The 3 Themes Powering the 2025 Bull Run, and into 2026?

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We hope everyone is enjoying the buoyant market conditions.

And well done to those that “stuck it out” the last few years while the small end of the market was devoid of all hope.

Three themes are driving the bull market conditions in small stocks right now.

US critical minerals, gold and silver.

Our gut feel is that the bull market in these themes will continue into 2026.

(for whatever a gut feel is worth... ours is based on watching markets for many years but obviously we could be wrong)

US critical minerals, gold and silver are broadly driven by global instability, which doesn't seem to be going away any time soon.

And even if things DO stabilize into some kind of new normal, it won’t be something that “instantly” happens - anything on the global stage takes a long time, with bumps along the way.

We have added 11 new stocks to our Portfolio this year.

We generally aim to do between 8 to 10.

We are slightly above our average for 2025.

After a slow start to the calendar year, over the last couple of months we have been quickly adding silver stocks and US critical minerals stocks in anticipation of strong runs in these themes for 2026.

Some years we do less stocks, if the market is not looking ideal for the foreseeable future.

(that’s why we only added 3 new stocks in the first 6 months of 2025)

In late 2023 and into early 2024 we didn’t add any new stocks for a full 7 months while we were cautiously waiting to see how far the small end of the market would fall...

(remember 2023 where pretty much every small stock just kept going down no matter what? Even trying to “pick the bottom” and “get a bargain” was fraught with danger... )

At the start of 2023 we also called gold as our next big theme.

...but we were slow to add new gold positions due to the general malaise in the small end of the market at the time.

Turns out our call on gold in 2023 was right. Very right.

But we were slow to back our high conviction gold thesis with new Investments...

...and in hindsight we went too “early stage” with mainly gold exploration stocks that usually run AFTER gold producers and gold developers in a gold bull market.

We have not yet ridden the gold wave that we predicted as well as we could have.

In fact we have never been so right on a macro theme and captured so little of the upside...

(we are now ready with a good mix of gold production, developers and explorers)

When we were bullish on battery materials in 2019, we only added VUL to our Portfolio - then lithium had a huge run the next year and we started adding more battery materials stocks.

(in hindsight, wish we had added a few more battery materials stocks earlier given we were so convinced on the battery materials theme in 2019).

So our takeaways from the battery materials bull market and the current gold bull market are that if we are high conviction on a macro theme, we need a more structured way to quickly position our Portfolio for the best exposure to that theme...

Ahead of it running.

We have been doing this for 25 years and yes we are still learning and refining our strategy.

We are also conscious of going too hard, too early, on a macro theme - which we learned from the many false starts in the uranium macro theme in recent years.

Taking these lessons on board, here is the general strategy we came up with - which we will be refining (and sharing what we learn along the way) over the coming years and into whatever the next macro themes we predict are going to be:

(read our full explainer here)

We went high conviction on silver at the start of 2024 - we dipped our toe in with two development stage silver stocks (both with JORC resources, SS1 and MTH).

When it looked like the silver theme was starting to play out as we predicted a couple of months ago, we quickly added more silver stocks - This time mix of development stage and some exploration.

For more detail on our “silver September” read our article here where we share all our silver stocks (it's the cabbage one).

US critical minerals is our other high conviction theme for 2026 where we have been adding Positions this month - USA based projects with exposure to commodities that are on the USA critical materials list.

Rare earths and antimony are hot, but there aren’t many opportunities on the ASX for development stage projects, especially ones that haven’t run yet.

Our latest Portfolio addition was in the US critical minerals thematic, with a development stage project and the biggest resource of the metal in the USA.

We added American West Metals (ASX:AW1) to our Portfolio this week.

AW1 owns the single biggest indium resource in the USA.

Indium is used in missile defence systems, semiconductors and fighter jets.

Recently the Pentagon came out explicitly saying it is looking to add indium to its US$1BN strategic stockpile buying spree. (Source)

We Invested in AW1 because we think it can capture some of the capital that will flow out of the US government and US investors into the critical minerals industry.

(especially big, US based projects)

And interestingly, AW1’s Managing Director Dave O’Neil said in a webinar earlier this week that:

“We have been approached by the Department Of War, Department of Energy and local government to move this forward” (source)

(Watch the full AW1 presentation on their indium project here)

Surprisingly... despite the market rush into US critical minerals stocks like antimony and rare earths, AW1 had barely moved from its 12 month lows before we Invested.

Check out the 9 reasons why we Invested in AW1 in our Initiation note here:

Our New Investment: American West Metals (ASX: AW1)

US critical minerals definitely heating up now

Nobody expected the Kevin Rudd letters to be thrown around the small cap end of the market ahead of that Albanese/Trump meeting in the USA on Monday 20th October (which is Tuesday morning Australia time).

Three companies in our Portfolio got the invitation - SS1, RML and PNN:

(Source)(Source)(Source)

All of them would have sent a file across to the Australian Embassy in the US by now OR at the very least briefed Rudd personally.

This morning, the high brow financial media outlet The Australian Financial Review was shaking a disapproving finger at the small cap market again, seemingly bemused that small companies would announce an approach from the Australian Ambassador to the US and their share prices would go up:

(read it here)

SS1 and RML got a mention in the article (some good publicity saying they are “going to visit the Trump Administration”):

(source - AFR)

One company that we are throwing into the mix as one to watch in our Portfolio this week is IonDrive (ASX:ION).

(ION’s news last week actually looked even better than a Rudd letter)

ION announced that it would be:

“participating in a fully funded Australian Government-led delegation to the U.S. focused on critical minerals and energy security”

And that CEO Ebbe Dommisse would be:

“attending invitation-only investment and R&D roundtables in San Francisco with U.S. officials, defence representatives, and innovation leaders”...

(Source)

Rare earths are one of the biggest talking points in US government circles right now.

And ION has already signed a BINDING agreement for rare earths recycling in the USA...

With Colt Recycling - one of the USA’s largest and most advanced eWaste recycling companies...

(Source)

Back when that deal was done on the 1st of September, we said:

(Source)

Maybe the invite-only roundtable attendance has something to do with wanting to learn more about what ION’s up to with Colt?

The Department Of Energy (DOE) has US$1BN to allocate toward recycling tech for critical minerals (we wrote about that here).

Whatever comes from all these meetings over in the US - we have a few of our Investments circling anything that comes from it.

US critical minerals macro theme in “stage 3” of our macro interest model?

So over the last 7 days we are definitely seeing momentum in the US critical mineral macro thematic growing.

On Friday last week, China announced further “dramatic” export restrictions on rare earths - which kicked things off.

Then the US responded with tariff threats and its own export controls on things critical to China (like advanced software).

Then, a few days later, the largest bank in the USA, JP Morgan, said it would put US$1.5 trillion to work in industries deemed “critical to US national interest”.

(Source)(Source)(Source)

The China/US back and forth got the ball rolling...

And then that J.P. Morgan announcement further kicked the whole US critical minerals macro thematic into stage 3 of our “macro interest” chart:

We are seeing early signs of a few US critical minerals companies lock away giant cap raises (for them anyway - we are talking $20-30M+) just inside the last ~five days...

So we think we are firmly in stage 3 for the macro thematic as a whole...

Gold and silver

Gold and silver delivered another big week of gains, but gave up most of the week's rise in the last 8 hours of trading this morning.

Silver hit a high of US$54.8 last night but ended the session at US$51.92.

Gold hit a high of US$4,380 last night but ended the session at US$4,251.

Probably a healthy pullback given the near vertical rises both gold and silver have delivered this month.

Even at the pulled back values, if someone had told us in July that by October silver would be above US$50 and gold would be above US$4,000 we would have been delighted.

(and we wouldn’t have believed them)

Let’s see what happens next week.

We’ll be watching the silver price, gold price and any outcomes of the Albo-Trump meeting that's happening early Tuesday Morning Australia time.

Have a great weekend,

Next Investors