Happy Thursday!
Pour the double-double: Pan American Silver wrote shareholders a $300 million check in the same quarter it missed on earnings, and the rest of this issue proves good news doesn't need a headline commodity move to matter.
On the mining side, a Highland Valley junior let its drill core talk it into a deeper hole, and a Nevada gold-copper project keeps thickening its high-grade core.
On the energy side, a Montney gas producer raised guidance and found a new buyer all the way in Oregon, a midstream operator's EBITDA went five and a half times what it was a year ago, and a small-cap producer used a record quarter to fund an acquisition.
Let's get into it.
🥇 Gold (spot): $4,395/oz 📉
🥈 Silver (spot): $64.92/oz 📉
🔌 Copper: $6.57/lb 📉
☢️ Uranium (U₃O₈ spot): $86.50/lb 📈
🛢️ WTI Crude: $81.19/bbl 📉
🔥 Natural Gas (Henry Hub): $2.74/MMBtu 📈
🍁 TSX-V Composite: 975.87 📈
💵 U.S. Dollar (DXY): 99.87 📉
The Motherlode: Pan American Silver Banks a Record $300 Million for Shareholders, Even With a Miss on the Bottom Line
What happened: Pan American Silver $PAA.TSX ( ▲ 0.25% ) posted Q2 2026 adjusted earnings of $0.73 a share on revenue of $1.12 billion, short of Wall Street's call for $0.92 a share and $1.16 billion.
Silver production still came in at 6.5 million ounces, the high end of guidance, but weaker gold output dragged on the headline numbers.
None of that stopped the company from returning a record $300 million to shareholders in the quarter: about 4.4 million shares bought back plus a $0.184 dividend, bringing year-to-date buybacks to roughly 7.3 million shares.
Why it happened: Pan American generated $344 million in attributable free cash flow in the quarter, and management is running an enhanced shareholder returns framework that targets handing back 35% to 40% of that free cash flow in 2026.
With $3.2 billion of available liquidity on the balance sheet, the company has plenty of room to keep buying stock even in a quarter that missed on the income statement.
What it means for your position: an earnings miss on strong silver production and record capital returns is the kind of quarter that separates a temporary stumble from a real problem.
If you're holding anything in the silver space, this is the read: the cash machine is intact, the buyback is real, and the miss is a gold-output story, not a silver one.
Worth watching whether gold production catches up before the next print turns this from a footnote into a pattern.
Drill Bit Tech & Trends: GSP Resource Lets the Core Talk It Into a Deeper Hole
GSP Resource wrapped its 2026 Phase 1 drill program at the Alwin and Mer properties in the Highland Valley Copper Camp having drilled about 1,801 metres across eight holes, roughly 20% more than the planned 1,200 to 1,500 metre program.
The overrun wasn't budget creep: it came from the crew extending holes on the spot because of the alteration and mineralization they were seeing in real time.
The clearest example is Mer's maiden hole, ME-26-04, which kept going to a final depth of 292.7 metres, the deepest hole ever drilled at Mer, after visible copper mineralization justified chasing it further.
All four Mer holes hit near-surface visible copper, testing a historic zone that once ran 30 metres at 0.53% copper and a 175 by 120 metre soil anomaly the company mapped last year.
Over at Alwin, four step-out holes flanking the 2024 discovery hole (5.04 g/t gold and 1.01% copper over 7.90 metres) came back with visually similar mineralized zones.
Assays are pending through Q3, but the so-what here is process, not just rock.
Letting core observations extend a program on the fly, instead of sticking rigidly to a pre-set metreage, is exactly how a junior turns a planned program into a better one.
The Tailings: P2 Gold's High-Grade Core Keeps Getting Fatter at Gabbs
P2 Gold $PGLDF ( ▲ 4.36% ) ran its latest batch of reverse circulation holes at the Lucky Strike Zone on its Gabbs project in Nevada, delivering 79.25 metres of 0.78 g/t gold and 0.29% copper, including a punchier 21.34 metres at 1.28 g/t gold and 0.34% copper.
The holes tested the higher-grading core of the zone, and the company says that core keeps thickening as drilling steps to the southwest.
Gabbs already carries a 1.84 million ounce gold-equivalent inferred resource, and this infill and expansion program feeds directly into an updated resource estimate that will underpin a feasibility study targeted for the fourth quarter.
Not a headline intercept, but a steady, unglamorous kind of drilling that turns an inferred number into something a bank might eventually lend against.
The Gusher: Birchcliff Raises Guidance and Finds a New Buyer in Oregon
What happened: Birchcliff Energy $BIR.TSX ( ▼ 1.24% ) posted strong Q2 2026 results and lifted its 2026 production guidance to a range of 83,000 to 84,000 boe/d, with Q4 average production expected around 88,500 boe/d.
Alongside the results, the company signed a physical natural gas delivery contract for 35,000 MMBtu/d of service at the Malin hub in Oregon, running from January 2027 through the end of 2030.
Why it happened: the Malin deal is a deliberate move to diversify Birchcliff's gas marketing beyond its usual AECO-area exposure, giving the company a new outlet on the US West Coast just as its Montney program keeps outperforming.
What it means for your position: a raised guide plus a new four-year offtake in a different market than the one that usually sets the price for Alberta gas is the kind of quiet de-risking that doesn't move a stock in a day but shows up in a steadier revenue line over the next few years.
Worth tracking if you hold anything else angling for a Malin or West Coast gas outlet as a hedge against AECO's usual volatility.
The Pipeline: Tidewater Midstream's EBITDA Is Nearly Six Times What It Was a Year Ago
Tidewater Midstream $TWM.TSX ( ▲ 1.83% ) posted record quarterly consolidated adjusted EBITDA of $88.9 million, up from just $16.0 million in the same quarter last year, and swung to consolidated net income of $15.0 million from a $16.3 million loss a year earlier.
Management raised its deconsolidated adjusted EBITDA guidance to a range of $100 million to $110 million and trimmed consolidated net debt by $41.9 million to $537.6 million since the start of the year.
A midstream operator putting up numbers like that while also paying down debt is the kind of quarter that gets less attention than a splashy upstream deal, but it's exactly the plumbing that makes the rest of the patch's barrels and molecules worth something.
The Flare Stack: InPlay Oil's Record Quarter Buys It Another Producer
InPlay Oil $IPO.TSX ( ▼ 1.51% ) posted record quarterly adjusted funds flow of $44.7 million, up 48% from Q1, and net income of $22.9 million that included a $37 million unrealized hedge gain.
The company's first-half drilling program ran 30% to 48% ahead of its own internal projections, all delivered under budget and ahead of schedule.
InPlay used the strength to sign a definitive deal to acquire a private oil and gas producer for $54.25 million cash, funded entirely through recently expanded credit capacity, while still finding room to return $7.6 million to shareholders through dividends and buybacks.
A small cap doing an acquisition, a buyback, and a dividend in the same quarter it beat its own drilling targets is a lot of boxes checked at once.
Stat of the Day
Tidewater Midstream's adjusted EBITDA went from $16.0 million to $88.9 million in the same quarter, one year apart.
That's not a rounding error.
It's five and a half times the money, from a company most of this newsletter's readers have never once mentioned at a barbecue.
Somewhere, a midstream analyst who's spent a career being told plumbing is boring is feeling extremely vindicated today.
Tidewater Midstream's EBITDA is five and a half times what it was one year ago
Keep your grades high, your dilution low.
See you tomorrow.