Editor's Note: Dr. David Eifrig, a former Goldman Sachs Vice President and now the CEO of one of the largest publicly traded independent financial research firms in America is sounding the alarm on Wall Street's "Debasement Trade." He warns failing to prepare could mean leaving huge money on the table. Please read below...

Dear Reader,

Wall Street has been making headlines lately for piling into a strange new money move.

What they've dubbed the "Debasement Trade"...

And it could affect you and your money in a MAJOR way.

No one in the media does a better job of explaining all of this than Dr. David Eifrig, who has produced a new analysis to explain exactly what this all means for you and your money.

You see, the "Debasement Trade" is just one reason why, according to Dr. Eifrig, this gold bull run could only be in its early innings.

Given what's happening, he recommends you move your money to his No. 1 gold stock immediately (not a miner or ETF but it has 1,000% upside potential.)

Doc is no stranger to moments like this...

As a former Goldman Sachs Vice President, he has traded profitably through just about every stock market situation you can imagine, including Black Monday.

That's why his latest gold alert deserves your attention.

We've posted Doc's new work for free on our website right here...

Regards,

Matt Weinschenk
Director of Research, Stansberry Research

Copper Is the AI Trade No One Priced In—3 Miners With the Most to Gain

Reported by Bridget Bennett. First Published: 9/8/2026.

Copper spent two years as the least interesting story in the commodity complex. Gold took the headlines. Semiconductors took the capital. Copper just kept grinding higher until COMEX futures printed a record above $6.70 a pound in August. Prices have eased since then as rising oil prices and bond yields pressured the demand outlook, but the trend has not broken.

The record is not the interesting part. The arithmetic underneath it is. Demand from data centers, grid replacement, electric vehicles and defense budgets is compounding at the same time that mine supply is constrained by falling ore grades and permitting timelines measured in decades. That is not a problem that prices can solve quickly, and it lands directly on the income statements of the companies pulling copper out of the ground.

Copper's Supply Problem Is Structural, Not Cyclical

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Ross Givens, lead strategist at Traders Agency, treats copper as a three- to five-year position rather than a trade. He is a technician by habit, sizing entries based on consolidation patterns and signs of quiet accumulation instead of headlines. He walks members through that analysis live each week inside his Black Ops Trading Club. Applied to copper, his framing is that the AI buildout was priced into the obvious names first. NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) is already the most valuable company in the world. The physical layer beneath it never attracted the same level of investment, even though none of it gets built without wires, transformers and substations.

The tightness is measurable. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that miners have pulled roughly 700 million metric tons of copper out of the ground across all recorded history. S&P Global has cited industry estimates that the world needs to mine that much again over roughly 22 years just to sustain baseline growth, and that figure ignores electrification entirely. Ore grades are working against that math, having fallen roughly 40% globally since 1991. Work compiled by analyst Thierry von Arvy shows supply flattening early next decade while demand continues to climb. New mines take well over a decade to move from discovery to production, so no amount of drilling can close the copper supply deficit within that time frame.

The Futures Curve Is Signaling a Physical Copper Shortage

Futures curves normally slope upward because storage and financing cost money. Copper's has inverted, a condition traders call backwardation, which means buyers are paying a premium to take metal today rather than wait for December delivery. Nobody does that for a commodity sitting readily available in a warehouse.

Backwardation steepened sharply across Western exchanges this year as traders rerouted metal into U.S. warehouses ahead of the possibility that refined cathode could be swept into the tariff regime. Once that copper lands in a bonded warehouse, it is effectively stuck there, draining the rest of the world even as domestic inventories swell. A surplus that looked comfortable on paper a year ago now appears balanced at best outside the United States and closer to a deficit if those flows continue.

Freeport-McMoRan Offers the Cleanest Operating Leverage

Freeport-McMoRan (NYSE: FCX) is the largest U.S.-listed name in the group and the biggest domestic producer of refined copper, holding stakes in Grasberg, Cerro Verde and Morenci. Shares set a record close in late August and trade near the upper end of their 52-week range, with institutions holding four-fifths of the float.

The reason miners move more sharply than the metal is operating leverage. All-in sustaining costs are largely fixed once a mine is running, so every incremental dollar in the copper price flows toward the margin line. Freeport's first-half net income climbed 65% year over year on that dynamic, with U.S. mining operations more than doubling their contribution to operating income. Givens argues that the market is valuing the company based on today's copper price rather than the one he expects.

Hudbay Minerals and Trekor Metals Add Torque to the Copper Trade

Hudbay Minerals (NYSE: HBM) is the mid-cap version of the same exposure, anchored by Copper Mountain in British Columbia alongside operations in Peru. It posted record trailing-12-month adjusted EBITDA last quarter.

Trekor Metals (NYSEAMERICAN: TGB), renamed from Taseko Mines in June, is the small-cap.

Gibraltar provides the production base, while Florence Copper in Arizona poured its first cathode in February, turning the company into a two-mine producer with a domestic asset at a moment when Washington is pushing hard to strengthen homegrown supply chains.

Institutional ownership thins out as the list moves down the market-cap spectrum, which Givens reads as a constraint on large funds rather than a verdict on the businesses.

For broader exposure, the Global X Copper Miners ETF (NYSEARCA: COPX) has nearly doubled over the past year.

Where the Copper Trade Could Break Down

Not everyone treats this price as a clean read on demand. Some analysts argue that a meaningful slice of the move is a policy premium tied to tariff uncertainty rather than consumption, and that a final ruling could cool prices simply by ending the guessing. Stanley Druckenmiller's Duquesne Family Office added to Southern Copper (NYSE: SCCO) last quarter, although he has publicly favored the metal itself over the equities.

Execution risk also separates these three companies. Freeport's copper is already coming out of the ground. Trekor's valuation leans on a ramp-up that still has to meet its targets, and the smallest name would fall hardest if copper prices stall.

Watch the spread between spot and December delivery. As long as buyers keep paying up for metal today, the shortage is real, and copper mining stocks remain leveraged to it.

3 Stocks Built for Higher Rates—And 2 That Could Break

By Bridget Bennett. Published: 9/8/2026.

The August jobs report landed Friday morning with 162,000 new positions, well above forecasts of 56,000, and the bond market read it as another reason to brace. The 10-year Treasury yield pushed back toward 4.79%, near its highest level since late 2023, and a hike at the Fed's Sept. 15-16 meeting is now close to a coin flip.

That comes a week after Fed Chair Kevin Warsh used his Jackson Hole keynote to say inflation is still running too hot. Headlines have reached for the scariest available framing: rates at a 25-year high.

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That framing hides more than it reveals. The last 25 years produced the cheapest money in recorded history, including a long stretch of negative real rates. Five percent only looks extreme against that backdrop.

The number that actually matters is the spread between what a company pays to borrow and what it earns on that money.

A 5% Rate Only Hurts Companies Earning Less Than 5%

Joel Litman and Rob Spivey of Altimetry Research view the current rate move as a symptom of corporate demand for capital rather than a verdict on the economy. Estimates put AI-related corporate debt issuance at roughly $1.5 trillion this year, and that supply is doing more to push up the long end of the curve than any fear of default.

A company borrowing at 5% to fund projects returning 30% or 40% will take that trade every time. A company borrowing at 5% to fund projects returning 4% is quietly destroying itself. The rate is the same, but the outcome is opposite.

Negative Free Cash Flow Is Not Always a Warning

The clearest example is the one spooking investors right now. Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) posted its first negative free cash flow since its 2004 IPO, burning $5.9 billion in the second quarter as capital expenditures (CapEx) hit $44.9 billion. Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) swung to negative $7.6 billion on a trailing basis. Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) is the last of the group still generating cash.

Spivey's point is that negative free cash flow driven by investment, rather than operating losses, has historically been a buy signal. Amazon went deeply cash-flow negative while building AWS in the late 2000s, and that stretch marked one of the best entry points in the stock's history. The Home Depot, Inc. (NYSE: HD) and Starbucks Corporation (NASDAQ: SBUX) turning free cash flow positive in the early 2000s signaled the opposite: Growth had stopped.

The most aggressive version of that pattern is happening outside the public markets. Litman and Spivey have spent months tracing how capital raised around SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) is being routed into xAI and the suppliers serving both, and their research on where that money is actually landing names companies most investors have not yet connected to the buildout.

ASML Holds the One Bottleneck Nobody Can Copy

ASML Holding N.V. (NASDAQ: ASML) builds the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography systems required to make the world's most advanced chips, and it has no competitor.

Order intake has been strong enough for the company to raise full-year guidance to €43 billion to €45 billion (approximately $49.9 billion to $52.2 billion) and lay out a two-year capacity sprint: roughly 65 low-NA EUV systems this year, an increase of about 30% for 2027, with another 30% under study for 2028. Management says that added output is already nearly fully spoken for.

Pricing power is the newer part of the story. ASML has signaled that it wants to charge for the full value of its tools rather than throughput alone, a shift that has reportedly frustrated Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (NYSE: TSM). Litman's favorite illustration of the moat: A Chinese manufacturer took an ASML machine apart to reverse-engineer it and could not put it back together. The blueprint was never the product. The calibration is.

GE Vernova Is Sold Out Into the Next Decade

Nuclear may be the long-term answer to AI's power problem, but gas turbines are the only answer available today.

GE Vernova Inc. (NYSE: GEV) ended the second quarter with 116 gigawatts of gas turbine equipment across backlog and slot reservation agreements, up from 100 gigawatts three months earlier. It now expects at least 125 gigawatts under contract by year-end.

Manufacturing is scaling toward 20 gigawatts of annualized output, with a stated path to 30 gigawatts by 2030.

The volatility since June has tracked sentiment around the AI buildout rather than anything in the numbers.

The services and maintenance stream attached to every installed unit is the part the market keeps underweighting, and Altimetry's adjusted return on assets for the business runs near 20%, compared with a reported figure closer to 5%.

Comfort Systems Turned HVAC Into an AI Trade

Comfort Systems USA, Inc. (NYSE: FIX) is a mechanical and electrical contractor, which sounds unglamorous until you look at the backlog: $14.06 billion at the end of the second quarter, compared with roughly $8 billion a year earlier. Technology work now accounts for 58% of revenue.

The advantage is modular prefabrication. Building as much as possible in owned facilities cuts time on-site, helping the company sidestep the labor scarcity choking competitors.

Only a company with this footprint can run that model at scale.

2 Stocks the Rate Math Is Working Against

Oracle Corporation (NYSE: ORCL) is the exception among the big spenders.

S&P cut it to BBB- in July, one notch above speculative grade, and free cash flow was negative $23.7 billion in fiscal 2026. Shares are down roughly 20% year to date.

The problem is not the spending; it is what the spending buys. Oracle is building capacity closer to what Digital Realty Trust, Inc. (NYSE: DLR) or Equinix, Inc. (NASDAQ: EQIX) sells than to the services layer that hyperscalers monetize.

Litman and Spivey see returns on assets sliding sharply as that investment comes online, and fiscal first-quarter results on Sept. 10 will be the next test of whether the market agrees.

Rocket Companies, Inc. (NYSE: RKT) is a different problem with the same root. After absorbing Redfin and Mr. Cooper, Rocket touches roughly one in six United States mortgages.

That scale is an asset when rates fall and a liability when they do not, while corporate borrowing demand is doing its best to keep the long end elevated. Altimetry's read is that the current price requires returns on assets to roughly triple.

Watch the spread between borrowing costs and returns on invested capital, not the headline rate. That gap is what separates the companies compounding through this cycle from those financing their own decline.