US Army eyes off critical mineral processing

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We aren’t going to talk about silver this week...

much.

(even though it hit an NEW all time high of US$64.5 AND closed out the week at US$62... another week, another new all time high for silver, hooray)

Instead we have consolidated our silver thesis and the ASX silver stocks we are Invested into this ebook.

We are going to pay to send this eBook to about a half a million people who are not on our mailing list over the next 8 weeks to try and get some of them to subscribe to our newsletter...

But you can read it first - here it is:

(Click here to get the eBook)

(let us know if you find any glaring errors in it before we start sending it far and wide on Monday, thanks)

A 0.25% US Fed rate cut is partly responsible for silver’s price run over the last couple of days...

The US Fed cut has also woken the gold price up, which is pushing back towards testing the all time highs it hit back in October...

And Donald Trump said yesterday (again) that he thinks interest rates should be a LOT lower...

like at 1% compared to the current ~3.5% to 3.75%.

His hand picked new choice for Fed chair gets appointed early next year... Wonder if they will deliver this?

Lower rates (when inflation is still lingering in the economy) means higher precious metals prices...

So, we are expecting big things from gold and silver in 2026.

How about our other favourite macro theme for 2026 - US critical minerals?

The US government sent another very strong signal to the market this week that we are just getting started with the whole “securing domestic supply and processing of US critical minerals”.

The US military said it plans to:

“Develop a fleet of small-scale refineries to produce critical minerals, used to make bullets, armour and other types of weaponry”.

(source)

Yep - the US Army is moving into critical minerals refining...

The first commodity they plan to target is antimony - and the plan is to work alongside Perpetua Resources’ project in Idaho.

US$3.5BN capped Perpetua has a 6 million ounce gold project with an estimated 200M pounds of antimony running through the gold deposit.

Perpetua is the US government's “antimony national champion”.

Perpetua was also the first company to receive a strategic equity Investment from JP Morgan.

JP Morgan is the world’s biggest investment bank... and it hand picked Perpetua as its first investment from the US$1.5 Trillion it committed to “industries critical to the US national interest”.

Perpetua will be developing the biggest antimony resource in the USA.

Perpetua is also next door to our Investment Resolution Minerals (ASX:RML).

(read more about our Investment in RML here)

Back to the US Army moving into refining critical minerals - How does that news relate to our Investments?

The article also said “The Army is in talks with other U.S. antimony projects for additional sourcing”.

(source)

Out of our US critical minerals Investments - we think SS1 (silver and antimony in Nevada), RML (gold, antimony and tungsten in Idaho) and LKY (antimony in California) are all relevant to this week's news in some way.

SS1 because it's trying to define an antimony resource as big (and maybe even bigger) than Perpetua’s, and it is also likely to have an antimony resource that is running through a giant precious metals deposit (silver), same as Perpetua’s (gold) - which JP Morgan liked enough to invest in.

RML because its next door to Perpetua, its project produced antimony and tungsten during the two previous world wars AND RML is looking to define gold, antimony and tungsten resources.

And LKY because it's got the old Desert Antimony Mine in Nevada, which actually produced antimony during World War I and World War II.

All three are also actively pursuing government funding (hopefully, they are all on the shortlist of companies the US Army is looking at for potential feedstock).

The article also said “If successful, Washington aims to develop refineries for other minerals as well, including tungsten, rare earths and boron”.

(source)

So it feels a little bit like the US government is initially dabbling in processing/refineries... before potentially going bigger...

Which we think will be a “rising tide, lifts all boats” type move.

The move into refining comes a few months after the Department of War (Pentagon) started sending out purchase orders for stockpiles of the same minerals.

(source)

Our view is that once there is more certainty on the refining side (end user where demand will come from), the financiers will be more willing to get behind mining assets.

(after all, the main question for the mining assets is where will the feedstock go if China controls all of the world’s processing for these critical minerals).

We recently listened to an interview with JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon who talks about this too:

(Check out the full interview here: Source)

Dimon talks about how the "there's not that much time" and that the US has "five years" to get its act together with critical minerals supply chain development...

(He also talks about speed being important to reshore US manufacturing - which is good for our our US manufacturing exposure - AML3D - ASX:AL3)

JP Morgan recently made that US$1.5 Trillion commitment to “industries that are critical to the US national interest” including critical minerals. (source)

And then did their first deal investing US$75M into Perpetua Resources.

Something tells us that they won't stop there...

And the US government have explicitly said they are definitely not done yet taking equity stakes in critical minerals assets in the US either:

(Source)

It can sometimes feel like a macro thematic is losing its legs here on the ASX - the market can get fatigued and sell down stocks momentarily.

We think that these major macro thematics always end up running for much longer than anyone thinks they can - just like we saw with the small then GIANT lithium booms between 2017-2022...

(remember that mini battery minerals boom in 2019, before things really started taking off in 2020?)

We have said a few times in the past that we think of the ASX as a first mover that is ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to anything in resources.

(a rabid bunch of Aussie resource stock punters that can sometimes go too hard too fast on a global macro theme before the general global investing community catches on - present company included...)

But in other jurisdictions, we are still so very early in the US critical minerals macro thematic.

For example, this article from Bloomberg this week is essentially an “explain it to me like i’m 5 years old” summary of the US critical metals thematic...

Which tells us that there is still a big part of the global investment community that is new to this whole concept:

(source)

Again, just because we have been investing in resources for 20 years and thinking about US critical minerals for a long time, doesn’t mean your average US fund manager even knows it exists yet...

We think it's going to be more of a 2 to 5 year macro thematic rather than the recent short term burst of enthusiasm.

And we will actually need to see things happen - i.e refineries built, projects coming online and producing before the market takes a longer term breather on the thematic.

(hopefully some of our Investments are the ones to take advantage of those capital flows)

Another really good interview we watched this week was with Tomasz Nadrowski on the Money Of Mine podcast.

Tomasz runs the Amvest Terraden Critical Materials Fund which is solely mandated on investing in non-Chinese critical minerals stocks.

Tomasz’s day job is thinking about the US critical minerals macro thematic a lot more than your average investor so we highly recommend listening to the following:

(Watch it Here)

He’s even written a whole book on it - which is being released in January.

We think 2026 is going to be a big year for precious metals and US critical minerals too.

Have a great weekend,

Next Investors