In our January dark horse commodities outlook, we flagged rare earths as one of our top asymmetric opportunities for 2026. NdPr, the neodymium-praseodymium blend that goes into every permanent magnet, surged over 50% in 2025 to close near $87/kg. We said at the time that pricing would be driven more by policy than by fundamentals, and that mining and processing projects outside of China were increasingly attractive.
We also said we remained bullish on rare earth prices for the year.
Since then, the thesis has only accelerated. On February 11, Chinese Premier Li Qiang, the country’s second-ranking official, toured rare earth production facilities and research institutes in Ganzhou, Jiangxi province. These pre-Lunar New Year inspections are how Beijing telegraphs policy direction for the year ahead, and Li used this one to emphasize that rare earths are central to China’s advanced manufacturing strategy.
That visit came ahead of the April Trump-Xi summit. Three days later, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi warned publicly against what he called opposing China “in a purely emotional, knee-jerk way,” while the administration paused enforcement of several China-focused tech restrictions to keep diplomatic space open for those same talks.
Then, at the Munich Security Conference on February 14, Secretary of State Marco Rubio laid out the U.S. policy stance plainly.:
“Deindustrialization was not inevitable,” he said. “It was a conscious policy choice, a decades-long economic undertaking that stripped our nations of their wealth, of their productive capacity, and of their independence.” He called for “creating a Western supply chain for critical minerals not vulnerable to extortion from other powers.”
The correction starts with supply chain sovereignty, and critical minerals are at its center, which is the driving force behind our recommendation this month.
