The article below is an excerpt from our Q2 2025 commentary.
In the second quarter, the commodity complex split neatly into two camps. On one side: uranium, platinum group metals, and gold—stubbornly immune to the malaise that swept through nearly everything else. On the other: a broad swath of resources quietly losing altitude, their decline accelerated by President Trump’s April 2nd Inauguration Day tariff announcements, which injected a level of uncertainty into global commodity markets not seen in years.
The numbers told the story in quick strokes. The energy-heavy Goldman Sachs Commodity Spot Index slid 4.5%; the Rogers International Commodity Index, with its heavier tilt toward metals and agriculture, fell 3.1%. Resource equities were a study in contrasts. In North America, the S&P Natural Resource Sector Index—weighted toward energy—dropped 2.1%. Globally, the S&P Natural Resource Index, buoyed by metals and agriculture, gained 3.3%.
Beyond the resource world, equity markets roared back from their first-quarter slump. Investors, emboldened or perhaps forgetful, poured back into last decade’s anointed winners— the mega-cap technology names. The S&P 500 surged 11%. The NASDAQ 100, driven by its tech leviathans, soared an eye-catching 18%. In the process, the tech trade more than erased its early-year weakness and reclaimed center stage.
Yet amid the tariff-induced jitters, a few commodities refused to play along. Uranium, platinum group metals, gold, and silver all rose smartly, as if oblivious to Washington’s noise. Their strength wasn’t just a counterpoint to the general drift lower—it was a reminder that in commodity markets, the bigger story often runs on its own timetable.
Uranium
In our last letter, we suggested—quietly but with conviction—that uranium might be setting the stage for an old-fashioned short squeeze. The setup was there: hedge funds, brimming with certainty, had built large short positions in uranium equities. Their reasoning, we thought, was as shaky as a prospector’s ladder. The Sprott Physical Uranium Trust, they argued, was about to run out of cash and would be forced to dump part of its uranium stockpile into the market—sending prices down in a tidy cascade.
It didn’t happen.
Instead, in the second quarter, the Trust raised fresh cash with the ease of a seasoned hand passing the hat in a friendly crowd. The bearish script tore in the middle. Hedge funds, caught with the wrong end of the bet, scrambled to cover. The spot uranium price climbed 15%, but the real fireworks were in the equities: the URNM uranium ETF surged 45%, the best performance in the entire commodity complex.
This was not simply a short-term skirmish. The nuclear power story is no longer about possibility; it’s about arrival. Announcements keep coming—new reactors, new fuel demand, new commitments—and each one tightens the long-term supply picture. In an op-ed we’ve written elsewhere, we make the case that the molten-salt reactor, once an engineer’s daydream, could emerge as a real-world solution to the fiscal dilemmas of debt-heavy Western economies.
The first leg of this bull market in uranium is behind us. Prices have already risen nearly fivefold in four years. Now, with the air clearer and the bears scattered, we believe the second leg—stronger, faster, and more decisive—has begun.
Platinum Group Metals
Platinum and palladium, two metals accustomed to long stretches of market neglect, staged a sharp reversal this quarter. Platinum prices jumped 37%, palladium gained 12%, and the three major South African producers—long battered by a dismal market—rose an average of nearly 40%.
It is not a rally born of whim. For years, both metals have been grinding through deep bear markets, prices depressed by demand weakness and the slow bleed of above-ground stocks. In our last letter, we argued that those stocks were dwindling, the deficits were deeper than advertised, and the day would come when supply would no longer mask scarcity. When that happened, the price moves would be abrupt.
That day, we think, has arrived.
In the PGM Section of this letter, we lay out the second-quarter trends that strengthen our conviction: supply pipelines tightening, demand sources holding firm, and inventories drawing down with each passing month. These bear markets have been living on borrowed time, and the clock has run out. A new bull market in platinum group metals is underway.
Gold and Silver
Gold spent the quarter behaving like a market that couldn’t quite decide whether it was in trouble or in charge. In the wake of President Trump’s “Inauguration Day” tariff announcement, prices dropped 5% almost overnight. Two weeks later, they had rallied 15%—a snapback fueled less by optimism than by the dawning realization that Trump’s trade policy had injected a new strain into global finance. It was an unusual strain: both U.S. Treasury bonds and the dollar fell together, a pairing that almost always signals systemic stress.
From there, the metal made its move. Gold set three consecutive all-time highs in the quarter, topping out at $3,432 on June 13. It finished the quarter up 5%—a modest number that conceals the magnitude of the swings in between. Silver followed its own, quieter arc, ending the quarter ahead by just over 4%.
The equities told a more uniform story. The GDX gold stock ETF climbed 13.3%, and the SIL silver stock ETF rose 22%. Yet, for all this strength, the public has been conspicuously absent. In fact, gold and gold equities have been the best-performing asset class over the past eighteen months, and investor interest has declined.
Why that matters—and why it reminds us of the run-up to the 2011 peak in reverse—is a topic we explore in detail in the Gold and Silver section of this letter. If our reading is correct, this kind of broad disinterest, when set against strong prices, is not apathy at all. It is a bullish signal hiding in plain sight.
Oil
“BP Says Oil Supply Growth Outside OPEC to Stall Next Year”
– Bloomberg News, August 8, 2025.
In the second quarter, the energy complex led the commodity markets lower. Oil prices— WTI and Brent alike—reacted to President Trump’s April 2nd tariff announcements with a sharp pullback, only to stage a spirited June rally that erased the losses, then give it all back again. The quarter ended with crude down 9%, and the mood in the oil pits distinctly sour.
The International Energy Agency did its part to deepen the gloom. Its June Oil 2025 report offered a forecast so downbeat it bordered on funereal: oil demand, it claimed, would barely grow over the next five years, while world liquids capacity—oil and natural gas liquids together—would swell by nearly 7.5 million barrels per day, tipping the market into a structural surplus of historic proportions.
Investors took the cue. Energy’s weighting in the S&P 500 slid back under 3%, a level last seen in the depths of the COVID panic. By another measure—the gold-to-oil ratio—oil now sits at one of the cheapest points in history. In April, an ounce of gold bought 58 barrels of crude, a reading matched only once before, in April 2020 at the height of lockdowns.
For anyone with a memory longer than a news cycle, the symmetry is striking. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was gold, not oil, that had been declared obsolete. European central banks raced to dump their reserves; gold bears pronounced the metal “demonetized.” Between 1999 and 2005, the gold-to-oil ratio repeatedly fell below 10, touching lows of 6.8 in August 1999 and 7.3 in September 2000 when gold fetched $270 and oil $37. Investors willing to believe those prices were wrong found themselves buying the trade of a generation: from the summer of 2000 to the fall of 2011, gold rose sevenfold, gold stocks fifteenfold.
The message of today’s ratio is just as clear—if you’re willing to hear it. Oil, in gold terms, is as cheap as it has ever been. The bearish narrative behind that cheapness—that electric vehicles will hollow out oil demand, that non-OPEC supply will grow relentlessly—has the same hollow ring as the “gold is dead” chorus of 2000.
We believe both pillars of the IEA’s outlook will fail. EV adoption, the linchpin of its demand pessimism, is already showing cracks. And its supply optimism leans heavily on a U.S. shale boom that has quietly plateaued and, by our analysis, is poised to decline—a reality the IEA has yet to factor in.
The last time the gold-to-oil ratio was this extreme, it marked the start of an eleven-year run in which the maligned asset – at that time gold -- trounced every other class. We think history is about to rhyme. Oil’s turn is next. For the supporting data—on both the demand resilience and the looming supply constraints—see the Oil section that follows.
bron Adam Rozencwajg
Natural Gas
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