Rick Rule — research hub

Stock & name index

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Overall thesis

• Copper is the centerpiece. 30 years of underinvestment + ~18-year lead times mean a supply shortage within 5 years short of a global depression; the top-10 majors need ~$250B/decade just to hold output (before AI). At $6 copper the producers — Freeport, BHP, Rio, Glencore, Anglo — are "swimming in cash," and we could mine more copper to 2050 than in all human history. Updated Aug-06: he marks himself wrong on the near term — he expected the Gulf oil shock to weaken demand and higher rates to make Chinese speculative inventory expensive, but "the copper price has been much stronger this year than I had anticipated," lifting even the development stories (Marimaca a "4", Hot Chili, ATEX). The standout laggard among the majors is Teck ("the valuation gap between Teck and its peers relative to its pipeline is impressive"); the raw leverage is in the tier-2 names, already "up uniformly 12, 15, 20% in two weeks." Ivanhoe's bump was zinc (Kipushi), not copper, "where the news was bad." On lithium he is now explicitly cautious: the 2019 shortage was processing capacity, not lithium (SQM disclosed ~85 years of production), the market is oversupplied, ~145 of 150 juniors have no developable project, and MidAmerican/Occidental/Chevron/Exxon all believe direct lithium extraction works — "if your lifting and production costs begin to approach free… that'll be very hard on the hard rock lithium producers." Critical-minerals narratives (antimony, vanadium, titanium) fail the $10bn tier-one bar outright. Updated Aug-14 — the copper thesis gets a financing leg: the $250bn to stand still is a funding gap, not just a cost. Equity is "extremely expensive" for a miner trading below sum-of-the-parts ("you're raising equity capital at a price that substantially undervalues the free cash flows"), debt "might cover 65 or 70% of the cost of the mine," so 30–40% has to come from offtakes, royalties and streams — "30 billion or 35 billion or more, as much as 75 billion of unconventional finance." He dates the realisation to Metals Week London, end-2025: "there's nothing that we can do, nothing at all, to avert a shortage in copper," and expects government money in the stack too ("no money in the world as dumb as government"). He also expects the nominal copper price five years out to be "dramatically higher," which is why a royalty that "pencils even in mid single digits at today's copper price" on a long-life asset is worth owning. Updated Aug-26 — the near-term call is formally retired: "I said that I expected the increase in the copper price to be moderated by what I saw as a weakening economy. That hasn't happened. I was just dead wrong." He also rejects the fashionable read that copper is "a puppet to the AI buildout story": data centres and grid build-out are "a 2-year forward, or 3-year forward, or 5-year forward phenomenon. The copper quote is weekly," and higher nominal rates should discourage inventory holding by traders "using 90% margin" — so spot is reporting real demand, not a narrative. The residual conclusion is one he finds uncomfortable and states anyway: "the underlying economy around the world is substantially stronger than I thought it would be in a time of war, in a time of higher interest rates, in a time of threatened trade wars… I'm at a loss to explain how the government can conjure this as a bad economy, one that needs lower interest rates." The same pattern repeats on oil: given a closed Strait of Hormuz "I would be surprised the oil price was this low" — the market "underestimated the amount of floating inventory… and the amount of inventory that existed in strategic and economic stockpiles" — and higher energy prices, which "work in effect as a tax," produced far less economic weakness than he expected.
• Energy security is back — uranium's "certain money" is ahead. The Straits-of-Hormuz conflict spikes oil & gas (and helium, fertilizer, sulfur) and revives energy security for the first time in ~50 years — the "one certainty from the Gulf conflict" (Jul-23). Uranium is the unsung beneficiary: hated and below the cost of production 6–7 years ago, it's run $20→$85–90, so "the easy money has been made — the certain money is ahead of us." Producers that lost money at $20/lb now "make real good money" at $85–90, yet even that price doesn't incent much new supply while demand grows "like crazy" (as the 1973 embargo built the French & Japanese fleets; uranium is uniquely dense — one warehouse can power Japan 5 years — with no coal/gas/battery substitute). Play it up the risk ladder: SPUT (physical proxy, he's the largest holder) / Cameco → the URA ETF → gamier Kazatomprom → juniors NexGen / Paladin / Denison. The move is in the out-years (2029–31), played via the miners. Updated Aug-01: the equity selloff is not capitulation — it's "a question of faith among the faithful" in a worldwide community of only 30–40k people, and sentiment runs ~60% positive / 40% negative when hate would be ~90% negative. What's left is a quality problem: of 120–130 uranium stocks maybe "eight or nine are worth considering," and "at least 90% will eventually return to their intrinsic value, which is zero." Benchmark everything to Cameco; he came down the quality trail to NexGen only for a substantial price-to-NPV premium (holding his nose at "outrageous G&A") because that deposit "will finance itself over time." Retail answer: the spot physical uranium trust + Cameco, "and then do nothing for a while" — 25–30% downside against a potential 3–4× decade if Westinghouse lets Cameco sell watts rather than pounds. The one certainty from the Gulf war is energy security (the 1973 embargo begat the Japanese and French fleets in 1974): "Will this matter in 2026? Likely not. Will this matter 5 years from now? Desperately — probably more than SMRs, probably more than data centers." Updated Aug-06: the Westinghouse IPO doesn't change the Cameco thesis — it's a funding decision (the projected US buildout's capital "can't stand… on their own balance sheet") and a vote of confidence that the administration's ten 1-gigawatt Westinghouse reactors proceed; it removes engineering earnings but "will add back nuclear fuel supply, nuclear fuel processing… depending on the price and terms, it's extremely positive." Tactically he has been buying the equity pullback under a rule that removes timing entirely: nothing in the uranium book "would sell for any price near the current price," so he acts only "on days that are very bad days, when the NexGens or the Camecos sell off for whatever reason." Company-specific exception: Lotus "can fall to zero" on its balance sheet and needs refinancing (a "7" if reinstated) — "I don't like bad balance sheets." Structural leg (Feb-13 clip compilation): the market's move from spot to term contracts is "hugely beneficial for the juniors" — "no other mineral resource commodity in the world" lets a junior lock price and volume for 10–30 years, so they become bankable, and Paladin should see a cost of capital "350 or 400 or 450 basis points lower" than a gold or copper developer — "probably the critical structural change in that market," and one "the entire market is overlooking." The same clips state the quality screen (six or seven of ~120 juniors "have enough uranium to bother with"; a junior that spends its presentation on the uranium market — "time to leave") and why he owns NexGen despite naming its sponsorships, the high-priced convert and community-relations problems: "I own it because the deposit is that good."
• Own oil & gas — but near-term price could fall first. ~$1B/day of sustaining-capital underinvestment (2½–3 yrs) plus war damage to Iran/Qatar/UAE capacity makes future shortages structural — "we will experience today's prices inevitably, if not higher, by ~2029," irrespective of war; even US tier-1 shale is ~85% drilled out at $60–70 oil. Near-term, though, he flags a possible fall: high prices caused real demand destruction in frontier markets (Sri Lanka paid ~$220/bbl), so if restocking is weak that could overwhelm supply and push oil down faster than expected. Exxon is the disciplined allocator and "where you start an oil portfolio"; he personally tilts to discounted high-quality Canadian producers, owns the best-of-best service majors (Halliburton, Schlumberger), and—riskiest—speculates in 31 reviewed micro-cap conventional offshore explorers in emerging/frontier markets (West Africa his favorite theater "largely because other people hate it" — same NPV at ~50% the market cap). On a 2029–30 lens (Jul-23) he calls oil stocks "really truly cheap" and says the portfolio "has to be overweight the United States and Canada," laying out an explicit risk ladder: Exxon (de-risked beta, best allocator, the 19bn-bbl Ghana find) → Chevron (more risk; also the Venezuela survivor that "stuck it out") → Occidental (balance-sheet risk, still below Buffett's price). Gas alpha as the US glut clears in ~2–2½ yrs: Devon (post-Coterra, largest independent US gas producer) and EQT (Marcellus); then Canada (Carney political risk — anti-hydrocarbon but "can add and subtract") via Cenovus, Canadian Natural, Freehold Royalties, Tourmaline, Birchcliff, Peyto, and the Lundin heavy-oil special situation International Petroleum (Keystone-debottleneck kicker). The global deferred-capex catch-up is played via the service majors Schlumberger / Halliburton / Transocean (also the cleanest Venezuela play). Total is framed negatively — "an outsourced apparatus of the French state, not run for the benefit of shareholders." Updated Aug-06: at $2.65 gas the headline is meaningless in aggregate — below the cost of production for a primary gas producer (a Hugoton or gassy Eagle Ford operator), effectively free for a Permian oil producer making $80/bbl ("any price north of a nickel makes money"), so "for the US natural gas business as a whole, $2.65 is fine compensation." He owns EQT ("less of an oversupply in the Marcellus… than in the Midcontinent or in Texas") and Devon post-Coterra, "a merger that is both synergistic and strategic." On a 2029–30 shortfall from underinvestment he upgrades the verb: absent a depression, "rather than could, I would suggest that the word is will." Canada: still holds Tourmaline and Birchcliff (with Peyto), "cautiously optimistic that Mr. Carney will overcome his anti-carbon bias" and let Alberta gas reach BC LNG — the former banker "knows the thing that Canada does best… is produce oil and gas"; Strathcona earns respect but not ownership. International Petroleum is "really truly knocking on" a 3 (≈50k bbl/d, phase three self-funded without debt while paying dividends, 12–13 years of PDP behind it), Texas Pacific Land a 4 on water revenue going 0 → $160M in five years, and Cheniere only a 5 — "on a valuation basis it should be a six," carried by a Qatari-outage windfall that "I don't think… lasts." The service majors (Transocean / Halliburton / Schlumberger) remain the deferred-sustaining-capital catch-up trade — five or six years of it, "really all across the industry" — though he pointedly refuses to rank them after 40 years of distrusting his own oilfield-services calls. Aug-04 (Stansberry) — the flagship version of the thesis: today's price is "a function of an artificial shortage [that] could end with an armistice" and is merely "a foretaste of the oil price that we're going to see in 2029 and 2030 when we have a structural supply shortage that can't be ended by an armistice." The non-obvious corollary: because US output is now shale, where "you get a substantial part of the net present value… out in the first 18 months," a capital strike hits the US and Canada harder than Saudi, Iran or Brazil, whose conventional wells deplete more slowly — "our spending cycle needs to continue very very very high to maintain our current levels of production." The cause is "investor stupidity": the market rewards dividends and buybacks, so under-spenders are "cannibalizing themselves" and he is "taking the backside of that trade" — which makes the stingier dividend the better one ("if you defer your sustaining capital investments, you're not able to pay the dividends four or five years out"). The one-stock answer for a general audience is Exxon — 30-year capital-allocation record, still funding sustaining capital, a Guyana discovery big enough to move its dial: "buy Exxon. Just relax… if it goes lower, buy a little more." Then US natural gas as oversupply flips with the export build-out (Devon's interfingered Coterra leases = three-mile laterals not one-mile; EQT moving Marcellus gas "Pennsylvania to Massachusetts"), and Canada cheaper still on headline political risk — the full list being Cenovus ("not a great company, but stupidly cheap"), Canadian Natural ("a better company"), Freehold, Tourmaline ("maybe best return on capital employed… fantastic operators"), Birchcliff, Peyto and PrairieSky, all on a hold-to-2030 condition (ARC Resources is gone — Shell took it). The riskier outlier is Petrobras: drill-bit efficiency now grows production and reserves on suboptimal capex while paying an "outrageous" state-driven dividend, with escalating Brazilian-state "theft" as the risk. Two confirmations he watches: the big banks "moving away from energy credits" (less capital now = less production later, and a lending opportunity for Battle Bank), and the peak-demand fallacy itself — $10 trillion over 45 years moved hydrocarbons' market share only from 83% to 81%, while a billion people still have no primary electricity.
• Gold to save, silver to speculate (only when hated). Two different buckets: he saves in gold — price-insensitive, no price near current that makes him a seller, "the only price action I'm interested in is lower, I'd like to own more," so pullbacks are "heaven-sent." Silver is a speculation entered only when the asset class is genuinely hated; he sold 80% of his speculative silver into January's hyperbolic "hockey-stick" top and will buy back only "if silver becomes hated again." Sequencing: gold establishes momentum first, then the generalist flood (e.g. India's physical-silver imports at multi-year highs) flips leadership and silver outperforms. The long game is USD debasement (~$40T debt + ~$120T unfunded entitlements → "inflate our way out," a 1970s redux of −75% purchasing power; real inflation ~8–10%/yr vs the CPI's 2.6%, so he won't own duration), gold target $5,500–6,000. For a silver-stock book: best-of-best Wheaton / Agnico / Pan American, then Peñoles / Hochschild / Buenaventura for risk-takers — and Pan American hides ~1B oz (Navidad + Escobal) the market gives no credit for. Updated Aug-01: silver bullion still isn't a buy — it's "disappointed, but there's still hope in the market," and his calibration for real hate is 2020's ~$20 silver when "18 of 20 comments described it as a four-letter word." Silver miners aren't "on sale" either (no capitulation bargains) but are arithmetically attractive: his book is "discounting $37–42 silver in a $55 world," with pipeline + cash flow enough that NAV grows over 3–5 yrs with no help from the silver price. Sequencing restated — gold moves first as the dollar decays and the generalist returns, then "silver begins to outpace gold" and "I suspect I'll be ludicrously rewarded," possibly 2–3 years out. Near-term he expects metals sideways-to-lower through the balance of 2026 (the Fed "has lost control of the long rate"; higher US and Japanese rates raise gold's carry and make bonds relatively attractive) — and hopes so, since he's still buying. The structural anchor: precious metals are <0.5% of US savings & investment assets vs a 2% four-decade mean — reversion "would quadruple demand." Updated Aug-06: unmoved by the higher gold price — "I'm of mixed minds. I'm still looking to buy gold. So my own preference would probably be for the gold price to be lower." The debasement case gets a live example: the US "created a bunch of dollars out of thin air by printing them, lent them to the Japanese to buy yen" so Tokyo wouldn't have to sell Treasuries — "printing more US dollars with no additional backing makes the existing ones worth less… the bottom line's always the same. The citizens always get it." Practical note for bullion buyers: every cash transaction over $10,000 is "a suspicious activity in and of itself" and generates a report — expect it, answer plainly, never structure around it. Among the silver/gold miners, the capital-allocation test does the sorting: Hecla is out (20 years of negative reserve replacement — "they've destroyed as opposed to added capital"), while B2Gold ("one of the cheapest intermediate producers in the world," two tier-one deposits) and Agnico (20 straight years of positive reserve reconciliation) are in. Updated Aug-14, with gold above $4,400: still buying — "about half that paycheck will go into physical gold. And I'm pretty price insensitive" — on a horizon where "it wouldn't surprise me if the sell decision for my personal gold was made by my heirs." The rule is stated twice: he is "a systematic saver in gold" (every liquidity event feeds it), and he front-ends that saving when "there's a rout of selling," shifting existing dollar savings in "out of a current paycheck rather than a future paycheck." Near-term he is candid — "I have no earthly idea": a rising nominal rate strengthens the dollar and raises the foregone-interest cost of holding gold, so "the next three or four months could be problematic," while the 10-year view is unchanged. The upside trigger is political, not economic — if rates are forced down and the market gets a 1975-style signal "that short-term American politics are more important than the sanctity of the US dollar, then you'll see gold rip." Equities: "you're not seeing enough euphoria in the gold stocks yet to have them be a trading sell." Updated Aug-26, gold $4,700: the buckets get named as a framework — "I save in gold. I regard gold as wealth itself and liquidity. I invest in gold stocks and I speculate in small gold stocks. For me, those are three different buckets" — and every allocation question is answered "on behalf of whom?" (savers → gold, investors → GDX, speculators → GDXJ). He is adding to physical gold out of the conference paycheck, "fairly price insensitive" ("Would I have preferred to buy it at $4,000? Yes. Will I buy it at 4,700? Yes"), with the mechanism now explicitly real rather than nominal rates. Two brakes are stated in the same breath: "that hyperbolic chart always scares me… I'm beginning to see it in gold now," and the sell-half rule applied live to speculations up >100% in three months. On silver he is still out and unapologetic — "I have not" bought back — because "when the reason that you own something goes away, you need to at least reconsider your investment thesis"; he denies it is hated ("people are bored of silver… more it's less loved"), while conceding on a 40–50-year chart that his gold-savings/silver-speculation split is "a bad habit formed of age" and "over my lifetime I'm probably wrong." The froth alarm is restated as the one indicator he trusts: silver substantially outpacing gold = generalists have arrived — and it has not fired yet, with generalist participation "still very very little." Structural anchor updated: precious metals are still "less than 1/2 of 1%" of North American savings and investment assets, so "most market participants grievously under own gold and gold securities" — a trim is right only for someone already at 18–20%. Platinum/palladium may be re-entering "the precious metals matrix" (SPPP inflows rise when PMs run), but "I haven't studied the platinum market… since I left Sprott."
• A resource M&A wave — buy the takeover targets. Consolidation is "here, not coming," and he expects it to go "feverish" over the next two years as Wall Street's demand of the majors shifts from capital discipline (dividends/buybacks) to sustainability — 20 years of under-investing in production catching up. The most attractive theme "irrespective of commodity" is to identify and buy the likely targets: strategic/synergistic deals (Agnico's Finland roll-up — bolt on a neighbor and run it through existing infrastructure) plus horizontal "get-bigger-for-passive-flows" deals (Equinox/Orla → a must-own million-ounce producer that wins index inclusion; Calibre, G Mining/G2 at a 70% premium yet accretive) — with cheap mid-tiers OceanaGold & B2Gold (if Goose hits nameplate) as rerate/takeover candidates. A related tell (Jul 2026): two of the ten best drill holes of his career in six weeks (Mogotes, NW Argentina; Arras, Kazakhstan) hint that bigger budgets + new tech are ending a long discovery drought — a possible 1991–93-style exploration-stock bull. His developer grades (1 best, 10 worst): Dakota Gold 4 (large holding), Equinox 5 (digesting Orla → major producer), Vizsla Silver (owns heavily — a 2–3-yr Sinaloa-cartel "buy hate"), Vista Gold a "weak 6"; on uranium, UEC in the "catbird seat," NexGen 5 (best deposit, hates the Formula-1 G&A), Denison under review on ISR-at-depth. Rankings refreshed Aug-06 (1 best / 10 worst): International Petroleum "knocking on" a 3; 4s — Marimaca, Texas Pacific Land, Alamos (restored from 5); 5s — Dakota Gold (with the sterilized-Homestake option), Equinox (wants two more clean quarters from the Canadian mine; "cash is really going to gush" if it hits nameplate), Cheniere, Viper (to be reinitiated); 6s — Bunker Hill, Emperor Metals (owned; a 5 but for the post-conference run); 7 — Lotus if reinstated; unranked/no view — Silver One, White Gold, Arizona Metals, Eagle Nuclear, Noble, Scorpio (too small), Mayfair (can't get to a million minable ounces), Standard Lithium, Vista Energy (agrees with the bull description), Transocean (owned, deliberately unranked). Two passes on price/structure rather than quality: Cadillac (Lassonde's Kerr-Addison — "a truly spectacular land position" at "an absurd valuation relative to the proven and probable") and Osisko Development (superb data, but "the discontinuous nature of both grade and structure has kept me from owning"). New structural filter for explorers: prefer two strategic producer shareholders, not one — "it's tough to have an auction with one bidder" (Founders Metals, with B2Gold and Gold Fields). The Abitibi orphan thesis is dead by Agnico's own account: regional mills now buy and truck sub-mill ore, which is why he owns Emperor. Aug-04 — the mechanism named: the M&A wave is being driven by passive flows, so the play is to "get in the way of the money." Index construction rewards "trading liquidity, simple market cap and heft," which means a valuation gap between small and large companies has only two resolutions — "either the value arbitrageurs arb that away or the big companies take over the little companies. End of discussion" — and "front running the ETFs, if you give yourself a two-year or three-year lag time, is really truly simple," with the re-rating coming from the single-asset discount disappearing on takeover. He splits the deals in two: strategic (Agnico buying a deposit that "couldn't advertise the construction of a mill" because it has one "within trucking distance and doesn't have to build a $350 million mill" — the deposit "is more valuable to it than it is to the current shareholders") and tactical (Equinox/Orla combining with "absolutely no operating synergy" to reach a million ounces a year — "you construct a new major and that will get index inclusion and it will get passive buying every two weeks"). Related passive-era move: own the manager, not the product — rather than paying fees on several Sprott ETFs, buy Sprott Inc. and hold an indirect interest in all ~50 while being paid a dividend ("would you rather pay or be paid?"; he's still the largest shareholder). His old ETF objection survives but is softened: GDXJ is volume-weighted, "not necessarily a measure of value," and "60% of the stocks in the ETF I wouldn't buy with a straight face" — yet for someone who won't do the work, "buying an ETF is a lot better than doing nothing." Screen formalised Aug-14: delta first ("something that's worth a lot more than it's selling for… it requires you to do the work"), then size ("5 million ounces plus, or better yet 10 million"), then which kind of buyer applies — strategic (within "trucking distance of an existing hungry mill," the correction Agnico's Ammar Al-Joundi gave him) or tactical (Ross Beaty's Equinox/Orla/Calibre flywheel: size → liquidity → index inclusion → passive buying → lower cost of capital, so judge "heft and sustainability," not asset fit). Current tactical targets: B2Gold (discount to NPV that closes when the Nunavut mine hits nameplate; two potential tier-one assets an acquirer could isolate by selling the tier-2s) and OceanaGold. Early-stage exception: an "extraordinarily high-quality early stage discovery… becomes a must own asset" (Barrick/Arequipa on 11 drill holes for $1bn; Kinross/Great Bear in a bad tape; Snowline as illustration, "not a recommendation"). Depletion audit — asked which majors have a problem, "all of them" bar Agnico and Gold Fields; Barrick and Newmont are clean for five years only if they settle and Fourmile re-enters the Nevada pipeline. And on a sale process, count bidders and price time: Seabridge is down to one ("there's no deal tension with one bidder"), so "at $5,500, time is on the side of Rudi. At $4,400… time is on the side of the bidder."
• Royalties & streamers are the way to own the copper funding gap. New Aug-14 — his most fully-argued idea to date. By-product silver inside a copper mine is valued as copper cash flow at 6–7×; "isolated in a silver stream, it trades at 15 times cash flow." Add a streamer's lower cost of capital and a deal like Wheaton's Antamina stream from BHP is "literally accretive to BHP shareholders and Wheaton shareholders simultaneously — a true win-win," made better by being uncapped: you get the silver discovered later, free of discovery, development and sustaining costs, on deposits where "big deposits get bigger." He rejects the standard bear case on the giants — that the foundational mega-deals are history — as "exactly wrong": "there are very few companies in the world that are large enough to allocate capital to the major miner in three and four and 5 billion chunks. Franco and Wheaton are two of those," and as the need exceeds even them the facilities get syndicated, with Franco and Wheaton "the architects." Participants down the ladder: Triple Flag, Osisko Gold Royalties, Royal Gold, large hedge funds, then the copper royalty tier — Ecora, Altius, Elemental. He already owns "a lot of Franco and a lot of Wheaton and a lot of Agnico," and the mispricing is behavioural: "most people don't do any work. They want to feel, not think… a lot of folks don't care too much about becoming rich. They want to live rich." The one red flag in the sub-sector: transaction velocity well above the sector's means the acquirer is probably overpaying — unless there is a structural advantage (Nations Royalty's Aboriginal-controlled model, "a wall around their business"; Empress Royalty as Endeavour Financial's royalty arm, "at least ostensibly"). Uranium Royalty's Sweetwater purchase fails the price test — "a very fully priced acquisition," bought from Orion at a big markup, with soda-ash/trona cash flow as "a bit of mission drift," offset by becoming "one of the largest fee simple real estate owners in the country."
• Discipline beats everything — stay in your circle of competence. He prices natural-resource and conventional financial-services businesses and flatly refuses to value technology (won't say if Nvidia is reasonable — "I don't care"), citing Cundill/Buffett's no-FOMO rule. Good strategy dies on bad tactics; be a contrarian (buy when PEs are high because there's no E), fade hyperbolic "hockey-stick" moves (they resolve unpleasantly for whoever chased them), discount political risk by region without social bias (it exists "in all languages" — California and Alberta too), and do the work if you want outsized gains. Codified Aug-01: the entry signal is measured hate, not drawdown — hopeful / disappointed / hated are three different states and only the third is a buy. Keep cash: he puts ~25% odds on a 50% equity decline within two years ("notice I didn't say a probability, I said a possibility"), and in that tape "there's no industry in the world more marginal than junior mining." Price cash correctly — not as opportunity cost but as interest minus purchasing-power decay (an 8%-debasing dollar makes a 4.5% bond a −3.5% real loss), i.e. the premium on an option to buy stupendous rather than relative bargains; 2009, not 2008, was the best year of his career because he had "the tool — the cash — and the courage from education." Sizing rule: own as many speculative stocks as hours per month you'll actually spend on 10-Ks, 10-Qs, resource statements and insider filings — the single most common failure across ~100,000 graded portfolios is 50–60 names supported by an hour or two of work. And match the tactic to the strategy: a five-year thesis held on a two-month tactic "dooms you to failure." Sharpened Aug-06: the filters get numbers. Size first — "I really try to restrict my own account to tier one deposits or potential tier one deposits. I define tier one arbitrarily as a minimum of $10 billion in in-situ recoverable reserves and resources, but preferably $20 billion," with a million minable ounces as the gold floor; sub-scale critical-minerals stories are excluded by construction, because they win by selling "a narrative as opposed to reality." Price is part of the rating, so a rating can fall on strength and rise on weakness with no news. Don't publish a number where you have no edge — he owns Transocean but won't rank it after auditing 40 years of his own oilfield-services calls. And leverage, not being wrong, is what kills: the yen carry was "an extremely reliable game for 20 years" run at 50% equity, but at 30–50:1 a second-standard-deviation reversal is "an existential mistake" — exactly Long-Term Capital Management, who were right about convergence and still died on a hiatus. Financing tells matter too: a junior extending expiring out-of-the-money warrants isn't housekeeping — "they need the money." Two sell rules codified Aug-26. (1) Sell half on a double when nothing changed: ask first whether the business improved or only the metal did — "other than the gold price, nothing much materially changed with those companies" — then restate the valuation as a ratio, "if nothing has changed in a company and the company stock has gone from $1 to $2, it's precisely half as attractive as it was before the price doubled," and "sell half those positions and get the rest for free." Applied hardest to names added recently. (2) When the reason you own something goes away, reconsider: he bought silver only because it was hated, "silver ceased to be hated," and so it was sold and never repurchased — with sentiment graded on a scale (hopeful / bored / afraid / hated) rather than as a switch. The circle-of-competence rule holds under pressure: shown Bitcoin, the S&P and semis all turning up together, "I have no opinion as to the real value of the S&P 500. I understand natural resources. I understand conventional financial services and I don't understand much more." Two further Aug-26 items: the financing window is read from his own fill, not from industry complaints — quality issuers were funded all year, his orders "getting cut back" with few warrants offered, and if gold merely holds this level "October could be a spectacular month indeed for financings" (with the caveat that only 10–15% of juniors turn that capital into value); and a sector he knows, likes and is not in — US community banks, "really cheap," small franchises at substantial discounts to book earning 10% after tax on book, i.e. "a 15% after tax earnings yield" reinvestable for growth, and consolidating as older owners sell — he names no individual bank, and says Rule Media plus Battle Bank have used up the time. Sep-08 — the method stated whole, for the first time in the archive: "I'm not a generalist. I do one thing. There are a lot of investors that I compete with who try to be all things to all people. I proved to myself relatively conclusively in my 30s that I couldn't do all things." The three legs are domain knowledge, a hired team ("I employ geologists, I employ engineers, I employ financial analysts") and a 50-year rolodex that is specific rather than social — "I know who to call about Archean geology in the Abitibi. I know who to call about exploring for copper gold porphyries in accreted terrain." The negative leg matters as much: "I don't distract myself… if you ask me a question about laws, I don't know and I would tell you that and I don't waste any time on it whatsoever." Applied live to Abaxx, the only name he refuses to rate: he likes the founder and the mission but "my track record in science and technology is unblemished by success," so no view on the technology and — symmetrically — no rebuttal of the short report either, where on a silver short report he did have the edge and did take it on. Two further Sep-08 screens: "adult supervision" as a register test (the Lundins at International Petroleum and 20% of Talon, Beaty at Equinox, the Goodmans at Dundee, Giustra at Copper Giant) — with its limit visible in the same breath, since supervision does not transfer across a change of business model ("they're more useful to me as a merchant bank"); and social licence judged on local capacity, not sentiment — Solaris faces "real social and political challenges… not fake ones," but the failure mode is that "a population that doesn't have sufficient capacity will make a poor decision," which is precisely the gap Nations Royalty exists to close.

The product — Rule Investment Media

All of the below is from his own pitches in the appearances archived here (esp. 2026-JUN-06, 2026-JUN-07, 2026-JUN-09, 2026-JUN-17, 2026-JUL-05, 2026-JUL-08, 2026-JUL-23, 2026-AUG-11, 2026-AUG-14, 2026-AUG-26, 2026-SEP-08).

How it serves retail investors:

• A veteran reviews your actual holdings, free. The rankings service grades the portfolio a retail investor already owns — name by name — rather than selling them a new one.
• Education over alerts. The classroom/boot-camp model teaches retail to do resource due diligence themselves; his stated objection to resource index funds is paying fees for a portfolio half of which he "wouldn't otherwise own."
• Access to management. The pre-symposium interviews put every exhibitor's management on the record, free, on YouTube.
• Cheap paid tier. The only real costs are the $99 boot camps and symposium admission.
• Mentoring is where he says the business is going. Asked on 2026-SEP-08 what he does for fun, the answer is not investing: "increasingly, Amber, I really like mentoring. I mentor various youth constituencies… and I really really really enjoy mentoring. I'm looking forward to being able to do more of that in my life." Read alongside the free rankings and the classroom, the whole enterprise is a teaching business he happens to fund with a resource book — plus two hours of reading a day and "industrial tourism," his phrase for work travel where "local people show me what they think is important."

Transcripts

One dated page per appearance — each has its full stock table, talking points, and the saved transcript. Newest first.

To process — backlog

Rick Rule appearances discovered via YouTube search (Rick Rule), not yet processed — verify publish dates & channels, newest first. Limited to the last ~2 years. None queued yet.

For personal study — not investment advice. Source material © the respective shows / Rule Investment Media.