Most Discussed This Week
Commoditymaxxing
Last week, the entire market gazed upward at the stars. The world's largest private space company, SpaceX, entered public markets in the biggest debut in history, frontier AI labs amassed unprecedented valuations, and semiconductors continued to drive global indices. But each of these stories hinges on the physical world. Data centres, grids, satellites and fabs all require metal extracted from the ground. While screens buzzed with IPO chatter, metals quietly sold off. That contrast is the setup.
The next 18 years will need as much copper as the last 10,000. A single 1GW AI data centre requires roughly 50,000 tonnes; solar uses five times what a gas turbine does per megawatt; an EV consumes five to six times a combustion engine. Growing merely in line with GDP, the world must bring five tier-one mines online every year against a pipeline you can count on one hand, while the largest legacy mines see their grades fade. Today's bottleneck is HBM memory; copper is the one around the corner.
Silver has sold off sharply, but the shortage only deepens. Demand runs c.1.2bn ounces a year against c.1bn of supply, eating into the last c.600m ounces of above-ground inventory — a clock measured in years, not decades. Every solar panel and satellite is silver-intensive, and demand only accelerates as data centres start launching into orbit.
Gold has lost its lustre since the war began, but every reason to own it has got stronger. In the 1970s, the last time debt was monetised this aggressively, the dollar lost roughly 70% of its purchasing power and hard assets won by a distance. The death of the 60/40 portfolio is becoming consensus, with major banks pushing a 60/20/20 stock/bond/gold mix and back-tests pointing nearer 30% gold, yet most investors hold close to zero. That gap is the whole trade.
And the supply chain chokepoints are tightening. China controls roughly 80% of Western rare-earth processing, shipments to major Asian economies have fallen by as much as 80%, and export licensing has blown out Western tungsten prices to roughly 2.6x the domestic Chinese level. The minerals themselves are abundant; what China controls is the refining — a lead that would take a decade or more to close. Western governments are now backing domestic projects with equity, permits and price-floor offtakes, but the timeline is measured in years.
The demand is colliding with war. Ukraine has burned through more explosives than all of World War II, every copper-bodied shell gone for good, and those arsenals must be rebuilt. The US, Europe, Japan and Taiwan are all raising defence budgets, none of which works without critical minerals. Every shiny paper story ultimately resolves into metal pulled out of the ground.
What Drove The Collective Ideas This Week
WoW: -4%
The Conviction basket gave back -4% last week in a session dominated by macro mechanics and capital reallocation rather than fundamental deterioration. The largest IPO in history pulled growth-fund capital out of smaller physical-AI and robotics-hardware names, hot inflation data killed near-term rate-cut hopes, and a midweek geopolitical scare around the Strait of Hormuz whipsawed oil and equities before a de-escalation brought indices back to modest gains. The upside came from the sustainability and industrial-quality corner of the ideas list, where independent validation of decarbonisation commitments reminded the market what durable competitive advantages look like in the capex upcycle. The downside was concentrated across tech and software, where custom-silicon momentum, frontier-model releases and AI commoditisation fears triggered sector-wide narrative resets, alongside pockets of energy services and cloud infrastructure where near-term cashflow pressure or heavy capital spending overshadowed otherwise strong operating prints.
Find out more about Collective ideas on CurationAI.
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📺 Anthropic, AI Personhood and Recursive Improvement
Why watch? Anthropic's latest comments on recursive self-improvement raise the stakes in the AI race, shifting the conversation from better models to systems capable of accelerating their own development. The discussion explores what that could mean for regulation, jobs, AI personhood and the economic structures that may emerge as increasingly autonomous intelligence enters the real world. Watch here.
🎧 All-In's Best Ideas Pitch-Off
Four specialist investors pitch their highest-conviction trades live, spanning casinos, energy, oncology and decentralised infrastructure. It's a useful snapshot of where serious capital is looking for asymmetry — from Talen Energy's power exposure to Aktis Oncology's biotech optionality and GEODNET's crypto-enabled physical network thesis. Listen here.
Stock of the Week: The Cheapest Copper in Europe
Copper and silver sit at the centre of some of the biggest structural themes in markets today: AI infrastructure, electrification, renewables and defence. KGHM gives investors exposure to both through a single asset base, producing copper and silver from the same Polish ore body and processing it through its own smelters and refineries.
The story has strengthened materially this year. Under new leadership, Q1 net profit came in 51% ahead of expectations, while EBITDA more than doubled. More importantly, production costs fell sharply as silver and gold by-product credits transformed the economics. In effect, precious metals are subsidising the cost of copper production.
At the same time, demand continues to accelerate. Data centres, satellites, power grids and solar installations all require increasing amounts of copper and silver, while new supply remains difficult and time-consuming to bring online. If the forecast copper deficit materialises, KGHM offers exposure to two critical materials at a time when both are becoming harder to replace and more valuable to the global economy.
New or Updated Showcases
IP Group
IP Group is a specialist intellectual property investor that backs and commercialises breakthrough technologies emerging from leading universities and research institutions. Its portfolio spans deep tech, life sciences, and clean technology, giving investors exposure to a diversified pipeline of early-stage innovation, with valuations still heavily influenced by sentiment toward private markets rather than the underlying quality of its assets. Read more.
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