---
title: "Four Silver Miners. One Two-Week Window. Here's Clive Thompson's Framework."
url: "https://www.readplaza.com/articles/four-silver-miners-one-two-week-window-heres-clive-thompsons-framework"
type: "article"
publisher: "Commodity Culture"
category: "Market Commentary"
published: "2026-06-29T09:48:00+00:00"
updated: "2026-07-27T03:25:33.362127+00:00"
reading_time_minutes: 8
tags: ["Silver Mining Companies", "Gold", "AI"]
---

# Four Silver Miners. One Two-Week Window. Here's Clive Thompson's Framework.
Silver is sitting at $68 after hitting all-time highs above $100 in January. A lot of people have concluded the trade is over. Clive Thompson thinks that's wrong, and he's got the data and the experience to back it up.

Clive is a portfolio manager and financial educator, and one of the most analytically rigorous guests I've had on the show. In our latest conversation, he broke down the silver and gold markets, named four specific mining stocks to watch ahead of August earnings, and walked through where he sees real value outside of precious metals.

Here's the full breakdown.

Why Silver Is Stuck and Why That's TemporaryThe Iran peace-war cycle has been whipping the silver price around for months. When peace talks heat up, markets read it as lower oil, lower inflation, and potential rate cuts. That should be bullish for silver, but the first reaction is actually a selloff because traders price out the inflation premium that was propping up precious metals. When the war looks back on, the logic flips.

The result is a metal that's been trading off headlines rather than fundamentals. The fundamentals themselves are not complicated. The Silver Institute's World Silver Survey 2026 confirmed the sixth consecutive annual supply deficit. The shortfall grew 15% to 46.3 million ounces in 2026 versus 40.3 million ounces in 2025. Since 2021, 762 million ounces have been drawn from above-ground stocks. That's nearly an entire year of global mine output. The Silver Institute's own language in this year's report is that the market has entered "an era of reduced stocks," with liquidity expected to stay thin and price swings larger than investors have been used to.

The near-term headwind Clive points to is rate expectations. With Fed Chair Kevin Warsh signaling one rate increase before year end, markets are pricing in a tighter environment. But Clive's framework is real rates, not nominal. With inflation near 4% and any hike being a quarter point, real rates stay at effectively zero. That's historically been the best environment for precious metals. His advice for the long-term investor: don't try to pick the week or the month. Stack consistently, dollar-cost average, and most purchases made now will likely look cheap when you look back over a few years.

Gold: Why the Ducks Are All in a RowClive's conviction on gold is higher and his language is less hedged. He called continued upward movement over the coming years "almost inevitable" and laid out three reasons.

First, the debt trajectory. US government debt is growing at 7 to 8% per year, faster than GDP growth or the tax base. That number is going up, not down. Clive sees it trending toward 9% and then 10% over the next few years. US M2 money supply now stands at $23.1 trillion and is accelerating. Every dollar of new debt is a promise to print money down the line, and that money eventually finds its way into tangible assets. Not all at once. Not in a straight line. But it gets there.

Second, central bank behavior. The ECB recently confirmed that gold now represents 27% of global central bank reserves, ahead of US Treasuries at 22%. It's the first time gold has led since 1996. Clive's read on this is not that central banks are trying to destroy the dollar. They are diversifying against the risk of being sanctioned. Countries outside the US orbit are quietly moving away from a reserve structure that Washington can freeze.

Third, the currency reset scenario. Clive was careful to call this a scenario, not a prediction. But the logic is worth sitting with. If confidence in government bonds breaks, the system doesn't default in the traditional sense. It resets. A new currency replaces the old one. People with savings accounts convert over without much friction. People with large fiat positions face capital controls or find their old assets hard to use. Gold gets you to the other side regardless of what form the new currency takes. If you start with 20 gold coins, you still have 20 gold coins on the other side.

Four Silver Miners to Watch Before August EarningsThis is the section that generated the most interest when Clive posted his video on YouTube, and I wanted to capture it properly in writing.

Clive's approach is called calendar investing. The thesis is simple. Silver miners with costs well below current spot prices are going to report significantly higher earnings per share when they announce Q2 results in July and August, because silver prices were much lower in the same quarter last year. That earnings surprise tends to move share prices. He back-tested this across 36 companies, filtered out those with negative P/E ratios and those priced at dangerous premiums, and identified the four that showed the largest historical earnings-per-share increases with the most consistent price reactions around results time.

His four candidates — and he was clear this is observation, not investment advice — are:

Gold Resource Corp 

McEwen Mining 

SSR Mining 

Pan American Silver 

All four are expected to report Q2 results between August 5 and August 12. Two of the four are currently trading below 10 times earnings, against a US broad market at over 20 times. For companies with high earnings growth forecasts, a sub-10 P/E is the kind of gap that typically doesn't stay open. A strong earnings print is the catalyst that closes it.

Clive's own positions are long-term holds. Some of his mining stocks he's owned for years. He's not advocating a trade here. But for anyone trying to understand the mechanics of the silver miner setup heading into earnings season, this is the cleanest framework I've seen.

SpaceX, AI, and the Circular Logic of the BubbleOn SpaceX, Clive drew a clean line between two ways of looking at a stock. The Ben Graham approach: buy when price is below intrinsic value. The supply and demand approach: buy when more people want the stock than there are shares available. SpaceX, with its tiny float and enormous fan base, is the second type of trade. The $4.27 billion Q1 net loss doesn't matter when demand for shares overwhelms supply. Tesla has run on that same logic for over a decade.

His bigger concern is the AI complex. Capital expenditure on infrastructure — data centers, Nvidia chips, training costs — is running at an estimated $800 billion this year, heading toward $1 trillion and then $1.2 trillion. End-user revenue across the major AI platforms is roughly $40 to $60 billion. That's a ten-to-one gap, and none of those capital costs disappear. They have to be depreciated, often over short useful lives because the chips become obsolete quickly.

What Clive sees happening: some of these companies fail, others consolidate, and end users eventually pay much higher prices or get rationed. When the earnings growth stories currently priced into the mega caps don't show up, the multiple compression will be ugly. The enthusiasm is still running but it can turn fast when the first bad news lands.

Where Clive Actually Sees ValueWhen asked where he'd look outside of precious metals, Clive's answer came down to three things.

Small and mid-cap equities. These trade at much lower multiples than the mega caps running the S&P 500. They benefit from automation without needing to win the AI infrastructure bet themselves. They just adopt the tools.

Asian equities. Low multiples, real growth, and far less exposure to the AI concentration risk baked into US markets. He didn't name specific names but his point was clear: markets pricing in pessimism with genuine growth underneath them are where Ben Graham would be looking, and that's not the S&P right now.

Companies with large workforces. This is the counterintuitive one. A company with 100,000 employees has more to gain from AI efficiency than a company with 1,000. As headcount slowly shrinks through attrition and automation, margins expand without requiring a single AI breakthrough. The time horizon is long but the direction is clear.

What he'd avoid: the US large-cap market at current valuations, and any company whose earnings story depends on AI monetization that hasn't shown up yet.

One More ThingClive's website at clivethompson.com has a gold price predictor tool where you can plug in your own assumptions — stock market crash probability, inflation path, rate changes — and get a forward gold price estimate out. There's also a portfolio simulator that shows the Sharpe ratio impact of adding gold across different historical starting periods. His research puts the mathematically optimal gold allocation, averaged across all historical starting dates, at 30%.

He also mentioned his Little Trot children's book series, built around teaching kids financial concepts before they leave school. The latest one relevant to this audience is Little Trot and the Great Gold Rush, which covers the history and role of gold as a store of value. Worth keeping on the shelf if you've ever tried explaining inflation to a teenager.

Why I Started Writing for YouI've been making videos on Commodity Culture for years but there's only so much you can get into in an interview. The reason I joined ReadPlaza is to go deeper in writing alongside every episode.

If you want to keep getting pieces like this straight to your inbox, subscribe to my free newsletter right here

No algorithm. No noise. Just the analysis.

Jesse Day
Commodity Culture