This $0.30 Stock Controls A $24B Resource The Iran War Is Depleting

This $0.30 Stock Controls A $24B Resource The Iran War Is Depleting The most asymmetric Iran war trade is not oil, plastic, or fertilizer. Since Trump took out Iran’s supreme leader over a month ago… Every savvy trader has been on the hunt for exposure to the resources made scarce by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Oil was the obvious trade. Plastic, fertilizer, and helium were less clear but delivered incredible returns to those who connected the dots. Now aluminum seems to be the latest hot commodity, driven up by a recent strike on a major gulf factory. But we’ve had our eyes on a different metal. And while we have no idea when and how the Iran War is going to end. We do know is that if a friend asked us for a recommendation on where to buy a lottery ticket… We’d instead direct them to open an Interactive Brokers account and buy the small cap critical mineral stock you’ll learn about today. If you dozed off in chemistry class like we did, let us re-introduce you to Tungsten (W). Disclaimer: This newsletter is for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. All investments involve risk, including possible loss of principal. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Always conduct your own due diligence and consult a licensed financial advisor. The authors may hold positions in securities mentioned. The WW3 Metal Trade We’ve been keeping an eye on critical minerals for a while now. Any savvy trader had their eye on mining and metals when Trump made them a priority of his second term, contributing to nothing short of asymmetric returns across a wide basket of stocks. One knock on effect has been China’s aggression around their dominance in the sector when engaging in broader trade negotiations. There’s been quite a few back and forth restrictions between the U.S. and China on the critical minerals front, scrambling supply and creating new imperatives for domestic sourcing. But none of it compares to what is going on in tungsten. In February 2025, China imposed export controls covering 41 product codes including tungsten. Western markets barely blinked. Inventories were still full. Traders assumed it was a negotiating chip. Turns out it wasn’t. Tungsten stockpiles became depleted. The price started moving and has not stopped ever since. APT (ammonium paratungstate, known as the most important raw material for all tungsten products) has almost multiplied 10x from its pre-restriction baseline. It was around $320 in early 2025 before the Chinese restrictions. After this, prices soared towards $900 by 2026. And it didn’t stop there. By early March, prices were around $2,100 and have continued to go up towards $3,000 by the end of March. The ongoing conflict in Iran has brought extra demand and eyes towards this rare earth element. Supply is so scarce, China has even become a net importer of tungsten now . BMO Capital Markets VP George Heppel said it plainly in Bloomberg on March 15: “I have never seen a market as tight as tungsten is right now, aside from maybe lithium in 2021. This isn’t like lithium, where there was a huge pipeline of projects that could come online.” George is right. There is no easy or fast pipeline for tungsten. New western mines need two years minimum to permit, finance, and build. And that’s assuming capital shows up and permits clear. China’s exports are now at zero. Global inventories are nearly depleted. And there are only two major publicly traded companies producing western tungsten right now. One is priced for the future and a popular stock. The other is trading at under $1/share, well below its highs, has two operating mines generating positive cashflow, and sits on a resource base worth multiples of its market cap at today’s spot price. But first let’s set the stage. What Tungsten Actually Is And Why We Need It Tungsten, Swedish for ‘heavy stone’, is a metal found in mineral ores. It is known for its extreme hardness and high melting point. Its Latin name, “wolfram”, is where the symbol ‘W’ comes from. It has a melting point of 3,422°C. The highest of any element, more than three times what it takes to melt steel. A density close to gold. Second only to diamond in hardness among natural materials. Chemically inert. Dimensionally stable under extreme thermal shock. That combination of properties makes tungsten irreplaceable in a short but critical list of applications. Not just hard to substitute. Irreplaceable. And every one of those applications sits at the intersection of the biggest macro themes in markets right now. Cemented carbide: ~60-65% of global tungsten demand. This is the drill bit, the milling insert, the cutting tool that machines aluminum airframes and titanium engine components. Modern manufacturing runs on this material. The USGS consistently reports that ~60% of US tungsten consumption goes here. There is no commercially viable replacement at equivalent performance. Steel alloys and superalloys: ~14% of demand. High-speed steel in drill bits contains tungsten. So does stellite, the alloy coating turbine blades in jet engines. Aerospace demand here is steady and growing as Boeing and Airbus work through multi-year backlogs. Defense and tungsten metal products: ~12% of demand. This is the category that is now driving the price. Kinetic energy penetrators, the long tungsten darts fired from tank cannons, rely on its density to hold momentum and punch through armor. The alternative, depleted uranium, is politically constrained in most allied nations. Missile counterweights, gyroscopes, radiation shielding, aircraft balance weights: all of these need tungsten specifically. Project Blue estimates this segment is growing 12% in 2026, driven by the Iran conflict and NATO rearmament. Electrical and electronics: ~8-9% of demand. Tungsten electrodes for TIG welding. X-ray tube anodes. Contact materials in switching equipment. And WF6, the tungsten hexafluoride precursor used in semiconductor CVD deposition. As chipmakers push to smaller nodes, tungsten fill for via and contact interconnects remains essential. Samsung, TSMC, and Intel are all consuming meaningful volumes. As the AI buildout continues, tungsten continues to receive structural demand. This is growing, and not stopping anytime soon if we look at hyperscaler capex guidance which keeps increasing to record highs. This means that the end of the Iran war and the restocking of ammunition stockpiles would not end the growing tungsten demand, due to the AI supercycle. Chemicals and other: ~5%. Petroleum refining catalysts. Tungstate pigments. Photovoltaic wire, which grew 198% year-over-year to 4,500 tonnes in 2025. Lithium tungstate for batteries. Small today, but these add permanent incremental floor demand that didn’t exist a decade ago. Now, let’s talk about recycling, as many of you are probably wondering if that is an easy solution. The answer to “can we just recycle more?” is more complicated than most people think. Globally, recycling provides roughly 25-35% of total western tungsten input. It is a real, but extremely tiny buffer for now. But here is the critical distinction that ruins the recycling reliance: recycling only works on tungsten that comes back. The issue here is that military consumption is structurally unrecoverable and therefore recycling is irrelevant to offset the growing demand given the defense supercycle. When a kinetic energy penetrator is fired at 1,700 metres per second, it doesn’t come back. It embeds in its target, fragments on impact, or erodes progressively during penetration. The tungsten disperses into a debris field, alloys with the target material, gets contaminated with explosives residue, and ends up buried in foreign soil or at the bottom of the ocean. There is no way to collect it. It is gone from the supply chain permanently. The same is true for artillery sub-munitions destroyed on use. Rocket nozzles that erode in flight. Counterweights in downed aircraft lost at sea or in conflict zones. This is called terminal consumption, and it is almost entirely a military phenomenon. As NATO dramatically scales production, Rheinmetall is targeting 1.1 million shells by 2027 and Russia consuming an estimated 4.5 million rounds in 2024 alone, an increasingly large portion of total global tungsten demand is going into a use that generates zero scrap, zero recovery, zero secondary supply. At the same time, the conflict driving that consumption is also disrupting the European recycling supply chains that would normally offset primary supply losses. The recycling buffer is real, but fails to keep up and is easily being consumed. You cannot refill it from munitions expenditure. We expect defense related tungsten demand to accelerate faster than other demand segments, therefore, recycling should become less relevant and not something the west can try to count on. Rheinmetall 120mm shell Here is the other thing about tungsten’s demand base: it is almost entirely price insensitive. The tungsten content in a Rheinmetall 120mm shell is maybe 10-20% of total unit cost. Significant, but not big enough to stop the demand. Nations across the globe need to be prepared in uncertain times like these. The insert on a CNC machine represents a fraction of the machining operation’s hourly rate. You don’t stop buying because raw material costs doubled. You build inventory, renegotiate contracts, and keep the lines running. Defense buyers don’t negotiate on raw material content at all. They run approved supplier lists and multi-year contracts. Substitution is either not allowed or not viable. How China Outplayed Everyone In Tungsten China’s dominance in tungsten isn’t a market share story. It’s a monopoly that was deliberately constructed over 40 years. The country holds 53% of the world’s known reserves. It controls approximately 79% of annual mine production. That is 67,000 of roughly 85,000 metric tonnes. More importantly, it controls 82.7% of the entire downstream supply chain: concentrate processing, APT refining, finished product manufacturing. By the time tungsten leaves China as a product, it has been through multiple Chinese-controlled processing steps. The US hasn’t mined tungsten commercially since 2015. A full decade of zero domestic production while consumption continued. How did this happen? In the 1980s and 1990s, China ran sustained below-cost production that crushed western mines into closure. The Hemerdon mine in Devon. The Hollister mine in Nevada. The Strawberry tungsten mine in California. One by one, they went uneconomic and shut. China wasn’t just building its own industry. It was systematically eliminating competition. Then it codified the monopoly through export controls. Here is how the squeeze was applied: February 4, 2025. MOFCOM applies the Export Control Law to 41 tungsten HS codes. Chinese shipments fall roughly 40% over the course of 2025. October 2025. New 2026-2027 rules limit approved exporters to just 15 whitelisted companies with strict historical volume thresholds. The long tail of traders who had been routing product west gets cut off entirely. January 6, 2026. China bans tungsten exports to Japan specifically, citing military end-use restrictions. Japan had been receiving 56.8% of China’s total APT exports. Those flows stop immediately. January and February 2026. China’s combined APT exports drop to effectively zero. When the US and China reached a partial rare earths truce in early 2026, tungsten was explicitly excluded. It was not even discussed. China suspended gallium, germanium, and antimony as diplomatic concessions. Tungsten stayed locked. SMM (Shanghai Metals Market) stated it plainly: no relaxation anticipated in the near term. The framework runs through at least end of 2027. The market has now split in two. Domestic Chinese APT has softened slightly as Beijing manages internal prices. The Rotterdam benchmark reflects what western buyers actually pay. It keeps climbing. SMM’s March 27 analysis was headlined “Domestic Weakness Meets Overseas Strength.” The domestic to overseas price spread has blown out to roughly 25%. That arbitrage cannot be exploited. The export mechanism has been structurally removed. The obvious question here is why this is different than the Ukraine war driving defense demand for tungsten. There is one more structural factor that most people are missing completely, and it explains why this price cycle is fundamentally different from 2022. In 2022, the Russia-Ukraine war sent tungsten prices briefly higher as markets worried about Russian supply. But that rally faded. Why? Because China was still a net exporter. Western buyers had a backstop. The floor on the price was whatever China was willing to ship at. That backstop is gone. Customs data tracked by Tivan and Exante Data using UN Comtrade and GACC show that China has moved sharply into a net trade deficit in tungsten over the past two years. For the first time in modern history, China is now importing more tungsten than it exports. The country that built a global monopoly by flooding the market with cheap supply is itself short of tungsten for its domestic industrial base. A genius move on their part, but very bad for western society. This changes everything about the price ceiling debate. In 2022, a skeptic could point to China as a source of relief supply. In 2026, that argument is simply not available. China cannot export what it does not have to spare. The structural price floor has been permanently raised. The Defense Catalysts Military tungsten demand is growing 12% in 2026, according to Project Blue’s Janine Le Roux. That’s driven by the Middle East conflict and the broader NATO rearmament cycle that was already underway before it. Rheinmetall is scaling to 1.1 million artillery shells per year by 2027. The US Army is targeting 100,000 rounds per month. NATO’s ASAP program is building toward 2 million rounds annually. Russia produced an estimated 4.5 million rounds in 2024 alone. Every one of those rounds contains tungsten. None of it gets recycled. It’s fired and never to be seen again. The Pentagon has been moving fast with investments in exploration and production for western tungsten. A Defense Logistics Agency RFI for approximately 1,700 tonnes from domestic or allied sources. The Big & Beautiful Bill Act includes a $2 billion Defense Stockpile Fund specifically for critical minerals. The structural catalyst is the January 1, 2027 DoD procurement ban. Starting that date, Chinese and Russian tungsten is barred from all US defense contracts. That is a mandated floor for western-sourced supply that exists regardless of price, regardless of trade negotiations, regardless of whether APT is at $500 or $3,000. Even if China was willing to export again, they would not be delivering it to the US defense industry. Europe is moving in the same direction. Ursula von der Leyen, announcing the EU-Australia Free Trade Agreement on March 23-24, specifically named tungsten: “Today, we agreed to step up cooperation with four major projects covering production of rare earths, lithium, and tungsten. We are building on our work with allies towards a buyers’ club.” The EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act gave tungsten both Critical and Strategic designation. Only 17 materials receive the Strategic label. Binding 2030 targets including 10% domestic extraction and 25% recycling. All of this is leading to a big squeeze in demand. Our Tungsten investment strategy section is available to paying subscribers only. By subscribing you’ll unlock the rest of the article and all of our existing research library, which includes deep dives and price targets on hot stocks like $KRKNF, $AAOI, and our recent best selling Nvidia GTC report focused on the future of AI networking. Hear what some of our 100+ paid subscribers have to say after only a month into launch. “I genuinely believe [AB] is one of the best sources for timely stock insight. Their calls on photonics and semiconductor names like AAOI, AXTI, and MRLN were especially sharp and well informed.” - Lasko 557 “Michael’s work on kraken robotics, has me convinced that Michael is the Robinhood for Retail investors” - Bashir “Looking at this report. You guys could have charge 1K for that alone! Its fire. Man I cant tell you how excited I am. Thanks again” - Private wealth manager who bought Palantir at $3 “My portfolio has grown from $2.5 million to $5 million since September 2025 thanks to the calls of Michael Sikand and the community members that collaborate with him.” - (RL, Prev. investing for 20 years, private business owner) The Investment Strategy There are two publicly traded companies producing tungsten at meaningful scale in the western world. Read more

This $0.30 Stock Controls A $24B Resource The Iran War Is Depleting The most asymmetric Iran war trade is not oil, plastic, or fertilizer. Since Trump took out Iran’s supreme leader over a month ago… Every savvy trader has been on the hunt for exposure to the resources made scarce by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Oil was the obvious trade. Plastic, fertilizer, and helium were less clear but delivered incredible returns to those who connected the dots. Now aluminum seems to be the latest hot commodity, driven up by a recent strike on a major gulf factory. But we’ve had our eyes on a different metal. And while we have no idea when and how the Iran War is going to end. We do know is that if a friend asked us for a recommendation on where to buy a lottery ticket… We’d instead direct them to open an Interactive Brokers account and buy the small cap critical mineral stock you’ll learn about today. If you dozed off in chemistry class like we did, let us re-introduce you to Tungsten (W). Disclaimer: This newsletter is for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. All investments involve risk, including possible loss of principal. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Always conduct your own due diligence and consult a licensed financial advisor. The authors may hold positions in securities mentioned. The WW3 Metal Trade We’ve been keeping an eye on critical minerals for a while now. Any savvy trader had their eye on mining and metals when Trump made them a priority of his second term, contributing to nothing short of asymmetric returns across a wide basket of stocks. One knock on effect has been China’s aggression around their dominance in the sector when engaging in broader trade negotiations. There’s been quite a few back and forth restrictions between the U.S. and China on the critical minerals front, scrambling supply and creating new imperatives for domestic sourcing. But none of it compares to what is going on in tungsten. In February 2025, China imposed export controls covering 41 product codes including tungsten. Western markets barely blinked. Inventories were still full. Traders assumed it was a negotiating chip. Turns out it wasn’t. Tungsten stockpiles became depleted. The price started moving and has not stopped ever since. APT (ammonium paratungstate, known as the most important raw material for all tungsten products) has almost multiplied 10x from its pre-restriction baseline. It was around $320 in early 2025 before the Chinese restrictions. After this, prices soared towards $900 by 2026. And it didn’t stop there. By early March, prices were around $2,100 and have continued to go up towards $3,000 by the end of March. The ongoing conflict in Iran has brought extra demand and eyes towards this rare earth element. Supply is so scarce, China has even become a net importer of tungsten now . BMO Capital Markets VP George Heppel said it plainly in Bloomberg on March 15: “I have never seen a market as tight as tungsten is right now, aside from maybe lithium in 2021. This isn’t like lithium, where there was a huge pipeline of projects that could come online.” George is right. There is no easy or fast pipeline for tungsten. New western mines need two years minimum to permit, finance, and build. And that’s assuming capital shows up and permits clear. China’s exports are now at zero. Global inventories are nearly depleted. And there are only two major publicly traded companies producing western tungsten right now. One is priced for the future and a popular stock. The other is trading at under $1/share, well below its highs, has two operating mines generating positive cashflow, and sits on a resource base worth multiples of its market cap at today’s spot price. But first let’s set the stage. What Tungsten Actually Is And Why We Need It Tungsten, Swedish for ‘heavy stone’, is a metal found in mineral ores. It is known for its extreme hardness and high melting point. Its Latin name, “wolfram”, is where the symbol ‘W’ comes from. It has a melting point of 3,422°C. The highest of any element, more than three times what it takes to melt steel. A density close to gold. Second only to diamond in hardness among natural materials. Chemically inert. Dimensionally stable under extreme thermal shock. That combination of properties makes tungsten irreplaceable in a short but critical list of applications. Not just hard to substitute. Irreplaceable. And every one of those applications sits at the intersection of the biggest macro themes in markets right now. Cemented carbide: ~60-65% of global tungsten demand. This is the drill bit, the milling insert, the cutting tool that machines aluminum airframes and titanium engine components. Modern manufacturing runs on this material. The USGS consistently reports that ~60% of US tungsten consumption goes here. There is no commercially viable replacement at equivalent performance. Steel alloys and superalloys: ~14% of demand. High-speed steel in drill bits contains tungsten. So does stellite, the alloy coating turbine blades in jet engines. Aerospace demand here is steady and growing as Boeing and Airbus work through multi-year backlogs. Defense and tungsten metal products: ~12% of demand. This is the category that is now driving the price. Kinetic energy penetrators, the long tungsten darts fired from tank cannons, rely on its density to hold momentum and punch through armor. The alternative, depleted uranium, is politically constrained in most allied nations. Missile counterweights, gyroscopes, radiation shielding, aircraft balance weights: all of these need tungsten specifically. Project Blue estimates this segment is growing 12% in 2026, driven by the Iran conflict and NATO rearmament. Electrical and electronics: ~8-9% of demand. Tungsten electrodes for TIG welding. X-ray tube anodes. Contact materials in switching equipment. And WF6, the tungsten hexafluoride precursor used in semiconductor CVD deposition. As chipmakers push to smaller nodes, tungsten fill for via and contact interconnects remains essential. Samsung, TSMC, and Intel are all consuming meaningful volumes. As the AI buildout continues, tungsten continues to receive structural demand. This is growing, and not stopping anytime soon if we look at hyperscaler capex guidance which keeps increasing to record highs. This means that the end of the Iran war and the restocking of ammunition stockpiles would not end the growing tungsten demand, due to the AI supercycle. Chemicals and other: ~5%. Petroleum refining catalysts. Tungstate pigments. Photovoltaic wire, which grew 198% year-over-year to 4,500 tonnes in 2025. Lithium tungstate for batteries. Small today, but these add permanent incremental floor demand that didn’t exist a decade ago. Now, let’s talk about recycling, as many of you are probably wondering if that is an easy solution. The answer to “can we just recycle more?” is more complicated than most people think. Globally, recycling provides roughly 25-35% of total western tungsten input. It is a real, but extremely tiny buffer for now. But here is the critical distinction that ruins the recycling reliance: recycling only works on tungsten that comes back. The issue here is that military consumption is structurally unrecoverable and therefore recycling is irrelevant to offset the growing demand given the defense supercycle. When a kinetic energy penetrator is fired at 1,700 metres per second, it doesn’t come back. It embeds in its target, fragments on impact, or erodes progressively during penetration. The tungsten disperses into a debris field, alloys with the target material, gets contaminated with explosives residue, and ends up buried in foreign soil or at the bottom of the ocean. There is no way to collect it. It is gone from the supply chain permanently. The same is true for artillery sub-munitions destroyed on use. Rocket nozzles that erode in flight. Counterweights in downed aircraft lost at sea or in conflict zones. This is called terminal consumption, and it is almost entirely a military phenomenon. As NATO dramatically scales production, Rheinmetall is targeting 1.1 million shells by 2027 and Russia consuming an estimated 4.5 million rounds in 2024 alone, an increasingly large portion of total global tungsten demand is going into a use that generates zero scrap, zero recovery, zero secondary supply. At the same time, the conflict driving that consumption is also disrupting the European recycling supply chains that would normally offset primary supply losses. The recycling buffer is real, but fails to keep up and is easily being consumed. You cannot refill it from munitions expenditure. We expect defense related tungsten demand to accelerate faster than other demand segments, therefore, recycling should become less relevant and not something the west can try to count on. Rheinmetall 120mm shell Here is the other thing about tungsten’s demand base: it is almost entirely price insensitive. The tungsten content in a Rheinmetall 120mm shell is maybe 10-20% of total unit cost. Significant, but not big enough to stop the demand. Nations across the globe need to be prepared in uncertain times like these. The insert on a CNC machine represents a fraction of the machining operation’s hourly rate. You don’t stop buying because raw material costs doubled. You build inventory, renegotiate contracts, and keep the lines running. Defense buyers don’t negotiate on raw material content at all. They run approved supplier lists and multi-year contracts. Substitution is either not allowed or not viable. How China Outplayed Everyone In Tungsten China’s dominance in tungsten isn’t a market share story. It’s a monopoly that was deliberately constructed over 40 years. The country holds 53% of the world’s known reserves. It controls approximately 79% of annual mine production. That is 67,000 of roughly 85,000 metric tonnes. More importantly, it controls 82.7% of the entire downstream supply chain: concentrate processing, APT refining, finished product manufacturing. By the time tungsten leaves China as a product, it has been through multiple Chinese-controlled processing steps. The US hasn’t mined tungsten commercially since 2015. A full decade of zero domestic production while consumption continued. How did this happen? In the 1980s and 1990s, China ran sustained below-cost production that crushed western mines into closure. The Hemerdon mine in Devon. The Hollister mine in Nevada. The Strawberry tungsten mine in California. One by one, they went uneconomic and shut. China wasn’t just building its own industry. It was systematically eliminating competition. Then it codified the monopoly through export controls. Here is how the squeeze was applied: February 4, 2025. MOFCOM applies the Export Control Law to 41 tungsten HS codes. Chinese shipments fall roughly 40% over the course of 2025. October 2025. New 2026-2027 rules limit approved exporters to just 15 whitelisted companies with strict historical volume thresholds. The long tail of traders who had been routing product west gets cut off entirely. January 6, 2026. China bans tungsten exports to Japan specifically, citing military end-use restrictions. Japan had been receiving 56.8% of China’s total APT exports. Those flows stop immediately. January and February 2026. China’s combined APT exports drop to effectively zero. When the US and China reached a partial rare earths truce in early 2026, tungsten was explicitly excluded. It was not even discussed. China suspended gallium, germanium, and antimony as diplomatic concessions. Tungsten stayed locked. SMM (Shanghai Metals Market) stated it plainly: no relaxation anticipated in the near term. The framework runs through at least end of 2027. The market has now split in two. Domestic Chinese APT has softened slightly as Beijing manages internal prices. The Rotterdam benchmark reflects what western buyers actually pay. It keeps climbing. SMM’s March 27 analysis was headlined “Domestic Weakness Meets Overseas Strength.” The domestic to overseas price spread has blown out to roughly 25%. That arbitrage cannot be exploited. The export mechanism has been structurally removed. The obvious question here is why this is different than the Ukraine war driving defense demand for tungsten. There is one more structural factor that most people are missing completely, and it explains why this price cycle is fundamentally different from 2022. In 2022, the Russia-Ukraine war sent tungsten prices briefly higher as markets worried about Russian supply. But that rally faded. Why? Because China was still a net exporter. Western buyers had a backstop. The floor on the price was whatever China was willing to ship at. That backstop is gone. Customs data tracked by Tivan and Exante Data using UN Comtrade and GACC show that China has moved sharply into a net trade deficit in tungsten over the past two years. For the first time in modern history, China is now importing more tungsten than it exports. The country that built a global monopoly by flooding the market with cheap supply is itself short of tungsten for its domestic industrial base. A genius move on their part, but very bad for western society. This changes everything about the price ceiling debate. In 2022, a skeptic could point to China as a source of relief supply. In 2026, that argument is simply not available. China cannot export what it does not have to spare. The structural price floor has been permanently raised. The Defense Catalysts Military tungsten demand is growing 12% in 2026, according to Project Blue’s Janine Le Roux. That’s driven by the Middle East conflict and the broader NATO rearmament cycle that was already underway before it. Rheinmetall is scaling to 1.1 million artillery shells per year by 2027. The US Army is targeting 100,000 rounds per month. NATO’s ASAP program is building toward 2 million rounds annually. Russia produced an estimated 4.5 million rounds in 2024 alone. Every one of those rounds contains tungsten. None of it gets recycled. It’s fired and never to be seen again. The Pentagon has been moving fast with investments in exploration and production for western tungsten. A Defense Logistics Agency RFI for approximately 1,700 tonnes from domestic or allied sources. The Big & Beautiful Bill Act includes a $2 billion Defense Stockpile Fund specifically for critical minerals. The structural catalyst is the January 1, 2027 DoD procurement ban. Starting that date, Chinese and Russian tungsten is barred from all US defense contracts. That is a mandated floor for western-sourced supply that exists regardless of price, regardless of trade negotiations, regardless of whether APT is at $500 or $3,000. Even if China was willing to export again, they would not be delivering it to the US defense industry. Europe is moving in the same direction. Ursula von der Leyen, announcing the EU-Australia Free Trade Agreement on March 23-24, specifically named tungsten: “Today, we agreed to step up cooperation with four major projects covering production of rare earths, lithium, and tungsten. We are building on our work with allies towards a buyers’ club.” The EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act gave tungsten both Critical and Strategic designation. Only 17 materials receive the Strategic label. Binding 2030 targets including 10% domestic extraction and 25% recycling. All of this is leading to a big squeeze in demand. Our Tungsten investment strategy section is available to paying subscribers only. By subscribing you’ll unlock the rest of the article and all of our existing research library, which includes deep dives and price targets on hot stocks like $KRKNF, $AAOI, and our recent best selling Nvidia GTC report focused on the future of AI networking. Hear what some of our 100+ paid subscribers have to say after only a month into launch. “I genuinely believe [AB] is one of the best sources for timely stock insight. Their calls on photonics and semiconductor names like AAOI, AXTI, and MRLN were especially sharp and well informed.” - Lasko 557 “Michael’s work on kraken robotics, has me convinced that Michael is the Robinhood for Retail investors” - Bashir “Looking at this report. You guys could have charge 1K for that alone! Its fire. Man I cant tell you how excited I am. Thanks again” - Private wealth manager who bought Palantir at $3 “My portfolio has grown from $2.5 million to $5 million since September 2025 thanks to the calls of Michael Sikand and the community members that collaborate with him.” - (RL, Prev. investing for 20 years, private business owner) The Investment Strategy There are two publicly traded companies producing tungsten at meaningful scale in the western world. Read more

This $0.30 Stock Controls A $24B Resource The Iran War Is Depleting The most asymmetric Iran war trade is not oil, plastic, or fertilizer. Since Trump took out Iran’s supreme leader over a month ago… Every savvy trader has been on the hunt for exposure to the resources made scarce by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Oil was the obvious trade. Plastic, fertilizer, and helium were less clear but delivered incredible returns to those who connected the dots. Now aluminum seems to be the latest hot commodity, driven up by a recent strike on a major gulf factory. But we’ve had our eyes on a different metal. And while we have no idea when and how the Iran War is going to end. We do know is that if a friend asked us for a recommendation on where to buy a lottery ticket… We’d instead direct them to open an Interactive Brokers account and buy the small cap critical mineral stock you’ll learn about today. If you dozed off in chemistry class like we did, let us re-introduce you to Tungsten (W). Disclaimer: This newsletter is for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. All investments involve risk, including possible loss of principal. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Always conduct your own due diligence and consult a licensed financial advisor. The authors may hold positions in securities mentioned. The WW3 Metal Trade We’ve been keeping an eye on critical minerals for a while now. Any savvy trader had their eye on mining and metals when Trump made them a priority of his second term, contributing to nothing short of asymmetric returns across a wide basket of stocks. One knock on effect has been China’s aggression around their dominance in the sector when engaging in broader trade negotiations. There’s been quite a few back and forth restrictions between the U.S. and China on the critical minerals front, scrambling supply and creating new imperatives for domestic sourcing. But none of it compares to what is going on in tungsten. In February 2025, China imposed export controls covering 41 product codes including tungsten. Western markets barely blinked. Inventories were still full. Traders assumed it was a negotiating chip. Turns out it wasn’t. Tungsten stockpiles became depleted. The price started moving and has not stopped ever since. APT (ammonium paratungstate, known as the most important raw material for all tungsten products) has almost multiplied 10x from its pre-restriction baseline. It was around $320 in early 2025 before the Chinese restrictions. After this, prices soared towards $900 by 2026. And it didn’t stop there. By early March, prices were around $2,100 and have continued to go up towards $3,000 by the end of March. The ongoing conflict in Iran has brought extra demand and eyes towards this rare earth element. Supply is so scarce, China has even become a net importer of tungsten now . BMO Capital Markets VP George Heppel said it plainly in Bloomberg on March 15: “I have never seen a market as tight as tungsten is right now, aside from maybe lithium in 2021. This isn’t like lithium, where there was a huge pipeline of projects that could come online.” George is right. There is no easy or fast pipeline for tungsten. New western mines need two years minimum to permit, finance, and build. And that’s assuming capital shows up and permits clear. China’s exports are now at zero. Global inventories are nearly depleted. And there are only two major publicly traded companies producing western tungsten right now. One is priced for the future and a popular stock. The other is trading at under $1/share, well below its highs, has two operating mines generating positive cashflow, and sits on a resource base worth multiples of its market cap at today’s spot price. But first let’s set the stage. What Tungsten Actually Is And Why We Need It Tungsten, Swedish for ‘heavy stone’, is a metal found in mineral ores. It is known for its extreme hardness and high melting point. Its Latin name, “wolfram”, is where the symbol ‘W’ comes from. It has a melting point of 3,422°C. The highest of any element, more than three times what it takes to melt steel. A density close to gold. Second only to diamond in hardness among natural materials. Chemically inert. Dimensionally stable under extreme thermal shock. That combination of properties makes tungsten irreplaceable in a short but critical list of applications. Not just hard to substitute. Irreplaceable. And every one of those applications sits at the intersection of the biggest macro themes in markets right now. Cemented carbide: ~60-65% of global tungsten demand. This is the drill bit, the milling insert, the cutting tool that machines aluminum airframes and titanium engine components. Modern manufacturing runs on this material. The USGS consistently reports that ~60% of US tungsten consumption goes here. There is no commercially viable replacement at equivalent performance. Steel alloys and superalloys: ~14% of demand. High-speed steel in drill bits contains tungsten. So does stellite, the alloy coating turbine blades in jet engines. Aerospace demand here is steady and growing as Boeing and Airbus work through multi-year backlogs. Defense and tungsten metal products: ~12% of demand. This is the category that is now driving the price. Kinetic energy penetrators, the long tungsten darts fired from tank cannons, rely on its density to hold momentum and punch through armor. The alternative, depleted uranium, is politically constrained in most allied nations. Missile counterweights, gyroscopes, radiation shielding, aircraft balance weights: all of these need tungsten specifically. Project Blue estimates this segment is growing 12% in 2026, driven by the Iran conflict and NATO rearmament. Electrical and electronics: ~8-9% of demand. Tungsten electrodes for TIG welding. X-ray tube anodes. Contact materials in switching equipment. And WF6, the tungsten hexafluoride precursor used in semiconductor CVD deposition. As chipmakers push to smaller nodes, tungsten fill for via and contact interconnects remains essential. Samsung, TSMC, and Intel are all consuming meaningful volumes. As the AI buildout continues, tungsten continues to receive structural demand. This is growing, and not stopping anytime soon if we look at hyperscaler capex guidance which keeps increasing to record highs. This means that the end of the Iran war and the restocking of ammunition stockpiles would not end the growing tungsten demand, due to the AI supercycle. Chemicals and other: ~5%. Petroleum refining catalysts. Tungstate pigments. Photovoltaic wire, which grew 198% year-over-year to 4,500 tonnes in 2025. Lithium tungstate for batteries. Small today, but these add permanent incremental floor demand that didn’t exist a decade ago. Now, let’s talk about recycling, as many of you are probably wondering if that is an easy solution. The answer to “can we just recycle more?” is more complicated than most people think. Globally, recycling provides roughly 25-35% of total western tungsten input. It is a real, but extremely tiny buffer for now. But here is the critical distinction that ruins the recycling reliance: recycling only works on tungsten that comes back. The issue here is that military consumption is structurally unrecoverable and therefore recycling is irrelevant to offset the growing demand given the defense supercycle. When a kinetic energy penetrator is fired at 1,700 metres per second, it doesn’t come back. It embeds in its target, fragments on impact, or erodes progressively during penetration. The tungsten disperses into a debris field, alloys with the target material, gets contaminated with explosives residue, and ends up buried in foreign soil or at the bottom of the ocean. There is no way to collect it. It is gone from the supply chain permanently. The same is true for artillery sub-munitions destroyed on use. Rocket nozzles that erode in flight. Counterweights in downed aircraft lost at sea or in conflict zones. This is called terminal consumption, and it is almost entirely a military phenomenon. As NATO dramatically scales production, Rheinmetall is targeting 1.1 million shells by 2027 and Russia consuming an estimated 4.5 million rounds in 2024 alone, an increasingly large portion of total global tungsten demand is going into a use that generates zero scrap, zero recovery, zero secondary supply. At the same time, the conflict driving that consumption is also disrupting the European recycling supply chains that would normally offset primary supply losses. The recycling buffer is real, but fails to keep up and is easily being consumed. You cannot refill it from munitions expenditure. We expect defense related tungsten demand to accelerate faster than other demand segments, therefore, recycling should become less relevant and not something the west can try to count on. Rheinmetall 120mm shell Here is the other thing about tungsten’s demand base: it is almost entirely price insensitive. The tungsten content in a Rheinmetall 120mm shell is maybe 10-20% of total unit cost. Significant, but not big enough to stop the demand. Nations across the globe need to be prepared in uncertain times like these. The insert on a CNC machine represents a fraction of the machining operation’s hourly rate. You don’t stop buying because raw material costs doubled. You build inventory, renegotiate contracts, and keep the lines running. Defense buyers don’t negotiate on raw material content at all. They run approved supplier lists and multi-year contracts. Substitution is either not allowed or not viable. How China Outplayed Everyone In Tungsten China’s dominance in tungsten isn’t a market share story. It’s a monopoly that was deliberately constructed over 40 years. The country holds 53% of the world’s known reserves. It controls approximately 79% of annual mine production. That is 67,000 of roughly 85,000 metric tonnes. More importantly, it controls 82.7% of the entire downstream supply chain: concentrate processing, APT refining, finished product manufacturing. By the time tungsten leaves China as a product, it has been through multiple Chinese-controlled processing steps. The US hasn’t mined tungsten commercially since 2015. A full decade of zero domestic production while consumption continued. How did this happen? In the 1980s and 1990s, China ran sustained below-cost production that crushed western mines into closure. The Hemerdon mine in Devon. The Hollister mine in Nevada. The Strawberry tungsten mine in California. One by one, they went uneconomic and shut. China wasn’t just building its own industry. It was systematically eliminating competition. Then it codified the monopoly through export controls. Here is how the squeeze was applied: February 4, 2025. MOFCOM applies the Export Control Law to 41 tungsten HS codes. Chinese shipments fall roughly 40% over the course of 2025. October 2025. New 2026-2027 rules limit approved exporters to just 15 whitelisted companies with strict historical volume thresholds. The long tail of traders who had been routing product west gets cut off entirely. January 6, 2026. China bans tungsten exports to Japan specifically, citing military end-use restrictions. Japan had been receiving 56.8% of China’s total APT exports. Those flows stop immediately. January and February 2026. China’s combined APT exports drop to effectively zero. When the US and China reached a partial rare earths truce in early 2026, tungsten was explicitly excluded. It was not even discussed. China suspended gallium, germanium, and antimony as diplomatic concessions. Tungsten stayed locked. SMM (Shanghai Metals Market) stated it plainly: no relaxation anticipated in the near term. The framework runs through at least end of 2027. The market has now split in two. Domestic Chinese APT has softened slightly as Beijing manages internal prices. The Rotterdam benchmark reflects what western buyers actually pay. It keeps climbing. SMM’s March 27 analysis was headlined “Domestic Weakness Meets Overseas Strength.” The domestic to overseas price spread has blown out to roughly 25%. That arbitrage cannot be exploited. The export mechanism has been structurally removed. The obvious question here is why this is different than the Ukraine war driving defense demand for tungsten. There is one more structural factor that most people are missing completely, and it explains why this price cycle is fundamentally different from 2022. In 2022, the Russia-Ukraine war sent tungsten prices briefly higher as markets worried about Russian supply. But that rally faded. Why? Because China was still a net exporter. Western buyers had a backstop. The floor on the price was whatever China was willing to ship at. That backstop is gone. Customs data tracked by Tivan and Exante Data using UN Comtrade and GACC show that China has moved sharply into a net trade deficit in tungsten over the past two years. For the first time in modern history, China is now importing more tungsten than it exports. The country that built a global monopoly by flooding the market with cheap supply is itself short of tungsten for its domestic industrial base. A genius move on their part, but very bad for western society. This changes everything about the price ceiling debate. In 2022, a skeptic could point to China as a source of relief supply. In 2026, that argument is simply not available. China cannot export what it does not have to spare. The structural price floor has been permanently raised. The Defense Catalysts Military tungsten demand is growing 12% in 2026, according to Project Blue’s Janine Le Roux. That’s driven by the Middle East conflict and the broader NATO rearmament cycle that was already underway before it. Rheinmetall is scaling to 1.1 million artillery shells per year by 2027. The US Army is targeting 100,000 rounds per month. NATO’s ASAP program is building toward 2 million rounds annually. Russia produced an estimated 4.5 million rounds in 2024 alone. Every one of those rounds contains tungsten. None of it gets recycled. It’s fired and never to be seen again. The Pentagon has been moving fast with investments in exploration and production for western tungsten. A Defense Logistics Agency RFI for approximately 1,700 tonnes from domestic or allied sources. The Big & Beautiful Bill Act includes a $2 billion Defense Stockpile Fund specifically for critical minerals. The structural catalyst is the January 1, 2027 DoD procurement ban. Starting that date, Chinese and Russian tungsten is barred from all US defense contracts. That is a mandated floor for western-sourced supply that exists regardless of price, regardless of trade negotiations, regardless of whether APT is at $500 or $3,000. Even if China was willing to export again, they would not be delivering it to the US defense industry. Europe is moving in the same direction. Ursula von der Leyen, announcing the EU-Australia Free Trade Agreement on March 23-24, specifically named tungsten: “Today, we agreed to step up cooperation with four major projects covering production of rare earths, lithium, and tungsten. We are building on our work with allies towards a buyers’ club.” The EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act gave tungsten both Critical and Strategic designation. Only 17 materials receive the Strategic label. Binding 2030 targets including 10% domestic extraction and 25% recycling. All of this is leading to a big squeeze in demand. Our Tungsten investment strategy section is available to paying subscribers only. By subscribing you’ll unlock the rest of the article and all of our existing research library, which includes deep dives and price targets on hot stocks like $KRKNF, $AAOI, and our recent best selling Nvidia GTC report focused on the future of AI networking. Hear what some of our 100+ paid subscribers have to say after only a month into launch. “I genuinely believe [AB] is one of the best sources for timely stock insight. Their calls on photonics and semiconductor names like AAOI, AXTI, and MRLN were especially sharp and well informed.” - Lasko 557 “Michael’s work on kraken robotics, has me convinced that Michael is the Robinhood for Retail investors” - Bashir “Looking at this report. You guys could have charge 1K for that alone! Its fire. Man I cant tell you how excited I am. Thanks again” - Private wealth manager who bought Palantir at $3 “My portfolio has grown from $2.5 million to $5 million since September 2025 thanks to the calls of Michael Sikand and the community members that collaborate with him.” - (RL, Prev. investing for 20 years, private business owner) The Investment Strategy There are two publicly traded companies producing tungsten at meaningful scale in the western world. Read more

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