May 24, 2026 | Preparing To Say Goodbye (To Our Junior Miners And Explorers)

The commodities investment thesis goes like this:

• The price of gold, silver, copper, uranium, etc, will rise as production stagnates and demand increases (also as fiat currencies are inflated away).
• Higher prices will give the best miners lots of free cash flow.
• The miners will then raise dividends and buy back shares.
• As the cash keeps piling up, the miners will start buying each other out.

How is this thesis doing in the real world? Even better than expected:

Mining is now the most profitable major industry:

And share buybacks are surging. As commodities analyst Tavi Costa reports:

Gold miners are now doing more share buybacks than at any other point in history.

We have never seen anything remotely close to the scale of what is happening today.

This is a direct consequence of the extraordinary profitability the sector is generating at current metal prices.

Now For The Buyouts

Mining, especially gold/silver mining, is throwing off enough free cash to let the industry take itself private, if it wants. But it doesn’t want. The advantages of publicly traded shares are too numerous to make a (non)leveraged buyout attractive for most miners.

In other words, there’s a limit to how many shares the typical gold/silver miner is willing to buy back.

So, at some point, the focus will naturally shift to boosting production through acquisitions. That’s happening on a modest scale already. See: Gold Miner Buyout Binge, Part 1.

But there’s nothing “modest” about what’s coming.

Over the next few years, we’ll be saying goodbye to many of our Portfolio’s junior miners and explorers. Luckily, there’s no shortage of emerging replacements. Fun times!

John Rubino May 24th, 2026

Posted In: John Rubino Substack

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