Tuesday, September 8, 2026 Independent. No ads, no sponsors, no affiliate links.

Gold

Should I Buy Gold Now After the 2026 Sell-Off?

Should you buy gold now after the 25% sell-off? An honest buy-vs-wait framework with expert views, WGC scenarios, and the price triggers that matter.

The Commodities Unfiltered desk7 min read

Latest analysis

All analysis →

Six markets, followed from the mine to the exchange

New here? Start with the basics
Au

Gold

The monetary metal. Central banks are buying, and the cost of digging it up keeps rising.

5 articles Ag

Silver

Half precious metal, half industrial input. Solar alone now eats a huge share of supply.

4 articles U

Uranium

The nuclear restart meets a decade of underinvestment. Producers are in no hurry to flood the market.

2 articles Cu

Copper

The electrification metal. Ore grades are falling just as the grid, EVs and data centres need more of it.

Coverage coming Pt

PGMs

Platinum, palladium and rhodium, priced below what it costs to bring new supply on.

1 article Nd

Rare Earths

Magnets for motors and turbines. Mining is the easy part; separating and refining is what China controls.

Coverage coming
Open-pit copper mine

Why these metals, why now

Almost everything we cover is short. That's the story.

The grid, EVs, data centres and a nuclear restart are all pulling on the same pile of metal, and for most of the last decade nobody built the mines or refineries to supply it.

So you get deficits, or prices that sit below what it would cost to open the next mine. Copper grades are falling. Uranium producers would rather hold output than chase spot. Silver is mostly a byproduct, so higher prices don't bring much new supply. And the hard part of every chain, the smelting, refining, conversion and separation, mostly happens in China now.

~95%of U.S. uranium demand is met by importsEIA uranium marketing data
~90%of rare-earth separation capacity sits in ChinaIEA critical minerals outlook
$121 → $58silver's round trip from the January 2026 peakfrom our silver coverage

Most writing about this recycles the same few narratives. We'd rather read the earnings call, pull the filing, and check the exchange data. Then tell you what it actually says.

Read the field guide

Six terms you'll meet in every filing

Full glossary

Commodities reporting assumes you already speak the language. You don't have to. These are the ideas that come up most, in plain English.

Gold · Silver

All-in sustaining cost (AISC)

What it costs a miner to produce an ounce and keep the mine running, including the boring stuff like maintenance and overhead. Not just the cost of digging.

Why it matters: the gap between AISC and the metal price is the miner's real margin. When gold fell below $4,000 and AISC kept rising, that gap did most of the damage to mining stocks.

Uranium

Term price vs. spot price

Spot is what a pound of uranium trades for today. Term is the price utilities agree in multi-year contracts, and it's where most real uranium actually changes hands.

Why it matters: in 2026 term prices hit an 18-year high while spot drifted. Reading only the spot chart gets the whole market wrong.

Copper

Treatment and refining charges (TC/RCs)

The fee a smelter charges a mine to turn concentrate into metal. When there's too little concentrate to go around, smelters cut the fee to win business.

Why it matters: TC/RCs near zero, or negative, mean the mines can't feed the smelters. That's a supply squeeze showing up before the copper price does.

Silver · PGMs

Byproduct supply

Most silver comes out of mines that are really digging for copper, lead, zinc or gold. Same for some platinum-group metals. The silver is a bonus, not the plan.

Why it matters: a higher silver price won't make a copper mine dig faster. Supply barely responds, which is why silver deficits can last for years.

Rare earths

NdPr and separation

Neodymium and praseodymium are the two rare earths that make the strongest magnets. Mining the ore is easy. Separating those two from the other 15 elements is the hard, expensive, mostly Chinese step.

Why it matters: announced Western mines don't fix anything until a separation plant is actually shipping oxide.

All markets

Incentive price

The price a metal needs to hold for long enough to justify building a new mine or plant. Below it, nobody builds. Above it, projects get funded and supply eventually arrives.

Why it matters: platinum and several others still trade under their incentive price. Shortages don't fix themselves until that changes.

Where the analysis comes from

Our standards

Every number on this site traces back to a document you could open yourself. These are the four places we look, in the order we trust them.

Earnings calls
01

Earnings calls and guidance

The full transcript, not the headline. What management commits to, what it hedges on, and what it quietly walks back a quarter later.

Regulatory filings
02

Filings and technical reports

Reserve statements, feasibility studies and regulatory filings. These are the numbers a company can be sued over, so they tend to be the honest ones.

Operators
03

Operators and specialists

The people who dig, process and sell the metal, and the engineers who model the plants. Quoted by name, with the date and where they said it.

Exchange and physical data
04

Exchange and physical data

Warehouse inventories, term contracting, Mint sales, premiums over spot. The story usually shows up here weeks before it shows up in the headlines.

What we don't use: bullion-dealer blogs, promotional newsletters, or any analysis that ends with a buy button. When a source has a position, we say so in the same paragraph.

More from the archive

Everything we've published