A broad bid is running through the critical-resources complex Friday morning while the S&P 500 barely moves. USA Rare Earth (NASDAQ:USAR) stock is up 8% to $18.40 in early trading. Meanwhile, Critical Metals (NASDAQ:CRML) shares are jumping 10% to $6.37.
Additionally, MP Materials (NYSE:MP) stock is up 5% to $58. United States Antimony (NYSE:UAMY) shares are up 4% to $5.48, extending gains from Wednesday’s buyback announcement.
The VanEck Rare Earth and Strategic Metals ETF (NYSEARCA:REMX) is up 6% to $80.28, outrunning both the S&P 500 (up 0.3%) and the NASDAQ 100 (up 0.1%). There’s no fresh company news behind the moves. This is a sector rotation into hard assets, showing up first where liquidity is thinnest.
Sector Bid and Market Moves
Gold is up 1.63% over the past 24 hours to $4,646.10 per ounce while the U.S. dollar index is down 0.2%. That follows a bond selloff that pushed the 30-year Treasury yield to its highest level since 2007, U.S. debt crossing $40 trillion, and a Treasury decision to double its bond buybacks. Hard assets are catching a bid in that environment, and critical minerals equities like MP Materials and USA Rare Earth are the highest-beta expression of it.
The 30-year Treasury yield printed 5.19% on the latest observation, sitting at the 94.4 percentile of its one-year range. This elevated long-duration cost of capital historically pushes flow into scarce physical commodities and the equities that mine them, including REMX holdings like MP Materials.
Two days ago, the same complex was quiet while United States Antimony moved on its own $100 million buyback authorization. Today every name is higher and the ETF is beating the broad tape by a wide margin.
Where the Names Diverge
USA Rare Earth is valued almost entirely on promise rather than production. In Q2 2026, the company generated $5.8 million of revenue against a $46.3 million loss from operations, burned $56.9 million in cash, and ended with $1.5 billion in cash and a $2.8 billion agreement to acquire Serra Verde Group. With USA Rare Earth stock more than 50% below its 52-week high and up 55% year to date (YTD), sentiment moves the name hard in both directions.
Critical Metals posts the largest percentage gain off the weakest base. Even after today’s rally, CRML shares are down 16% YTD and remain the only name in the group still in the red. Its Tanbreez rare earths deposit in Greenland and Wolfsberg lithium project in Austria are pre-revenue, with production not expected until 2028 or 2029. Small floats and thin catalogs make Critical Metals the highest-torque way to play a sector move, up or down.
MP Materials moves least among gainers because it produces at scale. Mountain Pass in California and the Independence magnet facility in Fort Worth, Texas anchor a business model that rests less on future milestones than peers’. That is why MP Materials stock caps both upside and downside on days like this, even with an analyst target price of $75.38 and 13 Buy and 5 Strong Buy ratings on the name.
United States Antimony is riding the same policy theme through a different commodity. The company is the only fully integrated antimony company in the world outside of China and Russia. On Wednesday its board authorized a repurchase program of up to $100 million, days after cutting full-year revenue guidance to a range of $60 million to $75 million from $125 million.
Fund Note and What to Watch
The VanEck Rare Earth and Strategic Metals ETF is a narrow thematic vehicle whose daily moves track a small set of mining and processing names. That fund carries single-country policy risk and small-cap concentration risk, so a rule change from one producing jurisdiction or a rerating in a handful of top holdings can drive outsized swings.
Position sizing should reflect that volatility. These names give back quickly when momentum fades, so smaller allocations and staggered entries make sense for anyone leaning into the theme rather than one-shot commitments at the highs (we laid out the sizing and exit rules for exactly this kind of high-torque trade in a free speculation playbook). USA Rare Earth’s 55% YTD run and the fund’s 36% one-year gain both illustrate how fast these swings compound in either direction.
The bid’s ability to hold into the close is the near-term tell given the thin base under some of these names. Investors can watch for follow-through in gold and the long end of the Treasury curve as the next tell for the complex, since a drift back in yields or a stronger dollar would take the wind out of the trade.
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