Delbrook Resource Fund Has Down Q2 Despite Shrewd Positioning; Sees Opportunity And Momentum With Rare Earths

The Delbrook Resource Opportunities Master Fund LP posted a net return of -5.7%* in the second quarter of 2026, trimming its year-to-date gain to +5.1%. The Vancouver-based long/short materials hedge fund closed June with roughly 50% net long exposure, weighted toward precious metals and critical materials, after a sharp repricing of Federal Reserve rate expectations hit gold-mining equities across the board. Portfolio manager Matthew Zabloski‘s team told investors the selloff traced to positioning, not any break in the commodity thesis it has built over the past several quarters.

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The resources strategy dates to 2013, run through the Delbrook Resource Opportunities Fund; while the Master Fund LP launched on September 2018. It is managed by Delbrook Capital Advisors Inc., based in Vancouver, British Columbia, one of the world’s three major mining finance hubs, and led by Matthew Zabloski, who founded the firm in 2010. Zabloski has also worked as a portfolio manager at Fidelity Management and as a co-founder of CI Cambridge Advisors, is a founding board member of the Shareholder Gold Council, and holds a BA and MBA from the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario.

Q2 by the numbers

Delbrook’s official June tearsheet, distributed alongside the letter, shows the fund ahead of its benchmark, the SPDR S&P Metals & Mining ETF (NYSEARCA:XME), across every period on record, from the trailing month through the since-inception numbers dating to 2018.

The fund also has a better record on a risk-adjusted basis: monthly standard deviation of 8.8% against XME’s 9.8%, a Sharpe ratio of 0.8 versus 0.5, and a Sortino ratio of 0.5 versus 1.0, though XME’s information ratio of 0.2 is the one measure the tearsheet doesn’t report a fund-side figure for. Jensen’s alpha, the excess return the fund has generated relative to what its market exposure alone would predict, stood at 16.1%. The fund closed positive in 62.8% of months since inception, against 57.4% for the benchmark.

As of June 30, gross exposure stood at 76% long and 28% short, netting to 48% long, a hair below the “approximately 50%” the letter itself cites for the same period. By resource type, precious metals made up 58% of the book and base metals 34%, with energy metals at 6% and a scattering of smaller sleeves in bulks, industrials, royalties and mining services rounding out the rest.

What moved the market in June

June’s reversal in equities came down to one thing, Delbrook wrote: an aggressive hawkish shift in rate expectations. Markets entered the quarter pricing two rate cuts by the end of 2026. By June, that had flipped to two hikes priced in by 2027, one of the sharpest repricings in policy expectations the firm says it has seen in recent memory. The VanEck Gold Miners ETF (NYSEARCA:GDX) dropped roughly 18% during the quarter. Delbrook had already trimmed exposure to the sector’s higher-beta names earlier in the year, the firm noted, but the exposure still weighed on performance.