What's in the pipeline for our Investments heading into the new year?

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Christmas is getting closer.

Realistically around two weeks to go before everyone mentally checks out of the markets for the year.

We admit getting into the holiday spirit early after taking Thursday and Friday off this week

(and attending Good Things 2025 - if you know what that means or were there too... you are probably middle aged)

However, the week did start with a different kind of bang on Monday.

Last Friday night, ASX investors had to watch silver surge by 6% AFTER the ASX had already closed for the week at ~US$56.4.

And then sit around all weekend wondering what would happen to ASX silver stocks on Monday.

As expected, Just about every single silver stock was up Monday morning and most held gains - here is how our silver Investments ended the week:

• Sun Silver (ASX:SS1) - finished up 8.4%, peaking at 20.5%
• Black Bear Minerals (ASX:BKB) - finished up 13.4%, peaking at 16.5%
• Mithril Silver and Gold (ASX:MTH) - finished up 37%, peaking at 46.6%
• Rapid Critical Metals (ASX:RCM) - finished down 8.5%, peaking at 15.3%
• Advance Metals (ASX:AVM) - finished up 11.7%, peaking at 33.0%
• Investigator Resources (ASX:IVR) - finished up 24.1%, peaking at 39.7%
• West Coast Silver (ASX:WCE) - finished up 27.6%, peaking at 41.4%
• Pantera Minerals (ASX:PFE) - finished flat, peaking at 16.7%

And then last night, again (as seems to be becoming the trend)...

Silver touched a new all time highest ever price in its history of US $59.33

And closed at US $58.3 - up over 2% for the night.

Which means another interesting Monday open for ASX listed silver stocks.

(which are already up since this happened last week)

Here is a summary of why we like the silver macro theme and each of the ASX silver stocks we are invested in from this week.

Silver ended the week even higher than last week's close

And further strengthened the “generation cup and handle” breakout prophecy that we are following (read more about the cup and handle stuff here):

Silver’s previous all time high was set a few weeks ago but it retraced pretty quickly:

(Source)

There would have been a lot of holders who just ended up bailing and taking profits when the silver price lost its momentum at the start of November.

(insurance on if this was the silver rally ending)...

But silver has roared back in the last two weeks and is now higher than ever before.

Right now we think the silver price needs to keep its upward momentum to make the market believe the move is real... and get the general FOMO to start properly kicking in.

Many who assumed the silver rally was over a few weeks ago were probably looking to come back in after the initial surge last Friday night...

Anyway, let's see what happens to ASX listed silver stocks on Monday after silver hit a new all time high last night...

What about the rest of the small end of the market?

No one seems to know if the ASX small caps market rally from July to October was the top...

OR if it was just the start of a broader rally into Christmas and the new year period.

The broader market sentiment in the small end has cooled off from the October euphoria.

BUT it feels like (and we could be wrong) that any signs of a rally could take things a lot higher than we saw in October.

The catalyst to make it happen could be anything...

(Keeping in mind that many small stocks are now cashed up after pulling off big capital raises in the July to October bull run, and would have since been busy spending that money and likely pregnant with news...)

So what could happen to trigger a strong run into Christmas?

It could be a single stock running hard which re-activates everyone in and around the markets in a loop as follows:

1. A small cap CEO sees another company’s share price running on good news and realises investors are still around willing to reward positive news with buying.
2. Same CEO who finally had some cash to “do stuff” decides to deliver news (catalysts) as quickly as possible after seeing the market is rewarding news (rather than waiting until the new year when the market starts up again).
3. News gets delivered
4. Investors reward the good news
5. Another small cap CEO sees that company getting rewarded and (1) to (5) repeats...

Alternatively, if investors are mentally checked out for the year already and the CEO’s see good news go unnoticed with thin volumes being traded, they’ll likely put the cue in the rack for the year and decide to come back when they think the market will be willing to pay attention again...

OR we might be overthinking it and it could be something a lot simpler...

Like a rate cut from the US Fed that indiscriminately injects positivity into markets like the ASX.

Especially risk-on stocks like the ones we Invest in?

(US Fed rates decision is due this week)

This week started off with us thinking the cycle was starting...

Then ended with low volume days where news was being missed or sold into.

(so we took two days off - its been a long year)

But we are back at it now and hoping for a strong run for the remaining two weeks before the break.

The market feels like it's in a bit of a Mexican stand off but we think the next two weeks of trading will be an interesting sign on whether we get a big run up in early 2026.

Who we will be watching over the holidays

Christmas break or not, we’ll still be refreshing silver and gold prices, reading about US critical metals and closely watching a few stocks in our Portfolio that have guided the market to expect news in the coming weeks.

Here are some of the companies in our Portfolio where we are on “catalyst watch” over the Christmas/new year break (which we take as the rest of December and the first two weeks of January):

• TTM has ~37 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. So we could see a deal announced at some point inside the next ~6 weeks.

Lingbao also just raised ~A$227M and explicitly said it would use 80% of those funds for “mergers and acquisitions” AND also said Lingbao were preparing for a 2nd site visit to look at infrastructure and mines in the area, so we wait to see what may come of this.

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

Good news from the FDA could be a material catalyst for ILA.

• 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 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... AND 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.

• BKB was set to have drilled its 4th drillhole at Rebel peak “targeting extensions” last week we noticed in an update recently, so we could see results before the end of year.

This is along strike from its shallow resource where prior sampling returned grades much higher than this part of the resource at over 5g/t.

• AVM could be having results from both drilling and resampling of old cores at its Yoquivo silver project in Mexico and a 2nd drill rig began drilling at its Victorian gold project in early November, where visible gold was seen in drill cores prior.

Although the Mexican silver project already has an established foreign resource, some positive extension results from the gold in Victoria could make things very interesting given how some other explorers there have reacted to results of late.

• RCM has been drilling at its silver project in NSW for a while now. RCM said in an announcement back in late August that it had "2 drill rigs on site to expedite results”, so with two rigs spinning for over 3 months now, surely we would be closing in on some results.

This one we are considering potentially material because it would be silver drill results coming out into a hot silver market (of course, the results will need to be strong...)

• MTH has an updated JORC resource 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.

A resource upgrade would be great... but silver grades like that in drilling while silver is running could really get the market interested in MTH...

• AW1 is resampling its indium asset in the USA for gallium (following up a hole which had 77.3g/t gallium over a total of 552m) (Source).

We are in AW1 for the indium, but gallium is also an important US critical mineral, and we think the market doesn’t really appreciate the fact that AW1’s asset is ~300km away from the APEX mine, which was the only primary gallium mine ever operated in the USA... AW1’s theory is that its project is analogous to the APEX mine. (source)

Then there are the stocks where there are no explicit timelines for catalysts but a big game changing deal could drop at any time, without anyway of knowing its coming:

• ROC is one of those companies in our Portfolio where one big deal could be a game changer for the company.

ROC says there are ~20,000 sites across 14 customers in “advanced commercial discussions”...

• 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”.

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 just raised $4M 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”.

• and 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.

(Where’s PNN? PNN decided not to proceed with their US rare earth acquisition - but are up 20% yesterday on the back of strong niobium and rare earth drill results at their Brazil project)

Interestingly, there were two sets of articles out this week which said the US government is still pushing hard in the sector...

(Source)

Even venturing into spicy locations like the DRC to gain access to critical metals:

(Source)

We want to see the US critical metals theme fire up again in 2026.

And we just put some cash into the LKY placement this week...

Have a great weekend,

Next Investors