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Here’s the big signal as far as I see it: as at 3.40pm AEDT on Friday, the XJO is back to 8,900pts, heading towards levels we last saw in October 2025. That was when Albanese and Trump were having a meeting over critical minerals and in the backdrop of that event, perhaps, Australians were bullish to be on the map.
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What does this tell me? Well, there’s a time-tested rule that whatever happens in the first month of the trading year tends to set the scene for what happens for the remaining 11 months. That’s a pretty big rule of thumb, true, and in a post-COVID world, any truisms have shown themselves to be reversible.
Still, let’s not put bad juju out there. Can we hit 9,500pts by year’s end? I’m hoping so.
Critical Minerals again a theme
Of course, this comes in the same breath as critical minerals supply chains come back to the fore, just like it’s October 2025 all over again. This time, Trump is talking a lot about critical minerals in Greenland; since the US kidnapped Venezuelan President Maduro, the world has woken up to the reminder of the USA’s military might.
And that’s got the Kingdom of Denmark a little nervous, seeing as talks this week between the former and the USA were concluded with not much really changing or being agreed upon.
Trump has since declared critical minerals a national security issue, which doesn’t really fundamentally change anything, but it shows that the US is turning its attention back to the mining of metals as a going concern.
And in that same context, now we’ve got troops from EU countries – including France – also heading to Greenland, on paper, to challenge the interests of China and Russia in the region. Of course, if you believe that’s really why, I have an arctic nation to sell you.
Metals Rally adds context & upside for BHP
At the same time, in the background, metals prices are going wild right now. It’s not just gold, silver, and copper anymore: it’s everything.
Take a look at month-on-month (MoM) performance for the following metals as at 3.45pm AEDT on Friday 16 Jan, via public data on TradingEconomics:
- Gold up +6% MoM
- Silver up +37% MoM
- Lithium up +62% MoM
- Platinum up +19% MoM
- Tin up +30% MoM
- Nickel up +25% MoM
- Rhodium up +26% MoM
- Neodymium up +17% MoM
- Indium up +45% MoM
(Even salmon futures are up, which has nothing to do with metals whatsoever, nor anything else in this article, but I think it’s funny that there’re salmon futures to begin with.)
Here’s what perhaps matters more for Australia: at the same time as the above was captured, it’s also true that iron ore futures on the SGX in Singapore are currently at around US$107/tn – they haven’t hit that level since about October 2024.
On the back of that, in turn, the BHP share price is nearing all-time-highs of $50/sh – which puts BHP’s market cap more or less in line with Commonwealth Bank. That’s not surprising for a country with an economy based on rocks and houses, but, it’s still an indication that we really could be seeing a ‘commodities supercycle.’
One last note: the Powell thing
All of this is to ignore what, on Monday, looked like it might have been the big issue of the week: Trump’s decision to use the US DoJ to hand the Federal Reserve an indictment, targeting Jerome Powell over some comments he made about a renovation project or something.
If that makes no sense to you, it’s because it doesn’t, but Powell’s come out showing the man has utter steez – Jerome used the Federal Reserve’s official media outreach channels, as well as the Central Bank’s YouTube account, to tell the US people that the indictment is politically motivated.
Long story short, Powell has long been a thorn in Donny’s side by refusing to cut rates with aplomb, and because of that, Powell is probably the only thing standing in between a President nobody has the balls to oppose and what could well be significant US economic deterioration.
At a certain point, one really must ask whose agenda Trump is actually working for here. The best case scenario is that it’s only his own.
Anyway, we got US inflation data this week, it’s still pretty hot, and the Fed are unlikely to cut rates this month. That may or may not re-irritate the sore in Trump’s side, so don’t expect to have heard the last of it yet.
Until next week!
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