Happy Monday!
Pour the double-double, because Barrick and Newmont just buried a billion-dollar hatchet before most of us finished our first coffee.
Oil is doing jump scares over the Strait of Hormuz, gold is flirting with a two-month high, and two different drill rigs quietly delivered the kind of numbers that make a Monday feel like a payday.
Let's get into it.
🥇 Gold (spot): $4,340/oz 📈
🥈 Silver (spot): $64.05/oz 📈
🔌 Copper: $6.61/lb 📈
☢️ Uranium (U₃O₈ spot): $86.50/lb 📈
🛢️ WTI Crude: $82.13/bbl 📈
🔥 Natural Gas (Henry Hub): $2.75/MMBtu 📉
🍁 TSX-V Composite: 954.90 📈
💵 U.S. Dollar (DXY): 99.81 📈
The Motherlode: Barrick and Newmont Settle Their Nevada Standoff
What happened: Barrick $B ( ▲ 1.69% ) and Newmont $NEM ( ▲ 3.13% ) ended their months-long fight over the Nevada Gold Mines joint venture.
Newmont is handing Barrick $1.95 billion and folding its Fiberline and Mike developments into NGM, while Barrick contributes its Fourmile project.
In exchange, Newmont signed off on Barrick's plan to spin out and list its North American gold assets by year end.
Why it happened: Newmont had been holding up that IPO, alleging Barrick starved the joint venture to build up Fourmile on the side.
Neither company wanted a Nevada-sized legal headache dragging into a gold market this hot, so they traded cash and rock for a clean slate and a modernized governance agreement.
What it means for your position: This removes an overhang instead of creating one.
Barrick's spinoff can now proceed without a lawsuit-shaped asterisk, and $1.95 billion landing in the door within 30 days is real firepower.
If you hold either name, or anything that trades on gold-sector M&A sentiment, file this under bullish and boring, which in mining is usually the best kind of bullish.
Just don't expect the eventual IPO prospectus to dwell on how ugly this fight got behind closed doors.
Drill Bit Tech & Trends: A Copper Deposit Gets Its Fingerprint Lifted
Midnight Sun Mining $MDNGF ( ▲ 3.79% ) ran a high-resolution ground magnetic survey over its Dumbwa copper deposit in Zambia's Copperbelt, and it turned up something more useful than another drill hole: a fingerprint.
The survey matched the magnetic signature of Dumbwa's known high-grade copper zones to two brand-new, untested targets about a kilometre east of the current mineralized corridor, plus a third area to the west.
Instead of drilling blind across a 20-kilometre copper-in-soil anomaly, Midnight Sun now has a geophysical map telling it where to point the rig for Phase 2 drilling, slated to start in the third quarter.
It's not as flashy as a fat intercept, but it's exactly the kind of tool that turns a lucky discovery into a repeatable one.
The Tailings: Gold X2's Best Hole in a While
Gold X2's $AUXX ( 0.0% ) infill program at the Moss Gold Project just handed over its punchiest number in months: 26.65 metres of 4.22 g/t gold, including a scorching 10.9 metres at 9.02 g/t, from hole MMD-26-415 in the Moss Main Zone.
The company is drilling to convert inferred ounces into indicated ones ahead of a bigger economic study, and grades like that make the conversion math a lot friendlier.
Not every hole in the batch was a banger (one Southwest Zone target came in roughly a third light versus the geological model), but seven of eight expansion holes beat expectations outside the current resource shell.
Moss already carries 2.46 million ounces indicated and 4.2 million inferred, so a few more holes like this one and that resource keeps compounding.
The Gusher: Saturn Mops Up Burgess Creek
What happened: Saturn Oil & Gas $SOIL.TSXV ( ▲ 3.18% ) is finishing its takeover of Burgess Creek Exploration.
After its tender offer expired and ran through the mandatory extension, Saturn took up 99.7% of Burgess Creek's shares, more than 133 million of them, and is now invoking the compulsory acquisition provisions of Alberta's Business Corporations Act to mop up the rest. Cash goes out to the remaining holders on or around August 26.