One of today's picks collects gold at a 97% cash margin and holds a royalty on a Canadian mine whose new underground ramp is set to double output next year.

The other two give you a Brazilian copper producer whose newest mine lifted throughput 27% in a single quarter, and a jet-engine parts maker built on nickel superalloys and titanium that just raised full-year guidance across the board.

Each one has a checkpoint you can put on your calendar.

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The nuclear renaissance stopped being a slide deck this week. TVA became the first U.S. utility to receive an NRC construction permit for the GE Vernova Hitachi BWRX-300 small modular reactor at the Clinch River site near Oak Ridge.

That is a real permit, a real site, and a real reactor design that other utilities are already lined up behind.

Layer on what else hit in the last seven days for you to weigh. The IAEA lifted its long-term nuclear forecast again, projecting global capacity could triple by 2060. General Matter filed its licensing application for a domestic enrichment plant.

And the OECD-IAEA Red Book laid out the uncomfortable math: reactor-related uranium demand could jump from 70,000 tonnes today to 130,000-150,000 tonnes by 2040, with high-growth cases blowing past 200,000 tonnes.

Global exploration spending rose 46% in the last cycle to $1.78 billion. The Red Book says that's not enough, so treat the supply gap as the number that drives your uranium thesis into 2040.

Then Korea confirmed it's in talks to build up to eight large reactors in the U.S., two of them APR-1400s. Saskatchewan released a formal nuclear energy security strategy the same day.

Your takeaway: You want exposure to both ends of this: the reactor builders and the fuel cycle. The fuel cycle side is where the supply gap is measurable and the timeline is short.

Enrichment capacity in particular is where the West is still badly underbuilt, so that is the part of the chain to watch most closely.

On September 23, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau and Argentine Foreign Minister Pablo Quirno launched the Andes-Atlantic Corridor, a joint push to move Argentine lithium, copper and rare earths to Atlantic ports on infrastructure Washington helps finance.

One day later, Landau signed a framework for American investment in Nigeria's mining sector, which Nigeria values at $700 billion in mineral resources. Map the port operators and lithium names on the Argentine route before the tenders drop.

Brazil's President Lula, meanwhile, signed Law No. 15,506 on September 16, formally creating a National Policy on Critical and Strategic Minerals with a presidential-level council attached.

The U.S. followed up by signing a non-binding critical minerals agreement with Goiás state, home to Serra Verde and other rare earth projects.

Serra Verde is private, so for you this is a read-through to listed producers with Brazilian assets, not a direct trade.

Read the pattern. Ecuador just took a $1.7 billion Chinese deal for a major gold deposit. Nigeria signed with Washington the same week.

Argentina locked in with the U.S. Brazil is trying to keep both doors open while building its own domestic chain. This is the great sorting: Latin America is the prize, and where you put capital next depends on which side each country ends up on.

Your takeaway: You want producers with existing operating assets in the U.S.-aligned corridor: Argentina, Chile, Brazil, plus the U.S. itself.

Companies with permits already in hand and Western capital sponsors are the ones who get the low-cost federal offtakes and grants. Explorers with paper claims and no relationships get skipped.

Three data points landed within a week, and together they tell you the automation curve just steepened.

EACON confirmed its autonomous solution is now deployed across more than 1,500 battery-electric mining trucks, making battery-electric the largest single powertrain in its autonomous fleet.

Volvo announced its Autona program has hauled three million tonnes autonomously. Epiroc rolled out seamless underground-to-surface truck automation using 3D LiDAR.

The bigger structural signal came from Barrick, which selected Avathon's Physical AI platform to run an AI-native operating model across its North American mines.

That's not a pilot. That's a company-wide integration linking exploration, planning, safety, processing, maintenance, and supply chain into one intelligence layer.

Why you should care: labor costs, diesel costs, and permitting delays are the three margin killers in this cycle. Autonomy attacks all three simultaneously.

It cuts headcount at remote sites, enables electric haulage economics, and shrinks the environmental footprint arguments regulators use to slow-walk permits.

Your takeaway: The winners are the majors with the capital to deploy autonomy at scale and the equipment names supplying the systems.

The gap between fully autonomous fleets and legacy operations is now measurable in cost per tonne, and it will widen every quarter.

SEVEN PICKS SELECTED

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*Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Investing involves risk. This material does not constitute investment, legal, accounting, or tax advice. Zacks Investment Research is not a licensed dealer, broker, or investment adviser.

OR Royalties (NYSE: OR)

OR Royalties, the former Osisko Gold Royalties, gives you gold exposure without the mine-site cost inflation.

It earned 20,757 gold equivalent ounces in the second quarter; revenue and operating cash flow both rose 62% from a year earlier, and 2026 guidance calls for 80,000 to 90,000 GEOs at a cash margin of about 97%.

The anchor asset is its royalty on Canadian Malartic, where Agnico Eagle's Odyssey underground mine is expected to produce about 120,000 ounces this year, about 240,000 in 2027, and about 450,000 in 2028. You get paid on that ramp without funding a dollar of the build.

The balance sheet lets management pay you while you wait. Net debt was $139.4 million at the end of June; the quarterly dividend was raised 18.2% to $0.065 a share, and the company kept buying back stock.

Your next catalyst is a construction decision at Cariboo in British Columbia, where OR holds a 5% NSR royalty and a start is expected in the second half of this year.

Ero Copper Corp. (NYSE: ERO)

Ero Copper gives you copper growth in Brazil, the same country that just wrote a national critical minerals policy into law. Its newest mine, Tucumã in Pará state, lifted plant throughput 27% from the first quarter and pushed copper output up about 6% to 8,964 tonnes, even on lower grades.

Consolidated 2026 copper guidance of 67,500 to 77,500 tonnes was maintained, with both copper operations weighted to the second half, and C1 cash cost guidance of $2.15 to $2.35 a pound leaves you a wide margin at today's copper price.

The cash is starting to show up. Second-quarter revenue rose 8% from the first quarter to $284.3 million, operating cash flow reached $138 million, and net debt fell $38 million to $452.7 million, or 0.8 times EBITDA.

Gold from the Xavantina operations is the swing factor: management expects the low end of its 40,000 to 50,000 ounce range, heavily weighted to the second half.

Watch third-quarter Tucumã throughput and Xavantina mining rates to see whether the second-half step-up is real.

Howmet Aerospace (NYSE: HWM)

Howmet makes the engine airfoils, structural castings, fasteners and forged wheels that go on nearly every commercial and military aircraft flying, and its parts are built from nickel superalloys and titanium, two metals Washington now treats as strategic.

The numbers back it up: second-quarter revenue rose 24% from a year earlier, or 21% excluding acquisitions and divestitures, and the adjusted EBITDA margin widened 340 basis points to 32.1%.

Management raised full-year guidance again, to about $10.05 billion of revenue, $5.27 of adjusted earnings per share and $1.9 billion of free cash flow, and it bought back $600 million of stock in the first half.

Engine makers are still capacity-constrained, which keeps pricing on Howmet's side. Treat it as a critical metals supplier with an aerospace order book, and use the third-quarter report as your check on whether the guidance raise holds.

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Gold: $4,180/oz. Down about 3% year-to-date from the January opening of $4,350.60, and well off the $5,586.20 high set earlier this year. Central bank buying continues to set the floor.

Silver: $60/oz. Down about 13% year-to-date from the January opening near $71, and far below the $121 peak set in January. The pullback has industrial buyers restocking.

Copper: $6.60/lb. Up about 18% year-to-date from the January opening of $5.65. The phased refined-copper tariff plan (15% in 2027, 30% in 2028) keeps U.S. premiums in focus.

Uranium: Holding firm with the IAEA lifting its long-term forecast and TVA scoring the first BWRX-300 permit. Utilities are contracting further out the curve than they have in a decade.

Nickel: Range-bound, but the structural bid is building as Western buyers push for non-Indonesian, non-Chinese supply.

Rare Earths: NdPr pricing remains elevated as U.S.-Brazil critical minerals cooperation ramps and Goiás state gets pulled into the Western supply chain conversation.

Tin: Overlooked but tightening. Critica's Tasmanian tin-tungsten resource announcement flagged $1.4 billion in project economics on a metal Western supply almost forgotten about.

Platinum: Firm on tight above-ground stocks. Hydrogen build-out is the slow-burn catalyst that keeps getting pushed out but never disappears.

Metal Trend Exploration Focus

Today's picks tie together three threads: a gold royalty that collects on production growth without carrying the cost inflation, copper tonnes coming online in a country that just put critical minerals policy into law, and the aerospace metals chain Washington wants kept at home.

Add the Andes-Atlantic Corridor, the Nigeria framework and TVA's first BWRX-300 permit, and you're watching the Western supply map get drawn in real time.

All three names report third-quarter results in the coming weeks, so you'll get fresh numbers to test each thesis against.

— Noah Zelvis, Resource Brief