Good morning.
Here is the week in one uncomfortable fact: the United States and Iran spent it exchanging airstrikes, and gold went down. It sits around $4,090, roughly 23% below the January all-time high above $5,300, and it fell on most days this week, not on quiet-correction boredom but into an actual shooting war.
That is not how the reflex goes. Bombs fall, money runs to gold. Except the same event pushed oil higher, which revived inflation fear, which repriced a Federal Reserve that now looks likely to stay higher for longer, and higher real-rate expectations are the one thing gold cannot ignore. Two forces, opposite directions, and this week the rates side won. Worth sitting with, because it is the kind of week that teaches you what actually drives the metal.
Now the number that interests me more than the tape: $11 billion. That is the value of mining M&A transacted in January alone, 85 deals, more than 77% of them in gold and silver. And the consolidation did not pause for the geopolitics. Deals kept closing right through the week, boards signing arrangements while the tape whipped around on headlines out of the Gulf.
The people who own and operate these assets are not trading the headline. They are transacting through it, at these prices. When the operators keep closing deals while the tape whips around on geopolitics, I pay attention to the operators.
The metal that flipped
The quieter story of the year is copper. The International Copper Study Group came into this cycle projecting a surplus. It has now abandoned that call and forecasts a 150,000 tonne refined deficit for 2026, which would be the first structural shortage since 2009.
Here is where it gets interesting. Nobody agrees on how big the hole is:
- ICSG: 150,000 tonnes
- J.P. Morgan: roughly 330,000 tonnes
- UBS: roughly 520,000 tonnes
Three serious institutions, one direction, a 3.5x spread between the smallest and largest estimate. When forecasters agree on the sign but disagree this much on the size, the honest conclusion is that supply is genuinely hard to model right now. Mine disruptions, slow project delivery, concentrate shortages. UBS pegs demand growth at 2.8% against refined supply growth of 1.7%. That gap does not close by itself.
J.P. Morgan’s published forecast has copper averaging near $12,075 per tonne this year. That is their number, not mine. I don’t do price targets. I do arithmetic, and the arithmetic says demand is compounding faster than supply.
Uranium has two prices, and only one of them matters
Spot uranium sat at $85.85 this week. Flat. Boring. Down from over $101 in January. If you only watch spot, uranium looks asleep.
The long-term contract price, where utilities actually buy the pounds that run reactors, is at roughly $94 and broke above $90 earlier this year for the first time since 2008. Term up, spot flat. That divergence tells you the marginal buyer has shifted from traders to utilities, and utilities sign contracts measured in decades, not weeks. Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft have all signed agreements for fresh nuclear capacity to feed AI data centers.
Spot is the price of uranium today. Term is the price of uranium’s future. The market that matters is quietly repricing.
Silver’s round trip
Silver at $60 deserves a moment of respect. In January it did something it had never done in recorded trading: it broke $100, touching $116. The prior ceiling, roughly $50, had held since the Hunt brothers in 1980 and held again in 2011.
Then it gave back nearly half. Five months, top to here, and like gold it opened lower most days this week.
If you have been in this market longer than one cycle, you have seen this movie. The 2011 silver top was followed by years of grind. Whether this one plays out the same way, I don’t know, and neither does anyone else. What I do know is that $60 silver is still higher than any price silver traded at in any year before 2026, and the industrial demand side, solar and electronics, did not go away because the spot price corrected.
One number from the venture floor
The 2026 TSX Venture 50’s resource cohort averaged 431% share price appreciation. That is the kind of number that gets printed on conference banners. Remember that it is a survivorship list by construction: the 50 are chosen because they went up. The other 1,600-odd listings on the exchange did not get a banner.
One pattern worth watching
A financing structure keeps showing up in the developer space this year, and it is worth learning to spot. A physical metals trader, the kind of firm that makes its living moving the metal itself, takes an equity stake in a developer, signs a binding offtake agreement, and sometimes lends the construction money on top. When the company that has agreed to buy your metal also becomes one of your largest shareholders, that is not portfolio money placing a bet. That is a customer underwriting its own supply.
Strategic money reads differently than fund money. Fund money rents the story; strategic money buys the mine’s output. When you see a trading house on a developer’s cap table, read the whole release, because the equity is usually the least interesting part of the deal.
That’s the math for this week. If a friend forwarded you this, you can get it every Sunday at micromathcapital.com.
Micro Math Capital
Disclaimer
This content is published by Micro Math Capital for informational and educational purposes only. It is not investment advice, a recommendation, or an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any security. Nothing here should be relied on for investment decisions. Readers should do their own due diligence and consult a registered investment advisor before making any investment.
All facts and figures are drawn from public sources believed to be reliable, but accuracy is not guaranteed. Any forward-looking statements reflect current expectations only and actual outcomes may differ materially. Micro Math Capital accepts no liability for any loss arising from the use of this content.
Sources for this issue: Fortune gold/silver spot reports July 6-7 2026; USAGOLD price history and July 2 daily report; ICSG forecast via industry deal tracking; J.P. Morgan Global Research copper outlook; UBS copper estimates; Cameco uranium price page; Sprott Uranium Outlook 2026; Junior Mining Network press releases July 2-7 2026; TMX 2026 Venture 50.