Happy Tuesday, Apes! Pour the double-double, dust off the core boxes, and let's see who got a government check overnight.
Washington just wrote a $450 million defense check for tungsten.
Two small-cap names most of Bay Street has never screened for are riding along.
Down in Calgary, a leaked cabinet report is calling TC Energy's pipeline dominance a market failure, while Cardinal Energy is spending its oil windfall on more steam instead of stashing the cash.
Grab your coffee; it's a check-writing kind of Tuesday.
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🥈 Silver (spot): $62.99/oz 📉
🔌 Copper: $6.31/lb 📉
☢️ Uranium (U₃O₈ spot): $90.00/lb 📈
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Gold and silver are cooling off ahead of this week's Fed decision, oil keeps climbing on the Saudi pipeline outage, and the TSX-V is bleeding out as risk-off creeps back into the juniors.
⛏️ The Motherlode: Washington Writes a $450 Million Tungsten Check
What happened. The U.S. Department of War is putting $450 million into The Elmet Group (NASDAQ: ELMT) $$ELMT ( ▲ 4.46% ) to rebuild America's tungsten supply chain, including roughly $150 million to restart the Springer Tungsten Complex in Imlay, Nevada, a joint venture split between Elmet (70%), junior Blue Moon Metals (20%, TSXV: MOON / NASDAQ: BMM) $$BMM ( ▼ 1.32% ), and EQ Resources (10%, ASX: EQR) $$EQRLF ( ▼ 2.42% ).
A separate Defense Logistics Agency contract worth up to $2 billion, with $150 million guaranteed, leans on the same trio's mines (Blue Moon's Springer project in Nevada, plus EQ Resources' operations in Australia and Spain) to help rebuild the National Defense Stockpile.
Why it happened. Tungsten is the poster child for critical-minerals dependence. It's one of the hardest naturally occurring metals around, it's essential for everything from armor-piercing rounds to cutting tools, and for decades the West let one country dominate the supply chain. The Pentagon has decided it's done waiting for the market to fix that on its own.
What it means for your position. Direct government capital landing on a name most speculators have never screened for is about as close to a binary de-risking event as junior mining gets. It also widens the critical-minerals trade beyond the usual lithium and rare-earth names, tungsten juniors just became something to watch, not just a trivia answer.
⚙️ Drill Bit Tech & Trends: Yukon Metals Stacks Geophysics to Vector a Buried Target
Yukon Metals $$YMC.CSE ( ▲ 6.1% ) just wrapped a 12.7 line-km induced-polarization survey at its Birch project in the Yukon and found a fresh chargeability anomaly about 2 km south of its known Birch skarn zone, sitting right on top of an intrusive body, a magnetic high, and elevated moly-in-soil geochemistry (prior grab samples ran up to 16 g/t Au and 1,825 g/t Ag).
What's in it: One of the new IP targets has already been drill-tested this season, with assays still pending.
The trend: Juniors are increasingly stacking geochem, magnetics, and IP surveys before ever mobilizing a rig, cutting drilling risk and stretching exploration dollars further.
The skeptic's footnote: This is targeting, not a discovery. There are no assay numbers to trade on yet, just a promising address.
So what. Bookmark this one. The real test comes when those pending assays land, not before.
👉 Dig in