This is MacroVoices, the free weekly financial podcast targeting professional finance, high net worth individuals, family offices, and other sophisticated investors. MacroVoices is all about the brightest minds in the world of finance and macroeconomics telling it like it is, bullish or bearish, no holds barred. Now, here are your hosts, Eric Townsend and Patrick Ceresna. MacroVoices episode 516 was produced on January 22nd, 2026. I'm Eric Townsend. Craig Tindale is a name you might not know, but his recent sub-stack post highlighting geostrategic risks created by offshoring the dirty business of midstream commodities production has caught the attention of both the Pentagon and the White House. Craig is also a longtime MacroVoices listener and he'll join me as this week's feature interview guest. We'll discuss why China is holding all the cards and how those cards were served to them, not only on a silver platter, but on a platter made from silver mind elsewhere but refined in China. Then be sure to stay tuned for our post game segment after the feature interview when we'll have Patrick's Trade of the Week plus our latest perspective on all the major markets. And I'm Patrick Ceresna with the macro scoreboard week over week as of the close of Wednesday, January 21st, 2026. The S&P 500 index down 74 basis points trading at 6875, geopolitics creating some volatility, but the key support lines are still holding. We'll take a closer look at that chart and the key technical levels to watch in the post game segment. The US dollar index down 26 basis points trading at 9879. The March WTI crude oil contract down 204 basis points trading at 6062. Now while the price is off of last week's levels, we are seeing key supports holding. The March Arbob gasoline up 108 basis points to 188. The February gold contract up 436 basis points to 4837. The momentum continues to accelerate on gold. The March copper contract down 463 basis points to 577. The January Uranium contract up 186 basis points trading to 85 even. Notable breakout over the last few weeks in Uranium. The US 10 year treasury yield up 11 basis points trading at 4.25 and the key news to watch this week is the flash manufacturing and services PMIs. And next week we have the first FOMC meeting of 2026. The PPI inflation numbers and we get into the heart of earning season. This week's feature interview guest is Craig Tindale. Eric and Craig discuss rare earth strategic choke points, the midstream refining and where China's dominating critical links in the supply chain and then they dig into what it means for AI data centers, defense readiness, industrial reshoring and more. Eric's interview with Craig Tindale is coming up as macro voices continues right here at macro voices.com. And now with this week's special guest, here's your host, Eric Townsend. Joining me now is Craig Tindale. Craig is a private investor long time macro voices listener and has recently penned an article called Critical Materials a strategic analysis, which has gone absolutely viral. The financial times reported that it has gained the very direct attention of the White House and the Pentagon. So this is really just incredibly great work that you've done. Craig as you know is a long time listener. This is not the first time that our listeners have heard concerns about how China's dominance in terms of the supply chain has considerable strategic implications. But I think you've done a far better job than anyone else of just concisely writing about exactly what the issue is. So congratulations on that. Why don't we dive right in strategic diagnosis of what you call the end of infinite materiality. What is this article about? Why is it important? Well, I guess it's the ultimate genesis of state capitalism versus stateless capitalism. We've got on one side a state that is intent on dominating all areas of commerce internationally. On the other side, you've got a free market philosophy that is gained by price. And so the Chinese are basically gaming the system by lowering the cost of refining and smelting so that they gain control. If you look at 50 to 98 percent of the critical metals needed by the West to go forward with all their electrification, their data centers, their EVs, just about everything you can think of, even the nuclear buildout, it requires critical metals. Without those critical metals, you can't go forward. And what Chinese supply chain is done is grab it in the middle and direct it towards itself. And it's done that at multiple layers, one layer is the smelting refining, which I'll just mention. The other is the off-take agreements and the mine ownership, which directs towards those smelters. Another area is the ownership of the actual mines. If you look at Xinjiang and some of the Chinese state-owned mining conglomerates, they've gradually bought everything in the West, in particular, gold and silver and copper and many of the others. And they're directing those outputs until the last few years. Those outputs haven't been used by the West. They've been used by China. They now control everything that we need to control to reassure everything. And Alexander Hamilton, I think, pointed out in 1791, article, the report of manufacturers that went to Congress, that liberty and freedom exists, and they're not by itself. It's contingent on having a manufacturing and a supply channel that allows it. At that stage, Hamilton was looking at the dependence on the English. I guess I put it today that we're looking at not at the English, but at the Chinese. And that all his assumptions about the importance of that existing and the manufacturing existing exact is actually conditions precedent for the West to be successful. And without that, we'd become enslaved. We're almost surfs in SCRFS in the whole global supply chain. I guess I frame it like this, that we have a financial balance sheet and we're good at that putting claims upon claims upon claims, but we've disconnected from the physical or the balance sheet of matter. And so these two things are separating as we speak. As they separate, the ability for us to control our destiny becomes less than less. You write about the feedstock paradox. I love that terminology. You're describing this phenomenon where it seems like there's something about human nature that people think about the raw material as the strategic asset. President Trump has clearly become aware of the importance of rare earth elements, but he's talking about where we can mind them. And the reality of the situation is China's got, well, you've done some fantastic statistics. So I shouldn't speak for you. Give us a perspective how much of the refining and processing that's necessary in order to get any benefit from these raw materials. How much of that does China control today? And what would it take if the United States were cut off from that Chinese supply? What would it take for the United States and the rest of the West to recover if that event were to happen? They've got 50 to 98 percent control, depending on the category of the metal. 90 percent is, you know, things like Scandium. I started Scandium. Scandium is used in an aluminium alloy. And that aluminium alloy is relevant to the new combat drones. An F-35 was built on the physics of G-Force 9 because that's all human beings can connect with. A combat drone can do 20 to 30 Gs because there's nobody sitting in it. And the alloy is required of that. There are a new industrial material. The whole West produces 15 tons of Scandium per year at the moment and they need hundreds, if not thousands of tons of Scandium to build these combat drones. The only source of that Scandium at the moment is virtually China. And so if we want to build our combat drones and defend ourselves and not create incentives for war, that is, you know, there's two sides of this. One side is we have to defend ourselves. I think what people miss is if we can't defend ourselves, we create an incentive for the more powerful nation, the foreign nation to take advantage of that. And having a good defense is important to creating a world piece as anything else. You know, but copper is the same. You know, copper goes into almost everything. In some of these ultra high voltage cables per kilometer, there's about 60 tons of copper. I read an article yesterday, there's 2,177 tons of copper in Microsoft's new AI data center in Texas. The US planned to build 13 to 15 of these. That's a lot of copper. Everything we look at, that physical intensity of copper is apparent in it. Not just the copper, it goes into everything. Siemens at the moment have a 138 B and Euro backorder on equipment, things like the major transformers. The major transformers are taking four to five years to be delivered. So we can build as many nuclear power stations as we want. But if you can't put the transformers in place to actually move the electricity and if you can't put the UHVs in place, there's the ability to transmit other power lines. They're stranded assets, these nuclear power stations. That's why a lot of these new AI data centers are being sat next to nuclear power stations because they already have the equipment in place and they now have to wait. So you end up with a situation where they control our destiny. They were already licensing a double licensing program and it was later a few days ago they decided that they were going to supply rare earths to Japan for the defense industry. On the other side of it Siemens with 138 B and Euro backorder relies almost 100% on heavy rare earths from China. The order book from China is about 15%. You can really imagine the China going well if you want your rare earths. We want our transformers first. So they layer upon layer the ability to dominate the supply chain just by their initial influence. This happened in history. If we look back to 914, there was a thing called the zinc crisis. A company called Metal Giselle Shutt. German company was established as the major refiner of zinc and copper and a whole bunch of other industrial metals. They had subsidiaries in North America and they had subsidiaries in Australia. Ironically called Australian metals and American metals. They basically took the off-takes from those mines and sent them to Germany. In the Battle of Orgurs in 1914 the French were overrun because they ran out of shells. A lot of people don't understand why the French got overrun. So easily a lot of people say they're still the old generals relying on horse cavalry and things like that. The reality is they ran out of shells and Lloyd George was made minister for munitions in those days because the fear was that they wouldn't be able to supply themselves. So this has happened before many many times. It's not actually a unique thing in history. You go back from the 16th century spying. The Spanish had all the gold from the Americas and silver as well but they couldn't eventually, they couldn't buy it I think because the Dutch were making it and everything and Europe was making everything and they were going to take their gold because they couldn't manufacture and I think themselves and eventually the Spanish Empire fell even though they had a mountain of gold. So we've got rhyming right through history of this kind of thing happened. We just have and how that happened at this scale. Now how can we fix it? That's a complicated subject. It obviously depends on will whether we can optimize the political skills to do that. I think President Trump obviously sees it and I think he's probably seen it intuitively. He's almost Hamiltonian in his regard of manufacturing and reshoring the future materials and manufacturing capacity of the United States and he almost follows a complete Alexander Hamilton playable and Hamilton came up through intense conflict and so he knew the importance. Eisenhower was similar. Everybody reads just that Eisenhower speech and says you know watch out for the military and industrial complex. Eisenhower was even more interesting if you read the rest of the speech. He was worried about the manufacturing complex and the ability to be self-sustaining and that's what he warned about. You know we take one message you know it's similar to this freedom and liberty. It's an ideal but we forgot what the foundation of that idea was and that's interdependence. If we're beholden to foreign powers we risk that liberty and freedom right across the West because we become beholden to the supplier of our goods and they can withdraw them they can stop our reshoring they can do all the things that they need to do. Craig I think that you're focused on the midstream in other words it's not where the rear earth elements get mined from it. Who's got the ability to actually separate those rear earth elements and produce the final product that we need for all of these applications. Some numbers taken directly out of your article and by the way I should have mentioned at the beginning folks. Craig's article is linked in your research round up email it's free on his sub stack and I very strongly recommend that everyone read it start to finish it is covered a cover just an outstanding piece of writing but if you look at something like gallium which is essential for certain kinds of military radar and 5G networks and semiconductors and so forth. China controls 98% of gallium production not where it's mined but where it gets refined and produced. Magnesium melting 90 to 95% rear earth separation 90% the high tech magnet production which is the the heart of electric vehicle motors wind turbines for wind powered energy and so forth and the actuators in defense mechanisms more than 90% controlled by China graphite anode production for lithium ion batteries more than 90% controlled by China tungsten production more than 83% controlled by China and there's a long list that continues after that. Craig what would it take if President Trump were to get together with other Western leaders and say boy you know this leaves us exposed to where if China cut us off from all this stuff we would be completely helpless. We can't have that vulnerability. Let's reshore and rebuild all of that capacity so that we're not dependent on China for any of this stuff. How many years and how many dollars would it take to eliminate this dependency? Short answer is trillions. I think it's variable because there's a lot of stuff on foot at the moment. They can already see this the White House and Congress and the Department of Wars they call it now. You know I track a lot of companies who are receiving funds you know as far back as two or three years ago to develop our capacity to refine rare earths and and all these metals. You know if you look at a company like UCU Unicorn I think they'll receive something like a hundred million dollars already to produce a rare earth's capacity in Louisiana which has gone into initial production I think this month or next month. You've got companies from Australian company like IPX IPRion X now they're producing titanium out of Virginia and they've got a new process that they took from the University of Utah from a scientist called Zach Fang which is a delightful name. He works in the University of Utah. He's like a Steve Jobs of materials science. He's come up with a way of making titanium powders you know at 80% less cost than the current method. There's another company that comes from Italian is also Australian lead. It takes the technology and the IP from James Toer out of Rice University and they use it's in called Flash Jewel Heating which heats everything up to 3000 jewels and checks some chlorine into it. You get a metals oxide out of it that then can be separated into its different streams. Not many people realise it but the Department of Energy tend to put out just before Christmas for $325 million worth of funding to take rare earths, titanium, gold and silver out of fly ash from coal to power plants. For every coal-fired power plant there's billions of tons of fly ash sitting around it that were at the output of the burning so much coal. They all have a significant amount of minerals still in them. They just have to be extracted. There's a number of innovations that we're doing and it fits the old American Yankee Know How Innovation Cycle that a lot of this stuff is coming to the fore. But what it takes is lowering the cost of capital for these projects. These projects haven't I guess flown in the past because we've been funding things to give quarterly results like social media, like a lot of the software is going to eat the world type stuff, learn to code type stuff, where the cost of capital is not high at the start and once you built the software you just have to incrementally add to it. It's not a 10-year return and the return is fairly significant. So we measure bread and milk as far as inflation but we don't measure the asset market as inflation. So we measure bread and milk but we don't measure the price of shelter and so when bread and milk have gone up we've raised the cost of capital and not noticed that a lot of the industrial projects have been killed off. As soon as we go to four and five percent the industrial projects die on the vine and we go back to the hollowed out economy that the Fed policy creates for us and it's the Fed policy that's at the core of the problem. The core of the problem is that industrial projects just don't get the funding that they need. Now the other one is weaponized pricing. We're going to deal with that. Weaponized pricing is every time at the moment is great example is copper smelting in China is being done at negative cost. So if Peru and Chile ship their copper to China they're getting paid 50 dollars a ton to process it. Now you imagine what that does to the copper refiners in the west they can't compete and it's their method of getting complete control. They send us broke in the key areas that we need to evaluate. I think one example is the chairman of Palantía has put together another star called Epirus. Epirus basically shoots a gallium gun you know it micro seconds at drones and they just fall out of the sky and fries their internal electrics. You know you put these gallium guns in low or thought orbit and you know you can fry the electrics of an ICBM inside the site load. So they have very consequential if you take it away from us because it changes the pathway of our defense. You know we talk about copper if you cannot put the copper in place the end product. You know it you can't build anything that we're talking about. So we need to do what we did in 1914 and what we did in different our other scenarios and bring that on shore. Now I think there is a pathway to do that. I've got another page that coming out on how to change the Fed to do that and separate the Fed's abilities at price control consumer prices but separate out the infrastructure and industrial items so that they can survive. So they're not measured as part of inflation and you know we may even have an interest free bond or something like that type solution where we offer not an interest free bond or a tax free bond where we offer pension funds an alternative to invest in where a pension fund would flow money into an industrial project and it wouldn't be paid by the Treasury it would be paid by the industrial project with a tax free rate. The industrial project donors would partner with the state like the Chinese do to produce the industrial output that they need to do. There's no other way of doing it you know state capitalism on the Chinese side. I think it's 50 points ahead of half time and it's got we know we're not playing well enough to make a comeback. Let's talk about how the AI trend plays into this because a lot of military experts have opined that basically the AI race between the US and China for leadership on AI is akin to the US Soviet arms race because AI has such profound implications in terms of its military applications and so forth. From reading your article it sounds to me like you know we're headed this is 1947 we're headed into an arms race not with the Soviets this time but with China and it's about AI and the strategy is going to be that we'll buy our nuclear warheads from Moscow. I mean what that doesn't make sense how much of you know you got to do two things to build an AI data center you've got to have all of the copper and all the materials that go into building that data center and then you've got to power the data center. How much are we dependent on China if China thought that the strategy if we ever did get into a kinetic conflict where we're actually at war with China and they decided to cut us off how much would that impair our ability to build AI data centers? Well we it could potentially totally impair it you'd end up with a situation where you've got to do rationing on the western side to make sure that they they get the materials they need to build the data systems. If we if we start looking at AI not as a consumer device like I guess Michael Bury sees it and as a weapon system which you've just outlined then it becomes a different equation because if you can't build these AI data data centers and they are weapon systems the arms race takes a whole different feel look and feel and all of a sudden your return on investment and the various metrics that you would put on others as a consumer item go out the window and it becomes a must do so you know I've been AI to me is a western weapon system manufacturing of the future to reconceptualization but you know it essentially is and so a lot of this Michael Bury thing about you know it's it's a bubble it doesn't equate properly with where it actually sits it's making it sound like it's a it's a you google where in fact if they don't succeed the west might not succeed either now individually they may may not succeed but I think the workloads are potentially coming onto these systems are so important that we can't look at them as a consumer a consumer device now if you've got transformers taking four or five years to get to you from Siemens or Natasha and the rare earth said dependent on and then you're in quite a chokehold you need to find that stuff from somewhere else and you know I think in the article I outline you know potential areas that would probably I thinkable today but they won't you know thinkable tomorrow that you know it's 20 grams of silver in a in a a solar panel I propose that you tear all them up if you get into real desperate circumstances and and use them for data centers and weapon systems the same goes for gallium and all the other things you know where we have to re-frying the world to some extent the world is not how we see it or how we've seen it the world is a different place and we have to reframe our conceptual building blocks to to look at the world this way because a denial by China or Russia because Russia controls some of these these things as well in particular titanium that framing changes how we look at capitalism be you know we have to adopt some type of state capitalism and everyone will think that's that's nationalization it's not nationalization it's just admittance that's stateless capitalism that followed price to the point of efficiency so far that we're letting out foreign powers supply the things that are crucial to our ongoing perseverance as as the west it's that important and the the density of copper is significant the density of silver is significant as well now you wrote this article Craig from the perspective of geostrategy and basically trying to get policy makers attention to recognize how vulnerable we've made ourselves to being cut off by Chinese dominance of supply chains but you actually got to this through your own research not trying to research geopolitics but research investments so let's talk about where the trades are and where some of the opportunities are I hate to take such a grim topic and in trying to make a buck out of it but that's what we do here on macro voices sometimes that's what I do too so let let's talk about that I want to start with silver which you mentioned a couple of times most analysis that I've read recently about silver says okay look what's going on here is silver is basically gold on steroids we got central banks buying up a lot of gold because they're concerned about us policy that's just causing the bubble in silver that's about to blow off there's really nothing substantial behind it I think you've got a very different perspective from reading the article tell us about silver's strategic importance how does it play into the rest of everything that we're talking about and is this a bubble that's over in silver or is it just getting started well it's yeah let's just do some numbers we've been 5,000 tonne of silver short for the last four years I think the overall it's 24,000 tons since 2020 when we're in deficit we have to drag it out of vaults or people's cutlery draws in order to provide it silver is actually central to the whole electrification the AI you know there's 20 to 40 grams of silver in a in a major missile there's eight tons of silver in a data center there's almost you know in the robotics world if anyone's going to build these robots armies there's a good percentage of silver in in each robot so it becomes a substantial input now 70% of our silver comes as an off-tank from copper zinc and lead refining but the 60% happening in China now you know we're already in deficit let's let's take that into account even with the the Chinese output now just before Christmas they put some licensing in the basically said that all silver would be licensed to the end supplier I think there's 43 different Chinese companies that can output silver now what if they decided to cut all that off from us from the west you know all of a sudden the 5,000 tonne a year deficit turns into maybe 10,000 tonne a year deficit or more now they all come has to come out of our cutlery draws I saw one analyst say that there's 200,000 tonne inside people's cutlery draw like I doubt that because I actually don't think anyone knows how much is in the cutlery draws and the jewelry draws but we would have to drag it out of the vault and that's going to send silver obviously skyrocketing because you know the the net cost of silver in some of these products is marginal anyway you know there's a lot of silver in an EV but silver doubled it's only going to add one percent or so to the costs of the EV and you know then we've got to prioritize what silver goes into what if we look at AI as weapon systems rather than consumer items they would get priority over an EV I'd give you another thinking model and this is triggered by what happened to BHP recently BHP were told that they were going to take offshore C and Y as payment for iron ore and BHP refused for a month and then they decided that they would accept the offshore C and Y they were the last holdout of all the iron ore producers what if China said to us you can have these rare earth minerals but we're going to require offshore C and Y to pay for that would introduce a really weird dynamic because all of a sudden you've got to have industrial companies in the west trying to reassure the the AI companies building the data centers the defense companies try to source C and Y in order to pay for these things I've noticed there's a number of gold producers being acquired by if you look at the quantum of that it's getting quite significant what if they gave for golders money and they back the C and Y with gold and they require all of the rare earths and critical metals to be purchased under offshore C and Y they could still run their internal runny as a currency that was for it and then they run the outside currency as a reserve currency so to speak all of a sudden you know the tables change that doesn't mean that USD would crash or Euro would crash or anything like that because they're still required to service debt but it would change the whole dynamics of the currency market and still put them in a place because you even go down to the machinery level Linus metals put out a note a few months ago basically saying well it's all well and good for us to start building these refining points in Texas but we need the Chinese machinery to do that because when we're not making in the west the machinery to refine these metals we you know we're beholden to them for even the machinery so we're going to learn how to do that so that puts a lot of gap you know that puts a lot of I guess risk in the west climbing back into a situation where they they enjoyed for the last four decades and that is dominance over you know egomani over the east as you look at this picture overall where do you think the most trading opportunities are we talked about silver briefly but what else is going to get scarce as much as the solution to this problem would be for governments to make big investments in reshoring you've also said in the article that you don't think that reshoring will be profitable for a lot of American companies in the short term so it's not the actual reshoring that you want to invest in you probably want to invest in scarcity first of all would you agree with that and if so what other things besides silver that you know silver is already seeing a huge move what hasn't moved yet where's the ripe trading opportunity I think the ripe trading opportunities are the ones that weighs our own form of state capitalism is starting to to show that face you know I mentioned a few of them before where you know the Department of War and the Department of Energy you're starting to find out some of these companies and I think they give us the trails to follow about the companies that will flourish in this new era you know the new scandium plays the new gallium plays there's some winners being picked and they've been subsidized with state capital from the west and that's happening right across Canada and there's something in the Australia as well and they're the I guess they're the sense to follow you know to to good returns you know some of these companies that I'm sitting on at the moment have already had four five hundred year up to a thousand percent near term increases in price as far as stocks you know MTM for instance I think I bought a eight cents and it's it's near a dollar at the moment you know I wouldn't be surprised that goes to fifty dollars at some stage now that's crazy I know but they're the kind of returns I think you'll get from this circular economy IPX that I mentioned it uses some IP out of the Rice University and what it does is it heats up fly ash and e-waste so you know all the circuit boards and that you know it's sitting in millions of tons in in the US and it heats them up and injects some chlorine into it and makes a chloride metal chloride mix out of it and then you can separate it at the chloride stage so you know I can envision you company I think you know I just don't mean this one there's a there's a dozen of these types of companies where all of a sudden we're processing the e-waste they just made an agreement to take two thousand five hundred tons of e-waste off Glencore you know so they're they're fraternizing with the large industrials and they take that e-waste and out of a ton of e-waste there's about five hundred grams of gold out of a ton of e-waste there's about three hundred grams of silver I mentioned fly ash the same thing is if you heat it up they and add the chlorine mix you get this chloride that all of a sudden makes it a circular economy you know we can start processing these things and this kind of fits the the mode that we've used in the past in more situations under under under under conflict where we've we've had to use our own resources and I think ultimately it serves us because it's going to teach us to be innovative you know there's another one opirion X that's going to make titanium out of Virginia 25% of an f-35 is titanium but that that's been given a hundred and fifteen million dollars out of the department of defense to I guess upscale this titanium capability so that they can produce titanium at oxides now this is an innovation story we've just had the two last two decades where we've worshipped at the altar of Zuckerberg who I guess is you know main claim to find this is hypnotizing our attention and distracting us where we've had you know real scientists developing IP that hasn't been recognised yet because they can't get it off the ground because they can't get the capital now if you look at some of these plays you know they're moving from pilot to commercialisation and you've obviously got that risk element there but if they can make it through the commercialisation stage and they've virtually done that certainly in the IPX case these are the industrial companies of the future these are the materials companies that have to emerge if the West is going to survive there's no other way to do it you know if you think of all the paths of doing this you know it's going to be innovation and it's going to be a reestablishment of this materials capability onshore whether it's in Australia through the Allies or whether it's onshore in the US there has to be developed there's no other way of doing it and you're not going to do it the same way that's not the American way they will do it in a more innovative way you know to stop the pollution one of the reasons that we offshoreed everything is that we didn't want the pollution tax that we didn't want the pollution in our country you know I think Ricky Gevace you know made a great analogy about you know slavery being relocated to Foxconn factories we're natural around them you know just because we haven't got ships and we're not bringing people over where we're still enslaving them in their own countries now we can divert past that with innovation we can you know I mentioned you see you you know I'll mention them by symbols because I'm an investor first there in Louisiana they're developing an amazing closed loop system that doesn't have any heavy rare earth pollution with it but throughput is lower costs than the old metric now obviously the you know the limitations on this is you know we have a limited skill base and we have a limited education base we're telling everyone to learn to code a few years ago and now we should be teaching and learn to go to chemistry or learn the go to engineering in order to create the industrial aids to point out there's a number of these companies I mentioned Linus you know they're building our they've got the go ahead in Texas they had ESG problems in Texas you've got all these I guess folks who were worried about the development of some of these capabilities in US states slowing the whole process down with agreements and bureaucracy that are now starting to be taken out of the way so you know Linus has been trying to get this thing off the ground in Texas as a rare earth refining project for a few years and now they're going forward and we have to get these things out of the way for them I think it's just common sense you know I would go down the rabbit hole of all of these chemical plates there's a lot of a chemical association with critical metals plays and you know if you go down there you'll find that you know that's a future investment the future investment this era is pivoted to a a critical metal survival industrialisation 2.0 that provides the feedstock and supply chain into the the things that we've talked most about in the greater financial environment investment environment we keep talking about an AI bubble in order to do an AI whether it's a bubble or not why not I don't think it is I think it's a military capability we need to understand the conditions present to creating those massive AI datasets and those and the you know all the electrification that goes with it the energy the gas the nuclear needs copper like I said you know that one that Microsoft one I just read a report on 2,177 tons in 1 a.o. danison and it's 20 from round the world that's a lot of copper I think we have to be I guess careful of this is not an automatic commodity play either because China's gaming that system too I put a note out yesterday about iron ore the Simondah the the guinea iron ore play for China and Rio Tinto they've put 20 billion dollars into an iron ore play it's I think you know large percentage of that goes into a railroad and you know 20 billion dollars and it's not something that we would have risked in the west because we'd have to have a return of 20 percent if you look at what China uses they use about a billion ton of copper a year in all their industries for 20 billion dollars they get I think stage 4 and 5 they get up to about 60,000 ton when the mind is fully operational they get to about 100,000 ton per annum but that's at 65 percent mineral concentration you know if you look at something like FMG they're at 56 percent mineral concentration now that nets out that you've got a process 85 hundred tons more in ore and in dirt you've got to get the same amount of iron ore out so you've got this thing where if they finance it they might lower the cost of iron ore by 10 percent say 10 dollars a ton and that 10 dollars a ton will give them an overall saving across their iron ore usage of 10 billion dollars and that 10 billion dollars gives them an ROI of 50 percent of their investment straight away and inside say 12 to 24 months you know that's a significant difference because if their return on investment also looks at the price it means that the iron ore they that they them investing in ore iron ore production and making these mines and making an oversupply pays them back their ROI is differently configured to our ROI and so where we're saying well the copper demand's going up you know significantly so the price will go up that's old analysis when your analysis says well the copper demand's going up they have complete control of the supplies so our copper cost might go up but their copper cost if they decide to stop refining it for us are giving it to themselves exclusively means that they've lowered the cost of copper from all their supplies and that that changes everything because it changes the valuation of company like Fortescue FMG it changes the valuation of BHP it changes the valuation and very well together because really all of a sudden even though they own 45 percent of some of their mine they're in a cost plus situation they're not in an iron ore price situation and Craig you've got an entire section in your article which is about disruptive technologies and where some of the investment opportunities are so again I very strongly encourage all of our listeners to read the article Craig you told me off the air you're not really promoting anything as a private investor other than reading your articles tell us where your sub-stack is and if there's anything else you'd like to tell our listeners about what you do well my sub-stack is just my name Craig Tindale you'll find it there same with my say Tindale for X and then you can find me on LinkedIn as well because I'm publishing there as well just my name again or I'm asking from anybody I've done pretty well of investing over the last decade and I don't really need to promote anything what I'm really trying to promote is our own survival and awareness of what we need to do for our own survival so it's pretty pure in that context and I just ask you to read it thoroughly because it's important to every one of your investment portfolios out there and to forward it to other people because we need to get the word out we need to change the way we're thinking about things in the West so that we you know we become resilient that we survive as a as a culture as a as a civilization and that if we don't do that you know we have a different future than I think we're all we've grown up with and again folks the name of the article is critical materials a strategic analysis and you'll find a link to that article in your research roundup email Patrick Suresna and I will be back as macro voices continues right here at macrovoices.com now back to your hosts Eric Townsend and Patrick Suresna Eric it was great to have Craig on the show now listeners you're going to find a download link for the post-game trade of the week in your research roundup email if you don't have a research roundup email that means you have not yet registered at macrovoices.com just go to our homepage macrovoices.com and click on the red button over Craig's picture saying looking for the downloads Patrick Craighead interesting takes on all sorts of commodities but rear earth elements were clearly the area where he seemed to feel the best trading opportunities existed so for this weeks trade of the week how about showing our listeners how to structure a bullish play on rare earth element scarcity with reasonably constrained risk parameters. Eric coming out of Craig Tindale's interview the takeaway is straightforward in rare earth the choke point isn't mining it's the midstream China dominate separation and magnet production which makes the strategic supply chain trade not a simple commodity beta play so for this week's trade of the week I want to express that theme through a basket rather than trying to pick a single winner by buying the rmx the rare earth and strategic metals ETF that said timing matters rmx is already up about 20% year to date which makes the entry more fragile and increases the risk of a sharp short term mean reversion so instead of running a pure delta one exposure and risking an early shakeout I want to own the basket and dampen near term downside volatility the structure is straightforward long the rmx shares paired with a short dated downside put the March 20th 2026 84 dollar put roughly 10% out of the money last trade around $3.28 or just over 3% of spot you're paying a known premium to protect the early phase of the trade if rmx pulls back the put absorbs a part of the drawdown now if it grinds higher the hedge expires and the premium is simply the cost of the insurance Patrick every Monday at big picture trading your webinar explains how retail investors can put on our most recent trade of the week for those listeners that want to explore how to put on these trades in greater detail don't miss out on a 14 day free trial at bigpicturetrading.com now let's dive into the post game chart tick alright Eric let's talk equities the perceptual pendulum seems to have swung from Trump's on a plane to Davos to announce that he's going to war with Europe all the way back to oh Trump came to Davos and told the audience that there will be no tariffs because the deal on Greenland is already done and the USA will be more than satisfied just to have military bases without taking possession of the entire island okay so suddenly we're seeing a brisk rally which I think is set to continue until wait for it the Trump perceptual pendulum swings back the other way now I have no idea when that will be or what the catalyst will be to bring it about but I think we've just changed directions on that pendulum and I think it's bullish for the stock market until the pendulum goes the other way but the big question on my mind is whether the current bullish swing is going to deliver a new all time high print suggesting that this market still has farther to go or if it's going to be not quite as much as a new all time high in which case maybe we're seeing a topping formation here we should know that within a week or two at the most well last week Trump did introduce some short term volatility with some headlines but the market quickly absorb the short term pullback along its 50 day moving average and as quickly reverse back up now we are seeing an S&P 500 that is generally heavy in its price action you see the breadth of the market widening you continue to see the equal weight S&P 500 trading right along it's 52 week high like it wants to break out and a material out performance in the small cap sector which continues to make fresh 52 week highs and so we have overall a market that's being accumulated but the same thing we've talked about for the last few weeks since the start of the year has been that the mag 7s remain a substantial drag on this index you can see that chart on page 4 we're breaking to lower lows as the big leadership stocks are dragging their heels now we were talking about the fact that the financial stocks have just started to break down because there are many of them missed on their earnings but we haven't yet seen a technical violation on the financials they could arguably still be bought on dip and stay in primary trend overall this market continues to have all of the signatures of sector rotation underway not broad selling now inevitably markets that are get heavy and tired well it could inevitably turn into a sell off very similar like Darius talked about in last week's episode but overall right now the market has not broken or violated any key levels so retesting highs is still entirely on the table and let's move on and talk about this dollar last week I said that while the Dixie rally had been brisk I thought it was being fueled by Trump's bold geopolitical moves and was ripe to retrace if a deal was struck and those geopolitics calm down well sure enough as soon as Trump announced that there would be no need to tariff eight European Union countries all the sudden the Dixie has retraced much of that rally so I think we're still in a consolidation range with no clear directional trend and I think the headlines will determine the next leg well the dollar breakdown that happened here really was a euro driven breakdown a lot of the other cross currencies while they moved weren't moving meaningfully and we still have things like the Japanese yen continuing to break down as the JGB market continues to be under substantial stress so while the US dollar has definitively turned a little bit lower here there isn't a lot of clarity that somehow that the downside window was reopened and it's old just gonna be US dollar downside from here there will be looking for signs that potentially it's there we're trading exactly at the 50 day moving average and really consider this 98 to 99 zone on the dollar index to be a kind of a fair value zone where there's been a lot of volume that transacted there and it spent the last six plus months trading in a tighter range around that level and until the dollar shows signs of meaningfully breaking out of this trade range then I still want to reserve a little bit of neutrality here and assume that the trade range is just prevailing here all right Eric let's touch on oil here we're struggling with resistance at the contract 200 day moving average which is 60 spot 49 on March WTI we need to see a move above 62 spot 50 WTI in order to really confirm the bullbroof is on and frankly as the geopolitics start to calm down the risk of a downside retrace toward the 59 dollar and then 55 dollar supports is increasing so I think the headlines will drive this let's see which way it goes well Eric the observations you're making on the technical levels line up the same for me the observation I would make though is that oils stopped going down on bad news and generally even though we had a quick little pop here on the upside the other week this entire consolidation has stayed above the 50 day moving average so while we do have to clear a hurdle in the 200 day moving average and we do need to see you know a bull continuation pattern emerge for there to be any pivot at this stage at least the price action is somewhat constructive and therefore you want to watch closely here whether this does turn into something a little bit more bullish all right Eric we got to talk about gold here Patrick last week I said that the fresh all time high we just put in on the gold chart would activate measured move targets all the way up to wow so much higher above the market 4900 to 5100 I didn't know we get almost all the way there in a week now though what we have is a massive 23 dollar wide unfilled gap way down at 4600 that's fully 250 dollars below the current market as of recording time that means that the bull market is still on but we could easily see a 250 plus dollar pullback just to fill that gap in before moving higher and when you consider that the geopolitical tempo is suddenly calming down there's plenty of room to see that big pullback Patrick you're the options man so for those of us without right longs on here as position traders what's the best way with a hedge or some other trade in order to lock in those gains without giving up the further upside that I'm convinced is still left in this bull market while there's different ways to measure out these measured moves generally all of them overlap that big round number of 5,000 and that's what everyone's looking for here on gold the fact is year that we've had a rally from just around 4400 to start of the year to a stone throw away from 5,000 we've seen a very fast advance in almost a parabolic fashion in the short term now without disputing the long term bull market of gold and the idea that the basement will inevitably draw gold to much higher levels in years to come there's a short term tactical high very likely to be coming in here which will spur a consolidation and the big question here is should investors do something about it and like your suggesting like what are some of the options well I recognize that this moment at least on a short term basis has a poor payoff profile for new entries so a minimum new participants could be looking for short term pauses for tactical entries but investors that are long gold here have a very important decision obviously selling gold has tax implications depending on where and how you hold it and so if one wants to hold their core long term holding and just simply put in some guard rails around their gold position from a short term over bought condition then except no substitute for just putting on a collar around gold prices as an example on the GLD if you were to color up your position with a hedge 5% below the market and sell a covered call 10% higher on the strike giving yourself still ample upside out to March you can put on the structure for a dollar 50 cost per share and so this immediately reduces delta dollar exposures and gives you some guard rails in order to lock in this beautiful advance leave lots of room for the trade to also keep working and so this is the one way that you can approach it now if you are willing to tactically sell down your position as an example we've been long the GLD through leap positions which are not these long-term equity holdings and these in many cases these are up several hundred percent and so these leap positions have now become very close to delta one in these situations profit taking the leaps and replacing them with bull calls spreads allow you to return some convexity and asymmetry back into the trade rather than holding gold at this stage in a delta one manner all right Eric let's touch on uranium here well we've already been in a very brisk rally on uranium and uranium miners then President Trump at Davos strongly reaffirming commitment of the US government to the nuclear renaissance really goose the market so this bull market is really taking off the risk is that we've come up so far so fast that it invites a vicious pullback which wouldn't even begin to upset the bullish trend and frankly chasing this uranium bull with new money way up here is kind of risky unless you're willing to ride out a pretty big pullback so waiting for such a pullback might be the more prudent time to try to put new money to work on the long side of this market I'm convinced though that it still has a long way to the run to the upside before it's over well Eric on page eight I have that uranium U308 futures chart and what we can see uranium is broken out to a 52 week new high and so we clearly have a new trend in place the question of course is will we see the equities continue to participate they've also broken out to those 52 week highs definitely uranium is working right now nowhere near as overbought as gold and gold miners here so there's looks like there's some room to go in this uranium space I wanted to touch on this copper chart Eric and so what we have seen here is that copper has started to get heavy up along the six dollar level and so we saw two attempts to legitimately close above it and each time it's now given it back at least in some form of a consolidation is happening here obviously the long-term fundamentals are still looking great for copper and there's room for it to go but after such an extended run on the upside just you know in two months running from five to six dollars there's room for this to pause here and consolidate maybe even a reversion back to its 50 day moving average for a new tactical buy on dip opportunity Patrick before we wrap up this week's show let's hit that 10 year treasury note chart this has been an incredibly quiet market all throughout the holiday period and just last week we saw the yields wake up with a spike not only above 420 but reaching all the way to 430 on the upside clearly longer duration yields have all reacting negatively and while the stock market has initially recovered the losses we're seeing these yields getting at least for the first few days of reaction still staying sticky at some of these higher levels folks if you enjoy Patrick's chart decks you can get them every single day of the week with a free trial of big picture trading the details are on the last pages of the slide deck or just go to big picture trading dot com Patrick tell them what they can expect to find in this week's research roundup when this week's research roundup you're going to find the transcript for today's interview as well as the traded the week chart book we just discussed here in the post game including a number of links to articles that we found interesting you're going to find this link and so much more in this week's research roundup that does it for this week's episode we appreciate all the feedback and support we get from our listeners and we're always looking for suggestions on how we can make the program even better now for those of our listeners that write or blog about the markets and we like to share that content with our listeners send us an email at research
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