “the small end of market will rip starting in July” prediction could actually come true.

(yes 97% of July was terrible BUT a small stock bull run starting from July 31st still counts as July)

It's only a week long run so far, but hey, it's a good start.

PLUS the ASX market (and our small gold silver and US critical minerals stocks) have yet to respond to all the positive macro news overnight - so there should beleast another days worth of green coming on Monday.

So it’s all “feeling” pretty good.

But how about some hard data?

Last week I said I should substantiate my “feelings and observations” with some actual data:

So here is my first attempt:

With the point being to show how macro theme sentiment drives small stocks, and show how sentiment has turned positive over the last 8 days, after being negative for months.

(and to help prove that my “the markets will roar back starting in July” call could still come good...)

So first, here are the “baskets of stocks” we own in each theme: silver, gold and US critical minerals:

Now for each theme - Here’s the running daily, average share price rise/fall (equally weighted) across each thematic basket since Jan 1st 2025.

The point is to roughly show how a set of stocks in a theme performed over time, so we get a rough idea of general sentiment of that theme over time.

(also note these are NOT our entry points and we are just using the stocks we are Invested in)

Great run up during 2025 (how's that US critical minerals sentiment on the green line?)

Every theme’s sentiment (ie share prices) started to fall together from around (surprise surprise) May 2026 - or you could argue even earlier around the end of January 2026.

First - let's cherry pick the good bit: June 2025 to January 2026 (the bit where all the lines are going up, happy days):

Pats on the back, “you really called those themes well”, “look at all these stocks going up”.

It wasn't to last.

Sentiment started to fall from January 2026 - gold came off, silver came off hard, US critical minerals speculative hype died down.

So the last ~7 months was a general down trend in sentiment and share prices on all three themes.

Now, let's take just the crappy part:

Ouch - a horror show.

BUT...

Over the last 8 days it looks like things have started to turn around across all three themes...

(cough cough remember my July market run prediction)

How's this from July 30th to yesterday (8 days):

A nice bounce off the bottom?

The start of the second wave?

Lets not get too excited just yet - it's only been a week.

We need this to keep going for at the very least a few more weeks before I can dubiously claim my “the run will start in July” medal on a technicality.

Here what it looks like zooming in from when the sentiment down trend started around January 2026, and the nice rebound from the last 8 days:

Anyway... Monday should be good (based on all last night's happenings) and then we watch and pray for it to keep going from there.

Hang on, let's say this second run DOES happen.

If small stocks just go up and down together based on theme sentiment what's the point of picking individual stocks?

The idea is to choose stocks that have the highest chance to deliver some big news in a window where the market is VERY interested in what they are doing = bigger than average share price rise.

Here is what the high falutin finance guys call it:

Beta is the return you get just from being exposed to the market (or a sector/commodity). It measures how much something moves relative to a benchmark.

If gold rises 8% and a gold stock rises 16% simply because gold stocks are leveraged to the gold price, that's beta, you don't need any skill to capture it, just exposure.

Alpha is the excess return above beta - the part attributable to skill, stock selection, or some kind of an edge.

If gold stocks as a group rose 16% but your pick rose 40% because you identified a company with a better deposit or upcoming catalyst, that extra ~24% is alpha.

A useful way to think about it with your portfolio: owning any silver producer this week was a beta trade on silver's 12% move - the tide lifted everyone.

Picking the microcap that re-rates 3x because of a drill result the market hadn't priced in OR because its share price had been overly smashed during the down turn - that's alpha.

So what happens when a stock thematic sentiment starts running? And all the stocks in that theme are going up?

(or in this case... three themes going up at once)

What we aim for during a theme run is to hold stocks that can “generate alpha” by announcing a material drill result (or other major progress) into a hot market.

(share price re-rates and company can go on to raise significant capital to progress their project, even while the theme pauses again)

If you have ever been in a stock, that is currently swirling inside an HOT macro theme, and they lob in significant positive announcements - like a massive drill hit for that hot, hot commodity...

*chefs kiss*

(but also remember that drilling is risky, stocks will go down if they announce bad drill results)

Here is a list of our gold, silver and US critical stocks that say they have a drill result announcement due in the coming weeks:

• Power Minerals (ASX: PNN) - assays from its rare earth project in Brazil. (following up one of the highest grade hits we have seen from any ASX small cap). (read our latest PNN article)
• American West Metals (ASX: AW1) - assays are pending from AW1’s indium project in the US (the single biggest indium JORC resource inside US borders). (read our latest AW1 article)
• Resolution Minerals (ASX:RML) - assays pending from gold-tungsten discovery in Idaho, USA - next to $4BN Perpetua Resources. (read our latest RML article)
• WA Gold (ASX:WAU) - Assays pending from drilling on its gold project next door to $1.5BN Minerals 260 (read our latest WAU article)
• Advance Metals (ASX:AVM) - assay results from its 22.4M ounce silver project in Mexico (we are following this one on a hole by hole basis after the recent copper hits from the project). (read our latest AVM article)
• Rapid Critical Metals (ASX: RCM) - RCM shouldn’t be too far away from drilling results on the discovery made last year. This time drilling is from east to west into that newly discovered structure - so we should know for sure IF RCM’s made a big new discovery or not with these results. (read our latest RCM article on that discovery)
• West Coast Silver (ASX:WCE) - WCE just finished drill testing underneath and around what was once Australia’s highest grade silver mine. Assays from that drilling are expected this month. WCE has a track record of putting out some seriously high grade results which the market usually responds well to when silver prices are up. (read our latest WCE article)
• Black Bear Minerals (ASX:BKB) - assay results from silver project in Texas, we could also get a surprise conversion of its 17.6M ounce silver equivalent foreign resource estimate into JORC status on this one. (read our latest BKB article)
• Sun Silver (ASX:SS1) - drilling right now at its ~539M ounce silver equivalent deposit in Nevada, USA. We already know the silver is there. The big surprise here could be antimony hits + a potential maiden antimony JORC resource estimate. (read our latest SS1 article)
  
• Investigator Silver (ASX: IVR) - IVR’s one of the more advanced stage silver Investments we have BUT they are doing infill drilling at the moment, so we could see those assays come out at arbitrary times. (read our latest IVR article)

Macro themes first run on hype, then go quiet for a while, then run again when the real world catches up to the hype?

So how to choose a theme that's going to run?

So you have a chance to hold a company that delivers a big result into a hot theme?

When we choose a theme to invest in, it usually has a real world set of events behind it that need time to unfold.

For example:

Gold: Western governments growing debt + wars + global power shift upending the worlds reserve currency = print fiat currency = gold goes up.

Silver: Gold’s cousin that follows gold - but also has industrial uses in AI, robotics, energy, advanced weapons and there is a growing multi-year supply deficit.

US critical minerals: USA suddenly realised that they have no domestic supply of the critical minerals needed to build AI, robotics and advanced weapons - and their main adversary China dominates all the supply = emergency rebuild of USA domestic mining.

All sound plausible and exciting enough at the pub.

If the theme concept makes sense to most people, then the speculative run will have more participants.

But even if it sounds good, geopolitical situations, global currency events, robot and AI buildouts, fiat currency depreciation don't just happen in a few weeks.

The problem is the real world moves slower than a punter mashing a buy button after they hear a cool sounding macro investment theme.

Reminds me a bit of the 2017-18 battery metals FIRST run on the CONCEPT of electric vehicle adoption.

Back in 2017 everyone had been driving petrol cars forever, but then this concept of eclectic vehicles replacing petrol cars started being talked about.

A big global theme that everyone can understand.

“Wait a second, if everyone will buy an electric car, each one needs a battery, batteries need lithium, copper, nickel and cobalt, so we need more mines - buy battery metals companies!”

Speculators pile in too fast before the real world has caught up.

In 2017-18 the market bought the EV revolution and battery metals companies before anyone was actually buying EVs.

Without real world backing yet, the macro theme hype tapered off...

~2 years later, when EV sales actually doubled in the real world and government policies to drive adoption started being announced, the SECOND run started, and it was 10x bigger.

We think H2 2025's critical minerals and precious metals runs were the "2018 moment."

Speculators got ahead of reality

The 2020-22 moment is still coming.

As the real world events that were always going to take longer than the early birds thought, are finally starting to play out.

Finishing off with an example, here is a summary of what had to happen in the real world to drive the SECOND and bigger battery metals bull run during 2020, 2021 and 2022.

(thanks AI, made this task way quicker than manually researching it):

Government policy to drive demand and supply:

Actual adoption of EV’s growing rapidly:

Car makers doing deals to buy battery metals direct from mining companies (and even companies just planning to build a mine):

And battery plants being planned and built:

Throw in some ultra low interest rates and mass government stimulus (during covid) and all the ingredients were there for a major speculative bull run.

So all the 2017 to 2018 folks were a bit early.

And we had a 18 to 24 month quiet period before this second wave in 2020.

Lets see if something similar plays for gold, silver and US critical minerals.

We are getting some solid “real world” news supporting precious metals and US critical minerals.

Including this morning Donald Trump hosting mining leaders at the White House and announcing $ billions in deals to get the US domestic mining industry rebuilt.

(side note: Critical minerals for US national security and maintaining global dominance seems a bit more urgent than battery metals for commercial EV adoption)

AND just inside the last few weeks everything seems to be accelerating with a lot more urgency:

• On the ~19th of July - Trump tells America to go make magnets in an interview A speech urging defence contractors and "brilliant minds" to pivot into manufacturing high-performance permanent magnets. This is a direct quote: "I'll Tell You How To Make Money: Do Magnets"
  
• 20th July - EXECUTIVE ORDER #1 - “Securing America's Defense Supply Chains and Ensuring Domestic Acquisition of Critical Materials”.
  
• And there's a hard deadline bolted onto it: 1 January 2027. A ban on foreign imports of critical minerals for US military use. That's five months away.
  
• 24th July - US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said China's rare earth exports still fall short of its May summit commitments.
  
• 27th July - Reuters and Bloomberg report that the administration is weighing extending Chinese rare earth magnet access PAST its own 1 Jan 2027 cutoff. Why? Because Pentagon suppliers including MP Materials, USA Rare Earth and Lynas have admitted domestic processing and magnet capacity won't be ready in time
  
• 29th July - The US Army awarded Lockheed Martin US$5.86BN - the largest-ever PAC-3 Patriot deal - as part of a US$59BN push to "urgently" build thousands more missiles.
  
• 29 July. The US fighter fleet is already below Congress's 1,145 primary aircraft floor, and shrinks to about 3,000 total jets by 2029. (source)
  
• 30th July - EXECUTIVE ORDER #2 - Trump restricts EXPORTS of recovered and recycled critical minerals - e-waste, black mass and magnets - under Defense Production Act authority.
  
• And TODAY, Trump sits down with the mining CEOs. Reuters reported he's expected at a State Department hosted roundtable with top mining executives today, Friday 7 August. The Department of Energy is expected to host something too. (source)

For precious metals, a few days ago the US intervened to prop up the Japanese Yen.

“The US Treasury is printing dollars and buying US Treasury bonds from the Japanese. So the Japanese are in effect dumping US Treasuries but the US is managing the dump by printing dollars and absorbing the bonds. It’s clever - it’s also pretty desperate. “ (source)

Fiat Currencies in trouble, printing = good for precious metals.

Last night it was also reported that China’s central bank is accelerating is gold buying (source)

And over the last 10 days we have seen these key real world events in precious metals:

• 31 July - 3 Aug. The Japanese yen hitting a 40-year low, forcing Japan and the US into their first joint currency intervention since 2011.
  
• 3 Aug. South Korea's central bank going on record saying it will start buying gold for the first time in 13 years.
  
• 4 Aug. Analysis showed five of the seven G7 nations - all but Germany and Canada - now spend more on debt interest payments per year than on their entire military.
  
• 4 Aug. The US Treasury lifting its Q3 borrowing estimate to US$739BN. That's $68BN more than planned just three months ago.
  
• 4 Aug. Central banks buying a record 289 tonnes of gold in Q2, up 62% year on year.
  
• 4-5 Aug. Weak US jobs data cutting the chances of a September Fed rate hike = good for gold and silver.
  
• And TODAY: China’s central bank increasing its gold reserves “by most since October 2023” (source)

Lets see if this run in sentiment and real world catch keeps going next week for gold silver and US critical minerals.

See you next week, and have a great weekend

Next Investors

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