Xi Lands Today Holding Something We Want

Volkswagen got kicked out of Europe's blue-chip stock club this week.

The index picks its members by size, and VW's stock is down nearly 30% this year. Last Friday, the company warned it'll take about €10 billion in charges in 2026. Roughly €6 billion of that is a write-down on Porsche.

That one stung a little because I'm a Porsche guy, and I have been for a long time. And in case you didn't know, the Porsche and Piëch families control Volkswagen. Their holding company owns about 53% of VW's voting shares.

VW blames a lot of things… a Chinese market that's shrunk about 20%, American tariffs, and electric cars that earn less profit than its gas cars.

While that’s all true, my read is a bit simpler than that.

VW and Porsche were too slow to own their own supply chain, and they're paying for it in their costs.

Look at the battery, the most expensive part of an electric car. BYD started out in 1995 as a battery company. It makes its own cells and has bought stakes in lithium mines around the world.

When you own the mine and the battery plant, nobody marks up the final product. That's how BYD sells its little Seagull hatchback in China for under $10,000 and still makes money.

And it’s working our nicely for them. Last year, BYD passed Tesla as the biggest maker of battery-powered cars on the planet.

VW's first battery cells from its own European gigafactory came off the line last December. Porsche set up its own battery cell company in 2021 to build high-performance cells for its electric sports cars, which, for me as a fan of their sports cars, felt like heresy.

Porsche then cut most of that staff last year and announced this spring that it's shutting the company down.

BYD spent 30 years moving closer to the source. The Germans took too long.

Carnegie Bought the Mines. Ford Bought the Forests.

None of this is new. It's the oldest play in the book, and America pretty much invented it.

Andrew Carnegie didn't want anyone else setting the price of his iron ore, so he bought iron mines in Minnesota's Mesabi Range and hundreds of miles of railroad to haul the ore to his mills.

Henry Ford's River Rouge plant in Michigan took in coal, iron ore, and timber from mines and forests Ford owned, and finished cars came out the other end.

In business school, they call it vertical integration. To me, it’s the difference between renting and owning. Like it or not, a renter pays whatever the landlord asks when the lease comes up.

Seems like the West forgot that lesson.

For about 40 years, it was cheaper to buy from whoever was charging the least, and that was usually China. Factories paid consultants to learn how to run "just in time," with parts showing up the day they’re needed.

It was efficient, it was cheap, but expensive in the long run.

One Rule in Beijing Shut a Ford Plant in Chicago

In April 2025, China put new export restrictions on rare earths and the magnets made from them.

You've probably never seen one of these magnets, but you already own dozens. They're small, they're the strongest permanent magnets made, and they sit inside electric motors, power seats, speakers, wind turbines, fighter jets, and guided missiles. There simply isn’t a substitute.

Within weeks, European parts suppliers started shutting down production lines. Ford idled the Chicago plant that builds the Explorer for a week because it couldn't get the parts.

One government decision in Beijing adjusted a licensing rule, and an American assembly line went quiet.

The U.S. Geological Survey tracks 77 mineral commodities. China produces 74 of them and is the world's No. 1 producer of 39. As if that weren’t enough, it refines roughly 90% of the world's rare earths.

The Pentagon Is Now a Mining Shareholder

The United States finally woke up, and it's done being a renter.

In July 2025, the Pentagon became the largest shareholder in MP Materials, which runs America's only large rare earth mine.

The government also guaranteed a minimum price for the company's main product, nearly double what the market was paying at the time.

Last November, Washington added copper, silver, uranium, and seven other materials to its official list of critical minerals.

That list now has 60 entries.

Silver goes into nearly every circuit board and solar panel made, and no other metal conducts electricity as well.

The defense industry is moving even faster. Weapons makers are skipping the middlemen altogether and going straight to the miners to lock up supply.

Sam Riggall, who runs Sunrise Energy Metals, described the new buyer as "not very sensitive to pricing."

Think about it. A single missile can cost millions of dollars. The metal inside it is a rounding error. If the choice is paying double for tungsten or not building the missile, the Pentagon pays double.

For a mining company, for any company really, a customer who doesn't haggle is the best customer there is.

By the way, I first wrote about Sunrise back in May and gave the ticker away for free. It's building a scandium mine with backing from the Department of War, and the stock is up 36% since.

Xi Lands Today. A U.S. Mine Still Takes 29 Years.

Xi Jinping lands in Washington today for a three-day visit. It's the first Chinese state visit in 11 years, and rare earths are on the agenda.

Last fall, China agreed to pause its broadest export controls for one year. That pause has been shaky since it started. U.S. officials have privately accused Beijing of abusing it by cutting off rare earths to Japan and taking their time on export licenses to American buyers.

I don't know how the summit goes, and neither does anyone else.

If talks go badly, the controls could come back, and anyone holding critical minerals gets paid.

If talks go well, the pause gets extended, and these stocks could cool off as traders relax. I'd welcome that because a handshake in the Oval Office doesn't dig a mine.

In the U.S., it takes an average of about 29 years to get a new mine from discovery to production, according to S&P Global.

A dip in prices after a friendly summit would just be a cheaper entry into a problem that'll still be here through at least the end of this decade.

No matter what happens this week, the West needs mines and refineries it doesn't have. When carmakers, chipmakers, and the Pentagon all want the same scarce resources at the same time, you want to own the scarce thing.

How Much to Own, and How to Own It

You don't need to bet the farm because a slice of your portfolio will do.

I'd build that slice in two layers.

The base is boring. You want to look for the funds that hold a basket of miners, and large producers that already dig metal out of the ground and sell it. Those let you sleep at night.

The second layer is where the big moves come from.

The smaller companies building the mines and plants that the West is now desperate for. These can double, triple, or more. But they can also drop 30% or more in a month on the heels of a bad headline.

So you keep each one small, small enough that a bad month doesn't shake you out of a long-term trend.

The hard part is picking which companies, what to pay, and when to take money off the table. That's what Premium Members get.

What Premium Members Already Own

We started building this part of the portfolio in April 2025, well before most investors were paying attention.

Since then, Premium Members have received recommendations across five critical minerals… silver, copper, uranium, rare earths, and tungsten.

Every trade we've closed has made money. That's 6 for 6, with an average gain of 67%.

Three of those were Moonshot Rides. When a position runs far enough, we tell members to sell their original position, take money back out, and hold the rest for free.

We've done that three times since covering the sector.

Our silver positions are still comfortably in triple-digit gains.

Copper is close behind, with several of our picks up double digits.

Of course, some positions are down, which is why we build with a boring base under the moonshots so that we don’t get flushed out.

Premium members knew which companies to own, what to pay, how much to put in each one, and when to take their money off the table.

As the summit plays out this week and this megatrend unfolds, they'll hear from me on what to do next.

You can join them below.

Stay sharp,

Double D

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