BUY ALERT - Washington Lifted Sanctions and This Stock Fell

Nobody sends you a notice when your grocery bill goes up. You just end up paying more whether you like it or not.

You stand at the register on a Tuesday, the total is higher than it was, and you pay it, because there is nothing else you can do.

Fertilizer is a large part of why.

According to the World Bank, prices are up 31% this year, and everything put in the ground in 2026 cost more to grow because of it.

The extra dollar you handed the cashier started as an extra dollar a farmer handed a fertilizer company, months earlier, in a transaction you never saw and had no say in.

Sixty-Two Cents on the Dollar

One company we’re adding to the Moonshot Minute portfolio today sells the crop nutrient nobody can squeeze.

In the first half of this year it collected an average of $266 for every tonne of potash it sold, and $166 of that came back as cash earnings.

A business like that, in a year when fertilizer prices are up 31%, ought to be expensive.

In March this stock traded above $85. As I write this, it’s trading in the mid-$60s.

I’ll explain why we’re getting such a great discount, but first, you need to know something.

A Potash Producer Buys Nothing

Farmers use three major nutrients, and they are not substitutes.

Nitrogen builds the plant.

Phosphate builds the roots.

Potash carries water through the crop and hardens it against drought and disease.

A grower short on any one of them gives up yield.

The companies selling them are in three completely different positions, and the difference is what each one has to buy before it can sell anything.

A phosphate producer buys sulfur.

Most of the world's sulfur comes off refining sour crude, and a large share of that crude moves through the Strait of Hormuz, which has been effectively shut for months. Sulfur got expensive and stayed there.

One of the world's largest phosphate producers reported a quarterly loss this month and pointed straight at input costs.

A nitrogen producer buys natural gas.

The nitrogen itself is free, since roughly 78% of the air is made of it, but pulling it out of the sky and forcing it into ammonia burns enormous quantities of gas.

In Europe, that has been a problem for years, and several plants there have gone quiet this season while their North American competitors run flat out.

But a potash producer buys nothing.

Potassium cannot be pulled out of the air or built in a plant. It has to be dug up, and this company's input is an ore body it already owns and has been mining for decades.

So the obvious question is why everybody doesn't just dig their own.

BHP is trying.

Their Jansen mine in Canada was approved in 2021 at $5.7 billion for the first stage.

That estimate is now $8.4 billion, with first production pushed to mid-next year.

The second stage went from $4.9 billion to $6.9 billion and slipped to 2031. In June they wrote off $2.3 billion against the project. Total commitment is north of $15 billion, and BHP has missed its own cost and schedule estimates three times.

That works out to roughly $2,000 of capital for every tonne of annual production capacity.

The company I am recommending today already owns six mines. On its own earnings call this month, management put the cost of expanding those existing mines by three million tonnes at $200 to $300 a tonne.

Somewhere between seven and ten times cheaper, on shafts that were sunk decades ago and paid for long before any of this started.

That is the moat.

Getting into potash is nearly impossible, and this company finished getting in a generation ago.

Keeping costs steady is one thing. This company has spent the last four years pushing its own costs down, and it did it while the price of its main product was collapsing.

A 250-Tonne Machine and Nobody Underground

Four years ago potash was one of the best businesses on earth.

The price cleared $1,000 a tonne in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine and Belarusian supply went behind sanctions. Everyone in the industry printed money.

Then it broke.

By late last year, the price was under $300.

A 70% collapse in your only product does what you would expect. Expansion plans got shelved across the industry while management waited for a price that might not come back.

This company mined straight through it and set records for both production and sales volume in the first half of this year.

Then it held the costs it controls flat this year against last year, in an economy where nothing is flat, by taking the people out of the mine.

At one of their main sites, a 250-tonne boring machine cut an entire production wing without a single person setting foot underground.

That was the first time it had happened in more than fifty years of mining at that company.

How?

The operator sat in a control room a few hundred meters away, working off radar, LiDAR, and AI systems reading the rock face in real time.

Two years ago management told investors they were aiming for 40 to 50% of ore mined under automation by the end of 2026. They hit 53% in the first half of this year.

Six months early, and above the top of the range of their original estimates.

You’ve probably heard a great deal about artificial intelligence this year, most of it involving chips and data centers and power bills. In fact, I’ve written about it quite often in these pages.

Well, this is what it looks like when it shows up in a potash mine and quietly shaves cost out of every tonne that comes up the shaft.

So the cost side cannot be raised from outside, and it is being lowered from within. That leaves the price.

China Just Signed at $348 a Tonne

Once a year the major potash sellers sit down with China and India and settle benchmark supply contracts. Whatever those two agree to sets the tone for what everyone else pays for the next twelve months.

Last year those talks happened with the price under $300, and the whole industry braced.

China settled 2026 at $348 a tonne. India settled at $383.

The bottom is behind us, in a business whose customers cannot skip a season.

And the weather is about to make skipping one even harder.

A 69% Chance of the Strongest El Niño on Record

On August 13, NOAA put the odds of a very strong El Niño above 90% for this fall and winter, and 95% for October through December. They give it a 69% chance of being stronger than any El Niño in the record going back to 1950.

Strong El Niño years scramble harvests. Drought across Australia and Southeast Asia, floods through parts of South America, and a wheat, rice and palm oil market that reprices in a hurry.

And you’ll feel it in the spring with even higher prices than what you’re seeing today.

It also hardens fertilizer demand.

A grower watching the weather turn against him has exactly one lever he controls, and that is how much yield he built into his soil before the season started.

Costs are locked down, prices are recovering, and demand is about to get more urgent.

So why did this stock go from $85 to mid-$60s?

In March, Washington finished lifting sanctions on Belarusian potash.

It came in stages. First in December and again in March, both tied to prisoner releases.

On March 26, the Treasury formally struck Belaruskali and the Belarusian Potash Company from the sanctions list.

Belarus digs about a fifth of the world's potash. For four years, most of it had been locked behind those sanctions.

The market did the obvious arithmetic, assumed a flood of supply was coming, and sold.

So this company’s stock went from above $85 in March to $61 by the first week of July.

Anyone who bought the excitement in the spring rode it all the way down.

I didn’t recommend it when it was exciting, and I bought nothing while it fell, because I wanted one question answered first.

Was the flood real?

It was not. You see, Belarus never stopped selling.

They shipped roughly 12 million tonnes last year.

Before the sanctions, they shipped about 12 million tonnes.

When Lithuania cut their rail line to the sea in 2022, they rerouted the entire business through Russian Baltic ports and overland trains into China.

Slower, more expensive, and they did it anyway.

Lifting the sanctions only put a legal stamp on tonnage that was already moving.

Then Belarus settled its own contracts.

China paid $348. India paid $383, and Belarus sold to them. Across the past decade, India has averaged about $8 a tonne over China. This year, the seller everyone expected to dump inventory asked $35 more and got it.

A company clearing out a warehouse cuts its price to move volume. Belarus raised its price into the exact market it was supposed to be drowning.

The flood was a story that never became a reality, but the discount it left behind is real and still sitting there.

Why Today?

Two things land between here and year-end.

Crop development across North America is running ahead of its average pace, which the company expects to pull the fall fertilizer application season forward and bring potash volumes back to normal levels after a soft second quarter.

And there is an investor day on November 30 where management lays out its targets for the next several years.

We waited five months for a price worth paying. I want members holding this before they arrive, not reading about it after.

The Name, the Price, and the Size Are Below

Everything above this line is yours whether you ever pay me a dollar or not.

The margin math. Why nobody can compete their way into this business. What a competitor is spending right now to try. And why the market marked this one down for a flood of supply that never showed up.

What I’m revealing below is the ticker.

If you’re a Premium Member, see below where you’ll find the ticker, with our buy-up-to price, the exact position size going into the portfolio, what breaks the thesis, and a lot more.

Here is the Moonshot Minute record, with nothing left out of it.

Thirteen positions closed since I started this letter. Thirteen winners and no losers, averaging a gain of 78%. Seven of those thirteen doubled or better before closing them.

Twenty-seven positions still open. Twenty-two are green, five are down, and the whole book still averages 44%, even with every loser counted against it.

Five of the open positions are up more than 100% right now. The best of them is up 225%, and we pulled our original stake out of that one back in April.

But before sharing the new buy alert, two things you should know.

The first is speed.

Nothing about this one is fast, and it will not triple by Christmas.

What it does is pay you while you wait, through a dividend and a buyback whose pace it raised this summer.

The second is purity. Potash is one of the businesses under this roof, and it is the best of them by a distance. The others are not all in the same shape, and members get my read on each one below.

Being early can be expensive. In this one it costs nothing.

You’re going to hand over that money at the register either way. This is the only version where some of it comes back.

Double D

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