USA Rare Earth Stock: The Round Top Equity Stake

USA Rare Earth (Nasdaq: USAR) has become one of the most-watched small caps in the critical minerals trade, and Matt McCall’s “Trump’s $16 Trillion Chess Move” presentation for The Oxford Club uses it as the final exhibit in the government-stake pattern at the heart of his pitch. The sequence he documents is real: Lithium Americas, Trilogy Metals, and then USA Rare Earth, three mining companies the U.S. government took equity positions in, with each stock moving violently when the stakes were announced. Of USA Rare Earth, the presentation says simply: “shares went vertical.” For the specifics, our “Rare Earth Stock Picks: The Government-Backed Pattern” article is worth a read.

Here is what USAR is, what actually happened, and how it fits the investment pattern McCall is teaching.

The Company and the Deposit

USA Rare Earth is developing the Round Top deposit in Texas, which the presentation describes as “the largest rare earth metals deposit outside of China.” That framing matches the company’s own positioning: Round Top hosts a range of critical minerals, including heavy rare earths, lithium, gallium, and other elements that the U.S. currently sources overwhelmingly from China. The company’s plan pairs the mine with a domestic processing and magnet supply chain, which is the part Washington cares about most: mining is one thing, but refining and magnet-making capacity is where China’s dominance (~90% of refining, per figures McCall cites that match widely reported estimates) actually bites.

The Government Stake

In January 2026, the U.S. Commerce Department took an equity stake in USA Rare Earth, per reporting the pitch cites and our check confirms. This was not an isolated gesture. The government’s stake in Lithium Americas (announced September 30, 2025, tied to a Thacker Pass loan restructuring, with the stock up 204% in under a month, per the pitch) and its position connected to Trilogy Metals’ Ambler Access Project (October 6, 2025, with shares up 440% in a week by the pitch’s account) established the template: Washington is now willing to own pieces of the critical-minerals supply chain it deems strategically essential. MP Materials preceded them all as the pioneering case. We walk through the full story in our XAI Chess article.

For USAR, the stake was the market’s confirmation that the company cleared the government’s strategic bar. “Shares went vertical” is a fair description of what a federal backstop does to a small-cap’s risk profile: the single biggest question for a development-stage miner, whether the project ever gets financed and built, gets partway answered by the U.S. government showing up on the shareholder register.

The Pattern McCall Is Teaching

The presentation’s core argument is not “buy these three stocks.” It is that the government-stake pattern reveals where the next one might land. The pitch’s main event is a deep-sea mining story: Executive Order 14285 (“Unleashing America’s Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources,” April 2025) directs officials toward offtake agreements and stockpile feasibility studies for polymetallic nodules, and McCall’s teased hero pick is a roughly-$5 company he says owns the only U.S.-flagged vessel capable of harvesting them. LAC, TMQ, and USAR are the precedents that make the pattern credible, and our sibling coverage of The Metals Company fingerprint and the deep-sea mining story and the SKO List deep-sea mining explainer cover that main event in detail.

To his credit, McCall concedes the pattern’s limits in his own words: “Nobody knows for sure if Trump will ultimately back this company. Nothing is final until that ink is dry.”

The Magnet Step, and Why It Matters Here Too

USAR’s story shares the strategic logic that won MP Materials its government backing. Round Top’s value is not just the rare earths in the ground but the plan to process them domestically and feed them into a magnet supply chain, the high-value step China actually dominates. The government’s equity stakes have clustered around companies with credible mine-to-magnet strategies rather than pure rock owners, because the policy goal is not American mines but American independence from Chinese processing. That is the lens the pitch’s pattern argument implies for its deep-sea pick as well: nodules containing battery metals are only strategic if they can be processed on U.S. soil or U.S.-flagged vessels, which is precisely the language Executive Order 14285 uses. Reading the stakes through the supply chain, rather than the deposit, is what the government itself appears to be doing.

What an Investor Should Weigh on USAR

The honest bull case: a strategic heavy-rare-earth deposit in Texas, a government stake signaling strategic importance, and a policy environment (export controls, defense supply-chain mandates, the January 1, 2027 deadline the pitch dramatizes) that structurally favors domestic producers. The honest bear case: development-stage miners carry project risk (funding, permitting, construction, ramp-up) regardless of who holds the shares; “vertical” moves cut both ways on small caps; and a government stake is not a guarantee of the mine’s economics, only a signal of intent.

The pattern is best used as a screen rather than a promise: government backing identifies which projects Washington considers strategically necessary, and the market reprices that recognition fast. What happens after the repricing still depends on execution.

For more on McCall himself, see our profile of Matt McCall, and for the sibling Oxford Club campaign this one pairs with, our XAI Boom review.

The full “chess move” presentation, including the main deep-sea pick and the government-stake chain, is available through this link.

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