Happy Friday! ☕ Pour the double-double, blow the dust off the core boxes, and let's close the week out.
The US-Iran ceasefire died on live TV, oil ripped, and gold spent three days arguing with itself.
Down below, the drill bit never stopped: Arizona got wider at depth, tungsten crawled out of last year's core, and Alberta quietly became the place AI goes to plug in.
📊 Commodity Ape Quick Stats
🥇 Gold (spot): $4,118/oz 📈
🥈 Silver (spot): $60.40/oz 📉
🔌 Copper: $6.25/lb 📈
☢️ Uranium (U₃O₈ spot): $85.75/lb ➡️
🛢️ WTI Crude: $71.40/bbl 📈
🔥 Natural Gas (Henry Hub): $3.01/MMBtu 📉
🍁 TSX-V Composite: 905.98 📈
💵 U.S. Dollar (DXY): 101.1 ➡️
Snapshot: Friday, July 10, midday. WTI is up about 3.5% on the week but slipped Friday on a surprise crude build, so read that arrow as a weekly move. TSX-V and DXY are intraday. Spot-check before send.
🏆 The Motherlode: Trump Kills the Ceasefire, and Gold Can't Decide If It Cares
What happened: The US-Iran ceasefire is dead. The President said the deal is "over," fresh US strikes followed, and Washington pulled the waiver that let Iranian oil flow.
Crude jumped and closed the week up about 3.5%.
Gold did the whiplash thing: it cratered as much as 2.1% to below $4,030 mid-week, then clawed its way back toward $4,118 by Friday.
Why it happened: Pin this up, because it is the counterintuitive part. A Hormuz shock spikes oil, higher oil stokes inflation, and stickier inflation keeps the Fed hawkish.
Odds of a September rate hike jumped to roughly 68% on the CME FedWatch tool, up from the high 50s a few days earlier.
High real yields are gold's kryptonite (bullion pays you nothing to hold it), and a risk-off dollar near 101 pours salt in the wound.
What it means for your position: Do not confuse a macro flush with a broken thesis.
The TSX-V is thin, and when generalists de-risk, small-caps get sold first and asked questions later.
The tell to watch is real yields and the dollar, not the missiles.
If this is a fear spike that fades once Hormuz calms down, the gold names that got thrown out with the bathwater are where the bounce lives.
🔬 Drill Bit Tech & Trends: The Tungsten Was in the Core All Along
IDEX Metals (TSXV: IDEX) went back to its 2025 drill core from the
Freeze project in Idaho and re-assayed it with sodium peroxide fusion, a more complete digestion than the four-acid method used the first time.
The rock did not change.
The lab method did.
And out came broad tungsten the original assays had basically missed: 180.5m at 0.11% WO₃ in one hole, 72.2m at 0.13% in another, with a high-grade sliver of 1.21m at 1.55% WO₃.
This is the un-sexy edge in exploration.
Scheelite (calcium tungstate) does not fully dissolve in a standard four-acid digest, so tungsten can sit in the core invisible until you fuse it properly.
IDEX is now re-running its remaining 2025 holes and screening all future core for tungsten.
Critical-minerals bonus: tungsten is on every Western supply-risk list, and China controls most of it.
The skeptic's footnote: 0.11% WO₃ over big widths is enrichment, not an ore body. A re-assay confirms a system is tungsten-bearing. It does not hand you an economic grade. Interesting, not bankable, at least not yet.
👉 Dig in
⛏️ The Tailings: West Point Gold Keeps Widening Arizona at Depth
West Point Gold (TSXV: WPG) $WPGCF ( ▲ 1.81% ) dropped two holes from the NE Tyro zone at its Gold Chain project in Arizona.
The headline hole, GC26-168, cut 56.4m of 4.24 g/t gold from 242.3m, including a punchy 28.9m at 7.77 g/t. Its twin, core hole GC26-161, ran 68.2m at 2.20 g/t, including 34.3m at 3.57 g/t.
The story is the shape: the vein system is widening as it goes deeper, now traced about 270m below surface and still open in all directions.
CEO Derek Macpherson reckons the textures point to multiple gold events stacked over a bigger vertical range than a typical low-sulphidation epithermal.
It all feeds a maiden resource estimate due later in 2026.
The catch: 19 holes (5,920m) are still pending, and a maiden resource is exactly where drill-hole glamour meets tonnes-and-grade reality. Great intercepts. Now prove continuity.
🛢️ The Gusher: Pembina Bets $2 Billion That AI Runs on Alberta Gas
What happened: Pembina Pipeline $PPL.TSX ( ▼ 1.63% ) $PBA ( ▼ 1.04% ) and its partners took a positive final investment decision on the Greenlight Electricity Centre, a 932 MW gas-fired power plant in Sturgeon County built to feed a single data centre.
That customer is now confirmed: Meta's $META ( ▲ 0.37% ) $13 billion AI campus, its first in Canada. Pembina's net tab is roughly $2.1 billion for about $310 million a year of run-rate EBITDA once it lights up in the second half of 2030.
Why it matters: This is the gas-to-power thesis going from slide deck to steel. It is a long-term tolling deal (capacity plus usage payments), so it behaves like Pembina's fee-based midstream, not a merchant-power gamble.
It also catalyzes roughly 150 million cubic feet a day of new gas demand and a fresh egress option for the basin.
What it means for your position: For PPL holders, a new contracted cash-flow leg and a platform management calls "highly scalable" (a phase two is already hinted).
For the patch, Alberta just became the continent's easiest place to plug a gigawatt of AI load into natural gas.
The engineering-and-construction contract went to Aecon Group (TSX: ARE), $ARE.TSX ( ▼ 2.1% ) so the build has a public winner too.
🔧 The Pipeline: The Sneaky Winner Isn't the Plant, It's Whoever Sells the Gas
Every gigawatt of gas-fired AI power needs feedstock, and Greenlight alone will burn about 150 million cubic feet a day.
Stack that on LNG Canada already pulling roughly 1.4 Bcf/d of feedgas and the Western Canadian gas balance starts to look a lot tighter.
The purest leverage is the producer, not the plant. Tourmaline Oil $TOU.TSX ( ▼ 0.69% ), Canada's largest gas producer, sits right in the fairway of a tightening AECO.
The "so what": AECO has spent years as North America's punching-bag gas hub, blown out on chronic oversupply. Data-centre load plus LNG export pull is the first real demand story the basin has had in a decade.
It will not re-rate AECO overnight, but the direction of travel just flipped.
The skeptic's footnote: gas producers have promised a demand supercycle before and then drilled straight into the next glut. The supply response in the Montney is fast and merciless. Watch the rig count, not the press releases.
🔥 The Flare Stack: Strathcona Fires Up the Kettle at Meota Central
Strathcona Resources (TSX: SCR) $STHRF ( ▼ 2.64% ) hit first steam at Meota Central, the newest expansion of its Lloydminster thermal business.
Construction is done, first oil is guided for late in the third quarter of 2026, and the pad is targeting roughly 13,000 barrels a day at peak by mid-2027.
Why care about one thermal startup?
Heavy oil is where the WCS differential does its damage, and every new steam barrel is leveraged to that spread.
Strathcona is tightly held (Waterous-controlled), so the float is thin, and the operational milestones tend to move the story more than the daily tape.
📈 Stat of the Day: One Gigawatt
That is the power draw of Meta's single Alberta data centre.
One building.
A full gigawatt, roughly what a mid-size city pulls, now earmarked for servers doing matrix math.
Alberta's answer is not more grid.
It is a dedicated 932 MW gas plant sitting next door, burning about 150 million cubic feet of gas a day.
The AI boom keeps getting described in chips and models. Under the hood, it is an energy story wearing a software costume.
One AI data center. One gas plant. Zero grid help.
Keep your grades high and your dilution low.
See you Monday. 🦍