Rick Rule — Where I See Value in Gold, Uranium & Copper: 30 live rankings, the $10bn tier-one test, and "I have no interest in up days"

Orogen is a prospect generator with royalties. It does early exploration itself, then hands projects to bigger companies who pay all the drilling costs — Orogen keeps a free carried interest and, if a mine is ever built, a royalty (a small slice of every ounce produced, forever, with no share of the costs). It currently has 13 or 14 projects being drilled on someone else's dime.

The model already paid out once spectacularly: Orogen generated a Nevada discovery in the Walker Lane belt whose royalty was sold for what Rick calls "a dramatic return to shareholders" — big enough that "everything that's left over in Orogen was icing on the cake." What's left is not small: a big cash pile, a royalty on the producing Ermitaño mine operated by First Majestic (with proven expansion and a fresh discovery being drilled), and the drill-program lottery tickets.

The questioner's worry was the ~$200M price tag against ~$80–100M of measurable net asset value. Rick's answer is that this is "a premium priced company and I would suspect that it deserves the premium" — you are paying for the machine that produces royalties, not just the ones it has. He is a very large shareholder. The single risk he names is human: after such a large win, has management's hunger been "sated"?

B2Gold is a mid-sized gold producer with mines in Mali, Namibia, the Philippines and now Nunavut. Rick is a large shareholder and calls it "one of the cheapest intermediate producers in the world" on a sum-of-the-parts basis (i.e. add up what each mine is worth and compare that to the share price).

The quality distinction matters to him: B2 owns two tier-one deposits — his bar is roughly $10 billion of metal in the ground — whereas a comparably cheap peer like OceanaGold is "more a collection of tier 2 deposits." Big, long-life mines survive bad years; small ones don't.

Two things you must be able to judge before buying. First, the new CEO: founder Clive Johnson was uniquely good at the un-teachable part of the job — flying to Mali when the government was tearing up contracts and settling it quietly, operating through Duterte's Philippine crackdown, even running a mine in Russia. Second, the Goose mine in Nunavut, which ran late and over budget. Johnson only stepped down because it was finally on track; if Goose reaches full design capacity, Rick expects the same re-rating Equinox got when it cleared the same kind of problem. "B2 is cheap. It may get cheaper."

International Petroleum is the Lundin family's heavy-oil producer at Cold Lake in northern Alberta — roughly 50,000 barrels a day. Rick has followed the deposit for 30 years and it is closing in on his top tier: "I don't have a three ranking yet, but they're really truly knocking on it."

What earns the upgrade is the funding picture. The company is generating enough cash to build its next major expansion ("phase three") out of its own pocket — no new debt, no issuing shares that dilute existing owners — while still paying substantial dividends. That is rare in oil, where growth is usually paid for by someone else's money.

And the base is durable: even before phase three, the existing phases hold about 12–13 years of proved developed producing reserves — oil already drilled and connected, needing no further capital to flow. So the only real interruption risk to cash flow is the oil price itself.

Texas Pacific Land owns an enormous acreage position in West Texas and doesn't drill anything. It collects rent: royalties from oil and gas produced on its land, plus grazing and surface leases. Rick has owned it for close to 30 years and ranks it a 4 even after a big run.

The change he's paying for is water. Fracking consumes and produces vast quantities of water in a desert, and Texas Pacific is turning into the region's water supplier and water-storage landlord — "water revenues have grown from effectively zero five years ago to $160 million this year. I expect that to continue." That converts a pure commodity-royalty stream into an infrastructure toll.

His warning is about temperament, not value: this is a decades-long compounding holding, "for people who don't have my patience, people who are traders, probably Texas Pacific is not the right name."

Marimaca is developing a copper deposit in northern Chile — not producing yet, so you're buying an asset in the ground plus a management team's ability to build it. Rick ranks it a 4, one of his higher marks for a pre-production company: "the stock has been on fire, but so are the drilling results" — i.e. the share price rise is backed by real geology, not just enthusiasm.

He frames it inside an admission. He expected copper to be weak this year (higher oil prices slowing the world economy; higher interest rates making it expensive for Chinese speculators to sit on inventory). "I was wrong" — copper has been much stronger, and that strength has lifted every credible development story, Marimaca included. He remains a long-term copper bull, but is honest that the sector "has over rewarded me in 2026."

Alamos is a mid-tier gold producer. The interesting part here is the mechanics of Rick's rankings: he had cut it from 4 to 5 purely because the share price had risen — nothing about the business got worse, it just got more expensive. Price is part of the rating, not separate from it.

Now the stock has come back down while the company has "a very very nice pipeline" of projects to grow into, so the rating goes back to 4. He discloses both that he owns it and that he has been a personal friend of CEO John McCluskey for 40 years — the kind of conflict he routinely puts on the record.

Dakota Gold is trying to bring gold mining back to the Homestake district in South Dakota — the ground around one of the greatest gold mines in American history. Rick ranks it a 5, and thinks the base case is essentially settled: "I don't think there's any doubt that Richmond Hill becomes a mine. The question becomes now how big?"

The reason he ranks it more aggressively than the arithmetic alone justifies is a free option. When Barrick handed the old Homestake mine to the State of South Dakota, a lot of gold was effectively "sterilized" — locked away because nobody could mine it. If Dakota gets back into production, Rick's speculation is that it could pay the state a sum welcome in its budget to unlock those ounces. Nobody is paying for that today.

He also views the district as one connected system — Richmond Hill and Maitland as "one event," possibly three separate mines feeding a shared processing mill — with mineralization at depth that appears in nobody's mine plan.

Cameco mines uranium and co-owns Westinghouse, which designs and builds reactors. The news was that Westinghouse is being taken public through an IPO, and the question was whether that damages the long-term Cameco story. Rick says no — it's a funding decision.

Building ten large reactors in the United States requires enormous capital that Cameco "can't stand… on their own balance sheet." Selling shares in Westinghouse to outside investors raises that money without Cameco writing the cheque. It also signals management genuinely believes the US programme will happen, since you don't float a business into a market you expect to disappoint.

The trade-off is straightforward: Cameco gives up some Westinghouse engineering profit, but gains from supplying and processing the fuel for every reactor built — "it'll add back a lot. So depending on the price and terms, it's extremely positive." The only caveat he attaches is the one every IPO deserves: it depends on price and terms.

Westinghouse is the reactor-technology business part-owned by Cameco. It isn't yet something you can buy — the IPO is the event under discussion — so it appears here as context rather than a recommendation.

Rick reads the float two ways at once. It is an admission that the capital needed to build the projected US nuclear fleet is too large for the current owners' balance sheets, and it is a vote of confidence that the government's plan to fund ten 1-gigawatt reactors using Westinghouse technology is real. Whether it's good for outside buyers, he says, comes down entirely to "the price and terms."

NexGen owns one of the best undeveloped uranium deposits in the world, in Saskatchewan. In this session it appears mainly as the vehicle for Rick's tactic rather than a fresh thesis: he refuses to time the market, and instead buys "on days that are very bad days, when the NexGens or the Camecos sell off for whatever reason — the prime minister of Japan sneezed or something like that."

The corollary is what makes it a stance and not a shrug: "I don't have any uranium equities that I would sell for any price near the current price." Because the sell side is closed, only down days require action — "I have no interest in up days."

Copper equities have run hard with the metal near record highs, and the question was which ones haven't. Among the big producers, Rick's answer is Teck: "the valuation gap between Teck and its peers relative to its pipeline, I think is impressive." Pipeline means the projects it can build next — the part of a miner's value that the market ignores when it's focused on this quarter's output.

He notes his usual preference is the biggest, lowest-cost producers, and that the raw leverage to copper sits in the smaller "tier 2" names — but those are already up 12–20% in two weeks. That is the honest timing caveat: the easy part of this move has happened, and he still likes the sector "five years out."

A shareholder asked a clever bear question: Agnico sold $261 million of its junior-mining shareholdings in one quarter — three times what it bought — and used the money to buy back its own stock. If the best acquirer in the industry prefers itself to the juniors, is that a top signal?

Rick says no. They simply compared a speculative value (what those juniors might be worth) with a known one (what their own shares are worth) and took the bird in the hand. Agnico also doesn't need exploration luck: it already has enough development projects to grow for five years.

The durable point is the quality test he offers in passing, and it is one any investor can run on a miner: for 20 consecutive years Agnico has enjoyed a "positive reconciliation" — through drilling it upgraded more ounces from resource (probably there) to reserve (economically minable) than it dug up that year, while still growing the resource. A miner that can't do that is quietly liquidating itself.

Tourmaline is Canada's largest natural-gas producer and the one Rick rates highest among the Canadian gassy names he owns — better positioned, in his view, than the well-regarded Strathcona.

The bet underneath it is political as much as geological: Canadian gas sells at a discount because it struggles to reach tidewater. If more of it can flow west to British Columbia's LNG export terminals it can be sold at world prices. Prime Minister Carney is on record as anti-carbon, but Rick is "cautiously optimistic" the arithmetic wins — a former banker with an expensive spending agenda knows "the thing that Canada does best in terms of their economy is produce oil and gas."

Birchcliff is a smaller, gas-focused Canadian producer that Rick owns alongside Peyto. Because it's almost purely gas (rather than oil with gas as a by-product), it is a direct bet on the Canadian gas price rather than a diversified energy holding.

He states the entry conditions rather than a target: "to own Birchcliff, you need to be a continued bull on North American, but particularly Canadian natural gas. And you have to believe that the impediments involved in moving more Canadian natural gas to liquefied natural gas export facilities on BC is going to go ahead." If you don't believe both, you shouldn't own it.

EQT produces natural gas from the Marcellus shale in Appalachia. Asked to pick between it and rivals elsewhere, Rick's reasoning is purely about local supply and demand: "there is less of an oversupply in the Marcellus where they operate than there is in the Midcontinent or in Texas where the others operate." Gas is expensive to move, so regional gluts are real and persistent.

The longer-term frame is his underinvestment call. Asked whether years of underspending could cause a gas shortfall by 2029–30, he upgrades the verb: absent a depression or an ugly global recession, "rather than could, I would suggest that the word is will."

Devon is the other US gas holding, and the reason is its recent merger — one he calls "both synergistic and strategic." Synergistic means the combination cuts duplicated costs and lets adjacent acreage be drilled more efficiently; strategic means it changes the company's position in the industry rather than just making it bigger.

Paired with EQT, it is his way of owning the eventual clearing of the US gas glut without betting on a single basin.

Transocean owns offshore drilling rigs and rents them to oil companies. Rick owns it but deliberately publishes no ranking, for an unusually candid reason: after 40 years of analysing oilfield services and watching how his own calls turned out, "I don't have much faith in them." When he doesn't trust his own edge, he declines to put a number on it.

He owns it anyway because of a whole-industry argument that doesn't require picking the best operator. For years the oil industry has skipped sustaining capital — the routine spending required just to stop production declining — and deferred new projects. That bill comes due, and "they're going to have to play catch-up in that investment for the next five or six years." Transocean's leverage to that catch-up is specific: it falls hardest in the offshore frontier basins it specialises in.

Halliburton sells the services and equipment oil companies buy when they drill and complete wells — so its revenue rises when the industry finally spends the maintenance capital it has been deferring.

Rick holds it as one of three best-of-breed service names (with Schlumberger and Transocean) on exactly that thesis: a five- to six-year catch-up in sustaining capital "really all across the industry." He isn't picking a technology winner; he's buying the toll collectors on a spending wave he thinks is unavoidable.

SLB is the largest oilfield-services company in the world, and the third leg of Rick's deferred-capital trade alongside Halliburton and Transocean.

The logic is the same and worth restating because it is the opposite of a commodity-price bet: he doesn't need the oil price to rise. He needs producers to resume the maintenance spending they have postponed — which they must do to keep production flat, whatever the price does.

Vista is a fast-growing, low-cost oil producer in Argentina's Vaca Muerta shale — one of the largest shale resources outside North America. Rick doesn't formally rank it, but when the description offered was "fast growing low-cost producer with a very experienced management," his answer was that "on the face of it I agree with his assessment."

Treat that as an endorsement of the characterisation rather than a completed piece of work: the whole ranking system exists precisely because he doesn't put numbers on companies he hasn't finished analysing.

Founders is exploring for gold at Antino in Suriname. It has drilled good intercepts but doesn't yet have a formal resource estimate — an early-stage story where the main question is who is standing behind it.

Two producers, B2Gold and Gold Fields, are both shareholders, and Rick thinks that is worth a great deal. You get free adult supervision and technical help; the tradable share count is smaller than it looks because majors don't day-trade, which cuts both ways on volatility; and — the point most investors miss — if a discovery is proved up, two interested industry buyers means an auction. "It's tough to have an auction with one bidder… Having two creates dynamic tension."

The cost side is unglamorous and real: Suriname is tropical rainforest with helicopter-only access, so everything including the helicopter fuel gets flown in. Cost per metre drilled is very high and the company will need capital continuously. He doesn't own it, but "I look fondly on that."

Equinox is a mid-tier gold producer that recently changed CEO and is still proving out its big Canadian operation. Rick ranks it a five — a hold-and-watch, not a buy — and says plainly what would change it: "one, but better yet two more quarters" of the Canadian mine running properly.

Why that matters: a mine that reaches its designed production rate ("nameplate capacity") stops consuming cash and starts producing it in volume — "cash is really going to gush through that company." The company's cash-generating potential, including the Valentine deposit, he calls "pretty spectacular." The next question then becomes capital allocation: what do they build with it?

On the chairman, Ross Beaty: expect nothing until October (he is on Bowen Island in his garden and kayak all summer) and then 14-hour days — "I've known Ross for 50 years. This is a firsthand observation."

Ivanhoe operates in the Democratic Republic of Congo and is usually thought of as a copper company. Its shares jumped roughly 20% in a week and the host assumed copper was the reason. Rick's correction is the useful bit: "the performance in Ivanhoe had much less to do with copper, where the news was bad by the way. But the news from the zinc mine was pretty spectacular."

The zinc mine is Kipushi, and he rates the quarter's results all the more highly because of what they overcome: heavy transport costs, and provincial politics in which the governor controls trucking and blocks the cheaper option of shipping by rail. (He declines the easy moral: "we do that in the states too before we get too self-congratulatory about it.")

It's an explanation of a share move rather than a recommendation — but a reminder to check which part of a diversified miner actually delivered.

Cheniere liquefies US natural gas and ships it abroad. Right now it is earning extraordinary money because the Gulf conflict has cut the world off from Qatari gas, leaving Cheniere as "the best game in town… like they have the only ice cream stand in town on a 110 degree day."

Rick rates it a five and shows his work: on valuation alone it deserves a six — i.e. it is expensive — and the only thing pulling it up is a windfall he expects to end. "I don't think that lasts."

That is the general lesson worth keeping: a company earning peak profits from a temporary dislocation looks cheap on today's earnings precisely when it is most dangerous to extrapolate them.

Viper owns mineral and royalty interests under Permian Basin acreage — it collects a share of the oil and gas produced without paying drilling or operating costs. Rick has it unranked at the moment and says "I suspect I will reinitiate it with a five," i.e. a middling grade once he finishes the work. Flagged as pending, not as a call.

Vizsla is building a high-grade silver mine in Sinaloa, Mexico. The reason nobody can forecast its schedule is brutal: ten of its employees were murdered, and construction restarting depends on an accommodation with the cartel that controls the area — a negotiation the company "is forbidden from engaging in but must engage in," and which can never be disclosed. What you will eventually see is a bland release saying management is "satisfied with the current security arrangements."

So Rick refuses to guess a timeline: "you aren't going to be able to monitor that. Nor am I." He does read one signal as genuinely positive — the company has been able to recruit senior Mexican executives, people who understand the local situation better than any outsider: "it would suggest that people who know believe that it is either safe or becoming safe."

The question concerned a narrow-vein underground gold mine being built by Sean Roosen's team, where infill drilling showed the actual grades varying a lot from the geological model, and where management owns only about 1% of the shares.

Rick's answer separates two things. On data, he gives full credit — "Sean has drilled the living S out of this thing… you have unusually good data," and the build was deliberately over-financed to absorb surprises. On geology, he still passes: a vein that "shrinks and swells" is inherently hard to mine to a plan, and "it is precisely the discontinuous nature of both grade and structure that has kept me from owning the company."

He attaches an unusual humility clause. The last time they disagreed — Rick wanted to accept a hostile takeover bid for the original Osisko, Roosen refused — Roosen's stubbornness made Rick 35% more money in three or four months. "You disagree with Sean at your peril."

Emperor owns two modest gold deposits in Quebec's Abitibi belt. Rick owns it personally but ranks it a six — and the reason is purely price: it was a favourite at his conference and "the stock got bid up too much." Otherwise it would be a five.

The thesis is a change of industry structure. Historically a small deposit was an orphan: too small to justify building its own processing mill, so it never got developed and merely traded well in successive bull markets. Rick believed that for years — until Agnico Eagle's CEO Ammar Al-Joundi told him he had it wrong: there are now so many roads, so much power and so many existing mills across the Abitibi that "producers like us that have mills in the region will buy and truck the ore from the mine to our mills."

In other words, small deposits near big mills have become sellable inventory rather than orphans. That reversal is why he bought.

Mayfair remains unranked, and the reason is a good illustration of Rick's size filter. He notes that the company's resource statement (gold that is probably there) differs from its reserve statement (gold that is economically minable), and that he cannot get to a million minable ounces in his own head.

"If I can't get a million minable ounces, I'm not going to rank it." A million ounces is roughly his floor for a gold project worth the risk of building — below it, everything that can go wrong with a big mine can still go wrong, but the payoff can't cover it.

Sovereign owns a huge deposit in Malawi containing both rutile (a titanium mineral) and graphite. Rick's answer never changes because the situation doesn't: "Sovereign is a company that will either cost you half your money or make you 10 times your money." That is a genuinely binary outcome, not a hedge.

Rio Tinto's withdrawal is widely misread, he argues. Rio didn't sour on the deposit; it exited the entire zircon/rutile/graphite business and sold Richards Bay. What that does kill is the hope of a quick takeover — which suits Rick, who feared Rio would buy the company out "at an insufficient premium" before the value was proved.

Why it will take years: the graphite quality is still in question, more metallurgical work is needed, Malawi's regulators lack the experience to permit quickly ("under capacity in terms of regulatory strength"), and the feasibility study has to include basic infrastructure that elsewhere you'd take for granted. "It's going to tax your patience."

Rick gives no ranking on Standard Lithium itself, but is unusually explicit about the industry: "I'm very cautious on lithium."

His history lesson: the famous lithium shortage of about seven years ago was never a shortage of lithium. The world's second-largest producer, SQM, disclosed some 85 years of production at then-current demand. What was scarce was processing capacity — the plants that turn raw lithium into battery-grade chemicals. Processed-lithium prices spiked, everyone went looking, and because nobody had looked before, they found a lot. Meanwhile the processing bottleneck was fixed. Result: oversupply, and of roughly 150 juniors created in the mania "probably five or six have developable projects."

The forward risk is technological. MidAmerican Energy (Berkshire Hathaway), Occidental, Chevron and Exxon all believe in direct lithium extraction — pulling lithium out of salty water that oil and gas wells already produce for free as a by-product. Rick disclaims technical expertise but notes who is betting: "if your lifting and production costs of lithium begin to approach free… that'll be very hard on the hard rock lithium producers." He adds the historical irony that until about 15 years ago lithium was waste that fouled equipment.

Hecla is a large American silver producer, and Rick is not a shareholder. His objection is capital allocation measured over a full cycle: for every ounce sold, how much new reserve and resource did the profit buy back? For Hecla the answer over 20 years is negative — "over 20 years they've destroyed as opposed to added capital." A miner is a depleting business; if profits don't replace what was dug up, the company is slowly liquidating.

He concedes the one thing it does offer: as a high-cost, high-volume producer, its profits swing violently with the silver price, so it is powerful leverage if you're convinced silver spikes. Plus a quirk of the market — "Americans tend to pay more, whether they should or not, for American silver."

Asked how much further a troubled uranium company can fall, Rick doesn't soften it: "Lotus, with their balance sheet and with their moderate as opposed to horrible grade, can fall to zero. It's important that you know that."

The mechanism is dilution, not bankruptcy drama: the company "is going to need to be refinanced," and a company with a weak balance sheet raises money on whatever terms it can get — usually by issuing shares so cheaply that existing owners' stakes shrink toward nothing even if the mine eventually works.

It is currently unranked; if he restored it, "I'd bring them back at a seven. I don't like bad balance sheets." Note this is a company-specific verdict inside a sector he is otherwise very bullish on.

Cadillac holds the historic Kerr-Addison ground in the Cadillac trend of the Abitibi, is chaired by Pierre Lassonde (co-founder of Franco-Nevada) and has just come to market. Rick likes essentially everything about it except the price.

The asset: "a truly spectacular land position bolting onto Agnico Eagle basically everywhere," with four past producing mines on it including Kerr-Addison. The backer: Lassonde has delivered something like $5 billion of shareholder value in a decade across several vehicles.

The problem: "the market is going out with what I see as an absurd valuation relative to the proven and probable reserves and resources" — you are being asked to pay today for ounces that have not yet been proved to exist. "I'm just not willing to pay up like that without a lot more by way of reserve and resource." A clean example of separating a great asset from a good investment.

Critical One is drilling an antimony-gold project (Howells Lake, Ontario). Antimony is a genuinely strategic material, and the drill results have been eye-catching — but Rick won't rank the company, and explains why in a way that applies to every "critical mineral" story.

He restricts his own account to tier-one deposits: "a minimum of $10 billion in in-situ recoverable reserves and resources, but preferably $20 billion" of metal in the ground. Antimony, vanadium and titanium markets are simply too small for a deposit to reach that size, "which means I'm predisposed against them because they're usually tier 2 or tier three deposits."

He is careful to say they can still make money for traders, because "somebody can point to the big picture around a restricted material and appeal to investors' feelings as opposed to the way they think. They can sell a narrative as opposed to reality." That is precisely the trade he declines to make.