September 17, 2026
Bonus Content: The S&P 500 Has 4.6% of Upside Left. That Changes How Much Risk You Should Carry.
What a Gold Story Looks Like Before Most Notice
The biggest gains in mining rarely come after a discovery is obvious.
They come earlier.
Before the market has clean answers. Before the analysts have polished models. Before the headlines make it feel safe.
That is the stage this company may be entering now.
The early clues are already on the table:
- Neighboring a producer with a roughly $4.5B market cap
- Surface grades reported up to 73 g/t gold and 21% copper
- A second drill now turning on the project
None of this proves what sits underground.
But it does explain why this moment and this company are worth watching.
Because in mining, the wave usually starts before the crowd can see it.
The S&P 500 Has 4.6% of Upside Left. That Changes How Much Risk You Should Carry.
The arithmetic became uncomfortable on Wednesday. The S&P 500 closed at 7,551.81, its lowest close since July. Yardeni Research cut its year-end target to 7,900. Do the math and you get roughly 4.6% of upside to the number Wall Street’s former biggest bull is now willing to put his name on. That is not a trading opportunity. That is a risk management conversation.
Ed Yardeni, one of the biggest stock bulls on Wall Street, slashed his year-end S&P 500 forecast a month after raising it, cutting the target to 7,900 from 8,400, which had been the highest estimate on the Street as recently as August. The mechanism behind the cut is straightforward: rising bond yields compressed his assumed forward P/E to 18.6 from 19.8, which drove the target lower. The previous year-end forecast of 8,400 has now become a mid-2027 target.
Yardeni also lowered the subjective odds of his flagship “Roaring 2020s” base-case scenario from 80% to 70% and raised the odds of a bearish outcome from 20% to 30%. The catalyst is a bond market that is no longer cooperating. “The risks of a downturn have increased over the next three to six months,” Yardeni said in a note, pointing to higher Treasury yields driven by rising energy prices. The benchmark 10-year yield climbed to a high of 5.041% this week, a level not seen since 2007.
The Fed made it worse. The Federal Reserve approved its first interest rate hike in more than three years Wednesday, with the FOMC voting unanimously to increase the key rate by 25 basis points, bringing the overnight funds rate to a target range of 3.75% to 4%. The FOMC’s median projection now calls for one more hike this year, which would bring the median rate to 4.1%.
The sovereign wealth fund community is adding institutional weight to the caution. The New Zealand Superannuation Fund, valued at NZ$94.4 billion (about $54.4 billion), was ranked the world’s best-performing sovereign wealth fund earlier this year by analytics firm Global SWF. Its record does not come from aggressive U.S. equity bets, the fund has outperformed while being underweight the high-flying tech stocks through this period. Now its CEO is flashing a warning: Jo Townsend cautioned that the returns enjoyed by stock market investors in recent years are likely to slow, noting that returns for U.S. equities over the past couple of years are close to double annualized returns for the past 20 years. Her view echoes Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management, who told CNBC last month: “We should not be expecting the same kind of returns going forward as we’ve seen over the last six months.”
BofA’s Savita Subramanian, whose year-end target of 7,400 sits below where the index is trading right now, frames the risk in historical terms. The S&P 500 has had only one pullback of at least 5% this year, in March; historically, three such pullbacks happen in an average year. The last correction of 10% or more came in spring 2025. By historical standards, the market is overdue. September and October are historically the weakest two-month stretch for the S&P 500, producing an average decline of 0.56% and the largest average corrections of any two-month period in BofA’s data going back to 1928.
Trader’s Action Plan
The central question for active traders is not whether Yardeni’s 7,900 proves accurate, it is what a compressed upside reward means for position sizing and hedging right now. With less than 5% of theoretical upside to the most optimistic revised target, any new long in SPY or SPX needs a tighter leash. The VIX at 17.71 is still historically subdued relative to the signals building overhead; options pricing has not yet fully reflected the risk being telegraphed by rates, energy, and institutional money. That gap, if it closes, favors staying smaller and keeping dry powder available below 7,490, the next technical support level identified by Schwab’s desk. The case for adding risk increases materially only if the 10-year yield reverses back below 4.75% or if oil shows a sustained pullback from above $100. Until one of those conditions is met, protection earns its cost.
