1Washington is funding the US rare-earth supply chain directly — loans, sole-source contracts and an equity stake
Ross Givens, in an eleven-minute video titled "The Pentagon Just Gave These 3 Stocks $1.2 BILLION (Nobody Noticed)", argues that US critical-minerals policy stopped being a statement of intent this week and started being money. The mechanism he gives is specific: China's early-2026 export controls on seven rare-earth elements, on finished magnets, and on products with only trace rare-earth content, set against Chinese refining of roughly 90% and mining of roughly 70% of global supply. The Pentagon's stated answer is to onshore the magnet supply chain by 2027, and the instruments it is using are not grants.
The three cheques are datable. (Energy Fuels) was awarded a $725m Office of Strategic Capital loan this week for a US separation and metallisation plant; Givens' argument is that the market still files it as a uranium miner when it has been producing separated NdPr in Utah since 2024 and is targeting heavy rare earths by year-end. It trades near $16 against a $28 January peak, at about $3.8bn of market capitalisation. (US Antimony) holds a $245m sole-source Defense Logistics Agency contract plus $170m of commercial business and Defense Production Act money — over $300m of new work against a market capitalisation near $1bn, with revenue up 163% year on year. (USA Rare Earth) is the furthest along and the least subtle: the government took a direct equity stake put at 8–15%, alongside $1.6bn of backing that includes a Chips Act loan and warrants.
What separates the four names is whether the money has actually arrived. (Critical Metals) controls 92.5% of the Tanbreez heavy-rare-earth deposit in Greenland at around $10 a share and has no government cheque at all — Givens says he "wouldn't be surprised" if one comes, which is a forecast rather than a catalyst. Materials, the name the crowd already owns, appears only as a contrast: its $400m deal is about a year old, which is the whole point of the video.
Two things to hold against it. The packaging is promotional — a clickbait title and two hard sells of a paid trading service inside eleven minutes — while the contract sizes, loan terms and revenue figures underneath are named and checkable, so the two deserve separate treatment. And a state cheque changes who carries the financing risk; it does not make the equity cheap. is already up roughly 90% year to date, and Givens describes it outright as the proof the playbook works rather than as a hidden gem.
2Equity risk repriced upward overnight, while the Iran premium came out of oil and gold
The overnight tape did the repricing. The KOSPI fell 10% in Seoul on an AI- and memory-led sell-off, the VIX rose 18% to 20.44, and US futures followed — S&P down 1.5%, Nasdaq down 2.8%. had dragged the indices lower on Monday.
The awkward part is the gainers list, which is the same complex: joining the $1trn club on the memory super-cycle, up 15.66%, up 5.19% on an analyst upgrade, with , and among the storage and optical names moving higher in the pre-market lists. Those lists and those futures do not describe the same moment — the risk-off futures picture is a 23 June pre-market development, set against a risk-on close the day before. Read together they say the leadership changed overnight, not that the leaders were weak.
Commodities moved the other way, and for unrelated reasons. The US formally waived Iran sanctions as the deal entered its implementation phase, Hormuz flows began normalising and oil softened about 1%; Marco Rubio was selling the reset to wary Gulf allies and Lebanon–Israel talks were opening. Gold fell 2.09% to $4,114, reversing the previous session's Iran-driven precious-metals surge, on a firm dollar and expectations of a Fed rate hike. So the geopolitical premium drained out of energy and metals in the same hours that equity volatility jumped 18% — two moves with no common driver, which is why neither one confirms the other.
3US valuations are at their most extreme reading on record, and it is still not a timing signal
The week's Excess Returns recap distilled interviews with Aswath Damodaran, Andy Constance and Tobias Carlisle, and the valuation reading in it is as extreme as the series allows: a US Shiller PE around 44 times, with each of the six or seven Advisor Perspectives valuation measures at its most overvalued print in the dataset. The care taken with the conclusion is what makes it worth reporting. Carlisle's line is that it is "tempting to get scared out of the market — that's a mistake". The consequence he draws is lower forward returns and more volatility, not a date.
His answer is rotation rather than exit. He watches equal-weight against the cap-weighted index and the S&P 100 against the S&P 500, and reads small-cap and value beginning to outperform as the very early stages of a reversal of large-growth dominance — only two of the Magnificent Seven outperformed last year. His analogue is 2000: an expensive headline index concealing a bifurcated market, with genuinely cheap small- and micro-cap value underneath it, which is where he puts a strong ten-to-fifteen-year setup.
Two caveats travel with it. This is a value investor's lens, and Carlisle concedes there is not much you can do with the overvaluation read on its own. And it is a recap of interviews rather than fresh work — the arguments arrive second-hand, with no dated catalyst attached to any of them. The rotation half is at least testable in a way the valuation half is not: the spread against the cap-weighted index either keeps widening or it does not.
4The buyback bid has flipped to net issuance, and the wave's biggest new listing is already unwinding
Constance's contribution is the one with a mechanism you can watch. The market has flipped from buyback-driven to net share issuance — a wave of IPOs, buybacks slowing, and itself issuing stock, with an aside about a cited $15bn AI misstep. Buybacks shrink the float and raise per-share value; issuance does the reverse. It is a slow signal: the last time the market sat in net issuance was late 2021, roughly three to six months before the 2022 drawdown. One reading is that mega-caps dilute while small caps catch up, which is the rotation above arriving through the share count instead of the multiple.
The largest single piece of that new supply is . Damodaran's numbers: priced at $135, opened at $150, trading in the $170s — roughly 150 times sales for a $2trn capitalisation, on a float of only about 4%. His framing is stories versus numbers, that a total-addressable-market story is incomplete without unit economics, while granting that Starlink's optionality is genuinely impressive. The tape has begun testing it: Yahoo Finance and Google News carried the stock down 16.4% on Monday, one account putting it at $600bn of value erased in three days — and still, on Damodaran's own figures, above where it was priced. With about 4% of the company floated, a very small slice of stock is setting that mark.
The same capital-allocation lens produces a preference rather than a call. Damodaran's objection to the AI build-out is the depreciation schedule — infrastructure booked over ten years that may be obsolete in five — and he calls Apple's discipline "an ode to restraint" against peers over-investing to be first. That is a view on how the money is being spent, not on the shares.
What the sources recommended
Four buy calls, all from a single eleven-minute video, all on one theme, and nothing on the sell side. One of the day's three videos was a careers episode on advisory business models with no market content, so the entire recommendation set is one source's work.
(Energy Fuels) is Givens' first pick on the $725m loan, with an explicit preference for buying dips in a roughly $13–18 zone — his phrase is "buy on dips, not panic" — rather than chasing. (US Antimony) is the "$7 name", carried by the $245m sole-source contract and 163% revenue growth, and he flags its roughly 8.3% average daily range in the same breath. (USA Rare Earth) arrives with its own disclaimer: up about 90% year to date and three to four times the market capitalisation of the other two, offered as evidence the playbook works rather than as an entry. (Critical Metals) is called speculative by the person recommending it — the Greenland deposit is real, the government money is not there yet.
Nothing was put up for sale. The two sceptical mentions stop short of a call: is an objection to the multiple, and is named as the crowded prior trade.
Nothing on today's calendar settles any of this
No dated US macro release surfaced for the session, and the earnings calendar does not populate until 7 July, and then only with small caps. That leaves a headline- and flow-driven tape rather than a data-driven one, and it puts the weight on three things. Whether the overnight risk-off follows through at the US cash open or reverses — the memory and AI complex is where that shows first. Whether the Iran implementation holds: sanctions are formally waived, Trump's line is "I'll do what I have to" if Tehran misbehaves, Rubio is working the Gulf allies, and Lebanon–Israel talks are opening, with oil the swing factor as Hormuz flows normalise. And whether gold's 2.09% fall to $4,114 is the start of a hawkish-Fed repricing or the give-back of a one-day geopolitical spike.
None of the structural arguments above — the valuation extreme, the rotation, the issuance regime — get marked to market today. They are the kind that resolve over quarters, which is exactly why a 2.8% futures gap is a poor test of any of them.
