MacroVoices #516 Craig Tindale: Critical Materials, A Strategic Analysis

This is Mac. Financial Podcast. Professional finance. sophisticated investors. economics telling it like it is. Bullish or bearish. No holds barred. Now here are your hosts, Eric Townsend and Patrick Serezna. Macro Voice's episode 516 was produced on january twenty second, twenty twenty six.

six, I'm Eric Tempsend. Craig Tyndale is a name you might not know, but his recent Substack 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 macro voices 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 mined elsewhere but refined in China. Then be sure to stay tuned for our postgame 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 Serezna with the Macro Scoreboard week over week as of the close of Wednesday, January 21st, 2026. The S P five hundred index down seventy four basis points, trading at sixty eight seventy five. 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 postgame segment.

The US dollar index down twenty-six basis points, trading at ninety-eight seventy-nine. The March WTI crude oil contract down two hundred and four basis points, trading at sixty sixty-two. 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 four hundred and sixty-three basis points to five seventy-seven. The January uranium contract up 186 basis points, trading to 85 even. notable breakout over the last few weeks in uranium. The US tenured treasury yield up 11 basis points, trading at four and a quarter. 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 earnings season.

This week's feature interview guest is Craig Tyndale. 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 Reshowing and more. Eric's interview with Craig Tyndale is coming up as Macro Voices continues right here at Macrovoices dot com. Eric Townsend.

Joining me now is Craig Tyndale. Craig is a private investor, longtime 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 uh really just incredibly great work that you've done, Craig. As you know as a longtime 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 c 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 uh 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. You've got on one side a state that is intent on dominating all areas of commerce internationally, and on the other side you've got a a free market philosophy that is gained by price.

And so the the Chinese are are basically gaming the system by lowering the cost of uh you know, refining and smelting. so that they gain control. If you look at fifty to ninety eight percent of the critical metals that needed by the West to go forward with all their el electrification, their uh data centers, their uh EVs, you know, just about everything you can think of, the even the nuclear build out. It requires critical metals. Without those critical metals you can't go forward.

And what the Chinese supply chain has done is is grabbed it in the middle and directed it towards itself and it's done that at multiple layers. That one layer is the smelting refining, which I just mentioned. The other is the off take agreements and the mine ownership.

Which directs towards those smelters. Uh another area is you know the ownership of the actual mines. If you look at Xinjiang and and some of the the Chinese state owned mining conglomerate, Yeah, they've gradually bought everything in the West, you know, in particular gold and and silver and and and copper and and and many of the others and are 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 resure everything. And, you know, it's Al Alexander Hamilton, I think, pointed out in his seventeen ninety one article, The Report of Manufacturers That Went to Congress. that liberty and freedom exists, you know, not by itself. It's a contingent on having a a manufacturing and a supply channel w that allows it. You know, that at that stage Hamilton was looking at the dependence on

Um the English. I guess I put it today that w we're looking uh 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 you know, p conditions precedent. for um the West to be successful. And without that we'd be we'd become enslaved. We're we're almost serfs in S E R F S in the whole global supply chain.

I guess I I frame it like this, that we have a uh financial balance sheet and we're good at that and 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 uh becomes less and less

You write about the feedstock paradox. I 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 uh become aware of the importance of rare earth elements.

But he's talking about where we can mine them and the reality of the situation is China's got well, you've done some s some fantastic statistics, so I 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 fifty to ninety eight percent control, depending on the category of the metal. The ninety percent is, you know, th things like scandium.

I'll start at scandium. Scandium is used in an aluminium alloy and that aluminium alloy is relevant to the new combat drone. An F thirty five was built on the physics of G force nine because that's all human beings can connect with. A combat drone can do twenty to thirty G's because there's nobody sitting in it.

And the alloys required of that are a new industrial material. You know, the whole West produces fifteen 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 that scandium at the moment is virtually China. And so if we want to build our combat drones and and defend ourselves and not create incentives for war. That is, you know, there's two sides of

one side is we have to defend ourselves. I think what people miss is if we can't defend ourselves we create a an incentive for the more powerful nation, the the f the foreign nation, to take advantage of that. And having a a good defence is as important to creating a a world peace as anything else.

You know, but copper's the same. You know, copper goes into almost everything. In in some of these ultra high voltage cables, per kilometer there's about sixty tons of copper. I read an article yesterday there's two thousand one hundred and seventy seven tons of copper in Microsoft's new AI data center in tech. The US planned to build t thirteen to fifteen of these. That's a lot of copper.

Everything we look at, the physical intensity of copper is apparent in it. Not just the copper, it goes into everything. Siemens at the moment have a hundred and thirty eight billion euro back order. on equipment, things like the major transformers.

The major transformers are taking four to five years to 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 the UHVs in place, that is the the ability to

transmit over power lines. They're stranded assets, these nuclear power stations. That's why a lot of these new um these new AI data centers are being sat next to um nuclear power stations because they already have the equipment in place and they don't have to wait.

So you end up with a situation where they control our destiny. You know, they they're already licensing a pr you know, a double licensing program and, you know, as late as a few days ago they decided that they weren't gonna supply rare earth to Japan for the defence industry, you know, on the other side of it, Siemens with a hundred and thirty eight billion euro back order. relies almost a hundred percent on rare heavy rare earths from China, you know, the order book.

from China is about fifteen percent. You can really imagine the China going, Well, if you want your air earths, we want our um transformers first. And so they they they layer upon layer the ability to dominate the supply chain just by their their initial influence and Yeah, this happened in history. Um, if we look go back to nineteen fourteen, there was a thing called the the zinc crisis.

A company called uh Metal Giselschut, German company, was established as the major refiner of zinc and copper and and a whole bunch of the other industrial metals. They had uh subsidiaries in North America and they had subsidiaries in Australia, um, ironically called Australian medals and American medals, and they basically took the off take from those mines and send them to Germany.

you know, in the battle of Auguse in nineteen fourteen the French were overrun because they ran out of shells. You know, a lot of people don't understand why the French got overrun. So easily a lot of p people say, Yeah, they were still the old generals were relying on um horse cavalry and and things like that. The reality is they ran out of shells. And Lloyd George, that was made minister for uh 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. It happened you know, you go back in the sixteenth century Spain. The Spanish had all the gold from the American And silver as well. But they couldn't you know, eventually they couldn't buy the thing because the Dutch were making uh everything and Europe was making everything and now it'd take their gold.

Because they couldn't manufacture anything themselves and eventually the Spanish Empire fell, even though they had a mountain of gold.

So y you y we've got rhyming right through history of this kind of thing happened. We just haven't had it happen at this scale. Now how c how can we fix it? You know, that's a complicated subject. It obviously depends on will. Whether we can I guess optimise the the political skills to 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 the future materials and um manufacturing capacity of the United States, and he almost follows a complete Alexander Hamilton playbook. And Hamilton came up through intense conflict and so he knew the importance. Yeah, Eisenhower was similar. Everybody reads this there, Eisenhower speech.

and says, you know, let 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 ideal 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 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 your focus on the midstream. In other words, it's not where the rare earth elements get mined from. It's who's got the ability to

actually separate those rare 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 roundup email. It's free on his substack and I very strongly recommend that everyone read it start to finish. It is uh cover to 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 five G networks and semiconductors and so forth.

China controls ninety eight percent of gallium production, not where it's mined, but where it gets refined and produced. Magnesium smelting ninety to ninety five percent, rare earth separation ninety percent. The high tech magnet production, which is the the heart of electric vehicle motors, wind turbines for w wind powered energy and so forth, and the actuators in defense mechanisms, more than ninety percent controlled by China.

graphite anode production for lithium ion batteries, more than ninety percent controlled by China. Tungsten production, more than eighty-three percent controlled by China. And there's a long list that continues after that. Craig, what would it take? if uh 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 resure 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 the the Department of War as 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 r refine rare earths and and all these metals.

You know, if you look at company like UCU, Unicor. I think they've received something like a hundred million dollars already to produce a rare earth capacity in Louisiana, um, which has gone into initial production I think this month or the m or or next month. You've got companies, an Australian company like IPX, Iperion X. Now they're producing titanium um out of Virginia. Um and they've got a new process that they took from the University of Utah.

from a a scientist called Zach Fang, which I I is a delightful name. Um he works in the University of Utah. He's like a Steve Jobs of of materials science. Well he's come up with a way of making titanium powders. you know, at eighty percent less cost than the current the m current method. There's another company that comes metallium that is also Australian led. Um it takes the uh the it takes the

technology and the IP from James Tour out of Rice University. And they use a thing called flash jewel heating, which heats everything up to 3,000 joules and jackets. some chlorine into it, you get a methyl's ox uh oxide out of it. that then can be separated into its different streams. You know, um not many people realise it but the Department of Energy tend to put out just before Christmas. for three hundred and twenty five million dollars worth of f f funding to take uh rare earth

Tik t titanium, um gold and silver out of flyas from um from coal fired p p power plants, you know. For every coal fired power plant uh billions of tons of of uh fly ass sitting around it that were of the output of the of burning so much coal. They all have a uh a significant amount of minerals still in them. They just have to be extracted. There's a number of of innovations that we're doing and it it's like 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. You know, these projects haven't I I guess flown in the past because, you know, we've been funding things that give quarterly results like uh social media. Like a lot of the software's gonna eat the world type stuff, you know, learn the codes type stuff.

Yeah, where the cost of capital is is you know, not high at the start and once you've built the software you just have to incrementally add to it. it's not a ten year return and it it the return is is fairly significant. So we haven't you know, we we measure bread and milk as far as inflation, but we don't measure the the asset market is is inflation. So we we measure bread and milk but we don't measure um

you know, the price of shelter. And so when bread and milk have gone up, we've raised the cost of capital and not notice that a lot of the industrial projects have been killed off. it but as soon as, you know, we go to four and five percent, the industrial w projects, you know, die under vine and and we know, we go back to the kind of

hollowed out economy that the Fed policy uh creates for us. And it's the Fed policy that's, you know, at the core of the p 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 weaponised pricing. We've got to deal with that. Weaponised pricing is you know, every time at the moment is great examples, copper smelting in China is being done at neg n negative cost. So if Peru and um and Chile uh ship their copper to uh China, they're getting paid fifty dollars a ton to 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 you know, gaining complete control. They sent us broke in the key areas that we need to evaluate. I think one example is the chairman of Palantir has put together another startup called Epirus. And Epirus basically shoots a gallium gun, you know, at microseconds. at drones and they just fall out of the sky. It fries their internal electric. You know, you put these gallium guns in low author orbit and you know, you can fry the electrics of an IC I C B M inside a silo.

So they have very consequential if you you take it away from us because it changes the the pathway of our defence. You know, we talk about copper. If you cannot put the copper in place, the end product. You know, it it you can't build anything that we're talking about. So we need to do what we did in nineteen fourteen and what we did in in different o other scenarios and bring that on shore. Now

I think there is a pathway to do that. I've got another paper coming out on how to change the Fed to do that and separate the Fed's ability to price control consumer prices but separate out the infrastructure and uh industrial items so that they can survive.

So they're not measured as as part of inflation. And you know, we may even have an interest free free bond or something like that type solution where we offer Um s not an interest free bond, a a tax free bond, where we offer pension funds an alternative to investing. where you g you a pension fund would flow money into an industrial project and it wouldn't be paid by the the Treasury, it would be paid by the industrial project at a tax free rate.

the industrial project owners would partner with the state. like the Chinese do, to produce the 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 is fifty points ahead at half time and has got we you know, w 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 Uh 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 i th this is nineteen forty seven. 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 gonna be that we'll buy our nuclear warheads from Moscow. I mean

W what? Uh that doesn't make sense. How much of you know you gotta do two things to build an AI data center. You've got to have all of the 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 th thought that the strat if we be 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 centers. If we if we start looking at AI, not as a consumer device like I guess Michael Beery 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 di data centers and they are weapon systems the the arms race takes a whole different feel look and feel. And all of a sudden your return on investment and and the various metrics that you would put on it as a con as consumer item go out the window. And it becomes a must do. So, you know, April AI to me is a wess weapon system manufacturer of the future. It's a reconceptualization.

But you know, it it essentially is. And so a lot of this Michael Beery thing about you know, it's it's a bubble, it doesn't equate properly with where it it actually sits. It it's making it sound like it's a it's a new Google where in fact if they don't succeed, um, the West might not succeed either. Now, individually they m they may or may not succeed, but I think the workloads that are potentially coming onto these

uh 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 Hitashi, And the rare earths they're dependent on, then you're in quite a chokehold. You need to find that stuff. from somewhere else. And, you know, I I think in the article I I outlined, you know, potential areas that were probably unthinkable today, but they won't be unthinkable tomorrow. It's twenty grams of

silver in a in a uh uh a solar panel. I propose that you you tear all them up if you get into real desperate circumstances and and use them for data centers and and weapon systems.

The same goes for gallium and all the other things. You know, where we have to reframe 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 f building blocks to to look at the world this way because a denial by China or Russia because trust Russia controls some of these these things as well, m in particular Titania. 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 nationalisation. It's not nationalisation, it's just admittance that stateless capitalism that followed price to the point of efficiency so far that we've letting our foreign powers supply the things that are are crucial to our ongoing perseverance as as the West. It's it's that important.

And the d the density of copper. is significant. Now you wrote this article, Craig, from the perspective of geostrategy and basically trying to get policymakers' attention to recognize how vulnerable we've made ourselves to being cut off by Chinese dominance of supply chain. But you actually got to this through your own research, not trying to research geopolitics, but research investment.

So let's talk about where the trades are and where some of the opportunities are. I I hate to take such a grim topic and and try to make a buck out of it, but that's what we do here on Macro Voices sometimes. Well that's what I do too. So let Let's talk about that. I wanna start with silver, which you mentioned a couple of times. Most analysis that I've read uh recently about silver says, Okay, look, uh 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 uh concerned about U.S. 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 uh 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 five thousand tonne of silver short for the last four years. I think the overall it's twenty-four thousand tons. since two thousand and twenty. When we're in deficit, we have to drag it out of vaults or people's cutlery drawers in order to pr provide it.

Silver is actually central to the whole electrification, the AI. You know, there's twenty to forty 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 England's gonna build these robots armies, there's a good percentage of silver in in his in in each robot.

So it becomes a substantial inp. Now, seventy percent of our silver comes as an offtake from copper, zinc and lead refining, but that's sixty percent happening in the in China. Now, um, 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 that basically said that all uh silver would be licensed to the end supplier. I think there's forty three 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 a five thousand ton a year deficit turns into maybe ten thousand tonne a year deficit or more. Now that all com has to come out of our cut redrawers. I saw one analyst say that there's two hundred thousand

ton in inside people's cutwilly drawer. I like I doubt that because I actually don't think anyone knows how much is in the Cutwheelie drawers and the and the jewelry drawers. But we would have to d drag it out of the vaults and that's gonna 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 E V but silver doubled, it's only gonna add one percent or so to the the cost of the E V.

And you know, then we've got to prioritise what silver goes into what. If we look at AI as as weapon systems rather than consumer items, they would get priority over an E V. I'll give you another thinking model.

And this is triggered by what happened to BHP recently. BHP were told that they were gonna take offshore CNY um as payment for iron ore and BHP refused. for a month and then they decided that they would accept the offshore CNY. They were the last holdout

What if China said to us, you can have these rare earth minerals but we're gonna require offshore sea and water to pay for'em? That would introduce a really weird dynamic because all of a sudden you've got to have industrial companies in the West trying to reshore 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 go for g gold as money and they they backed the C and Y with with gold and they require all of the rare earths and critical metals to be purchased under offshore CMY. They could still run their internal Rennie as a currency that was fiat, and then they run the outside currency as as a reserve currency, so to speak. All of a sudden you you know, the

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. Uh, Linus Metals put out a 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 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've got to learn how to do that. So that puts a lot of gap. You know, that look puts a lot of I guess risk. in the West climbing back into a situation where they they they enjoyed for the last four decades and that is dominance over you know hegemony 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 uh investments in reshoring.

You've also said in the article that you don't think that reshoring will be profitable for uh 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's already seeing a huge move? What hasn't moved yet? Where where's the ripe trading opportunity? I think s the ripe trading opportunities are the ones

you know, I mentioned a few of them before, where you know, the the Department of War and the Department of Energy are starting to finance some of these companies and I I think they give us the trails to follow about the companies that will flourish in this new era. You know, the the s new Scandium plays, the new Gallium plays. There's some winners being picked and they're being subsidized with

um state capital from the West and that's happening right across Canada and it's happening in the Australia as well. And they're the they're the I guess they're the the sense to follow. you know, to to to good returns. You know, some of these companies that I'm sitting on at the moment have already had four or five hundred s you know, up to a thousand percent near term increases in price as far as stock. You know, MTM for instance, I think I bought at eight cents and

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 um e waste. So, you know, all the circuit boards and and that that are you know, is sitting in millions of tons in in the US.

And it it heats them up and injects some chlorine into it and makes a chloride metal chloride m mix. out of it. Um and then you can separate it at at the chloroid stage. So, you know, I I can envisage a company and they 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 wave.

they just uh 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 industrial And they take that e waste and out of a ton of e waste is about five hundred grams of gold. out of a ton of V waste is about three hundred grams of silver.

I mentioned flyass, the same thing. Is if you heat it up they and y you know, 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 war situations under under under conflict. where we've t we've had to use our own resources. And I think ultimately it it serves us because it's gonna teach us to be

You know, there's another one, Iperion X, that's going to make titanium out of Virginia. 25% of an F 35 is titanium. But they they've been given a hundred and fifteen million dollars out of the Department of

defence to I guess upscale this titanium capability so that they can produce titanium 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 client to find this is uh hypnotizing our attention and distracting us, where we've had, you know, real scientists developing IP that hasn't been recognized 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 Yeah, they're they're moving from pilot to commercialization and you've obviously got that risk element there. But if they can make it through c the commercialization stage and they've virtually done that, but 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's gonna survive. There's no other way to do it, you know, if you think of all the paths of of doing this.

You know, it's gonna be innovation and it's gonna be a re establishment of this materials capability onshore, whether it's whether it's in Australia through the Allies or whether it's on shore in the US. That 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 offshore their

is that we didn't want the pollution tax, the the we didn't want the pollution in our country. We you know. I think it Ricky Gervais, you know, made a great analogy about you know uh slavery being relocated to Foxconn factories with natural round them that you know, just because we haven't got ships and whatnot.

bringing people over, we're we're still enslaving them in their own countries. Now we can divert past that with innovation. We can You know, I mean I mentioned UCU, um you know, th I I'll mention them via symbols because I'm an investor first. They're in Louisiana, they're developing an amazing closed loop system that doesn't have any heavy rare earth pollution with it.

throughput is lower cost 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 him learn to go to chemistry or l learn the guard of engineering.

in order to create the industrial age two point oh. There's a number of these companies. I mentioned Linus, you know, they're building a they've got the go ahead in Texas. They had ESG problems in Texas. You've got all these, I guess, folks who are worried about the the development of some of these capabilities in US state.

slowing the whole process down with agreements and bureaucracy that are now starting to be taken out of the way. So th 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. I you know, I would go down the the rabbit hole of all of these chemical plays.

there's a lot of a chemical association with critical metals place. And you know, if you go down there, you'll find that Yeah, that's the future of investment. The future of investment, this era. is pivoted to a a critical metal survival industrialization two point oh that f 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, well no I don't think it is, I think it's a military cape. We need to understand the conditions precedent to creating those massive AI data centers and those um and the you know, all the electrification that goes with it, the energy, the gas, the nuclear needs copper.

Like I said, you know, the w that one that Microsoft one I just read a report on, tw two thousand one hundred and seventy seven tons in one AI danison, there's and there's twenty of'em around the world.

That's a lot of copper. I think we have to be w 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 Simon Da, the the Guinea iron ore plant for China and Rio Tinto, they've put twenty billion dollars into an iron ore plate. It's I think, you know, a large percentage of that goes into a railroad and

you know, twenty billion dollars and it's not something that we would have risked in the West because we'd have to have a return of twenty percent. If you look at what China uses, they use about a billion ton of copper a year. In all their industry. For twenty billion dollars they get I think stage four and five they get up to about sixty thousand tonne. When the mine's fully operational they get to about a hundred thousand tonne per annum.

But that's at sixty-five percent mineral concentration. You know, if you look at something like FMG, they're at fifty-six percent mineral concentration. Now that nets out that you've got a process I need five. 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 ten percent, say ten dollars a ton.

And that ten dollars a ton will give'em an an overall saving across their um iron ore usage of ten billion dollars. And that ten billion dollars gives them an ROI of fifty percent of their investment straight away in inside, say, twelve to twenty-four months. Yeah, that 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 or iron ore production and making these mines and making an oversupply

pays them back. Their ROI is differently configured to our ROI. And so we're we're saying, well the copper demand's going up, you know, significantly, so the price will go up. That's old analysis. The new analysis says, well, the co copper demand's going up. They have complete control of the supply, so our copper costs might go up.

But their copper cost, if they decide to stop refining it for us, start giving it to themselves exc exclusively, means that they've lowered the cost of copper from all their supplies. And that m that changes everything because it changes the valuation of company like Fortescue, m FMG, th i it changes the valuation of BHP, it changes the valuation of Rio altogether. Because Rio all of a sudden, even though they own forty five percent of the some of that are mine.

They're in a cost plus situation. They're not in a an I and all 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 uh read the article. Craig, you told me off the air you're not really promoting anything as a private investor, uh other than reading your articles. Uh tell us where your substack is and if there's anything else you'd like to tell our listeners about what you do. Well my substack is just my name, Craig Tyndale. You'll find it there. Same with my C Tindale for X.

And then you can find me on uh LinkedIn as well because I'm publishing there as well, just my name again. All I'm asking from anybody, I've done pretty well out of investing over the the last decade and um I don't really need to promote em 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. to 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 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 Serezna and I will be back as Macro Voices continues right here at macrovoices.com.

Your hosts Eric Townsend and Patrick Sereza. Eric, it was great to have Craig on the show. Now, listeners, you're gonna find the download link for the postgame 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, Craig had interesting takes on all sorts of commodities, but rare earth elements were clearly the area where he seemed to feel the best trading opportunities existed. So for this week's 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 Tyndale's interview, the takeaway is straightforward.

In rare earth, the choke point isn't mining, it's the midstream. China dominates 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 REMX, the Rare Earth and Strategic Medals ETF. That said, timing matters. REMX is already up about twenty percent 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 I exposure and risking an early shakeout, I want to own the basket and dampen near term downside volatility. The structure is straightforward. Long the REMX shares. paired with a short dated downside put. The March 20th, 2026,$84 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 REMX 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 bigpictrading.com. Now let's dive into the postgame chart tick. All right, 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 f 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 absorbed the short term pullback along its fifty day moving average and has quickly reversed back up.

Now we are seeing um an SP 500 that is generally heavy in its price action. You see the breadth of the market widening. You continue to see the equal weight SP 500 trading right along its 52-week high, like it wants to break out. and a material outperformance 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 four. 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 though 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 will it could inevitably turn into a sell off, very similar like Darius talked about in uh 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. Now 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 calmed down. Well, sure enough, as soon as Trump announced that there would be no need to tariff eight European Union countries, all of a 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 has reopened and it's all just gonna be US dollar downside from here. There we'll be looking for signs that potentially that'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 uh 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 wanna reserve a little bit of neutrality here and uh assume that the the trade range is just prevailing here. All right, Eric, let's touch on oil here.

We're struggling with resistance at the contract two hundred day moving average, which is sixty spot forty nine on March WTI. We need to see a move above sixty-two spot fifty WTI in order to really uh confirm the bull move is on. And frankly, as the geopolitics start to calm down, the risk of a downside retrace toward the$59 and then$55 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 oil 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. Well we gotta 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, forty nine hundred. to fifty one hundred. I didn't know we'd get almost all the way there in a week. Now though, what we have is a massive twenty-three dollar wide unfilled gap, way down at forty six hundred.

That's fully two hundred and fifty 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 uh 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 with outright 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? Well, there's different w ways to measure out these measured moves. Generally all of them overlap that big round number of five thousand, and that's what everyone's looking for here on gold.

The fact this year that we've had a rally from just around 4400 at the start of the year uh 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 debasement 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 you're 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 uh if one wants to hold their core long term holding and just simply put in some guardrails around their gold position from a a short term overbought condition, then accept no substitute for just putting on a collar around gold prices. As an example, on the GLD, if you were to collar 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 fifty cost per share. And so this immediately reduces Delta Dollar exposures and gives you some guardrails in order to lock in this beautiful advance. leave lots of room for the trade to s 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 leap.

and replacing them with bull call 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 goosed 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 it 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 uh the copper has started to get heavy up along the six dollar level. And so we uh saw two attempts to legitimately close above it. And each time it's now given it back.

At least uh some form of a consolidation is happening here. Obviously the long term fundamentals uh 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 uh to six dollars, there's room for this to pause here and consolidate, maybe even a reversion back to its fifty 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 a spike not only above 420 but reaching all the way to 430 on the upside.

Clearly longer duration yields have all reacted negatively. And while the stock market has initially recovered uh uh the 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 bigpictrading.com.

Patrick, tell them what they can expect to find in this week's research roundup. Well in this week's research roundup you're gonna find the transcript for today's interview as well as the trade of the week chart book we just discussed here in the postgame, 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 would like to share that content with our listeners. Send us an email at research roundup at macrovoic dot com and we will consider it for our weekly distributions.

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