TWITTER ON PACE FOR 7-DAY LOSING STREAK

Twitter shares were on pace Monday to decline for a seventh-straight day amid doubts about whether Elon Musk’s $61 billion deal to acquire the social media platform would go through.

Twitter (ticker: TWTR) was down 6.7% to $37.98 on Monday. Unless the stock stages an end-of-day rally, this would the Twitter’s longest losing streak since December, when it also fell for seven consecutive days. The shares have lost 23.5% over this seven-week stretch, their worst decline since March 19, 2020, when the stock lost 29.7%. The Nasdaq Composite was down 4.6% over the same period.

Musk tweeted last week that his acquisition of Twitter was on hold pending details on the number of fake accounts, or bots, that were active on the platform. Twitter has calculated that less than 5% of accounts are fake, but Musk said his team would be conducting a random sample to verify the calculation. Eliminating bots has been a key point for Musk, who said it will help make the platform more valuable.

In a flurry of tweets on Monday, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal defended the company’s spam-fighting policies, saying management had shared an overview of the process with Musk a week ago.

“We suspend over half a million spam accounts every day, usually before any of you even see them on Twitter,” he said in a tweet. “We also lock millions of accounts each week that we suspect may be spam – if they can’t pass human verification challenges.”

Musk responded to Agrawal’s thread with a “poop” emoji. The Tesla (TSLA) CEO said last week he was “still committed to [the] acquisition].”

Wall Street still seems to expect that the acquisition will go through, with some speculating it may be a way to renegotiate the price.

“While we believe this review likely delays the acquisition, we would be surprised if there are any material changes to the deal structure as a result of spam/false [daily active users],” wrote Citi analyst Ronald Josey.

Separately, Twitter last week announced it was suspending hiring and would be rescinding some offers. The company also laid off two senior executives.

Gold is one of the market’s go-to hedges in rocky times. Don’t forget that gold miners’ stocks are too.

The stock market’s gains in 2026 belie the rocky macroeconomic picture: elevated inflation, heightened geopolitical tensions, and jitters about the artificial-intelligence trade. That backdrop, in theory, should be the time for gold to shine. Instead, the price of the yellow metal has tumbled more than 5% so far, after last year’s blistering 65% rally. In part, the U.S. dollar’s recovery has stymied gold, which benefited from the greenback’s weakness in 2025.

Even with the precious metal’s recent weakness, gold mining stocks could be the best way to profit from this year’s uncertainty.

Gold miners “are a valuable hedge against macro risks that would likely be damaging for equities,” BCA Research’s Noah Weisberger and Rishabh Shah wrote this week.

Concerns about the Federal Reserve’s next moves to tackle inflation, the increasingly crowded AI trade, and steep valuations for tech stocks are just some of the drivers that could help gold’s price get on even footing— and lead to even bigger gains for miner stocks.

These stocks’ prices tend to outpace gold’s moves, because the companies have fixed operational costs. So when gold’s price rallies, their profit margins soar, and vice versa. For instance, the VanEck Gold Miners GDX +7.39% exchange-traded fund has fallen 11% this year as the metal has slumped.

Now, gold’s price just needs to stabilize to help miners’ stocks take off, and that seems to be happening. The precious metal has recently found support above the $4,000 level, and has stuck in a narrow range since the end of June. But its price rose ever so slightly in July, ending a four-month losing streak for the metal. Technical analysis also suggests that gold is due for a comeback.

Barron’s recently wrote that the pullbacks for both gold miners and the metal itself are overdone. Senior technical analyst Doug Busch noted that the VanEck ETF is on the “verge of a breakout” and has the potential to hit $11o in early 2027, up more than 40% from its current price.

Gold miners also have more than their role as a market hedge going for them. Their fundamentals are solid, too, says Chris Mancini, portfolio co-manager of the Gabelli Gold Fund.

“Precious metals miners are generating substantial amounts of free cash flow given profit margins of over $2,000 per ounce, and are returning this cash to shareholders through buybacks and dividends,” he said in an email.

“Buying the miners is a cheap way to get exposure to the price of gold,” he added. His fund owns Newmont NEM +6.71%, a Barron’s stock pick last year, and Agnico Eagle Mines as top holdings, as well as miners Northern Star Resources, Endeavour Mining, and Kinross Gold K+8.59%.

Miners are better businesses than they used to be, the BCA team added.

“Capex is more disciplined, margins are high and rising…and they are largely independent of the AI story,” Weisberger, BCA’s head of equities, and Shah, a senior analyst, wrote.

That last part is key. AI is disrupting the software industry and many other services and information-oriented businesses, and investors have piled into AI stocks. But ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and other large-language models aren’t going to replace the need to mine for metals.

“Equity portfolios can benefit from exposure to quality that is uncorrelated to AI risk, and gold miners fit the bill,” the BCA team said.

They recommend that investors buy the VanEck Gold Miners ETF, which owns top miners such as Agnico, Barrick Mining ABX +7.24%, and Newmont.

An important bonus for big gold miners’ stocks is that their valuations are attractive after the gold’s pullback, too. The VanEck ETF is now trading at just a little more than nine times next year’s earnings estimates. That’s a big discount to its five-year average price-to-earnings ratio of 14, according to FactSet.

What’s more, the ETF is currently valued at a more than 50% discount to the S&P 500 SPX -0.17%, which is trading for about 19 times earnings estimates for 2027. Mining stocks have typically traded at just a 25% discount to the broader market over the past five years. So there is significant upside for the group if valuations move back toward normal levels.

One factor that complicates mining stocks as a market hedge, of course, is if stocks bounce back, which has been the case so far in August.

But both the market and economic outlooks remain cloudy, and investors remain nervous about the Fed’s next moves and AI stocks. Gold miners should do just fine, even if the anxious mood on Wall Street persists.

TWITTER ON PACE FOR 7-DAY LOSING STREAK

CEO defends its fight against spam.