Sectors

A sector is not fine-grained enough to steer on

Two companies with the same sector label can move on entirely different things. This is the taxonomy that tries to solve that: 10 sectors, spread across 30 subsectors, each with a definition of its own.

Personal portfolio. Not investment advice. As at 25 August 2026 Full text

Why

One label, three engines

Take the label btc-miner. Of the 10 positions under it, 6 are companies that combine mining with AI and HPC hosting or with data centre and power infrastructure. Their revenue increasingly comes from contracts with data centre tenants. That moves on demand for compute, not on the bitcoin price. 3 positions genuinely only mine. And 1 sells the machines and mines nothing itself; it moves on the investment cycle of the other two, with a lag.

Three fundamentally different drivers under one heading. Weigh them as one sector and you measure the spread wrongly: it looks as if one thing is held while three are. Or the other way round: it looks diversified while everything hangs on the same driver. Neither mistake is visible at sector level.

Hence the second axis. The sector says which commodity, the subsector says where the movement comes from. Below is the full taxonomy: every category with its definition and the number of positions currently in it.

The taxonomy

10 sectors, 30 subsectors

Sectors by descending number of positions. A subsector with zero positions stays: it belongs to the taxonomy, even when nothing sits in it right now.

uranium

22 positions · 7 subsectors

athabasca-explorer 7×: Exploration or development in the Athabasca Basin (Canada).
african-developer 5×: Uranium project in Africa (Namibia, Niger, Zambia); lower grade, higher political risk.
explorer-other 3×: Uranium explorer OUTSIDE the Athabasca Basin and OUTSIDE Africa.
producer 3×: Produces or has produced uranium (including care-and-maintenance with a restart option).
fuel-tech 2×: Enrichment or nuclear fuel technology; mines no uranium, moves on nuclear policy and HALEU demand.
fysieke-trust 1×: Holds physical U3O8; pure spot price exposure without operational risk.
royalty 1×: Royalties or streams on uranium projects; no capex, no operational leverage.

gold

15 positions · 3 subsectors

discovery-play 8×: Exploration; the leverage sits in the find, not in the gold price.
producing-miner 5×: Delivers gold; cash flow moves on the gold price minus AISC.
development-stage 1×: Feasibility or construction phase, resource estimate in place, path to production.

copper

14 positions · 4 subsectors

junior-explorer 8×: Exploration without a resource path to production.
development-stage 2×: Feasibility or construction phase, resource estimate in place, path to production.
mega-project 2×: A single world-scale project carries the valuation; scale over grade.
producer 2×: Delivers copper; cash flow moves on the copper price minus costs.

silver

13 positions · 3 subsectors

junior-explorer 6×: Exploration without a resource path to production; moves on drill results and risk appetite.
producing-miner 6×: Delivers silver to the market; cash flow moves on the silver price minus AISC.
development-stage 1×: Feasibility or construction phase, resource estimate in place, path to production.

energy

11 positions · 3 subsectors

crude-oil-producer 8×: The engine is the oil price (Brent/WTI) × production volume.
gas-lng 2×: The engine is the gas/LNG price; a different curve and different offtake contracts than oil.
offshore-services 1×: Sells drilling services; moves on day rates and fleet utilisation, not on the production curve.

btc-miner

10 positions · 3 subsectors

hyperscaler-hpc 6×: Mining plus AI/HPC hosting or data centre and power infrastructure; the engine shifts from the hash price to contracts with data centre tenants.
pure-btc-play 3×: Mints BTC and nothing else; revenue follows hash price × own hashrate.
asic-hardware 1×: Sells mining hardware, mines nothing itself; moves on the capex cycle of miners, lagging the hash price.

crypto

10 positions · 3 subsectors

eth-staking 4×: ETH treasury and/or validator/staking operation; ETH price plus staking yield.
sol-play 4×: Solana treasury, validator or ecosystem exposure.
btc-treasury 2×: Listed vehicle holding BTC; share price = BTC price × premium/discount to NAV.

mining-other

10 positions · 4 subsectors

nikkel-pge-cluster 5×: Nickel-copper-PGE magmatic systems. Runs ACROSS the primary sector: also valid under pgm. Filtering on this value returns the whole cluster, regardless of sector.
tin-play 3×: Tin.
lithium 1×: Lithium.
rare-earth 1×: Rare earth elements.

other

6 positions · 2 subsectors

holding-shell 4×: Investment vehicle, holding company or empty shell; no operations of its own.
operational-outlier 2×: Operating company with revenue that does not fit a commodity thesis.

pgm

6 positions · 4 subsectors

nikkel-pge-cluster 3×: Nickel-copper-PGE magmatic systems. Runs ACROSS the primary sector: also valid under pgm. Filtering on this value returns the whole cluster, regardless of sector.
pgm-producer 2×: Delivers platinum/palladium/rhodium; cash flow on the PGM basket price.
pgm-developer 1×: Feasibility or construction phase on a PGM project.
pgm-explorer 0×: PGM exploration.

Personal portfolio. Not investment advice. As at 25 August 2026 Full text

Cross-section

Where the taxonomy crosses itself

nikkel-pge-cluster sits under mining-other and pgm, with the same definition, and that is deliberate. A nickel-copper-PGE system yields all three metals from the same rock; which metal counts as the primary commodity depends on the mix and shifts with prices. The sector taxonomy has to choose somewhere, geology does not. By keeping the subsector identical under both sectors, a single filter still returns the whole cluster: 8 positions.

The reverse situation exists too, and it is a trap: 4 subsector names occur under more than one sector without being one category. For 3 of them the definition differs per sector. For the last one the definition reads the same, but the yardstick around it does not: a project in the development phase is judged on different things in copper than in gold.

junior-explorer copper · silver 14×
producing-miner gold · silver 11×
producer copper · uranium 5×
development-stage same definition copper · gold · silver 4×

A producer in uranium sells under long-term contracts and therefore only half follows the spot price; a producer in copper sells on today’s market. Same word, different behaviour. That is why this page is grouped per sector and is not one alphabetical list: outside its sector a subsector name means something else.

Terms

Terms the site uses

AISC: All-in sustaining cost: what it actually costs a miner to produce one unit, including the maintenance needed to keep producing. The margin is the commodity price minus this number.
NAV: Net asset value: the estimated value of what a company owns, per share. A listing can sit structurally above or below it; that premium or discount is itself a movement.
Grade: The concentration of the metal in the rock. High grade means less material has to be moved for the same output, and moving material is the biggest cost driver in mining.
Resource estimate: An estimate of what is in the ground, prepared under a reporting standard. The distinction between a project with and without such an estimate is the distinction between development and exploration.
Feasibility study: A study that assesses whether a mining project is technically and economically viable. There are successive stages, from a first scoping study to a full feasibility study; the further along, the more precise the estimate of costs and revenue.
Capex: Capital expenditure: the investment needed to build or expand a mine, separate from the running costs of producing.
Royalty: A right to part of the revenue or output of a mine that someone else operates, acquired with an upfront payment. The holder does not carry the construction or operating costs of the mine.
U3O8: Uranium oxide concentrate, also called yellowcake: the form in which uranium from the mine is traded. The uranium price is quoted per pound of U3O8.
HALEU: High-assay low-enriched uranium: uranium enriched to between 5 and 20 percent U-235, higher than the fuel of most existing reactors. Some of the new, smaller reactor designs need it.
PGM: Platinum group metals: the group of metals that includes platinum, palladium and rhodium.
Hash price: What a bitcoin miner earns per unit of compute per day. It moves with the bitcoin price and with how many other miners are taking part, and therefore not one-to-one with the price of bitcoin.
Hashrate: The total computing power with which miners secure the bitcoin network. If it rises, each miner gets a smaller share of the same reward; that is why the hash price does not move one-to-one with bitcoin.
GARCH: A statistical model that estimates from the price history how much a price is likely to move in the period ahead. Approach describes what the system measures with it.
Coverage: For a regime: whether all of the day's inputs were there. Full means every factor in the calculation had a value; partial means one or more were missing. The table on the homepage gives the coverage per group.

Method

How this taxonomy comes about

The taxonomy is manual. There is no model sorting companies into a category; every position has been classified one by one, asking which driver really steers the price. That is a judgement, and it can be wrong.

What makes it testable is that the taxonomy sits in one file under version control. Every change is a recorded change with a date and a reason attached, not a silent reclassification. When a company becomes something other than what it was (and in these sectors that happens constantly), it moves, and you can see back when and why.

The sector follows the primary commodity. For companies with exposure to several commodities that is the most important one; for companies that mine nothing but hang purely on a commodity price (physical trusts, royalties, fuel technology), it is the commodity the price depends on.

One position carries no subsector today and is under review. Leaving it out would make the picture tidier than it is. Of the 30 defined subsectors, 29 currently carry a position, spread across 35 sector-subsector combinations.

This page shows the taxonomy and the counts. What exactly sits in it (which companies, for what amount) is not on it and will not be. See Legal.

How this taxonomy is used

The subsector is one of the axes on which the system assesses sectors. The approach behind it has its own page.

See the approach The allocation