r/TheBullishEdge

I was watching this unfold this morning. Bessent announced the Treasury is doubling its buybacks, explicitly to keep the 10- and 30-year from running. The 10y dropped to 4.64% then bounced back to 4.67% while I was looking. The 30y sat around 5.21%. Gold went through $4,550 on the futures, spot near $4,544.

The thing that bugs me is how many people are calling this money printing. It is not. The Fed is not even involved. A buyback is the Treasury buying its own bonds back, and it funds that by issuing new debt. Mostly short bills, because issuing new long bonds to buy back old long bonds would accomplish nothing.

So it is a maturity swap, not a debt reduction. Fixed long debt becomes short bills you roll forever. Total debt does not shrink. And the interest bill can actually go up, because if the short paper you are issuing costs more than the long debt you are retiring, every rollover costs more, not less.

What matters for gold is even simpler. The government is now saying out loud it cannot let the 10y rise. That is suppressing the symptom, not treating the cause. Suppress nominal yields while inflation is still sticky and real yields fall. Gold trades inverse to real yields. And this is also a signal about the dollar itself, which is where gold, with no issuer and no counterparty, wins.

I am not pretending it is a straight line. Japan ran yield control for years without the yen breaking. One day above $4,500 proves nothing. If inflation dies or the dollar strengthens for other reasons, this reverses.

But the reason I think today is a preview and not a top: they chose to suppress the symptom instead of doing anything about the deficit. Every step further down that road, more short issuance, a bigger interest bill, then the pressure to actually monetize it, is good for gold. Today is pricing step one, not the whole chain.

I hold gold, so I am biased. Check it yourself. The number that would make me reconsider fastest is the actual size of the buyback relative to the market, or how much of the funding is short versus long. What are you watching?

TL;DR: NorthWest Copper showed up on my August 13 screen with 31.6 times its 50-day median-volume reference. The company has a real copper-gold asset, strong drill results and a funded 2026 program, but its old project economics were weak, the replacement PEA is late, and a large block of financing shares becomes tradable September 15. My current assessment is Watch, not Buy.

Disclosure: No position in NWST.V or NWCCF. This is my personal research, not investment advice.

WHY IT HIT MY SCREEN

NWST.V closed August 13 at C$0.27, up 3.85%, on roughly C$573,000 of dollar volume. That was 31.63 times its 50-day median-volume reference.

There was no same-day corporate release that explained the move. That matters because unusual volume is a reason to investigate, not evidence that someone knows something.

WHAT IS REAL

NorthWest owns 100% of the Kwanika-Stardust copper-gold project in British Columbia. This is not a grassroots land package with nothing but geophysics. It has a defined resource, a prior PEA and several strong 2025 drill holes.

Two examples:

K-25-280 returned 36 metres grading 0.80% copper and 3.21 g/t gold, or 3.67% CuEq. The company estimated 31.2 metres of true width.

K-25-273 returned 123 metres grading 1.31% copper and 0.83 g/t gold from 28 metres, including a near-surface zone the company wants to incorporate into a more capital-efficient plan.

The balance-sheet story also improved. NorthWest closed a fully subscribed C$13.8 million brokered financing in May. The hard-dollar units were priced at C$0.35, versus the August 13 close of C$0.27. The financing is intended to fund the updated PEA and up to 10,000 metres of 2026 drilling.

WHY I AM NOT CALLING IT A BUY

The 2023 PEA is the central problem. At its base-case metal assumptions, it reported a C$215 million after-tax NPV7, but only a 12.7% after-tax IRR, C$567.9 million of initial capital and a long payback. That is not an obviously financeable junior-mining project.

Management says the new plan will use higher-grade zones, better recoveries and a more selective mine design to improve the economics. That is plausible. It is not proven until the updated PEA is published.

The timing deserves scrutiny. The financing release targeted the new PEA for mid-2026. On July 8, the company called it near term. As of August 13, it still had not been published.

There is also a paper overhang. The May financing issued about 34.1 million shares plus half-warrants exercisable at C$0.45. Those securities become freely tradable September 15. Paying C$0.27 today does not eliminate the risk that financing participants sell when the hold expires.

Finally, NorthWest disclosed that it pays Atrium Research C$12,000 per quarter for company-sponsored research. I have no evidence that Atrium caused the August 13 volume. But any bullish research distributed under that mandate should be identified as sponsored, not treated as independent confirmation.

WHAT WOULD CHANGE MY VIEW

The bull case needs an updated PEA with a materially higher after-tax IRR, a shorter payback, lower or more credible initial capital, and economics that still work under conservative long-term metal prices. Continued high-grade drill results would then need to demonstrate continuity rather than isolated intervals.

The bear case is simpler: another marginal PEA, heavier-than-expected capex, weak follow-through from the 2026 drilling, or selling pressure after September 15.

There may be another acquisition cycle coming in copper as senior miners search for long-life projects in stable jurisdictions. That is a sector scenario, not evidence that NorthWest itself will be acquired. A senior would still need to believe Kwanika-Stardust can become an economic and permit-ready mine.

My conclusion: NWST is interesting enough to monitor, but the next PEA must repair the exact weakness that kept the 2023 project from clearing a higher investment hurdle. A 31.6x volume spike got my attention. It did not answer that question.

What would you require from the new PEA before moving a project like this from watchlist to investment candidate?

Primary sources:

2023 PEA: https://northwestcopper.ca/news/northwest-copper-announces-positive-pea-for-the-kw-4886/

May 2026 financing: https://northwestcopper.ca/news/northwest-copper-announces-closing-of-fully-subscr-15149/

2026 drilling program: https://northwestcopper.ca/news/northwest-announces-2026-drilling-underway-at-kwan-15334/

K-25-280 drill result: https://northwestcopper.ca/news/northwest-announces-significant-intercept-of-36-0-11652/

K-25-273 and K-25-283 results: https://northwestcopper.ca/news/northwest-reports-results-from-two-holes-at-its-kw-13280/

Atrium disclosure: https://northwestcopper.ca/news/northwest-copper-provides-update-on-10-million-best-efforts-financing/

Educational content and personal assessment only, not investment advice. Do your own due diligence.

Today's divergence is what pushed me to run this test: gold futures gained about 2.5% while Bitcoin fell about 1.5% on August 10 closing data.

But one day is not evidence. So I tested the broader claim.

Disclosure first: I have significant personal exposure to gold and own no Bitcoin. (I have in owned it in the past) That gives me an obvious potential bias. I tried to deal with it by using a fixed rule, checking the numbers against independent data and including the strongest counterexamples to my own thesis.

Method : I used daily closes from August 10, 2016 through August 10, 2026.

1. Identify every S&P 500 price-index drawdown of at least 10%, from the previous closing high to the eventual closing low.

2. Measure continuous COMEX gold futures and BTC/USD over those exact dates.

3. Cross-check the S&P 500 with FRED, gold with the official GLD archive and Bitcoin with Coinbase data published through FRED.

This is an ex-post stress test, not a timing strategy. The trough is only known after it happens.

(This was meant to be a graph and is available as such on my blog but reddit dosen't allow me to post a graph here)

Episode S&P 500 | Gold futures | Bitcoin |

Feb. 2018 correction -10.2% | -2.6% | -26.0% |

Q4 2018 -19.8% | +5.1% | -37.4% |

COVID crash -33.9% | -2.5% | -33.4% |

2022 bear market -25.4% | -7.2% | -58.8% |

2025 drawdown -18.9% | +1.7% | -21.1% |

Bitcoin was negative in all five. Its median return was -33.4%. Gold was positive in only two of five, so this is not a claim that gold always rises in a crisis. Its median return was -2.5%, and it lost less than Bitcoin in every episode.

Independent checks

The FRED S&P 500 series reproduced the same five peak dates, trough dates and drawdown percentages.

The official GLD archive returned -2.4%, +5.0%, -3.6%, -7.3% and +1.6% over the same windows. That is almost identical to the gold-futures result.

Coinbase Bitcoin data through FRED returned -25.9%, -37.9%, -31.4%, -58.8% and -16.0%. Exact BTC returns differ from Yahoo because a 24/7 market needs an arbitrary daily cutoff. The robust result is unchanged: negative in all five, with a median of -31.4% on Coinbase versus -33.4% on Yahoo.

What happens if the threshold is only 5%?

That expands the sample to 13 S&P 500 drawdowns.

- Gold was non-negative in 6 of 13, with a median around -2.3%.

- Bitcoin was non-negative in 2 of 13, with a median between -16.9% and -21.1% depending on the closing source.

The best counterexample for Bitcoin was the April-to-June 2019 correction. The S&P 500 fell 6.8% while BTC gained roughly 52% on Coinbase data. Bitcoin does not fail in every risk-off period.

Gold also failed badly during the January-to-March 2026 correction. The S&P 500 fell 9.1% and GLD fell 12.9%. BTC fell 25.3%, but gold did not protect capital in that episode.

Iran is a warning against cherry-picking

The first week of the 2026 Iran war actually favored Bitcoin: from February 27 to March 6, gold futures fell 1.6% while BTC gained 3.4%.

The July re-escalation also favored BTC over the next five S&P sessions: gold fell 2.0% and BTC gained 2.6%.

The latest seven-day snapshot favored gold: from August 3 to August 10, gold gained 10.3% while BTC gained less than 1%.

These Iran windows were selected retrospectively from the AP chronology. They are context, not a preregistered event study. Depending on the week, either side can cherry-pick a win.

My conclusion

If "safe haven" means an asset that always rises in a crisis, neither gold nor Bitcoin qualifies.

If it means an asset that has reduced the damage during major equity drawdowns, gold has the stronger record in this ten-year sample. Bitcoin may have other valuable characteristics, but it has not yet demonstrated gold-like downside protection.

What definition would you use for a safe haven, and what result would make you change your view on gold or Bitcoin?

This is educational analysis, not investment advice.

Sources:

- S&P 500 methodology and independent data: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SP500/downloaddataand

- Official GLD description and historical archive: https://www.spdrgoldshares.com/usa/gld/

- Coinbase Bitcoin through FRED: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CBBTCUSD

- Iran chronology: https://apnews.com/article/iran-us-timeline-trump-hormuz-war-ceasefire-04da58cbae991183f8b52ef5bf615963

- Academic safe-haven definition: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=952289