Eldorado's Skouries Slip Costs It a Fifth of Its Gold Guidance, and Whitecap Answers With a Dividend Hike and a 2027 Budget

Happy Thursday! Pour the double-double, dust off the core boxes, and let's see who hit something overnight.

Eldorado just told the market its flagship growth project needs more time and more money, and gold's sliding again this morning like it heard the news first. The energy patch had a tidier day: Whitecap, AltaGas and Enerflex all walked in with cleaner numbers and bigger dividends. And out on the eastern edge of the Athabasca Basin, a uranium junior's Geiger counter is doing more talking than its drill rig.

As of Oct 29, 2026, late morning ET. Source: Kitco (gold, silver, copper); Numerco via Yellow Cake (uranium); oilprice.com (WTI, natural gas); Trading Economics (DXY); last confirmed print (TSX-V, Oct 27 close).

🥇 Gold (spot): $4,023.00/oz 📉
🥈 Silver (spot): $52.43/oz 📉
🔌 Copper: $6.60/lb 📉
☢️ Uranium (U₃O₈ spot): $92.50/lb 📈
🛢️ WTI Crude: $102.80/bbl 📈
🔥 Natural Gas (Henry Hub): $2.90/MMBtu 📉
🍁 TSX-V Composite: 838.48 📈
💵 U.S. Dollar (DXY): 102.23 📈

Bullion's extending its slide below $4,025 as the dollar firms and uranium keeps climbing on fresh surface readings out of the Athabasca Basin. The TSX-V print is still carried over from Tuesday's close, so lean on it for direction only until a fresher same-day read lands.

What happened. $ELD.TSX ( ▼ 6.22% ) (NYSE: EGO) cut its consolidated 2026 gold production guidance to 425,000 to 475,000 ounces, down from 495,000 to 600,000 ounces, after its flagship Skouries copper-gold project in Greece needed a slower ramp-up than planned. Skouries' own 2026 gold guidance took the hardest hit, falling to 10,000 to 35,000 ounces from 60,000 to 100,000 ounces.

Why it happened. Management said the ramp-up "has taken longer and cost more than we expected." Skouries' total project capital is now pegged near $1.425 billion, with about $390 million of that going toward accelerated operational capital just to get the mine running at design rate. Commercial production is now expected in late Q4 2026, later than the company had been pointing to.

What it means for your position. On the midpoint, the consolidated cut works out to roughly 18%, the kind of number that shows up in a one-line headline and nowhere else in the release. Eldorado's base operating assets (excluding Skouries and the McIlvenna Bay copper project) are still guiding to 410,000 to 430,000 ounces, so this isn't a company falling apart, it's a flagship project running late and over budget, which is its own familiar genre of mid-tier pain. Watch the Q4 call for whether "late Q4" actually holds.

👉 Read the full story

River Road Resources (TSXV: RRRL) just finished a helicopter LiDAR survey over its Stobart gold project near Williams Lake, British Columbia, trading drill metres for pixels before it spends a dollar on diesel.

So what. Cheap aerial data is the fastest way for a thinly funded junior to figure out where not to drill, which matters more than it sounds when every hole costs real money.

👉 Dig in

$SRND.TSXV ( 0.0% ) ran a handheld scintillometer over its Corvo project, 60 kilometres due east of Cameco's McArthur River mine on the eastern edge of the Athabasca Basin, and came back with readings up to 48,000 counts per second at the Manhattan East showing, up from a previous high of 10,600 cps on the same spot. A nearby Brooklyn trend occurrence got upgraded to 36,000 cps from 20,000, and the crew found a brand new radioactive showing nearby running up to 13,400 cps in altered pegmatite, with 56 of their readings clearing the 300 cps anomaly threshold.

So what. A scintillometer reading is a Geiger-counter click, not an assay, and the company's own release says as much, so treat this as "there's clearly uranium mineralization walking around on surface here" rather than a resource estimate. Nine grab samples are at the lab now, and the company's eyeing a 2027 drill program once this winter's geophysics wraps up. Its last drill campaign (nine holes, 2,457 metres) came back anomalous across the board, so the surface story and the drill story are at least telling the same tale so far.

👉 See the details

What happened. $WCP.TSX ( ▼ 4.01% ) posted Q3 2026 production of 390,720 boe/d (61 percent liquids), up from 374,623 boe/d a year ago, funds flow of $1,173.1 million (up 32 percent per share), and net income of $326.4 million. The company raised its 2026 guidance for the third time this year, to 392,000 boe/d, bumped its monthly dividend about 1.5 percent to $0.0617 per share, and tabled a 2027 budget of $2.4 to $2.6 billion aimed at 400,000 to 410,000 boe/d.

Why it happened. The Kaybob Duvernay is running at 120,000 boe/d of productive capacity and heading toward 130,000, the newly commissioned Lator battery in the Montney adds another 35,000 to 40,000 boe/d of capacity as it ramps up, and operating costs actually fell quarter over quarter to $10.22 per boe. That's a company getting more oil and gas out of the ground for less money, which is the whole game.

What it means for your position. Net debt is down to $2.1 billion from $3.3 billion a year ago, free funds flow was $639.8 million after capital spending, and the 2027 plan already pencils in roughly $4.1 billion of funds flow at US$80 WTI. A dividend increase plus a bigger budget plus a shrinking debt load isn't a one-off beat, it's a company compounding. The real tell is Charlie Lake: a play Whitecap only recently leaned into just got its 2027 well count bumped because results keep beating expectations.

👉 Read the full story

$ALA.TSX ( ▲ 0.02% ) posted record Q3 2026 results: normalized EBITDA of $389 million, up from $268 million a year ago, and normalized earnings per share of $0.29, up from just $0.04. Management credited global export performance and Canadian trade diversification for the jump, with the CEO saying he expects full-year results to land near the high end of guidance.

So what. AltaGas is the midstream and utilities name that keeps showing up whenever Canadian LPG and natural gas need a way out of the country, and a near-tripling of EBITDA is the kind of number that makes a "diversify away from the US" narrative look like more than a slogan.

👉 Dig in

$EFXT ( ▼ 2.8% ) posted Q3 2026 revenue of $623 million, down from $777 million a year ago, but adjusted EBITDA of $129 million, free cash flow of $102 million and net earnings of $55 million ($0.45 a share) still cleared the bar enough for the board to raise the quarterly dividend about 17 percent, to $0.035 a share (US), payable November 25. The company's engineered systems backlog hit a record $2.1 billion.

So what. Revenue going backward while the dividend goes up isn't a contradiction here, it's a compression and fabrication shop converting a record backlog into cash now instead of chasing top-line growth, the kind of trade services investors usually reward.

👉 See the details

450.9 metres of gold-bearing rock from surface, grading a modest 0.6 g/t, but running the whole way down. $TGRGF ( ▼ 4.4% ) pulled that interval out of its Ceibal target on Colombia's Quinchía project, with two juicier pockets inside it (9 metres at 1.4 g/t and 8 metres at 1.3 g/t), and the hole still hadn't left mineralization when it stopped. Lay that core run on its side next to the Empire State Building and it's longer than the building is tall, roof included.

Keep your grades high, your dilution low. See you tomorrow. ⛏️