Happy Wednesday!

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

Oil just did in one morning what it hasn't done since July: crossed $100 a barrel, and the reason is exactly as ugly as it sounds.

A Saudi VMS system next door to Nevada's usual spotlight just paid off in copper and zinc.

80 years of forgotten drill logs in Arizona are getting run through an AI evidence machine.

Six stories, an eight-line Dashboard, and a stat about how much it now costs to dodge a war zone with a boatload of gas.

Let's dig in.

🥇 Gold (spot): $4,400/oz 📈
🥈 Silver (spot): $66.50/oz 📈
🟠 Copper: $6.65/lb ➖
☢️ Uranium (U₃O₈ spot): $89.50/lb ➖
🛢️ WTI Crude: $94.90/bbl 📈
🔥 Natural Gas (Henry Hub): $2.87/MMBtu 📉
🍁 TSX-V Composite: 959.60 📉
💵 U.S. Dollar (DXY): 98.60 📉

Gold and silver whipsawed on the same story driving oil: a weaker dollar and a fresh Iran flare-up.

The TSX-V is soft along with the rest of the resource-heavy tape, caught between celebrating energy and worrying about what a sustained oil shock does to inflation.

What happened. Sun Peak Metals reported assay results from its maiden 10-hole drill program at the Safra VMS project in Saudi Arabia.

Highlights include 39.0 metres averaging 1.38% copper and 0.84% zinc, including 17.75 metres at 1.60% copper and 1.58% zinc, and 19.42 metres averaging 1.17% copper, 2.59% zinc and 22.35 g/t silver, with a 3.0 metre sub-interval running 3.08% copper, 11.72% zinc and 57.25 g/t silver.

All seven holes at Safra Main hit mineralization, and the zone is still open at depth and along strike.

Why it happened. Sun Peak is the first foreign-owned junior to hold 100% exploration licenses in Saudi Arabia, with 13 licenses across a belt that's produced real mines but has barely seen a modern junior driller.

The same team just dropped a second drill program's worth of samples at the neighbouring Halahila project too, so this isn't a one-hole story.

What it means for your position. A maiden program that hits on all seven of its first seven attempts is a genuinely good rate for a system this early.

Saudi Arabia is a jurisdiction most North American speculators have never looked at twice, which is precisely the setup that produces a re-rate once a few more holes confirm the system keeps growing.

Nothing here is a resource yet. It's step one of a real discovery story, not a press release with no rock behind it.

👉 Read the full story

T2 Metals engaged Geomorphic AI to run an AI-supported drill targeting review of its Cora Copper project in Arizona, sitting inside the same Laramide porphyry belt that hosts $FCX ( ▲ 0.68% ) Freeport-McMoRan's Lone Star mine and $RIO ( ▼ 0.8% ) Rio Tinto and $BHP ( ▼ 0.36% ) BHP's Resolution project.

Cora already has real history behind it: 1950s-era holes hit 225.5 metres of 0.29% copper under shallow cover, and a 2022 aeromagnetic survey flagged a buried porphyry target nobody's drilled yet.

So what. The AI can tell you where to point the drill. It can't tell you what's actually down there until someone commits the capital to find out.

👉 Dig in

$STKXF ( ▲ 2.04% ) StrikePoint Gold closed a bought-deal private placement for $190 million, the full upsized amount, to fund its purchase of the Northumberland Gold Project from $NEM ( ▼ 0.85% ) Newmont in Nevada's Walker Lane, a deposit carrying 2.86 million ounces indicated and 1.57 million ounces inferred gold-equivalent.

Canaccord Genuity ran the deal as sole underwriter. The number worth sitting with: 95,000,000 subscription receipts went out at $2.00 each, and Tembo Capital alone bought 20,300,000 of them.

Once the deal closes, Tembo will hold roughly 19.9% of the company, a board seat, a technical committee seat, and a 0.5% royalty on Northumberland for a separate US$10 million.

So what. Buying a real, already-defined Nevada resource off a major turns a junior explorer into a company with an actual flagship asset, and Northumberland genuinely is that.

It's also a massive dilution event, landing on a company that was, by one analyst's math, sitting at roughly 6.24 million shares before all this started. Good asset, real strings attached.

👉 See the details

What happened. The US military destroyed five Iranian oil tankers overnight, four in the Gulf of Oman and one near Kharg Island, after Iran's Revolutionary Guard attempted to strike a US warship for the second time in two days.

Iran retaliated with missiles at the US-linked Al-Azraq base in Jordan; Jordan says its air defenses intercepted 18 of them.

At least seven tankers total have now been struck since Tuesday evening across the wider Gulf. Brent crude jumped past $100 a barrel Wednesday, its first time above that level since July, and WTI ran to roughly $95.

Why it happened. This is round two of a tanker-for-tanker escalation that started with US strikes on three Iranian tankers on September 5. The US framed the latest strikes as retaliation for Iran targeting its navy; Iran calls the strikes on its shadow fleet an act of war. Brent's last visit to $100 was in July, and it fell back under $80 within weeks, so today's move is roughly a $20 round trip in about a month.

What it means for your position. Canadian energy names typically move on this kind of headline, and the broader Toronto tape is doing exactly that today: mixed, with energy names getting a bid from the oil price while the resource-heavy index overall stays soft on worries about what a sustained energy shock does to inflation and the Bank of Canada's next move.

If you're holding Canadian energy for the commodity exposure, that part of the thesis is intact. If you're holding it expecting a clean market rally on top, today's mixed tape says not yet.

👉 Read the full story

$ENB.TSX ( ▲ 0.03% ) Enbridge announced that Greg Ebel will retire as President and CEO effective December 31, 2026, after four years in the role, and that Michele Harradence, currently head of Enbridge's gas distribution and storage business, will succeed him effective January 1, 2027.

Ebel will stay on as a board advisor through May 2027. Harradence joined Enbridge in 2014 from Shell Canada, has run the gas utilities business since 2022, and previously led operations for Enbridge's gas transmission and midstream unit out of Houston.

The timing lines up with the rest of today's energy news. Ebel's tenure was defined by folding three US gas utilities bought from Dominion Energy into Enbridge's platform, building out a $41 billion growth backlog.

Handing the reins to the executive who ran that integration, right as Hormuz tensions push LNG buyers to lock up more North American gas supply, reads like a company betting its next chapter is gas-utility-shaped, not just pipeline-shaped.

👉 Read the full story

International Petroleum Corp, listed simultaneously on the TSX and Nasdaq Stockholm, repurchased 140,673 of its own shares over four trading days last week under its normal course issuer bid: 85,673 in Stockholm, 55,000 in Toronto.

Split across two different brokers on two different continents. IPC has now bought back 868,121 shares under the program, with room for roughly 6.4 million more before the bid winds down in December.

Not a headline-grabber, and it isn't supposed to be.

A member of the Lundin Group quietly retiring shares on two exchanges at once is the kind of unglamorous capital discipline that never makes a promoter's highlight reel, which is exactly why it's worth a mention.

👉 Read the results

That's roughly what it now costs, per shipment, for Qatar and the UAE to dodge the Strait of Hormuz by transferring an LNG cargo from one tanker to another out at sea, tacking on up to 35 extra hours of sailing time.

It's happened three times so far. Three cargoes, rerouted around a war zone, at a premium of seven figures each, and that's still only about 3% of what normally would move through the strait in a month. The physics of keeping liquefied gas cold on a boat puts a hard ceiling on how much of this workaround anyone can actually do.

Read between the lines: when moving gas around a blockade costs more than most people's houses, and it still barely dents the supply gap, that's the market telling you the real fix isn't a clever shipping trick. It's the strait reopening.

Keep your grades high, and your dilution low.