David Hay — Another Golden Opportunity? — Haymaker republishes and explicitly endorses abbreviated excerpts of Kevin "The Macro Tourist" Muir's Aug 8 piece "Sometimes Trading Is That Simple: Long Gold Again": China stepped aside during the late-2025 western mania and "has quietly begun buying again" into the new pessimism; gold "refused to break below 4000" all summer while the US dollar and real rates — the two things "supposed" to drive it — were both rising, which "was telling you that it was being accumulated," and once the 50-day and the downtrend line broke, shorts covered and gold ran $350; the 1-yr 25-delta gold call skew has collapsed to its lowest since before COVID ("no one is paying up for right-tail risk"); gold stocks trade at 11× with the gold decline already in the earnings; Muir is "buying gold, platinum, and a bunch of different gold mining stocks." Haymaker adds the caveat that bullion and miners "have had a snappy rally of late," notes its own July 27 AGI Buy alert is "up about 15% since," and passes on an Adam Taggart chart suggesting any GDX pull-back "should render it an accumulation candidate" (Aug 12 2026)

A guest-sourced Daily: the Haymaker Team republishes "an abbreviated re-posting" of Kevin "The Macro Tourist" Muir's August 8th edition, Sometimes Trading Is That Simple: Long Gold Again, and stamps it with an explicit house endorsement — "Kevin is making a convincing case for gold, and the miners thereof, based on a very simple reading of the market. It's one with which we agree strongly enough to broadcast the main thesis here" — with one caveat of its own: "both bullion and the miners have had a snappy rally of late." Muir's argument runs on four legs. (1) The buyer of last resort came back when the crowd left. "China doesn't want the price of gold to rise too much too quickly… They are interested in buying as much gold as they can over the next decade… not drive it higher over the next year," so western euphoria kept them out — "the Chinese have zero interest in letting hedge funds and other speculators move up the price of gold, and then sell it back to China for a profit." Now "the speculative fervor has broken. Everyone who bought gold in the final frenzy months of 2025 is now offside. And into this new found pessimism, China has quietly begun buying again" (with Poland actually "leading the charge" this past quarter, and official Chinese figures "probably… just a fraction of their actual buying"). But he immediately disqualifies it as a standalone reason: "these whales have been softening the decline for some time now, yet gold has been steadily falling." (2) The price refused to do what its drivers told it to. "What is supposed to drive the price of gold? Real interest rates and the US dollar. For most of the summer, the US dollar was rising and real interest rates were spiking higher, yet the price of gold refused to break below 4000. Gold was telling you that it was being accumulated." Then "when the technical levels were broken to the upside — whether it was the 50-day moving average or the downward trendline — bearish traders were forced to cover, and the next thing you knew, gold was 350 dollars higher. Sometimes trading is that simple." (3) Nobody is paying for upside any more. At end-2025 "gold and silver had been on Page 1 every day for a month" and he had nothing to add — "I am more interested in the investments that are on Page 17 of the newspaper on their way to Page 1." Today, "few care about gold. They are more interested in semiconductor and memory stocks," and the option market proves it: gold uniquely trades calls over puts, "usually the 1-yr 25-delta call skew is around 3 or 4 vol points… but this past month it dropped to the lowest since before COVID. Gold sentiment is so beaten up, no one is paying up for right-tail risk." (4) The miners are priced for the decline that already happened. "Apart from the depths of the GFC and the apathy of the 2011-13 period, gold stocks have never been this cheap! They are trading at 11x!" — and the cyclical-P/E objection is met head-on: "all of that gold decline is already in the earnings… analysts were previously slow to raise the price of gold in their models. My guess is that if gold stabilizes here, analysts will raise estimates, and EPS will bottom. And then, once they bottom, all of a sudden, 11x looks cheap!" The action: "I am buying gold, platinum, and a bunch of different gold mining stocks. I think the gold bull market resumed this week" — with the discipline attached, "if I am wrong… just remember Paul's other famous line: 'Losers average losers.'" Haymaker's own two contributions are the securities: its July 27 AGI Buy alert, "popped about 15% since then," and an Adam Taggart chart suggesting "any pull-back on GDX, the leading gold miner ETF, should render it an accumulation candidate."

One-line take: the first wholly guest-sourced Daily in this archive — Haymaker writes only the framing and the two securities, and hands the argument to Kevin Muir — but it is also the clearest re-statement of the house's own recurring method, which is why it earned the endorsement. Attribution matters here and is kept explicit throughout: the reasoning below (China's price-insensitivity, the 4000 hold, the skew collapse, the 11× miners) is Muir's, quoted from his Aug 8 edition; the stance — publishing it, agreeing with it, and pointing at AGI and GDX — is Haymaker's. What makes the piece worth archiving is that Muir's central move is the same one Haymaker ran on gas the day before (Aug-11), on the miners two weeks earlier (Jul-26) and on frac sand (Jul-27): find the asset whose price is refusing to obey the bearish story about it, and read the refusal as accumulation. Muir states it more precisely than any of those, because he names the drivers first and then shows them failing: real rates and the dollar — the two variables gold is "supposed" to follow — "were spiking higher" all summer, and gold still "refused to break below 4000." A price that will not fall on its own bear case is information about who is on the other side. The second contribution is the sentiment instrument: rather than a survey, Muir uses the 1-yr 25-delta call skew in gold options — a market where, unusually, calls normally cost more than puts because the perceived tail is up. That premium collapsing to its lowest since before COVID is a paid-up, real-money measure of indifference ("no one is paying up for right-tail risk"), and it is the kind of gauge that cannot be talked into agreeing with you. The third is the earnings-already-reset answer to the cheap-cyclical trap: an 11× miner multiple is only a trap if the E has yet to fall, and Muir argues the fall has happened — "all of that gold decline is already in the earnings" — while sell-side gold decks still lag, so stabilisation alone produces upward revisions. Continuity: this reinforces rather than shifts Hay's standing precious-metals stance — Jul-26's record-outflow apathy read on GDX/GDXJ and Jul-27's Alamos buy at $29 ("before long we may bump it up to a Strong Buy") — and now supplies the price-action confirmation those two were missing, plus a mark: AGI "popped about 15%." Honest caveats to carry: Haymaker's own hedge is in the text ("both bullion and the miners have had a snappy rally of late"), so this is a chase warning attached to a bullish endorsement, not a fresh entry point; the GDX line is conditional on a pull-back, not a buy-here; no new rating, price or Buy-list action is stamped on either name; and Muir's platinum buy is his own, unaccompanied by any Haymaker vehicle. Format note: a Daily, not a Friday POW! — no Buys / Trims-Holds tables, so no portfolio changes.

1. Stocks & names mentioned

Ticker	Name	Research	View	What he said	At
AGI	Alamos Gold	QT · SA · STK · FA	Positive	Haymaker's own name (not Muir's), carried forward with a mark: "We gave readers a timely AGI, Alamos Gold, Buy alert on July 27th, and it's popped about 15% since then." It appears inside the very sentence that hedges the endorsement — the thesis is broadcast "with the caveat that both bullion and the miners have had a snappy rally of late" — so the function of the AGI line is two-sided: it is the track-record receipt that earns the house the right to publish a gold call, and simultaneously the illustration of why a new buyer is no longer getting the Jul-27 price. That alert bought at ~$29, "cut in half" from the ~$55 February peak, on 10.4× trailing / under 10× 2027's $3.27 consensus, with the Young-Davidson earthquake treated as a fading one-off and a note that "before long we may bump it up to a Strong Buy." Nothing here upgrades it — no new rating, price, target or Buy-list action is stamped — but the surrounding Muir argument supplies the macro case the July alert was leaning on: China "quietly begun buying again" into post-mania pessimism, gold that "refused to break below 4000" while the dollar and real rates rose, a 25-delta call skew at its lowest since before COVID, and miners at "11x" with "all of that gold decline already in the earnings." Read as: position established, thesis corroborated by an outside voice, chase discouraged.	read ↗
GDX	VanEck Gold Miners ETF	QT · SA · STK	Positive	The second Haymaker-authored line, and an explicitly conditional one: "Here's a chart another great friend of Team Haymaker, Adam Taggart, sent us yesterday, which suggests that any pull-back on GDX, the leading gold miner ETF, should render it an accumulation candidate." Note the precise shape — the instruction is to buy weakness, not strength, which is the same caveat ("a snappy rally of late") applied to a vehicle rather than a name. The valuation case beneath it is Muir's, and it is the strongest statement on miners in this archive: "apart from the depths of the GFC and the apathy of the 2011-13 period, gold stocks have never been this cheap! They are trading at 11x!" — with the standard cyclical objection ("the P/E gets cheap because earnings are headed a lot lower") answered directly: "all of that gold decline is already in the earnings! They have declined with gold. And not only that, analysts were previously slow to raise the price of gold in their models. My guess is that if gold stabilizes here, analysts will raise estimates, and EPS will bottom. And then, once they bottom, all of a sudden, 11x looks cheap!" Muir's own action is the ETF's constituents in aggregate — "I am buying gold, platinum, and a bunch of different gold mining stocks. I think the gold bull market resumed this week." This continues the Jul-26 reading of GDX (record fund outflows as apathy rather than information) and now adds the two things that read was missing: a valuation floor (11× on already-reset EPS) and a price confirmation (the 4000 hold and the $350 short-covering run).	read ↗

"View" is Haymaker's stance in this Daily — both names are Haymaker's own additions to guest content, and both are reiterations of standing positive views (Jul-27 AGI, Jul-26 GDX/GDXJ) rather than fresh rated calls: no new rating, price, target or portfolio action is attached to either, and both carry the same qualifier — the rally has already happened, so AGI is a held winner and GDX is a pull-back accumulation candidate. Not rowed — deliberately: gold bullion and platinum (Muir: "I am buying gold, platinum, and a bunch of different gold mining stocks") are commodities, not securities, and no vehicle is named for either — they belong to the gold & precious metals and platinum themes; silver appears only in the historical aside about the late-2025 mania; "semiconductor and memory stocks" are named only as what the crowd is looking at instead of gold, with no view taken. Also referenced but not securities: Kevin Muir / The Macro Tourist (the author of the excerpted piece, whose newsletter Haymaker recommends subscribing to), Adam Taggart (the GDX chart), Bruce Kovner (the quoted maxim behind the price-refuses-to-fall read) and Paul Tudor Jones ("losers average losers") — people, so intentionally excluded; the People's Bank of China and Poland's central bank are official-sector buyers, not investable names. Research: QT Qualtrim · SA Seeking Alpha · STK Stock Analysis.

2. Talking points

Whose piece this is — and why Haymaker is publishing it

Stated up front: "the material below is actually an abbreviated re-posting of Kevin 'The Macro Tourist' Muir's August 8th edition, titled Sometimes Trading Is That Simple: Long Gold Again." Haymaker "hold[s] Kevin in the highest regard for his exceptional economic and market insights."
The endorsement is explicit and is the reason this archives as a Haymaker view rather than a reprint: "Kevin is making a convincing case for gold, and the miners thereof, based on a very simple reading of the market. It's one with which we agree strongly enough to broadcast the main thesis here."
The house caveat is attached in the same breath — "with the caveat that both bullion and the miners have had a snappy rally of late" — and readers are pointed at the primary source: "we recommend you subscribe to the 'Tourist's newsletter to absorb the piece in full."

Haymaker's own mark: the July 27 AGI alert, +15%

"We gave readers a timely AGI, Alamos Gold, Buy alert on July 27th, and it's popped about 15% since then."
Placed inside the caveat sentence rather than as a boast — the same fact that validates the July call is the reason the entry point today is worse. That dual use is the honest way to publish a bullish outside piece into a position you already hold.

The GDX chart — from Adam Taggart, and conditional on weakness

"Here's a chart another great friend of Team Haymaker, Adam Taggart, sent us yesterday, which suggests that any pull-back on GDX, the leading gold miner ETF, should render it an accumulation candidate."
Read the conditional carefully: this is buy the dip in the miners, not buy the miners here. The archive's Jul-26 record-outflow read on GDX/GDXJ now has a technical companion.

Muir: China is a price-suppressing buyer, not a price-chasing one

"I have long counseled that China doesn't want the price of gold to rise too much too quickly. If the price of gold runs hard, they would likely walk away. They are interested in buying as much gold as they can over the next decade. They want to accumulate it for as little as possible, not drive it higher over the next year."
Which inverts the usual reading of central-bank demand: "that's why when sentiment turned overwhelmingly bullish among western buyers, it worried me. China doesn't want to compete with those buyers."
The motive stated plainly: "the Chinese have zero interest in letting hedge funds and other speculators move up the price of gold, and then sell it back to China for a profit. That's why the Chinese weren't going to participate in the mania."

The fervor broke — and the whale came back

"Over the last six months, the speculative fervor has broken. Everyone who bought gold in the final frenzy months of 2025 is now offside. And into this new found pessimism, China has quietly begun buying again."
Attribution honesty: "I like to isolate China as the main buyer, but this past quarter, it was actually Poland leading the charge."
And a caution about the data itself: "China has no interest in letting the West know how much gold it is buying… making their moves too transparent allows hedge funds and other speculators to front-run their purchases. It's probably safe to assume whatever they announce officially is just a fraction of their actual buying."

Why the central-bank bid is not, by itself, the reason to buy

The disqualifier, and the most disciplined line in the piece: "China and other central banks returning with blue tickets is not enough of a reason to buy extra gold again. These whales have been softening the decline for some time now, yet gold has been steadily falling over the past few months."
A structural bid that has coincided with a falling price has already been proven insufficient. It is context; the trigger has to come from somewhere else — which is the job of the next section.

The trigger — a price that refused to obey its own drivers

He names the drivers before testing them: "What is 'supposed' to drive the price of gold? Real interest rates and the US dollar."
Then the failure: "for most of the summer, the US dollar was rising and real interest rates were spiking higher, yet the price of gold refused to break below 4000. Gold was telling you that it was being accumulated." Introduced via "one of my favourite market quotes… from Bruce Kovner" — the consensus-not-confirmed-by-price setup.
The resolution: "when the technical levels were broken to the upside — whether it was the 50-day moving average or the downward trendline — bearish traders were forced to cover, and the next thing you knew, gold was 350 dollars higher. Sometimes trading is that simple."

Page 17 on its way to Page 1

His filter for what is worth an opinion: "I am more interested in the investments that are on Page 17 of the newspaper on their way to Page 1."
Applied to end-2025: "gold and silver had been on Page 1 every day for a month! There was nothing more to say. It was a mania, and it would end when it ended, and not a moment sooner" — a refusal to short a mania as much as a refusal to join it.
Applied to today: "Few care about gold. They are more interested in semiconductor and memory stocks." Note the mirror to Aug-11 and Aug-3, where the semis are the crowded side of the same rotation.

The apathy gauge — a collapsed call skew, not a survey

The structural quirk first: "gold is different from equities in that investors pay more for calls than puts (in volatility terms) because they view the risk of gold spiking higher as larger than it crashing. Sometimes, the 1-yr 25-delta call will trade 10 vol points higher than the 25-delta puts!"
The reading: "usually, the 1-yr 25-delta call skew is around 3 or 4 vol points, but this past month, it dropped to the lowest since before COVID!" (Chart: GLD 1-yr 25-delta call implied with skew, 13 years, Bloomberg.)
The conclusion, and why this beats a sentiment survey: "gold sentiment is so beaten up, no one is paying up for right-tail risk. That's the kind of environment that makes me like gold all the more!" — real money declining to pay for upside, not opinions collected in a poll.

The miners at 11× — and the answer to the cheap-cyclical trap

"Apart from the depths of the GFC and the apathy of the 2011-13 period, gold stocks have never been this cheap! They are trading at 11x!"
He states the bear case himself: "when commodities turn down, the P/E gets cheap because earnings are headed a lot lower."
And answers it on timing, not on denial: "all of that gold decline is already in the earnings! They have declined with gold. And not only that, analysts were previously slow to raise the price of gold in their models. My guess is that if gold stabilizes here, analysts will raise estimates, and EPS will bottom. And then, once they bottom, all of a sudden, 11x looks cheap!" (Chart: AMEX Gold Bugs Index with NTM EPS and P/E, one year, Bloomberg.)

The position — and the stop-loss philosophy attached to it

"Well, I can feel the rush again. I am buying gold, platinum, and a bunch of different gold mining stocks. I think the gold bull market resumed this week."
Note platinum alongside gold — no vehicle named, but it is a live position for Muir and maps to the archive's platinum theme.
The risk discipline is one line and it is the whole of it: "and if I am wrong… just remember Paul's other famous line: 'Losers average losers.'" — i.e. this is a momentum-confirmed entry, and it will be cut rather than averaged down if the confirmation fails. That is a materially different rule from Haymaker's own dollar-cost-average-the-weakness habit (AESI, APA) — a genuine methodological difference between the guest and the host, published without comment.

Housekeeping

A Daily, not a Friday POW!: no Buys / Trims-Holds / Sells tables and no portfolio changes. Signed "The Haymaker Team" for the framing, "Kevin Muir, the MacroTourist" for the body.
Two charts referenced, both Bloomberg, both from Muir's original: the GLD 1-yr 25-delta call skew over 13 years and the AMEX Gold Bugs Index NTM EPS/PE over one year. The Taggart GDX chart is Haymaker's own addition.

3. In plain English

A jargon-free note on why each name matters here. (Companion to the table above; renders on each name's consolidated page.)

AGI — Alamos Gold Positive

Alamos Gold is a mid-sized Canadian gold miner — it digs gold out of the ground in Canada and Mexico, so its profits rise and fall with the gold price but faster, because its costs stay roughly fixed while its revenue moves.

Haymaker told readers to buy it on July 27th at about $29, after the shares had fallen roughly by half from their February high. In this piece Hay marks the position: it has "popped about 15% since then." That is the only thing new about AGI here — there is no fresh rating, no target and no new instruction.

What the rest of the post supplies is the reason the July call is working, and it comes from a guest: Kevin Muir, who writes the newsletter The Macro Tourist and whose August 8th gold piece Hay is republishing in shortened form because he agrees with it strongly enough to put his name to it. Muir's case is that the people who bought gold during the late-2025 frenzy have given up, China has quietly resumed buying now that it no longer has to bid against them, and — the part he cares about most — gold simply refused to fall below $4,000 all summer even though the dollar and inflation-adjusted interest rates, the two things that normally push gold down, were both rising hard. When a price won't go down on bad news, somebody is buying it. Once gold then broke above its recent trend, traders betting against it had to buy it back, and the price ran $350 higher.

The honest catch, and Hay states it himself: "both bullion and the miners have had a snappy rally of late." Someone buying Alamos today is paying about 15% more than the readers who acted on the July alert. This is a position being confirmed, not a new entry being recommended.

GDX — VanEck Gold Miners ETF Positive

GDX is a single fund that owns the big listed gold-mining companies, so buying it is the simplest way to bet on gold miners as a group rather than picking one and taking the risk that its particular mine floods or its particular mill breaks.

Hay's instruction here is deliberately conditional. A chart from Adam Taggart, he says, "suggests that any pull-back on GDX, the leading gold miner ETF, should render it an accumulation candidate." In plain terms: wait for the price to dip and then buy, rather than chasing it after the run it has just had.

The argument for why the miners are worth accumulating at all belongs to the guest, Kevin Muir, and it is a valuation one. Gold-mining shares trade at about 11 times their earnings, which he says is as cheap as they have ever been outside the 2008 financial crisis and the miserable 2011-13 stretch. The obvious objection to a cheap-looking commodity stock is that the multiple only looks cheap because profits are about to collapse — you are dividing by an earnings number that is about to shrink. Muir's answer is that this has already happened: gold fell, and the miners' earnings fell with it, so the damage is in the numbers now rather than ahead of them. Meanwhile the analysts who build the forecasts were slow to put a higher gold price into their models, so if gold merely stops falling, those forecasts get revised upward, profits stop declining, and a stock trading at 11 times a bottoming profit number is genuinely cheap rather than a trap.

Muir is acting on it — "I am buying gold, platinum, and a bunch of different gold mining stocks" — and adds one discipline worth remembering: if it doesn't work, he sells rather than buying more, because "losers average losers."

Summary derived from the paid Haymaker newsletter (text in transcript.txt), which itself republishes abbreviated excerpts of Kevin Muir's The Macro Tourist (Aug 8, 2026), for personal study. Not investment advice. © Haymaker / David Hay and Kevin Muir / The Macro Tourist for source material.