A token is a small piece of a word, and AI bills everything in tokens. Part 1 of The Language of AI decodes the industry’s jargon for investors in plain English.

Roughly half the world's tungsten lives in skarn: a hard, ugly, calc-silicate rock that forms where a hot granite leans against limestone. Strip away the market noise and this is a story about chemistry at a contact. Here is how it works — in pictures.

Where an ASX investor can actually buy the AI build-out: semiconductor and data-centre stocks explained, plus why there's no ASX vector-database play.

AI's inputs got over 99% cheaper, yet AI bills keep rising. A plain-English guide to agentic AI economics, and the one cost test investors should apply to any AI story.

Timing, visibility, funding and luck decide more investing outcomes than talent. Part 1 of a Samso series on the human behaviours behind our decisions.

The iron ore market is splitting in two. The product that pays today's dividends, 62% Fe fines (62% iron content) into Chinese blast furnaces, carries a softening price outlook on every published forecast. The product with the strongest structural story, high-purity magnetite feed for direct-reduction steelmaking, sits mostly in projects that are the hardest to finance. That is the dilemma.

The gold price has fallen roughly 28% from its January 2026 record high, and the share prices of small gold companies have fallen even harder. This Insight walks through twelve ASX-listed gold small-caps, one by one, in plain language. For each company we ask two simple questions. Does the project stack up as a real, money-making mine? And does the company look like the kind of business a bigger gold miner would want to buy?

On 8 July 2026, Rio Tinto told Sovereign Metals it will not exercise its option to become operator of the Kasiya rutile-graphite project in Malawi, handing back full control of one of the largest critical-minerals discoveries of the decade. Read one way, that looks like a vote of no confidence from the world's second-largest miner.

Start with the facts as of this week. Spot gold is trading around US$4,025–4,050 per ounce (2 July 2026), having touched an eight-month low earlier in the week before recovering above US$4,000. That is roughly 28% below the record high of ~US$5,595–5,602 set on 28–29 January 2026 — and yet still about 22% higher than a year ago. Both of those numbers matter, and most commentary quotes only one of them.

A handful of the world's giant copper mines also carry platinum and palladium. They are rarely worth mining on their own — but the story of how they got there is one of the clearest windows we have into how a copper-gold deposit is made. This is that story, told for the curious rather than the credentialled.