Quick reminder before we get into today's Market Insights…
I'm going live tonight at 5pm ET for a free event called "The Next Gold Rush," where I'll walk through exactly why I believe we're in the early stages of a commodity supercycle in critical metals…
And I'll hand every live attendee my Early Opportunities Watchlist at the end. If you haven't reserved your seat yet, you can do that here.
Now, on to today's article, because it's the perfect setup for tonight.
The Best-Performing Metal You've Never Bought
There's a metal that's quietly outperformed gold, copper, and most of the stock market this year, and I'd guess most of you have never made an investment decision around it in your life.
Tungsten.
You've heard of it. Maybe from old incandescent light bulb filaments, maybe from a drill bit in your garage. What you probably don't know is that tungsten has the highest melting point of any metal on the periodic table, which makes it irreplaceable for armor-piercing ammunition, missile components, fighter jet parts, semiconductor manufacturing, and industrial cutting tools.
There is no substitute. You either have tungsten or you don't build the thing.
And right now, the world doesn't have enough of it.
How China Turned Off the Tap
China produces roughly 80% of the global supply.
Over the past year and a half, Beijing has methodically tightened the spigot - cutting domestic mining quotas for three straight years, then layering on export licensing requirements in early 2025, then escalating in January of this year with a formal "dual-use items" export control framework that effectively created a government whitelist of approved exporters.
The result has been one of the sharpest commodity price moves I've seen in years. Tungsten prices have risen as much as 557% since China's restrictions began, with some benchmarks showing year-to-date gains north of 350%.
That's not a typo. That's a metal most investors have never thought about, quietly becoming one of the best-performing commodities on Earth.
The war in Iran poured gasoline on the fire. The U.S. has been burning through Tomahawk, Patriot, and Precision Strike missile stockpiles at a pace that's forcing the Pentagon to confront an uncomfortable truth: America hasn't had an active commercial tungsten mine since 2015. Three decades of relying on cheap, subsidized Chinese supply left the U.S. defense industrial base completely exposed at the exact moment it needed that metal most.
So now Washington is scrambling. And it's not the only one.
Two Continents Start Stockpiling
The European Union (EU) just shortlisted tungsten, alongside rare earths and gallium, for its first-ever joint critical minerals stockpile - a direct response to watching Beijing wield its mineral dominance as a geopolitical weapon. The EU is in talks with the Port of Rotterdam right now about where to physically store the reserve. That's NATO-aligned governments on two continents simultaneously deciding that tungsten is important enough to stockpile like strategic oil reserves.
And just yesterday, a small Nevada-focused mining company called Guardian Metal Resources (GMTL) released the results of a pre-feasibility study on its Pilot Mountain project - believed to be the largest undeveloped tungsten deposit on American soil.
The numbers are striking: an after-tax net present value of $660 million and an internal rate of return near 60% at base-case pricing. At current spot tungsten prices, those numbers roughly double. This would be the first new U.S.-based tungsten mining operation in over a decade.
That's the story in one sentence. After 30 years of dormancy, America is racing to rebuild an entire domestic industry from scratch, for a metal it can't function without, at the exact moment global prices are exploding.
Get the Full Picture Tonight
I've spent the last several months digging into this opportunity, and tonight at 5pm ET I'm going to share exactly how I'm thinking about playing it - along with the broader critical metals supercycle building in copper, rare earths, and beyond.
This is a free event, no cost to attend, and everyone who's there live will walk away with my Early Opportunities Watchlist. That list won't be available afterward - it's for live attendees only.
Most investors will spend the next year hearing about tungsten for the first time when it shows up in a headline they can't avoid. You have the chance to understand it tonight, before that happens.
I'll see you at 5,
Matt McCall
Founder, NXT Wave Research
