LME Week opens today with copper concentrate in a squeeze and gold miners priced well below what their earnings would suggest.

That's where today's picks come in: an Americas gold and silver producer that sold its Turkish assets for $1.49 billion in cash and is sending much of it back through buybacks, a Colombian gold miner heading into first gold at a new plant, and the US ammonia producer running on cheap domestic natural gas.

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London Metal Exchange Week kicks off today, and the concentrate market looks like nothing the industry has seen before. Fastmarkets' copper concentrates treatment charge index (cif Asia Pacific) fell to negative $272.20 per tonne on October 9, from negative $69.70 at the start of the year.

A negative TC means smelters are effectively paying miners to secure concentrate. LME three-month copper set a record intraday high of $14,875 per tonne (about $6.75/lb) on September 10 and settled near $14,485 on Friday. Zinc treatment charges are at record lows heading into 2027 contract talks, and tin has held above $50,000 per tonne since June.

Chilean mine output fell 7% from January through July, and global copper mine production slipped 1% year over year, per Fastmarkets. Section 232 tariff expectations pulled metal into the US and drained LME stocks over the summer. You are looking at a market where both the raw-material end and the refined-metal end are tight at the same time.

Your takeaway: When smelters are paying miners for concentrate, the leverage sits with whoever controls the ore. Favor integrated producers with mine-to-metal flow over pure processors, and listen for 2027 treatment charge signals in the majors' LME Week commentary this week.

China's battery-grade lithium carbonate spot price fell to about 102,000 yuan/mt on October 16 (roughly $14,300/mt), per SMM and Mysteel. SMM's weekly average dropped 14.7% to 104,400 yuan/mt, and the most-traded Guangzhou futures contract slid another 4.2% on Friday.

The selling is about expected future supply: ternary cathode orders are weak, and salt plant inventories edged higher. If you have lithium exposure, watch whether the 100,000 yuan level holds.

Here's the contrarian wrinkle. SMM says LFP supply and demand are stable, separator inventories are low with supply tightening, and spot destocking is still lending support. The pressure is coming from forward supply expectations, not from today's physical market. That gap is often how capitulation lows form.

Your takeaway: Don't rush into pure lithium miners while the supply overhang is still being priced in. Build your watchlist of integrated battery-materials names with downstream processing contracts now, and wait for spot to stabilize before you act.

World Gold Council data put the industry's average all-in sustaining cost (AISC, the full cost of pulling an ounce out of the ground) at a record $1,785/oz in Q1 2026, up 16% year over year.

Against gold around $4,200 today, that implies a margin near $2,400/oz. That's about 21% below Q1's record $3,076/oz, but still far above anything the industry earned before 2025. Moore Mining's review of fiscal 2025 results found median AISC up 14.3%, with the median margin still around $1,715/oz.

Yet Sprott says the NYSE Arca Gold Miners Index trades at about 5.7 times expected operating earnings, roughly 22% below its 20-year average of 7.3 times, even though forward earnings per share have risen about 4.4-fold since the end of 2023. You are getting cash flow per ounce well above historical norms at a below-average multiple.

Your takeaway: You don't need gold to rally for this to work. You need the equities to catch up to their cash flow. Q3 earnings season, which starts in late October, is where that case gets tested.

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Aris Mining Corporation (NYSE American: ARMN)

You get a gold producer in the middle of a step change. Aris Mining runs Segovia and Marmato in Colombia and kept its 2026 guidance of 300,000 to 350,000 ounces after producing 148,000 ounces in the first half, with the second half weighted heavier.

Q2 adjusted EBITDA came in around $179 million. The next catalyst is Marmato's new 5,000 tonne-per-day carbon-in-pulp plant, on schedule for first gold in Q4 2026, with a ramp to about 4,000 tpd by mid-2027 and full capacity by the end of 2027. Management's longer-term target is roughly 500,000 ounces a year.

If the miner valuation gap starts to close, a producer with that much growth ahead is the kind you want to own. Your risk is Colombia: the jurisdiction and the ramp-up execution both need to go right.

SSR Mining Inc. (NASDAQ: SSRM)

SSR Mining spent two years under the shadow of the February 2024 Çöpler incident in Türkiye. It has now walked away from the problem: on June 24 it closed the sale of its 80% Çöpler stake for about $1.49 billion in cash, and on July 17 it swapped its 20% of the Hod Maden project for an uncapped 4% net smelter return royalty.

What's left is an Americas gold and silver producer (Marigold and Cripple Creek & Victor in the US, Seabee in Canada, Puna in Argentina) guiding to 450,000 to 535,000 gold-equivalent ounces in 2026. The cash is coming back to you: SSR repurchased 12.9 million shares for $409.2 million in the first half, which it calls an effective yield of nearly 8%, and the board approved another $500 million in June.

Puna's silver output adds leverage if the gold/silver ratio narrows. Production is weighted to Q4 and AISC is trending toward the top of guidance, so the Nov 3 Q3 report is your first checkpoint.

CF Industries Holdings (NYSE: CF)

Nitrogen isn't a metal, but it's the input grain markets can't do without. CF Industries is one of the world's largest ammonia producers, and it runs on US natural gas, a structural cost edge over European and Asian producers that rely on imported LNG.

Its plants ran at 98% of available ammonia capacity in the first half, producing $1.34 billion of net earnings and $2.18 billion of adjusted EBITDA. Trailing free cash flow was $1.82 billion, about a 10% yield on its roughly $18 billion market cap. CF raised its dividend 20% to $0.60 a quarter in July and is working through a $2 billion buyback.

The growth leg is low-carbon ammonia: Donaldsonville's carbon capture with ExxonMobil has run since July 2025, and in August CF broke ground with JERA and Mitsui on Blue Point One in Louisiana, a roughly $4 billion plant set to be the world's largest low-carbon ammonia facility. Q3 results land Nov 4 after the close.

• Gold: $4,160 oz, down about 3.5% year to date from the $4,350 January opening and well off the $5,586 peak. Miner equities still trade below their 20-year average multiple.

• Silver: $57/oz, down about 19% from the $71 January opening and well off its $121 peak. That leaves the gold/silver ratio near 72.

• Copper: $6.59/lb, up about 17% year to date. LME three-month peaked at $14,875/t ($6.75/lb) on September 10. Record-low concentrate TCs tell you mine supply is the binding constraint.

• Uranium: Spot around $90/lb; the long-term price sits at $96 (Sprott/Cameco series), flat for about four months. Term above spot means utilities are more worried about post-2030 supply than today's.

• Lithium (carbonate): China spot about 102,000 yuan/mt (~$14,300/mt) on October 16, with SMM's weekly average down 14.7%. Still capitulating, not bottoming yet.

• Nickel: LME around $15,350/t ($6.96/lb). Indonesian supply growth keeps the pressure on, and nickel is the second-best stocked metal on the LME.

• Tin: LME around $50,400/t, above $50,000 since June. One of 2026's strongest industrial metals on AI/data center demand and supply disruption.

• Zinc: LME around $3,700/t. Concentrate TCs are at record lows into 2027 contract talks, and cash trades at a premium to three-month, a sign of nearby tightness.

Metal Trend Exploration Focus

LME Week sets the tone for the next quarter, and this one opens with concentrate markets tight and copper cash still at a premium to three-month. Precious metals have pulled back, but the gap between miner earnings and miner valuations is the biggest asymmetry on the board.

Battery metals are still capitulating, which is the phase you want to watch before you start accumulating. The theme into year-end: supply discipline is meeting electrification and AI power demand, and the equities haven't fully caught up. If you're positioning now, you're early.

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— Noah Zelvis, Resource Brief