Happy Wednesday!
Pour the double-double: gold just punched through a two-month high, silver's tagging $66, and the miners are partying even harder than the metal itself.
On the rock side, a BC porphyry gets a fresh 900-metre geophysical target and a Highland Valley copper hole comes back running fat grades.
On the patch side, a gas producer locks in a decade-long export deal, a sulphur play blows past its own guidance, and a drilling contractor has to publicly deny it snuck a rig into Greenland.
Let's get into it.
🥇 Gold (spot): $4,422/oz 📈
🥈 Silver (spot): $66.25/oz 📈
🔌 Copper: $6.66/lb 📈
☢️ Uranium (U₃O₈ spot): $86.50/lb 📈
🛢️ WTI Crude: $83.30/bbl 📈
🔥 Natural Gas (Henry Hub): $2.66/MMBtu 📉
🍁 TSX-V Composite: 966.58 📈
💵 U.S. Dollar (DXY): 99.85 📈
The Motherlode: Gold Punches Through a Two-Month High, and the Miners Are Outrunning It
What happened: Comex December gold touched $4,502.70 an ounce Wednesday, its highest print since mid-June, while spot gold ran as high as $4,438 before settling near $4,422, a two-month high.
Silver moved even harder: spot silver added as much as 2.4% to touch $66.25, also its best level since June.
The move came after July's US CPI print landed tame, prices up just 0.1% on the month and 3.4% on the year, with the core measure matching the slowest annual pace since March 2021.
Why it happened: cooler inflation trims the odds of a Fed hike (swaps still price roughly a 40% chance for September, though October's odds slipped to about 60% from 75% a day earlier), and China's central bank just logged its 21st straight month of gold buying, adding roughly 20 tonnes in July alone, its biggest single addition since October 2023.
Add a Strait of Hormuz corridor that's still effectively shut, with no deal yet to reopen it, and you've got three separate tailwinds blowing the same direction at once.
What it means for your position: the metal itself is up about 9% since the end of July, but the equities are running up to three times that pace. $$B ( ▲ 1.69% ) is up 11% this month, even after the $1.95 billion Nevada settlement with $$NEM ( ▲ 3.13% ) knocked its shares on Monday, while $$ELD.TSX ( ▲ 2.86% ) has ripped 33% and $$EQX ( ▲ 3.39% ) 29% in the same stretch.
If you're holding anything with real ounces in the ground, this is the kind of tape that turns a good quarter into a great one.
Just don't confuse a Fed-driven melt-up for a permanently repriced metal.
Drill Bit Tech & Trends: Kodiak's Geophysics Turns Up a 900 Metre Twin
$$KDKCF ( ▼ 1.25% ) ran a 3D induced polarization survey over its MPD copper-gold porphyry project in southern BC, and it just found something worth drilling: a chargeability anomaly stretching over 900 metres, sitting right next to the existing South deposit and separated from it by what looks like a fault.
That's geophysics-speak for "this might be the same ore body, just offset and buried a little deeper."
The company has two rigs turning already, 6,348 metres drilled so far across the Ketchan and West deposits, with the new target now slated for drilling later this year. It's not an assay, but it's exactly the kind of tool that turns "maybe something's down there" into a funded drill target instead of a guess.