Welcome back, GoldBuzzers!

Gold and silver both pushed higher on tariff and geopolitical tailwinds, the CME decided to shut down all metals trading mid-session (again), and JP Morgan slapped a $6,300 year-end target on gold.

We'll break it all down below.

Plus, Nigel Hughes is back with the final part of his Insider deep dive - this time covering the gold, silver and mining signals that most of you have been asking about.

Ok, let’s dive in. 👇

Gold clawed back most of Tuesday's losses to trade around $5,165 on Wednesday, buoyed by the usual cocktail of tariff chaos and geopolitical jitters - President Trump's 10% global tariff is now live and the White House is already pushing to crank it to 15% after the Supreme Court torched his broader reciprocal levies last week. Silver stole the show though, surging over 3% to roughly $90 and compressing the gold/silver ratio down to 57.6 - a far cry from the 80+ levels we saw just 18 months ago.

Then things got really interesting: the CME halted all metals trading on its Globex platform around midday citing "technical issues" (the second time in a month, and conveniently just 48 hours before March First Notice Day for silver contracts - make of that what you will). When metals reopened around 1:45 PM Central, prices got immediately smacked down.

Meanwhile, JP Morgan dropped a fresh note today reaffirming their $6,300 gold target by year-end - so even the big banks are saying this bull run has serious structural legs. On the headwinds side, Fed officials continue pumping the brakes on rate cut expectations, with Susan Collins noting that holding steady is "likely appropriate" given sticky inflation. US-Iran nuclear talks resume Thursday in Geneva, and investors are watching closely.

Bottom line: the fundamentals keep stacking up for precious metals, but the paper market shenanigans aren't going away anytime soon.

Guest Article by Nigel Hughes | GoldBuzz Insider Beta Tester

Nigel Hughes is a blockchain engineer and technical consultant with over 30 years of experience in fintech, trading systems, and emerging technology. He's held senior roles including work with the NEM Foundation, one of the world's leading blockchain organizations, and has led technical strategy for trading and blockchain platforms across Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

In my previous article, I shared how the GoldBuzz Insider system helped me sidestep a 43% loss in Bitcoin since last August. But this is a precious metals newsletter, and I realize many of you may not be interested in Bitcoin, so let me talk about the signals that most of you actually care about - gold, silver and mining stocks.

I’ve been watching these signals since the start of 2025 and here are my observations.

For each market, the Insider dashboard shows two strategies - Max Return and Min Risk - and makes it clear whether each is Bullish or Bearish.

What I particularly like is the Proximity measure, which estimates how close a signal is to changing. If a change is approaching, it even gives you an estimated number of days, which helps you prepare. It’s a simple layout but it gives you everything you need at a glance.

There’s not much to say about gold, and that’s actually the point.

Both the Max Return and Min Risk systems were bullish when I started receiving the signals at the beginning of 2025, with gold at $2,658. Both stayed bullish the entire year. Gold closed at $4,322 - a 62% gain.

If you were following the gold forums last October, you’ll remember the panic when gold fell 10%. A lot of people bailed out or went short. Both systems remained bullish throughout that correction, and gold quickly recovered to make new highs.

Some people might want a system that’s constantly jumping in and out of the market. But if you’re in a sustained uptrend and you have confidence in the method, why not just ride it?

Silver was a different story. It was much more active, much more volatile and much more profitable if you were on the right side of the moves.

The Max Return system returned 125% on the year. It gave me 12 trades, with the winners significantly outpacing the losers. The standout was a run from November through to the end of the year that returned 48% on its own.

The Min Risk system was slightly more conservative - 11 trades, in the market 65% of the time - but it still returned 100% on the year.

2025 was obviously an excellent year for silver. But even in a bull market, I find it incredibly reassuring to follow a systematic approach that will get you out when you need to, rather than relying on guesswork.

This is where Insider really surprised me. I knew very little about mining companies when I started, and I didn’t start receiving the mining rankings until April 2025, so I’d already had a few months with the main signals before they were released.

Here’s the problem with mining stocks that most investors learn the hard way: the majority of individual companies significantly underperform their benchmark ETFs. You’d have been better off just buying GDX or SIL than trying to pick winners. So why take the risk of picking an individual company if the reward isn’t there?

The Insider system tackles this by ranking over 200 companies - across Majors, Producers, Juniors, Royalty Companies and ETFs - using a scoring system that identifies which ones are actually beating their benchmark, and by how much. Every company has been pre-screened on fundamentals like financial stability, costs and share structure before it even makes the list.

The results speak for themselves. When I received my first Gold Majors rankings on April 13th, Lundin Gold was ranked #1 with a score of 9.4 out of 10. Its price was $46. Today it’s over $120.

But my favorite example is from the Gold Juniors. Back in April, the #1 ranked company out of about 75 was a little outfit called Montage Gold, trading at $3.65. I liked the name and kept watching it hold its position near the top of the rankings throughout the year. It’s now over $16.

Most of the other top-ranked companies have doubled or tripled over the past 10 months as well.

Insider doesn’t tell you to short a market. It’s only ever Bullish (in the market) or Bearish (out of the market). So ultimately, it can only take what the market delivers. And if you believe, as I do, that this is a generational bull market, then there’s a lot more to come.

It’s been a wonderful experience to be involved from the very early days of the Theseus research project and to see it come to fruition like this. I was never a gold guru before any of this - but I’ve learned an enormous amount since last year, and I hope you’ve found my experiences useful.

Nigel is an expert in all things Crypto, Blockchain and AI. He consults remotely with individuals and small teams from all over the world. Feel free to get in touch with him via his LinkedIn.

That’s all for this Thursday, folks. I’ll see you on Sunday.

Before you go, please take a moment to rate today’s newsletter and let us know how we did.

Rick Adams
Founder, GoldBuzz
rick@goldbuzz.com