Our 2026 outlook and catalysts we are watching for in the near term

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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.

Happy New Year!

The last three of these “first few days of January” emails we have sent in recent years have been, frankly, pretty grim reading.

Desperately trying to find hope for the year ahead - after trudging through a barren wasteland that was the year just gone.

Not this time.

In the lead up to Christmas AND the few trading days between Christmas and New Year AND the first trading session of 2026 yesterday...

There was a LOT of green and a LOT of volume in our Portfolio and broader small cap watchlist.

Which means there are plenty of people out there itching to be in the markets.

(as opposed to being so despondent with paper losses and terrible sentiment that they prefer to be away from the unending flow of horrors emanating from their screen, like we all were at the start of 2023, 2024 and 2025).

The last time we saw such an active “holiday break” was from 2020 going into 2021... during the great lithium and battery metals boom... spurred along by near zero interest rates, and COVID-era speculative investment mania.

This time activity was in precious metals (gold and silver) names, and a few of the US metals names.

Last week's relatively high levels of trading volumes over what is traditionally meant to be the “quiet time” in the markets bodes very well for the (at least) first few months of 2026.

Combined with the four glorious months that we saw from July to October, when a refreshing wind of positive sentiment drove nearly all small cap stock prices up, up and then up some more.

(before it came back off in November)

During these months of positivity, most small companies that had previously been pretty broke took the chance to raise plenty of money to finally “do stuff”...

(stuff like drilling, mining studies, clinical trials, tech sales etc)

“Stuff” which they have likely been busy “doing” since their cap raises, and should be announcing the outcomes of their spending efforts in the first part of 2026.

And if they manage to successfully “do the thing”, the markets look to be in the mood to reward the news with buying.

So happy days in 2026 for small stocks?

The key risk that might stop the “party” is a correction in the big end of the markets which would likely be led by a crash in the US tech (AI) stocks.

A correction in the big end of the markets would suck money and risk appetite out of every part of the markets...

(except gold and silver, which go up when fear is at its peak)

We saw this article a couple of days ago about a survey of Wall Street analysts, where ALL of them are predicting a stock market rally in 2026:

(source)

Of course, Wall Street analysts get things wrong all the time, so just because some fancy finance guys (who are probably incentivised to be bullish) are optimistic, it's not a guarantee there will be a stock market rally again in 2026.

Stocks going up or down is not just driven by their business fundamentals, it’s driven by the emotions of market participants - fear and greed.

So if nobody thinks a stock market crash is going to happen, it probably won’t happen...

Right?

We’ll see...

With Donald Trump’s well documented desire for the lowest of interest rates and his new Fed Chair pick incoming, could these optimistic Wall Street analysts be right?

(if the stock market is going to rally in 2026, why are gold and silver up so much...?)

We got it right... gold and silver best performers of 2025

At the start of 2023 we said we were bullish on gold and will be adding gold stocks.

At the start of 2024 we said we were bullish silver and started adding silver stocks.

(and basically haven’t shut up about silver since - look, it feels really good to be right)

In 2025... gold and silver were the best performing asset classes.

(it’s rare to get it this right in investing... so allow us this little victory lap)

So a big year for both gold and silver...

But we think the “gold and silver mania” hasn’t properly started yet...

Gold and silver stocks (especially in the development and exploration categories) have performed well, but we think will really start running once the broader market truly believes the price rises delivered by gold and silver are here to stay.

Looking at it over a few years, the gold price run is ahead of silver, and the silver run has just started and is playing catch up.

Gold producers and developers started running not after gold went up, but after gold traded sideways for a few months...

proving to the market that the gold price run up was NOT just a temporary spike...

The market started believing and capital started flowing into smaller, earlier stage gold stocks, pushing share prices up.

And then the gold price shot up again.

(source)

The past performance is not and should not be taken as an indication of future performance. Caution should be exercised in assessing past performance. This product, like all other financial products, is subject to market forces and unpredictable events that may adversely affect future performance.

The silver price just delivered its first proper run over the last ~6 months.

Silver hit new record highs and currently looks to be in “price discovery” mode.

(meaning no one knows where it might go, until it settles on a price range that the market thinks its worth)

While a few speculators (like us) have already jumped into silver stocks, as a result silver stocks prices have moved up...

The broader market and professional investors don’t generally buy into commodity price spikes, which can be temporary.

The market wants to see if the current silver price run is genuinely going to be sustained - essentially be higher for longer.

So either a bit of time trading between US$70 and US$80 will encourage the market to believe and more money to start moving into silver stocks.

OR silver spikes up again and we are back into price discovery mode, with stomach churning 5% daily moves up and down...

(Or it could also just go down... nobody knows)

Either way, we are watching closely over the coming weeks (and secretly hoping it just rips up to $100 kicking off the “silver mania” we have positioned our Portfolio for)

(source)

The past performance is not and should not be taken as an indication of future performance. Caution should be exercised in assessing past performance. This product, like all other financial products, is subject to market forces and unpredictable events that may adversely affect future performance.

Babe, wake up, the new Michael Oliver interview is out...

If you want to listen to somebody who actually knows what they are talking about when it comes to analysing gold and silver price movements, check out the new Michael Oliver video out on New Year’s Day.

“Michael Oliver started his career in 1975 in E.F. Hutton’s International Commodity Division, where he learned futures and technical analysis under COMEX chairman David Johnston, before developing his own momentum‐based approach in the 1980s after finding conventional charting unreliable. He famously anticipated the 1987 crash using these structural momentum tools.”

This is the guy who correctly called the “triple top silver breakout at $36” in early 2025, and he reckons silver is going to US$160 to US$200 in early 2026, and even higher after that.

He is also very bearish on the financial markets in general, so if you vomited a bit into your mouth like we did at “every Wall Street Analyst thinking the stock market will go up in 2026”, you will probably also enjoy Michael’s negative take.

(watch the video)

This guy has been spot on so far, and his silver price predictions are way higher than we are personally hoping for, so it’s a fun listen if you are long on silver.

And if even a fraction of what he is predicting comes true, then it will be game on for small to medium silver stocks...

Of course, he is also just “some guy” and he could be wrong this time around - markets are unpredictable.

How did we do in 2025? Here is what we said we would do at the start of last year

(click the link below the image if it’s hard to read)

(source)

We said we would add 8 to 12 new stocks in 2025.

We added 13 stocks... slightly more than planned mainly due to the “Silver September” flurry of new silver stocks we added when we thought the silver price was about to really go on a run.

(and it did)

So we mainly added gold and silver stocks throughout 2025, one tech stock (ROC now up over 400%) and one biotech (ILA now up nearly 200%) and US critical metal stocks with application in defence (our most recent addition is VKA)

So we stuck to the above 2025 plan that we laid out at the start of the year, so far so good:

(source - nextinvestors.com)

The past performance is not and should not be taken as an indication of future performance. Caution should be exercised in assessing past performance. This product, like all other financial products, is subject to market forces and unpredictable events that may adversely affect future performance.

Stay tuned for our 2026 plan...

In the meantime, here is a list of potentially share price moving news that could be coming in the next couple of weeks.

Our catalyst “watchlist” for the next 4 weeks

• TTM now has under ~12 days of exclusivity left with its 9.9% shareholder $4.2BN Lingbao for a deal on its 3.1M ounce gold, 22M ounce silver Dynasty project in Ecuador.

We could see a deal announced at some point in the coming weeks. TTM’s latest communications were that Lingbao was preparing for a second site visit to look at infrastructure and mines in the area recently, so we wait to see what may come of this.

Nice to see more interest coming into the stock as the clock ticks on that exclusivity date... (Yesterday we saw major shareholder Tribeca has increased its position to 13.37% of the company - institutional buying is always good to see when M&A deals are being discussed).

(source)

The past performance is not and should not be taken as an indication of future performance. Caution should be exercised in assessing past performance. This product, like all other financial products, is subject to market forces and unpredictable events that may adversely affect future performance.

• ILA recently made an additional submission to the FDA regarding the Animal Rule process for its Marburg disease drug (the Animal Rule could lead to accelerated FDA approvals) and explicitly said it is expecting feedback “by 2 January 2026”.

2nd January, US time would mean today... So we could see an announcement from ILA on Monday at the open.

• RML has assays pending from holes to the south of its gold discovery in the US. If those holes come in similar to the results we have been seeing so far, it would extend the known strike of the deposit from ~600m to ~3km.

600m alone is already very big for a gold deposit. 3km would be giant...

• HAR has assays due any day now from its project in Senegal. The last set of assays took its share price from 6c to ~21c. HAR is also currently drilling its US gold project, following up old hits that were ~3m at 100g/t+ gold.

Results similar to the previous round of drilling from Senegal OR visible gold/high grades from the US drilling could be a needle mover for HAR.

We saw a fair bit of buying in HAR last week - so the market may be starting to speculate that good results are on the way... (fingers crossed we see something positive here soon).

(source)

The past performance is not and should not be taken as an indication of future performance. Caution should be exercised in assessing past performance. This product, like all other financial products, is subject to market forces and unpredictable events that may adversely affect future performance.

• BKB was set to have drilled its fourth drillhole at Rebel Peak “targeting extensions”.

This is along strike from its shallow resource, where prior sampling returned grades much higher than this part of the resource at peak grades of ~16.6g/t.

BKB also recently started drilling its silver project in Texas - with the silver price running hard right now any results from that program could bring with it a fair bit of market interest.

• AVM could be having results from both drilling and resampling of old cores at its Yoquivo silver project in Mexico and a second drill rig began drilling at its Victorian gold project in early November, where visible gold was seen in prior drill cores.

AVM has assays pending from its silver project in Mexico AND is drilling with two rigs on its Victorian gold project - any news from either asset could be material catalysts for AVM (assuming the results are good).

• MTH has an updated JORC resource estimate due for its project in 2026. But we are particularly interested in those assays pending from Target 5 where sampling returned silver grades up to 4,520g/t.

Those assays pending from Target 5 could be big catalysts for MTH - especially with the silver price gapping up so fast right now.

• WCE finished an aircore drill program on its regional targets AND has diamond drilling results due inside the next few weeks.

The aircore drilling will be the first time WCE has gone looking for repeats of the Elizabeth Hill Mine (previously one of Australia's highest-grade silver mines). So we are really interested in seeing results from those holes (though they are due in Feb 2026).

Before that we could see results from those diamond holes being drilled next to the old Elizabeth Hill mine.

WCE raised $3.2M in the week before Christmas and New Years so look well funded going into the coming results.

• KAU could come out with an early report on its December quarterly gold production figures.

With the gold price trading where it was last quarter, we think gold producers in the market will be looking to put out numbers as soon as they can.

(an early report is always a good signal when it comes from the producers).

Then there are the stocks where there are no explicit timelines for catalysts but a big game changing deal could drop at any time - like it did with ROC recently.

One company in our Portfolio with a similar setup is ONE.

• ONE is another where one big deal could be material for the company’s revenue profile.

ONE’s sales pipeline is at the highest point it's ever been (>180 prospects, 48,000 endpoints) AND CEO James Fitter explicitly said “Several of the late-stage opportunities we’ve been pursuing are expected to close in the coming months, adding further new customer logos to our roster”. We follow ONE’s Linkedin page and have noticed some more client activity.

And finally there are the “US critical mineral government funding” catalyst stocks - these are the ones with exposure to US critical minerals and actively chasing non-dilutive funding:

• ION raised $4M a few months ago and said it would use the cash to “focus on e-waste recycling in the US, including a US-based e-waste recycling plant” AND also said...

... “The funds raised from the Placement also strengthen the Company’s balance sheet, important for US Government grant applications”.

• Then there are all of the critical minerals stocks that we would love to see win some sort of US government funding - RML, SS1, LKY, LSR and AW1.

Have a great weekend,

Next Investors