The Charts of The Week - 3/6/2026: PDAC Curse, Stagflation, Gold Outflows, Oil Price Spikes, & Arizona Copper Buyouts

An action-packed PDAC week was punctuated by volatile trading amid continued US/Israel military operations in Iran--an oil price spike complicated matters and sent equities tumbling.

Mar 06, 2026

The bull market brought out the investors, finally. The Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) 2026 convention achieved a record-breaking attendance of 32,155 participants in Toronto, marking the highest turnout in the event's 94-year history.

For years, die-hard mining and precious-metals investors have asked one another: what will it take to bring the generalists back and attract younger participants to the sector? We may now have the answer. Sharply rising metal prices and strongly bullish investor sentiment were finally enough to push PDAC attendance through the 30,000 mark.

From a contrarian perspective, several large accounts on X (formerly Twitter) have argued that the packed halls and upbeat mood on the convention floor are signs the precious-metals and mining sectors may be approaching a cyclical peak.

It’s certainly food for thought. But at the same time, 32,000 people gathering in Toronto over four days hardly signals the kind of manic exuberance that typically accompanies a major market top.

This is a bull market. Attendance at the industry’s flagship conference should be rising. It’s also worth noting that the 2026 turnout exceeded the prior record by a few thousand people—not by a factor of two.

Personally, I suspect we’ll see 50,000 people at PDAC before this bull market is ready to keel over. I want to see busloads of Americans driving up from Michigan and New York to learn about Canadian mining, and I want to see the President of the United States welcomed as an honored guest at PDAC.

In other words—we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Meanwhile, it must be noted that the “PDAC Curse” is alive and well; the TSX-Venture Composite fell nearly 5% for the week and the GDXJ Junior Gold Miner ETF fell a whopping 13%!

TSX-Venture Composite (Weekly)

GDXJ (Daily)

It’s also notable that gold funds experienced their largest weekly outflows since October 2025, and on Wednesday the GLD saw its largest single-day outflow (-US$2.91 billion) since November 2016:

Normally, the gold fund outflows wouldn’t be remarkable. However, taken in the context of everything else that’s going on out there it strikes me as textbook wrong-footed knee-jerk selling that could quickly reverse in the other direction.

On Thursday, the Comex announced that it was lowering margin requirements for gold and silver futures by 22%. Then on Friday morning, the BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) released the U.S. nonfarm payrolls report for February and the news was bleak.

Total nonfarm employment declined by 92,000 in February, a large downside miss relative to the +55,000 analyst consensus expectations. Moreover, revisions to December and January totaled -69,000. The unemployment rate also ticked up to 4.4% and average hourly earnings increased .4% month-over-month.

To be clear, this is a stagflationary economic report that only serves to confirm multiple other recent economic data prints. Taken in totality, the economic data trends (import/export prices, unit labor costs, retail sales, services PMI, etc.) point to a deteriorating U.S. labor market amid stubbornly high consumer/commodity prices.

The deteriorating economic data trends combined with last week’s ~40% spike in the WTI crude oil price served to throw equities for a loop, and prompted analysts to begin considering the potential economic effects of $100+ crude oil prices for an extended period of time:

$100 crude oil would probably translate to a 40%-50% increase in U.S. consumer gasoline prices. Such a shock rise in gas prices would likely sink Trump 2.0’s already low approval ratings even further, resulting in a Republican Party debacle during the November mid-term elections.

Trump knows he needs to finish this Iran “special military operation” in March. Should it drag on into April/May, with continued adverse impacts to global energy markets, it will make him and his administration increasingly unpopular at home. Greatly increasing the likelihood of a deeply fractured Republican Party that is vulnerable to surprise upsets in battleground states come November.

According to Polymarket wagering, there is a roughly 50/50 chance of a US/Iran ceasefire by the end of April.

Those odds sound about right. However, April feels like a long time from now, especially with the moves we’ve witnessed in energy markets this week.

WTI Crude Oil (Daily)

European jet fuel prices are at the highest levels since 2022 amid a very similar price spike to the one that occurred shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine:

The US/Iran/Israel conflict triggered investor panic-buying into energy stocks, producing a record weekly inflow of US$7 billion into energy funds:

Turning to junior mining, the week kicked off with a splashy M&A news headline that Hudbay Minerals (NYSE:HBM, TSX:HBM) is acquiring Arizona copper developer Arizona Sonoran Copper (TSX:ASU) in an all-equity transaction valued at roughly US$1.5 billion.

Naturally, ASCU shares gapped higher and traded up ~30% at Monday morning’s high. However, as the week progressed and metals/miners (including HBM shares) came under pressure we saw the deal premium evaporate in ASCU’s share price:

Arizona Sonoran Copper (Daily)

Setting aside the short term market volatility, I love Hudbay’s aggressive move to control a tier-1 Arizona copper mining district—Hudbay is clearly positioning itself as a fast-growing North American copper producer that isn’t afraid to pull the trigger on M&A that its larger peers are painfully slow to act on.

This deal should pay dividends for HBM shareholders for many years to come.

As I noted earlier in the week, I believe HBM’s US$1.5 billion deal for Cactus puts other high-quality U.S. copper explorers/developers front and center in the question of “Who’s next?”

Faraday Copper (TSX:FDY)
Hercules Metals (TSX-V:BIG)
Ivanhoe Electric (NYSE:IE)
Trilogy Metals (NYSE:TMQ)
Northern Dynasty Minerals (NYSE:NAK)

The problem with the above list is that Northern Dynasty’s Pebble Project is a permitting nightmare, and both Trilogy/Ivanhoe aren’t likely to become buyout candidates (due to a multitude of reasons including their respective market valuations). That leaves Faraday and Hercules as the only two U.S. copper developers/explorers that have the potential to become targets of large mining firms looking to consolidate a U.S. copper district/belt.

Faraday Copper (Daily)

I consider both Faraday and Hercules to be strong picks in 2026. I am heavily overweighted to Hercules due to what I perceive to be its very attractive valuation at the current ~C$200 million market cap, and the considerable exploration & discovery upside across its 100,000+ acre Idaho Porphyry Belt property position.

Hercules Metals (Daily)

Goldfinger Capital favorite Talon Metals (TSX:TLO) doesn’t fit the criteria for a “U.S. Copper developer/explorer” due to the fact that TLO’s reserves & resources are heavily weighted to nickel, and its Tamarack Project in Minnesota hosts polymetallic ore bodies of which copper is only one important byproduct. However, we could see a copper mining revival in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula over the coming decades—such a copper revival will depend on the exploration success of companies like Talon, Perseverance Metals (TSX-V:PMI), and Bitterroot Resources (TSX-V:BTT).

I’ll conclude this week’s missive by highlighting the steady bid that persisted in Talon throughout the week, a week that saw the share prices of many base metals producers/developers decline by 10% or more.

Talon Metals (Daily)

I can read the tape, and I sense that some positive developments are on the way for Talon shareholders.

Disclosure: Author owns shares of several stocks discussed in this article including Hercules Metals, Talon Metals, Arizona Sonoran Copper, and Hudbay Minerals. Author may choose to buy or sell at any time without notice.

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