Sir Gold, the Oil Baron, and Dr. Copper — The Commodity Supercycle and 15 Stocks
September 8, 2026
17 min read
Sir Gold, the Oil Baron, and Dr. Copper — The Commodity Supercycle and 15 Stocks
A real-asset supercycle began in the Covid panic, and now the great cycles are converging. Why a quality investor of all people finds quality where nobody wanted to see it for years — in gold, oil and copper companies. The macro clock behind the clock, plus 15 concrete stocks and the ETF alternative. Our two-part analysis for The Market by NZZ, brought together here as the extended investor's view.
Important note upfront
This piece describes a macro cycle and names individual companies purely to illustrate the argument. It is not investment advice and not a buy or sell recommendation. The commodity sectors discussed are highly volatile. Where positions are marked as "held in the portfolio," that refers to the personal and/or arvy portfolio at the time of the NZZ publication and can change at any time.
In 60 seconds — the core thesis
- The turn came on 20 April 2020. That day, oil went below zero (−$37) — and almost simultaneously, bond yields found their floor after 39 years of decline. Two generational lows in the same panic. A world that consumes commodities begins to become one that produces them.
- Two ponds. One crowded (the AI trade, priced for a world that does not exist yet). The other emptying (commodities, priced for a world nobody wants) — and offering, for the first time in 15 years, exactly what a quality investor looks for: low debt, attractive FCF valuations, hard-won capital discipline.
- Three metals, three voices, 15 names. Gold is the memory (target >$8,000), energy the discipline (~$50 breakeven, cash back to shareholders), copper the arithmetic (structural deficit from ~2030). Preference: gold and energy first, copper the longest cycle — but the latest and most volatile.
Table of contents
01The Clock Behind the Clock — Why a Quality Investor Fishes in This Pond
"The only constant is change." — Heraclitus, two and a half thousand years ago
Let's start with the confession, because this is not where a quality investor usually fishes. I run a concentrated portfolio of around thirty quality businesses, co-invested with my own money. My religion is returns on invested capital, capital discipline, moats, and management that allocates capital like owners rather than empire-builders. By that creed, mining and oil should be the last place you find me — because for most of modern history, resource companies failed every one of those tests: buying at the top of the cycle, overrunning budgets, diluting shareholders, treating the commodity price as a license to spend.
So why am I here? Because two things have changed: the businesses themselves — and the crowded pond next door.
20 April 2020 — two generational lows in the same panic
That day, the price of a barrel of WTI oil went below zero, down to −$37 at the low. If you owned a barrel, you had to pay someone to take it off your hands. Energy was a relic, a value trap, a sector you only owned so you could apologize for it. It was not a death. It was a cleansing. Because at almost the same moment, something quieter happened: bond yields, which had fallen for 39 years — since the 1981 peak — touched their floor. The great rate-cutting cycle that had carried the entire asset-light era for four decades was over.
Two generational lows, struck in the same panic: oil and interest rates, both on the floor, both in April 2020. That is not a coincidence. That is an inflection point — the moment a world that consumes commodities began to become one that produces them.
The big clock: a century of alternating bulls and bears
Equities, bonds and commodities move on a 30-to-40-year cycle, and the turning points are linked. A secular commodity bull is inflationary — bearish for bonds — and inflation sooner or later kills every equity bull. Major commodity peaks arrived roughly every thirty years: 1920, 1950, 1980, 2008. Extend the line and the next lands around 2038 to 2040 — meaning we are, right now, in the early-to-middle innings of the move toward it.
| Decade | Leadership | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| 1970s | Commodities | Miserable for stocks in real terms |
| 1980s / 1990s | Financial assets | Great equity bull |
| 2000s | Commodities | The last supercycle |
| 2010s | Asset-light growth | QE-driven tech bull |
| 2020s → | Commodities? | The thesis of this piece |
Why the businesses have changed
The near-death of the 2013–2020 bear market — and, for energy, the extinction event of April 2020 — did something no strategy memo ever could. Add a decade of ESG pressure that starved the whole complex of fresh capital, and you get an industry forced into discipline from two directions at once. Debt came down instead of trophies going up. Free cash flow went to buybacks and dividends instead of bonuses. What is left, at today's prices, is a set of cash-generating businesses with low debt, attractive free-cash-flow valuations and hard-won discipline — confirmed quarter after quarter. Precisely the raw material compounders are made of.
The cautionary counter-example proves the rule: BP is the one major that wavered — blurring its strategy, wobbling on the promise to pay down debt — and the market punished it for exactly that. The lesson is not that discipline is optional. It is that the market now enforces it.
The crowded pond next door
The second half of the answer is the alternative. While this purified, oligopolistic complex sits with attractive valuations, the entire rest of the market is crowding into one pond: the AI trade. And here I am careful to separate a great idea from a great investment. AI will change the world. So did the internet, the railroads, the radio. What is in dispute is whether a world-changing idea protects the price you pay for the stock. History is brutal on this point.
The most expensive lesson of the last cycle
Amazon fell 97% from its dot-com peak — while the business kept firing on all cylinders. In his 2000 shareholder letter, Jeff Bezos wrote that the stock was down more than 80% year-on-year, yet insisted the company was stronger than ever. He was right. Amazon was the winner. And the stock still needed a decade to grow back into the price. Being right about the future and right about the price are two different bets — and the crowd is making only the first.
Look at the TAMs being underwritten today: $28.5tn for SpaceX, $30tn for Anthropic. Set that against the arithmetic of what software actually earns — total global software revenue last year was on the order of $3tn. Two ponds: one crowded, priced for a world that does not exist yet. The other emptying, priced for a world nobody wants — and quietly compounding cash. That is why I am here. Not because I stopped being a quality investor — but because, for the first time in fifteen years, quality is what this pond is selling.
We first developed the thesis that physical assets reassert their value in an AI-obsessed world here: The Return of the Old Economy. And why the crowded AI pond is bearish for the producers and bullish for the appliers is the subject of AI Like in AI-rlines?.
02Sir Gold — The Memory
Gold moves in cycles — and the oldest cycle story ever written is about exactly this: the 7-year cycle. In Genesis 41, Pharaoh dreams of seven fat cows devoured by seven lean ones. Joseph reads it as prophecy: seven years of abundance, then seven years of famine. Store grain in the fat years; you survive the thin ones. Four thousand years later, that is still the whole job of gold in a portfolio — the store you build in the fat years for the lean ones you cannot yet see.
Gold throws off no cash flow, no dividend, no underlying business. By every rule of quality investing I just confessed to, it should not interest me. And yet: gold is the memory of markets — the asset that remembers every debasement of every currency there has ever been. And now the buyer has changed. The relentless bid under gold is not speculation — it is the central banks themselves, led by China and the emerging markets, quietly rotating reserves out of US Treasuries and into metal.
The buyer change that changes everything
By late 2025, gold made up roughly 27% of global official reserves, against about 22% for US Treasuries — the first time since 1996 that the world's central banks held more gold than American government debt. The institutions that print the paper are themselves choosing the metal.
I have laid out elsewhere why I think this cycle ends somewhere north of $8,000 an ounce, with $10,000 as the upside case — a figure drawn from the two comparable secular gold bulls of the 1970s and 2000s and from the buyer change in 2022, when central banks turned decisive net buyers. The 7-to-8-year cycle tops — 1974, 1980, 1987, 1994, 2003, 2011, 2020 — point to the next major top around 2028.
Why the miner, not the metal — the operating leverage
If a miner produces at an all-in cost near $1,500 an ounce while gold runs toward $8,000, the margin per ounce does not double — it multiplies. Even if costs rise to $2,000 or $2,500, the price of what they sell does not stop rising. That is why, if you believe the number, the interesting instrument is almost never the metal. It is the miners.
The honest other side, which I never skip: since 1800, gold has returned only about 0.6% a year in real terms — against roughly 6.9% for US equities. Gold is not a compounder. You do not buy it for what it yields; you buy it for what it protects against. Which is why I hold it as a permanent insurance position of around 10%, bought and left alone. Research by Prof. Dr. Thorsten Hens (University of Zurich) suggests the best risk-adjusted long-term results come from a portfolio of roughly 90% equities rebalanced with a 10% gold allocation. On gold, my take is simple: own it, do not trade it.
Five gold miners for $8,000 gold
NEMNewmontPosition
The world's largest gold producer and the current gold position. Diversified across a dozen mines and several jurisdictions — exactly the risk that ruined generations of mining investors, spread thin.
ABXBarrick
The second giant, with the highest composite of the five on the screen. Cleaned-up balance sheet, disciplined capital allocation, global portfolio — the classic "Good Story" finally getting a "Good Chart."
AEMAgnico Eagle
The quality operator with the lowest geopolitical risk — Canada and stable jurisdictions rather than adventure. The name you hold when you want to sleep and still ride the gold price.
WPMWheaton Precious MetalsWatchlist
Not a mine but a streaming model: buys future production at a fixed price, carries no cost blow-ups and no single-mine disaster. HALO without the operating nightmare.
FNVFranco-Nevada
The royalty model in its purest form: takes a slice of revenue across a broad portfolio, without ever digging. The most elegant way to own the gold price.
And for anyone who won't choose: just buy GDX — the basket, as an ETF — and take the sector rally without the single-name risk. (European investors: check the equivalent that fits your jurisdiction.)
03The Oil Baron — The Discipline
Back to 20 April 2020, because energy is where my common thread shows its clearest cause and effect. The extinction event that drove oil below zero killed the marginal, the bloated, the badly financed — or forced it into brutal discipline. What walked out of the fire is a different industry. This is George Soros' reflexivity in its purest form: the collapse did not kill oil, it purified it — of exactly the players who made it uninvestable for a decade.
The purification had two engines. The price crash was the first. The second was a decade of ESG pressure that choked off capital to the entire sector — no bank financing, no new mega-projects, no appetite for the next frontier well. Starved of capital and humbled by the crash, the survivors did the one thing the sector never used to do: paid down debt, raised buybacks and dividends, cut exploration budgets to the bone. BP's stumble aside, this is now the industry standard.
Starve an industry of capital for a decade, and you do not kill it. You engineer a supply-demand mismatch.
That mismatch is the through-line across all three metals: demand keeps grinding higher while a decade of starved investment caps supply. Elevated prices are therefore not a spike to fade — they are what a structural deficit looks like on a screen.
The seesaw: why energy and technology take turns
Technology is a long-duration asset that lives on low rates. Energy is short-cycle, tied to the commodity — and oil is itself an inflationary force. The very force that lifts energy crushes the tech multiple. In the arvy sector screen, energy ranks — purely on forward-looking chart strength — as number two of eleven sectors, while technology (mid-battlefield of AI winners and losers) ranks number seven.
The risk side? The loudest argument against me is oversupply — slower growth, rising non-OPEC supply, the risk that today's prices are a geopolitical spike rather than structural tightness. The bears are right on volatility; it will be brutal. But their case is a demand-and-price argument, while mine rests on supply discipline, capital return and regime change. A cleaned-up industry with ~$50 breakevens can hand back cash even in a flat oil market.
The three energy names — integrated and pure Canadian
XOMExxon MobilPosition
The integrated benchmark. A fortress balance sheet, disciplined capital allocation, a portfolio from the Permian to Guyana. The "Good Story, Good Chart" name in energy.
CVXChevronPosition
The second integrated anchor. A touch more concentrated, equally disciplined — the steady cash-flow compounder among the supermajors.
CNQCanadian Natural ResourcesPosition
The best beta to the oil price and the purest example of the new discipline: huge, long-life Canadian reserves with minimal decline, low breakevens, and a management that has paid down debt and returned cash for years — a dividend aristocrat like Exxon and Chevron. When oil runs, CNQ runs — with less exploration risk than almost any peer.
Where I stand
Energy is my largest real-asset position today — Exxon, Chevron, Canadian Natural Resources. I am already in, not watching. Prefer the basket? The sector ETFs XLE (integrateds) and XOP (geared producers) give you the whole theme in one line. European investors: watch the jurisdiction of the product.
04Dr. Copper — The Arithmetic
Energy told the supply-demand story. Copper is the doctor who confirms the diagnosis — because copper does not do stories, copper does arithmetic. Gold is a story about trust, oil a story about discipline. Copper is a bill. You need a certain number of tonnes to wire a house, turn a motor, string a grid, cool a data centre. That number is going up. And the number of tonnes the world can produce is not keeping pace. The gap between those two numbers is the entire investment case. Everything else is decoration.
The deficit is no longer a forecast — it is here
In early August 2026 the front contract on the Comex touched more than $6.70 a pound — the highest copper price in recorded history, up more than 50% in twelve months. The rule: "the longer the base, the higher the space." Energy built a fifteen-year base and broke it, gold a thirteen-year one. Copper just cleared a level that capped the contract for decades. Demand: from ~28m tonnes today to 42m by 2040. Supply: stalls around 2030.
Two of the three demand growth blocks — the AI build-out and the electrification of everything — are the same forces driving the tech bull market everyone already owns. Here is the irony that ties the whole piece together: the crowd fighting in the AI pond is, whether it knows it or not, creating the deficit in mine. You cannot be bullish on data centres and bearish on the metal that wires them.
And the cruel other half is supply: had exploration worked steadily over 35 years, the most recent decade should hold about 29% of the finds. It holds 5%. A higher price does not make a new mine appear — it makes one appear in fifteen years. That lag is the engine of every supercycle in history.
Why copper is the spiciest — and how I treat it
Copper is the sharpest of the three. Freeport's Grasberg, the second-largest copper mine on Earth, sat largely idle after a fatal mud rush and is not back to full capacity until 2029. In 2022, copper fell 37% in four months. And part of the current run is a tariff mirage — metal pulled physically into US warehouses ahead of a Washington tariff decision. So: last in, sized smallest, bought on weakness. Gold is the umbrella, copper is the sail.
I own two copper stocks now — small, probing positions in Southern Copper and Freeport, opened only after the confirmed, multi-year breakout I had waited for. I did not back up the truck; I put a first foot in the water. Here are the seven names, from the quality case to the geared end.
Seven copper names — from the quality case to the geared end
SCCOSouthern CopperProbing
The name my screen ranks first — story and chart in rare full agreement. The low-cost operator's low-cost operator, roughly 78% of revenue from copper. The quality case, with the quality already in the price.
FCXFreeport-McMoRanProbing
The leveraged bet with the Grasberg problem. Mid-cost-curve, so more torque: the same copper move roughly triples the margin here. Higher drama, higher reward, plus Indonesian political risk.
BHP / RIOBHP & Rio Tinto
The diversified giants. At BHP, copper is now the majority of earnings — a copper company the market still thinks of as an iron-ore company. Balance-sheet strength, dividends, less single-mine risk; in exchange, less torque.
TECKTeck Resources
The pure-play-in-progress: turning itself into a focused copper producer via QB2 and the Anglo American merger. Carries merger and ramp risk, in exchange for a sharpening copper story.
ANTOAntofagasta
The disciplined Chilean — a clean pure-play in the heartland of the metal. Concentration in one country is both focus and risk (water, seismicity, royalties).
HBMHudbay Minerals
The smaller, geared name for those who want more torque and understand its price. Faster up, twice-to-three-times as hard down. Size it small — a satellite, never a core.
Why the ETF calms the seas in copper
Look back at those seven names: a Grasberg mud rush, an Indonesian government that rewrites the rules, a Chilean water shortage, a merger that might not close. The more idiosyncratic and violent the single-name risk, the more a basket earns its keep — and copper has the most violent single-name risk of the three. Global X Copper Miners (COPX) for the broad complex, the junior-heavy Sprott Junior Copper Miners (COPJ) for more torque; European investors check the UCITS-eligible equivalent. One, at most two — the single names are for the targeted tilt; the basket is for owning the deficit and sleeping through the chop.
05Why I Love These as Businesses, Not Just Bets — HALO
One last thing, because it closes the loop on the confession. I have a shorthand for the assets I like structurally: HALO — Heavy Assets, Low Obsolescence. Something physical, brutally expensive to replicate, in no danger of being disrupted by a clever line of software. A copper orebody is close to the platonic ideal of the category.
Nobody is coding an app that replaces a proven tonne of copper in the ground — which is precisely the risk hanging over the AI pond next door. I am not abandoning my religion — returns on capital, capital discipline, moats. I am noting that a purified, oligopolistic industry, priced on attractive free cash flow with debt paid down, finally satisfies that religion — and that in a commodity deficit, the moat is the orebody.
The moat of the future is geography, regulation and physics — things you cannot copy, because the earth itself is the competitive advantage.
That is the thread, end to end. We are moving from a commodity-consuming world to a commodity-producing one, and the turn came in the Covid panic. Each metal tells the same supply-demand story in its own voice: energy the discipline, gold the memory, copper the arithmetic.
My preference is clear: gold and energy first, copper the longest but latest cycle. And above it all, one rule that has held since day one: I act only when "Good Story" and "Good Chart" agree. On gold and energy they already do. On copper, the ceiling has just broken. It will be choppy — expect it. But anyone who sees the three breakouts on the chart and the fundamentals and still looks away is not doing it out of ignorance. They are doing it at their own risk.
What "Good Story & Good Chart" means in practice, and why patience is the hardest discipline, is covered in The Tortoise Problem of Quality Investing. And why the price you pay determines your risk — not quality alone — is the subject of What Were You Thinking?.
06Frequently Asked Questions
How can a quality investor suddenly recommend mining and oil stocks?
Because the businesses have changed. After the 2013–2020 bear market and a decade of ESG capital starvation, the sector was forced into discipline from two directions: pay down debt, return cash, cut exploration. What was left are cash-generating businesses with low debt and attractive FCF valuations — exactly the characteristics quality investing looks for. BP is the counter-example that proves the rule: it wavered on discipline, and the market punished it immediately.
Is this a buy recommendation for these 15 stocks?
No. It is the illustration of a macro thesis, not investment advice and not a buy or sell recommendation. The names show how different profiles — from the quality operator to the geared junior — might play the same theme. Commodities are highly volatile; drawdowns that test your nerves are part of the thesis. Anyone who wants to own the theme broadly and without single-name risk will find the sector ETFs the simpler answer.
Why the miner rather than physical gold?
Because of the operating leverage. If a miner produces at an all-in cost near $1,500 and gold runs toward $8,000, the margin per ounce multiplies — not just the gold price. Crucially, this cuts both ways: miners are more volatile than the metal. Physical gold (or a gold ETC) remains the insurance position — around 10%, bought and left alone; the miners are the geared expression of the thesis for those who believe the number and can carry the volatility.
What if the AI boom keeps running — does the commodity thesis then break?
On the contrary. Two of the three copper demand drivers — the AI build-out and electrification — are the same forces driving the tech bull market. You cannot be bullish on data centres and bearish on the metal that wires and cools them. Anyone cheering the AI capex boom is implicitly cheering a copper deficit. The thesis is therefore partly a hedge against the very scenario most portfolios already price in.
Why single stocks at all rather than just an ETF?
For most investors, most of the time, the ETF is the right answer — especially in copper, where single-name risk (mine disaster, politics, water, mergers) is the most violent. The basket calms the seas and lets you hold the theme through the volatility. The single names are for the targeted tilt — one, at most two ETFs plus, if desired, a few single names as satellites. Always check the jurisdiction of the product (for European investors, UCITS equivalents).
Read on — the thematic anchors of this analysis
The Return of the Old Economy
Where the real-asset thesis was first developed
AI Like in AI-rlines?
The crowded AI pond — bearish for producers, bullish for appliers
What Were You Thinking?
Why the price you pay determines your risk
The Tortoise Problem
Good Story & Good Chart, and the discipline behind it
No Pain, No Premium
How to hold volatile positions through the noise
Why arvy Is Your Long-Term Partner
Quality strategy, skin in the game, FINMA-regulated
The Message from Sir Gold, the Oil Baron, and Dr. Copper
For fifteen years the market punished the heavy, the physical, the cyclical and rewarded the weightless. That era began to end in April 2020 — quietly, on the day oil cost less than nothing and interest rates found their floor. While the crowd fights over one pond, priced for a world that does not exist yet, the supercycle sits in another: limited players, oligopolistic structures, capital discipline — and valuations the crowded pond can no longer offer.
At arvy, that means concretely: we look for "Heavy Assets, Low Obsolescence" with real free cash flow and moats of geography, regulation and physics. It will be choppy — that is part of the thesis. But anyone who sees the three breakouts on the chart and the fundamentals and still looks away does so at their own risk.
Original written by Thierry Borgeat, Co-Founder of arvy, for The Market by NZZ (two-part series, August/September 2026). The extended arvy version was reviewed by Patrick Rissi, CFA and Florian Jauch, CFA. Data sources: TradingView, GMCP, S&P Global, CRB (cycles & charts); BofA Global Investment Strategy (bubble concentration); Bloomberg, BNEF (copper supply/demand); All Star Charts (copper miners relative); Prof. Dr. Thorsten Hens, University of Zurich (gold allocation); Amazon (Bezos 2000 shareholder letter). Last updated: September 2026.
Disclaimer: This article is for general educational purposes only and does not constitute personal investment advice. The securities named are illustrative and not a buy or sell recommendation. Commodity sectors are highly volatile; substantial losses are possible. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. arvy is a FINMA-supervised asset manager with a CISA license (Art. 24). Imprint & Legal Notice.
