Happy Tuesday, apes! 🦍

Pour the double double, dust off the core boxes, and let's talk about the month gold is having.

Ottawa just waved through one of the year's biggest energy takeovers, a junior sold the land next to a world-class lithium discovery for less than a decent truck, and Venezuela let an oilfield services giant into its data room for the first time in years.

What happened: $AEM.TSX ( ▼ 1.1% ) Agnico Eagle Mines signed on to buy 53,420,000 units of $RMRDF ( ▲ 2.48% ) Radisson Mining Resources in a non-brokered private placement, C$1.07 a unit, C$57.2 million total (roughly US$41 million).

Each unit carries half a warrant struck at C$1.39. Once it closes around September 2, Agnico will hold about 10.5% of Radisson on a non-diluted basis, nearly 15% fully diluted, plus a board nomination right it hasn't exercised yet and a top-up right to protect the stake from future dilution.

Why it happened: Radisson's flagship is the O'Brien gold project in Quebec's Abitibi greenstone belt, a past producing mine turned exploration story that's been generating drill results good enough to get a senior's attention.

Canada's biggest gold miner doesn't write eight-figure cheques into juniors for the fun of it.

What it means for your position: This is the kind of stamp of approval that can re-rate a junior overnight: real capital, real board access rights, and a top-up clause that says Agnico plans to stay relevant if Radisson keeps hitting.

Watch whether that board seat actually gets exercised; that's usually the next signal worth trading on.

One skeptic's footnote, though: a placement priced below the tape is still dilution, so check the math on your position before you get swept up in the smart money headline.

👉 Read the full story

$PUMXF ( ▼ 8.02% ) Puma Exploration just wrapped nearly 2,800 line kilometres of high resolution drone magnetic surveys across three New Brunswick projects: McKenzie Gold, Jacquet River, and Caribou East. Six survey blocks, flown by a specialist contractor, with noise levels reported cleaner than Geological Survey of Canada thresholds, which matters when the plan is fusing this data with mapping and geochem to pick real drill targets instead of guessing.

Drone geophysics at this scale is a lot cheaper and faster than a traditional airborne survey, and it's exactly the kind of tech upgrade letting small caps punch above their budget.

Puma also has $K.TSX ( ▼ 1.58% ) Kinross Gold footing the bill for a drill program at its Williams Brook project, so there's a credible partner already validating the ground.

👉 See the survey results

Visible Gold Mines is selling its 78 claims making up the MegaLi lithium property, plus an adjacent 41 claims owned by Noranda Royalties, to PMET Resources for a grand total of $201,000 cash. Visible Gold keeps a 1.34% royalty, though PMET can buy most of it back for up to roughly $2.68 million down the road.

Here's the punchline: MegaLi sits about two kilometres from PMET's Shaakichiuwaanaan project, home to the world's largest pollucite hosted caesium pegmatite resource on the planet.

Somewhere out there is a junior that owned the parking lot next to the discovery of the decade and sold it for beer money.

👉 Read the release

What happened: Ottawa signed off on $SHEL ( ▼ 1.42% ) Shell's takeover of $ARX.TSX ( ▲ 0.71% ) ARC Resources under the Investment Canada Act, the last regulatory box left after competition clearance, transportation approval, Hart Scott Rodino in the US, and a securities exemption in Alberta.

Shareholders approved the deal in July with a 99.5% vote, and the Alberta court signed the final order the next day.

Terms are unchanged since April: C$8.20 cash plus 0.40247 of a Shell share per ARC share, worth roughly US$13.6 billion in equity and about US$16.4 billion including debt.

Why it happened: ARC is a pure-play Montney producer and one of the TSX's steadier dividend payers, exactly the kind of North American gas and condensate exposure a supermajor wants as LNG demand ramps.

What it means for your position: Barring a last minute surprise, this closes around September 2.

If you're holding ARC for the arb spread, the finish line is in sight. If you're holding it for the dividend, that dividend has a new owner in about a week.

👉 Read the approval notice

$SLB ( ▼ 2.42% ) SLB signed a contract with Venezuela's state oil company PDVSA granting access to reservoir and production data that's been in rough shape since a ransomware attack last year, bad enough that staff reportedly resorted to coordinating over Telegram and rebuilding records from paper.

The deal reportedly includes AI-based data tools, training, and cloud access, with the payment mechanism still murky given US restrictions on Venezuelan oil revenue.

This is the first real outside look at PDVSA's reserve data in years, and whoever controls that pipeline of information has a head start if Venezuela's patch ever reopens to serious outside capital.

Skeptic's footnote: nothing about the payment side is settled, and getting paid in crude when the US controls the export spigot is its own adventure.

👉 Read the report

International Petroleum Corporation repurchased 225,000 shares last week under its normal course issuer bid, split between its Nasdaq Stockholm and TSX listings.

That brings the total bought back so far to 502,616 shares, all to be cancelled, with room for almost 6.5 million more before the program wraps in December.

Nothing flashy here, just a Lundin Group name with production in Canada, Malaysia, and France quietly shrinking its share count while nobody's watching. Sometimes boring is the whole point.

👉 Read the buyback notice

Spot gold is up roughly 19% this month, its best run since 1999.

Blame a falling US dollar and the Treasury doubling down on long bond buybacks, but also just blame gold being gold this year.

Keep your grades high, your dilution low.

See you tomorrow.