Happy Tuesday, GoldBuzzers!

As I said last Thursday, gold and silver were extremely oversold and we were due for a significant rebound. I also mentioned that “a daily close back inside GLD's lower Bollinger Band” would be the first confirmation that the washout is over, and that’s what we got with three consecutive days of solid gains.

Despite the peace announcement, the situation in the Middle East still looks uncertain and the June Fed meeting takes place tomorrow, so there are still hurdles to overcome before we can be confident this is the start of a sustained move higher.

If we get that kind of a sustained move, some of the junior miners are ready to do some serious catching up and that’s what I’m looking at today.

️Let’s get into it. ⬇️

Gold closed Monday above $4,310 an ounce, up about 2.8 percent and logging a third straight session of gains, while silver jumped close to 4 percent to finish just under $70.

Both metals caught a bid after the US and Iran reached a ceasefire that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz, pushing crude to a two-month low and cooling the energy-inflation fears that had been feeding talk of another rate hike. The agreement is set to be signed in Switzerland on Friday, though neither side has released the text, so traders are pricing the headline and not the fine print.

Attention now shifts to the Federal Reserve, which holds its first meeting under new chair Kevin Warsh tomorrow is widely expected to leave rates on hold. With oil falling and the Fed likely sidelined, buyers kept the upper hand into the close.

Silver juniors are the scrappiest end of the precious metals world - explorers and early developers chasing silver deposits with long runways and limited cash. Most have no revenue, no production, and a stock price that moves more on project news than on any reliable financial metric. The trade-off is optionality: when a junior gets the right catalyst at the right moment in the silver cycle, the move can be violent to the upside.

As you can see in our infographic below, the silver junior space is massively underperforming most other mining sectors at the moment, with only 11% of names beating their ETF benchmark. But a handful of names are getting actual things done. Things like new acquisitions, mines restarting, construction milestones - and that separates these companies sharply from the rest.

Let’s look at three juniors with very positive recent catalysts.

In my view, Honey Badger Silver (TUF.V) is the most interesting repositioning story in this category right now. In April, the company closed the acquisition of the Prairie Creek Silver Project in Canada's Northwest Territories for C$12 million - a fully permitted, high-grade underground silver-zinc-lead asset that had been sitting largely dormant. Prairie Creek carries a historic 2021 resource estimate of 9.8 million tonnes of measured and indicated resources at 139 g/t silver, with significant zinc and lead credits on top.

And after Eric Sprott’s massive recent investment, the Chairman has been buying too.

By the end of May, Honey Badger had appointed JDS Energy & Mining to run an updated preliminary economic assessment (a PEA - think of it as a first serious look at whether the project works financially), targeting completion in Q3 2026. At #1 in our Silver Juniors ranking, climbed three spots from #4, it's a small company betting big on a single high-grade project.

Bunker Hill Mining (BNKR.TO) is the most imminent producer in this list - and the category's biggest rank mover over the past two months, up nine spots to #12. The company is restarting the historic Bunker Hill mine in Idaho's Silver Valley, a lead-zinc-silver operation that last produced concentrate in 1981. As of mid-March, construction and commissioning stood at 85% complete, with mills turning and stockpiles sufficient for the first three months of operations. Exploration drilling already underway has hit new high-grade silver in the Cate-8 target adjacent to development, adding upside to the initial mine plan. The restart is happening now - this month.

Skeena Gold & Silver (SKE.TO) is the biggest name in the trio by a wide margin - a C$5 billion developer with a project that will eventually produce gold and silver at scale. Eskay Creek, Skeena's open-pit project in British Columbia's Golden Triangle, hit 49% completion as of late February 2026, with initial production targeted for Q2 2027.

In April, Skeena completed a US$750 million senior secured notes offering to refinance its project financing and partially buy back a gold stream - the kind of capital structure move that de-risks a development project considerably. At #4 in the Silver Juniors ranking, one spot up from #5.

Vizsla Silver (VZLA) slipped two spots to #2 as ongoing security and operational disruptions at its Panuco silver-gold project in Sinaloa, Mexico continue to weigh on its trajectory despite a government-backed working capital facility secured in May.

Hycroft Mining (HYMC) fell two to #3, but the underlying story is actually strong - the company reported a 55% jump in measured and indicated gold and silver resources to 562.6 million ounces of silver at its Nevada Hycroft Mine, plus $189 million in cash and no debt at quarter-end.

Blackrock Silver (BRC.V) dropped three to #5 despite filing an updated PEA for its Tonopah West project in Nevada showing a 28% after-tax IRR at disciplined metal prices, with a permit in hand from Nevada environmental authorities.

Silver Storm Mining (SVRS.V) climbed five to #15 on a major milestone: the company poured its first silver-gold doré at its La Parrilla Silver Mine Complex in Durango, Mexico on June 11, 2026.

Silver Juniors as a whole remains a weak-performing category, with fewer than one in eight names beating SIL right now. What this week's featured names illustrate is that within that weak category, the companies actually executing on near-term milestones are separating meaningfully from those still at the "drilling and hoping" stage.

If a sustained silver price leads to capital returning to the sector, some of these stronger names will rebound significantly from these levels.

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

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Rick Adams
Founder, GoldBuzz
rick@goldbuzz.com