Title: Rick Rule: The Best Buying Opportunity Is Still Ahead
Show: Mel on The Street (YouTube)
Guest: Rick Rule (founder, Rule Investment Media / Rule Symposium)
Date: 2026-07-05
URL: https://youtu.be/JDVojPqSZuc
Length: 34:27
Note: auto-captured YouTube transcript, (mm:ss) cues preserved; verbal filler (um/uh/you know/false starts/verbal-tic "like") removed in place, wording otherwise verbatim. Obvious ASR name garbles left in the raw text but mapped in the analysis ("Ares Minerals in Kazakhstan" = Arras Minerals; "index conclusion" = index inclusion).
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(00:04) [music] >> Hi everyone. I'm Melanie Shafer and welcome back to Mel on the Street. Now today I'm joined by Rick Rule who needs no introduction and we're going to talk about where he sees opportunity in today's market. What's changed since I last heard from him and with the Rule Symposium just around the corner, what investors should really be paying attention to.
(00:28) Rick, thank you so much for joining me. >> A pleasure to be with you. Thank you for having me. >> So Rick, I want to start with the big picture. When you look across the resource sector today, where do you think people are getting it wrong and where do you think we are in the cycle? >> I think that we are probably approaching a cyclical low in a secular bull market.
(00:50) I think that precious metals will do really quite well over the next decade, but I suspect that in the very near term they're headed lower as a consequence of higher US interest rates. A higher US interest rate makes the dollar more attractive, of course, and assets priced in dollars, including precious metals, usually do poorly during times of rising nominal interest rates.
(01:15) I also suspect that partially because of a rising dollar, but also because of a temporary weakness caused by the money that was drained out of the system by very, very high energy prices for the next 3 months, that we might have at least a slight economic contraction, which could cause industrial materials like base metals and energy to head lower.
(01:42) Make no mistake. This is a cyclical low in a secular bull market. I would expect, as I said earlier, precious metals over the course of this decade to do very well and I expect industrial materials, including both energy and base metals to do well as well for reasons that we can discuss should you wish later in this interview.
(02:06) >> Yeah, absolutely. And before we get into that, you've built a career by buying what everyone else wanted nothing to do with. Is there investment that you're buying today that would make most people watching maybe think that you've lost your mind? >> Sadly, there isn't anything hated right now, Melanie.
(02:25) I'm famous for trying to buy hate. And there is nothing hated in the sector. But I need to say the second-tier and third-tier gold mining stocks are as cheap relative to their fundamentals as I've ever seen in my career. For the last 5 years, I've been telling generalist investors with regards to the precious metals that you should buy alpha.
(02:54) Pardon me, you should buy beta. You should buy the Franco-Nevadas, the Wheaton Precious, the Agnico Eagles. You should buy the quality. And by and large, that's been good advice. And people who don't own them should definitely buy them. But we have a situation now that's risk off.
(03:11) Tertiary stocks are beginning to get hurt. And there's no more stocks that are more tertiary, more marginal than the gold juniors. The consequence of that is I'm buying them. This isn't for everyone. This is a trade that requires hard work, requires a stomach for volatility. It requires a stomach for cyclical risk. But I do like sectors that are out of favor, out of favor with regards to value.
(03:36) And I would suggest that the second and third-tier gold stocks meet that criterion fairly well. >> Yeah, as gold has rallied pretty sharply over the past few months, has that changed your mind? Today, should I buy gold here? What would your answer be? >> I think it depends on their timing. I don't think a trader probably wants to buy gold here.
(03:57) But I think an investor does. It's interesting that people were falling all over themselves to buy gold at 5300 and 5400. The same circumstance exists then that exists now. But gold is a thousand dollars cheaper. It's odd that people would rather pay a thousand dollars more for an asset. Make no mistake. I think in the long term gold will at its very least maintain its purchasing power, its absolute purchasing power.
(04:27) And I personally believe that the US dollar will repeat its performance of the 1970s, which is to say I believe the US dollar will lose 75% of its purchasing power, while gold will maintain its purchasing power. It will feel like gold did well. The truth is that gold will break even, while the dollar will do much much worse.
(04:50) >> Rick, you've also always talked a bit about your changing position in silver. What has changed for you? Where do you see the better opportunity with silver today? >> I was a fairly prominent silver speculator when people hated it, when silver was below $20 an ounce, pardon me.
(05:10) You couldn't find a nice thing being said about it on very many investment channels and certainly in social media. Silver was hated. It was particularly hated by the youngsters who bet on the silver squeeze that they could break the big banks. When that didn't happen, they began to regret the fact that they could ever learn to pronounce silver.
(05:29) I love commodities that are hated because they don't even need to really return to favor. They just need to lose their hatred to jump. And that's what happened in silver. My suspicion was twofold that a precious metals bull market was already underway, that gold would lead like it always does, but when the generalist investors came into the market, that the leadership would change from gold to silver.
(05:57) And I felt that silver may or may not become a hot speculative asset, but that it would cease to be hated. All of that happened. When that happened, my reason to own silver, which is to say the market's hatred for it, went away. You may recall in early January of this year, we wrote in a parabolic up move in silver.
(06:17) And in my 50 years of investing and speculating, I've learned that parabolic up moves always resolve themselves to the downside. And so I always sell parabolic up moves. And if I like the asset class, I always buy parabolic down moves. That isn't to say I'm anti-silver. It's just to say that silver's place in my portfolio existed because it was hated.
(06:43) And when it was no longer hated, I sold it. >> So, talking about these headlines and how people are reading things and every day there's another geopolitical headline moving markets. How much attention do you think investors should actually be paying to the news and how much of it is just noise? >> I think most of it's noise, but I think that some of the headlines can give you a sense about probabilities that we will face in the future.
(07:12) And I think that's useful. What headlines really do for me is allow me to bet against popular perceptions that are wrong. And headlines give me that opportunity. Make no mistake, the big picture, the politics of the big picture are changing, and some of those changes make the headlines. As an example, in the period sort of 1990, maybe 1985 to 2015, we had a very benign geopolitical climate worldwide.
(07:56) We began to notice the Chinese muscling their way into markets around the world, much like we did in the 1960s and 70s. And I guess some elements of American society didn't enjoy things being done to us that we had done to others. But the circumstances change now. You have trading blocks as opposed to economic coalitions.
(08:25) You have sometimes the West against Europe, sometimes the West and Europe against Japan. That competition changes a lot of things. Ironically, in the resource business, what it often means is that there are sources of capital, government capital, that become available where they weren't available.
(08:49) I'm not saying that's a good thing as a taxpayer, but the mining industry loves dumb money, and there's no money as dumb as government irrespective really of the source. So, I do think it's important to pay attention to the big picture, but I think it's important not to let yourself become too overly influenced by headlines.
(09:10) >> Yeah, so in terms of investing, what you're looking at right now? I know you talked a little bit about that a few minutes ago, but let's say I handed you a blank piece of paper and asked you to build me a natural resource portfolio from scratch. Where would you start? >> A lot of that depends on you, Melanie.
(09:28) For somebody who is risk tolerant and is willing to do a lot of work, a lot of study, there is more money in the juniors. Most people aren't willing to do the work. And most people conflate volatility with risk. In that case, if they're constructing a natural resource portfolio from scratch, I would suggest still that you buy the biggest and best names in the sector.
(09:56) If I'm right, the beta, and I would define beta as the outperformance of a sector relative to the broad market, the beta in the best of the best precious metals stocks, the aforementioned Franco-Nevada, Wheaton Precious and Agnico Eagle, could form all by itself a portfolio that somebody could buy and 5 years from now, 7 years from now, 10 years from now, having paid no more attention to it, having watched baseball, played with their kids, read books, they would be very, very, very happy.
(10:30) Similarly, if that same investor constructing a natural resource portfolio, bought the biggest of the multi-commodity mining companies, the BHPs, the Rio Tintos, the Glencores, they would over the next 5 to 7 years become very, very happy. And similarly, should they buy as an example Exxon Mobil, well, they might not be happy in 2026, maybe 2027, they'd probably be ecstatic by 2029 or 2030.
(11:07) Somebody like yourself that spends a lot of time thinking about natural resources and is willing to spend say an hour per month studying every single holding in her portfolio, would probably do well to accept more volatility, accept more risk and look for more alpha. But the answer to the question really depends on who the questioner is and how hard they're willing to work.
(11:33) >> Yeah, and to follow up on that, you've always emphasized buying great businesses rather than simply making commodity bets. What do you think separates a company that's truly investable from one that's just riding a hot commodity? >> People and culture. If you look as an example at the culture in Agnico Eagle, what made Agnico Eagle great? They've only had three CEOs in a 50-year career.
(11:58) Those CEOs have never chased trends. They have thought very seriously about what makes a great mining company and they've tried to create a great mining company. They treat their people well, which means that their turnover is a third of the turnover in the industry. They don't have that retraining expense.
(12:17) They don't make acquisitions to make acquisitions. They make acquisitions that are synergistic by location with their existing deposits. They don't hire contractors to build mines. They build their own mines. It's culture. Culture and people become even more important the more risk you take. I would suggest that junior mining companies are much more about people than they are projects.
(12:44) Melanie, some of your listeners will be familiar with Pareto's law, the social science dictum around the 80/20 rule, the suggestion that 20% of the people generate 80% of the utility. The most important thing to know about speculation really is twofold. That Pareto's law is a bell-shaped curve. It doesn't go in one direction.
(13:08) So, while 20% of the people generate 80% of the positive utility, a different 20% of the people generate 80% of the aggravation. So, your first job is to find the good 20 and hang out with them and identify the bad 20 and get as far from them as you possibly can. The second thing about people in juniors is as follows.
(13:27) If you put that positive performance lip, the 20% of the people who generate 80% of the utility through the same performance dispersal curve, they conformably align. Which means that 20% of the 20 generates 80% of the 80. Or 4% of the population generates 65% of the utility. I've noticed in juniors that it's true for at least one more toss, which is to say that 1% of the junior mining company managements generate about 40% of the positive utility.
(14:05) So, to the extent that you're going to speculate as opposed to invest in juniors, what you are looking for is serially successful management teams who are engaged in an activity that's very similar to the one where their prior successes have already occurred. If you get that right, you will do very well over time.
(14:28) That's the most important of the speculative victims. >> Yeah, and I just want to pivot a little bit because your Rule Symposium kicks off July 6th in Boca Raton, Florida, and runs through to July 10th. Every year, it brings together some of the biggest names in natural resource investing.
(14:48) When people think about this symposium, they sort of naturally focus on the presentations, but I'm curious about what happens when the microphones are off. What are some of the speakers going to be talking about behind the scenes that maybe they won't be saying on stage? >> Well, one of the things is that if our speakers go hide amongst themselves in some room upstairs, they're not invited to come back next year.
(15:11) We make them interface with the attendees. I [clears throat] got an email about, I don't know, 10 years ago from an attendee saying that following Robert Friedland, for those who don't know, is serially successful mining financier. He said, following Robert Friedland around the exhibit floor, watching what booths he stopped in front of, and listening to the questions that he asked, made the whole conference worthwhile.
(15:34) That they got the whole rest of the conference for free. I think what the macro commentators at our conference, the Nomi Prins, the Danielle DiMartino Booths, the David Stockmans, I think what they're going to be beginning to talk about in terms of macro, in the United States, will be the growing drift of the Democratic Party to the DSA, which is to say, the growing socialization of the Democratic Party, and the precedent being established by President Bush in terms of federalizing and politicizing power.
(16:18) There has been some speculation in the mining press about what will happen to the extent that a much more leftist regime inherits the powers established by President Trump in a new circumstance. So, if you're looking for an insight that I think will scare the macro people, that is certainly it. Among the resource people, I think you will see discussions of a few trends.
(16:54) The first is the growing political acceptance, oddly, of the natural resources business. If you look, Melanie, as an example, at uranium, seven years ago, as a proponent of uranium, I sort of expected to see myself on a post office wall with most wanted over my picture. Now, the same people who were vilifying me want to subsidize me.
(17:20) I mean, that's a very odd turn of events. From a taxpayer's perspective, as I said, I'm horrified. From an investor's perspective, the idea that they no longer want to lynch me, but rather want to subsidize me, is to say the least interesting. So, that will be a subject of interest. On the other side, increasing commodity prices will inevitably mean increasing nationalization.
(17:49) Not just nationalization in places like Bolivia, where they try to swallow resource companies whole, but rather increased royalties, increased taxation, increased requirement by host governments to offload to the mining and oil and gas community some of the responsibilities that traditionally the governments have undertaken themselves.
(18:14) This is inevitable. Governments, nobody tries to steal a copper mine when a copper mine isn't making any money. But, now that lots of copper mines are making a million or two million dollars a day, they become very tempting targets for governments whose job it is to expropriate wealth and distribute it among their performance.
(18:34) I think that will be a subject of discussion. A different subject of discussion, I hope, and I hope to lead it, is the fact that the increased exploration budgets that we've seen worldwide over the last 3 years are beginning to yield discoveries. We've had two different drill holes in the last 6 weeks. One by Mogotes in Northwestern Argentina, the other by Ares Minerals in Kazakhstan, that are among the 10 best drill holes I've seen in my entire career.
(19:10) The fact that we had these drill holes after a very, very, very long period of discovery drought has me wondering whether or not the combination of new technologies and exploration and the higher budgets that we've seen for the last two and a half or three years are going to lead us into the same type of exploration cycle bull market exploration stocks that we enjoyed all the way back in '91, '92, '93.
(19:38) And I think the answer might be yes. So I think that that will be an interesting subject of discussion. And I think it's one that the veteran participants in my conference will be talking about a lot. Hopefully publicly. >> Yeah, so when people head home after the symposium, what's some of the main ideas that you hope completely change the way that they're going to think about investing? >> The most important thing that they can do when they get home from the conference is listen to the recordings.
(20:10) We're going to give these people 46 hours of valuable but dense programming in four days. That's more information than one can absorb. I put on the conference and I have to play the recordings. The idea that a citizen, a person with a life, can obtain all the information the four days that we give it to them, it's preposterous. It's impossible.
(20:34) What we hope to teach every year at the conference is that in capital intensive cyclical business you have to be a contrarian or you're going to be a victim. It makes perfect sense if you think rationally that if you like the gold business long term as an example, it makes absolute sense that $4,400 is a better entry point than $5,400 was.
(20:59) But in the short term emotions matter to people. We try to tell people that most of them buy physical goods intelligently. But they buy financial goods stupidly. What a declining market is is a sale. And sometimes investors act like shoppers who are in a store where an announcement comes over the PA that says storewide sale, everything 30% off, and they leave the store.
(21:30) As opposed to buying the goods. So, we hope to get that message across to people. We hope too to get the message across that probably less than 10% of the entire population of junior resource stocks are viable. Which is to say 90% are probably over the cycle worthless. You have to do the work to identify the wheat and throw out the chaff, or you're going to get murdered in this business.
(21:59) We try to give people the tools, and we try to give people an introduction to those serially successful people that we described earlier in this interview. One of the things that we've done, Melanie, for 25 years that's proven to be enormously popular, is we have a feature called the Living Legends, where we introduce our attendees to a group of entrepreneurs who have each built multi-billion dollar resource companies from scratch.
(22:27) We interview them about how it is that they were able to do that, and what lessons they learned building it that made them better investors. We ask them to identify the mistakes that most speculators make, and we ask them to identify what they're doing with their own money now. This is an enormously important lesson for people.
(22:53) Understanding the construction of these companies, understanding how to identify the younger people that exhibit the same intellectual traits that made these people serially successful. This is a wonderful wonderful attribute of the conference. At this year's conference and more importantly at next year's conference, we're taking that a step further.
(23:13) We are introducing a group called the next legends where we identify people in their 40s and 50s who have already generated more than one success. The living legends are all the entrepreneurs of my era. The people who started to exhibit their success in the 1980s and 1990s. People who still have it but sadly won't be with us for too many more years.
(23:45) What we're going to try and do this year and next year is identify the entrepreneurs who have already established a pattern of success but will be active for the next 20 or 30 years. We think that will prove to be a popular feature. Particularly among investors more your age than mine. >> Sure.
(24:03) Yeah, I mean that sounds like an amazing idea and I'm excited to hear that that's happening this year and next year. So, I want to put this a little bit back on you now instead of asking you how the people who go to the symposium may change their mind. You are really well known for specific things that we've already mentioned.
(24:22) I want to ask you what's one opinion that you had in your early career that you completely changed your mind on and what made you cause that change? >> Well, very early in my career, Melanie, I didn't understand how natural resource markets worked. I came of age in the decade of the 70s. That was an amazing epoch.
(24:42) The most benign climate to invest in natural resources and being, I just have to say it out loud, being a young male, I was dumb enough to confuse a bull market with brains. I thought I was making money because I was smart. It didn't occur to me that I was making money because the oil price went from $2.
(25:00) 50 to $30 or that the gold price went from $35 to $850. I also didn't understand as a young man that markets truly work. That the cure for high prices is always high prices and the cure for low prices is always low prices. In 1982, when the commodity prices broke, I learned just how smart I was, which is to say not very.
(25:24) So, the important truth that I didn't know is that markets work. That these businesses are genuinely cyclical. And that you either have to be a contrarian or you're going to be a victim. Mercifully, I learned that lesson by age 30. Now at age 70, I've had 40 years of understanding how resource markets worked and the last 40 have been dramatically more successful than at least the first part.
(25:58) Pardon me, the last part of the first 10. That realization that markets work, that one must be a contrarian is an extremely valuable piece of information that unfortunately I had to learn the hard way. >> Yeah, so instead of looking back now, if we look forward and say we're sitting here and I hope we are having this conversation in a year from now, what do you think will have surprised investors the most? >> Over the next year, I'm not sure that much will surprise
(26:33) us. My suspicion is my hope is that this summer is very soft. I think that there will be room for nominal interest rates to continue high, which I think will keep the US dollar high and I think it'll keep gold soft. And I think it'll keep resources soft. I think that's a wonderful opportunity because I think longer term the US dollar doesn't stand a chance.
(27:04) I'm not saying it will perform badly against other fiat currencies. I think it'll do well against other floating abstractions, the Canadian dollar, the euro, things like that. But I think in absolute terms, the purchasing power of your savings and my savings will decline by as much as 75% over 10 years.
(27:22) So, I would view the softness as an opportunity, not something to be afraid of. Similarly, I expect that it is likely that oil prices in the aftermath of the, assuming the peace is maintained, relative peace is maintained in the Middle East, that oil prices continue soft. I think the high prices probably did some work around demand destruction in very poor markets and I think that'll continue with us at least through the summer.
(27:52) And it wouldn't surprise me, as I said at the onset of this interview, if we have soft industrial materials market, too, as a consequence of a soft economy. Make no mistake. Looking out a bit, we are going to have very strong industrial materials markets, very strong oil markets, very strong gold and silver markets, perhaps not as a consequence of anything other than the deterioration of the US dollar.
(28:23) But I'm delighted, frankly, with the market conditions that confront my conference. It would have been embarrassing for me to say, "The following is all true, but it's all priced in the market. There's no opportunity." In this particular circumstance, you have a curated list of companies, as you know, I think, Melanie. No company is allowed to exhibit at our conference if that company's stock is not owned in the accounts of the conference sponsors.
(28:48) So, our opportunities are all vetted. It would be a tragedy, I think, to introduce people to a whole bunch of opportunities that were already, as a consequence of the market, overpriced. And we're not going to have to do that. I would also say that we will be introducing or reintroducing at the conference, rather, a sector that used to be important to us 20 years ago, which is oil and gas exploration.
(29:18) One sector which is still not in favor among investors are small cap oil companies. The market likes big ones. And companies that are involved in conventional exploration, not shale exploitation, and companies that are involved in frontier and emerging markets. So, we'll have a session at this year's conference that's precisely that.
(29:42) Microcap companies involved in offshore oil and gas exploration in frontier markets. This is a sector that's treated me extraordinarily well for 35 years, and I'm delighted to be able to reintroduce that to the conference. We'll have my friend Keith Hill speaking, who is the author of much of the Lundin family's success in precisely exploration in frontier and emerging markets.
(30:10) So, if I had a sleeper session for this year's conference, one that I think will be talked about for a decade, that would be it. >> And so, just very lastly, talking about opportunity, outside of oil and gas, where do you think in the mineral space or metals, where do you think there's further opportunity outside of gold and silver? >> For people who are willing to work, I think we're coming into a real mergers and acquisition market.
(30:37) The big companies throughout resources have been encouraged by Wall Street in the last five or six years to exhibit extraordinary financial discipline and return any surplus capital to shareholders by way of dividends or share buybacks. Over the next two years, the concern of Wall Street is going to change to sustainability.
(30:57) These companies have under invested in maintaining their production. They've under invested for really 20 years. That's going to catch up with them. The consequence of that over the next two years, you're going to begin to see a really feverish pace of mergers and acquisitions. So, for people who are willing to work, the place that money is going to be made is identifying the takeover targets almost irrespective of commodity.
(31:22) The ones where there are real strategic reasons for them to be taken over. I'm talking as example about the recent Agnico Eagle consolidation of Finland where big companies can take over smaller companies and leverage the producing assets that they already have while maintaining or even increasing their production when the opportunities to do so aren't organic to the company where they can't as an example build out their pipeline because they don't have a pipeline.
(31:55) The second form of merger and acquisition that we're going to have, Melanie, will be what we would call horizontal acquisition where companies amalgamate with each other not necessarily for strategic reasons, but rather simply because big companies have more trading liquidity. They get more index conclusion and they get more passive buying.
(32:16) The takeover of Orla very recently by Equinox is just that sort of acquisition. There aren't very many operational synergies, but when you combine the two companies, you suddenly get a million ounce producer that will be must-own. Must include in all the indexes and it'll get a lot of passive buying.
(32:36) So, I would say that the theme that will be most attractive to resource investors, irrespective of commodity, will be to identify and buy the most likely takeover targets. >> Yeah, so that's going to be another topic, I'm sure, that investors are talking amongst themselves, especially about the rumors that go around about it at the symposium.
(32:56) The symposium is sold out for in person right now, but people can go on to register to watch it online, is that right? >> They can. And I want to share something with your viewers that many might not know. If you attend our conference, either live or live stream, unlike any other conference on the planet, if you think for any reason that we didn't deliver you value, we'll give you your money back.
(33:21) We've had this money-back guarantee for 30 years now. Unlike any other conference I know, in 30 years our content has been good enough that we've had to refund a little less than 1/10 of 1% of the money that we've charged. But that guarantee is your guarantee that our content can, and if you work hard, will make you money.
(33:46) There is no financial risk to anybody to attend our conference, because if in their sole discretion, we didn't deliver, there'll be no charge. >> Yeah, I have to love that honesty, for sure. Rick, thank you so much for joining me. >> A pleasure. Thank you for the opportunity to have this discussion.
(34:05) I look forward to visiting with you in the future. >> [music] [music] [music]