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Wednesday, October 14, 2026

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October 2026 Random Ramblings

October 2026 market commentary covers SOLS’s cancelled merger, a hypothetical Starbucks-Chipotle deal, Russell 2000 weakness and AI premiums for Oura and home builders.

SOLS $9.7BSBUX $109B
Yet Another Value Podcast 87 clicks

From X

@StableBread

Fajasy on X

McCreedy West had “a few weeks” of development (the tunnels that reach new ore) ahead of its miners and no stopes (the blocks of ore being mined) ready to go when Magna Mining $MGMNF (TSX: $NICU) took it over in March 2025. So Magna spent 2025 catching up and missed its H2 2025 grade guidance, shipping ore at 2.64% copper equivalent (CuEq, which converts every metal into copper at set prices) in Q3 and 3.41% in Q4, below the 2.9-3.4% and 3.8-4.4% it guided. 2026 has gone better. In Q2, McCreedy West set Magna-era records for tonnage (98,446 tons) and cash margin, and production costs fell to US$144/ton processed from US$156 in Q1. Through H1 2026, McCreedy West produced 8.62M payable pounds of CuEq (the metal the mill and smelter pay for after recoveries). It needs 7.4-9.4M lbs in H2 to land in the 16-18M lbs guidance range, so repeating H1 would put the year inside guidance. Costs are inside guidance too. H1 cash costs (operating costs plus smelting and refining charges, per payable pound) of US$3.63/lb sit within the US$3.40-3.80 range. All-in sustaining costs (AISC, which add sustaining capital and corporate overhead) of US$4.39/lb also sit within US$4.20-4.70. Both exclude the precious metals stream held by Franco-Nevada $FNV, which buys half the mine’s gold, platinum, and palladium at a discount. Magna says the stream adds US$0.78-0.92/lb at its 2026 budget prices. Magna’s first reserve estimate for McCreedy West, effective December 31, 2025, came to 987,000 tonnes of probable reserves, which Magna says supports three years of production at its 2026 mining rate. Three years sounds short, but CEO Jason Jessup says it’s “in line with the reserves that McCreedy West has operated with since being restarted in 2003 by FNX Mining,” and that Magna “could have extended” the reserves. McCreedy West’s Intermain nickel zone isn’t in the reserves or the guidance. Jessup wants nickel to hold “north of $8” per pound “for at least a quarter” before restarting it, and says Magna could be shipping Intermain nickel to Vale $VALE “within 8 to 12 weeks” of a decision. At ~$7.48/lb nickel, the Intermain restart waits.
@StableBread

Fajasy on X

Magna Mining $MGMNF (TSX: $NICU) paid US$6.5M for a package of assets from KGHM $KGHPF, the Polish copper giant, including McCreedy West, now its only producing mine, and Levack, its flagship restart project. It paid ~US$3.7M in cash and ~US$1.4M in shares at closing, with ~US$1.4M due on December 31, 2026. It could also owe up to US$16.9M in milestone payments as the mines reach commercial production, including US$4.2M for Levack. Counting the milestones at their US$4.7M fair value, Magna valued the consideration at US$11.2M against US$25.0M of net assets. That’s why its 2025 results include a US$13.8M “bargain purchase” gain (US$25.0M − US$11.2M). It also took on reclamation liabilities with a fair value of US$9.8M and a precious metals stream held by Franco-Nevada $FNV, the royalty and streaming company, which it booked as a US$22.6M liability at the acquisition. Here’s Magna’s pipeline, from production to exploration: → McCreedy West (producing): Run since March 2025. All of its 2026 guidance comes from the 700 Footwall Copper Zone. → Levack (restart study): Connected underground to McCreedy West and idle but maintained since KGHM stopped mining in 2019. → Crean Hill (permitted): Past-producing nickel, copper, and precious metals mine southwest of Sudbury, Ontario, with a pre-feasibility study (PFS) due in the first half of October. → Podolsky and Shakespeare (later): CEO Jason Jessup pencils in Podolsky as the fourth mine “probably sometime in 2029,” and says Shakespeare, which would need its own mill, is “probably 5 years down the road.” → Exploration: 584 km² of claims across the Sudbury Basin. Copper pays most of the bills. In H1 2026, copper made up 68.4% of McCreedy West’s metal revenue, nickel 10.3%, and platinum, palladium, gold, and silver 21.2%. So despite the ticker (NICU, for nickel and copper), Magna today is a copper producer with nickel upside. Magna doesn’t own a mill. It trucks McCreedy West’s crushed ore to the Clarabelle mill run by Vale $VALE, pays Vale a fixed price per ton for trucking and milling, and sells the ore to Vale on delivery. It also has an ore selling agreement with Glencore $GLNCY for Glencore’s Strathcona mill. Magna’s financial statements report just two significant customers, and with McCreedy West’s ore going to Vale, changes in Vale’s terms hit revenue directly. In Q2 2026, a retroactive adjustment to the Vale contract roughly doubled the smelting and refining charges taken out of Magna’s revenue, to US$2.9M from US$1.4M. Incoming CFO Greg Huffman expects the charges to normalize in H2 2026.
@StableBread

Fajasy on X

Bernstein expects copper to run short from 2027, and the IEA says a new copper mine takes ~17 years to go from discovery to production. So I found a miner restarting old ones, with a CEO who restarted its flagship once before and says it could produce 2-3x today’s output. Its restart study is due in the first half of October, and a much richer discovery at the same mine isn’t in the study yet. That company is Magna Mining $MGMNF (TSX: $NICU), a copper miner in Sudbury, Ontario. After more than a century of mining, Sudbury has plenty of past-producing mines to restart. Per Magna’s September deck, Brazil’s Vale $VALE and Switzerland’s Glencore $GLNCY are the only other companies with significant property holdings in the Sudbury Basin, and they run the district’s two mills and two smelters. Magna has agreements to sell its ore to both, so its next restarts don’t need a new mill. Magna’s stock trades at CAD$2.45/share, down 9% y/y and 38% below its CAD$3.94 intraday high on January 29, 2026. Counting its convertible notes, in-the-money options, and share units as shares, and netting out its cash plus the ~US$5.1M from exercising the options, enterprise value is ~US$454M. That buys you McCreedy West, the producing mine that carried Magna to its first quarter of positive free cash flow (FCF) in Q2 2026. You also get Levack and Crean Hill, two past-producing mines with a preliminary economic assessment (PEA) and a pre-feasibility study (PFS), respectively, due in the first half of October. Notably, Magna’s leaders have run McCreedy West and Levack before. Both mines belonged to FNX Mining, a Canadian miner, before they passed to KGHM $KGHPF, the Polish copper giant that sold them to Magna. CEO Jason Jessup led the FNX team that restarted Levack, and chair Vern Baker was FNX’s VP of Operations. Jessup also says Magna doesn’t plan any more financings after Alpayana, a Peruvian mining group, invested US$99M in August. So Magna could triple or quadruple its output (McCreedy West plus 2-3x from Levack) without raising more money, and R2, the high-grade zone it found at Levack, would come on top of whatever the PEA shows. The question is whether CAD$2.45 is an early price for a multi-mine Sudbury producer, or a price that already assumes Levack restarts well before its numbers are public.

Investor Letters

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