Robert Friedland posted a chart on October 13, 2026, and then he used two words a miner rarely pairs. The recovery in drilling over the past three months is good. The copper share of that drilling, flat for two years, is bad. Copper's price is up by more than half since October 2024. The bits, he said, still belong to precious metals. His own teams at Ivanhoe Mines and Ivanhoe Electric keep drilling anyway. He said a tier-one copper find is only a matter of time.
Here is the idea, and it is the only one. A higher copper price is not a copper drill hole. The fleet can come back and still not come back for copper. Until the share of the holes moves, the incentive price is a story the industry tells. It is not a change in what the rigs are aimed at.
This is not advice to buy or sell Friedland's companies, a copper stock, or the metal. A founder talking about his own drills is a founder talking. The chart is the part that can be looked at. The last sentence of the post cannot.
What the picture actually shows
The chart is titled "Project drilling activity by commodity." Friedland said it came from Alex Topouzoglou at Stifel. The source line says S&P. The months run from October 2024 through September 2026. Each month is a stack. Gold is the yellow base. Copper is the orange band above it. Then come nickel, minor base metals, lead and zinc, silver, platinum-group metals, and a thin pink cap of specialty commodities. A red line is a five-month average of drill holes. A dashed blue line is total drill holes reported, on a scale that runs into the thousands.
You do not need a ruler to see Friedland's first point. The last three months are taller. July, August, and September 2026 lift the stack. The dashed line of total holes lifts with them. After a soft stretch in the spring, the fleet is busier. That is the part he called good. On a chart of holes, busy is better than idle. Idle rigs find nothing.
You also do not need a ruler to see the second point. Gold is the thick color in every month on the page. Copper is a thinner band. That band does not fatten just because the whole stack jumps at the end. From the first bar to the last, copper's slice of the picture looks like the same decision, repeated. Precious metals take the room. Copper keeps its old seat. That is the part he called bad.
Do not invent a percent the chart does not print. The post says the copper share "remained largely unchanged." The eye agrees. It does not agree to a fake figure read off a screenshot. Share is the claim. Flat is the claim. The exact slice is S&P's, and it is not labeled on the graphic Friedland posted.
The price did its job. The rigs did not switch.
Friedland said copper prices have risen more than 50 percent since October 2024. The market supports the direction, and it supports the size. A published quarterly series put the London Metal Exchange copper average for the fourth quarter of 2024 at $9,180 a tonne. On October 12, 2026, the official cash price was $14,822 a tonne. That is a rise of about 61 percent from that quarterly average to that day's print. Early October cash prints were also in the mid-$14,000s. You can argue about the exact October 2024 day. You cannot argue the move back under 50 percent without picking a strange start. The metal cleared the bar he named.
A price that rises by half is supposed to be a siren. It is supposed to pull geologists off gold fences and onto copper fences. Friedland's point is that the siren rang and the trucks did not turn. Precious metals still dominate the stacks. He thinks the incentive price is high enough for gold and silver, and not high enough for the next person to take copper risk. "Not high enough to encourage others" is the phrase. The "others" are everyone who is not already a copper company with a drill turning.
An incentive price is not a number on a screen. It is the price at which a board will fund a hole that might miss. Copper holes are deep, slow, and easy to explain after they fail. Gold holes, in a market that pays up for ounces, are easier to finance on a smaller story. The chart is what that choice looks like after two years of a rising copper price. The orange band did not take share from the yellow one. The industry heard the price. It funded the metal the stock market was already paying for.
Budgets can rise while the share stays flat
There is a fact that sits next to this chart and must not be smoothed into it. S&P Global has reported that copper exploration budgets rose to a 12-year high in 2025, about $3.30 billion, up 2 percent, even as total nonferrous exploration budgets slipped to about $12.4 billion. Money did move toward copper. A reader who stops at Friedland's post will miss that. A reader who stops at the budget headline will miss Friedland. Both numbers can be true. A budget can grow and still be a small share of the world's holes if gold drilling grows as fast, or faster.
S&P's own copper work says where a lot of that money went. In 2025, mine-site programs were 43 percent of global copper exploration budgets. Grassroots work was 25 percent. More than 60 percent of the annual increase in discovered copper, in their review, came from deposits tied to existing mines, not from new systems. They also wrote that no major copper deposit meeting their threshold was discovered in 2025. The list of big finds from 1990 through 2025 grew by five deposits and about 3 percent of contained copper, much of it from old camps, not from blank ground.
That is the bad news under the good budget line. Spending near a mine you already have is not the same act as drilling for a new tier-one deposit. It is safer. It is rational. It does not refill a pipeline. Friedland's chart of shares, and S&P's note on grassroots versus mine-site, are the same complaint in two dialects. The dollars rose. The hunt for a new district did not take over the fleet.
Majors and juniors are not the same spender. S&P has said majors increased copper exploration spending while juniors faced a sharp drop. The stacks on Friedland's chart do not split majors from juniors. They do show who the industry, as a herd, chose to drill. The herd chose gold. A major can raise a copper budget at an existing pit and still leave the global picture looking like Friedland's orange band. The new discovery, the one that changes a decade of supply, usually starts as someone else's hole, often a junior's, in a place that is not yet a mine. Those are the holes the share would show if the incentive had truly arrived.
The last sentence is not a drill result
Friedland did not stop at the chart. He said that no matter the copper price, his geologists at Ivanhoe Mines and Ivanhoe Electric keep drilling for the next tier-one copper discovery, and that it is only a matter of time before they find one. Read that as what it is. It is a founder telling you his teams did not wait for the herd. It is also a forecast with no date, no hole, and no grade.
"Only a matter of time" is how certainty sounds when the result is not in yet. Time is not a deposit. A team that keeps drilling is a choice you can respect and still not count as an ounce. Ivanhoe's history has real mines in it. That history is not in this post. This post is a chart about the industry, and a promise about two companies he controls. Do not let the promise borrow the credibility of the chart. The chart is S&P's activity data, drawn by Stifel. The promise is his.
One reply under the post said shareholders who believed in the companies keep getting crushed. That is one person's complaint, not a study. It is still the right kind of noise. A founder's clock and a shareholder's clock are not the same clock. Drilling can be the correct long bet and a painful hold. The chart does not settle that. It only says the rest of the industry has not joined the bet in proportion to the price.
What to watch if you are an investor
Watch the orange band, not the speech about the price. If copper's share of drilling widens over the next few quarters, the incentive Friedland says is missing will have shown up in the only place it counts. Rigs will have been pointed at copper instead of at gold. If the stack keeps rising and the orange band stays the same width, then the three-month recovery is a precious-metals story. Copper will still have a high price. It will not have a new discovery cycle. Price and cycle are different objects. This chart is how you tell them apart.
Watch the kind of hole, not only the count. A rise in holes around existing mines can lift a copper budget and still leave Friedland's complaint intact. The hole that matters for a shortage a decade out is the early hole, far from a mill. S&P already split those in the budget data. If grassroots copper stays near a quarter of the copper budget while mine-site work stays near half, the industry is shopping in its own garage. That can extend a mine. It rarely opens a new belt.
Watch the gold price as the rival bidder for the same rigs, the same geologists, and the same junior equity. Friedland said the incentive seems high enough for precious metals. The yellow base of his chart is that sentence drawn in color. As long as a gold hole is easier to fund than a copper hole, copper can be "the most important of the metals listed" in a speech and still lose the week on the drill pad. Importance is not a schedule.
Do not watch this as a reason to treat any one copper developer as the drill that will hit. The post names two companies because they are his. A disciplined reader can note that someone is still drilling copper when the herd is drilling gold. That is a fact about effort. It is not a fact about a discovery. Tier-one is a result. It is earned when the tonnes and the grade survive a study. It is not earned when a founder says the clock is running.
What would make this reading wrong
The reading is wrong if the copper band is wider than the eye thinks, and a table from S&P shows the share rising in a way the stacked colors hide. Screenshots lie by a few points. They do not usually hide a takeover of the chart by copper. If the next Stifel update shows copper taking a clearly larger slice while gold shrinks, Friedland's "bad" will have expired. Update the view. Do not marry it.
The reading is wrong if budget dollars, not hole counts, are the incentive that matters, and those dollars are already building mines that do not need a new district. A world that expands known deposits can add copper without a new tier-one discovery. S&P's own review says a lot of the recent added copper came that way. If that is enough to meet demand, Friedland's worry about the missing discovery is a geologist's worry, not a buyer's. If demand keeps outrunning extensions of old mines, the flat share on this chart is the shortage being arranged in advance.
The reading is wrong if "only a matter of time" turns into a hole that stands up. Then the founder's certainty will have been early, not empty. You still would have been right, on the day of the post, to refuse to count a sentence as a discovery. You change the count when the assays and the tonnes arrive. You do not change it because the man who owns the drills is confident.
The reading is also wrong if the three-month recovery fades and the "good" half of the post was a seasonal bump. The dashed line has spiked before, including a sharp jump near the end of 2025, and then cooled. A tall September is not a new era. The two-year copper share is the sturdier fact. The last three months are the fresher one. Do not trade the fresh one as if it had repealed the long one.
The idea, once
On October 13, 2026, Robert Friedland posted an S&P drilling chart, via Stifel, and split it in two. Drilling has recovered in the past three months. That is good. Copper's share of the drilling has barely changed in two years, even though the copper price is up by more than half since late 2024. That is bad. Gold still dominates the picture. Copper budgets can rise, and S&P says they did, without the fleet switching, and much of that money hugs existing mines. A price is not a hole. A founder's "matter of time" is not a hole either. The hole shows up when the orange band gets wider. Until then, the rigs came back for the metal the market already loved.
A note on sources and limits
The description of the chart, the three-month recovery, the flat copper share, the claim of a price rise above 50 percent since October 2024, and the comments on Ivanhoe Mines and Ivanhoe Electric are from Robert Friedland's post on October 13, 2026. The graphic is the one attached to that post, credited by him to Alex Topouzoglou at Stifel, with S&P as the source line. No percent share was read off the bars, because the graphic does not label those shares. The fourth-quarter 2024 London copper average of $9,180 a tonne is from a published quarterly series. The $14,822 official cash price is the October 12, 2026 print reported from the exchange. The rise of about 61 percent is that pair of figures divided, not a forecast. The $3.30 billion copper exploration budget, the 2 percent rise, the $12.4 billion nonferrous total, the 43 percent mine-site share, the 25 percent grassroots share, the note that no major deposit on S&P's threshold was discovered in 2025, and the point that most of the added copper came from existing camps are from S&P Global research published in 2026. They describe budgets and discoveries. They are not the same series as the monthly drill chart. Nothing here is investment advice, a solicitation, or a personal recommendation. Drill results fail. Prices fall. You can lose money. Do your own work.