The Favorites Index did well in September compared to the price of gold and the TSXV Index, reaching a peak gain of 469% before settling back to being up 461% at the end of September. The KRO Gold Producer Index which hit a recent peak in August declined during September in tandem with gold’s retreat from its peak at $4,664 on August 24.

The widely expected Federal Reserve decision to increase rates by 0.25 points on September 17 has been followed by expectations for further rate increases. The 10 year rate has passed the magic 5% mark and is currently sitting at 5.28%. The gold uptrend stalled not because interest rates are at this level but rather because the perceived trend is for higher rates which supposedly makes gold less attractive. But the US federal debt has also passed the $40 trillion milestone and the Iran War still has no resolution in sight. The desire to increase the war budget to $1.5 trillion is competing with the need to refinance maturing debt at these higher rates.

The case for a higher long term gold price remains intact. Markets are cringing ahead of the midterm elections on November 3 not because of concern about the outcome, but rather about how the US president will handle the outcome. There is a serious risk of a global exit from both US equities and debt. October is going to be a tricky month. Especially vulnerable are AI related stocks, with Anthropic hoping to complete an IPO during October. I thought it was a disturbing sign of hubris when Nvidia announced it would expand its share buyback to $150 billion as the stock makes new highs.

Bucking this gold negativity is a deal announced September 21 whereby <B>Artemis Gold Inc</B> will acquire <B>Vista Gold Corp</B> in an all stock deal that initially valued Vista Gold at USD $2.83 per share. The plan of arrangement requires a two-thirds majority of votes cast in a special meeting likely to take place in December. The next three months will be an interesting test of where we are in the mother of all resource junior bull markets. Substack Post “Is the Artemis deal a capitulation event or does it put Vista Gold into play?” published September 29, 2026 explains why this is such a good deal for Artemis Gold and why I think the final value for Vista Gold will be at least $5 per share.

The strongest performer this month has been P2 Gold Inc which benefited from the LME copper price hitting a new high at $6.71 per lb on September 22. P2 Gold plans to release an updated resource estimate in Q4 ahead of a feasibility study in Q1 of 2027 that benefits from expansion drilling done this year.

The strength in copper is coming from rising expectations for copper demand growth from the AI data center buildout and the import of the copper into the United States ahead of a possible tariff on copper imports. I was able to obtain a historical dataset for COMEX copper warehouse stocks and at it to my copper chart. I was shocked at the result. Since 2025 COMEX warehouse stocks have climbed to a record high and currently dwarf combined LME and Shanghai stocks. It seems that fears about a possible tariff on imported copper are still at play.

A couple of Favorites have retreated after releasing disappointing results. On September 2 Solitario Resources Corp released assays for the first 3 of 10 holes drilled at Golden Crest in South Dakota. These did not echo the high grades sampled at surface and management seems to have low expectations for the rest. The market was not happy and in Substack Post “Five Reasons why Solitario is a top buy today” published September 7 I explained why this is a very good time to buy.

This week Solitario released visual results for the 2 holes it drilled at the Cat Creek project in Colorado. This was supposed to be a make or break Henderson style molybdenum prospect but it seems that Solitario has touched the edge of a copper-molybdenum system too deep to be open pit mined. Shallow visual molybdenite transitions to visual chalcopyrite at depth in the second hole. They could have drilled another hole but because of the unexpected implication that Cat Creek is something much bigger and better than Anaconda thought when its parent Arco pulled the plug weeks before a planned drill program, Solitario has decided to complete additional IP lines over Cat Creek to better define the target.

This new development may explain why unusually high rhenium values were found near the old silver focused adit at surface. Rhenium tends to be weak in pure moly porphyry systems but stronger in copper-moly porphyry systems such as Bingham Canyon. There are other anomalous values at surface such as gold and palladium which are not correlated with Henderson style moly porphyries. Despite the nice core visuals, when the assays arrive they are unlikely to constitute a no-brainer discovery, but the range and nature of the assayed metals may signal Solitario has nipped the edge of something much better than expected. Meanwhile Chris Herald has dibs on a drill rig until mid October on the longshot hope that the USFS will grant permits to allow drilling a couple twin holes on the copper-gold porphyry Bright Angel target this fall before winter closes the pass. Sorry, but the idea of the USFS granting a timely permit floods my head with memories of Disney’s Snow White singing mournfully, “some day, my prince will come”.

Arizona Gold & Silver Inc got whacked this week when it released assays for the first two holes drilled from the newly permitted area of the Philadelphia project in Arizona. The assays are fine but not the bonanza grades needed to confirm the Oatman Hypothesis. Hole #174 drilled a couple 100 ft deeper will likely also disappoint. Management’s updated strategy is to drill holes along the northern strike of the vein to chase the rake of the Perry Zone as indicated by the color contours of its grade times thickness long section. Note that the upper long section depicting drill hole pierce points in the 70 degree dipping vein has a vertical depth scale whereas the scale of the lower long section with the grade times thickness contours follows the plane of the vein.

I have added red ovals to highlight the apparent rake indicated by the grade times thickness contour. If the rake interpretation is correct, holes #173 and #174 do not kill the Oatman Hypothesis; they simply do not confirm it. Holes #175 and its deeper equivalent to #174 will, however, be important for the Perry Zone. Unfortunately, it will be at least two months before Arizona Gold gets assays for these new holes. As with Solitario and its Golden Crest project in South Dakota, investors need to pull back and look at the big picture. Arizona Gold, after a very long wait, has drill pads permitted on BLM land that will allow it to test a 3 km strike of the Philadelphia vein at depths below the 300 m physical limit possible on the old patented claims. This is a story of not just confirming that Oatman style bonanza grades occur at depths never before drilled, but that multiple Oatman style ore shoots repeat through the strike of the vein. We hope the Perry Zone gets confirmed as one of them, but even if it just a zone with a good grade that works for underground mining, with $34 million in the bank and more to come from the Sorbie financing, Arizona Gold is now financed and permitted to systematically test the entire strike of the Philadelphia vein.

A disaster befell Spanish Mountain Gold Ltd on October 1 when Stockwatch published a press release emailed early in the morning by the Xatsull First Nation (pronounced Hat-Sul) which declared all prior agreements null and void and revealed that Spanish Mountain is a place where “members continue to gather foods and medicines, camp with family, access the land for recreation and cultural well-being, and maintain living connections to spiritually and culturally significant places”. I have visited the property which requires driving along gravel roads through grazing land, logged off areas and pine bark beetle devastated stands. When you look at the First Nation territory map for this region you can see that the reserves are nowhere near the SMG project or Imperial Metals’ Mt Polley Mine. This is a classic First Nations extortion exercise given muscle by former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s decision to make Canada become a signatory to UNDRIP which effectively turns people with First Nations DNA into a race-based aristocracy with dominion over Canada’s resource extraction future.

Spanish Mountain’s CEO Peter Mah was on vacation out of cell range somewhere in British Columbia so nobody at the company noticed the email. The stock had been under pressure from people exercising in the money warrants expiring in November, but when investors read the Xatsull news they were reminded of the day that the Tl’azt’en Nation, after collecting benefits for a decade from FPX Nickel Corp, suddenly discovered in July 2023 that Mt Sydney, which hosts the Decar project into which over $50 million had already been sunk, was “sacred” and that its development as a world class supply of clean nickel was unacceptable. The stock price tanked and has never really recovered. All the company could do if it did not want to be cancelled by Trudeau’s reconciliation enforcers was bow and scrape while mumbling acknowledgement drivel that effectively marginalizes 97% of Canadians.

Spanish Mountain traded over 4 million shares before the regulators halted the stock to find out what was going on. The company had written in its MD&A statement that there were no present agreements with the First Nations groups in whose jurisdiction SMG sits. There was nothing new in the Xatsull news release but it was written and delivered in a sneaky manner designed to spook the market and cause losses for shareholders. If the Xatsull FN were serious it would have delivered the news release to Spanish Mountain during the afternoon after the market had closed so that the company would have time to prepare a response. The next day Spanish Mountain did provide a response which basically said that the feasibility study is being done according to the rules of the BC Environmental Assessment Office with full engagement with all stakeholders.

When Peter Mah’s team took over in 2023 there were legitimate First Nation concerns about the mine infrastructure proposed in earlier economic studies. Spanish Lake is drained by Spanish Creek which flows into the Quesnel River which flows into the Fraser River which is a huge salmon fishery gateway. The original tailings plan would have impacted local salmon spawning areas, which is why Mah’s team redesigned the plan. As Peter points out, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) plays a very important role in the mine permitting cycle and the DFO is not going to let mining harm any of its waterways.

What the Xatsull gambit really is about is a dispute with the Williams Lake FN whose traditional territory overlaps that of the Xatsull FN. The SMG project and Mt Polley are within the overlapping part, which is also overlapped by the traditional territory of the Lhtako Dene Nation whom the Williams Lake and Xatsull groups despise even more than each other. Spanish Mountain thus has a three-body-problem on its hands trying to make three incompatible groups happy. The current animosity between Williams Lake and Xatsull is linked to the Mt Polley mine expansion which Williams Lake supported and Xatsull opposed. When the plan was approved Xatsull took its case to the Supreme Court and lost.

As if it was not bad enough that Trudeau signed Canada onto UNDRIP, in 2019 the BC provincial government under the NDP created DRIPA (Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People Act) which made BC alignment with UNDRIP a provincial matter. BC courts have taken DRIPA to its logical conclusions which is why BC’s mineral claims staking system has ground to a halt. We now have a situation where anybody who stakes claims must “consult” the First Nations groups in whose territory the claims sit. This consultation was supposed to have a time limit but such limit has turned out to be imaginary. Not so when a numbered company owned by a First Nations group stakes claims and consults itself. Another problem is the Cowichan Band decision involving Lulu Island in Greater Vancouver which seems to imply that real estate title in British Columbia is not real.

The BC Premier David Eby has called a snap election for October 24 hoping to turn his NDP party’s slim majority into a stronger majority with the help of disarray within the conservative party. The Xatsull attack on Spanish Mountain is good timing to rally the conservatives around the cause of ripping up DRIPA as a first step before Prime Minister Mark Carney gathers up the courage to rip up UNDRIP before the United States does it for him and turns Canada into a vassal state where all Canadians are equal. His call for a trillion dollars worth of investment in Canada collides with UNDRIP which has never been signed by a nation with a widespread indigenous population claiming multiples of the country’s area. On February 26, 2026 DefenseAnalyses.org published The Centrifugal Strategy, a Machiavelli-style argument that the US president’s blather about annexing Canada is counter-productive because in the past such efforts have rallied Canadians. The author suggests that it is better to manipulate Canada’s various warring factions such as Quebec, First Nations, and the West into seeking fragmentation which the United States can easily absorb and ultimately extend the Monroe Doctrine to the Northwest Passage in which China and Russia are taking an ever greater interest. If Canada wants to survive as an independent nation, the first thing it should do is rip up UNDRIP and then work out a solution with Canada’s First Nations that benefits all Canadians, not just a DNA defined 3% fraction of the population.

KWGQ 0:18:09: Why do you think the Artemis deal to acquire Vista Gold will be a test for your claim that we are in inning 4 of the mother of all resource junior bull markets?

In Substack Post ”Is the Artemis deal a capitulation event or does it put Vista Gold into play?” I provide a detailed explanation why this is a very good deal for Artemis Gold Inc but not so much for Vista Gold Corp. In my West Vault Mining Inc at MIF September 2026 Substack Post on October 4, which is unrestricted, I provide background on why this market is so reluctant to embrace pre-development gold juniors such as Vista Gold Corp despite the gold price having exceeded the dreams of most gold bugs.

The market has repriced gold producers to reflect the value implied by the current gold price because the institutional audience can see the cash flow. But the institutional audience is still fearful that this will prove to be a temporary windfall best dealt with by paying dividends and doing share buybacks. Even a recent Financial Times LEX column clucked approvingly about how disciplined gold producers are today compared to more than a decade ago. This has created two valuation frameworks, one that prices advanced pre-development juniors as if the long term future for gold is in the $2,000-$2,500 range. and the other that grudgingly prices gold producers in the $4,000-$4,500 range. In the graphic above I try to show the disconnect between these two valuation frameworks. My argument has been that $4,000 plus is the future reality for gold and that eventually the valuation framework for companies like Vista Gold and West Vault will be the same as for gold producers. Artemis, whose stock is held 33% by two individuals, Ryan Beedie and Steven Dean, can ignore the warnings from timid fund managers and has positioned itself to arbitrage the difference between these two valuation frameworks.

The fourth inning of this mother of all resource junior bull cycles is having trouble getting underway, and the final quarter of 2026 during which Artemis Gold hopes to acquire Mt Todd at a tenth of its value will be a litmus test of its strength. If competing bids emerge that drive up the exit price for Vista Gold, that will be a bullish sign. Because more than 50% of West Vault’s stock is owned by individual investors there is little chance another producer can pull off a similar arbitrage stunt. West Vault’s Hasbrouck project is also priced at a tenth of its value at $4,000-$4,500 and will benefit from Vista Gold shareholders recycling their proceeds into West Vault.

KWGQ 0:24:44: What was the September Metals Investor Forum in Vancouver like?

The Metals Investor Forum held on September 18-19, 2026 had the misfortune of classic Indian Summer weather that usually runs from Labor Day Weekend until the end of September. So only about 600 investors showed up during the two day conference which was held at the JW Marriott Parc next to the casino. Furthermore, this venue is quite a way from the downtown core so on Friday missed out on financial sector traffic. The company lineup was among the strongest I have seen in a while.

MIF introduced a new feature at the end called Shark Tank moderated by Jamie Keach. After each speaker’s session the screen displayed a QR code which allowed the audience to see on their smart phones the companies in that session and select which one each member wanted in the Shark Tank. Because it takes about 3 minutes for everybody to get their act together it was fun watching the race on the screen. In my session Rackla quickly took an overwhelming lead while West Vault and Nevada Organic battled it out for second place.

The poor turnout was disappointing, but MIF does record all the presentations and backstage interviews which it posts on YouTube. My presentation, Three Ways to Play an Uncertain Future, consisted of three thematic segments that represented each of my companies. I assembled all the YouTube content for the companies in my session into three unrestricted Substack Posts which includes a link to the segment in my presentation relevant to the company as well as comments about each company.

West Vault Mining Inc at MIF September 2026 illustrated my idea of “Gold as a bridge away from America”. Rackla Metals Inc at MIF September 2026 focused on tungsten as a hot topic in the theme “The Critical Metals Security of Supply Crisis”. Nevada Organic Phosphate Inc at MIF September 2026 featured the politically neutral topic of “A Unique Predictable Feel Good Story”.

John Kaiser owns shares of Arizona Gold, Nevada Organic, Rackla Metals, Spanish Mountain, Solitario, and Vista Gold

The first two segments of my MIF presentation were of a doom and gloom nature that first dealt with gold as a bridge away from Maga Land, featuring West Vault Mining Inc as a way to profit from this growing mess, and then dealt with the metal supply vulnerability the Global West created for itself through its arrogant rejection of exploration and mining in its own back yard, with an emphasis on tungsten and how Rackla Metals Inc and its Lentung tungsten project in Canada is a very promising partial solution. The third segment was about a feel good story that spans the entire ideological spectrum, and whose success will be good for America in general. I say “for America” because there are limits as to how far one can ship a whole rock phosphate fertilizer product.

Nevada Organic Phosphate Inc had to battle through the entrenched anti-mining mentality within the BLM to secure a drill permit for its Murdock Mountain project in northeastern Nevada which is very close to the Union Pacific railway. The company got its permit just in time to mount a drill program late last year to drill enough holes to prove that the low heavy metal content in the outcrop of this southwestern edge of the Western Phosphate Field was the same in the unweathered phosphate rock and that this bed’s grade and thickness was sufficiently consistent to be underground mineable.

The proof in the form of assays was delivered in Q1 of 2026 and the market responded enthusiastically, enabling Robin Dow to raise over $5 million at $0.18 after the May 2026 MIF conference. But then Nevada Organic ran into a problem which is a legacy of the Global West’s hostility toward mining, namely the shrinkage of the technical skills needed to make exploration a productive exercise. This includes the decline in drill rigs and competent crews that was a natural fallout of the metals bear market that began in 2012. Barrick has 22 drill rigs grinding away at its phenomenal Fourmile gold discovery in Nevada, leaving the juniors in the wilderness crying, “a kingdom for a drill rig and competent crew!” After the tenth hole, which was an important stepout, Nevada Organic had to dump its contractor and go searching for a new rig and team.

The market was not happy and the stock dumped 50%, because this sort of story requires continuous progress towards the goal of demonstrating that Murdock Mountain hosts up to 200 million tonnes of phosphate rock that can be mined, ground up, and sold as a whole rock phosphate fertilizer that can be applied directly to fields. The heart of the Western Phosphate Field in Idaho has phosphate beds with a grade three times richer, but it is also loaded with heavy metals which have to be chemically stripped out, with the resulting synthetic combination of nitrogen and phosphate in the form of MAP and DAP feeding American cash crops like corn, soybeans and wheat which underpin America’s unhealthy eating habits.

The American farm sector is increasingly dominated by giant industrial businesses, with the traditional small farmer being squeezed away. But within the MAGA movement there was born the MAHA movement, “Make America Healthy Again”, and despite being undermined by its false prophet, will prove resilient across ideological boundaries. Organic food is generally dismissed as an elitist obsession and in my view has limited growth potential. But there is a growing interest in the origin of food and how the soil in which it grew is being sustained.

I was very impressed by Michael Pollan’s book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”, and the documentary narrated by Woody Harrelson, “Kiss the Ground”. Both avoid the shrill righteousness of the organic cult, and focus instead on respect for food and farming. The key theme is regenerative farming, which does not shun non-organic inputs, but seeks farming methods that keep the soil alive for future generations. The problem with synthetic MAP and DAP is that it pounds the natural nutrients in soil, and is vulnerable to runoff that ruins America’s waterways, a problem that will only worsen as climate change alters rainfall patterns.

To my shock Robin Dow, who has been the promotional dynamo behind the company, admits he has never had time to read or watch the book or documentary. I hope during the winter down time he finds time to do so; he will understand even better why his story resonates with so many people, regardless their political leanings, and he will be a re-energized dynamo in 2027. His presentation covers all the bases about what the company is trying to accomplish, but what I try to do in my presentation and in the backstage interview is outline the next stage of this story. It turns out that on the following Monday Nevada Organic announced that it secured a new rig and crew. At the moment Robin is laser focused on getting enough holes done on the Nevagro Lease to support a maiden resource estimate in H1 of 2027 before winter shuts down Murdock Mountain.

The challenge facing Robin’s effort to revive market interest in drilling progress is that the June financing is coming free trading and the retail audience that took it down is focused on fine-tuning personal positions based on stock and warrants. While there is a risk that new problems will hinder drilling progress, that would simply push the critical milestone into H1 of 2028. The stage is now set for attracting a new audience in the form of family offices, high net worth investors, who understand the long game of delivering a PEA which demonstrates what it would cost to mine and turn into a marketable product whatever resource turns out to be present on the Nevagro lease. Once that is accomplished the story shifts to developing a large scale market for an organic phosphate fertilizer. Hitherto such operations elsewhere have been small quarry operations with limited expansion potential, but Murdock Mountain is special.

While Robin blew stress gaskets fretting about the drilling delays, Garry Smith’s team has spent the summer resampling all the outcropping Upper Phosphate Zone beds that Rob McEwen’s team documented decades ago while investigating the Leach Mountain Range for gold potential, which it turned out not have anything to write home about. The BLM has accepted Nevada Organic’s phosphate lease applications covering three other outcropping area whose tonnage footprint would boost the 10-45 million tonne target for the Nevagro Lease toward 200 million tonnes. Nevada Organic is now focused on establishing drill pad locations which the BLM requires to grant a drill permit. Some time in the next month we will find out what sort of thicknesses and grade ranges these other beds have. A year ago I would have shrugged, who cares? But today we know that what is measured in the weathered outcrop will be very similar to what fresh bedrock assays.

If the numbers prove similar to the Nevagro Lease numbers, thanks to the marine deposition nature of these sedimentary phosphate beds, we will be able to extrapolate down-dip tonnages and start taking those 200 million tonne targets seriously. This will be what interests the next high net worth investor audience stage. When the PEA delivers economic numbers for the Nevagro Lease, Murdock Mountain will finally be ready for the third audience, institutions whose fund managers need to point to hard numbers to explain their decisions involving other people’s money. But the high net worth audience will already understand the implications and have taken positions for the third stage, which is attracting a major fertilizer company that appreciates the future of regenerative farming, sees how the Nevagro numbers map to the additional tonnage on the other three leases, and be in a position to justify a buyout.

John Kaiser owns shares of Nevada Organic Phosphate Inc

The first segment of my MIF presentation featured West Vault Mining Inc to illustrate how to play the theme “Gold as the Bridge Away from America”. Understanding what I mean is key to appreciating why I think we are in the fourth inning of the mother of all resource junior bull cycles. Since the late 1970s North American and European investors priced gold producers and pre-development gold juniors differently from other metals in that valuations carried a premium for a substantially higher future gold price. Why did gold enjoy this privilege and none of the other metals, especially given that gold is not particularly useful relative to other metals for real world applications?

Doug Casey promoted the “fiat currency debasement” argument for gold which was rooted in the history of the Weimar Republic’s efforts to deal with its post World War One debts by literally printing currency which resulted in the famous hyper-inflation that Zimbabwe repeated in recent decades. Worries that governments will start printing money to pay back their debt is a legitimate reason to own gold as a wealth preservation strategy. It is, however, irrelevant to the value of gold mines and undeveloped ounces in the ground because their value depends on the difference between the price of an ounce of gold and the cost to produce tha ounce. The Weimar hyper-inflation did not make German ounces in the ground worth developing because even as the price of gold soared in marks, so did the cost in marks to produce those ounces.

In the same breath that gold bugs on the newsletter circuit warned about fiat currency debasement they sang praises for various juniors with ounces in the ground whose grade was too low to make production profitable which is why such stocks were so cheap. But don’t worry, the way western governments are accumulating debt, it is just a matter of time before gold soars from $400 to $2,000. During the final decades of the 20th century the United States won the Cold War and emerged as the biggest and most powerful economy in the world with the US dollar as the sole global reserve currency. During this long period gold was effectively flat, mainly because from its $35 base in 1972 to the $400 level where it settled down at in 1980 gold had experienced a 400% real gain. Worthless ounces in the ground were suddenly in the money and the exploration and mining sector proceeded to find and develop so much gold that it doubled the above ground gold stock.

The gold resource juniors attracted two audiences, one that was focused on finding and developing ounces that were profitable at the prevailing gold price, and another we can call gold bugs who bought the story about higher future gold prices. The first group dismissed the fiat currency debasement story because, not being arithmetic challenged, they saw fiat currency debasement as simply forcing the gold price to adjusting for inflation which did not change the economics of ounces in the ground. During this multi-decade period many gold deposits were delineated which were of this marginal nature, such as Vista Gold’s Mt Todd and West Vault’s Hasbrouck deposits. This type of gold junior became known as a “gold optionality” play that would one day reward shareholders.

Because I recognized that fiat currency debasement would never make these deposits worth mining I began to hunt around for a story that would explain why the price of gold would rise at a rate exceeding adjustment for inflation. Around 2006 I came up with the idea of tracking the annual value of the above ground gold stock relative to non-inflation adjusted global GDP expressed in US dollars. This accounted for each year’s incremental gold production. When I plotted the ratio of the gold stock and GDP values as a percentage, which effectively made the gold price invisible, I realized the value of the gold stock was functioning as an indicator of uncertainty about the US dollar and America’s role as the guarantor of the post World War II order. This interpretation is qualitative in that it reflects a high level memory of my experience of history over the decades.

Gold’s peak in 1980 reflected enormous uncertainty in the context of the Iranian revolution, inflation spawned by the OPEC oil shock, and the Soviet Union’s ambitions in Afghanistan. America, which seemed to have lost it, turned things around and during the following two decades uncertainty diminished. It started to rise when China in the 2000s emerged as a major growing economy when it turned itself into a hybrid communist-capitalist system that offered cheap labor and lax environmental standards as an enticement for foreign capital investment.

If the convergence between the sizes of the Chinese and American economies continued as we approached 2030, and generated anxiety about how long the United States would remain the undisputed hegemon, we might see the gold stock and GDP value ratio reach the level experienced in 1980. Since annual new gold supply represented an ever smaller percentage addition to the above ground stock, this rising percentage could only happen through a rise in the price of gold which had nothing to do with inflation and everything to do with its traditional role as a haven against uncertainty.

In fact, we did not even need anxiety to spike for the real price of gold to rise. The more the global economy grew, the greater the value of accumulated wealth which would seek to park some of itself in gold bullion. Given the linear growth of GDP and the shrinking relative annual addition of new gold production, this could be expected to drive a higher real price for gold.

But once I saw how China briefly weaponized rare earth supply in 2010-2012, and then saw how newly “elected” Xi Jinping afterwards abandoned all strategies that might have turned China into a Global West liberal democracy, wiping out expectations that the economic production advantage enjoyed by China would eventually disappear, I realized that geopolitical anxiety would also become a driver for a higher real gold price. I have been bullish about higher real gold prices since at least 2016.

I do not talk about this in my MIF presentation because I am supposed to get it done in 20 minutes and I have talked about this many times during the past decade. Since 2016 I have focused on how Global West and Global East will deal with a growing geopolitical conflict, but during the past two years my attention has shifted to something completely unexpected, namely the decision by the United States to isolate itself from all nations except in the form of master-slave relationships.

Unfortunately, this has not worked with regard to the chief Global East nations, unabashed autocracies, namely China, Russia, North Korea and Iran, but it has worked with Global West nations who are supposed to be America’s allies competing with the Global East for alliances with Global South nations. The latter are gradually turning their allegiance to China which offers foreign investment as a carrot whereas the United States now only brandishes sticks. The current gold uptrend began in February 2024 and remains intact despite having retreated from the $5,500 peak in January 2026 which was an overshoot driven by johnny-come-latelies. The real price gain since 1980, while not at the level gold achieved during 1972-1980, is substantial at 164%.

The decision by the Republican controlled Supreme Court and Congress to support the US president’s determination to repackage America as MagaLand and ignore the checks and balance system crafted by the 1776 democracy minded founders, has created a tipping point with regard to the rest of the world’s relationships with the United States, to which they are tied by the role of the US dollar as the global reserve currency.

Gold’s strength is not caused by American buyers, who much prefer bitcoin because it is a self-contained celebration of American greatness gratefully exploited by criminals and enemies of America, but rather because gold ownership is serving as a bridge away from America. This is new demand in addition to the regular annual stashing away of a portion of growing wealth into physical gold as a safe haven. It is not explained by official central bank gold holding growth which remains modest, nor in the holdings of physical gold ETFs whose correlation with gold price ended in late 2022 and failed to track the upside price explosion in 2024. Gold is rising from hidden demand, likely from China, whose secrecy reflects the political sensitivity of pulling back from reliance on the United States. The West Vault segment of my MIF presentation deals with this theme and my argument that gold is undergoing the third major fundamental upwards reset in real price terms.

My two Favorite advanced and permitted gold picks have been Vista Gold Corp and West Vault Mining Inc since the start of 2025. On the Monday following the MIF conference Vista Gold announced a deal to be acquired by Artemis Gold Inc on terms which disappointed the market. In a September 29, 2026 Substack Post I explain how this puts Vista Gold into play, with the Artemis stock price rising if and when it becomes clear that it will acquire Vista Gold at the proposed 0.0966 Artemis share for 1 Vista share terms. Why would the latter happen? The reason is that Mt Todd is being priced as if the future long term gold price will be $2,000-$2,500 while Artemis is being priced as if $4,000-$4,500 is the future long term price. This perceived value arbitrage exists because institutional investors see the cash flow of gold producers, but they are not yet interested in pre-development juniors.

Vista Gold is a market orphan with only one visible institutional shareholder owning more than 5%. The traditional gold bug audience for pre-development gold juniors, the sort that used to listen to Doug Casey, are no longer really interested in gold. They once liked the fiat currency debasement story because Casey style speakers used the Ayn Rand philosophy to flatter his audience with suggestions that they were successful because they were full of merit, whereas government spending was helping out the less fortunate members of society whose misfortune was due to their lack of merit. The newsletter writers fueled resentment with warnings about an eventual financial apocalypse which nobody really wanted to see happen, just loom as a possibility and spur an anticipatory rise in the real price of gold. By 2022 gold producers had lost their special status as leveraged proxies for higher gold prices due to the financial blowouts during the 2010s as they developed their acquisitions from earlier in the decade.

That “financial” betrayal was bad enough but traditional gold bugs ended up embracing the Maga story even though how it has been implemented would make Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman roll over in their graves. Financial institutions have rediscovered gold producers because cash flow speaks, but they have not yet looked up the food chain at pre-development juniors. The gold bug audience, which should be piling into pre-development juniors such as Vista Gold and West Vault, have not returned because, as American patriots, they sense that the reason the gold price is rising is that it is serving as a bridge away from America. Thanks to the resulting gold bug boycott Vista Gold may disappear well below its fair value which will be of great benefit to Artemis Gold.

West Vault’s Hasbrouck project is also being priced as if $2,000-$2,500 is the long term future for gold, which Sandy McVey cannot illustrate in his main presentation because of 43-101 rules, but which I illustrate in the West Vault segment of my presentation. West Vault’s situation is different from that of Vista Gold. More than 50% of the stock is held by a handful of high net worth investors who do believe in the long game of fundamentally higher real gold prices. These shareholders can afford to wait.

The stock is not higher priced because the market does not believe gold producers want to acquire and develop a deposit that will produce less than 100,000 ounces annually. In my view a point will come where the 100,000 ounce benchmark will be displaced by pure cash flow numbers, but that may still be a few years down the road. One problem with West Vault is the lack of liquidity which discourages high net worth investors from trying to buy a position in the open market. But this makes West Vault an ideal stock for retail investors to buy small positions to tuck away for a future $10-$20 target which could come when Peter Palmedo tires of Hasbrouck’s gold being locked away in an underground rock vault and decides it is time to develop Hasbrouck as the foundation of a future multi-mine gold producer. In the wake of the Vista Gold buyout deal I suspect an upward repircing of West Vault will come sooner than later as Vista Gold shareholders redeploy their capital into West Vault.

In the backstage interview I try to tease out of Sandy McVey the circumstances under which West Vault’s value might get unlocked, but he cannot really say more than echo the party line. But I did find it interesting when he told me that as a mine engineer his proper role with the company should be chief operating officer (COO), not CEO, which I had not heard before. West Vault was last in a MIF session of mine in May 2024 when gold’s rise above $2,000 was just getting underway. The stock price has tripled since then, so nobody should complain. But the longer gold stays above $4,000, solidifying the huge implicit margin, the closer we get to the day when Peter Palmedo declares, “time to build Hasbrouck”. The Vista Gold news may have disappointed some shareholders, but it will end up pleasing West Vault shareholders.

John Kaiser owns shares of Vista Gold Corp

My MIF presentation was structured around the three distinctly different companies in my session. The second part of my talk was themed “The Critical Metals Security Crisis” which is about the vulnerability the Global West created this century through its arrogant denigration of metal exploration and development in its backyard while happily consuming metals and products containing them originating from Global South and East nations. The United States as the world’s biggest economy has ignored this problem even though China did a trial run in 2010-2012 with Rare Earth Mania 1.0. I have now been displaying the chart below for quite a few years and while the USGS began to focus on “critical metals” during the current US president’s first term, it has all been talk and little action.

Even the steps taken during the president’s second term fail to address the horrific permitting timelines for simple exploration. Nobody who works for the BLM or USFS has bothered to read the memo that exploration is essential with very little impact every serious junior knows how to reclaim. And do not get me started about Canada which former prime minister Justin Trudeau launched on a national suicide mission by embracing UNDRIP, an agreement which elevates 3% of the population with a distinct ancestral DNA into an aristocracy with a final say on Canada’s resource extraction destiny disguised as “consultation”.

In my talk I focus on tungsten whose price has increased ten-fold from its average price over the past two decades due to a combination of China approaching a supply depletion cliff and weaponizing its dominant supply even as the United States blew up half its tungsten dependent arsenal through OEF which people are starting to mispronounce as Operation Epic Futility. The current APT tungsten price is not sustainable in the long run, but settling down into the $1,000-$1,500/mtu APT range is a reasonable expectation for tungsten supply from secure jurisdictions.

The tungsten segment presented below provides a good background about how the China ended up dominating tungsten supply and why tungsten’s moment has finally come, even though there is no sexy new use for this metal.

Of the three companies in my MIF session Rackla Metals Inc has the greatest immediacy as a buy because it has suffered this year from last year’s high expectations for the grassroots gold exploration Grad drill play in Yukon which were dashed by assays. In his presentation Exploration VP Scott Casselman describes the Lentung tungsten project which through sheer serendipity they noticed last fall had been sitting open for staking all year. Lentung is the opposite of Grad because it is a feasibility demonstration story with expansion potential using modern exploration technology. Don’t wait for the tungsten assays to confirm the Union Carbide data from nearly a half-century ago; Union Carbide’s work is reliable.

Scott did a great job in his presentation, but what one really should do is watch the Backstage Interview during which we cover a lot of ground. Two things stand out. One is that the recent $3.6 million flow-through LIFE financing was not taken down by Canadian clip and flippers of the sort that plague most LIFE financings; it was taken down by a single high net worth investor with door opening potential. Since Lentung is the richest tungsten deposit in the world with decent size, you might ask, once Lentung is turned into a 43-101 resource estimate, won’t doors open themselves for Rackla?

What came out during the interview is that Rackla is a contender for acquiring the Cantung Mine which has been in the Canadian government’s hands since the China price finally forced North America’s only tungsten mine into bankruptcy in 2015. Cantung is located about 60 km south of Lentung and accessible by an existing road with the addition of a small spur. Cantung was once the richest tungsten deposit in the world, but depletion through mining over a couple decades has left the remaining resource a shadow of its former self. Whether Rackla ends up owning Cantung or some other group, Rackla’s Lentung deposit will be part of Cantung’s future. The Canadian government, with its characteristic lack of urgency regarding anything important such as metal security of supply, has yet to figure out the method for making it available for being put back into production. Assuming the proposed terms are not too onerous, Rackla will make an offer and that secret investor may play a big role should Cantung be awarded to Rackla.

John Kaiser owns shares of Rackla Metals Inc

Although the deal has been negotiated in good faith by Vista Gold management, it is not a done deal because it requires two-thirds support from all votes cast at a special meeting to be held in December 2026. Artemis Gold owns 4.9% of Vista Gold, cannot buy more in the open market, and there are no lockup agreements with any shareholders with 5% or more shares. The circular for the April 28, 2026 AGM disclosed only one shareholder with more than 5%, Kopernik Global Investors LLC with 8,366,589 shares; Peter Palmedo’s Sun Valley Gold LLC, which owned 19,922,544 shares at last year’s AGM, now owns less than 5% after selling down to 12.4 million shares last year and distributing much of the portfolio’s Vista position to unit holders. Given that David Iben’s Kopernik styles itself a value investor (”believes that the markets are inherently inefficient and significant excess returns may be gained on a global basis via independent thought and rigorous research”), and is a recent 5% plus shareholder, I suspect Kopernik will be holding out for a much better value deal.

If Vista Gold receives a formal superior offer management must accept it, but Artemis will have the right to match it. The break fee is $18 million if Vista Gold accepts an unmatched superior offer, and $3 million if voters reject the plan of arrangement. These fees are chump change given that Vista Gold has $50 million working capital and the value of Mt Todd at current gold prices, and are not a deterrent. However, for any mid-tier producer to go to the trouble of making a superior bid that Artemis may not match, the premium would have to be substantial.

Complications would arise if a producer such as China's Zijin, which has been an aggressive buyer of pre-development gold projects around the world, were to make a cash offer. To match a higher cash offer Artemis Gold would have to revise the terms of its paper bid to offer more Artemis stock for each Vista Gold share. But Zijin could make a superior hostile cash offer where it is not asking management for approval but is speaking to the pocketbooks of shareholders. Zijin, which is publicly traded but part owned by the Chinese state, like Artemis Gold, would have to receive approval from Australia's FIRB (Foreign Investment Review Board). But because gold is not a critical metal it is hard to imagine an FIRB rejection. Vista Gold is effectively in play and the key question for Vista Gold shareholders is, when will the institutional market stop urging gold producers to spend their "temporary" cash flow "windfall" on share buybacks and dividends, and instead order them to focus on building their future gold production profile?

Artemis Gold, which is backed by real estate developer Ryan Beedie who owns 29%, and former CEO Steven Dean who owns nearly 4%, is not as beholden to institutional investors as are other mid-tier gold producers whose key people have big salaries and small equity stakes. It has already indicated it plans to develop Mt Todd at the 50,000 tpd scale outlined in Vista Gold’s 2024 feasibility study, leap-frogging the 15,000 tpd scenario for which Vista Gold produced a feasibility study last year in an effort to coax mid-tier producers and their timid institutional shareholders off the sidelines into the bidding pool. Mt Todd has a mining and output scale similar to Blackwater when the expansion stages are completed and is also a low grade, large tonnage system of the sort still shunned by top-tier producers (ie grade below 1 g/t gold).

Artemis Gold has a market capitalization of nearly CAD $9 billion and the cash flow to support debt financing of the USD $1 billion plus CapEx for Mt Todd. The two mines could turn Artemis Gold into a 1 million ounce per year gold producer; this status coupled with reduction of catastrophe risk would lead to an upwards revaluation of Artemis Gold if $4,000 plus gold emerges as the long term real price reality. These circumstances put Artemis Gold in a special position to arbitrage institutional myopia. In what follows I explain why this is such a good deal for Artemis Gold, why there is a good chance that the final terms will end up better for Vista Gold shareholders, and why the best strategy is to hold Vista Gold Corp for a higher price rather than sell now and redeploy elsewhere. The latter can be done in 2027 when the outcome of this potential auction is known.

Read more

The KRO Favorites Index has made a new high, though that is largely due to news on September 4 that effective September 21 Sunrise Energy Metals Ltd will be included in the S&P/ASX 200 Index. Sunrise has also indicated it is pursuing a dual listing in the United States which would expose the scandium story directly to an American audience. This has caused institutional investors to scramble to get positioned which helped Sunrise Energy to a new high at AUD $22.12 where it is no longer trading on medium term fundamentals but effectively as a technology style company. Sunrise had dropped to AUD $14.23 on September 3.

Scandium International Mining Corp whose Nyngan project is the next best scandium project after Syerston has inched higher to $0.175 but the market is not embracing this alternative to Sunrise because the board seems to be distracted by the Koala’s TNR Gold tutorial on how to defend against a proxy battle whose outcome we will learn at the AGM on September 22.

The KRO Bottom-Fish Index has also managed to achieve a new high, though neither of these Collections has any spectacular new gainers based on fundamental developments.

TSXV resource listing value traded surged during in August with a mid August peak. It slumped with the start of September when the uptrend in the price of gold stalled.

The 2025 Gold Replay that kicked off August has paused while the market waits for a Federal Reserve decision to raise, hold or even lower short term interest rates ahead of the November 3 mid-term elections. Gold’s retreat to the $4,400 level has also killed the upside momentum of the Gold Producer Index.

The US jobs report for August on September 4 was much stronger than expected, adding 162,000 new jobs. The CPI report showed inflation flat at 3.4% but it seems to have benefited from a decline in the Fuels Index which does not include gasoline but presumably does include diesel which is making a new high even in the United States where farmers are getting ready to harvest their crops.

The resumption of missile exchanges between the United States and Iran has pushed oil toward $100 per barrel. Now we have the additional complication that the East-West Crude Oil Pipeline which ships Saudi oil to a Red Sea port, by-passing the Strait of Hormuz, has been shut-down to assess damage from a drone attack out of Iraq. Meanwhile the Iran-backed Houthis are pushing their footprint in western Yemen closer to the Bab al-Mandeb chokepoint between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.

Oil prices have not truly reflected the supply disruption created by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz because China has been drawing down its strategic petroleum reserve as have other nations dependent on oil supply from the Middle East. The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which Biden drew down to contain prices after Russia invaded Ukraine, and which an even sleepier president failed to replenish during 2025 as he contemplated the liberation of Iran, continues to decline while the US oil rig count has increased only modestly. September’s inflation report is not going to be pretty, and even the president’s MAGA fans may stop believing the president’s claim that “affordability” is a Democrat fabrication.

The Federal Reserve is in a tough spot because employment remains strong as do inflationary pressures. At the same time there is a need to refinance long term treasury bills coming due, plus the new federal debt created by fiscal deficits which the president has promised to boost by $1.3 trillion if the Republicans retain control of the House and Senate. Long term US debt yields are rising. Lowering the short term rate will not change a growing aversion to ownership of long duration US federal debt. The new Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh is in an unenviable position. The gold uptrend has stalled because there is a high expectation short term rates will be increased not just to subdue inflation, but to sell short term debt to fund maturing long term debt. The resource juniors are in a wait and see mode. Next week I am off to Vancouver, first to participate in a site visit, and then to present at the Metals Investor Forum on September 18-19.

KWSQ 0:06:50: Which project are you visiting and to what extent do juniors still conduct site visits?

Next week I will visit the Reliance project of Endurance Gold Corp in southwestern British Columbia, a 6 hour drive from Vancouver. This will be my first site visit since 2023 when I visited the Hasbrouck project of West Vault Mining Inc in Nevada and the Vulcan project of Eagle Plains Resources Ltd in southeastern British Columbia. Site visits became a big thing during the early 2000s until 2014 when the resource junior bear market that started in late 2011 depleted audience attention and corporate treasuries. The companies used to pay for all the travel, food and lodging costs of research analysts and newsletter writers.

These site visits were group tours so it was an opportunity for the participants to trade notes and listen to each other’s queries of management. Watching the geologist or CEO respond to somebody else’s question allowed one observe body language and also think in real time how what one was hearing may be differing from what one was expecting. Physically walking the property also gave a much better feel for a property than watching some drone video shot by the company. If one paid attention one could also observe how local stakeholders felt about the project.

The best part was potentially noticing something about a project that is not apparent in press releases or even in a zoom call with a corporate executive. This wanders into the arena of potential “selective disclosure”. I remember Aurelian’s Fruta del Norte discovery hole in 2006 in Ecuador. It was a deep, geochemically blind hole drilled with only $1 million left from a treasury that had reached $20 million in late 2023. In the weeks before the discovery hole was announced on April 5, 2006 the stock had slumped into the $0.60-$0.70 range because exploration had yielded nothing of consequence. The stock closed at $3.03 on the day of the news, but stalled because with a single hole it is impossible to determine to what degree it represented true width. It could be a one hole wonder drilled down the dip of a mineralized structure.

In fact, in late 1986 Menika Mining Ltd drilled a spectacular hole at the Reliance project owned today by Endurance Gold. Menika’s Charlie Boitard had a special way of generating drill targets by moving a compass around on a physical map and waiting for a tingling sensation. The Menika hole into the Imperial zone boosted the stock ten-fold to $5. Subsequent holes at different angles failed to provide similar intersections and the stock price collapsed. The hole did catch the attention of Robert Boyd who was then with Homestake. He saw enough, however, about the geological context that when the project became available in late 2019 after Boitard had passed away and the junior let the claims lapse he jumped at it as CEO of Endurance Gold. In January 2026 Endurance finally delivered a maiden resource estimate based on 127 core holes representing 32,000 m for 1.45 million ounces at an average grade of 2.3 g/t gold with 77% within the open pit shell.

Aurelian’s Fruta del Norte discovery hole had a much better outcome and today Fruta Del Norte is a world class underground gold mine operated by Lundin Gold which is still yielding new high grade zones. During the month or so after the discovery hole was announced Aurelian took a group of analysts on a visit to the site where they would have seen core laid out in boxes from subsequent holes. With the help of a drill plan those analysts who were geologists understood what it meant and those who weren’t figured it out by just watching and listening. By June 2, 2006 when assays for 4 followup holes were announced confirming that this was not a down-structure one hole wonder, the stock had already touched $7.50. The stock gapped into the $10-$15 range and peaked at $43 on November 1, 2006.

Rules were eventually introduced where a company could only cover local costs of a site visit; research analysts had to pay their travel and lodging costs. They submitted their expenses to their brokerage firms for reimbursement. The reasoning was that if the company paid for all expenses it compromised the independence of analysts and newsletter writers. This ultimately became a problem for independent newsletter writers who pay out of their own pockets for these travel expenses. In May 2016 I visited the Hermosa-Taylor project of Arizona Mining Inc which I had recommended at $0.35 in January based on zinc-lead-silver values the company had been reporting in 2015 that everybody but Richard Warke ignored. In August 2018 South32 acquired Arizona Mining at $6.20 which valued the discovery at $2.1 billion. I was never reimbursed for my flight and hotel cost. Due to these expenses and the time disruption I rarely do site visits anymore. The newsletter industry has changed because most newsletter writers get paid by the company for favorable coverage. They may foot their own travel expenses but what they charge the company for site sponsorship and other social media marketing will more than cover those costs. It is a different world today.

What do I hope to learn next week when I visit the Reliance project? Endurance is shaping up as a fundamental winner though that is not yet reflected in the stock price which has suffered since the junior raised $8.3 million earlier this year by running the Canadian brokerage sector’s LIFE gauntlet. On August 12 I published a Substack article, If Endurance Gold is not a screaming buy, what is?. This past week the RC rig arrived to start drilling the 1,500 m Offset Anomaly whose strike length could double the existing resource for the 1,500 m Imperial-Eagle segment of the Royal Shear corridor where Endurance has had a core rig drilling infill and deeper holes. Assay turnaround time is running 8 weeks so we have only seen infill or modest stepout holes the market ignored because it wants to see two new developments. One is that the high grade continues and ideally blossoms at depth under the Imperial-Eagle Zone. The other is confirmation that the Offset Anomaly is similar or better. The company spent the summer building a road up the mountain to access the Offset Anomaly an sample the road cuts with assays still pending.

At the start of the season management was unsure if the Offset Anomaly was a fault offset continuation of the Royal Shear corridor or a parallel system. Given the strength of the Imperial-Eagle segment they obviously hoped it was a fault offset. In talking to management it is clear to me they now believe it is a fault offset of the Royal Shear and the question is how do grade and width behave within this mineralized segment. They are starting with an RC rig because near surface the heavily altered and oxidized bedrock yields poor core recovery. There will thus be nothing for me to see in the core boxes except blackish rock chips. Since assays won’t arrive until late November they will have to rely on arsenic XRF readings which are closely associated with gold at Reliance. The main thing I hope to gain is a deeper understanding of what makes Reliance tick. One other thing I will try to assess is what would an open pit mine look like? It’s next to Carpenter Reservoir and while that is a dead lake filled with suckers, are there any cottage owners who might object? And where is that quarry operated by the local First Nations group that is supposedly similar in scale to what the Reliance open-pit portion would be. So I hope to get a sense of the lay of the land site visit and perhaps pick up some good vibes from the crew.

KWGQ 0:18:30: Who will be in your session at the Metals Investor Forum?

The Metals Investor Forum will take place in Vancouver on September 18-19, 2026 at the JW Marriott Parq. My session takes place on Saturday during 3-4 pm. The three companies in my session are all Favorites: Nevada Organic Phosphate Inc, Rackla Metals Inc and West Vault Mining Inc.

Nevada Organic Phosphate Inc was at my May session following which Robin Dow raised $5.7 million for the Murdock Mountain phosphate project where the goal is establish the presence of up to 200 million tonnes of phosphate rock that qualifies as organic. In late August Nevada Organic reported good news for hole #10 which was a 1.5 km stepout along the strike of the outcropping Meade Peak Formation. Not only was the grade and thickness consistent with what we have seen with the first 1,500 m of the Nevagro lease, but the heavy metal content remains well below the maximum USFDA level above which phosphate has to be chemically processed to remove the heavy metals and produce the synthetic fertilizers MAP and DAP. The bad news is that the drilling crew proved so incompetent the company had to fire the contractor and is now trying to find a competent crew and rig in Nevada. The stock has slumped because news flow cannot resume until they find a crew.

West Vault Mining Inc was last in my MIF session in May 2024 and is now returning because the price of gold has put Hasbrouck so badly in the money that the biggest shareholder, Peter Palmedo, may have to unlock the vault that keeps Hasbrouck’s gold locked in the ground. Liquidity is poor so the stock is of not much interest to institutional buyers, but should be attractive to retail investors until it gets into the $5-$10 range where it belongs.

Rackla Metals Inc graduated from my Bottom-Fish Collection to the Favorites Collection on August 14, 2026 and is my top tungsten junior pick. I explained why in my August 16, 2026 Substack post. This past week Rackla surprised the market by announcing a $3.65 million flow-through LIFE unit financing at $0.365. These LIFE financings are free-trading the instant they close and Canadian brokerage firms specialize in clipping the warrant and flipping the stock into the market. This is what happened to Endurance Gold earlier this year and the stock price has yet to recover. Why would Rackla do such a financing in the middle of a 10,000 m drill program designed to confirm and expand the historic resource estimate for what is the highest grade tungsten deposit in the world with meaningful tonnage? It turns out that Canada’s Chucky Doll brokers will receive none of this paper because it is all going to a single high net worth investor who for now at least will remain behind the scenes. Why does Simon Ridgeway need somebody like that now? The Canadian federal government is still trying to figure out what to do with the mothballed Cantung mine which is about 60 km from Rackla’s Lentung deposit via the Howards Pass Road and only needs a small spur to connect. If indeed Rackla is one of the entities bidding for Cantung, if it should land this former tungsten mine, having a deep-pocketed shareholder in place to help raise the capital needed for a restart will be a good thing.

KWGQ 0:26:11: Are there any other companies you plan to check out at the Metals Investor Forum?

Silver North Resources Ltd, which is a KRO Favorite, is presenting in Peter Krauth’s session. Silver North is drilling the Haldane zinc-lead-silver project in Yukon. Silver North was in my May Metals Investor Forum session during which CEO Jason Weber described plans to delineate the Main Zone discovered in late 2024 and start doing scout drilling on targets identified through a geophysical survey designed to spot cross structures beneath the cover of oxidized scree. The geophysical results have delivered a complication in the form of the realization that the cover rock above the faults appears to be thrust faulted Sourdough rocks of the Keno Hill Quartzite Formation. It is the Basal Quartzite that is the host rock for the high grade Keno Hill style zones which form within the jogs of the main faults caused by cross faulting. On the one hand this is bad news because it disrupts their plan to send prospecting crews to assess those locations where the geophysics indicates cross structure. This will not work if the bedrock at surface is unmineralized Sourdough garbage rock. They will have to drill those cross structures on a geochemically blind basis. On the other hand this is good news, because it explains why prospectors scrambling over Haldane Mountain a century ago during the Keno Hill boom did not find much to dig holes into. This opens the possibility that there are lots of Keno Hill type zones, just not exposed thanks to the thrust faulting.

Surge Copper Corp is part of my Bottom-Fish Collection and a candidate for graduation to my Favorites Collection. On June 15, 2026 Surge delivered a PFS for its Berg copper-molybdenum deposit in British Columbia. Using $4.75/lb copper as a base case the after-tax NPV at 8% came in at CAD $4.6 billion with an IRR of 24%. While the IRR clears development hurdles the NPV is just below CapEx at CAD $4.6 billion. The market did not like that outcome, but with copper over $6/lb those economic numbers will improve.

South Pacific Metals Corp is also part of the Bottom-Fish Collection thanks to its big portfolio of projects in Papua New Guinea. South Pacific recently developed an uptrend which has stalled as it completes a $15 million financing at $0.83. This will be a chance for me to get caught up on which of its projects is going to end up carrying the day.

Carlin Gold Corp was added to the Bottom-Fish Collection in September 2025 when I saw signs that this comatose Nevada junior was waking up. Carlin Gold owns the Cortez Summit property east of Barrick’s fabulous Fourmile discovery which boasts about 16 million ounces of half oz gold under a thick layer of barren Upper Plate tombstone. Barrick drilled a million dollar hole just east of its border in 2017 but then dropped its option to earn 70% by spending $5 million over years. Billionaire Tom Kaplan through Electrum has been a long time shareholder of this junior headed by Wayne Livingstone and Bob Thomas. The problem with Cortez Summit, compounded by Barrick walking away, is that deep expensive holes are needed to test whether mineralization such as Goldrush and Fourmile is present within the underlying Lower Plate. The stock did nothing after a 10:1 rollback in 2023 but in 2025 new people got involved through private placements. On September 8, 2026 Carlin Gold raised $30 million at $1.30 of which Kaplan is putting up $21.5 million while Canaccord is rounding up the rest. The only exploration tool that will work at Cortez Summit is brute force grid drilling that sets up the geological landscape in three dimensions to allow more focused vector drilling. Barrick currently has 20 rigs operating on Fourmile. This will be a chance to meet the new CEO Quentin Mai.

John Kaiser owns shares of Endurance Gold Corp, Nevada Organic Phosphate Inc, Rackla Metals Inc and Silver North Resources Ltd

Solitario Resources Corp dropped 25% on September 2, 2026 when it announced results for 3 holes of a 10 hole maiden drill program completed during May-July on the Ponderosa portion of the 100% owned Golden Crest project in South Dakota. All the holes had short intervals up to 0.4 g/t gold within the Paleozoic limestone and hole #7 included 1.3 m of 1.37 g/t gold in the Precambrian basement rock. At the start of the season Solitario had two rigs which explains why #7 assays were received along with holes #1 and #2. The negative market reaction is due to frustration caused by waiting two years for the USFS to approve the drill permit and high expectations based on extensive gold soil and surface rock values within a 7 km by 2 km north trending corridor. For those who waited two years for the Golden Crest POO to start a maiden drill program in 2024 it is especially frustrating for the Ponderosa POO. For those who watched from the sidelines the current USD $0.59 price is an extraordinary buying opportunity for five reasons. (Edited Sept 7, 2026 to correct grammar and spelling.)

Read more

Substack Part 2

KWGQ 0:27:55: If Sunrise Energy is now stalled as an upside driver of your Favorites Index, where should investors focus their attention?

Last week I graduated Rackla Metals Inc from the Bottom-Fish to the Favorites Collection as what I think will become the hottest new tungsten junior. On Monday the company officially announced that the 10,000 m drill program at its Lentung project in southwestern Northwest Territories was finally underway, two months later than planned due to an unusually big snow pack and drill crew shortages. In my writeup I explain why tungsten has become a security of supply problem for not just the Global West but also China itself.

Saturday’s Financial Times described how North Korea’s GDP growth has outpaced that of South Korea for the past few years and is booming relative to the misery of prior decades. The article mentioned that during January through May North Korea exported $287 million worth of goods to China of which 68% was tungsten. China produced 81% of global tungsten production in 2025 with North Korea in fourth place at 2.4%. I find it remarkable that China is importing what is likely all of the tungsten production North Korea does not need for its own military applications. There is potential new large scale tungsten supply on the horizon, but it will not arrive until the next decade. That is a problem because the United States in its Iran War depleted half of the projectile arsenal it spent a decade building up. Yes, they can quickly manufacture new replacement missiles, but a key input is tungsten due to the hardness it bestows and its highest melting point among metals. That latter used to be its virtue when it served as the filament in an incandescent light bulb, but this usage has largely vanished.

I am excited about Rackla because its Lentung deposit is only 60 km by existing robust road from the mothballed Cantung Mine which the Canadian government wants to sell to somebody who will pay the reclamation costs and put it back into production. Lentung is higher grade than what is left at Cantung and has potential to more than double what Union Carbide outlined in 1977-1982 before it gave up as China slammed the market with cheap tungsten and eventually achieved overwhelming domination. The lack of similar competing advanced tungsten plays will focus market attention on Rackla as America’s tungsten problem becomes better understood. The stock is liquid because there are still a lot of shareholders unhappy about last year’s disappointing results for the Grad gold play which was supposed to be another Snowline style Valley discovery. Lentung is the complete opposite type of story; all they need to do is make the historic deposit 43-101 compliant and start a PEA for its development as future trucked supply for a revived Cantung operation that feeds America’s tungsten needs. Whoever ends up with Cantung will eventually want to own Lentung.

Now that it looks like we have a 2025 gold replay underway with a sustaining narrative, the short term upside drivers of the Favorites Index will be the advanced feasibility demonstration type gold juniors. In terms of massive upside potential the best bets are still the discovery exploration juniors such as Endurance Gold Corp, Arizona Gold & Silver Inc, Solitario Resources Corp and PJX Resources Inc, to name a few I have recently written about and all of which I own. But such big moves require discovery news, and there is always the risk assays disappoint. However, as the fourth inning of the mother of all resource junior bull markets gets underway, investors will be increasingly receptive to “encouraging” results which for the past decade have triggered tear inducing big sell-offs.

The four advanced gold Favorites that stand to benefit immediately from the 2025 gold replay are Vista Gold Corp, West Vault Mining Inc, Snowline Gold Corp and Spanish Mountain Gold Ltd. I’ll have more to say about each one in future Substack posts, but for now the important thing to note is that I am no longer using $3,000 gold as the valuation basis. I have changed what I call the “optimistic” long term price to $3,500 which is well below Friday’s $4,582 close, but I have also shifted the “fantasy” price from $5,000 to $7,000 so that everybody can see what happens to the net present value range for these projects if gold does indeed charge through $5,000 and makes a new high in 2027. The upshot is that all of these companies are still being priced well below the fair speculative value range using $3,500 gold in the cash flow models of their most recent economic studies.

Read more

Substack Part 1

Substack Part 3

The Favorites Collection has also enjoyed a reversal to the upside and made a new high on August 13, 2026 when it was up 418%. It has since retreated somewhat to being up 382%, but that does not reflect the growing broad-based uptrend among Favorites. A key contributor to the new high was Sunrise Energy Metals Ltd which hit a new high of AUD $20.50 on August 10 on news that the US Department of War has conditionally agreed to provide a USD $400 million loan for the development of the Syerston scandium deposit and downstream facilities to make scandium metal for the chip market as well as other scandium based chemical compounds. The DOW news release stated that in return Sunrise would supply the needs of the DOW and any other end-user designated by the United States.

The press release put out by Sunrise Energy did not mention this universal offtake right but focused on the fact that this loan offer is conditional on due diligence and other matters such as making sure the entire supply chain for the construction and operation of Syerston is not sourced from nations the United States views as problematic. Neither of the press releases mentioned any offtake prices. The Favorites Index has retreated during the past week because Sunrise Energy has pulled back to $15.90 as the market began to digest the dead money implications of this announcement.

Read more

Substack Part 2

Substack Part 3

KWGQ 0:00:00: Are we experiencing a gold replay of last year?

When we discussed the potential for a gold replay in the August 1, 2026 Kaiser Watch Episode gold was still hovering above $4,000 and the general equity market was suffering a lot of individual stock volatility, especially among Big Tech stocks. Gold producers were reporting good results with the caveat that AISC was rising more than the market wanted to see. The risk against a gold replay was the potential for a major general equity market correction which would drag gold below $4,000 and unleash collateral selling in the resource sector. At the end of July it was hit or miss whether or not we would get a sustained replay of the 2025 gold rally that climaxed at $5,500 in January 2026. General equity markets are still at record highs, but developments during August are reducing fear about what a major correction would mean for gold and gold producers and by extension resource juniors.

During August 2026 we have seen the US national debt hit $40 trillion (watch the daily increase at Debt to the Penny), a rise in long term bond yields after the US intervened to prop up the yen by selling euros, a decision by the Treasury Department to start buying long dated treasuries in September, and an uptrend in the prices of both gold and bitcoin. Most Americans are vaguely aware that the national debt is high and rising, which they have heard about since the late 1970s from the gold bug crowd. Eyes glaze and ears go deaf these days when somebody clucks about the debt. But that $40 trillion milestone making media headlines is a memorable number visible not just to Americans but everybody else in the world.

What is the US president going to do about that? Make life even less affordable for millions by further cutting social services and healthcare support, perhaps even taking the boots to retired boomers enjoying the benefits of universal healthcare? No, he is going to push for a bigger Department of War budget. In other words, the debt will keep climbing toward the $44 trillion level projected for the end of his term in 2028.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is trying to push down the yields of long-dated treasury debt, first by dumping Euros to support a falling yen lest the Bank of Japan start unloading its $1.2 trillion in US treasury debt to support the yen, and this past week by restarting quantitative easing to buy 10-30 year treasuries. A key reason is that 20-30 year mortgage rates are based on long dated treasury yields and if those yields keep rising it will freeze the real estate market as qualifying for a loan becomes ever more difficult.

An additional problem is that Net Interest on the federal debt is now the third largest federal budget item after Social Security and National Defense. A lot of long dated treasury debt is maturing over the next year which needs to be refinanced. The United States and quite a few other nations have resorted to refinancing by selling lower yield short term debt which kicks the can down the road.

Unfortunately, unlike five years ago when Biden’s term began, yields for treasuries two years or shorter are no longer near zero, ranging 3.8% to 4.19%, a relief for retirees with savings accounts. Thanks to the inflation spurt caused by Operation Epic Fury US CPI inflation has surged to 3.4% and may be due for another spurt as the Iran War drags on. In any case, if Federal Reserve chairman Kevin Warsh does lower short term rates, that does nothing for long term yields which are determined by the market for existing debt. During the past couple weeks the US dollar exchange rate against Global West currencies has started to weaken, even with the Canadian dollar whose government is negotiating with the United States on tariffs.

Strange as this may sound, the US president may be the first Republican president to fail to increase the national debt by an amount greater than accomplished by any predecessor. Biden’s record will stand unless the geopolitical conflict with China turns hot during the next two years and military adventures cease to be discretionary. Given how the United States is pulling its military assets out of the Pacific theatre into the Middle East to support the Iran War, what must Beijing be thinking about good timing for annexing Taiwan?

Oil prices have started to rise again with the expiry of the “truce” between the United States and Iran with no face-saving deal in sight to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The “crack spread” between oil and diesel is now even affecting American businesses, not just the rest of the world, fueling inflation. Consumers have started to tighten their belts as Walmart recently reported, much to the dismay of its shareholders. Meanwhile the US president has gushed his enthusiasm for North Korea’s dictator while slamming South Korea as a burden on America while Xi and Putin roll in the aisles laughing as 30,000 more North Korean soldiers get shipped out to Ukraine as cannon fodder. Kim Jong Un’s sister blew back a raspberry and Dear Leader farted 10 short range ballistic missiles into the ocean to thank the president for cutting short joint defense exercises between the United States and South Korea. The unwinding of Pax America continues. Unlike in March the prices for key metals such as copper, gold and silver have risen since the start of August.

Gold launched into an uptrend at the start of August, closing at $4,582 on Friday. But more importantly, on August 19 the GLD ETF had its strongest volume day since March 23 and gained over 300,000 ounces, the largest daily gain since January 16, 2026. Even more interesting is that GLD moved up $15.28 on Wednesday which is roughly equivalent to a $140 move in the price of gold. This is unusual because during US trading the GLD price move has generally reflected what the physical gold market had done the night before in London. In this case London gold had increased only $57.20 ahead of North American trading on Wednesday. We need more time to validate this, but I think a significant change took place this week with regard to overall American attitudes toward gold.

Bitcoin, which has had a terrible year and had acquired a volatility pattern mirroring that of Big Tech stocks, has developed an uptrend tracking that of gold. It seems that bitcoin is getting back its original narrative as a hedge against American fiat currency debasement, though a partial driver is optimism that the Clarity Act will get passed before the mid-term elections and pave the way to pull more cash out of the pockets of Americans into crypto-currencies.

My 2020 Gold Producer Index has sharply reversed its downtrend since the January 2026 peak when gold hit $5,500 and even Barrick, after getting spanked by the market for having to vend its 16 million ounce high grade Fourmile discovery into the Nevada Gold Mine JV with Newmont at a valuation of only $6 billion to secure permission for an IPO of its North American gold assets, has bounced back into an uptrend. We are definitely at the beginning of a 2025 replay with gold launching from a $4,000 base rather than the $2,500-$3,000 range at the start of 2025. The dozen gold producer charts I have assembled below clearly show the sharp upwards reversal. I do remain worried about a major general equity market correction causing collateral damage in all sectors, including metal producers and juniors, but I am making the bet that it will not be as brutal as in 2008 and for the resource sector will be short-lived. My reason is that a sharp correction in the pricing of AI focused Big Tech does not change the underlying AI boom, just the expected profitability of what I think will become a commodity style service. In 2008 the collapse of a fake real estate boom engineered through falsely risk classified securitized mortgages ripped the foundation from under the US economy; curtailing profit expectations is not the same thing as wiping out the prosperity potential of AI driven innovation.

In A King for a Sword - Tungsten - April 13, 2026 I explained why tungsten is emerging as the most critical among the “critical metals” that have become a major concern for Global West nations as well as the United States. At the time it looked like the exponential tungsten price chart was screaming for a price reversal, but that has not happened for the European APT price, though the ferro-tungsten price, which is a China price, has retreated 35% from its March peak to a price that is still 300% above its level in 2024. The tungsten price situation is different from the rare earth price situation where the China price remains low compared to elevated European prices. Tungsten supply is turning into a global problem and for the US Department of War which needs to replenish its missile arsenal it is an acute problem.

In the Substack article I alluded to a member of the Bottom-Fish Collection without naming the company because it was afflicted with several missing pieces that have become the bane of the Canadian resource junior sector. During the past week these missing pieces have finally been resolved and effective August 14, 2026 at $0.22 I am graduating Rackla Metals Inc to the Favorites Collection as a top priority good speculative value rated feasibility demonstration type junior with a focus on tungsten. Rackla has the potential to become the hottest Canadian tungsten junior because its high grade Lentung tungsten deposit near the mothballed Cantung Mine has a faster development track potential than larger scale projects undergoing feasibility studies.

Read more

Endurance Gold Corp provided a second update for its 2026 Reliance program on August 11, 2026 which the market largely ignored because the 7 holes so far reported do not represent anything bigger and better than is already known. That may change dramatically during the rest of the year. Endurance had great upside momentum in Q1 of 2026 after releasing a surprisingly good maiden resource estimate on January 19 which delivered 19.6 million inferred tonnes at 2.3 g/t gold for 1,450,000 contained ounces of which 1,120,000 were open-pittable and the rest underground mineable. This was based on 31,798 m of core and 5,908 m of RC drilling.

Momentum stalled in early March after Endurance completed an $8.3 million brokered LIFE private placement through a combination of hard, flow-thru and charity FT units at prices from $0.65-$0.955. A good part was pre-sold short by warrant clippers and a nitpicker at the BCSC tried to sabotage the financing with a false complaint about the MRE technical report. With an extra $2.8 million from the exercise of major shareholder Richard Gilliam’s remaining warrants Endurance started the drill season with about $12 million working capital. The stock has yet to recover from the shanking it received at the hands of Canada’s regulatory and financial sector. But therein lies today’s opportunity for very timely speculation.

Read more

Arizona Gold & Silver Inc is now busy drilling from BLM drill pad #10 to test the Perry Zone within the Philadelphia project down dip from hole #156 which last September yielded 20.43 m of 9.04 g/t gold and 34 g/t silver. Arizona Gold was unable to chase the Perry Zone deeper due to the location of BLM drill pad #2 and was instead forced to chase the zone along strike to the north at similar depth while waiting for approval of 16 additional drill pas that will allow it to fully test the Philadelphia vein for the Oatman Hypothesis as well as the Red Hill Hypothesis that an open-pittable system sits in the hanging wall of the vein. That strategy ended in late February when holes #159-#160 delivered much lower grades due to this segment of the Philadelphia vein having been down-dropped. Drilling to the south encountered a similar situation. The stock has since languished in the $0.55-$0.65 range, even after the expanded BLM permit and the $18 million Sorbie financing were approved in late June. The market was unimpressed by the $0.80 Sorbie financing because the money comes in $750,000 monthly installments over two years. However, on August 4, 2026 Arizona announced a $12 million private placement at $0.80 from a strategic investor which should impress the market and which boosts the treasury to $16 million immediately. Substack June 17, 2026 (Arizona Gold finally green-lighted for liftoff) provided a detailed overview of the Philadelphia and Silverton projects. At the Silverton antimony-gold target in Nevada the program finished with 11 holes for which assays are expected in late August.

Read more

PJX Resources Inc is a discovery exploration type junior which is a Fair Speculative Value rated Favorite with a high priority ranking based on its 100% owned Dewdney Trail project in southeastern British Columbia. In late 2023 Sullivan style exhalative massive sulphide boulders were discovered in talus not far from the former zinc-lead-silver Estella vein mine which shifted the focus from the Lewis Ridge SEDEX target to what is now known as the Estella Basin target. Permitting and road building delays resulted in late starts to drill programs in 2024 and 2025 which failed to intersect mineralization that qualifies as the source of the boulders. What was initially thought to be an east dipping Proterozoic sedimentary layer cake obscured by a Jurassic aged syenite dyke turns out to have been complicated through folding and later faulting as well as dyking. PJX participated in my Toronto MIF session and I recommend anybody who wants to catch up watch John Keating’s PJX Presentation as well as the Backstage Interview. After a snow related delay drilling this year began during the third week of July and PJX is now in the discovery time zone where core in the box visuals would speak loudly to those within earshot.

On Friday July 31, 2026 three hours after the open on what had been a very slow trading day for PJX a purchaser entered the market through Anonymous using a bot that bought stock in 500 share increments spaced up to 30 seconds apart until quitting 12 minutes before the close, soaking up 363,000 shares of the 486,303 shares that traded, or 75% of the volume. The stock closed up $0.06 at $0.25 thanks to a 24,000 share buying burst by a TD trader 6 minutes before the close, setting the highest price since the summer of 2024 when the market had high expectations for an instant discovery. I was not watching the stock on Friday so I am speculating that the Anonymous party on the sell side was an unmonitored iceberg order (an iceberg order does not reveal its full size, but automatically replenishes stock for sale as soon as somebody places an order at the offering price).

Given that it took a month to close the financing and that the stock has been easy to buy for the past year, it seems very peculiar that somebody would be overwhelmed by a sudden need a week after drilling began to surreptitiously buy a position at the offer using a bot on a Friday on the last day of the month. Because this activity smells so suspiciously of a cheater with inside information, it is hard to imagine anybody stupid enough to do such a thing, and it is best to assume that a discovery hole is not yet in the core box. In any case, everybody who follows PJX should be aware that discovery news could arrive any day. And if the Estella Basin target still frustrates, PJX has plans to test the Grundy Creek and Lewis Ridge targets this season. So this is the year PJX could finally hit the ball out of the park.

Read more

Flashing back to 2025, the resource juniors had a good start in Q1 of 2025 but soured during Q2 after the US president unveiled his Liberation Day tariff strategy, a declaration that all nations were America’s foes, especially members of the Global West. I was supposed to participate in the September 2025 Metals Investor Forum in Vancouver but it was planned as a one day event because demand was so weak. None of the companies in my Favorites and Bottom-Fish Collections wanted to participate so at the end of July I was asked by the organizers if I still wanted to be part of the conference. I decided to bow out, but during the first week of August the market began to respond to the H1 results being reported by gold producers. I described what was happening in KW Episode: Gold Producers report record quarters - Aug 18, 2025. The breakout and mood change was so dramatic that the September MIF event was expanded to 2 days and completely filled out with companies before anybody bothered to notify me about the change. This year I have at least two companies for the 2 day September 2026 event, but it is still a struggle to fill my four company slot.

The question being asked is, will we be treated to a replay of last year? The context today is similar but different in important ways. One of these is that in July 2025 my Favorites Index was up only modestly, but today it is up 330% after peaking at 396% in June 2026. A year ago we were still wondering if the resource junior bear market that began in 2012 would ever enjoy a bull cycle again. Today we are wondering if that one year bull run is all we get, or are we merely experiencing a third inning stretch in what will prove to be the mother of all resource junior bull markets? The uncertainty today has its roots in what we see when we look at the scale of a long term gold chart, and a failure to appreciate scale when thinking about the bad experience that followed gold’s first attempt to clear $2,000.

Read more

KWGQ 0:00:00: Last week at least 3 groups published short attacks on Bloom Energy which on Thursday was down 40% from its $346 peak in June where it had a market cap of nearly $100 billion. What were the shorts complaining about?

The Bloom-scandium story has become so important I must first provide some background. On April 13 we did a Kaiser Watch Episode with the theme A Kingdom for a Sword which looked at how a sudden lack of metals such as scandium or tungsten could cause huge problems for enterprises, be it a business or a Department of War.

It was the first time I addressed the Definitive Feasibility Study (DFS) Sunrise Energy Metals Ltd had published in early March for its Syerston scandium project in Australia’s New South Wales. What shocked me was that Sunrise used $3,000/kg scandium oxide as its base case price and justified it by arguing that solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) demand would hit 200-300 tpa in a few years. That was very different from a year earlier when CEO Sam Riggall was focused on getting the cost low enough to sell at a price attractive to the commercial aluminum market.

Although Sunrise does not mention Bloom Energy, everybody knows that only Bloom Energy has an SOFC design which overcomes the maintenance problem created by rapid degradation of the ceramic electrolyte caused by a high operating temperature. SOFC technology was developed during the first half of the 20th century but it could never be commercialized for this reason. An SOFC converts fuels such as natural gas or hydrogen into electricity through an electrochemical process rather than combustion; its scale can be small, it is not noisy, and it does not generate excess heat that might require water cooling. The secret sauce invented by Bloom founder KR Sridhar was to dope the zirconium ceramic with scandium for which he filed a patent that expires in 2032.

15 years ago, after the flat-lying, near surface Nyngan and Syerston deposits with scandium grades ranging 400-700 ppm were discovered in new South Wales, there were high hopes that the success of Bloom’s Boxes, now called Energy Servers, would allow these deposits to be developed as primary, scalable scandium mines that would serve a market that could grow as high as 1,000 tpa. But sales for Bloom’s fuel cells did not grow as expected, Bloom invented a way to recover scandium from the waste streams generated through conversion of ilmenite into titanium dioxide destined for the pigment market, and the urgency to develop primary scandium supply to serve Bloom’s SOFC market vanished.

Bloom’s titanium waste stripping method works well with the older sulfate process, which represents 60% of China’s titanium dioxide production capacity but only 30% in the rest of the world where the newer and cleaner chloride process dominates. Deployed in China through intermediaries this by-product recovery method provided Bloom with its scandium needs at a price believed to be $1,000/kg Sc2O3 or less, well below the $1,500-$2,000/kg needed for primary projects like Syerston and Nyngan. Bloom also got about 7.5 tpa as a by-product from the Coral Bay nickel-cobalt laterite operation of Sumitomo in the Philippines.

(Although deposit grades are reported as elemental Sc, scandium is sold and priced as scandium oxide (Sc2O3) on the basis of scandium oxide’s weight which is 1.534 times that of elemental scandium. Some juniors like to puff up their grades by presenting them as Sc2O3, and one of them which the Canadian government has backed, at one time even published tables in its corporate presentations comparing its Sc2O3 grades to everybody else’s published Sc grades. This is the same company that published a PEA whose positive PEA used an Sc2O3 price of $1,200 for a fraction of the output while “selling” the bulk in the form of master alloy with an embedded Sc2O3 price in excess of $3,000/kg which everybody already knew would never fly with commercial aluminum end users.)

Without Bloom needing scandium beyond what these sources in China and the Philippines could supply companies like Sunrise Energy, then called Clean-TeQ, and Scandium International had to cultivate commercial aluminum alloy users to embrace Al-Sc alloys. But these users wanted a price below $1,200/kg and had alternatives if that was not possible. And indeed it was not possible except at a much larger scale than the 35 tpa output for Nyngan and 60 tpa for Syerston which were actually expensive pilot plant projects whose CapEx nobody wanted to fund without solid offtake orders at prices that made them profitable. It was a classic chicken-egg problem which nobody dared to solve with a “field of dreams” assumption that if you build the supply the demand will come.

Sunrise gave up on scandium and spent $400 million trying to demonstrate the feasibility of mining the adjacent low grade nickel-cobalt deposit with a much lower scandium grade which at that scale would have yielded about 75 tpa of scandium oxide. But the Sunrise nickel-cobalt project died because of huge CapEx, a flood of cheap dirty nickel out of Indonesia, and a shift away from lithium ion batteries that relied on cobalt in the cathode.

Scandium International under its then CEO George Putnam tried to cultivate both commercial and defense department interest in aluminum-scandium alloy adoption, but that effort was undermined by suspension of its Nyngan mining lease due to incompetence by the NSW permitting department and the shakedown efforts of a landowner who still held the surface rights to the eastern half of the Nyngan mining lease. This problem has since been resolved in SCY’s favor, the mining lease has been reinstated, and the site infrastructure and first decade of mining is all located on the western half of Nyngan where SCY holds the surface rights.

The offtake development plan involving tests with various end-users, however, had fizzled and in 2022 the largest shareholder, Scandium Investments LLC, owned by Peter and Chris Evensen, kicked out the CEO and the CTO Willem Duyvestyn. They raised about $3 million through a private placement with 5 year warrants and embarked on a 5 year vacation with the answering machine left on waiting for an offtake order at $2,000/kg. The only thing they forgot to do was adopt a more suitable name such as Maytag Repair Services Inc.

I gave up on Scandium International and in late 2024, when I saw that Robert Friedland and Sam Riggall were reviving the original Syerston scandium story, which is the richest and biggest scandium deposit in the world, I adopted Sunrise Energy Metals Ltd at AUD $0.235 as my new scandium favorite in my 2025 Favorites Collection. It is among the best picks of my career, currently up 6,066% at $14.49 though it was up 7,810% when it peaked at $18.60 in June.

Sunrise Energy is seriously over-priced in terms of the demand context from a year ago when SOFC demand growth was modest, and when the growth story was all about coaxing aluminum alloy end users to adopt Al-Sc alloy. But in mid 2025 Bloom’s fortunes changed dramatically in a manner that has hugely benefited the outlook for Sunrise because SOFC is once again a stepping-stone for unleashing future potential aluminum related demand as high as 1,000 tpa. The current AUD $2 billion valuation reflects expectations that Sunrise will be the winner who takes all of the scandium supply future. Scandium Intl at CAD $0.175 with 418 million fully diluted with a valuation of CAD $73 million which is less than 5% that of Sunrise Energy is being priced as the loser who gets nothing. Why? At the end of the day it is all about management. Sunrise has promoter Robert Friedland and his make-it-so lieutenant Sam Riggall while SCY has a couple wealthy retired financial engineers for whom every day seems to be a Saturday in the park.

Bloom Energy’s fortune changed because exploding AI data center construction is running into a power problem. AI data centers need continuous power at a constant voltage, ideally direct current at the gate. They cannot afford to suffer brownouts. But when connected to the electricity grid they are exposed to brownouts caused by air conditioning demand fluctuations due to increasingly frequent and worse hot spells. If the civilian population suffers a brownout and an AI data center is connected to the grid, the AI boom reaps a public relations nightmare with people already wary about future AI related potential job losses.

The solution has been to pursue off-grid power sources. Uranium bugs have jumped with joy about this ideal application for small modular reactors, but this technology is not ready for rapid installation. The better solution is to build a mini power plant next to the data center fed with natural gas. But gas turbines are not easy to manufacture and the order backlog has soared to 3-4 years. In July 2025 Bloom Energy announced a deal to supply Oracle data centers with its Energy Servers. Not only could Energy Servers be quickly installed and connected to existing natural gas feeds, but they had the energy transition virtue of a lower greenhouse gas footprint than combustion based gas turbines and they do not need any water to cool excess heat from thermal combustion. The market realization that demand for Bloom’s solid oxide fuel cells could grow exponentially turned it into a pick and shovel proxy for the AI boom that drove the stock from $20 in early 2025 to a peak closing price of $346 on June 22 where it sported a market capitalization of $100 billion.

The question I asked a year ago was, where is the scandium supply supposed to come from to feed this Energy Server demand growth? The obvious solution would be to do an offtake deal with Sunrise Energy which was completing an updated DFS for Syerston and was attracting interest from the US Department of War for to feed its high performance hardware as well as future 6G related demand for chips that require scandium as an irreplaceable input. In the April 25 Kaiser Watch Episode I pointed out that Bloom Energy could eliminate any concerns by doing a deal with Sunrise Energy. It seemed such an obvious solution.

KWGQ 0:10:38: Given that this seems a logical path for a AI pick and shovel story like Bloom Energy with a huge market cap to pursue, what happened?

Read more

The KRO Favorites Collection from its launch on January 1, 2025 hit a peak gain of 396% in June and finished off up 383%. During this same period gold and the TSXV Index have achieved gains of 54% and 50%. However, the real question is, how have the Favorites done since the start of 2026?

Most of the Favorite Collection’s gains were achieved during the second half of 2025, with Sunrise Energy Metals Ltd leading the charge for a current gain of 7,232%. However, its gain for 2026 is only 118%. Sunrise Energy is now trading as a proxy for the future of scandium as both a nuts and bolts metal in the alloy sector and as the key to all manner of yet to be invented technologies. With its recent decision to invest in emerging scandium based technologies it has escaped the valuation trap of pick and shovel industries. Although a modest gain this year compared to 2025, it is good enough to put Sunrise in second place behind Faraday Copper Corp which has gained 119% this year based on its Arizona copper story.

For 2026 the Favorites Index has gained 45% with a peak 53% gain in June and a brief loss of 8% in March. Gold, which peaked with an insane 26% gain during January is now down about 7% for the year. The TSXV Index had a peak gain of 17% and is now down 9% for the year.

When you look at how the Favorites have done since the start of 2025 only seven of them are currently in the red. As a group they all posted gains at some point during the first half of 2026, but at mid-year it is a very different story. When you look at how they have done this year only 13 out of 30 are up as of June 30, 2026. I have created tables ranking the Favorites according to maximum gain, worst loss and current status. When I look at my Substack chart for the growth of free and paid subscribers, it has been flat since March.

The primary negative driver behind this mid-year lull, which I discussed in our last Kaiser Watch Episode on June 19, 2026, has been the Iran War which has boosted inflation expectations and stressed certain nations such as Turkey into selling central bank gold. The new Federal Reserve chairman Kevin Warsh has indicated he will not be the US president’s poodle and the Supreme Court has backed him up with a surprise ruling that the US president can fire any federal government agency worker who displeases him except for the Federal Reserve.

The June inflation numbers come out on July 14 and while the easing of the oil price during the pause of the Iran War could lower the transport fuel component of the Consumer Price Index, the concern is that there will be an uptick in other categories which forces Warsh to keep interest rates at current levels. The pressure on the gold price is due to the unwinding of the so-called “debasement trade”. This was premised on the notion that an all powerful US president could emulate what Turkey’s autocrat accomplished for Turkey’s currency and economy.

A secondary negative driver has been the investor rush into AI related stocks which has the dual effect of sucking risk capital away from the resource sector and boosting anxiety that an AI market meltdown is imminent. Some market observers have drawn parallels with mid 2008 where a rush into commodities failed during July, launching resource juniors into a downturn well before the September Lehman Brothers failure unleashed a global financial crisis. But back then the resource juniors were in the sixth year of a metal price bull market driven by the China super cycle when the financial crisis exploded. The financial crisis was created by Wall Street through the securitization of mortgages that fed an unsustainable real estate boom helped out by China’s massive export of deflation for consumer goods at the price of America’s manufacturing base. It interrupted the China super cycle which resumed in 2009 allowing the resource juniors to come back to life until 2013 when gold cratered and the Tea Party prevented America from launching infrastructure renewal as a fiscal stimulus alternative to quantitative easing.

Others have suggested that Q1 of 2000 when the dot-com bubble flamed out is a better comparison for the current situation where the AI dream has driven markets to record highs. But back in 2000 the resource juniors were still in the post-Bre-X dumpster and struggling with gold below $300 per oz while base metal prices were trapped in a long term real price decline. By that I mean although metals like copper were nominally stable, they were declining in inflation adjusted terms, which is terrible for resource exploration and development because costs are simultaneously marching higher (compare the nominal and constant price trends in the copper production chart).

That changed in 2003, which we long the resource juniors could feel, though copper producers forward sold heavily at prices lower than the spot price until 2006 when they finally grasped what was happening in China. The institutional audience’s suspicion of gold is similar to that of the base metal majors at the start of the China super cycle. China’s super cycle did not really become visible until 2003, but from 1980-2000 its share of global production for many metals rose relentlessly, and, in the case of copper, Chile emerged as the dominant producer. The bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000 did not hurt the resource juniors because they were already hurting badly.

From the perspective of the resource juniors the current situation is a blend between the dot-com and super cycle booms. The 12 year resource junior bear market that began in 2013 only ended in mid-2025 when the market finally started taking seriously the gold rally that started in February 2024. However, the majority of resource juniors are still moored at the dock wondering why John Kaiser insists the mother of all resource junior bull cycles is underway. Hell John, look how your Favorites suck half way through 2026!

What we do have is the foundation for a geopolitically driven super cycle coupled with a fundamental upwards reset in the price of gold linked to the crumbling of America’s post Cold War hegemony that the trajectory of the Iran War is revealing like that awful kid mumbling about the emperor not wearing any clothes. Nobody, including myself, wants to believe this is happening, but it will be good for resource juniors because it promises higher real metal prices, not because of a roaring global economy, but rather because globalized supply from the best endowed lowest cost jurisdiction can no longer be relied on. Kingdoms will come up for grabs for lack of swords, which will create the will to find and develop local and secure metal supply.

The backdrop is the AI technology driven market boom perceived as a dot-com style winner-takes-all battle but which in reality may shape up to be a commodity business with thin margins that will not support current valuations. The AI boom will eventually generate new prosperity paths but meanwhile the percentage of pension plan portfolio value represented by AI linked companies exposes individuals to a market crash that will not make the future benefits of AI disappear but will cripple wealth assumptions. The role of resource juniors in finding and delivering new metal supply will not receive front page attention until the AI dream runs out of sky without achieving escape velocity. Because none of the resource juniors will ever be a winner that takes all, the lateral blossoming of capital infusions so badly missing during this current third inning stretch of the mother of all resource junior bull markets will finally happen. Meanwhile the resource juniors need to be riders of the storm.

KWGQ 0:12:25: Which Favorite delivered the biggest gain so far this year?

Much to my surprise when I tabulated the 2026 performance of the KRO Favorites, the big winner was Nevada Organic Phosphate Inc which gained 271% but is now in third place with a gain of 114%. Nevada Organic is a good example of event driven speculation in the resource junior sector. These days the Polymarket and Kalshi prediction markets are exponentially gaining popularity because they provide a real time market for event based outcomes whose odds change as a result of developments ahead of the final event. Traditional sports gambling systems are super pissed because these prediction markets are just plain unregulated gambling, but what makes them different is that you can sell a bet that has not yet won but whose chance of winning has improved. The structure of the World Cup qualifying and knockout system creates lots of ways for fans to bet on their dreams while others take a more calculating approach. The ability to cash out of an initial low odds bet before some random bad penalty kick destroys the dream is something traditional gambling does not offer. But that is what resource juniors engaged in discovery exploration are all about.

In Q4 of 2026 Nevada Organic finally got approval and funding for a maiden drill program at Murdock Mountain in northeastern Nevada. Murdock Mountain is at the southwestern periphery of the Western Phosphate Field which at its center in Idaho has 25%-35% phosphate beds that have fed America’s agriculture for a century. But these phosphate beds, like the similarly rich ones in Florida and Morocco, are contaminated with heavy metals for which the USDA has created a Heavy Metal Index. To apply a fertilizer to a field its heavy metal content needs to be below this index. No problem. Sulfuric acid is used to process this “dirty” phosphate to create phosphoric acid which gets combined with nitrogen to create MAP and DAP, highly efficient synthetic fertilizers. But the USDA also created rules as to what farming practices qualify as organic, and one of them was that you cannot apply a fertilizer that has been chemically processed.

Nevada Organic’s story was that its phosphate beds, which grade only 5%-15% P2O5 and thus cannot compete against Idaho’s richer phosphate beds, have a heavy metal content well below the USDA’s Heavy Metal Index. That would make the Murdock Mountain phosphate eligible for the organic market because it would simply be a ground up whole rock product applied directly to fields. But these beds, which outcrop, had never been drilled because Big Ag wants the cheapest and most efficient fertilizers for its cash crops that feed America’s obesity problem. Why would anybody waste money delineating an inferior source of phosphate? So the market asked CEO Robin Dow, what if your low heavy metal assays for your outcropping Upper Phosphate Zone are due to weathering that leached out the heavy metals? What happens to the heavy metal grade when you drill into the fresh UPZ of the Meade Peak Formation?

In January 2026 assays for the six holes drilled in October confirmed that fresh UPZ rock had the same low heavy metal content. Robin’s technical guy Garry Smith created a cartoon showing why the Idaho beds are so rich but contaminated while the peripheral beds are not so rich but clean. Eliminating this risk that the story is stillborn created a market pricing slingshot effect. The removal of this huge failure risk turned Nevada Organic into the top performing Favorite.

So why has the stock price slumped during the past month after Nevada Organic raised $5.7 million to guarantee that it can delineate a phosphate resource without worrying about what happens in the world of AI fantasy valuations? The answer is that physical reality collided with Robin Dow’s acquiescence to investor demands for a regular drip feed of news, regardless how trivial.

The emerging assumption after the first six holes close to the weathered outcrop was that Nevada Organic was dealing with a reasonably continuous UPZ bed which to convert into a resource estimate simply involved marching the drill rig along the strike and sending several holes downdip along each section. On June 2 Nevada Organic reported that hole #8 up-slope 100 m from #4 and #5 had intersected only 15 m of Meade Peak formation, half what the other holes intersected. That got me worrying. On June 16 Nevada Organic reported hole #9 had intersected the expected Meade Peak thickness, but slipped in news that hole #8 had “no significant phosphate values”.

That news shattered the dream of a continuous bed 3-5 m thick grading 5%-15% P2O5. All of a sudden there was a hole in the middle of the bed! That meant that this “dot” could not be connected to the other dots to allow a back of the napkin calculation supporting the 10-46 million tonne tonnage footprint target for the Nevagro lease. Now the market’s expectation shifted to worrying, how many such bed disruptions will drilling encounter? Robin Dow is now in a quandary. Does he keep drip feeding the market news releases that fundamentally meaningless in terms of positive expectations, but devastating in creating negative expectations?

I talked to Garry Smith about what he thinks is going on in the area of hole #8 and he told me this area has been subject to shearing which would be post mineral because these beds form in a marine environment through precipitation. Above the Meade Peak Formation is a chert horizon, a silica bed created from the death of plankton with silica skeletons rather than carbonate skeletons. Garry emphasized that the term “no significant phosphate values” did not mean no phosphate was present, just not in terms that would qualify as economic. He said there were thin beds within the busted up chert, but not with a thickness, grade or continuity that would ever be mined.

On a large scale it is to be expected that disruptions occur at a smaller scale. The question the market is now asking is, how frequent will disruptions such as experienced in hole #8 be within the Murdock Mountain beds? The problem Robin Dow now faces is that of somebody gambling on the flip of a coin which has a 50% chance of being heads or tails. The chances of local disruptions pock-marking the Nevagro bed are less than 50% when looking at the big picture, but when flipping a coin there can be a long run of tails. Robin Dow’s hole by hole disclosure policy is now exposed to the risk that the drill hits a sequence of disrupted pockets within the Meade Peak Formation that are just plain bad luck. If these pile up the market will assume the trend is revealing the reality of a failed hypothesis.

In my view it is time for management to jettison its ADD afflicted audience and start catering to serious shareholders who prefer to receive drill results as pairs of holes along the strike of the Nevagro lease’s bed with full assays, telling us not just what the P2O5 grade is, but also confirming that the heavy metal grades are not undergoing spikes into story-killing territory. Such results should include sections so that the serious audience can start constructing a model of the evolving tonnage footprint.

There is an additional reason for Nevada Organic to dial back its core visual by core visual disclosure strategy. The parallel story is speculation about the potential size of the market for what ultimately could be a 200 million tonne resource of “organic” phosphate grading 5%-15% P2O5. The problem with speculations about the growth of organic farming is that it cannot happen if you only have a scalable supply of “organic” phosphorous, but not organic “nitrogen” and “potassium”. The answer to this organic growth obstacle is regenerative farming, which is a compromise between organic purism and synthetic ruthlessness.

KWGQ 0:18:15: How have your shovel ready gold ounce in the ground Favorites, West Vault and Vista Gold done?

At mid year West Vault Mining Inc was the second worst performer for the year, down 43%, whereas Vista Gold Corp was down only 3%. Peter Palmedo’s Sun Valley Gold LLC is the largest shareholder of both companies whose Hasbrouck and Mt Todd projects are permitted and shovel ready to build if a gold producer bought them out tomorrow. Both, however, are trading far below their fair speculative value at the current gold price just above $4,000. It is as if the market thinks these deposits have fatal flaws that prevent them from ever being built. The only fatal flaw is the market’s perception that Hasbrouck and Mt Todd will never be built because gold is headed back to $2,000, half its current level at $4,164, where the projects do become marginal. My running joke is the answer to the question, how high should West Vault and Vista Gold go if gold drops to $3,000?

In the advanced pre-development gold junior sector valuations represent extreme pessimism about the future of gold, whereas in Big Tech equity valuations reflect extreme optimism about the future benefits of AI, with SpaceX the most egregious example. I mention SpaceX because its valuation includes fantasies that future mining will take place in space on asteroids or planets such as Mars. How will it be possible to find and mine orebodies in places that do not have an atmosphere, no infrastructure nor mechanisms such as plate tectonics to concentrate metals when it is already so difficult to find and develop a mine on planet earth? Eventually these preposterous delusions will come back to earth, and that is what we positioned in resource juniors are waiting for.

I do not think your typical investor understands the valuation math that applies to mining which is rooted in the discounted cash flow model because we are dealing with a finite, depleting asset. Institutional fund managers do understand the math but they are herd people who hide within the safety of trends. Unlike 2003-2012 the resource sector is not viewed as a “safe” uptrend. Nevertheless, everybody I talk to dismisses the idea that gold is going back to $2,000. What they do wonder about is at what level gold will stabilize. Most think the lowest level will be about $3,500, which is why I use the more pessimistic $3,000 in my valuation models for West Vault and Vista Gold. My challenge is to teach investors how to apply this valuation math to ounce or pound in the ground juniors, and, once they trust these numbers, think again about where they think gold will end up in real price terms, and muster the courage to buck the trend.

Vista Gold was up 55% earlier this year but is now trading below $2 and down 3% despite raising USD $45 million at $2.50 in March from institutional investors who were willing to buck the trend. The company has feasibility studies for two mining scenarios, one for 50,000 tpd with a $1 billion CapEx and the other more recent one at 15,000 tpd with $400 million CapEx. The bigger scenario is the one that should eventually be developed, but the 15,000 tpd scenario was created to provide cover for mid-tier producers whose shareholders would choke at taking on a project with such a big CapEx. So far this approach has not paid dividends for Vista Gold because institutional shareholders are still insisting that gold producers treat their record cash flow as a temporary windfall they should return to shareholders through share buybacks or dividends. Vista Gold will not be in a position to do anything about developing Mt Todd at 15,000 tpd until 2027, but it will have the option of going down this path if by then gold producers continue to lack a mandate to grow their future gold production profile. By 2027 the gold chart will have repaired itself and fears about a retreat back below $2,000 will have diminished. Do the math and wait for the money to follow.

I run my DCF models all the way to $7,000 gold but I use $3,000 gold to decide whether or not the current market pricing of the junior represents good, fair or poor speculative value. At $3,000 gold Mt Todd at 50,000 tpd has an after-tax NPV range of $2.9-$4.4 billion for 10% and 5% discount rates. I use the mid-point USD $3.7 billion as my target outcome value which would be $24.57 per share. However, that is NOT the fair value for the stock because that number assumes the project is ready to begin production. Under my rational speculation model the fair value range for a project not yet at the funded construction stage of 50%-75% of that target outcome is $1.85 billion to $2.8 billion. That converts to $12-$18 per share which is 5-10 times higher than the current price. Even when you apply the “value trough” penalty of the Lassonde Curve Vista Gold should be trading USD $6-$12.

West Vault’s peak gain this year was only 7% despite gold charging to $5,500 and is now down 43% at $1.47 though there have been no negative developments or fallout from doing a LIFE financing which has left Silver North Resources Ltd down 42% as the third worst performing Favorite in 2026. But Silver North is now financed for two years of work at its Haldane silver project in Yukon and in June I bought my position from Canadian shanker-wankers.

West Vault is stalled because the Hasbrouck project is already at optimal scale but its projected annual gold output of 70,000 oz over 8 years is deemed too small for a gold producer to acquire and develop unless its name is McEwen Inc. It is called “West Vault” because Peter Palmedo through decades of bitter experience operating a gold focused fund called Sun Valley is of the opinion that gold is more valuable if kept locked up underground than mined. Like Mt Todd, the Hasbrouck deposit has been marginal at prevailing gold prices throughout its existence and has historically been treated as an optionality play on a higher future real gold price.

When I apply $3,000 gold to the Hasbrouck DCF model I get an after-tax NPV range of USD $470 million to $612 million at 10% and 5% discount rates. The USD $541 million mid point converts to CAD $757 million based on 60 million fully diluted shares. The fair value range for that outcome is CAD $6.31-$9.47, or $3.16-$6.31 with Lassonde’s “valley trough” penalty. The market is ignoring West Vault because it views Hasbrouck as too small for a producer to acquire and develop, and also takes the view that gold permanently in the ground is worth nothing. This standoff between what the market thinks West Vault is worth and what Peter Palmedo thinks it is worth makes West Vault the best short term buy among the ounce in the ground Favorites.

The passage of time is not only repairing the scary looking exponential gold price chart, but it is also repairing Peter’s aversion to juniors building mines. He spent his career running a gold fund with the premise that gold projects marginal today would one day be very much in the money. In February 2024 gold launched into an uptrend that has fulfilled Peter’s dream. At the current price gold is up 162% in real terms if you take $400 gold in 1980 and inflation adjust it to the present where it would be $1,588. At that price old deposits like Hasbrouck and Mt Todd deserve to remain in the ground. But for the first time in Peter’s career the price of gold has substantially outrun the cost of building and operating a gold mine. Despite this, investors in his Sun Valley fund have gradually been pulling out, leaving behind Peter and diehards for whom wealth preservation is no longer the point of Sun Valley LLC.

Meanwhile, as wealth preservationists abandon Sun Valley, the crypto and AI booms have created an entirely new elite of high net worth investors, many of whom have very high opinions about their acumen which might even discourage them from the temptation to return to the crypto and AI markets for more of what was good thing for them. These noveau riche may look at alternative investments such as exploiting the fundamental price reset gold has undergone.

The CapEx for Hasbrouck is USD $66 million, so let’s call it $100 million if they want to start building the heap leach mine tomorrow. Suppose a high net worth investor approaches West Vault and says I will give you $50 million for a 15% equity stake at $5 and a loan for $50 million convertible at $10 if you agree to use the money to develop Hasbrouck.

If $3,000 is the long term price for gold, this implies a future price range of $12-$15 for West Vault. If you plug in the current $4,164 gold price and take the mid point of the resulting NPV range, CAD $1.2 billion, the future range is CAD $20-$25 per share. This type of scenario may seem unimaginable today, but it is grounded in fundamental valuation math.

KWGQ 0:33:43: Besides doubling down on pre-development gold juniors such as Vista Gold and West Vault, what other Favorites should investors focus on?

With the uncertainty about where general equity markets are headed and what inflation might be, I recommend going back to the June 19 Kaiser Watch Episode where I suggest put your money on Favorites with high impact discovery exploration plays. If a junior delivers exceptional drill results the market will ignore general conditions and pile into that stock. Arizona Gold, Silver North, Solitario, PJX and Endurance are financed and permitted to deliver discovery holes between now and the end of the year. All will have news events between now and the end of the year whose implications for the stock price will be independent of whatever else is going in the market or with metal prices. These news events may prove negative, but the valuations created by the mid year lull in the resource junior sector will limit the damage the caused by disappointing news.

John Kaiser owns shares of Arizona Gold, Endurance Gold, Nevada Organic, PJX, Silver North, Solitario and Vista Gold

The steep decline of the Favorites Index in early June reversed on June 10 since when it has been up daily until Friday when US markets were closed for the Juneteenth holiday. On Thursday June 18 the index hit an all time gain of 408.7%, closing the week up 407.4%.

The 120 trading day index daily change chart above conveniently starts on December 30 so we can see the resource junior market sentiment changes. January benefited from gold’s run to $5,500 and silver’s run to $115 while February was a choppy month as gold flirted with falling back below $5,000. The Iran War started on February 28 and gold managed to hold above $5,000 until March 18 when it broke down and turned $4,500 as the new level it tried to stay above. But on May 27 the $4,500 base broke and gold bottomed at $4,075 on June 11. The rebound by the juniors was a rally of relief that gold did not break through $4,000 though I continue to tell myself to be prepared to endure a plunge toward $3,000. That is the critical base for gold which also repairs the scary exponential price chart. It is the reason my focus this summer is on discovery exploration type Favorites.

As usual, much of the uptrend in the Favorites Index is due to <B>Sunrise Energy Metals Ltd</B> which hit a high of AUD $18.60 on June 18 following the June 15 news that it is making an investment in a private US company called Agni Semiconductor LLC which is developing something called “next-generation non-volatile memory” that is based on aluminum scandium nitride (AlScN) ferroelectric diode technology. My brain already struggles to keep track of geology jargon so I will not even attempt to understand what this semi-conductor material is all about. All we need to know is that scandium plays a critical role in this thin film chip technology geared for aerospace and AI applications.

Sunrise Energy already has a market capitalization of AUD $2.4 billion, well beyond the NPV of its Syerston DFS using $3,000/kg scandium oxide. Robert Friedland has congratulated Bloom Energy through an X post but there is still no acknowledgement from Bloom that it still needs scandium for its Bloom Boxes. After a rough period in early June Bloom surged to a new closing high of $328.91 on Thursday when it gained $43.76. It is now clear that AI data centers absolutely need to avoid drawing their electricity from the grid that also feeds the civilian population. Brownouts are not good for data centers and if their demand inflicts brownouts on people already frightened by the prospect of an AI JobaPocalypse, they will be at the hyperscaler doorstep with pitchforks and torches. Natural gas converted at the data center into DC electricity is the perfect solution to this brownout risk and Bloom’s solid oxide fuel cells are the best application.

Bloom’s problem is that even if it does an offtake deal at $3,000/kg with Sunrise Energy, it will not see any product until two years from now. It also understands that with a $2.4 billion market cap Sunrise has no choice but to play the “field of dreams” card where if it builds the supply the demand will come. With the money already at its disposal and a market cap more than ten times Syerston CapEx Sunrise has no choice but to build the operation outlined in its DFS. Bloom can fake it until Sunrise makes it.

The risk Bloom Energy is exposing itself to is that other parties may step up with offtake orders that absorb Syerston’s initial 60 tpa scandium oxide output. Sunrise is planning a parallel operation twice the size, but that will take 3 years to come on stream. The Agni investment will also not be welcome news for Bloom Energy because it signals that Sunrise Energy has decided it will not just be an upstream pick and shovel supplier of a metal commodity. Syerston is the biggest and richest scandium deposit in the world, comparable to the Spor Mountain beryllium deposit in Utah which turned Brush-Wellman into the world’s dominant supplier of beryllium. The problem with beryllium is that while it has properties good for aerospace applications, its dust is toxic to a certain percentage of the population, a problem scandium does not have. Brush-Wellman, which today is called Materion, could not expand offtake demand for its beryllium supply, so it wandered downstream to invest in applications that need beryllium.

This is the playbook China has adopted for rare earths which it sells near the cost of production, not because rare earth producers are afraid of making a profit, but rather because China’s corporate structure is so interwoven that the profit is made through the markup charged for downstream applications such as permanent magnets. The low price of rare earths, coupled with bottleneck export restrictions, makes it difficult to develop rare earth supply outside China’s hybrid capitalist-communist system. I suspect the Agni investment by Sunrise Energy is only the first of many investments in new technologies that have scandium as a critical input. Sunrise, which controls a primary scalable supply of scandium, will become a scandium technology incubator. Some of these technologies like aluminum scandium nitride based chips may not need much scandium, but the value of those chips could be huge compared to the scandium input cost. NVidia’s chips may need gallium and germanium, but the total annual supply of gallium and germanium is worth less than $1 billion. Bloom Energy may discover two years from now that all of the Syerston scandium supply is already spoken for. If Bloom is only pretending scandium supply is not an issue in fulfilling its data center order book, it is going to end up with a problem because people are starting to ask questions.

On June 16, 2026 I woke up to a news release from Scandium International Mining Corp announcing it was initiating an update for the Nyngan DFS it had done in 2016 and which forms the basis for its mining lease. The author, Lycopodium, has been retained to look up the current prices for all the off-the-shelf equipment and reagents needed to produce scandium from the limonite ore that grades 408 g/ scandium. And it will take Lycopodium 6 months to get this done. Shortly after Sunrise released its DFS on March 3 SCY produced a new corporate presentation which showed how favorable Nyngan compares to Syerston whose scandium grade is about 50% higher. SCY does not plan to change anything about the Nyngan scale or flowsheet, but it does plan to follow Friedland’s lead in digging potholes all over the property to excavate high grade cherries to feed the initial years of the mine. I said to myself, you guys have been looking at this for 3 months and only today does it occur to you to update the DFS with new costs and it will take 6 months to get this done? Now every time I think of SCY a Chicago earworm starts squirming in my head with the words “I’ve been waiting such a long time” shifting to the refrain “slow motion riders”. What took Peter, Chris and JV Evensen so long to wake up?

In late April I dusted off my Nyngan DCF model based on the 2016 DFS parameters and escalated all costs 40%. CapEx ends up at USD $122 million which is roughly the after-tax NPV at 10% using $2,000/kg Sc2O3, but at $3,000/kg the NPV range is USD $258-$460 million at 10% and 5% discount rates. Based on 423 million shares fully diluted and a 100% interest that translates into an NPV per share range of CAD $0.83-$1.49. But that is not the upside valuation limit because like Syerston, the Nyngan DFS exploits only a fraction of the resource. The design is modular and output could be quadrupled by simply adding autoclaves.

SCY also owns the nearby Honeybugle project where drilling suggests a similar but bigger and potentially richer deposit. Nyngan could be developed at its original pilot plant scale and expanded as needed, but an entirely new and bigger standalone operation could be developed at Honeybugle if scandium demand does explode through Al-Sc alloy usage. Bloom Energy does not have to play games with Robert Friedland because it could do a development deal with Scandium International. The only problem is that management seems happier spending Saturday in the Park than getting things done in a timely fashion. Usually estimates about how long something could take are too optimistic, but in the case of Nyngan the estimate may be too pessimistic, perhaps for strategic reasons. There is also no reason that SCY could not follow Friedland’s lead and morph into a scandium technology incubator, attracting valuations not grounded in pick and shovel math which bogged down the prior management headed by George Putnam and Willem Duyvestyn. The SpaceX IPO has ushered in a new age of futurist valuation. AI applied to physical models in the materials science realm could result in all sorts of new applications in which scandium plays a critical role. Scandium International Mining Corp is in the Bottom-Fish Collection because the big missing piece is a management team brimming with piss and vinegar. But that is something that could change overnight.

The three Favorites that have had recent developments worth noting are all involved in discovery exploration and as such should be immune to what the gold and other metal prices are doing. This week I published an update on Arizona Gold & Silver Inc (Substack June 17, 2026 - Arizona Gold finally green-lighted for liftoff) so I do not need to say much here other than that the $18 million Sorbie Group financing has closed and the BLM has granted approval for 16 new drill pads at the Philadelphia gold-silver project in Arizona. This will finally let Arizona Gold step back enough to drill the down-dip extension of the Philadelphia vein, starting with the Perry Zone where the best grades have been intersected down-dip about 400 m. The Oatman Hypothesis is that the next 400 m down-dip will have seen the brunt of multiple boiling zone pulses at different past water table levels that allowed gold grades in the 20-40 g/t range to develop. We should have some idea if this is true through visuals in August, with assay confirmation likely waiting until September. This will be a depth where the Philadelphia vein has never been tested, and if confirmed that this is the same as with the Oatman vein which yielded 1.5 million ounces at 28 g/t, the new BLM drill pad approval will allow Arizona Gold to test for multiple repetitions along 2 km of the Philadelphia vein. Arizona Gold has also begun a 27 RC hole drill program at the Silverton project in Nevada which is testing an antimony target.

PJX Resources Inc surprised the market on June 18, 2026 with news that it had secretly raised $6.3 million through a hodge-podge of hard, flow-thru and charity flow-thru units which puts it in excellent shape to test multiple targets at Dewdney Trail in southeastern British Columbia. The bad news is that this involves 44 million units with a full $0.20 two year warrant which puffs fully diluted to 331 million. That further reduces the upside for a CAD $2 billion outcome for which the stock now at $0.15 at the target testing stage offers fair speculative value.

This is an old-fashioned Sullivan 2 Hunt looking for the source of high grade zinc-lead-silver massive sulphide boulders with exhalative textures found in late 2023. Last year’s drilling had a late start and encountered the Quake Zone towards the end of the program. The low grade mineralization suggests they are close to vent where Zn-Pb-Ag massive sulphides piled up as it did with the 156 million tonne Sullivan deposit. If they find something with comparable scale the value would be a lot more than $2 billion and we would see crazy S-Curve market action explode. Drilling has been delayed until July because they want to drill the Quake Zone target area from the cirque to avoid the post-mineral syenite dykes that interfered with drilling last summer. They built a road last year into the cirque but a late season snow dump has delayed access. There is no question that a major deposit is present in the Estella Basin area but where is it? This year they are fully financed, have an early start for drilling, and enough geology from the past two years of drilling to have a good chance of pulling a discovery hole.

PJX will have enough money to test the GAR reduced intrusion related gold system target on the Zinger property if it can get approval for a modified drill permit before the snow flies.

Solitario Resources Corp published a very brief update about the Golden Crest gold project in South Dakota on June 17, 2026 that had me worried for a while that the Ponderosa anomaly was shaping up to be a bust. All the press release said was that 4 holes had been completed, of which 2 had been shipped for assays while the other 2 were still being logged, with assays expected to arrive in early August. This was followed by three paragraphs about the Cat Creek molybdenum project in Colorado they plan to start drilling in mid July. The paragraph explained why molybdenum was important. And then it went on to talk about permitting for the Bright Angel copper-gold project, also in Colorado. I thought, what the hell, Plan A is already a bust and they are talking up Plan B and C as replacements?

When I got hold of Chris Herald there was an entirely different explanation for the way the Solitario press release was written. They started Golden Crest in mid May with 2 rigs of which they knew they would lose one at the end of June. They have not been able to find a separate rig to drill Cat Creek, so they decided to drill 4 more holes at Golden Crest and then move the remaining rig to Cat Creek and drill 2 strategic holes to test an 800 m IP anomaly over a 4-6 week period. They have good reason to want to test Cat Creek this summer.

Freeport’s Henderson deposit, which has a slightly larger 1,000 m wide footprint, had a resource of 260 million tonnes @ 0.49% Mo at the start of 1976 and it is still in production. Most primary moly porphyry deposits have grades below 0.1%, so Henderson is truly world class. The IP anomaly at Cat Creek, which resembles that at Henderson, will be the result of a pyrite cap that sits on top of the moly mineralized body. The potential tonnage footprint is 200-400 million tonnes. The reason they like Cat Creek so much is that in the surrounding area moly leakage mineralization is present. They have even assayed a few ppm of rhenium, which is very unusual because the rhenium grade is usually below lab detection limits and its presence is measured through refinery by-products. A moly expert mentioned to them that some primary moly porphyries have a platinum group metals credit, and these veinlets at Cat Creek turn out to grade up to 0.25 g/t PGM. Some sort of moly system is present beneath the IP anomaly. What they do not know is the grade of the moly zone beneath the pyrite shell. If it is above 0.1% Mo it will be visible as molybdenite, the moly sulphide.

If they get these visuals, they will put out a press release; from the geological context we will know if they have a major moly discovery on their hands before assays arrive. They have approval to drill up to 8 holes, so they may race to drill extra holes if the visuals are really good. Molybdenum could become topical because the price has surged to $34.50/lb of molybdic oxide close to the high it achieved during the moly boom in 2004-2008. Back then these primary moly deposits less than 0.1% Mo were dredged up and promoted. This time around nobody will care about those lower grade deposits, but if Cat Creek emerges as a Henderson lookalike, the market will care about it. Moly supply has declined since peaking in 2011 with the recent supply uptick due to Peruvian Cu-Mo mines coming on stream. Because the geological model is simple it will take only 2 holes to make or break this story over a 4-6 week period. Then that rig will go back to Ponderosa and churn away until the end of October when winter comes along.

Before the remaining rig moves to Cat Creek Solitario will have drilled 8 holes from 8 pads within the Geyser portion of the Ponderosa anomaly. Chris confirms that they are not sending sedimentary tombstone in for assays, but he also warns that it will take some time to vector into the heart of this system which has a 8 km north-south strike with a 2-3 km width, a huge target area within which there will be structural gateways it will take a lot of holes to sort out. Chris says it would take many, many holes to reach a game over verdict. The 6 week Cat Creek break will allow time for all the assays to get back and the team to figure out where to drill next. So the 2 months of drilling from mid May to mid July is really just a warmup act, with the real act unfolding from September into November when snow shuts down access.

As far as Bright Angel is concerned, even though there remains an outside chance of a permit to allow a drill program this season, that is irrelevant due to the dearth of available drill rigs. Also, the extra IP survey planned for Bright Angel has now been delayed until August which would be rather late for refining fall drill targets. Bright Angel will have to be drilled in 2027. The rig they do have will return to Ponderosa and stay there. Meanwhile they continue to do detailed surface sampling within and around the Ponderosa anomaly with ongoing pleasant surprises. Cat Creek could be an interesting Plan B sideshow this summer but the Golden Crest’s Ponderosa target remains Plan A.

John Kaiser owns shares of Arizona Gold, PJX Resources, Scandium Intl, and Solitario

The purpose of the Iran War was to undo the mess created when the US president in 2018 tore up Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. Once the deal was off Iran had no reason to refrain from enriching uranium toward weapons grade so that it can build a nuclear bomb. The result was 448 kg of highly enriched uranium that may have survived last year’s bunker bomb attack on Iran’s underground nuclear facilities. The goal shared by everybody except the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp is to end its stranglehold on Iran’s destiny. Iran’s obsession with Israel is irrational and it has been a source of instability in the Middle East. The IRGC’s religious fanaticism has prevented Iranians from flourishing as an open society. It is all about self-serving power for the IRGC theocracy. Iran having a nuclear weapon is in itself not the issue; Pakistan, India, Russia, North Korea and China all have nuclear weapons, lots of them in the case of Russia and China. It is nuclear weapons in the hands of religious fanatics that is the issue; Iran without the IRGC would never use a handful of nuclear weapons on its neighbors because the retaliation would be nuclear devastation of Iran. Nations seek nuclear weapons as a deterrence. But for religious fundamentalists that does not matter because earthly existence is merely a temporary exile from a divine reality. The goal that benefits everybody is to get rid of the IRGC. Not only was this goal not accomplished, but the IRGC has become more entrenched than ever, and now that the Strait of Hormuz has been weaponized, it is in an even stronger position to call the shots in the Middle East.

What the Iran War failed to accomplish was not the question. What it did accomplish was to indirectly stall the emerging mother of all resource junior bull markets through the disruption of oil and gas supply from the Gulf states as well as key fertilizer commodities such as sulfur and ammonia. This stirred up inflation visible through higher fossil fuel prices and set in motion future food inflation by raising the price of two key fertilizer inputs, phosphorous and nitrogen. In Asia, which is highly dependent on oil and gas supply from the Middle East, fuel rationing slowed down economic activity. Even if the current agreement results in longer term stability and the Strait of Hormuz stays open, it will take more than a year for damage to be repaired and the flow of energy to return to previous levels. The Iran War will be a lingering drag on the global economy and inflation may prove sticky. That has negative implications for gold and overall metal demand. It should have no implication for discovery exploration type juniors but resource investors remain vulnerable to the overall economic outlook.

Gold has been negatively affected by the Iran War in two ways. The first is that the energy crisis and other disruptions put pressure on the currencies of countries such as Turkey which sold central bank gold to defend their currencies. This was at odds with the prevailing story that the gold uptrend which started in February 2024 was due to central bank buying. My own view is that neither ETF nor official sector gold purchases explain the strength of the uptrend, but rather that the strength comes from stealth buying through state owned entities that do not have to disclose their gold holdings as do central banks.

My conspiracy theory is that China now owns at least as much gold as the United States based on buying all domestic gold production since 2000, and it may have been the main net buyer during the past two years such that it could own a lot more gold than the United States. The spike to $5,500 in January that started in Q4 of 2025 cannot have made China happy because its goal is to amass sufficient gold as cheaply as possible so that one day it can offer the renminbi as an alternative to the US dollar as a trade settlement currency. As a long term player China will have welcomed the pressure on the price of gold unleashed by the Iran War, even though the Iranian oil supply disruption was bad for its economy. Fortunately for China it spent the last few years building up its strategic petroleum reserve while the US president did nothing about America’s half depleted SPR while he and Netanyahu plotted the Iran War.

A week ago gold producers and juniors suffered a major sell-off when gold threatened to plunge through $4,000 but recovered when $4,000 held as a base. However, gold companies remain haunted by market fear that it is only a matter of time before gold crashes through $4,000 with $3,000 as the next stop. The irony is that pre-production juniors such as Vista Gold Corp are not being fairly priced using $3,000 gold, let alone $4,000 gold.

This strange state of affairs is captured by my trick question, how high should Vista Gold go if gold drops to $3,000? For the shovel ready 50,000 tpd Mt Todd scenario the fair speculative value range using $3,000 gold is USD $12-$18. The stock closed this week at USD $2.39. And yet every day gold drops $100 the stock gets hammered even though it should go higher whenever gold drops and makes exponential price chart look less scary. The perceptual inflection that resolves this disconnect has not yet happened and the Iran War was not helpful.

The second way the Iran War negatively affected the price of gold is due to gold’s strange relationship with inflation which is supposed to spur demand for gold. However, when inflation surges as it did during the Iran War, the Federal Reserve uses monetary policy to cool inflation. This means raising interest rates which will slow down the economy, reducing inflationary pressure, and giving a good yield to bonds whereas gold ownership delivers no yield. When May US employment showed a 172,000 job surge and then May inflation came in at 4.2%, this prompted even the new Federal Reserve chairman Kevin Warsh to support keeping interest rates where they are until inflation subsides.

In my June 5, 2026 KW Episode I argued that the job spike is not at all a sign of economic strength but rather a temporary anomaly linked to the upcoming World Cup. Furthermore, gasoline was the main component of the inflation surge, and, while I think food prices will have a delayed increase due to the fertilizer price spike, if the Iran War deal does allow oil to flow through the Strait of Hormuz, we should see lower inflation which would allow the Federal Reserve to ease interest rates. The post-Covid inflation proved sticky because it was happening in all supply chains, not just transport fuel. If gasoline prices do retreat lower inflation will allow easing of interest rates and that is supposed to be good for the price of gold.

Although the gold price retreat caused by the Iran War has put a damper on the mother of all resource junior bull markets, this will prove temporary because an important accomplishment of the Iran War, which was unilaterally launched by the United States without support from any nation except Israel, nor even Congress, is that it has reinforced the rest of the world’s growing concern that the United States is an unstable and unreliable player on both the geopolitical and economic stages. There is now a collective will to reduce dependence on the United States in almost every way. We see it in the fact that the total value of gold held by central banks is higher than the value of treasury bill holdings, though that is to a large degree due to rise in the gold price. Another sign is that there has been a quiet and steady repatriation of central bank gold from New York and London vaults to domestic vaults. The failure of the Republican controlled Congress to play any role in determining US policy is now understood as a sign of a structural change in the US government that has put decision-making in the hands of a few individuals which include tech titans. Gold’s role as a bridge away from America remains intact and has been strengthened by the Iran War.

Another accomplishment of the Iran War is that it has put the energy transition away from fossil fuels back on track. The United States may be hard bent on pumping oil, gas and coal, which it can do because it has such a rich endowment, but the rest of the world can no longer deny its vulnerability to oil and gas supply. What are the keys to domestic energy supply security? Solar, which is drastically cheaper than it has ever been, wind power, nuclear energy, and, unfortunately, coal for those nations that have coal deposits. In terms of cars, Chinese electric vehicles are affordable and starting to overcome range anxiety and long charge times. Chinese EVs will not be allowed into the United States, but the rest of the world which has no domestic car industry to protect, electric vehicles are the future. Toyota, which does manufacture cars in the United States, may be on the threshold of delivering a solid state lithium ion battery that solves all three problems and can go head to head with Tesla. This will be a plus for resource juniors exploring and developing critical metals such as lithium linked to the energy transition.

Yet another accomplishment of the Iran War that will be good for resource juniors is that the defense against Iran’s drones and missiles has within a couple months depleted a projectile stock that took America many years to build up. The Russian and Chinese domination of metal supply has not diminished but the geopolitics of metal supply has intensified. We see this in the price of tungsten, a metal in whose supply China dominates and which is a key input for American ordinance, something I pointed out in the Kingdom for a Sword Kaiser Watch episodes. There is now good reason for Global West nations to support exploration and development within jurisdictions they until recently fought to keep pristine while disgracefully importing their metal needs from autocracies where the downstream victims of pollution have no say. Unfortunately Canada is still under the sway of the First Nations aristocracy created by Trudeau’s UNDRIP which Prime Minister Mark Carney is afraid to rip up, encouraging British Columbia Premier David Eby to keep DRIPA alive. In the United States the people who staff the USFS and BLM are only just starting to think about what that memo from upstairs means.

The Iran War was not good for the mother of all resource junior bull markets, and it failed to accomplish any goals the US president and Israel had in mind, or at least which the rest of the world would have liked to see happen, namely the departure of the IRGC. The looming mid-term elections are a problem for a president who calls every defeat a stolen election, and who risks a constitutional crisis if he rejects an outcome that shifts control of Congress away from the Republican Party. The Iran War capitulation, however, may be a sign that he sees it is better to avoid defeat than risk invocation of the 25th Amendment. But in the long run the Iran War will prove good for the resource juniors because it spurs the rest of the world to stop relying on the United States, start investing in metal supply, and resume taking the energy transition seriously even if ultimately it makes no difference in the climate change trajectory. This, of course, also applies to the United States, which will have to take metal exploration and development in its own backyard a lot more seriously than it did during the globalization era.

John Kaiser owns shares of Vista Gold Corp