X
Everything we have picked from this writer, newest first.
When the FinTwit crowd was pumpin $BCAR in a manic bullish AI data center period, I was publishing my objective, although clearly non-favorable view on the stock. Almost no one listened. Now look at the result! 🤷🏽♂️ Don't forget. If someone calls something a "speculative bet" (myself included), they really just mean they're gambling.
Makes sense when $UUUU revenue is still all uranium, Q2's $25.1M came from that segment. Tho the rare earth product is already proven, ~1.2t of their NdPr oxide became ~3.0t of magnets at South Korea's largest EV drive-motor core maker and passed every qualification benchmark. https://t.co/IWyLWnuRGS
@EmmaStockNotes Maybe im stupid but $docu biz model just seems like a shitco to me 😬
@EdgeCGroup $chgg kick em while theyre down
Quick $BRUN 8-K update released today. P.S. Got the info and analysis done instantly via SECSift, then sent to my email! 👀 https://t.co/7L1DxtZYNH
The restart study due in the first half of October at Levack, the flagship mine of Magna Mining $MGMNF (TSX: $NICU), leaves out a zone where a hole reported in June cut 29.7% copper equivalent over 3.4 meters. Magna found the zone itself. In July 2025, a hole drilled into the footwall below Levack’s No. 3 orebody hit nickel-rich veins. Magna calls the area R2, short for “Rob’s 2,” and says R2 resembles the top of the Morrison deposit, where the nickel-rich veins of Rob’s Zone gave way to copper- and precious metal-rich veins at depth. As of June, R2 spanned ~300 meters vertically and ~150 meters north-south, and all 14 holes Magna had reported hit metal-bearing rock. The June hole’s 3.4 meters included 57.0% copper equivalent (CuEq, which converts every metal into copper at set prices) and 44.3 grams per tonne (g/t) of gold over 1.5 meters. In September, another hole extended R2 ~30 meters toward the No. 3 orebody. The veins are narrow. Magna reports lengths along each drill hole and estimates the veins’ true widths at 30-80% of those lengths, so the June hole’s 3.4 meters could be a vein 1.0-2.7 meters wide (30% × 3.4 and 80% × 3.4). In August, Magna finished a 2950 Level drift (a horizontal tunnel) that stops ~300 meters short of R2. CEO Jason Jessup said on September 24 that Magna plans to extend the drift to R2 “sometime in Q4.” From there, Jessup says Magna could start mining along the veins “as early as Q1 of 2027” and ship the ore to Vale $VALE, ahead of a resource estimate “potentially by the end of 2027.” Jessup says R2 can’t go into the restart study, a preliminary economic assessment (PEA), because it isn’t in a resource estimate yet. Once it’s added, he expects R2 ore to “displace some material in the PEA,” meaning replace some of the plan’s lower-grade tons, since it’s “much much higher margin.” Even after mining 1-2 tons of waste rock with every ton of vein (100-200% dilution), Jessup expects R2 ore to grade “10 to 15% copper equivalent,” 3-4.5x the 3.3-3.4% at McCreedy West, Magna’s producing mine (10% / 3.4% and 15% / 3.3%). Jessup also says “there are no streams or royalties on the precious metals” at R2. Franco-Nevada $FNV, the royalty and streaming company, holds a precious metals stream on two areas of Levack, but the technical report doesn’t publish their boundaries, so for now, investors only have Jessup’s word that R2 sits outside the stream.
The CEO of Nubeva Technologies $NBVAF (TSXV: $NBVA) owns 25.4% of the shares, and a 12% holder keeps buying more. Investing in Nubeva largely means trusting Randy Chou. He’s been CEO since the 2018 listing and sits on the board. Per the company’s site, he built SSL (web encryption) security at Alteon WebSystems, which Nortel bought for $7.8B in 2000. He then joined the founding team at Aruba Networks, a Wi-Fi company started in 2002 that HP $HPQ bought for $3.0B in 2015. In 2008, he co-founded Panzura, a cloud storage company that private equity firm Profile Capital Management bought in May 2020 for $225M, per Nubeva’s July 2023 investor deck. Granted, Panzura replaced him as CEO with Patrick Harr in May 2016, a month after Nubeva was incorporated, and the sale came four years later under Harr. Regardless, every company Chou helped build before Nubeva ended in a sale, and a partnership or sale is Nubeva’s own fallback if AI doesn’t fix its costs. Canadian insiders report their trades on SEDI, and Nubeva’s file since January 2024 has one active buyer. Clayton Davis, an Edmonton-based individual investor, crossed 10% on September 8, 2025 with 7,038,268 shares (10.03%), per the Form 62-103F1 he filed a year later, on September 10, 2026 (the disclosure Canada requires from anyone who crosses 10%). He then made 96 open-market purchases on 46 trading days through September 4, 2026, buying 1,755,797 shares for ~CAD$306K at CAD$0.09-0.26. Net of four small sales totaling 134,500 shares, he now holds 8,659,565 shares (12.34%). Davis’s latest purchase, on September 4, came a week after Nubeva filed its FY2026 results. In other words, he kept buying after seeing the full-year numbers. Chou hasn’t bought or sold in the open market over the same period, and Nubeva’s annual meeting filings list the same 17,797,741 shares for him in 2024, 2025, and 2026. In April 2024, Chou moved 3,630,000 of those shares into a donor-advised fund he still controls, and in a February 26, 2026 interview on Nubeva’s YouTube channel, he said he’d have to pre-announce any sale by the fund.
Q2 2026 was the first quarter of positive FCF at Magna Mining $MGMNF (TSX: $NICU), but only because cash from March sales arrived in April. The quarter set Magna-era records for revenue and cash margin: → Revenue: US$21.5M, after the precious metals stream and higher smelting and refining charges. → Cash margin: Record US$6.4M, or US$1.41/payable lb, up from US$4.3M in Q1. → Operating cash flow: US$6.4M, including US$4.8M of March sales paid in April. → Free cash flow: US$3.7M, even though operating cash flow absorbed US$3.8M of exploration and evaluation spending, mostly at Levack, Magna’s flagship restart project. Adjusted for the US$4.8M of March sales paid in April, Q2 FCF was an outflow of ~US$1.2M, and H1 2026 as a whole was a US$10.5M outflow. At the mine level, McCreedy West (Magna’s producing mine) generated a US$10.8M cash margin in H1 2026, covering its US$3.6M of sustaining capital almost three times over. But Levack, corporate costs, interest, and working capital kept the company as a whole cash-negative. As of June 30, 2026, Magna held US$28.2M of cash. With net proceeds from Alpayana, the Peruvian mining group that bought 19.9% in August, the September deck puts cash at ~US$124M. Magna’s only debt is US$16.9M of unsecured 10% convertible notes due March 5, 2029, a third of which Dundee Corporation $DDEJF, a Toronto investment company, bought. They convert at CAD$2.00/share into 11.98M shares, or 3.8% of the current share count. Magna has funded itself mostly with equity, so the share count rose from 163.4M at the end of 2023 to 313.35M after Alpayana, up 91.8%. Options and share units add more. At June 30, Magna had 12.35M options at a weighted average exercise price of CAD$1.21 and 1.73M restricted and deferred share units. At CAD$2.45, 9.64M of the options are in the money, and exercising them would give Magna ~US$5.1M of cash. Counting the in-the-money options, the share units, and the notes, the diluted count is 336.70M (313.35M + 9.64M + 1.73M + 11.98M).
Revenue at Nubeva Technologies $NBVAF (TSXV: $NBVA) has fallen 76% since 2023, but it still has ~4 years of cash. Since losing Kroll, its biggest customer, Nubeva’s revenue has dropped from its FY2023 high of $2.07M. Expenses fell 66% over the same period, from $4.03M to $1.36M. Nubeva booked $500,586 in FY2026, across three revenue lines: 1) Software licenses ($204,055, 41% of revenue): Attributed in the MD&A “primarily” to NuRR, its ransomware-recovery product. 2) Subscriptions ($90,819, 18%): NuRR, down from $113,356 in FY2025. The December 2025 interim MD&A blamed the decline on fewer customers renewing. 3) Support and maintenance ($205,712, 41%): The last TLS (web-traffic decryption) customer, paying under a source-code and distribution agreement Nubeva kept when it sold its TLS technology in March 2024. Just two customers made up 82% of FY2026 revenue (41% each). While the concentration risk exists, both customers have continued working with Nubeva. The TLS customer has been paying since before the March 2024 sale, and the license customer since FY2025. Nubeva ended FY2026 with $2,489,316 of cash and money-market funds and no debt beyond a $12,262 pandemic-era SBA loan. Cash fell $600,162 over the year, which means runway is ~4 years ($2,489,316 / $600,162) if nothing material changes. CEO Randy Chou didn’t expect Nubeva to burn cash in 2025. In a March 4, 2024 video posted the day the TLS sale closed, he said the sale would make Nubeva cash-flow positive for calendar 2024, with 2025 “targeted to be the same.” Instead, cash fell $457,706 in the 12 months to January 31, 2026, the closest reported period to calendar 2025 ($3,184,879 to $2,727,173). In other words, the TLS sale didn’t make Nubeva self-funding, so the ~4-year runway is how long Chou has to automate support or sell. Even if both top customers churned, cash would still cover ~2.5 years of operations. Nubeva hasn’t raised equity since a CAD$1.59M private placement in February 2022, and the last warrants expired in FY2025, so dilution has been minimal.
Half the gold, platinum, and palladium in ore from McCreedy West, the producing mine of Magna Mining $MGMNF (TSX: $NICU), goes to Franco-Nevada $FNV for $1,200 per gold-equivalent ounce, 29.0% of the average gold price in Q4 2025. Magna inherited the deal, a precious metals stream, when it bought McCreedy West from KGHM $KGHPF, the Polish copper giant. A stream is a deal where a financier pays a miner upfront for the right to buy part of its future metal at a discount to market. Magna’s stream gives Franco-Nevada 50% of the gold, platinum, and palladium in ore from McCreedy West and “certain areas” of Levack and Podolsky, until the deposits run out or 2048. Franco-Nevada pays 60% of the monthly average gold price per gold-equivalent ounce (platinum and palladium converted into gold) from McCreedy West, capped at $1,200/oz once gold tops $2,000. In Q2 2026, the stream cut net revenue by US$3.9M, so revenue would have been ~18% higher without the stream. CEO Jason Jessup called the stream “a bit of an overhang” on McCreedy West, and in April said its terms are “definitely open for discussion” with Franco-Nevada. The higher gold climbs, the more the stream costs Magna, and I wouldn’t count on Franco-Nevada softening the terms. Crean Hill, Magna’s permitted nickel mine, carries no Franco-Nevada stream, and Jessup says R2, the high-grade zone Magna found at its flagship Levack mine, has none either. At Q4 2025’s gold price, Magna kept 64.5% of the value of McCreedy West’s gold, platinum, and palladium (50% + 50% × 29.0%). That means a stream-free ounce from Crean Hill or R2 is worth 1.55x as much to Magna as one from McCreedy West (100% / 64.5%). The stream also covers two areas of Levack, including the Morrison deposit. Franco-Nevada’s filings set the price for its Sudbury streams at $400/oz, rising 1% a year from July 2011, and its later increases applied to McCreedy West only, so Levack’s price would’ve reached ~$460/oz by Q4 2025 ($400 × 1.01^14). So at Q4 2025’s gold price, Magna would keep 55.6% of the value of Levack’s streamed ounces (50% + 50% × ($460 / $4,141.90)), less than the 64.5% it kept at McCreedy West.
Seems I quite underestimated mgmt's turnaround abilities at $QMCO back in late April, despite my deep dive. +370% since! 🤔 https://t.co/TaFgHG1Jke
Elmet $ELMT expects Masan High-Tech Materials, its Vietnamese tungsten supplier, to stay its key refiner even after a U.S.-funded plant in Nevada comes online, and it bought 4.99% of the company for $124.75M on October 1. Masan High-Tech Materials (UPCoM: MSR) mines tungsten at Nui Phao in Vietnam, refines the concentrate into APT (ammonium paratungstate, the traded form of tungsten) and oxides, and calls itself the largest producer of processed tungsten outside China. Elmet, which turns tungsten into parts for U.S. missiles and jets, has bought from MSR for 12+ years, and the deal values MSR at $2.5B. The 55.1M shares came from a Masan Group (HOSE: MSN) subsidiary, so the $124.75M goes to MSR's parent, not into MSR. Along with the stake come (1) an MSR board seat, (2) an 18-month lockup on Elmet's MSR shares, and (3) 8+ years of supply that MSR puts at ~1,250 tonnes of WO₃ (tungsten trioxide, the standard measure of contained tungsten) a year, ~$1.5B of revenue to MSR at today's prices. That's ~$187.5M a year of spend with MSR ($1.5B / 8), equal to 82% of Elmet's $228.5M of TTM revenue. On September 14, Elmet's deck labeled ~$100M of the U.S. Department of War's (DoW) $450M "Strategic Investments in Elmet Refining & Trading," its new tungsten buying and trading division, to build a "diversified feedstock portfolio." The October 1 deck relabels the same ~$100M "Strategic Investment in Masan," and the stake cost $124.75M. At $2.5B, Elmet paid 10.7x the ~$233M of net profit MSR expects for 2026 ($2.5B / $233M). For context, APT was $3,040/MTU (metric ton unit, 10 kg of WO₃) on May 29, up from $330 in January 2025 per Elmet's deck, and Elmet's own 2031 targets assume $1,500/MTU. Elmet's 8-K also says it won't participate in MSR's 2026 interim dividends. On October 1, the day the shares traded, MSR's board proposed a second 2026 interim dividend of VND 5,000/share (Vietnamese dong). VND 5,000 is 8.5% of the VND 58,760/share Elmet paid, or ~$10.6M on its 55.1M shares. In September I wrote that Springer, the Nevada APT plant, gives Elmet the one step it didn't own: Turning tungsten concentrate into the oxide its powder line starts from. Elmet's deck calls MSR a "long-time supplier and processor of blue tungsten oxide (BTO)," so MSR already handles the conversion for Elmet. So the step Elmet didn't own in July stays with MSR, and Elmet paid 10.7x MSR's expected 2026 profit for its 4.99% while its own 2031 plan assumes APT at under half the May price.
My investing thesis in a nutshell (w/examples): 1) Buy with a strong margin of safety or stock price near/below cash and/or book value. 2) Buy in industries and/or markets where the money is flowing. Makes it a lot easier. 3) Buy the best early and/or the most overlooked in that particular industry. 4) Pay up for unfair advantages, excellent mgmt teams, and companies with huge latent pricing power. 5) Sell when the thesis breaks. Or a much better risk/reward setup hits your desk. Otherwise continue to add/hold. Don't track stock prices. Track the main business KPIs like any competent mgmt team would. Example #1: Bought $NBIS 4x mid $20's (best overall). Then bought $BRUN common and warrants pre-merger (most overlooked). Example #2: Bought $FTEK $1.39. Cash floor new excellent operator CEO. Strong upside potential w/data centers. Example #3: Bought $BABA $70's. Strong margin of safety, market leader, unfair advantages. Sold $170 for better risk/reward. Example #4: Bought $ELMT @$19 and @$14. Unfair advantage. Strategic. Cheap. Critical in strong growth industries. Example #5: Bought $TOST @$24. Beaten down due to macro headwinds and new/early $DASH competition. But almost everything in business stronger and expanding to new verticals. Lastly, if you're unsure or don't fully understand the business. Just say no. In fact, say no to most stocks. Most probably your best idea is already in your portfolio. Don't lockup your money in a 3/5 setup, you're trying to make outsized returns! And sub to my newsletter (link in bio) if you want my deep dives. 😉
The hoist at Levack, the flagship mine of Magna Mining $MGMNF (TSX: $NICU), was designed to move 6,000 tons a day, ~5.5x the record Q2 pace at McCreedy West, its producing mine. Most of Levack’s infrastructure is already built. Magna expects to finish refurbishing the hoist and the loading pocket where ore enters the shaft before the end of 2026. Magna is engineering a new ramp from surface (a sloped tunnel trucks can drive down) for the shallower zones, with the shaft serving the deeper Morrison ore. By mid-2026, crews had tunneled into the Intermediate Orebody (IOB), and Magna says mining the drilled part of the IOB “could begin immediately upon a positive restart decision.” CEO Jason Jessup said in July there’s a “very strong possibility that before the end of the year, we will skip first ore,” meaning hoist the first ore up the shaft, with shipments building through H1 2027. In the same interview, he said Levack and Crean Hill, Magna’s permitted nickel mine, are “both working towards commercial production in 2028.” On scale, he expects Levack to produce “possibly two to even three times” McCreedy West’s payable metal, which would make McCreedy West “our smallest mine within the next couple of years.” Magna’s first resource estimate for Levack (its estimate of the metal in the ground) found: → Contact deposits: 5.9Mt indicated at 3.2% copper equivalent (CuEq, which converts every metal into copper at set prices), mostly less than 750 meters deep. → Morrison footwall: 178,000 tonnes indicated at 15.5% CuEq, with the deposit continuing below the deepest drilling. → Total: 6.1Mt indicated at 3.54% CuEq and 5.2Mt inferred at 3.59% CuEq. Indicated tonnes come from drill holes spaced closely enough to support a mine plan. Inferred tonnes rest on fewer, more widely spaced holes, so their size and grade could still change with more drilling. Jessup says “the bulk of the PEA tons will come from the contact nickel zones,” so nickel matters far more to Levack’s PEA (preliminary economic assessment) than to McCreedy West, where it’s 10.3% of metal revenue. The PEA was due in Q3. On September 17, Magna pushed the PEA and Crean Hill’s pre-feasibility study to the first half of October to account for Canada’s proposed Productivity Mega Deduction. The deduction would let miners write off Canadian development spending right away, instead of deducting 30% of the balance a year, so both studies’ after-tax returns should come out higher. Jessup said of the PEA on September 24, “essentially it’s all done,” and he sees a “very high probability” of a restart declaration shortly after the PEA comes out.
Great analysis on $MSCI @vachelliaequity https://t.co/LSD8XwRB6x
The ransomware software of Nubeva Technologies $NBVAF (TSXV: $NBVA) passed every test in a month-long third-party lab evaluation in 2023, and its biggest customer, Kroll, walked away anyway. In January 2022, Nubeva launched Ransomware Reversal, or NuRR, the product the company is now built around. It’s a lightweight agent installed on servers, desktops, and laptops that watches for the file encryption a ransomware attack produces, captures copies of the encryption keys as the malware generates them, and stores those keys on the customer’s own network. After the attack, Nubeva uses the captured keys to build a decryptor (a program that reverses the encryption) and hands the customer its data back, without the ransom. The only outside test of NuRR I found was a month-long evaluation in 2023 at DreamPort, a lab in Maryland (the test doesn’t appear to have been commissioned by Nubeva). DreamPort is run by the Maryland Innovation and Security Institute (MISI), a nonprofit that partners with U.S. Cyber Command to connect the military with outside cybersecurity products. Per Nubeva’s July 20, 2023 release, NuRR passed all 17 tests in MISI’s test plan and captured the encryption keys in every attack, including ones using the LockBit, Ragnar Locker, and BlackBasta ransomware strains. But less than two months after the MISI results, Nubeva lost its biggest customer: → January 2023: Nubeva named Kroll, the risk advisory firm that runs more than 3,000 incident-response investigations a year, as a strategic partner using the product in its ransomware cases. → September 2023: Kroll ended the relationship and paid $180,000 to walk away. It had been 86% of FY2023 revenue (~$1.78M of $2.07M). Neither company gave a reason in a filing or press release. But in a July 2024 video on Nubeva’s YouTube channel, CEO Randy Chou said Kroll sometimes brought in 10 ransomware cases on the same weekend, and “neither the partner or us as a complete solution could handle the emergency services.” In an October 2025 video, he explained the constraint further. Each new ransomware variant needs its own decryptor, which Nubeva’s engineers built by hand. With 10 to 30 attacks running at once, “you don’t have enough engineers to go figure out the new decryptor.” Chou added that Nubeva “simply cannot afford to scale” its support, “and that’s still the reality,” so it’s waiting on automation before it grows again. A longtime investor I spoke with, who has followed Nubeva for years and has spoken with people who’ve used NuRR in the field, described the same constraint. He also says Kroll’s exit is why Nubeva stopped trying to grow on its own and bet on AI to write the decryptors.
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.
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.
@mkfilko How you be walking with $NKE shoes https://t.co/jITmdz7fgR
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.
Elmet $ELMT won a ~$36M U.S. defense stockpile contract for metal its plants already make, while deliveries under its $2B stockpile contract wait on new supply. On September 30, Elmet announced the award from the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), which manages the U.S. National Defense Stockpile. It covers TZM (titanium-zirconium-molybdenum alloy) billets, bar stock, and ingots, plus molybdenum and tungsten wire, materials used to make jet engine components. Elmet's $2B stockpile contract, announced September 14, is separate and covers tungsten concentrate, the upgraded ore a mine ships. The $36M is 27.4% of Elmet's $131.5M total backlog at July 3 ($36M / $131.5M), and the release doesn't say when deliveries start or how long the contract runs. On the slide for the $2B contract, Elmet's October 1 deck says Elmet "does not intend to begin delivering material into the National Defense Stockpile until sufficient incremental new supply is available." Elmet's supply agreement with Tungsten West (AIM: TUN) puts concentrate from Hemerdon, its tungsten mine in Devon, England, first in line for Elmet's DLA deliveries until Elmet's Nevada refinery is commissioned (targeted for 1H 2029). Elmet expects >1,000 tonnes a year of Hemerdon concentrate, and the mine targets full production by the end of Q1 2027. In September I treated $1.85B of the $2B ceiling as an upper bound, not orders Elmet has in hand, and the $36M sits outside the $2B entirely. So the stockpile's newest award goes to metal from Elmet's existing U.S. plants, while the $2B contract still waits on a mine in England that isn't at full production yet.
If ur reading a write-up and they don't include a valuation range, more often than not: 1) They're lying to themselves. E.g. only pitching bull case. "The next 10x." $GRAB a couple years ago. 2) They're lying to you, the reader. E.g. not focusing on bear case enough. "It's asymmetric"... but actual downside if couple thing flops is 60%+. $FLNC just 2-3 months ago. 3) They have no clue and prob conclude by saying "position as small speculative bet" to be in a win-win scenario to gain subs. $CCXI today... Multiple based valuation is the simple/lazy route and easier to defend, yet less practical. Absolute valuations like DCF or Penman REV forces you to think more through scenarios and the business itself, which is what's actually useful because it's more subjective.
The $VIX closed at 14.87 on September 25, while the S&P 500's $SPY realized volatility over the past month was 10.8. That 4.1-point gap is the premium option buyers pay over what the index has actually done, and it's the newest row in the volatility section of my macro dashboard. The other volatility rows (VIX, the MOVE index for Treasury volatility, the VIX term structure, and SKEW) all live inside the options market, while this one checks option prices against the index's actual moves. A wide gap means protection is expensive relative to recent moves. A negative gap means the market is moving more than options priced in, which is what a selloff in progress looks like. I added it because a VIX of 15 means something different when the S&P 500 is moving 10% annualized than when it's moving 20%. The gap is near its 5-year average of 3.3 after swinging from -1.2 in early July to 8.4 by late July, 0.6 in mid-August, and 6.7 on September 11. Stocks look calm next to bonds right now. The VIX sits at the 23rd percentile of its 5-year range, while the MOVE index jumped from 80.6 to 96.0 in the week to September 25.
@stepnotonpets And each layer already has a competitor. Pilz and $ROK sell SIL 3 wired safety controllers, and Scanreco says it's shipped 700,000+ SIL 3 remotes vs FORT's 19,500+ units. But neither's built wireless stops managed across a mixed fleet like $NTWO.
